The Art of Witnessing

Misan Harriman portrait

CÉLINE: I came across your work as a fashion photographer, and I want to talk about your trajectory from fashion to politics. Obviously, everything is political. How has the industry responded, both publicly and behind closed doors, to your vocal support for Palestine?

MISAN: I am so disappointed in many industries, but the fashion industry in particular has really surprised me, because so much of its wealth has come out of the Global South, and so much of its value chain is built off the backs of those in the Global South. They have been somewhat vocal about the things that are safe to be vocal about over the years: queer rights, climate, and Black Lives Matter. However, I’ve never seen such silence over Palestine, across the board. I can’t think of a big fashion influencer who has made a very strong statement on Palestine at all in the last two years, at least in film and music. We can pick a handful, but I’m just thinking of a fashion icon, a big, big name, whether they’re a model, fashion designer, or fashion editor; I can’t think of one.

My life was changed by shooting a Vogue cover. I cannot deny that. I was ushered into that world without necessarily asking for it. It just happened. And once I got into that world, I realized very quickly that I was a very different character. You only have to go to a few of the parties and meet some of the characters to realize that, beneath the surface, there is not much there. “I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.” I love that Anais Nin quote so much.

It’s been really sad because for many women, in particular, fashion has been a singular pillar to hold on to, a way to resist, to thrive, to show who they are against all odds. And for that not to enter this moment we’re in now is deeply disappointing. Fashion has co-opted our trauma. There was the Met Gala this year, highlighting Black dandyism. Anna Wintour is a genius in marketing, and she understands what culture and the zeitgeist is. But there’s a bigger question about how Black culture has been wrapped around white supremacy for too long, whether it’s in sports, music, or film. We have to ask ourselves whether Black excellence hasn’t become part of an imperial structure. I DMed some of my brothers who were involved in this, saying that if they were going to do it, then they should make sure that they have a moment at the Met on the red carpet for the children of Congo, the children of Sudan, and the children of Gaza. I said that if they did that, I would fly to New York with my camera and shoot it. Some of the proceeds would go to medical aid for Palestine. I didn’t hear back from a damn person.

In Kendrick’s performance during the Super Bowl, it wasn’t Kendrick who gave permission to that dancer to run with the Sudanese and Palestinian flags, yet the whole show was using revolutionary imagery. It was the most watched show in the world, and it’s literally a show about revolution, and yet we’re living through our Vietnam. You used to see people like Marlon Brando and Charlton Heston, who were complicated white men, march in Washington with MLK and other black civil rights leaders. We don’t have that kind of intersectionality at all right now. We don’t have a Palestine Liberation Movement in the way I wish we had. The irony is that the same demons are at the top of it all: imperialism, extractive capitalism, overt, historical and current white supremacy.

CÉLINE: How did you enter the conversation on Palestine? Because you’ve been a powerful voice in documenting uprisings and moments of truth. What was the turning point for you, personally, that led you to speak out about Palestine, despite all the risks for your career and your reputation? It doesn’t come without stigma. What was it for you that was a turning point?

MISAN: I’ve always had Palestinian friends. I’ve always had Arab friends. Muslim and Arab people are part of my soul. Our shared collective traumas are so similar in so many ways. I’ve known human beings that the world has told me are terrorists. I went to boarding school, and the Black boys and the Arab boys… we survived together. But there’s also the thing that (before October 7) really made me think… It wasn’t just the assassination of Shireen Abu Akleh (a Palestinian-American journalist who was killed by Israeli forces in May of 2022). That was bad enough, but what changed me, almost at a molecular level, were the images of her funeral. When I saw the IDF soldiers beating up her family members whilst they were holding her coffin. For me, that was it. You don’t need to explain or debate anything else. I was like, okay, I need to do more.

How did we get to the place where the security apparatus for a nation that calls itself the only democracy in the Middle East can beat up family members at a funeral of their sister, a woman who was assassinated in cold blood just for trying to make sure the truth stayed in the room? I read everything I could. Also, I have a family connection with apartheid. My father had one brother… the two Harriman men were very well known in Nigeria. One went to Oxford, one went to Cambridge; it’s kind of like the Cain and Abel story in many ways. Both were brilliant men. My dad became this huge industrialist, but my father’s brother became the first chairman of the United Nations Special Committee Against Apartheid. If you Google Ambassador Leslie Harriman, a picture of him smoking a cigar in traditional Nigerian dress with Muhammad Ali in the UN pops up. Activism, working against apartheid, is part of my family heritage.

And then there’s a small detail of me being born in Nigeria, and my parents being born in Nigeria, which was an occupied country by the same folks that created this mess in the first place. Nigeria, which is now Africa’s most populous country, was named by Flora Shaw, Baroness Lugard, a white lady. Imagine the power of that. One person named us, like my children named their teddy bears. I have some stock in the game. How the hell could I see the West Bank and Gaza and not recognize what was being done to them from my own heritage and lived experience of the colonial mess that all of us were born into? I read about the Sykes-Picot Agreement (a 1916 secret treaty between the United Kingdom and France, with assent from Russia and Italy, to define their mutually agreed spheres of influence and control in an eventual partition of the Ottoman Empire – Wikipedia), and I realized what was done to the Arab people.

CÉLINE: Historically, there is solidarity between Black and Arab liberation movements, African and Middle Eastern solidarity. For instance, after Malcolm X traveled to Palestine, the struggle for Black liberation in America became grounded and rooted in liberation for Palestinians. Often this discourse is erased when we talk about Malcolm X. Lisa al Hassan who is Syrian and one of our fellows and advisors at slow factory, did her PhD on Malcolm X and his connection to Palestine and all the work he did to legitimize the solidarity between Black Americans and Palestinians… there is a larger solidarity between Black and Arab folks internationally. And you just pointed to it so perfectly…

MISAN: There is a community in Palestine of Nigerians… Nigerian families that have been there for over 100 years. People forget that there are black Palestinians. No one in the Western media wants Black folk in the Western world to understand that. People find that to be a very dangerous thing for obvious reasons. Palestine has taken off the veil of what the world is. There is the madness of the colonial settler project all around the West Bank. There is the ridiculous categorization of Palestinians as Arab Israelis. What’s happening in Palestine is making mothers in Ohio wake up to the fact that the US military machine isn’t the good guy. Something about this moment has lifted the veil not just on imperialism and the for-profit war machine, but on the fact that many of us were like spectators in the Coliseum, watching Gladiators fight to the death during the Roman Empire, not realizing that everything was falling apart as we were being entertained. Russell Crowe’s character in Gladiator asks, “Are you not entertained?”

We’ve been dumbed down by going to Taylor Swift and Beyoncé concerts. We have been dumbed down by being hyper-focused on tribalization, on whether you support Arsenal, or you’re a Chicago Bulls fan; we have been dumbed down by the post 9/11 racism. The dehumanization of Black and Brown identities through entertainment is effective. Claire Danes running around the Middle East in Homeland, or a myriad of different films where the baddie, an Arab man, is either a rich fool or a terrorist. He cannot be a philosopher or a teacher or a lover or a father or just a deeply complicated, nuanced, imperfect soul who deserves a right to thrive. The Arab woman has been reduced to some sort of terrorist bride. I have bathed in the history of our collective past in a way that few in my position have. There’s a reason why I’m not asked to be interviewed on big shows…

CÉLINE: I didn’t know the depth of your understanding of all this. I’m delighted. What an alignment. This is exactly why we created this platform. We are building collective liberation with our work through our ethnic struggles. It’s not an isolated struggle.

MISAN: We’re dealing with a very well-organized machine… Zionism is part of a bigger, and in many ways uglier machine, which is capitalism. That’s what’s making this world so wounded, whether we’re talking about climate or marginalized groups like the Trans community. I can understand how many people are scared to resist because the cost is usually to their livelihood, and that’s what’s so dangerous about this for artists. Many artists are with us, maybe not in the same way I am… they haven’t gone down your rabbit hole or mine, but they recognize that children shouldn’t be treated in this way. They recognize that apartheid and settler colonialism are wrong, but they also have a team of publicists and managers who are telling them that they will never work again. I think of Omar El Akkad’s book title, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.

I’m not here to judge; if anything, I’m here to say, hold my hand, and we’ll figure out how to build a new circular economy to support all of us. I was talking to Malak Mattar (a great Palestinian artist), and I’m just like, it’s crazy that there isn’t a fund designed to make sure poets, dancers, filmmakers, photographers, all of us, don’t second guess, as we charge ahead, using our art as one of the great soft powers of resistance. And she’s like, but that’s how they win, right? There’s so much Arab wealth, Global South wealth… If one percent of it was used to make sure art survives… we are fighting tooth and nail to keep the lights on, because 99% of the real money is in Blackrock and mega hedge funds. There’s a reason why someone like Zuckerberg can come up with an idea, a good idea.

How many Arab women have been invested in on the tech side of things? I know investment in Black women is next to zero. I’m pretty sure it’s the same for Arab women. Most founders of the big unicorns that are destroying the world right now are men. In fact, almost all of them, whether it’s Elon Musk or Jeff Zucker, former President of CNN, are men. I think that’s something that we really must look at. I do not believe women are perfect, but there is something within matriarchy that hasn’t got that scorched earth button. I did some research on mass shootings in America, and I think there has only been one woman who has committed a mass shooting in almost 100 years, which is crazy, because women are abused. Women have crazy dads who give them a machine gun for their 16th birthday, but there’s something that stops a woman from walking into a school and just spraying babies to death. I then went further and looked at women on death row, and most of the women on death row had done awful things, but they were singular in nature. Poisoning your husband because he fell in love with someone else, that kind of thing. They weren’t massacring children. Since that’s the case, don’t you think that maybe we should have women in the room when it comes to military decisions, when it comes to how much we spend on defense, when it comes to our health care, when it comes to climate?

Most of the horrible decisions that have been made, like dropping nuclear bombs, have been made by men. I hate the sexist, misogynistic retort, “What about Margaret Thatcher?” She had to become the machine to get to where she got to. She had to turn herself into part of the patriarchy. In order to be in a position of power, she had to become part of the same machine that is destroying all of us.

CÉLINE: My philosophy teacher in Lebanon said, “Oppressive systems are afraid of two things, love and ideas, because both of these things open up the door to possibilities. It’s not the system. It’s just a system. And so when you say that artists like Malak Mattar and Slow Factory and creatives should be supported, you are literally calling for disruption. True disruption comes from the arts, from freedom of expression. True creativity is feared; that is why PBS is being defunded and Colbert is being canceled. We’re seeing all the things at the intersection of education and entertainment being taken down. Why is that?

MISAN: It’s the greatest weapon we have. It’s the only magic that Homo Sapiens have. Otherwise, we are the same as the primordial soup we came from. It’s what sets us apart from the rest of the natural world and makes us really, really special. I was worried about my show, only because of the crazy, unhinged response people have to anything that humanizes the Palestine Solidarity movement. This is why, for years, artists were arrested and killed, and archives were destroyed. No one has ever come after me for my images of women’s rights and the anti-racist movement. But there’s something about how I’ve managed to shoot Palestinian protests in LA and Johannesburg… At the time of this interview, the show has only been open to the public for five days… but the gallery space has already become a sanctuary. At the opening, a Lebanese lady collapsed and fell into my arms. She looked up at me with red eyes and said, “Now I know what art is.” So many Arab men, Muslim men, walk in and cry, and then I get phone calls from powerful forces who damn near threaten my life and tell me to shut it down.

CÉLINE: That’s why we want to print it. That’s why we want it everywhere. That’s why we want to support it.

MISAN: I found a very brave Black-owned gallery to take this on. You know, as well as I do, that this show would never be at the Tate. It would never be at any of the major spaces. Yet, everyone has the subject on their minds. How does that make sense?

CÉLINE: We have the superpower to bring to life things that are being experienced and ignored, or silenced, or purposefully kept quiet. There is a war on our bodies, on our land, on the Palestinian bodies, on the Sudanese bodies, on the Congolese bodies, on the Asian bodies, on the Tibetan bodies. And, there is a global movement of liberation. Palestine is the soul of that. Because, as you said, what’s happening in Gaza and the worldwide protests in response to the genocide are awakening people. People are seeing pictures of people uprising, of people rising into courage. That’s what this is about. This is about uplifting, showing that there is a door, there is a way, there is a path. That you don’t need to sit in pain. You can do something. What is the ultimate action you wish to inspire through your work?

MISAN: I want people to know that they’re not alone. Nina Simone was asked, “What does freedom mean for you?” And she said two words, “No fear.” I can feel you shaking when you look at my photos… let’s let that vibration become purpose, and let’s keep walking. I hate to bring this up, but we don’t have a choice in terms of the attention economics of our time. What I mean by that is the most followed people in the world are celebrities, sports figures, singers, and actors… The reason I’m behind the scenes doing everything I can to make some of the biggest ones speak is not because I look up to them… I think many of them are false idols, straight up. But human nature is a very interesting thing. And politicians will not make decisions out of their moral compass. But they will make decisions out of vanity, and the court of public opinion. And I’m telling you now, if you had the soccer stars, Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, David Beckham, and Mo Salah, the whole Kardashian clan, and Adele come together, week in and week out, demanding our politicians do something, it would make a huge difference…

The public is with us. In the rain yesterday, at the protest in London, we were there in the 1000s… I’m a Save the Children Ambassador for UNICEF, which is the biggest humanitarian agency for children. UNICEF has one job, which is to protect children globally… and yet there are children in a postage stamp-sized place with no airport that is walled in, where they are being shot by snipers, and rotting in incubators… There are Save the Children ambassadors, some of the most famous people in the world, who haven’t said anything. I’m just keeping it real with you. I’m the least famous kind of global ambassador for some of these large organizations. And many people say I’m the most vocal. It’s madness. I am not here to scream at you, “How dare you?” It’s past that. There are too many babies dying. I’m on my fucking knees begging you to say something. But if you don’t want to say something, leave these organizations and get busy living your fabulous life, ignoring the humanity of the children that need you most, but do not stay associated in any way with a children’s charity and say nothing for the children of Gaza, specifically Gaza…