Dubai: Creative writers and artists have been urged to help foster balanced and harmonious societies that allow collective otherness to thrive above narrow-minded nationalism.
The call came during a session on ‘Migrating Views: Identity and Nationalism in a World on the Move’ at Emirates Airline Festival of Literature in Dubai on Friday.
Jamal Mahjoub, a British-Sudanese author whose books frequently explore the relationships between Europe and Africa, opined that “the resurgence of a sense of nationalism in European countries at the moment and also what has been happening in the US now … is an assertion of certain kind of image of what American or Dutch or French is. But in reality it is not what they [the nationalists] portray.”
He said the need of the hour is “to embrace collective otherness which is about understanding that together we can also be one nation. And it is not going to be dominated by one for the sacrifice of another”.
“This requires a degree of imagination and precisely it is the job of creative writers and artists and so on to be able to create and produce an image, model or template that people can actually say that it does actually work and it does exist.
“A society that is interrogating itself, raising questions over what it is and where it comes from is a society which has a much bigger chance of being a healthy and balanced society than a society that is, as these nationalists would like, reverting to some image of what Britain or France or the Netherlands is, which is quite unrealistic and depends heavily on a kind of false image,” said Mahjoub, who is currently writing a non-fiction book about Sudan’s troubled history.
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The recent attacks against Indian-origin Americans in the US was raised with concern by Kanishk Tharoor, an Indian author based in New York who has written extensively about migration, indigenous rights, cultural destruction and nationalism. “This seems to be a growing trend in the era of Trump,” he said, calling for cultural pluralism and tolerance in countries with influx of migrant residents.
Izzeldin Abuelaish, a Palestinian doctor from Canada advocating for peace, tolerance and communication, said communities need to smash barriers and focus on the commonalities to overcome differences.
“It is important to see people as humans not [as] ‘these documents’,” he said, referring to the prejudice people face based on the passports they hold.
He cited Canada as a good example of inclusive and diverse society that can be a role model in how people treat each other with respect.
Another panelist, Afra Atiq, the first Emirati female spoken word artist and slam poet, later told Gulf News: “The UAE is actually a model that shows that you can live harmoniously with all these people of different nationalities and religions and backgrounds.
“We have to have tolerance with not just different kinds of people, we need to have tolerance with their ideas as well. Open dialogues and festivals like these are the things that push us forward,” she said.
