www.pasdelabas.org – Page 15 – writing from another someone not from where they are

12 Years a Slave

Despite the fact that it seems mean mouthed of me to criticise this film I will do that anyway. I had read no reviews of this film at all. I only knew that it had been made by the Turner art prize winner and that a West Indian friend of mine had been so moved that he had stopped the film halfway through unable to continue. So I went there with very high expectations.

I was disappointed from the outset. For me the film felt as if the director was still learning how to construct a film and that the elements of “art” filming (a mixture of imagery and sound reminiscent of video installation) felt out of place even though they did carry some powerful juxtapositions of sound and visual elements. The film however was quite watchable as a story and the narration of the events was well worth doing and I am pleased that I have seen this film as I will never forget the story it told. However I went to the film believing that I would see some new and more potent representation of slavery itself and this is where the film fell short.

It repeated the old tropes of slavery and I do not mean this in a derogatory fashion as slavery is represented elsewhere. It is more that I did not feel the film explored slavery beyond the confines of the old tropes. The character of slaves was not opened out at all for the audience. There was no sense of who the people were other than as people exploited finding, occasional, solace in song. Here I did not feel the film went beyond other representations of slavery. The evil of slave owners and/or the kind slave owner is well rehearsed. The pain and the whipping is well known. Lynchings we know about. However I do not know who these people actually were or how they related to each other.

There was a momentary scene when the captured free black Americans from the North were first taken to the slave markets of the South. The camera panned over a group of slaves and number of the men in the shot were scarred, their skins dry and flaking. In that brief shot I had some brief vision into something that was “other”, a view of a slave community that I only recognised with a painful shock of recognition. This is what I had hoped for in this film. Not as a voyeuristic experience but as something which gave a shocking reality rather than an acted form to this history.

I found the film very sentimental and even in places cloying. As I say this seems extremely unkind considering the subject matter of the film yet as the film has been so hyped I feel it is justified to criticise.

Travelling and Value

Yesterday, a friend, as they say, heard that her partner was invited for a two week walking tour in Sri Lanka. It was immediately clear and fine that the partner would go but it left my friend feeling somewhat sore. This is then partly a short tale of a very boring moment of jealousy but something more emerged with that: value and what was of value.

Now my friend works a lot with refugees and asylum seekers to the exclusion of paid work at times. My friend gains a lot of kudos from this at times and her work is valued and respected by many. However my friend doesn’t always feel valued because she is not paid. Partly she needs money to provide for herself but partly this is because she hasn’t been selected competitively to do the work but has chosen to do it.

So my friend doesn’t feel valued. The relation to the trip is that the jealously was not of travelling to Sri Lanka. Working with asylum seekers and refugees my friend often finds herself in far flung places only a few miles from her house. The world has come to her and she visits frequently. The jealously was of value. My friend felt that staying at home instead of travelling to Sri Lanka was a lesser option even though she deeply holds that her voyage through the world right here at home is a more ethical and demanding journey than one full of a purely pleasurable consumption of the world.

So my friend has decided that perhaps it is time to stop feeling that the work she does is something else less than work.

The New Birmingham Library

I was in Birmingham today and took the time to visit the new Birmingham Library. I’d heard about it on the dreaded Radio 4 when a few weeks ago they’d run a hugely positive effectively promotional report on it prior to opening. It had opened earlier this week and as it was a Saturday today there were queues to get in.

The route through the centre of Birmingham took us through the square where the old library had been. There was the staged seating that I remember around the square with the old library above it. I kept looking at the building wondering if we were there yet, not sure what the new one would look like or where it would be. I was following a friend, a Quaker friend who was visiting the new site for the first time as well although he knew the City well.

We followed what were crowds up the steps and through a double electronic glass sliding doors. It was hard to get through so many people were coming the other way and men with loudhailers stood on the other side calling people to ‘keep to the right’. We walked through what were the opened out innards of the old library re-roofed and filled with shops and bars through the other side and into a large square, a place which reminded me of nothing less than Paris.

At the far end was what was clearly the new library, the most modern building on the square. I was struck at once by its resemblance to a Mosque. It is a tiered building surmounted by a golden, not dome, but cylindrical form. The building is clad with a formal flower inspired patterning which echoed early designs I’ve seen in Norman mosaics in Sicily. A Mosque. I laughed. No one had mentioned that. It felt like a Freudian slip, either by the architect or me. What a wonderful co-production it was.

To get in we had to queue and I was taken back to the Pompidou Centre, was it called the Beau Bourg or something like that, in Paris, in the early 1980s. Inside as we went up escalators to see the building and reach the view points from which the midlands plain was visible I looked down at some bookshelves below. The books looked so small and untouched by these crowds. Rather like empty seats on a provincial circus tour.

Bull Street Quaker Meeting House

Amazing site just of Bull Street in the centre of Birmingham. A small lane leads off the main road between to giant buildings and there hidden lies the Quaker Meeting House somehow surviving the high rise developments around it. It is however not run by the Meeting but by a private conference company who allow the area meeting to use the rooms for free and have coffee and tea for free. The Meeting House is however a private business.

Railing

So what is the truth about the disappearance of the railings that were standard issue for (at least) late Victorian and Edwardian housing? I’ll post here a few images of those stubs of metal that prick our memories on top of countless garden walls. We hear that they were commandeered during WW1 to make munitions and then that this is an urban myth. Here are the railings of Sheffield’s (now defunct) main Post Office clearly not subject to this narrative.

Chesterfield Spire

There is no finer spire than that of Chesterfield Church. It is the result of a mistake of course but is the finest piece of Gaudi architecture north of Barcelona.

Spire of Chesterfield Church seen from train

Walter Benjamin was concerned with ‘aura’ and the impossibility of meaning remaining constant across time. The ‘aura’ of this spire is maintained by it being quite simply ‘up there’ and properly hard of access. The ‘aura’ is the twisting of the ordered, the contortion of the normative. All the result of error, poor planning, imperfect execution. There the passage of this artefact across time both changes in meaning (a mistake to the object of admiration – the failed engineering feat to one more wonderful than the ideal) and changes meaning (embodies the post-modern condition a materially emergent from the collapse of modernism).

desire…

Zizek’s definition of an obsessional neurotic (himself included) is someone whose object of desire is the other’s desire.

So I do recall a very intimate moment in which a friend told me that he had been drawn into the eyes of a woman, he had seen in her a great beauty which was not an obvious one, a woman who I later grew to love. The object of my desire there was his desire.

But isn’t there then a form of eternal regression? The object of his desire was the other’s desire? So what was he was desiring?

Zizek also uses this as a way of discussing jealousy – that my desire is the desire of what the other has.

Object ‘a’: what you see of yourself (you) in the other’s gaze. The example he gives is of the young woman who sees in the desire of the man something that she had not seen in herself before. So I am aware often that I am looking at women with desire, a sort of scrutiny of desire. I wonder often what it is that these woman, these young woman and me a now much older man, what it is that they think when they see me? As a young man I tried to hide my desire in open social circumstance. Now I wonder what it is that is seen? Is it that I am showing to the women (in all cases both of desire and of its lack/both of women and of men) what it is that are as well as what they think they are? Isn’t that disgusting? That I teach that this person is an object of my desire or an object of my lack of desire and that they are that as well as an autonomous desiring being? But then the latter is not something that I would hold as possible, there can be no autonomy without total oblivion, that is ignorance of meaning.

canonisation by drip feed

Sorry if this is mean but I find it annoying that so much is made of the death of David Frost. It’s not that I have anything against the man but for people who spent their lives on the screen why give them more screen time when they die? The broadcasting world is incestuous, one person’s death offering reasons to hear from others in the same business about their business and how good it is thanks to them via the dead ones good graces. It is canonisation by drip feed. God it gets on my nerves. Enough.

our friends the iconoclasts

Fascinating programme on Beyond Belief about new developments in Mecca and Medina.

I was talking the other day with my friends Afif and Nawal and we were looking at pictures of Mecca. They were showing me pictures of the crowds of pilgrims around the Kabba and in the background you could see incredibly tall skyscrapers that dwarfed the central point. They were both shocked at these buildings that dominated the skyline of the city. The radio programme discussed precisely this.

Mecca with the Kabah the black dot in the right foreground

Over the past 20 or 30 years the Wahabi Saudi Arabian controllers of Mecca have destroyed large areas of both the city of Mecca and of Medina and built large areas of new flats and hotels in high-rise blocks and skyscrapers that also house many shops. This has resulted in very large areas of ancient housing being destroyed and also the destruction of a number of sites connected with the life of the Prophet. This includes some very important sites that were part of the practices of the pilgrims coming to Medina. They were destroyed by bulldozers and tombs simply dynamited.

This behaviour is looked on badly by many Muslims. The Wahabi are a puritanical 19^th century group who have looked to return to the first years of the life of the Prophet. They are thus set against what they consider to be effectively polytheistic behaviours that they see expressed in people’s veneration of material aspects of the Prophet’s life, such as the house where he died in Medina and sites where he lived and members of his family died.

In the destruction of the sites we see, according to one of the participants on the radio programme, the destruction of the spiritual geography of Mecca and Medina. He went on to say that the great crisis of Christianity during the 19^th century emerged from two areas. One was the work of Darwin which led to a questioning of revealed text and the other was the work of the 19^th century German biblical lexicographers although that is not the correct term I use. They analysed biblical texts and alongside the material evidence gathered by archaeology were able to prove that the biblical texts and the historical and textual evidence did not correspond. He suggested that the destruction of the spiritual geography of Medina and Mecca would mean that in the future Muslims too would face the same issue. When they would visit the pilgrimage sites in the future the actual physical remains which, he claimed, were the real locations for the life of the Prophet, would no longer hold together the historico-spiritual life of the site. This would lead Muslims to the same point where doubt about the historical veracity of the life of the Prophet to would begin to emerge.

Alongside this I was considering that the Wahabi were iconoclastic in another way. The horror felt by the sensible Western mind at the destruction of the giant statues of the Bhudda by the Taleban are repeated in this puritanical form of Islam that leads to extremes of iconoclastic town planning in Mecca and Medina. However what is being destroyed from our perspective is the heritage rather than the sacred geography. We in the West tell ourselves the story that Islam has not gone through the series of pre- and Protestant Reformations that have marked the Christian world of the last six centuries and led to the breakdown of religious certainties and the emergence of forms of intellectual freedom which we cherish. So from that perspective, the work of the iconoclastic Wahabis is to our taste. In the long run it is they who will break the power of a notion of ‘true’ Islam. Certainly that the Wahabi’s were not orthodox Islam was the claim by one participatant in the radio programme for whom the Taleban were the skirmishing frontiersmen of the effectively uncultured Wahabis.

So the other way in which they are iconoclastic is in that they also attack our Western love of monuments to the past whether that be an intact 15^th century street or the tomb of a member of the Prophet’s family. So we find ourselves in a strongly “catholic” world. Whilst we have had successive reformations we remain in the thrall of the shrine, the relic and we give it a new terminology: tradition, heritage. But we enshrine its defence in certain laws, legal restraints being nevertheless overridden by commercial practices with more immediate gains than the humanistic or spiritual rewards offered by the shrine, the monument to the past.

Greeks and Bhuddism

The children have been reading, no, devouring, the Percy Jackson books. The central theme of these is that there are in this world ‘real’ Greek Gods and more particularly their children, demi-Gods, who inhabit both the normal mundane world and the super-powered world of the Gods. Now being a lover of Greek myths I found it fascinating that my children (6/9/11) should be so taken with the stories.

The eldest had asked me what I knew about the myths and I was tongue tied as my knowledge is largely of a comparative/anthropological nature and it is to Robert Graves that I owe my personal attachment to the stories. I disappointed my daughter because I wasn’t able to retell the stories and my accounts of the relationship of Greek myths to other mythologies let alone accounts of the use and significance of the myths in the post-Greek world was not what she wanted. Continue reading “Greeks and Bhuddism”