My Own RE:public – Page 14 – … of life, of literature … & MORE

When things fall…

Catching up on some London Review of Books reading – with which I always seem to be in arrears, and which is not always my fault because continental Europe delivery from the island is somewhat tardy – I would very much commend Tom Stevenson’s excellent reportage (LRB Vol. 44 No. 7 · 7 April 2022) of the first weeks of the Ukraine war. Framed by his journey out of Poland, first to Lviv then Kyiv, and described with an observant eye for the landscape and the human elements of the catastrophe that has befallen this land, Stevenson doesn’t shy from the complexities of geo-politics and some of the more technical aspects pertaining to defense and military – strategy, equipment, etc.

With words familiar to me for reasons different but somehow the same – see this recent post – the title of Stevenson’s piece, “Things fall from the sky”, resonated, and came to be explained by this passage in which Stevenson describes his crossing into the eastern side of Kyiv:

[…] A two-chair barber shop in a corrugated metal shed at the side of the road had opened its doors under a sign that read: ‘Express haircuts: fast and quality. 60 hryvnia.’ Marina, the woman working there, was turning away the local babushkas: she only wanted to serve volunteers. She spoke Russian with a heavy Ukrainian accent. The barbershop had reopened one week into the invasion, she said, and it would stay open ‘until things start falling from the sky’. In fact, things were already falling from the sky. […]fragments of a Russian missile – shot down by Ukrainian air defences – had landed on a housing complex next to a nursery school. The crater at the foot of one of the tower blocks was about four metres across. […]
LRB Vol. 44 No. 7 · 7 April 2022

In my blog post that I refer to above, I was pondering – my thinking very much influenced by how it was that so very many clever people over a considerable amount of time failed to recognize Russia’s intentions – the Bruegel depiction of Icarus’ fall from the sky; an extraordinary event seemingly unattended by all and sundry, and here we have Stevenson’s Marina, representative of many of the inhabitants of Kyiv, trying as best she might to get on with her life but ever alert, waiting …

Tom Stevenson’s piece is dated 25th March. Since he wrote, the war has intensified, atrocities against civilians have been uncovered – in Bucha for instance. And, as I write now, both Mariupol and Kharkiv are devastated, as are any number of villages in the eastern and southern regions. Kyiv still stands and with it a nation and a legitimate government, and its allies – with ever more financial and military support (the latest package from the US: a mind-boggling $33 billion). The prospects of an end to warfare, even of a return to diplomacy, have evaporated I fear. But to whom does one talk? To Putin? I think not. I would welcome Stevenson’s reasoned voice again, even when anything said may quickly be overtaken by events.

April is the cruelest month…

…’tis indeed this year, 100 years after the publication of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land that famously so begins. And for some much more so than for others. Embedded below a wonderful recitation by Jeremy Irons and Eileen Atkins (for BBC Radio 4 presumably).

In this early Spring 2022, my thoughts continue to be preoccupied with the once, and now again, “bloodlands” at the heart of Europe, and hope, pray even, that they will not be so for evermore. Reading the opening verses of Eliot’s immortal work anew, I am not wrapped in the memories of the Countess Marie and the Austro-German provinces, but think this time instead of other fertile lands in the here and now, one that produces food for the world, that would in any normal Spring be awakening from the long, cold winter and now instead perhaps just abandoned, a muddied quagmire left by monster tanks and trucks and man.

I. The Burial of the Dead

  April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

  What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
                      Frisch weht der Wind
                      Der Heimat zu
                      Mein Irisch Kind,
                      Wo weilest du?
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
“They called me the hyacinth girl.”
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed’ und leer das Meer.

[...]

The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot (1922)

The entire poem can be found all over the place of course. For instance, at the Poetry Foundation linked above and this annotated version at Bartleby. Audio files of Eliot’s own reading are here. And, this essay by Pericles Lewis (adapted from his Cambridge Introduction to Modernism) is informative.

Whose country is it anyway?

Nations and nationality. Land and people. Well worth contemplating at any time, but more so in these anxious days as an unjust war continues on the European continent, as a sovereign country is invaded and by a more powerful aggressor declared to as such not exist; these tangled roots of conflict inextricably entwined in the historical paths of the new nation states that were formed in accordance with the treaties made at the end of World War I, only to be viciously torn asunder, to then re-form (and again …) in the post World War II years as the old colonial powers retreated further out of lands strewn wide and two distinctly different conceptions of freedom and governance faced off and redefined the geo-political order. During those years, conflicts burgeoned in all corners of the world, one such being that region in the north-west of the African continent called the Maghreb.

Excerpt for the opening of “In the Country of Others” by Leïla Slimani, pub. Penguin, 2021.

In the Country of Others is the first novel in a planned series from Leïla Slimani; set in Morocco and exploring the fraught relationship between the peoples of that country and the French colonial power, and framed between the years immediately following the Second World War and the splintered nationalistic allegiances and revolutionary fervor of the mid-1950s that were to lead to independence. I should say, though this novel is removed with the war that rages in the Ukraine as I write – geographically, culturally, historically, that conflict informs and casts a shadow over all my reading at the moment, Slimani’s book is a powerful literary rendering of just one of the many failures of reconciliation left over from the last century and in that sense is informative of the situation in the conglomerate of states that (re-) formed after the break up of the Soviet.

As in her previous works of fiction, Slimani develops her narrative from very real circumstances, but this time very close to home indeed, and in every way. Home, here, is not the Parisian suburbs and their contemporary, middle-class milieus but, rather, the post-war colonial Morocco and a family blended out of French and Moroccan, like that of Slimani’s, and, as they, enmeshed in a profound and sometimes violent struggle for personal and cultural identity.

Calling upon an array of analogy and metaphor, like that of the hybrid orange and lemon trees that bring forth the most bitter of fruit, and through some wonderfully realized descriptive passages and imagery – visual and sensual – of a landscape and its inhabitants, at once harsh and seductive, juxtaposed against a reality defined by extreme hardship and poverty and the indignities of subjection that bring forth not the best in man, Slimani tells her story of the Belhaj family; seeking to take root upon harsh ground that is sparse in the emotional nourishment needed to grow and flourish.

Slimani’s characters, and with them their very personal searches for freedom and meaning, converge in Meknès and on the Belhaj farm in the rugged hilly terrain beyond. Mathilde sought an escape from the rural Alsatian monotony and found one in the small, dark and beautiful man out of the Maghreb, and Amine saw in the young French woman – sturdy, blonde, vivacious – a just reward for services rendered to a land not his own. In the hills sufficiently remote from the stringent cultural norms of the medina, Amine will shed himself of the traumas of war and realize his father’s interrupted dream of a prosperous fruit farm and, at the same time, raise his family insulated from the gossip and politicking of the old town and the old ways. But, old ways are hard to shed and, for this uncommonly attractive pair, the passion that promised so much, is hard to sustain.

For Mouilala, Amine’s mother, her only freedom is to be found shrouded in rigid custom and widowhood, and the confines of house and terrace. Who are we to say freedom must know no boundaries. And for the lovely young sister Selma, it is in the pursuit of Western pleasures; not knowing that pleasure comes at a cost. For the angry, oft absent brother, Omar, held captive to an ideology and the tricolore, freedom will come only in its demise.

There is the baby, Selim (to be heard from later I expect), and then there is Aïcha. Oh, and what a girl she is! (I allow myself to imagine her as Slimani’s maman!) For the greater part of the novel she is about seven years old. We go to school with her on her first day; to a Catholic institution in the city, at the insistence of Mathilde. A disaster to be sure, but a heralding in of many colorful narrative strands to come. There is nobody like Aïcha; neither physically nor intellectually. She gives back as much as she gets from the pampered colonial daughters, and in Jesus she finds a friend. (And has the good sense to keep this to herself.) And in the nuns, allies; for it is – perhaps, surprisingly – clear to them that she is an exceptional little girl.

Slimani allows all her characters’ viewpoints to come to the fore, but though it’s the voice of Mathilde that initially reverberates most, that sets the tone, that drives the narrative forward from the time of their arrival in Morocco in 1947, in the end it’s Aïcha’s way of seeing that lingers most. Once she lets us inside her precocious head, crowned with untamed locks, we see the people and the land, both near and dear, as a child would for sure – with love and anger, with envy and with confusion – but there is something more, an uncanny wisdom rooted in something more, something that makes her seem as old as the earth beneath her feet.

Podcasting Ukraine

In the midst of a serious (and difficult in many respects) read of Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands (in German translation in my case), a just released Ezra Klein podcast popped up on my screen and lo and behold with the respected (and sometimes polarizing) Yale historian as guest. I usually listen to Ezra’s podcast via Apple or the NYT website, but the first is device dependent and the latter probably on subscription so here embedded is the Spotify version.

Ezra Klein in conversation with Timothy Snyder March 15 2022

Professionally, in the last weeks Ezra has found himself (and almost exclusively so) confronted with this heinous war of Vladimir Putin against the Ukrainian people. And, personally, he seems as moved to outrage as the most of us. It would be fair to say, foreign policy is not usually Ezra’s primary focus, but he is embracing it and probably learning along with his listeners. Also, I rather imagine, as a new second time father, Ezra is coming to terms not just with a present danger but one that will surely affect future generations.

This discussion with Snyder is only the most recent of a number of excellent podcasts released since the beginning of hostilities – including with other such qualified figures as Adam Tooze and Fiona Hill (who mentioned Bloodlands as a must read that offers some historical context to the current situation), and I expect there will be more to come.

Whether I will be able to find words to adequately describe the human and moral catastrophe with which one is faced in reading Bloodlands, I don’t know. What I do know is: Timothy Snyder would surely have not predicted, a dozen years after its publication, that – for all the wrong reasons – there would be a new readership for his book; people like me seeking some historical and cultural context for this war in the middle of Europe that is, at once, upon us and removed from us.

To every picture be there a poem

“Musee des Beaux Arts” – W. H. Auden (1938)

A subscription is probably required to access this interactive tour de force at The New York Times, but it is such a remarkably timely piece that I feel inclined to make mention of it here.

Elisa Gabbert does her own close reading and analysis for the Time’s “Close Reading” series of W.H. Auden’s 1938 poem “Musee des Beaux Arts“, an ekphrasis which is in turn, if not an analysis, the poet’s own particular appreciation of two narrative paintings from Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Firstly, The census at Bethlehem (1566) and then Landscape with The Fall of Icarus (1555). An appreciation of an appreciation if you will.

*The census at Bethlehem* (1566) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, Belgium.

Or, in respect to the Icarus painting, even a couple more iterations of appreciations. For Bruegel also looks elsewhere for inspiration; finding it in the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses – itself an inspired narrative work with mythological and historical elements. Bruegel arranges his scene as Ovid does (compare just a few lines and the painting below); but he has the spectacular event met with indifference rather than astonishment. As if a boy falls from the heavens every day. Or was Bruegel inserting a temporal dimension suggesting that, in any precise moment, a lapse in attentiveness, a diversion, may mean that something is missed? And that something could be a boy falling from the sky or something much more real – like the darkening clouds of war for instance. (Like everywhere else in Europe, the low countries were permanently engulfed in one conflict or other during Bruegel’s lifetime.)

Beneath their flight,
the fisherman while casting his long rod,
or the tired shepherd leaning on his crook,
or the rough plowman as he raised his eyes,
astonished might observe them on the wing,
and worship them as Gods.

- Ovid's Metamorphoses (Book VIII) Eng. trans. Brooks More, 1922.

*Landscape with the Fall of Icarus* (c. 1555) by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique © Bridgeman Art Library / Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

As Gabbert points out, neither the painting nor Auden’s poem overtly signal approaching disaster let alone impending war, yet dangers are lurking in both. In the painting, Icarus has indeed fallen; his flaying legs barely noticed by a folk going about their business or just not caring, nor by the viewer eagerly progressing from one master work to the next, not seeing what Auden saw. After all, unprompted, human nature will have it that we see what we want to see – or we don’t see at all.

Looking eastward from Germany in these day, one can see the result of a political culture that was too concerned with economic interests and chose to look away for too long.

We have a situation …

In the wake of the February 24th 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the ultimate rejection of reason (and of international law) which had been preceded by weeks of diplomatic initiative (and hectic) in response to the unpredictable and irrational arguments and demands of President Putin, the reality of a new situation now existing upon this continent has firmly taken hold in the hearts and minds of many here in Germany. A reality that has, in only a matter of days, seen this country abandon many of the principals – not always principled one has to say – which have guided its defense and security decision-making processes since (at least) the end of the Cold War and Reunification.

As one who has only lived in Germany during times of peace and relative economic and political stability – granted, often disturbed by, amongst other things: financial crises and economic fluctuations, contrary continental folk (EU) and even more contrary island folk (Brexit), populist politics, climate change, and during the last two years, the pandemic, but all seen as irritations of various degrees of magnitude that were all somehow manageable – I now find myself struggling with uncertainties and scenarios I had not previously entertained.

German angst is a stereotype of course, but even as such is strangely contagious. The abstract nature of distant conflicts can gain in nearness with every iteration of “just two flight hours from Berlin”. As though Kyiv was something other than two hours from Berlin last week, last year, in 2014 …

How often have I reacted with barely disguised annoyance at the prevalent rhetoric in Germany on any and all matters military, resplendent as they are in phrases such as “given our history…”, “never again …”, at the monumental hypocrisy of allowing an arms industry to arm the rest of the world but not themselves and of imposing sanctions against Russia’s territorial aggression whilst at the same time extending economic cooperation (and refusing to recognize the geopolitical implications!), and a willingness to accept the security afforded by the US presence at home but a reluctance to fulfill their role as ally abroad. And, sometimes my reaction took a milder turn; simply to accept that my socialization at the other end of the world (where “duck & cover” was an unknown exercise) made me less sensitive to “the near and constant dangers” – and hot air – of the Cold War, and my failure to accept the accompanying relief and good will at its end, and just quietly wondered aghast at the German “naivety”. In the last days that word has often been taken out of my mouth, as the belatedly self-reflective identification of a “certain naivety” has found wide echo in all corners of the political spectrum, the media and, seemingly, amongst the volk.

No, I didn’t want to be right about these things, and I didn’t want to write about these things – but maybe I will have to. Yes, there is some measure of guilt attached – too much time spent foraging about in this rarefied world that I have created for myself; a space that then seems, in times such as these, too constrained and inconsequential … or just plain too small.

Of late I have been watching (again!) the hit US political drama from the noughties, The West Wing. Years not so long gone one would think, but in terms of the radically changed (and changing) face of media delivery and consumption, seemingly from a distant epoch. (My viewing observations include: firstly, in style already dated perhaps, but not not necessarily in substance – the more things change, the more they stay the same; and, secondly, a veritable minefield of political incorrectness to be excavated – a playground for ‘woke’ warriors of whichever persuasion!) When all else fails and the proverbial shit hits the fan, Leo will say something along the lines of: “Excuse me, Mr. President, we have a situation”, and with Jed in tow, or vice versa, together they march – or à la Aaron Sorkin ‘walk & talk’ their way – to the closeted security of the “sit. room”. So, it may well be, when I need to have my say on any new and what CNN would refer to as developing situation, I’m to be found in my very own more domesticated version of the Sit(-ting) Room (accessible from the top menu).

The other half

Somewhere in her slight, but written with almost existential urgency, 1987 memoir, Une femme, Annie Ernaux recalls how her mother, in her quest to improve the family’s standing, her striving for upward mobility in the firmly entrenched social structure of post-war France, at some stage began referring to her husband in the oh so formal language imagined (by her) to be that of the bourgeoisie. Now, having read this book in German (Eine Frau, Suhrkamp, 2019), the class difference to be discerned in the “upgrading” of (presumably in the original French) mon mari to mon époux (in German: mein (Ehe)Mann to mein Gatte), and especially in respect to the social norms of the time, is clear in the formalities of both languages, but I am not so sure how that would transpose in modern English nor how that was handled in the English translation. When did you last hear anyone casually – or seriously – referring to their “spouse”? In this respect the English formal is often confined to tax forms! And, complicated further by the social and linguistic improvements (or at least changes) of the last decade or so, I do wonder where the translation would have gone with this.

But, I divert, for it is not so much this (not uninteresting) nuance of language that concerns me, but rather how powerfully that seemingly simple but inherently complex play with words describes the life and the ambitions of Annie Ernaux’s mother, and that were so inextricable from husband and child. I read this book very much as a memorial to this life – giving it the respect and meaning in memory and reflection that it was often denied in the course of its living. And, because Ernaux’s mother is never named, it may be, more generally, read as about a woman of a certain stand and certain generation in a certain place – or any place really.

Unlike La place which I have previously written on, in which Ernaux disentangles her relationship with her father, and which is rendered with the rational distance from events and emotions that only distance in time affords, Une femme is written with immediacy and in the midst of grief and the lonely struggle against feelings of guilt and shame that that brings. But, it is also written by “a writer”, and as such Ernaux can do nothing other than write her way to some point of reconciliation; remaining attentive to her craft – assembling fragments, observations, narratives to a captivating whole. This book touched me deeply. I could write about all the “class” stuff that could be extricated from the text, but I won’t here – not now – rather I will just pay tribute to the courage of this wonderful French writer who, in confronting her own imperfect place in the world, dignifies that held by others. And gratitude, for sharing that experience that many of us have had, or will have, when faced with the realization that someone near and dear will never again exist upon this earth; one who connects us to our past, of finding ourselves for a short time or long set adrift; flaying, disoriented.

A comprehensive collection of Annie Ernaux’s work is available in English translation at Seven Stories Press.

A right royal Welfare Queen

In the process of posting at the end of last year on the film Passing, I considered Imani Perry’s review of that film, and in glancing Perry’s Wikipedia profile I was alerted to her role in a recent interesting art transaction; from which arose questions to do with ownership of art and the responsibilities that come with that – to the artist and to the public arena.

As reported here at Artnet, Perry was in fact the owner of the Amy Sherold painting Welfare Queen (2012), which was sold at auction for a sum way beyond the estimate. Controversy ensued on a number of fronts. Firstly, Sherold’s own dissatisfaction that this work which she herself sold to the fledgling collector Perry, for the first time and under generous circumstances, a decade ago, should now be auctioned; destination unknown. (Sherold articulates her disquiet on the matter in a statement to Culture Type.) And this leads, of course, and as the Artnet piece considers, to the matter of re-sale equity conditions. Mostly one would think in “royalties” (no pun intended!) but equally so in terms of due “care”, and I think it is this latter that grates so at the artist. Perhaps not all, not even most, artists have this as an imperative, but it seems for this Black woman artist a transaction has more worth than the almighty dollar; rather is an act of passing on the guardianship of her work, her art, her intent. An honorable intent.

Welfare Queen, oil on canvas, Amy Sherold, 2012.

In her lot essay for Phillips (something else that raised eyebrows; normally the prerogative of a qualified other, not the collector), and the above video, Imani Perry enthusiastically states her highest regard for the artist and the painting, and (in the essay) her wish that the new owner will be similarly disposed. I suppose it is no one else’s concern … well, Amy Sherold may be entitled to a legitimate interest … but one has to wonder, should the painting have meant so much to Perry, why on earth did she unload it at all, let alone let it loose to the highest bidder in the capitalistic playground of the auction house? As I say: not my business! For Ms. Perry: good business, perhaps. As I write, I can’t track the buyer which seems to indicate that it was not purchased by a public gallery and is destined for another private collection. Hopefully, one with an interest in its public display, because, for all the reasons Perry says, it is a powerful work that invites reflection and identification in many ways, and especially in respect to stereotyping – based on race, gender, class – created very often through political expediency and becoming entrenched through language (‘welfare queen’) into societal norms.

Diverting, I also note that in her essay Imani Perry remarks upon the painting being a constant companion and inspiration during the last years and in the course of her own creative endeavors, right up to the writing of her latest book, so I should mention that that book, South to America – A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, was in fact published last month by Harper Collins. There is a sample reading on the publisher’s website, an adapted essay (regarding New Orleans) at The New York Times and also there, a (middling to good) review by Tayari Jones.

Should you be unsure of quite where to place Amy Sherold, you may remember, as I do, her celebrated 2018 portrait of Michelle Obama; now hanging in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. Well, usually! For now I see, through until May this year, it is on a nationwide tour – with its other half so to speak!