Express
Hope Amidst the Rubble
Sari Nusseibeh with Anthony David, Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life (Picador, 2008)

Inside the ancient gates of Jerusalem, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher sits tucked away among stone paths worn smooth by thousands of years of footsteps and towering walls that shade the city from the sweltering Middle Eastern sun. Jerusalem’s old city, a maze of streets teeming with tradition and history, is the site of contemplation for Sari Nusseibeh as he weaves his way through the development of the conflict between Israel and Palestine in his memoir, Once Upon A Country: A Palestinian Life.
“In an ancient world such as ours, the truth inevitably gets embellished with a thick layer of legend,” writes Nusseibeh, rooting his story—an autobiography adorned with a touch of fantasy and the weight of history—at the doors of the near mythic church where Ubadah ibn al-Samit, the first of his ancestors to settle in Jerusalem, served as doorkeeper, and where a fairy-tale knight falls asleep and refuses to awaken until there is peace in the country. As the book progresses, his family history, a fairy tale about Jerusalem, a shifting political landscape, and a wish for the future mingle, culminating in a memoir that is aching with tragedy, yet insistently hopeful.
Nusseibeh, the current president of Al-Quds, the only Arab university in Jerusalem, a longtime advocate of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and an academic with a degree from Oxford, uses his personal memoir as a guide for narrating the Palestinian side of the conflict. His story, an impressively comprehensive depiction of the struggle for nationhood, is at once enthralling and inevitably heartbreaking, no matter your political bent. Though present-day events assure that the knight will not awaken by the end of the book, Nusseibeh writes about the struggle for and attachment to the land with such an air of enchantment that even the most pessimistic reader cannot help reveling in the possibility of a happier future.
As an intellectual, a philosopher, and someone who has spent a significant amount of time ferrying between political and academic gatherings in both the east and the west, Nusseibeh offers a rare perspective on a political situation that has become so mired in disappointment and mistrust that the prospect of writing objectively about it is nearly absurd. Unfortunately, in an attempt to maintain his position as an intellectual bystander reluctantly thrown into politics, he brandishes the reader with an image of himself that can’t help but feel forced, as he interrupts fluid passages about the mystique of Jerusalem and poetic musings on Islamic philosophy with repetitive imagery of his own messy hair, mismatched socks and affinity for cheap cigarettes. From time to time, tucking his reputation as the frazzled professor under his arm, Nusseibeh proffers statements that rebuff his insistence upon non-violence and his demand for ubiquitous tolerance.
Writing with well-founded anger about the humiliation of checkpoints, Nusseibeh at times infuses the text with subtle racism, referring to “Russian-born eighteen year olds barking out orders to old women,” taking a jab at Israel’s lower class immigrant population. And, of the growing international terrorism of the 1970s, he writes, “no one could deny that the world took notice of our plight only when passengers in first-class seats on airplanes began fearing they could end up in Beirut instead of Tokyo. Terrorism put the Palestinian issue on the map…” One of several points in the text when he explains away terrorism by invoking the desperation of circumstance, it undermines his persistent demands for peaceful solutions. Though he has a complex understanding of the conflict, and a great deal of sympathy for the human suffering on both sides, he does not always lend enough empathy to the Israeli cities riddled with suicide bombings and qassam rockets, which suffer from their own desperation of circumstance as well.
Nonetheless, in a region where both sides are better at exporting propaganda than generating truth, and where publications frequently read like hyperbolic press releases, Nusseibeh is able to pierce through the layers of contrived “information” to the core of what is basically true. From beginning to end Nusseibeh advocates for a two-state solution and is rigorous in his desire to maintain dialogue not only between the Palestinians and Israelis, but within the Palestinian population as well—goals that are both admirable and necessary for eventual peace.
By the book’s end, amidst religious fundamentalism on the part of Hamas, and right-wing extremism on the part of the Israelis, Nusseibeh’s sentences are heavy with frustration and constructed out of near tangible pain. Nusseibeh, a woefully hopeful optimist, seems ready to throw up his hands and cede defeat to the possibility of a future peace. Yet he still manages to reconcile his story with a message of hope and the belief that with tolerance and a respite from violence, peace isn’t entirely impossible. As the conflict in the Middle East continues to plague the front pages of newspapers across the U.S., it is comforting to know that within the region there are still people kindling belief in a better future, if for no other reason than an undying love for the magic of Jerusalem, where “ancient alleys, wonder and surprise are always lurking around the corner ready to remind you that this is not an ordinary place you can map out with a surveyor’s rod. It is sacred.”
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Theaster Gates: Black Vessel
By Robert C. MorganDEC 20-JAN 21 | ArtSeen
It is extraordinary that this exhibition of work by the celebrated artist Theaster Gates is the first we have seen in New York. Titled Black Vessel, the show pulls apart various strands that have haunted contemporary art in recent years.

THEASTER GATES with Phong H. Bui
DEC 20-JAN 21 | Art
Rail publisher Phong H. Bui speaks to Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates on the occasion of Black Vessel at Gagosian, his first solo show in New York.
My Beautiful City
By Thomas HeiseMARCH 2021 | Field Notes
In the spring of 2020, as the plague was sweeping the city, I found myself several times a day staring at an Instagram page dedicated to the furniture and household goods New Yorkers were tossing to the curb. Amongst the flotsam and jetsam were steamer trunks, benches of reclaimed lumber, numerous upright pianos, boxes upon boxes of books, a fainting couch with flower upholstery, glass vanities, bar stools, two Noguchi coffee tables, stand-up globes (I counted at least three) that hatched open at the meridian so you could store liquor inside, seemingly every fiddle leaf fig tree in the five boroughs, and other bric-a-brac and impedimenta and whatever else could be quickly discarded in a desperate effort to get out of New York as fast as possible.
Things on Walls
By Darla MiganMAY 2020 | ArtSeen
In what now seems like prescient thinking borne out of a creative collaboration, the exhibition Things on Walls at Affective Carean operating medical office specializing in psycho-interventionist treatmentexplores sculpture in a variety of mediums, including ceramics, wood, cast paper, resin, metal, and video. Organized by New Discretions, a curatorial project by Benjamin Tischer of Invisible-Exports, the show includes 17 works that play in the overlaps of inner life understood as both designed physical space and psycho-sensory interiority.