Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
A new reissue of John Berger’s post–September 11 writings
on art and activism.
Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance, by John Berger, Verso, 142 pages, $20
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Nearly twenty years have passed since John Berger’s Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance was first published as a furious response to the so-called “War on Terror.” The most notable move in the book, then as now, is the nimbleness with which Berger links the US-led invasion and destruction of Iraq to the ongoing dispossession of Palestine. For Berger, these are two acts in the same play, and the real drama of Hold Everything Dear, reissued for the second time this spring, is the double demand to speak out against tyranny and reclaim the leverage of international solidarity.
A painter and critic who made the practice of looking at art both exhilarating and widely accessible through his 1972 BBC series Ways of Seeing, Berger devoted his life and work to identifying asymmetries of power and inhabiting the position of the oppressed every time. This is how he theorized the male gaze in art history, and why he quoted from the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, poet laureate of the Palestinian condition, so often and in public. “This is the Berger I admire most,” wrote the filmmaker Peter Wollen in a 2002 review of Berger’s selected essays, “a man who is at home anywhere, curious, intense, always on the side of the underdog and the eccentric, always thrilled by creativity.”
From the late 1950s until his death, at ninety, Berger wrote a dozen novels, two poetry collections, and numerous plays. When he won the Booker Prize for his novel G. (1972), he immediately donated half the award money to the British Black Panthers. After fighting in World War II and going to art school in London, he spent most of his life in the farmlands of the French alps, between Geneva and Chamonix. The sheer force of his charisma, his empathy, his moral authority, and his impishness are all immortalized in the film Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger (2016), produced by Tilda Swinton, among others.
On a stylistic level, and as an exercise in critical coherence, Hold Everything Dear may not be the best or even the most interesting of Berger’s works. Besides Ways of Seeing and the selected essays, my preference would lean toward his collaborations with the photographer Jean Mohr and their notes on meaning in Another Way of Telling (1982). But Hold Everything Dear is undoubtedly the most urgent and relevant of Berger’s writings on art, politics, and conflict.
The book is a scattershot collection of disparate texts. Some are organized into numbered lists (“Seven Levels of Despair,” “Ten Dispatches About Endurance”). Others are aphoristic (“The lives of the poor are mostly grief, interrupted by moments of illumination,” “on this earth there is no happiness without a longing for justice”). There are glorious passages on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film La rabbia (1963), on the paintings of Francis Bacon and the poems of Nazim Hikmet, on the beauty of donkeys and boys playing marbles and drawing with dirt in Ramallah.
The most compelling essay by far turns to the art of Ahlam Shibli. Shibli’s series of eighty-five photographs titled Trackers (2005), about Bedouin Palestinians who volunteer in the Israeli Army, occasions a brisk, purposeful walk through the ideas of Frantz Fanon and Walter Benjamin to arrive at the conclusion that simplification—reducing complex political realities to linear narratives that are easy to understand but stripped of nuance—“serves only the interests of those who wield power.” By contrast, Shibli’s images show how “the interests of those who suffer under, or struggle against this blind power, are served now and for the long, long future by the recognition and acceptance of diversity, differences and complexities.”
At stake in 2007 was the wall, Israel’s euphemistically named “separation fence,” under construction at the time. “When finished,” Berger writes, “it will have filched nearly 10 percent of what remains of Palestinian land.” He speaks to a Palestinian woman at a checkpoint who tells him the silence of the West is worse than the threat of violence. He quotes an Israeli refusenik, a conscientious objector who will not serve in the occupied territories. “This army does not exist to bring security to the citizens of Israel,” the soldier explains. “It exists to guarantee the continuation of the theft of Palestinian land.” Just as American recklessness in Iraq and Afghanistan boosted recruitment for groups like Al-Qaeda and their offspring, Berger notes that the boys he meets in the West Bank and Gaza will join Hamas, and their families will vote for them. “The Israeli government claims that they are obliged to take these measures to combat terrorism,” he writes. And yet. “The stranglehold inspires the terrorism it purports to be fighting.” Today, with more than 50,000 dead and Gaza pulverized, this is more certain than ever.
Rereading Hold Everything Dear, it is striking to realize—to an utterly tragic degree—how there is nothing new in the devastation of the past two years, nor in the crass power dynamics of the second Trump administration. What is shocking, however, is to measure how impoverished public discourse has become. In the same year Hold Everything Dear was published, the artist Emily Jacir won a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for Material for a film (2004–ongoing), an epic installation telling the story of a poet and translator who was killed in Rome in 1972, the first in a string of assassinations carried out by Israeli operatives targeting intellectuals in Europe associated with the Palestinian cause. That honor would be unthinkable today, not because equally strong works are lacking (take your pick of recent projects by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Jumana Emil Abboud, Jumana Manna, Basma Alsharif, or Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme) but because the art world is so feckless and fearful as to choose avoidance over actual debate.
Jacir’s Material for a film opened up a crucial account of pan-Arab solidarity with Palestine. Among the victims of the Israeli assassination campaign were an Algerian playwright, an Iraqi professor at the American University of Beirut, and a literary gadfly who organized Jean-Luc Godard’s visit to Jordan and Lebanon, resulting in the landmark film Ici et ailleurs (1976). The murder of intellectuals deprived the Palestinian movement of oxygen. It cut off the head of a body politic by obliterating its vision and imagination and destroying its capacity to dream. In the last twenty-five years, Palestinians have lost towering figures such as Darwish and Edward Said, who gave to their struggle the space of a capacious language, with questions to answer and metaphors to fill. With the passing of Berger in 2017, the artist and writer Etel Adnan in 2021, and Godard in 2022, Palestinians are losing a generation of public intellectuals willing to stand up for them, name them, and speak out against injustice. “Every form of contestation against this tyranny is comprehensible,” Berger writes. “Dialogue with it is impossible. For us to live and die properly, things have to be named properly. Let us reclaim our words.” Now, the words to say, to save from obliteration, to hold everything dear, are Palestine and the Palestinians.
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie is a writer and critic based in Geneva.