[News] Art Is a Dream in Which We Imagine Our Future

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Art Is a Dream in Which We Imagine Our Future: The Twentieth Newsletter 
(2022)
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*Art Is a Dream in Which We Imagine Our Future: The Twentieth Newsletter 
(2022)*


Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research 
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On 11 May 2022, an Israeli sniper fired 
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at the head of the veteran Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh as 
she reported on an Israeli military raid on a refugee settlement in 
Jenin (part of the Occupied Palestine Territories). The snipers 
continued to fire at the journalists who were with her, preventing them 
from aiding her. When she finally arrived at Ibn Sina Hospital, she was 
pronounced dead.

After Abu Aqleh’s death, the Israeli military raided her home in 
occupied East Jerusalem, where they confiscated Palestinian flags and 
attempted to prevent mourners from playing Palestinian songs. At her 
funeral on 13 May, the Israel Defence Forces attacked 
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the massive turnout of family and supporters – including her pallbearers 
– and grabbed Palestinian flags held by the crowd. The murder of Abu 
Aqleh, who had been a highly respected journalist for Al Jazeera since 
1997, and the violence by the Israeli forces at her funeral reinforce 
the apartheid 
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nature of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Palestinian leader Dr Hanan 
Ashrawi tweeted 
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that the attack on Palestinian flags, posters, and slogans exposes ‘the 
insecurity of the oppressor’. The assault on these cultural icons, 
Ashwari went on to explain, shows Israelis’ ‘fear of our symbols, fear 
of our grief & anger, fear of our existence’.

The raid that Abu Aqleh was covering when she was killed took place in 
Jenin, the home of Palestine’s remarkable Freedom Theatre 
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On 4 April 2011, Juliano Mer-Khamis, one of the theatre’s founders, was 
shot dead not far from where Abu Aqleh was killed. ‘Israel is destroying 
the neurological system of [Palestinian] society’, Mer-Khamis said 
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and this neurological system ‘is culture, identity, communication … We 
have to stand up again on our feet’, he said. ‘We are now living on our 
knees’.

*Front:* Actors of a Beijing opera troupe perform. *Back:* Drama 
students of the Lu Xun Academy of Arts rehearse a play in a structure 
they built themselves.
Credit: Yan’an Red Cloud Platform [延安红云平台]

Eight decades ago, in the heart of China, hundreds of Chinese 
intellectuals and artists from cities such as Shanghai gathered in 
Yan’an, which had become a red base for the Communist Party of China 
(CPC). In 1942, in and around the caves of this city, a serious 
discussion took place about the paralysis of Chinese culture in the face 
of three serious challenges: the sclerotic nature of the Chinese feudal 
system, the viciousness of Western-led imperialism, and the harshness of 
the Japanese fascist occupation. Cultural workers had to confront these 
facts of history as well as the historical tasks that they presented. In 
Yan’an, the debate circled around the confounding assertion that artists 
could work without confronting the major historical processes of our 
time. Imagine, for example, a Palestinian artist who works today without 
being gripped by the force of Israeli apartheid.

The CPC’s head of the propaganda department, Kai Feng, invited artists 
to gather in the central Party office for three weeks to debate the 
state of art and culture during the revolutionary war. Mao Zedong, a 
leader of the CPC, listened to the interventions, made his own 
commentary, and the following year published /Talks at the Yan’an Forum 
on Literature and Art/. Our dossier no. 52 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=3e6d640883&e=d206d0a40d> 
(May 2022), /Go to Yan’an: Culture and National Liberation/, is an 
assessment of the Yan’an debate and its implication for our times. The 
dossier, illustrated by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s 
art department, looks back at the debates in Yan’an in order to 
illuminate our conjuncture and insist on the centrality of cultural work 
for our movements today.

*Top*: A singing troupe performs the /Yangge/ opera, /Brother and Sister 
Reclaiming the Wasteland/. *Bottom*: Fine arts students take sketching 
lessons.
Credit: Yan’an Literature and Art Memorial Hall [延安文艺纪念馆] and Yan’an 
Red Cloud Platform [延安红云平台]

Artists root their imagination in their lived experiences. The Freedom 
Theatre in Jenin does not perform plays that are a mirror of café life 
in Tel Aviv or New York; their plays go deep into the imagination of 
occupied Palestine. In Yan’an, our dossier explains, ‘urban 
intellectuals … had to go through their own transformation in order to 
close the gap between themselves and the peasant masses. This 
transformation was at the heart of the Yan’an Forum … together, they 
could turn into an effective political force’.

On 23 May 1942, Mao took the floor at the Yan’an Forum to offer his 
concluding remarks to the artists and intellectuals that had left cities 
such as Shanghai and made their way into the interior. Here, Mao said, 
new forms of life were being created, a new buoyancy that straightened 
the spines of the people and produced new forms of social life. ‘To 
arrive in a base area’, Mao said, ‘is to arrive in a period of rule 
unprecedented in the several thousand years of Chinese history, one 
where workers, peasants, and soldiers, and the popular masses hold power 
… the eras of the past are gone forever and will never return’. He meant 
that the imagination must be stretched to tell stories of and for the 
newly upright Chinese people. The purpose of art, the intellectuals at 
Yan’an argued, is to be relevant to these major historical events.

To make his point, Mao quoted the writer Lu Xun (1881–1936), who 
understood these changes and reflected on them in his poetry:

Fierce-browed, I coolly defy a thousand pointing fingers,
Head-bowed, like a willing ox I serve the children.

Mao described the enemy, these ‘thousand pointing fingers’, as the 
vampirish imperialists and cadaverous feudal landlords. The ‘children’ 
were the working classes, the peasantry, and the popular masses. Lu 
Xun’s words show that the artist – the ‘willing ox’ – must never submit 
to the old granite block of oppression, Mao explained; he or she must be 
willing to accompany the people in their struggle for freedom.

It is the struggle that enabled the popular masses to stand upright, to 
refuse to bow down to the centuries of humiliation of seeing their 
labour subordinated to the accumulation of wealth by the elites. 
Artistic practice and intellectual activity must reflect these broad 
changes which are present today in China’s mass campaign 
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to abolish absolute poverty, in Indian farmers’ refusal 
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to submit to the Uberisation of their livelihoods, in South African 
shack dwellers’ bravery 
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to stand firm against political killings 
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and in the massive mobilisation of Palestinians at the funeral of 
Shireen Abu Aqleh.

/Yangge/ singing troupes perform for the people at the 1943 Spring 
Festival celebration.
Credit: Yan’an Red Cloud Platform [延安红云平台] and China Youth Daily 
[中国青年报]

The debates at Yan’an cleared the way for artists and writers to 
germinate intense cultural activity, to disseminate new ideas into the 
cultural domain, to lift the conversation from the day-to-day to new 
horizons, and to create new political spaces and epochs. This cultural 
work called upon intellectuals and artists to focus on the future, no 
longer merely concerned with their own temperament (‘art for art’s 
sake’), to work for a new horizon, and to inaugurate a new humanity. 
There was no obligation to collapse their work solely into a political 
project, since that would reduce their capacity to go beyond the 
dilemmas posed by the present. Artists and intellectuals needed to 
support movements, but also to retain the space to create a passionate 
fervour in society that could fuel a new culture.

Mao’s interventions at Yan’an made it clear that intellectual and 
artistic activity would not by themselves change the world. Artists and 
intellectuals allude to reality, draw attention to certain problems, and 
provide an understanding of them. But art alone cannot remedy all 
problems. For that, it is necessary to turn to the organisations and 
movements that churn society into something new. If art forms must carry 
the enormous burden of political theory and praxis, they are often 
diminished. Art must breathe in the sensibilities of the working class 
and the peasantry and breathe out new cultural propositions. Alongside 
the tide of humanity that refuses to submit to oppression, this leads us 
into new possibilities.

Malak Mattar (Palestine), /Last Scene Before Flying with the Dove to 
Paradise/, 2019.

Asma Naghnaghiye, a young girl who participated in a Freedom Theatre 
camp, spoke 
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of the beauty of cultural work ‘In one of the exercises in the theatre I 
imitated a bird who flies above my neighbourhood and then above Jenin 
and then above the sea. It was a like a dream’. That dream of the future 
converts the present into a place of struggle.

Warmly,

Vijay

Website <www.eltricontinental.org>

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