You have to believe that the reach of literature is long when you see Anton Chekhov’s work performed on the stage and convince yourself that the man was explicitly talking about the Arab world’s political elites.
This hit home recently when I saw Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” at the Source Theater in downtown Washington. Set at the turn of the century, the play tackles the issue of how the aristocratic elite and landowning classes in Russia, who at the time owned much of the wealth and virtually all the power, failed to face and adapt to the changing realities in their world, and ended up paying a heavy price.
As you watch the self-absorbed members of the Ranevsky family clinging on to their halcyon past in the fabled cherry orchard they had owned for generations, refusing to let go of their old ways, you anticipate the inexorable end to this drama: Their loss of land and home, which are finally bought by the wretched Lopakhim, a mere peasant, the embodiment of Chekhov’s recurring theme of landowners and serfs, servants and masters, and oppressors and oppressed.
As adapted by David Mamet, the legendary American playwright, filmmaker and belleletrist, “The Cherry Orchard” is craftily set in the antebellum South and evokes the ethos of that part of American culture that in the end was confronted by the onslaught of changing social realities and moral truths — and had to yield. You don’t accept inevitable change, change will, like it or not, overtake you.
Change in human existence is, as it were, an irresistible detergent. It scours the old smells out of the house and ushers in the nervous queries of the young.
Yes, the Arab world is changing as we speak. But to say that that change has been triggered by the American occupation of Iraq, a pet idea of the imperial neocons, is humbug. Change in our part of the world is the direct outcome of a perception by a vanguard of young Arabs that modernity is an idea whose time has come.
Ironically, as those ponderous Arab elites opposed to change stifled the sentiments of the “Arab street” or cut the Arab sensibility off from nearly all that was alive and radical in the modern world, they simply added fuel to the engine of that demand for change.
The dizzying events in Lebanon over the last four weeks have indeed been significant, with commentators describing them as an uprising, even calling them the “red-and-white revolution,” after the red and white, with a cedar tree in the center, of the Lebanese national flag.
Of course it has been fashionable over the last decade and a half to identify revolutionary movements with colors.
There was the Velvet Revolution that defeated communism in the then Czechoslovakia, the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the so-called Purple Revolution in Iraq, connoting the color of the voters’ ink in the recent elections — in this case a stretch by the neocons of the term revolution.
Let’s call what’s been happening in Lebanon People Power. The broad alliance of Lebanese that embodies that power, and that has coalesced since the Feb. 14 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, is essentially united in saying that Syria, after a 30-year presence in Lebanon, has overstayed its welcome, and now is the time for it to pull out its 15,000 troops and intelligence services, leaving Lebanese voters the freedom to elect a Parliament this spring not beholden to Damascus.
I don’t see anything provocative, subversive or unrealistic here, do you?
Sure, Syrian occupation of Lebanon is not Israeli occupation of Palestine. Syria and Lebanon are two sister states inextricably tied by their historical, cultural, linguistic, political, economic and, yes, even family ties, but if the Lebanese have chafed under Syria’s control of their country all these years, and want it stopped, then surely Damascus will find that it has no options but to comply, particularly when you couple that with so much international and regional pressure on Bashar Assad’s government to do just that.
Moreover, the Arab League summit, to convene on March 22 in Algeria, is also expected to take up the issue.
Thus, over the weekend, Bashar said in a speech to his Parliament that he intended to “pull back” his troops in Lebanon to a region near the two countries’ common border. But, alas, he fell short of issuing a timetable for withdrawal as demanded by world leaders, not to mention the tens of thousands of demonstrators camped out in downtown Beirut.
Yet has anyone thought of the danger of a precipitous pullout, as these folks are demanding? How do you ensure sustained stability in Lebanon after the departure of the Syrians, avoiding the potential disintegration of Lebanese society into the kind of civil war that devastated the country between 1975 and 1990?
And how do you — an issue of no less concern — deal with the reaction of the Syrian ruling elite, the military and the security services to the “loss of Lebanon”? Is anyone able to “game,” or predict confidently, that there will not be resultant turmoil inside Syria, adding a new dimension of trouble to our already troubled part of the world?
Whichever way you look at it, there appears to be a new order emerging in our region beyond the ability of the old guard to block or impede.
Sadly, our political elite remain smug in their belief that the old ways will remain eternally valid, much in the manner of a man who had gone blind at one time in his life and continues to see his surroundings in terms of remembered images, and refuse to imagine that for their own survival and the survival of the societies they lead, new compromises and new insights must be hammered out.
Consider this with me: In Syria, the state-controlled media reported on the resignation of Prime Minister Omar Karami on Feb. 28 and broadcast live President Bashar’s speech to Parliament March 5, but did not mention, much less show pictures of, the protests in downtown Beirut!
Reason? Ask that of members of Chekhov’s Ranevsky family, thrashing about in the last days of their cherished cherry orchard, who refused to face the crushing wheels of reality.
