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Sent by a friend - and if you used to think George W Bush was the worst US President ever, all we had to wait for was Donald Trump in the North American continent and Bolsonaro in the South American continent and you start to get the picture.
Let me start with a story about the Democratic primary. Now, I’m no
operative, so this story has nothing to do with voting choices or
electability. It’s about how Palestine disappears in US electoral
discourses, even when people who identify as Palestinian purport to make
it visible.
Sometime ago, I was added to an online group of Palestinian Americans
organizing for Bernie Sanders’ campaign. The specific identity of the
group is immaterial. Many such groups existed and as far as I can see
the outcome of their work fit a standard template: we’re Palestinian
(and thus purport to speak for all Palestinians from within the United
States); Bernie’s not perfect (but he really is kinda perfect); Bernie’s
by far the best on Palestine (trust us); this isn’t merely about
Palestine (Palestine is merely the pretext); we’ll be sure to hold him
accountable (even though we just finished giving him unqualified
support). I don’t want to put Palestinians on the spot; all statements
supporting presidential candidates look more or less the same. Let’s
call it a limitation of the genre and leave it at that.
So, members of this group were working on a statement explaining why
Palestinians should support Sanders. Somebody put up a shared document
with various points exaggerating Sanders’ record as an advocate for
Palestinian rights and some fantasizing about Palestine’s future under a
Sanders presidency. Again, pretty typical stuff, which is to say a
whole lot of bullshit.
In the margin of the document, a user asked, “Is Sanders a Zionist?,”
to which another person replied, “Yes he is.” No discussion ensued.
The question and answer hung in silence until the document went public,
at which point any consideration of Sanders’ Zionism had been scrubbed.
I’m less interested in the question of Sanders’ Zionism than I am in
the reasons for scrubbing Zionism from the conversation about Sanders.
Sanders doesn’t call himself a Zionist, and the label can flatten a
pretty wide range of thought, but if we examine Sanders’ positions
against what the Palestine solidarity movement understands to be
Zionism, then Sanders unambiguously fits the description. He constantly
affirms Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. He opposes right of
return. He treats Netanyahu as the aberration from a humanistic norm.
Yeah, he’s a Zionist. This fact wasn’t lost on his Palestinian
American champions. It just didn’t seem to bother them very much.
But let’s leave the question of Sanders’ Zionism to the side, for it
has proved effective at putting colleagues at loggerheads. Whatever
Sanders or any other politician thinks about Palestine should have no
influence on how Palestinians think about Palestine. In fact,
according to the mythography of electoralism, it’s the community’s duty
to educate the politician. In order to accomplish that goal, the
community needs to convey principles it considers nonnegotiable. For
Palestinians, those principles would include right of return and full
equality in all of historic Palestine.
That’s not what happened in the various statements of support.
Instead, their authors instrumentalized Palestine as an abstract
commitment—an idea mobilized through performances of ethnic
verisimilitude—in order to boost a campaign extraneous to the actual
work of decolonization. Rather than pressuring the politician, they
made demands of the audience and assured people opposed to Zionism that
voting for someone pledging to uphold Israel’s “Jewish character” wasn’t
a pragmatic concession, but an act of virtue, a feat of devotion to
Palestine.
What does it mean that groups visibly and proudly identifying as
Palestinian felt it necessary to scrub Zionism in order to boost a
politician jockeying to supervise US Empire? By what moral calculus did
those groups take vital demands off the table? Did they have the
consent of refugees for whom right of return is sacrosanct? Of the
Palestinian working class in the United States? Or was it an exercise
in unilateral leadership by the diasporic professional class?
I know what the response is: we didn’t mythologize anyone; we
regularly pointed out his weaknesses. Well, not really. (I didn’t see
you pointing out that Sanders is a Zionist, for example.) Exerting
tremendous energy to conceptualize Sanders as a benevolent uncle figure
and then occasionally saying “he needs more work on this issue” or “we
need to keep pushing him” was a cardinal feature of mythologization, as
was running interference with points of view more palatable to the
mainstream when fellow anti-Zionists dissented from the consensus.
Saying “he’s the best on Palestine even though he’s not perfect” was the
rankest kind of mythmaking. It confused “being better than a terrible
field” with “being good.”
I saw in these statements a yearning to matter, a desire to at long
last be taken seriously after decades of abuse and disregard. It’s a
normal response to subordination, to the pain of continuous betrayal,
but no amount of high-minded talk about an electoral revolution will
compel sites of power to care about Palestinian Americans. They
shouldn’t be our audience, anyway. Palestinians are admired by people
around the world who value justice and resilience and dignity. Let’s
not forgot our place, which isn’t among consultants and technocrats, but
with the ignominious, the surplus, the unbeloved.
During the primary, and during the 2016 election cycle, whenever I
expressed skepticism about deploying Palestine in service of a
presidential campaign, other Palestinian Americans quickly intervened:
“Well, I mean Steve’s making an, ahem, important point, but, here, let
me butt in and do it, you know, more responsibly.” I found it to be a
pathetic move. The idea was to keep radicalism in check, or to snuff it
out. Decolonization, however, is inherently radical in the metropole.
The interventions were thus a form of ostracism: we don’t want
disreputable elements of our community running a bus over this good foot
we’re trying to put forward. The limits of US electoralism came to
define the parameters of Palestinian liberation.
Electioneering requires compromise, but compromise isn’t a neutral
practice. The people are made to sacrifice for the affluent. That’s
how compromise works under capitalism. Every time, every single time,
it’s some aspect of Palestinian freedom that must be compromised. Never
the candidate’s position. Never the system’s inherent conservatism.
Never the ongoing march of settler colonization. We’re volunteering to
be captured by the settler’s notion of common sense.
And what would have happened if your guy won? You already gave up
right of return. A one-state solution. Anti-imperialism. Nobody was
talking about general strikes until the pandemic. And nobody ever talks
about armed struggle. How did you plan to get these things back on the
table after having surrendered them to a person whose first, second, and
third priority is appeasing power?
You gave up something Palestinians
have struggled and died for over the course of decades, and for what?
Just to make the apocryphal and frankly useless point that this
politician is a more tolerable Zionist than the other ones?
And when your guy loses? This is the question of the moment, isn’t
it? You gave up all that leverage for nothing (except for individual
benefits). What happens next? God knows I can’t answer that question.
I’m not saying don’t participate, don’t vote, don’t be interested in a
candidate. That’s not the point. I dislike coercive forms of
persuasion. I’m simply trying to convince you not to give up the idea
of freedom as it’s articulated by the downtrodden. Not for any reason.
Certainly not for a goddamn politician.
There’s a question you ought to ask as necessary (which is to say
constantly): what happens to Palestine? When we humor a system
calibrated to exclude us, when we pretend that liberation is possible on
the margins of a hostile polity, when we imagine liberal Zionism as a
prelude to freedom, then what happens to Palestine?
Raising this kind of skepticism is a good way to get branded a
hater. (Treating the recalcitrant as irrational is a central feature of
electoral discipline.) I hate this sensibility precisely because I’m
not a hater, because I recognize that defiance is a priceless asset in
conditions of loss and dispossession. Let’s please abandon this smug
idea that skepticism ruins the party for sensible people. It’s an ugly
form of internal colonization. Recalcitrance can be a deep, abiding act
of love, in this case a devotion to life realized in the form of a
simple question: what happens to Palestine?
The system you deign to reform ranks nothing above ruling class
accumulation—the system, in other words, is designed to betray, and
performs its mandate with brutal efficiency. And so the answer to that
timeless question never changes: Palestine goes away. Any group that
doesn’t facilitate a flow of capital into the imperial core is fit for
disappearance. Our mandate, in turn, isn’t to seek the approval of our
oppressor, but to earn his contempt.
Instrumentalizing the persecuted is a critical feature of electoralism. Promoting a Zionist presidential candidate and remaining faithful to the core tenets of anti-Zionism? Forget it. It’s not happening. It can’t
happen. Electoralism is salted against insurgency. It’s not a space
for ideas, for creativity, for the simple decency of not asking the
least powerful among us to defer their freedom; it’s hostile to anything
that impedes the reproduction of orthodoxy. Liberation has always
required tremendous imagination. That’s not on offer when the talking
points are being written by David Sirota.
You have no cause to be angry with Sanders. Not now. He hasn’t
broken a single pledge. He never hid his intentions. There was plenty
of reason for concern when he kept repeating liberal Zionist platitudes.
It was you, not Sanders, who folded Palestine into a campaign that
always promised to maintain the status quo. The outcome was easy to
predict because it has many decades of precedent. Palestinians, victim
of a million betrayals, should know this better than anyone. We also
know that struggle has no easy trajectory. Mass movements predicated on
voting make for attractive sources of relief. Then they go up in smoke
and you’re left to find the next shiny figure to exploit, the next
fount of excitement and pageantry and social capital. This isn’t a
serious politics. It’s terminal naivete, or industrial self-promotion.
And now what? You disposed of the most radical members of our
community, systematically excluding so many brethren from the
life-sustaining pleasure of shared resistance, in order to assuage a
bunch of faceless assholes waiting for the first opportunity to dispose
of you, all that love sacrificed for no reward beyond some retweets and
an evanescent sense of importance, your moment of being accepted by the
polity now replaced by angry regret for having again succumbed to the
gravitational pull of authority, of the state and its functionaries, of
the very institutions that maintain our dispossession. But our nation,
Palestine, is neither temporary nor ephemeral. Our politics should
match the condition.
It should not be a matter of distinction, but Julian Assange is a
figure who is becoming the apotheosis of political imprisonment. This
seems laughable to those convinced he is an agent without scruple, a
compromiser of the Fourth Estate, a figure best packed off to a prison
system that will, in all assuredness, kill him.
That’s if he even gets there. Having spent a year at Her Majesty’s
Belmarsh prison, the WikiLeaks publisher faces the permanent danger of
contracting COVID-19 as he goes through the bone-weariness of legal
proceedings. Even during the extradition hearings, he has been treated
with a snooty callousness by District Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser,
which does not bode well for a favourable finding against the US
submission. As he endures them, he suffers in a facility that is
succumbing to the misrule caused by the coronavirus.
On April 9, Assange’s friend Vaughan Smith gave a description
of conditions that gave little cause for Easter cheer. “Julian is now
confined alone in a cell for 23.5 hours every day. He gets half an hour
of exercise and that is in a yard crowded with other prisoners.” Smith
also had a shot at the running of the prison. “With over 150 Belmarsh
prison staff off work self-isolating, the prison is barely functioning.”
The UK Department of Justice has adopted a mild approach to the issue
of releasing prisoners in the face of the coronavirus epidemic.
Despite the Prison Governors’ Association suggesting the release of
15,000 non-violent prisoners, the Department of Justice has opted for
the lower total of 4,000. To date, a meagre 100 have been released.
Assange insists that the situation is graver at Belmarsh than is
otherwise advertised. Official figures put the number of COVID-19
deaths at one in the maximum security facility. There are at least two,
with the possibility, argues Assange, of more.
By any reasonable assessment, Assange fits the bill of a non-violent
prisoner, and one with genuine political credentials. He was granted
asylum by Ecuador, a point of little interest to Baraister. His
condition both physical and mental has appalled friends, acquaintances
and a number of officials.
Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on
Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment,
has spent much time beating the drum of awareness about his plight.
Since 2010, he stated
in May last year, “there has been a relentless and unrestrained
campaign of public mobbing, intimidation and defamation against Mr
Assange, not only in the United States, but also in the United Kingdom,
Sweden and, more recently, in Ecuador.”
Rather than turning their attention to this state of circumstances,
news outlets prefer to gorge themselves on other details, such as the
newly revealed identity of his partner, which Judge Baraitser refused to
keep concealed. The writing on this subject is needlessly though
predictably tawdry.
“WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange fathered two sons
while hiding in embassy,” has been a favourite formulation. The Daily Mail can barely resist stirring the sauce pot, giving
Assange the appearance of an international man of fornicating mystery.
“Gabriel, aged two, and his one-year-old brother Max were conceived
while their father was hiding out to avoid extradition to America, where
he faces espionage charges over the leaking of thousands of classified
US intelligence documents.” But the man who sowed his oats was also,
the Mail is thrilled to remind us, “wanted in Sweden where he
was accused of rape.” It was rather good of them to also tell readers
that Swedish prosecutors dropped the investigation, though it does so
with customary scepticism.
The old hacks can barely resist regarding the entire matter of Assange having a partner and children as peculiar. The Mail seemed
to think it had uncovered a stunning morsel of information that would
shock all. “The news will come as a bombshell to Assange’s friends and
enemies since he was widely understood to have led a near-monastic life
since entering the embassy in 2012.” Monks would surely disagree with
that flawed assessment, as would his friends.
The theme of oddity has also made it across the Atlantic. The New York Post, for instance, considered it
“an even odder twist” that “British rapper M.I.A. is a godmother to the
children”. Hardly – M.I.A, along with a large clutch of celebrities,
has been a vocal supporter and barracker.
This mixture of lazy scribbling, creepy curiosity and saccharine
interest will do little to aid Assange.
His partner, now revealed as
lawyer Stella Moris-Smith Robertson, attempted to take some of the edge
off perceptions of the publisher in a court statement supporting bail.
“My close relationship with Julian has been the opposite of how he is
viewed – of reserve, respect for each other and attempts to shield each
other from some of the nightmares that have surrounded our lives.”
Retaining that shield will be an increasingly difficult matter now.
Assange’s scalp is precious. The application for bail made by his
defence team on March 25 was denied. Access to him from his legal team
is limited, hobbling the case. Even during a raging pandemic, where
entire states have mobilised their resources, there is always room for
little bit of vindictiveness. Scores need to be settled; the balance
sheet ordered. To that end, Judge Baraister and the UK justice system,
have not disappointed.
While the Coronavirus continues to ravage almost every nation on
earth, Arab countries remain unable, or unwilling, to formulate a
collective strategy to help the poorest and most vulnerable Arabs
survive the deadly virus and its economic fallout.
Worse, amid growing international solidarity, we are yet to see a
pan-Arab initiative that aims to provide material support to countries
and regions that have been hit hardest by the COVID-19 disease.
The lack of collective Arab responsiveness is not unique as it
mirrors Europe’s own systematic failure, exhibiting ‘solidarity’ when it
is financially convenient, and turning its back, sometimes at its own
brethren, when there are no economic incentives.
For example, when Greece defaulted on its debt to international
donors in 2015, Germany, and other European Union countries, pounced on
the opportunity to dismantle the country’s major financial institutions
and to profit from Athens’ mounting miseries.
All the talk of European solidarity, fraternity and community floundered at the altar of greed and unhindered profits.
That was not the first – nor will it be the last – occasion when the
opportunistic EU showed its true colors. In truth, Europe is united, not
by common history or unbreakable social bonds, but rather by the shared
belief that a united Europe is a stronger economic unit.
The same sordid scenario was recently repeated. As Italy began
buckling down under the unbearable burdens of the deadly Coronavirus, it
immediately, and naturally, sought the help of its European sister
states. To no avail.
Despite its sizable debt, Italy is a major player in the economic
arena of Europe and, in fact, the world. Indeed, Italy is the world’s
8th largest economy. But the country’s economy is now experiencing a
rare freefall, especially in the poorer regions of the South, where
people are literally going hungry.
The first country to come to Italy’s aid was neither France, nor,
unsurprisingly, Germany, but China, followed by Russia, then Cuba, and
others.
This palpable lack of solidarity among European countries has further
empowered the ethnocentric view already prevailing in Europe, and
championed by far-right movements like Italy’s League Party of Matteo
Salvini. For years, the latter has advocated against European
integration.
It will take months, if not years, for the political fallout of the
Coronavirus to be fully assessed. But what is already clear is that
international and regional economic hubs are actively hedging their bets
to consolidate their geopolitical positions in the post-Coronavirus
world.
Despite bashful American attempts to join the politically-motivated
international solidarity, US President Donald Trump’s humble moves
arrived too little, too late. In fact, a sign of the times is that
Chinese and Russian aid is pouring in to help the United States, which
now has the world’s largest number of COVID-19 cases.
A compelling question, however, is where are the Arabs in all of this?
Italy and Spain, in particular, share historical and cultural bonds,
and broad political interests, with many Arab countries, interests that
will remain long after the Coronavirus is eradicated. Failing to
register on the radar of international solidarity with Italy and Spain
will prove a strategic miscalculation.
Israel, on the other hand, is activating its aid agency, IsraAID,
which has previously worked in Italy between 2016 and 2019, after a
major earthquake killed nearly 300 people and left behind massive
infrastructural damage.
Israel uses ‘humanitarian aid’ as a political and propaganda tool.
Israeli missions are often under-funded and short-lasting, but their
impact is greatly amplified by a powerful, official media machine that
tries to project Israel as a ‘peace-maker’, not a war-monger.
The truth is, some Arab governments do, in fact, provide badly needed
funds and aid to countries that are devastated by wars or natural
disasters; alas, these efforts are often disorganized and self-centered –
and frankly, not at all motivated by true solidarity.
That said, the absence of Arab initiatives in the field of
international humanitarian solidarity dwarf in comparison to the lack of
Arab solidarity within the Arab world itself.
According to United Nation estimates, there are “101.4 million
(people) in the region who already live in poverty, according to
official criteria, and around 52 million undernourished.”
A new policy brief issued on April 1 by the United Nations Economic
and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), projects that an
additional 8.3 million people are set to join the poor and
undernourished masses throughout the Arab world.
Aside from empty rhetoric and useless press releases, we are yet to
witness a major collective Arab initiative, championed by, for example,
the Arab League, to provide an Arab equivalent to the many economic
stimulus plans that have been set into motion in many other countries
and regions around the world.
Late March, United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres,
issued a ‘global ceasefire appeal’, pleading to the world, especially to
warring Middle Eastern nations, to cease fire and to unite all efforts
in one single war against the Coronavirus.
Sadly, that call has so far gone unheeded. The war in Libya is
escalating, not subsiding; Israeli killing of Palestinians in the
occupied West Bank continues unabated; the flood of refugees out of
Syria, Turkey, and other Middle Eastern countries is yet to slow down.
Times of crisis, especially the kind that targets all of us
regardless of race, religion, or geography, often constitute a wake-up
call, present an opportunity for a new beginning, a new social contract
so that we may resurrect from the ashes of our collective pain to build a
better world.
Let COVID-19 be that opportunity that will allow all nations,
especially in the Middle East, to take a stance against war, hunger and
disease, to share their wealth and to extend the hand of solidarity to
Africa and our historic allies throughout the world.
Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author
and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His latest book is The Last Earth: A
Palestinian Story (Pluto Press, London, 2018). He earned a Ph.D. in
Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter and is a Non-Resident
Scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, UCSB.
Were so many of us wrong? Christos Tsiolkas on the new uncertainty
In times of uncertainty, you deserve understanding.
He who has not lived in the years before the revolution cannot know what the sweetness of living is. – Talleyrand
We
are on day six of our self-isolation. Has it been less than a week
since we caught the flight from London to Dubai, then Dubai to
Melbourne? The COVID-19 virus has done many things, the most daunting
and terrible being the lives that it has taken, but one of its
aftershocks that has surprised me most is the alteration it has caused
to our sense of time.
Christos Tsiolkas: ''I know, in my gut now, that Melbourne, that Australia, is home.''Credit:Eddie JimThree
weeks ago, we landed in Britain and though we joked and bantered about
touching elbows rather than kissing, we did hug and embrace friends, we
went out to dinners and we got drunk and sat shivering around outside
heaters, shoulder to shoulder, in the freezing English spring night. Day
by day, however, the anxiety and fears grew.
Throughout the first week, and then into the second, I receive constant emails from
home announcing that first this festival and then another would be
cancelled. On a train to Glasgow, preparing my reading for an event, my
phone vibrates and a text informs me that the AyeWrite Festival has also
been cancelled. By the third day in Scotland, reading the escalating
warnings on the internet, my partner, Wayne, and I make the decision to
return home.
We
are fortunate. We booked our journey through a travel agent and within
minutes of emailing him, he has got us on a flight departing London in
two days. We know that there are many people not so lucky. The websites
of all the airlines are crashing. The phones are not being answered. All
we want is to return home. That very notion, home, one that I have
questioned and resisted and challenged for so many years; that notion,
too, has been altered by the virus. I know, in my gut now, that
Melbourne, that Australia, is home.
There
is a strange and befuddling moment in Dubai airport. All the world
seems to be there. We are Australians and New Zealanders, Nigerians and
Ghanaians, Pakistani and Bangladeshi, North American and Latin American,
many of us scrolling on phones and laptops and iPads, seeking
information on which borders have been closed, whether we can indeed go
home. Some of us are sitting still and staring out into space, shifting
in those uncomfortable vinyl chairs, trying to not touch and not to
breathe on one another.
I am two seats away from a young woman,
poised and elegantly dressed, her hair hidden under a rainbow-coloured
turban. She is speaking on her phone in rapid French. My own French is
weak but I gather she has managed to get on a flight to Lagos and from
Lagos she will do her best to head home. Wherever home may be. “Paris
was strange,” she says into her phone. “Everything was closed,
everything was shut. I’ve never seen it like that.”
And it’s at
that precise moment, overhearing her conversation, looking around me at
the people staring at their screens, that it strikes me how bizarre and
ridiculous it is that we all have only so recently been zig-zagging
around the world, taking this freedom and this movement and this
privilege for granted. It isn’t a moral aversion that I am experiencing.
It isn’t righteousness; it is more a recognition of absurdity. I turn
to Wayne when he comes back from the long wait for the toilets.
“All of this, it’s unnecessary.”
“No, we need to get home, this is serious.”
“No, not that. All this travel, all this movement, that is what is unnecessary.”
''All this travel, all this movement, that is what is unnecessary.''Credit:Getty ImagesOn
returning home, I find a series of emails from Australian literary
festivals and arts organisations bemoaning the deleterious effect of
COVID-19 on the arts sector. I understand and share these fears. I’m one
of the lucky ones, able to support myself from writing. But for most of
my friends, their creative work is subsidised by work in hospitality,
in retail, in the public sector and in non-government welfare
organisations. The abrupt and shocking collapse of the economy has us
all reeling. And has us all frightened. Theatres are no longer putting
on plays and cinemas are shut; book launches and writing classes are
cancelled.
Again,
time has refracted back on itself and the arguments and politics and
conversations we were all so engaged with, so furious and so passionate
about only a few weeks ago, seem ephemeral and unimportant. Unemployment
is now the most pressing issue affecting us all.
It
isn’t an abrupt leap from where we were only yesterday to the dystopian
end-of-times of apocalypse. The in-between will be our lifetime.
Of
course, there is the desire to avoid the getting and the passing on of
the virus. But those images of thousands of desperate souls lining up
outside Centrelink are what has brought the severity of what we are all
undergoing into deepest focus. The people in the queues are clearly
ourselves – how we dress, how we use our mobiles, that negotiation of
both digital and physical space – yet they also are evocative of a past
that we never really imagined we would see again: the echoes of the
Great Depression.
Writers and filmmakers and artists have always
imagined apocalyptic scenarios, and climate change and rising inequality
has made that a central concern of recent speculative art and fiction.
But whether it is the savage and nihilistic violence of Cormac
McCarthy’s The Road, or the scenes of zombie rampage and
annihilating natural disasters that have proliferated in popular cinema,
what we hadn’t conceived was the moment of in-between. I think this is
why the dole queues are particularly frightening. They remind us that it
isn’t an abrupt leap from where we were only yesterday – blithely
assuming that the future would be ever-progressive and ever-prosperous –
to the dystopian end-of-times of apocalypse. The in-between will take
years. The in-between will be our lifetime.
So I worry for my
friends who are writers and artists and playwrights and filmmakers. But I
am equally worried for my friends who are nurses and couriers and
administrators and teachers. All those differences we were extolling and
idolising only a few weeks ago, they don’t matter much any more. In
this moment, community trumps difference.
In
between the pinging emails announcing the cancellation of one more
writers’ festival and one more play, there have also been links to
performances and artwork that people are creating online. There is
indeed something exhilarating and defiant in the determination of the
artist to keep making work. It might be my age or merely my disposition
but I also sense something melancholy in the production of such work. A
chamber orchestra plays in an vacant auditorium, a drag artist mimes in
front of a DJ in an empty room. What is missing, and what is wretched,
is that without the physical bodies of an audience, the work seems mere
rehearsal. It is not unlike the few minutes of an AFL match I watched
played without a crowd. The emptiness was deafening. I switched off the
game. Guiltily, I switched off the music.
In some ways, I have
been surprised by how much I have enjoyed this period of enforced
isolation. In saying that, I know that I am fortunate. That I have a
partner, a lovely home and shelves stacked with books and with LPs and
with DVDs. We have friends and family and neighbours who make sure there
is food on our doorstep and wine in our fridge.
I’m
not a complete Luddite: YouTube and streaming have also kept me
company. Yet it is the pleasures of the analogue world that have been
the most satisfying and the most sustaining. I am halfway through a
wonderful book, Jean-Michel Guenassia’s The Incorrigible Optimists Club,
a tender requiem for the generation of eastern European dissidents who
fled totalitarianism and wound up lost and exiled in Paris. It has been
sitting by my bed for nearly two years now.
This morning, I was dancing to Hiperasia,
a cheerfully inventive album by the Spanish electronica artist, El
Guincho. As with the Guenassia novel, I’ve had it for some time. Only
now do I give it a proper listen. Refracted through the changes brought
about by the virus, the recent past seems an aeon ago. All the same, it
has made me thankful for the present moment. Real time. The time of
minutes and hours. The time of patience and reflection.
I
miss people. Wayne and I discuss the progression of the virus, the
responses globally and locally, the uncertain future that is coming. We
both miss other voices, other perspectives, the opportunity to have
one’s argument contested and opposed. Of course, this is possible online
but Skype crackles and falters, the thin sounds on the other end don’t
have the resonance of the human voice. Digital communication also
exacerbates the limitations and prejudices of only speaking to those who
think the same way you do.
There will come a time when we can
return to the world, when social distancing will be the past. But there
will be a ruined economy and there will be fractured communities. It is
inevitable that this ruin and this fracturing will be part of the
writing and the art that is to come. Every day, I wander the hall, the
rooms of our house, I walk into the garden and tell myself I should
write. But all my ideas seem paltry and inadequate. It is a cliche, and
also a truth, that writing is a solitary labour. It is only now,
physically separated from friends and colleagues, that I realise how
much sustenance and inspiration I receive from their insights, their
conversation and their argument. A room of one’s own is a necessity. It
is not enough. These are the conversations that I want to have.
So
many of us writers are progressive and left-wing, feminist and
anti-racist. In one sense, the virus and its consequences have been a
validation. Our coalition government, who for so many years rubbished
the stimulus choices of the Rudd Labor government during the Global
Financial Crisis, is now legislating for the state to commandeer and
protect the economy. The tenets of economic liberalism that have
dominated the globe for more than 50 years have been smashed by the
urgency and virulence of this virus.
Yet there is another
canonical ideal of liberalism that has also been demolished by the
recent weeks, and that is the belief in open borders. While we waited to
get out of Europe, country after country closed itself off from the
rest of the world. In this sense, the virus and its consequences have
validated the conservative voices that defend the nation state. It is
not transglobal entities that are doing the work of looking after
communities. It is the nation state. Were so many of us wrong? Were we
shouting over people when maybe we should have been listening? Had we
assumed racism and xenophobia whenever we heard an argument that
challenged our beliefs? Had we forsaken questioning for certainty? And
if so, what does that mean for the fiction we’ve been writing and the
arguments we have been mounting?
I
worry about the overreach of state power in the responses to the virus.
They are necessary, they are medically and scientifically sanctioned,
but the powers of surveillance and control now being deployed are deeply
illiberal. And once enacted such powers may be difficult to reverse. I
am shocked at how little weight the notion of liberty seems to have
among my peers. A formative political awakening for me was the politics
of AIDS. Some of the finest writing and the best art of the 1980s came
out of provocation and resistance at the demonisation, and the attempts
of state control, over people’s bodies. That suspicion of the state – of
its courts and judiciary, of its police and its military, of its
bureaucracy and of its power – seems to be a matter of little concern to
a present generation of writers and artists.
An equal shock has
been the relative silence over the actions of the Communist Party of
China. Other governments have made mistakes or have had to backtrack on
initial responses but it has been the CPC that has been the most
appalling actor in this short history of COVID-19; in its initial
recklessness in turning a blind eye to the conditions that allowed for
its incubation, and in the terrifying repression it has visited on its
own citizens.
I
worry that we writers and artists have been woefully undergraduate in
our rage over the past decade, tilting at the same bloody windmills. And
maybe our understanding of history has been equally pitiful. The
greatest gift reading history has done, is make me suspicious of
certainty. Maybe that’s the conversation I’m really hankering to have.
After the past few months, after these transformations, can a writer
still adhere to certainty?
When we emerge out of our isolation,
the world will be smaller and our horizons will be local. The priority
will be solidarity and communion with the unemployed; everything else is
not unimportant, but everything else will be secondary.
I
also hope we emerge hungry for argument and conversation and debate. I
hope our writing and our art asks more questions and doesn’t pretend to
have all the answers.
