Forked tongue in Gaza

WAYNE KUBLALSINGH

IN THE late 1980s, I was a post-graduate student at Columbia University in New York. From beginning to end there was trouble.

First, I was not provided with accommodation. As I got out of a taxi on 42nd Street, to find refuge in a hotel, a slinky-looking man slid up to me patting down my pockets. I had to shove him off. In the night I felt the soothing fall of snow on my face. It was not snow. It was the retch of a drunk falling from one of the hotel’s upper window, bouncing off the fire-escape into my bedroom window. I was saved by a Jew, a Jewess.

Prof Anne Goodman at the Faculty Office agreed to keep my suitcase in her office until I found proper accommodation. She was kind, good-humoured, carried a sparkle in her eyes. A beacon in a sea of petty troubles in New York. I could not get university accommodation.

Staying at the Vanderbilt YMCA on 47th Street, two men, one African, the other Caucasian, sidled up and sat on either side of me at a bar where I was having my routine stew. They wanted to know this and that. What was my intention with respect to the ideas that I had written so strongly about? I suspect they were FBI. All my letters from Trinidad were being opened. I assured them, good-humouredly, that the bark of my writings was more ferocious than my bite.

Then I encountered the Palestinian. The erudite, handsome, intellectual Prof Edward Said. Columbia was a Jewish university, most of my teachers were Jewish, and had hired Said as a visiting lecturer. His classes were filled with admiring students. He did not like the anti-revolutionary Naipaul, but was impressed with the revolutionary CLR James. His presence reignited hot and heady debates between Jews and Palestinian sympathisers at the university. The wounds of both parties, Jews and pro-Palestinians, were real and raw. So tragic and pathetic, I could not bear to take sides.

I began to be unhappy with the folk of New York. I noticed that they never told you the truth or fact of a matter. They always told you what they thought they ought to tell. I was tumbled about in a sea of inexactitudes.

At the office for accommodation, I was shocked to see a student, newly arrived from Trinidad, receive accommodation while I was waiting for months. I behaved so shockingly badly it bears not repeating. When the computer lab technician refused to return my tokens to me, after the Apple computer glitched out on me for the dozenth time, Apple was new on the scene, I hijacked a ream of paper and stashed it in my locker. Police had to be called out.

I did get along nicely with my fellow students. But one day they turned cold. Ganged up, closed ranks. What was wrong? I knew not. They offered me a single stone-cold face. They had looked at one of my essays and had complained to the Jewish professor, Anne Goodman. They accused me of improper referencing. O horror, horror, horror. What a sin!

In academics, plagiarism is regarded as the most horrendous of crimes. I was mortified. Prof Goodman looked at my essay. They were talking bunk. She approved the correctness of my reference, and told me to “never sell yourself short.” My accusers quailed into darkness.

There was an African-American girl in our group. She was deeply upset. Some trifling thing had passed between herself and a classmate. I tried to persuade her that this was a mere trifle. However, nothing that I could say could pacify her. She was upset, bestially angry, gravely wounded. I was astonished. She was coming from a place, deep, personal, historical, which I could not fathom. The wound of racial feeling cut deep in America; we in Trinidad are jokey racists.

The Jews and the pro-Palestinians continued to battle each other. I began to see that the problem was not with the Jews or the Palestinians but with America. America has implanted its own forked-tongued ethic into the Palestinian question. An ethic of lies and treachery.

Though scores of treaties were made between the Pilgrim and Puritan "palefaces" and the "red man," the latter ended up decimated, their land stolen, in reservations. The "palefaces" broke agreements like they break little sticks and toothpicks. Americans did not want to share any of the lands it stole from the natives; they wanted all of it. Those who could not be pacified were killed, and those who could be, were put into reservations. Like Gaza. As long as Israel is backed by America, she shall continue to expand, bomb, lie with impunity.

After I finished my degree at Columbia, even though I had won a half-scholarship to continue PhD studies, and my wife, who had now joined me, had gotten a job at the university, I decided to flee New York. I could not survive in a place not grounded in trust. Forked-tongued, precarious, treacherous.

Unlike the native Americans, the people of Gaza and the West Bank, I had the option to flee. Once again Prof Goodman saved me. She wrote a recommendation for me, comparing my mind to Coleridge, a capacity to bring seemingly unrelated phenomena into a unity, which the dons at Oxford University in the United Kingdom accepted.