Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog

Former USF engineering professor Sami Al-Arian ended his hunger strike last week, taking a liquid meal for the first time in two months. Hours later, a federal appeals court affirmed the Virginia ruling holding the 49-year-old in contempt of court for refusing to testify in a federal investigation of Islamic charities accused of assisting terrorists.

I have never understood hunger strikes. This may be due to my first experience with the term coming from the 1991 Temple Of The Dog record of the same name, a performance that launched both Soundgarden and Pearl Jam to national attention. Its use as a rhetorical tool only came to my attention much later.

Mohandas Gandhi engaged in several hunger strikes during his campaign to bring independence to India, but his approach had a foreseeable conclusion: if Gandhi were to die while imprisoned by the British, it would turn international opinion against the colonists while simultaneously creating a martyred hero for the nonviolent revolutionaries. In the end, Britain had no choice but to acquiesce to his position.

Sami Al-Arian, according to his wife, has lost 50 pounds off his already slight frame, and can no longer walk due to his refusal to eat. Her imploring led him to change his mind and start eating — which leads us to ask again exactly what point was he trying to make? There is an aspect of performativity in hunger strikes insofar as the rhetorical act is written on the body, as Philip Auslander would say, but nobody is seeing Al-Arian’s bodily rhetoric anyway. He is shouting in an empty forest. The topic of terrorism does not generate the universal sympathy of Gandhi’s struggle against colonialism, and he hasn’t the name recognition to become a motivational martyr.

He could, of course, be making a much stronger point by using the power of the pen to express his case (the case being that he signed a plea agreement exempting him from future testimony) but that isn’t happening. A hunger strike from a federal prison is as calculatedly irrational as Corporal Klinger’s cross-dressing on M*A*S*H, and in the same way both want the same thing: to be let out without having to testify to anything. I love Klinger, because he is from Northwest Ohio and talks about it constantly. I’m not sure how I feel about Al-Arian (and I represent no organization or institution but myself with these words), but I know I’d feel much better if he’d say anything.