Here’s mine:

The History of Love

when we were orphans
we followed maps for lost lovers.

dancing backwards from the tree house
into the visible world  was always

the longest journey

Author list: Nicole Krauss/ Kazuo Ishiguro/ Nadeem Aslam/ Salley Vickers/ Kathleen Jamie/ Mark Slouka/ E.M. Forster

Read the article and join in here.

The news now of possible non-military national service, benefit exclusions, curfews and council housing evictions is changing all the time, so comment on that will be left here, however I had jotted some thoughts down in response to the initial fallout which I felt I wanted to publish.

London and other affected cities have pulled together and it is encouraging to see so many community projects being created to deal with the immediate aftermath of the riots. Unfortunately, not everything has been so inspiring.

Particularly disheartening (and the spark that led to this blog post) was one BBC reporter’s frankly maladroit questioning of a young youth worker who was attempting to explain, according to her line of questioning, the possible reasons behind the upheaval. Her brassy profession that she had once lived on a council estate and hadn’t turned out this way, and neither had her son, were awkward and unconvincing. And one did not have to be equipped with any great powers of discernment to see as she narrowed her eyes and at everything the young man said shot back ‘yes, but is that justified?’ that she wasn’t listening.

And this, surely, is the problem.

The questions asked across the board were skewed. Coverage was largely biased, leaning either to one side of the debate, which levelled itself at the question of class, bringing to the table in a smug, triumphant hand the old cards about education and ‘thuggery’ and the tragic and/or inevitable links between the two, or to the other side which thought vaguely in terms of law-abiding versus non law-abiding citizens. The latter, I would have to say, seemed more to fit the bill. But talk around the infinitely complex problems at the heart of the situation was vague at the same time as it was excruciatingly dichotomous. Good citizens vs bad citizens. Working class vs middle class. Whatever your view, the aim seemed to be to shove a wedge between the innocent and the guilty. Culpability? Well, obviously that’s with the parents. Or the lack of ambition (We’re breeding unintelligent children with no hope of a future! screamed one tasteless headline). Or, finally, the shadowy, faceless spectre that is The Government. Blame is thrown at random at age-old targets, yet no one seems to be able to explain what has led them to string their bow this or that way. The gun shoots. The bullets fall. The pattern of shells is about as readable as runes, or tea leaves sitting limp and sodden in a heap at the bottom of a cup. Why? Because the lens through which we have chosen to view this ‘incident’ is severely warped. And the desire to continue to peer through it reveals some unpalatable truths about our society and its slip into a kind of corruption that lies not only at the bottom of the ‘heap’ (if one must talk in such terms), but has contaminated the whole.
(Peter Oborne talks extensively about this in a recent article for the Telegraph)

Recent ‘revelations’ proved what we should all really have known already. The rioters weren’t just ‘low-life youths’. A young millionaires and an Oxford graduate are amongst those hauled in by the long arm of the law and waiting to stand trial in the newly set up 24-hour courts, as well as an organic chef (doesn’t get much more middle class than this, does it?) and, more poignantly, an aspiring social services worker who tearfully returned a high-end television set she had stolen to her local police station. One young lady was turned in by her furious mother, which story certain papers immediately grabbed upon, not as proof of the mother’s moral integrity and a plea to all parents in similar situations, but to hold up this animal for all the world to see. Since when does chaos control entail sending up individuals to a baying crowd, whose ‘brave’ vigilante response is to want to take a bullet to the heads of those who have broken windows, torched buildings and stolen thousands upon thousands of pounds of goods?

Oh, wait…

The name and shame culture is nothing new, after all. And it is no less disgusting now. That said, I for one, though admittedly politically left of centre, am thoroughly unconvinced by too-far-left-of-Liberal cries to ‘spread love and prayer’. Erecting ‘good thoughts’ walls, though sweet in sentiment, is hardly going to stop anyone from doing this again, should the opportunity (or excuse) arise. Telling everyone God loves criminals is equally unhelpful and more than a tad smug. Using social media, the very tool that facilitated these riots, to gather troops and organise local clean-ups? Now that is good citizenship. Riot Wombles, with my broom I salute you.
(For an interesting take on the riots that references the frankly uncomfortable image of a female Riot Womble wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan ‘Rioters are Scum’, try Hari Kunzru’s article in the Guardian)

And finally, there is the courage and bravery of the individuals who have been hit. There is something slightly painful about the nervous and awkward smile of certain of these ‘everyday heroes’ as they blink into the camera, unaware of how their small tragedy – gutted homes, ransacked shops, life savings looted – has somehow become front page news, but any unease around this is balanced out (and in some cases very encouragingly so) by coverage of the generosity of people willing to help those in need. Donations on a JustGiving page set up for Ashraf Rossli, the 20-year-old Malaysian medical student whose mugging whilst seriously hurt with a broken jaw was filmed on a camera phone, have so far reached £22,000. The shopkeeper who claims he now has only 25p left to his name after his shop was smashed and looted will no doubt also be receiving donations from well-wishers who feel sympathy for him and the family he has somehow now to find the means to support, perhaps through the De-loot London website, a site aiming to flag in online maps every independent store hit by looters in an attempt to encourage local communities to help businesses get back on their feet.

Not all will be so fortunate, and indeed not all were. In their name and in the name of this and future generations, I sincerely hope we can all make the necessary changes, at every level, from social work to parenting to education to work to policing to government, in order to prevent a future, bigger and even more devastating event. This was not a random act. This was a long time coming. Britain is damaged. I just hope, not irreparably.

The Devil in the Flesh (Penguin Modern Classics)

I picked up this intriguing little volume and turned to a random page. Within minutes I had glided through several pages. Returning to my seat, I turned to the beginning of the book, the Introduction. There, I learned that the author who had captured me within the space of a paragraph with his easy style, tongue-in-cheek tone and strangely innocent yet deeply thoughtful musings, that he had been noticed by none other than Jean Cocteau, who had seen at once his potential. A surly teenager, Raymond Radiguet was a fascinating creature to all that met him – oddly dressed, aloof; not shy but indifferent. He did not speak often, but when he did he made utterances that were at once strange and beautiful, without any hint of sentiment. This is his voice that captured Jean Cocteau’s interest, and it is the voice of The Devil in the Flesh (indeed the novel is based, by Radiguet’s admission, on his own experiences as a young man very much taken by an older, married woman).

Radiguet preferred to be alone than in the company of the many luminaries attending the same soirées as he, and in the summer of 1922 he was locked away in a house by Cocteau, under orders to stay there until he had written what he was intended to write. It was here he wrote the drafts for The Devil in the Flesh, a tale of love that is oddly loveless, yet aware at every line of love’s importance in our small lives. The backdrop is the Great War that had at the time of writing just ravaged Radiguet’s native France and left the whole of Europe devastated. Everywhere in the book, there is the sense of something filling the doorframe, a shadow as present as the shadow of the soldier husband the young hero’s love interest, Marthe, abandons for her much younger lover (in the book, he is only 15). Cruelly, the lovers burn the letters the devoted husband continues to send from his outposts in this or that war-torn corner of the world. It is not, however, a conventional love story. It is a dissection of love affairs, why we have them, why they are necessary, and arbitrary, and mean everything and nothing all at once. The startlingly wise voice of the young protagonist is itself really the voice of a young writer of only 18. This is not a book of great magnitude, but rather of piercing specificity. Radiguet has peered into the human heart, and has drawn conclusions that are not meant to unsettle in any sensational way, but still do, in subtler ways that tap at the truth behind our own perversities, our simplest, basest desires, striking chords we may not wish to hear, but know to be truer than the resonant melodies we hum around ourselves, keeping ourselves close, hidden, comfortable.

By turning Marthe in whatever direction happened to suit me I was gradually remaking her in my own image. I blamed myself for doing this, and for knowingly destroying our happiness. That she should begin to resemble me, to become my creation, both delighted and angered me. I saw it as a reason for our compatibility. But I also saw it as a cause of disasters to come. In fact, I had gradually communicated to her my uncertainty – an uncertainty which, when the day for decisions came, would prevent her from taking any. I saw how her weakness was like my own; we hoped that the sea would spare our sand-castle, whereas other children hasten to build higher up the shore.

Very often such a spiritual resemblance finds expression on the physical plane, in an expression of the eyes or in the way one walks. On several occasions, strangers took us for brother and sister. They must exist within us seeds of resemblance that are germinated by love. Even the most prudent lovers sooner or later give themselves away by a gesture or an inflexion of the voice.

It must be admitted that if the heart has its reason which reason knows nothing of, it is because the reason is less reasonable than the heart. No doubt we are all like Narcissus, loving and hating our own reflection, but indifferent to all others. It is this instinct for resemblance that leads us through life; it is this that makes us pause to admire a certain landscape, a certain woman, a particular poem. We can admire others without feeling this shock. The instinct for resemblance is the only rule of conduct that is not artificial. But in society only the grosser spirits appear not to contravene the rules of morality, always remaining loyal to the same type. Some men, for example, go blindly for ‘blondes’, unaware that the deepest resemblances are often the most secret.

A friend of mine, who also writes, confided in me that his trick when he is tiring of it, or wonders if there is any point, is not to write any further into the unknown, but to rest a while with what is familiar to him. And what is familiar to my friend is the voice of this man:

William Faulkner

William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech is a call to all writers not to lose faith in the true purpose of writing.

Writing must be

a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.

[...]

[The writer] must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.

The video unfortunately cuts off toward the end and is a little fuzzy on the audio front. However, full transcripts are available online. For example, here.

In light of the recent crisis across the UK, Faulkner’s closing words resound not only for writers struggling to find their voices, and make those voices heard, but for humanity as a whole.

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

[F]reedom of the press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose…

…

Here I am not trying to deal with the familiar claim that freedom is an illusion, or with the claim that there is more freedom in totalitarian countries than in democratic ones, but with the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness.

…

The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism

…

 Is every writer a politician, and is every book necessarily a work of straightforward ‘reportage’? Even under the tightest dictatorship, cannot the individual writer remain free inside his own mind and distill or disguise his unorthodox ideas in such a way that the authorities will be too stupid to recognize them? And in any case, if the writer himself is in agreement with the prevailing orthodoxy, why should it have a cramping effect on him? Is not literature, or any of the arts, likeliest to flourish in societies in which there are no major conflicts of opinion and no sharp distinction between the artist and his audience? Does one have to assume that every writer is a rebel, or even that a writer as such is an exceptional person? 
Whenever one attempts to defend intellectual liberty against the claims of totalitarianism, one meets with these arguments in one form or another. They are based on a complete misunderstanding of what literature is, and how — one should perhaps say why — it comes into being.

…

A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy — or even two orthodoxies, as often happens — good writing stops.

…

it is [...] certain that literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes. Not only is it doomed in any country which retains a totalitarian structure; but any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer. There is no way out of this. No tirades against ‘individualism’ and the ‘ivory tower’, no pious platitudes to the effect that ‘true individuality is only attained through identification with the community’, can get over the fact that a bought mind is a spoiled mind. Unless spontaneity enters at some point or another, literary creation is impossible, and language itself becomes something totally different from what it is now, we may learn to separate literary creation from intellectual honesty. At present we know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity. Any writer or journalist who denies that fact — and nearly all the current praise of the Soviet Union contains or implies such a denial — is, in effect, demanding his own destruction.

One of the more interesting pieces of reading I’ve sunk my teeth into of late. Click on the title to read the full essay. Reflections to come.

Aki

Because rhyme remains the parentheses of palms

shielding a candle’s tongue, it is the language’s

desire to enclose the loved world in its arms…

Derek Walcott

from ‘Omeros’

A Mother In A Refugee Camp

No Madonna and Child could touch
Her tenderness for a son
She soon would have to forget. . . .
The air was heavy with odors of diarrhea,
Of unwashed children with washed-out ribs
And dried-up bottoms waddling in labored steps
Behind blown-empty bellies. Other mothers there
Had long ceased to care, but not this one:
She held a ghost-smile between her teeth,
And in her eyes the memory
Of a mother’s pride. . . . She had bathed him
And rubbed him down with bare palms.
She took from their bundle of possessions
A broken comb and combed
The rust-colored hair left on his skull
And then—humming in her eyes—began carefully to part it.
In their former life this was perhaps
A little daily act of no consequence
Before his breakfast and school; now she did it
Like putting flowers on a tiny grave.

—Chinua Achebe

“I am speaking the truth. And the truth is savage and dangerous.” ”

Nawal El Saadawi (Woman At Point Zero)

The Writers in Prison Committee 50th Anniversary Celebration took place on Friday 16 April,  in the Wolfson Theatre at LSE. The event was chaired by Michela Wrong and featured Georgian activist and performance poet Irakli Kakabadze (winner of the Oxfam/Novib Pen Freedom of Expression Prize) and esteemed Egyptian feminist writer Nawal El Saadawi. In the tradition of the International Pen festival, one chair was left empty, in honour this year of Chinese political dissident Liu Xiaobo, who is currently in prison serving an eleven-year sentence for the ‘subversive’ content of his writing (see my Writers In Prison blog). Michela explained; “for prisoners, the thought of being forgotten is equal to spiritual death”. The empty chair is a reminder of his presence, his spirit and of the campaign for his release and the release of the countless other wrongly imprisoned or persecuted writers whom International Pen support.

***

Mary-Jane and I got the chance to interview Kakabadze before the event. Since he is such a prominent political activist, we wondered what he thought of the political apathy the youth of the UK are so often accused of, and how it differed to the political atmosphere in Georgia. He smiled and shrugged, as if to say “all in good time”. Since the break-up of the Soviet Union, Kakabadze explained, Georgia has been reinvigorated with a spirit of revolution we here in the UK, he suggested, have not been pushed to, enjoying as we do relatively peaceful living conditions, relatively low levels of crime and a democratic system of election and government; the people of Georgia on the other hand, youth and older generation alike, are united in the “struggle against authoritarian thinking”, the kind of thinking that has led to a severe lack of opportunity, which Kakabadze blames for the high levels of crime and violence; “[Georgian] society does not provide, it takes opportunity [...] a structure of violence hangs above [the youth of Georgia]“. They cannot help but be entrapped within this structure, and sink into what he calls the “subaltern”, the marginalised under-generation that live in shadows but whose actions and thinking shape the society that burgeons above it.

Kakabadze himself got embroiled in precisely this lifestyle at a young age. He left a life of gang violence behind when, aged just 15, he was stabbed so badly he nearly died. At the age of 19, he became actively involved in politics and peaceful campaigning. He went on to study philosophy and sociology at university and completed an Mst in Crisis Resolution, on which he currently lectures at Cornell University. The focus of his thinking and his campaigning has always been to reach resolution through peaceful means; performances of his poetry are often collaborative, involving music; he practices a method he calls ‘Polyphonic Blues’, which seeks to incorporate different ‘voices’ in a musical microcosm of the diversity of voice that exists in the world. Kakabadze believes that the best weapon against corruption and repression is an informed mind and continued expression of diverse voices, even in the face of adversity (Kakabadze has been subject to several attacks and has been arrested four times; one arrest led to a month-long prison sentence, with no fair trial preceding the sentencing). Thrown out of Georgia, he lives in Ithaca now with his wife and son, continuing to campaign for freedom of expression and political transparency in his home state.

There are many things that are not talked about, things relegated to the peripheries of rumour, suppressed for the very reason, Kakabadze thinks, that to talk about things is to open up channels of communication and to move if not towards resolution then towards the peaceful co-habitation of diverse views. Things are repressed that pose a threat. Nawal el Saadawi spoke at the event about the guards at the prison she was sent to banning her from having pen and paper in her cell, since these, they told her, were more dangerous than if she were to possess a gun. The fear of these prison guards is telling. To debate is to find a platform, and even if the views expressed are disparate, they are still launched from a common ground. If we communicate, we make connections, and these are the very connections that repressive governments and institutions seek to prevent or splinter. “The old rule of divide and conquer”, el Saadawi remarks drily. But no single person, however tyrannical, can rule the sway of an entire people. We must arm ourselves against deception, against corruption, against misinformation, even against physical force. “Health is a decision”, El Sadaawi says. “To live is a decision; to fight is a decision; everything is a decision“.

To have thoughts is instinct. To voice them is choice. To share them, imperative.

“Writers”, Kakabaze insists, “have an obligation to say the truth… even if the truth is painful.”

“Writing: such has been my crime ever since I was a small child. To this day writing remains my crime. Now, although I am out of prison, I continue to live inside a prison of another sort, one without steel bars. For the technology of oppression and might without justice has become more advanced, and the fetters imposed on mind and body have become invisible. The most dangerous shackles are the invisible ones, because they deceive people into believing they are free. This delusion is the new prison that people inhabit today, north and south, east and west…We inhabit the age of the technology of false consciousness, the technology of hiding truths behind amiable humanistic slogans that may change from one era to another…Democracy is not just freedom to criticize the government or head of state, or to hold parliamentary elections. True democracy obtains only when the people – women, men, young people, children – have the ability to change the system of industrial capitalism that has oppressed them since the earliest days of slavery: a system based on class division, patriarchy, and military might, a hierarchical system that subjugates people merely because they are born poor, or female, or dark-skinned.”
— Nawal El Saadawi (Memoirs from the Women’s Prison)

The past two weeks have been a blur of haze and literary glitter, through which I have passed breathlessly, drawing into myself pieces of information like shards of light, which nestle now, glowing gently, waiting to be shed back into the world. I shall be blogging retrospectively on the events and visits in the week. For now, though, quickly before I leave the house, is a little information about tonight’s event, most exciting for me since it will feature Chinua Achebe , a man whose strength and wisdom leave me utterly awestruck.

Tonight, I shall be interviewing Daljit Nagra ahead of the ‘Reading Revolutionaries’ event at Free the Word!, featuring Chinua Achebe via video conference, as well as writers Sujata Bhatt, Maureen Freely, Blake Morrison and Derek Walcott. Circumstances permitting (the volcano has cast its ash across the skies and unfortunately some of the writers due to appear have been unable to board flights; though I did catch wind of one particularly resilient character so determined to attend that he had considered travelling by ferry), I shall have an hour or so to speak with award-winning poet Daljit Nagra.

In 2004, his poem “Look We Have Coming to Dover!” won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. This is also the title of his first collection, published in 2007, which won the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. Look We Have Coming to Dover! was also shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize.

Here is the poem that got the ball rolling:

Look we have coming to Dover!

So various, so beautiful, so new …
Arnold, Dover Beach

Stowed in the sea to invade
the lash alfresco of a diesel-breeze
ratcheting speed into the tide with brunt
gobfuls of surf phlegmed by the cushy
come-and-go tourists prow’d on the cruisers, lording the waves.

Seagull and shoal life bletching
vexed blarnies at our camouflage past
the vast crumble of scummed cliffs.
Thunder in its bluster unbladdering yobbish
rain and wind on our escape, hutched in a Bedford van.

Seasons or years we reap
inland, unclocked by the national eye
or a stab in the back, teemed for breathing
sweeps of grass through the whistling asthma
of parks, burdened, hushed, poling sparks across pylon and pylon.

Swarms of us, grafting
in the black within shot of the moon’s spotlight,
banking on the miracle of sun to span
its rainbow, passport us to life. Only then
can it be human to bare-faced, hoick ourselves for the clear.

Imagine my love and I,
and our sundry others, blared in the cash
of our beeswax’d cars, our crash clothes,
free, as we sip from an unparasol’d table
babbling our lingoes, flecked by the chalk of Britannia.

EDIT

Daljit was unable to give the interview we had hoped for as he was busy preparing for the event when Mary-Jane and I arrived just before 6. We were half relieved (both of us get nervous about doing things like interviews ‘properly’) and half disappointed, but the event more than made up for it and I hope you will find my blogs on the event itself (above) interesting to read.

A poem I have since discovered of Daljit’s has really struck a chord with me. Sharing a title and theme with Seamus Heaney’s poem, ‘Digging’ deals with issues of identity. The peat from Heaney’s poem is here the flesh of the body, layers of flesh like layers of heritage, at once different and the same; bloodlines of culture, poetic bloodlines, Shylock’s lament (“does not a Jew bleed?”). We are all the same once the skin is peeled from the body. The body we have, somewhere along the way, separated from the mind; a dangerous and harmful division.

“God weakened man so he would fear my hellfire and love my paradise” – Nawal el Saadawi

‘Digging’ (which for copyright reasons cannot be reproduced here in my blog, even with appropriate references; seems a pity really), is available to read here: http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=10591

a cyber quadriplegic.

All limbs in place but

virtual appendages dangling lifeless as

the plastic wires that wind their way around

the humming machine;

engine running but

cerebral cortex copperthick with sleep.

Database: Medusa. Vibrating with

knowledge of a thousand things

programmed into

alternating currents whilst,

snakelike,

synapses snap amid

Soft Ware, Hard Drives and

Micro Chips.

Gentle buzzing says it’s running but

all

parts

are

dis

-connected.

I am

Typeless.

Thought suspended, delays on the transcript line

derailed between

two brains

short…

c-c-circuiting. My

inner monologue encrypted into symbols

trapped in fingers

hovering over keys like

cymbals shivering in the still air, waiting

to feel the imprint of flesh

embedded on the keypad

pumping out like sighs

Q-W-E-R-T…Y

Cyphers stubbornly resist

Decoding,

Instead, they twist and turn,

strain, but remain

unarticulated.

Words half-formed creep forth only to

retreat quickly

in rhythm to the cursor that flashes

in front of the unwritten word; an electronic heartbeat.

One lonely mark on a page that

gapes empty

Metronome tick,

flick,

steady.

wordless.