The Palestinian crisis, Holocaust production, and ‘Maus’
The irony feels unsettling as I sit in a Dhaka classroom and engage in a discussion about a graphic novel on a historical event that would inadvertently be the genesis of the present Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The novel under discussion is Maus (1986) by Art Spiegelman. It is at once a graphic novel, biography, autobiography, and a comic book that, portraying Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats, explores the Holocaust as experienced by the author's father Vladek, a survivor of the harrowing event. It is a tale within a tale–the father-son relationship is layered over the chilling recollection of trauma. In light of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, the questions that Maus raises about the hierarchy of trauma, the construct of resistance, and the banality of evil seem particularly pertinent.
Traditionally, the Holocaust has been studied as the ultimate traumatic event in the field of trauma and memory, fostering a culture of competitive trauma or "trauma olympics" with its disregard for other traumatic events such as slavery, colonialism, Partition and, in this case, the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There also exists a narrative of survivor glorification alongside the narrative of Holocaust exceptionalism. Such glorification is challenged in Maus through the portrayal of Vladek as an ordinary individual with a rash disposition, and a survivor with all-too-human flaws. For instance, Vladek himself harbours undisguised racism to which Françoise, Art's wife, retorts "How can you, of all people, be such a racist! You talk about blacks the way the Nazis talked about the Jews!" This reminds us that a history of trauma does not purge people of the propensity to perpetrate similar atrocities against other people. Such a reminder is only necessary because in the thick of a privileged, overrepresented historical event and a glorified survival narrative, humanity is stripped of flaws, absolved of accountability, and hiked on to an otherworldly pedestal. If, for instance, Holocaust exceptionalism did not absolve Jewish people of accountability for atrocities they commit in the present, then any and every critique against the Israeli state would not be deemed anti-semitism. Art conveys a consciousness of this critique as a news reporter, in Maus 2, accusatorily asks him "If [his] book was about ISRAELI Jews, what kind of animal would [he] draw?" to which Art falters "…porcupines?" Israeli Jews are now doing to Palestinians what the Nazis did to European Jews–will history's henchmen ever cease haunting humanity?
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Holocaust exceptionalism stems from its incomprehensibility, most notably due to the sheer number of people that were killed in such a systematic, industrialised method; six million people killed as efficiently as chicken are bred is undoubtedly hard to comprehend. However, in his book Discourse on Colonialism (first published 1950), critic Aimé Césaire has attributed the Holocaust's incomprehensibility also to the fact that it was white on white: the white man "applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa"–it was not the "crime against man" that was so astonishing, but the "crime against the white man." Incomprehensible, then–only in the Western imagination. 80 years later, we still see this bias manifest itself in the West's support for what Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov has called an "apartheid regime," i.e. Israel, in spite of the genocide in Gaza that bears eerie echoes of the 1948 Nakba and the 1967 Naksa.
Additionally, reading Maus amidst the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict reminds one that the construct of resistance ought to be revised. Art himself asks Vladek the dreaded-old-infamous question that reeks of victim-blaming: "Why didn't the Jews at least try to resist?" This is part of a grand narrative that, offensive as it is, asks why the Jewish people let themselves be killed, instead of asking why the system enabled it to happen–the same narrative also exists in the cases of colonialism and slavery. Evidently, it shifts focus away from the perpetrators. So, this nexus between resistance and humanity ought to be altered–one cannot demand resistance as a marker of humanity. The hollowness of this victim-blaming-cum-resistance question reveals itself under the light of Palestinian resistance. Although the Palestinians, in contrast, have resisted and still resist, public discourse regarding the conflict is imbued with accusation and surprise at the 'violence' of Palestinian resistance to their coloniser, as if they are to passively accept colonisation; or else people are reacting to the conflict as if it started on October 6th with Hamas attacking unprovoked.
Technically, a literary device that caught my attention in Maus is self-reflexivity, or self-reference–the writer repetitively reflects upon or refers to the written aspect of that very work. These instances also serve as narrative breaks to convey a sense of close proximity between our world and the world of the story being told. For instance, in Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History, Art shows Vladek a scene from Maus itself as he is writing it. So, we encounter Art showing Vladek the Maus-in-progress as he says "And here's you, saying: "Ach, when I think of them, it still makes me cry!" after we have seen Vladek utter that very dialogue. Then, after their conversation, we see Art going to grab a pencil as he says "I've just gotta write this conversation down before I forget it!" This creates a strong sense of urgency and dismantles the illusion of the otherworldliness associated with fiction, which aligns with Art's interest in dispelling the exceptional, superhuman aura that has traditionally surrounded the Holocaust, its perpetrators, and its survivors. It also undermines the sense of a comfortable distance that the traditional storytelling genre adopted by Art, i.e. the animal fable, would otherwise evoke. The reader, thus, feels unsettlingly close to the work they are reading.
Concurrently, Art conveys his consciousness of the limitations of this realist task that he has set himself through another instance of reflexivity–in Maus II, when his own troubles in representing the Holocaust begin to show, he says to Françoise, "I feel so inadequate trying to reconstruct a reality that was worse than my darkest dreams…reality is too complex for comics…So much has to be left out or distorted…See what I mean…In real life you'd never have let me talk this long without interrupting." Where reflexivity in Maus 1, with its immediacy, bridges the gap between the book and reality, reflexivity in Maus II, in contrast, highlights the constructedness that separates the book from reality.
Looking at Adolf Eichmann, an orchestrator of the Holocaust, during his trial in 1961 Israel, Jewish refugee and political thinker Hannah Arendt makes the controversial claim that evil is banal, suggesting that the evil embodied by the Holocaust is ordinary. Her claim is an attempt to dismantle Holocaust exceptionalism and glorification. Genocide is, after all, done by ordinary people, not superhuman monsters, and when this fact is shrouded in the garb of an unparalleled, extraordinary cruelty, it absolves those complicit of accountability, and dismisses their crime as an exception that cannot occur again. We see the repercussions of such a dismissal in the present Israeli-Palestinian conflict–for the Holocaust to remain an exception, other traumatic events, such as the Palestinian genocide, are to be disregarded. Art is well aware of the Holocaust's exceptional status in the trauma hierarchy. Hence, Maus is a project that at once recounts the horrors of the Holocaust and, crucially, dismantles the exceptional narrative shrouding it. It does as it undoes. The matter-of-fact tone with which Vladek recounts the most horrid atrocities against the Jews is an example; as if to say that evil, with all its banality, has ceased to stun him, as if to say that it can happen again–as it is happening right now.
To conclude, then, Maus unravels this shroud of exceptionality and allows us to glimpse how the banality of evil entails its recurrence. With the line between the literary work and the reader rendered thinner and thinner through reflexivity, it evokes a sense of continuation even after closing the book because it feels as though the story is still being written in the present moment; upon the bloody palimpsest that bears also the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Syeda Fatema Rahman is an undergraduate student at the Department of English and Modern Languages, North South University.
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