On Phoenicianism
A Reverie for 2010-ish
Translations
Some time around 2010 I went to see my father act in performance of Brian Friel’s play, Translations. In typical pretentious-Portland fashion, Marylhurst University had decided to bill the performance, which featured elaborate costumes and extensive rehearsal, as merely an “enhanced reading.” Dad did a splendid job despite not having acted in a decade and I remember it fondly.
Translations, written in 1980, features several themes related to British rule over pre-famine Ireland. Set in a Classical schoolhouse in County Donegal, it portrays Irish folk as well-read and multilingual, imposed upon by monolingual and oafish British soldiers set on Anglicizing all of the names in the county. The classically-educated Irish describe themselves as the metaphorical Phoenicians to the British Romans. The comparison is lost on the Redcoats. It’s got some great metaphors about maps and territory and what it means for a language to die.
A recent read through Oxford Classicist Josephine Quinn’s In Search of the Phoenicians, has brought me a new term to describe this attitude: Phoenicianism. It helps that her book also begins with a description of Translations, which immediately caught me in a Proustian moment. Indeed, upon further reflection, it strikes me that Portland in 2010 was caught in a bit of a Phoenicianist moment itself.
Phoenicians as the Imaginary Nation
As it turns out, many times the idea of Phoenician identity has been used by nation-builders. Quinn uses Irish Phoenicianism as an example of how the Phoenicians have reliably throughout history played a particular role for statesmen and nation-builders. She highlights how both Tunisia and Lebanon in turn have used the image of “Phoenicia” to build national identities separate from pan-Arabism and later Islamism. Indeed, English nation-builders in the court of Queen Elizabeth also went to the mythical Phoenicians, seriously insisting that they must have colonized Cornwall. Carthage itself, by the time of the Punic wars, invented for their own state-building project an idea of “Phoenician” identity that had never existed in the prior five hundred years of Mediterranean history.
And yet, Quinn demonstrates, there is no evidence that there ever really was a Phoenician nation. For the Irish, for the English, for the Tunisians, for the Lebanese, Phoenicia represents some imagined Other to stand up to Rome. There never was an Etruscan nation, or a Celtic nation, or anything like that. There were city-states, yes, and they referred to themselves as “Phoenicians” or “Etruscans” when trying to be intelligible to Greek people. Carthage embarked on a state-building project, yes, but this was an explicit creation of an identity that had never existed at scale. As far as Quinn can tell, there was never an identity that bound Phoenicians together into anything larger than families and poleis. As an “Other civilization,” the Phoenicians are entirely imagined.
Nope, the ancient Mediterranean contained a Hellenic “nation”, an Egyptian kingdom, a Persian Empire, and eventually Hellenistic kingdoms, and finally Rome. Pretty much everyone else was scattered city-states — with their own languages and material cultures, yes, but no literature, in many cases no writing, and no larger institutions. Cyrus is immortalized as Shahanshah for bringing institutions to the tribes of Iran (and eventually to the Phoenicians themselves.) If you were a Phoenician or an Etruscan or even a Scythian, you were collecting books written in Greek. There’s good reason to believe the famously-destroyed library in Carthage was Greek books. If you were a Celt, you’d eventually be collecting books in Latin. If you were a Canaanite Phoenician, you’d have a moment where you used Imperial Aramaic and then it would be Greek.
But somehow it’s dispiriting to think that’s all there was: a couple of empires, a couple of dominant literatures, and everyone else was split into small city-states. What about all the, well, other projects — you know, like Carthage — that never made it into our history books? I mulled this over and the Proustian moment came: I’ve certainly had a feeling similar to what these Irish people felt.
Phoenicians and Portland’s Gentry
Thinking about Portland for even a brief moment makes the idea of Phoenicianism hit home. Take a quick walk around downtown Portland today and you’ll see a whole suite of land acknowledgements and radical messages. Oregonians seem to imagine themselves as the Redcoats in our state’s story: this logging city was built on stolen land and we’re writing the heritage out of the history. Well, they’re not entirely wrong. Perhaps Marylhurst University was prescient putting on their play: as Heidegger says, the poetics seep into the culture before the explicit philosophy takes hold.
Unsurprisingly, Phoenicianism seems to serve mostly to encourage the well-to-do of Portland to find some way to identify with the Other — embrace some kind of queer identity, become environmental activists, make noise about indigenous history. This ethos treads precariously close to becoming, well, a straight-from-the-script-of-Portlandia white-guilt pastiche that runs into a predictable amount of clumsiness negotiating with actual indigenous political commitments. Nonetheless, I have been able to purchase some excellent new books from the guilt-stricken lily-white booksellers. Both of the links above will, I hope, feature in secondary-school history curricula.
A particularly interesting example of this identification-with-the-Other, all too familiar thanks to my Unitarian upbringing, is that in my own adolescence the adults couldn’t decide if the Classics themselves are “Roman” (bad) or “Phoenician” (good). The Irishmen in Translations read the Classics, and that shows that they’re refined noble savages, but at the same time it’s the Classical education that’s the mark of a Dickensian haute-bourgeoisie whom Portland in the 1970s had become a refuge from. A Buddhist schoolteacher once handed me a copy of The Republic because I needed “more advanced, college-level material like they read at Reed.” In the same month, I’d hear from the same teacher how Roman civic identity (the likes of which formulated by Plato in the aforementioned dialogue) was imperialist and culturally destructive to the people of Gaul. The Classics, insisted my well-to-do white teacher, are all dead white men.
Okay, this is all kind of table stakes for Portland. “Here’s an advanced-curriculum book, but I need to tell the class that everyone is basically the same so let’s make an enemy of the past.” Look, it shouldn’t be hard to parrot Harold Bloom and make a principled point that the Classics are there because they have canonical influence within Western civilization agnostic of any moral values that they may or may not impart. It only takes an expensive private education at, say, Reed College, to be able to say that. And yet there’s been a palpable insistence for the last twenty years or so to go beyond this — somehow, we have to hold America, as the leader of Western civilization, up to critique in its entirety. American Phoenicianism: we sensitive gentry have to somehow pull away from America the polity and try to imagine all the Carthages out there.
Personal Reflections
I should also add that this was 2010 — as Arjun Appadurai’s essay Fear of Small Numbers recently reminded me, this was a period when Boomer parents found themselves in shock and predictable defensiveness at a global surge of new anti-Americanism. Fareed Zakaria’s book had been conspicuously displayed on bookshelves of family friends for not even two years. They had now come to “symbolize the Nikes on their feet and in their missile silos simultaneously.” Combined with newfound class anxiety from the 2008 crash, the still-upwardly-mobile parents were frantically sending their kids to build houses in the Yucatan and to send photos to Claremont McKenna or wherever it was they had to get in. Everyone had to study abroad and take a gap year somewhere “non-Western” and the Classics (trappings of, for instance, the Yale-educated Bushes) were definitely not part of this agenda. We remember Kony 2012. The aging Boomers still wanted to buy the world a Coke. It was this mad scramble to be self-critical enough to get the imagined international community to like them back.
Boy, I really bought into that West-Coast-genry dogma. I got obsessed with trying to find the most Other languages, and the most Other sociopolitical structures, the most Other places. I bounced between fantasizing about the languages of the Pacific Northwest and about Finland’s public institutions and about New Zealand’s efforts to integrate Maori culture into the state. You know, the Instagram places. I joined Internet forums full of likeminded people and they (along with Noam Chomsky videos introduced by my father, and perhaps along with seeing my father do so well in a play called Translations) convinced me to study linguistics. Phoenicianism managed to create an ethos.
I’ve been to Juneau and Vancouver and Helsinki, and hopefully someday I’ll see New Zealand — yeah, Phoenicianism is a hell of a drug. (I hope it was more amusing than annoying for those Finnish folks watching me try to prove that I “get it.”) Obviously the Other I was looking for was just the mirror image of what I already knew. Neoconservative family friends tried to point out to me that I was looking for some Archimedean perspective that didn’t exist, and that every country depends on the United States to be the world police, and so on, which never failed to come across as precisely the oafishness I felt like it was my job to escape. Even if this alternative, better way of being didn’t really exist, it felt like my purpose to create it.
And, for what it’s worth, the neoconservative oafs basically went through a metamorphosis a few years later along with the whole culture. Gone was the Mike Huckabee talk of Jesus and here to stay was the Tea Party. With 2012 we got the evolution from “show the world America is actually good” to wokeness and anti-wokeness, and the rest is history. Clearly Appadurai’s global anti-Americanism hit the right nerve for us and birthed a new ethos— prove that we’re not those Americans who are so upsetting to the world.
The Project
Of course, like for everyone else, our Phoenicia doesn’t really exist. Certainly I never found it. We don’t even have a name for the Indigenous lands that would become the Oregon Country— the land where people toiled between the retreat of the ice sheets twelve thousand years ago and the arrival of Francis Drake on some bay near Manzanita in 1579. A lot of the societies were small-scale, like Celtic petty kingdoms that had never united. What we know of the the real social forms of pre-contact Oregonians is a very complicated history of many groups moving around. Oh, and they practiced slavery. Every European social democracy has shown us its racists doing shockingly well in elections. Australia and New Zealand have nasty exclusionary immigration policies that good liberals can’t get behind. Canada, the one we keep trying to admire, keeps producing nasty headlines about their history with indigenous rights. (And, of course, these are all postwar social democracies built under the aegis of the American military-industrial complex. Just like it was under Roman rule that the Levant and North Africa began to build their “Phoenician” regional identities.) The neoconservatives of my adolescence had one true observation: Phoenicia is, as I discovered, is entirely an idea.
The thing is, being a mere idea hasn’t actually stopped Phoenicia from being very powerful. It affirms what Henry Kissinger calls “the reality of intangibles.” As it turns out, nation-building involves a will to forget fragmentary and confused realities and differences. It’s a use of history for life. It worked in Ireland — a place that had never been ruled as a unitary republic — and it worked to a degree in Lebanon and Tunisia. Here the “postcolonial Nietzsche” (the one who so inspired Oswald Spengler) shines his laser eyes: the will to feel drunkenness in the narrative, to feel like this idea that is not real is still a purpose, is what gives itself the power to create. I repeat, a hell of a drug. It really does create things.
Also worth noting is the fact that this Obama-era Phoenicianist ethos has made more of a dent than we might think. Take seriously that Republicans don’t talk about Jesus anymore (find-replace: “trans people”). We got the America we wanted. It worked for me: I’m proud to have many international friends and to have a group of friends who are eager and experienced travelers. Some of us became Bobos in paradise. Some of us are putting on “enhanced readings” of Translations. Most of the people I know are willing to try all sorts of world cuisines with an admirably cosmopolitan appetite.
And, look, Arjun Appadurai is right. Part of me really still believes in trying to just not be that American. The world has really changed, and we need actually new ideas. The least we can do is have the will to imagine them, even if it involves a bunch of fantasizing about the past.
