Hide your books, hide your imagination
Spent last weekend watching Beckham and thinking about the ongoing encroachment of celebrity propaganda on documentary as a form. I insist on its vitality though! One that’s stayed with me for a long time is The Great Book Robbery, which I saw at the Toronto Palestine Film Festival in 2012. The doc tells about the looting of books from private homes during the 1948 Nakba, as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced to fortify the formation of the state of Israel. Books were among many precious items left behind as people fled, and they were retrieved by state agents to be locked away in the Israel National Library. This story of stolen property reveals how a calculated erasure of history, identity, and culture was enforced to establish the founding national myth of Israel. Colonialism involves the taking of land and resources, and it’s also a conquest of the imagination.
If you’re interested in a deeper look at the scaffolding of this conflict, the full documentary is on YouTube and I’ve embedded it below. I’d also recommend looking for local screenings of Joumana Manna’s tender and funny 2022 documentary Foragers, which is about how Israeli ecological policies criminalize Palestinians who forage for wild plants in their homelands.
These encroachments aren’t typically evil guy in a trenchcoat-style manouevres. They’re carried out and justified in mundane ways: as processes of bureaucracy, stewardship, and administration. While reading a reprint of Mini Aodla Freeman’s 1978 book Life Among The Qallunat, a clear-eyed testimonial of Inuit life and contact with agents of Northern and Indian Affairs, I learned that the Canadian government “unofficially bought up whole print runs of Inuit books and put them in their basements.”
Knowledge, imagination, and cultural agency threaten the state. In 1971, the black radical George Jackson wrote from jail that, “Power responds to all threats. The response is repression. If the threat is a small one, the fascist tactic is to laugh it off, ignore it, isolate it with its defense mechanism —media.” And when they can’t win the propaganda war??? “The greater the threat the greater the corresponding violence from power.”