Home/ Videos & Mixed Media/ I Am the Martyr Comrade Jamâl Sâtî
 

“By the time you see this tape, I, comrade Jamâl Sâtî, will have died” is believable, but not: “I am the martyr comrade Jamâl Sâtî.” While I can usually assume in the present of videotaping my future state at the time of broadcasting or screening, I cannot do so in the case of death. I cannot believe Jamâl Sâtî on TV telling me “I am the martyr comrade Jamâl Sâtî…” even if I am told that he had died in a martyring operation by the time I saw him on TV (Jamâl Sâtî, b. 1962, mortally blew up the explosives hidden in two baskets on his donkey at the South Lebanon Army checkpoint at Tallit Zaghla, Hâsbayya, in the morning of 8/6/1985). And while I can categorically assert “I will die,” I cannot deduce from this that at one point in the future I can say, “I am dead,” even if death is not a final disappearance.
 
   
  Click on each of the four posters to see enlarged versions
 

Magritte, Perspective II: Manet's "The Balcony"
1950 - Oil on canvas, 81 x 60 cm
Museum Van Hedendaagse Kunst, Ghent, Belgium
   
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, trans. Francesca Fremantle and Chögyam Trungpa (Boston: Shambhala, 1975), p.49.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Of Redemption,” Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 160.
 
 
  Was one of Jamâl Sâtî’s ears severed in the suicidal bombing he carried out?
   
 

Exhibitions:
— Premiered at the 6th Sharjah International Biennial, United Arab Emirates, 8 April - 8 May 2003.

 

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