Access and Closure

Access & Closure
[ stories from in and out of an occupied Palestine ]

Afterword

1. In August of 2008 I went to Hamtramck,
in eastern Detroit, to see Toby Millman’s exhibit,
“Access and Closure: photographs and cut paper work
from Palestine,” at the 2739 Edwin Street Gallery,
Hamtramck, Michigan. Though I had seen most of her
work before, conceptualized and formulated between
2006 and 2008, in different spaces and under different
circumstances, still, I wanted to have another brief look
before I set out to write this brief Afterword. I got lost,
as usual when I go to Detroit, and not only because of the
everlasting construction work on the I-75, which I had
to cross in order to get to Hamtramck (or so I had been
told by Mapquest). Eventually, I managed to get to my
destination, with endless directions from Toby over my
cell phone.
There was something about the splendid space of that
gallery that lured me in as soon as I stepped into the door
on the second floor; something about the arrangement of
Toby’s cutouts in and around and through that space, that
immediately told me I had arrived at the right place and
the right time; that I no longer needed any directions;
that art can take our hand and gently lead us in the right
way. The cutouts, the incisions in the white paper on the
walls, all pointed me in the right direction, and took me
to where I wanted to go.
I looked first at the huge map cutouts of the West Bank,
their incised, shifting borders suspended by a thread,

threatening to fall off the map at any minute and leave
the Palestinian fragmented territory behind, floating into
invisibility, outside time and space. The white, scarred
paper seemed so fragile and frail under the weight of
the powerful image, yet so evocative and succinct and
enduring. A couple of weeks before, Mahmoud Darwish,
the national poet of Palestine, had died, in Houston,
Texas, so far away from any virtual home he’d known
after his expulsion from his native Al-Birweh in 1948.
He died of a ruptured aorta, two weeks after I’d met him
in Haifa for the last time, and the incised maps on the
gallery’s wall seemed to me like the maps of his itineraries,
his Palestinian blood vessels, his ruptured poems.
2. John Berger argues that unlike, say, drawing,
photographs do not translate from appearances but,
rather, quote from them. One of my most favorite
moments in this book is the one about Hussein’s older
sister, who happens to walk into Toby’s frame while a
photograph is being taken, hair uncovered. The awkward
moment, at the intersection between different identities
and social norms and conventions, makes Toby delete the
image; delete the inadvertent quote, off her memory card,
and off the sister’s memory of embarrassment. The sister
then wants the photographer to take another shot of her,
to replace the first, after she arranges her headscarf. Then,
pondering her act for a minute, she looks at Toby and
takes off her headscarf, asking her to go ahead and take

her photograph, make a quote. She smiles for Toby and
for her camera, a smile of someone who suspends what
marks the boundaries between the self and the foreign
other who is coming from the other side, across national
and political and lingual divides, a smile which is an
intimate gesture of absolute trust.
These snippets and vignettes of the quotidian, these
minor and low-keyed interventions on the margins of
the Palestinian page, in images and in words, guide us
and tell us where and how to look and listen; they attract
and direct our gaze ever so gently, in a friendly gesture,
as if we were involved in a conversation among friends;
and they interpret and translate the complex Palestinian
reality for us so effortlessly, so casually, and so intimately
that we hardly feel what could have otherwise been
thought of as a form of intrusion. And that’s exactly
what makes these works so unique in my view: they have
the power to transform a photo, taken at random, into
an astonishingly incisive statement, as the incision —
now embossed—becomes the statement itself, and the
anecdotal paragraph across the page—an afterthought of
sorts, a bemused comment, a verbal glimpse of reality—
illuminates the image, foregrounds it, traces out what will
adhere to our visual memory, through the subtlety and
compelling expressiveness that Toby Millman manages
to bring out of the vulnerability of the white paper.
A visual storyteller, with a fine-tuned attentiveness to

issues of representation, Toby Millman turns her quotes
into acts of translation.
3. As I’m thinking about Toby Millman’s work, I’m
reading—for a seminar I teach on torture and pain—an
article by anthropologist E. Valentine Daniel. The article
is based on field interviews he has conducted during the
eighties with former Tamil prisoners, victims of torture,
illustrating “the limits, the particularity, the unshareability,
and the incommunicability of pain in torture.” Daniel is
primarily interested in the similarities between pain and
beauty, as they both resist articulation in language. One
of the former prisoners he has interviewed, a survivor
of a military forced-training camp, had been tortured by
hammering a nail up the sole of his right foot and leaving
it there overnight, and then, as a warning to the others
of what could happen if orders were disobeyed, his legs
were broken. Years after the incident, and even though he
was completely paralyzed below the waist, the prisoner
could still feel the excruciating pain caused by that nail,
in only this single spot, “no larger in circumference than
the point of the nail.”
Now as I look at the map that opens up this book, at the
embossed Bisan, the Palestinian city whose six thousand
inhabitants were expelled in 1948, I can see that it’s no
larger in circumference than the point of a nail. The map
is drawn and pulled toward that embossed point, as if

the memories of lost Palestine, the lost time and space,
are distilled into this tiny point, the only quivering point
on the flattened-out map. Toby Millman tells us, in the
accompanying text, that after choosing a different name
for herself every day, she and the shebab agreed “Bisan”
should be her name on Friday. Some five hundred
Palestinian villages and communities were razed to the
ground in 1948, and their inhabitants were scattered
upon the face of all the earth, as the Tower of Babel story
has it, pushed out of history, all carrying a tiny spot in
their souls, the size of a nail’s point, as a painful trace of
the place they were displaced from.
One day at a time, then, Toby carries the memory of
those nails and passes it on, one nail at a time. And
that’s what art can do: transform the unshareability
and the incommunicability of pain, the pain of loss
and dispossession, into sheer beauty. Pain resists and
destroys language, as Elaine Scarry tells us; beauty, on
the other hand, may resist language, but it always finds
another form of representation, another sign to carry on
what could not be carried on. The phantom pain of the
amputated Bisan is now an embossed point, which is
easier to carry, easier to remember.
4. “I don’t want to be involve/ Don’t get involved,”
Toby Millman translates for herself, and for us, toward
the end of her project. The Arabic root, d.kh.l, alludes

also to an entrance of sorts, as if getting involved means
opening a door and going in. And that’s exactly what she
does for us: she opens the door and invites us in. And
we stand there, pondering our involvement or the lack
thereof.
It’s an astonishing door, and the invitation is very hard
to resist.
Anton Shammas

This digital version was produced for the exhibition,
“Fractured Testimonies from Palestine” in 2020, which
was scheduled to open at AC Institute in New York City,
but moved online due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Copyright © 2008 Toby Millman
Afterword © Anton Shammas