THE UNKNOWN TERRORIST by Richard Flanagan (2006)

 THE UNKNOWN TERRORIST by Richard Flanagan (2006)

 

 In the first half he creates trash and in the second half of the book he throws the trash into your face. The two pages of Praise for The Unknown Terrorist all enjoy this facial treatment very much, much like the notorious Austrian playwright Peter Handke who literally abused his audiences in his eponymous play Offending the Audience – with most of the liberal-bourgeois audiences loving it. There’s nothing like looking in the mirror and seeing an ugly monster. Flanagan holds the mirror up for Australian society to see itself naked, in the way that men see the pole dancers at the Chairman’s Lounge in Sydney’s sleazy Cross. Metaphors, straight and mixed, abound. As the protagonist, the Doll, aka Gina Davies cries her death-cry “Fuck you, fuck you all”, we, the liberal-bourgeois readers are addressed. As a savage critique of Australian society – Sydneysiders in particular – this works very well. 

 

There are, however, some problems: one, Flanagan himself does a double entendre by teasing the male readership with graphic sex, guaranteed to sell copies, while throwing shit at them and at himself. Flanagan should read Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism to at least offer a hint of what a liberated sexuality might look like instead. His main philosophical cum psychical dictum being that “Love is not enough” is exactly the point Reich makes, namely when ‘love’ is denigrated by fascism (and religion) as deviant and dangerous sex, then we descend into the fascist mass hysteria so well described by Flanagan. Flanagan’s good women like Gina and Wilder are capable of true love and as punishment they have to sell their bodies for sex. Flanagan is not the first to use this theme, e.g. Berthold Brecht’s play The Good Person/Woman of Szechwan explores a similar conundrum, implying that the capitalist economy creates such a deviant morality. Flanagan does this by inserting the endless advertisements, naming the corporates without fear – I am surprised he didn’t get sued – that are financing the media frenzy to continuously up the ante. Flanagan’s Richard Cody as the somewhat clichéd TV journalist cum celebrity, may well resemble the corporate media world in Australia, except that they might be slightly more cunning than a dumb-ass like Cody – who of course deserves the bullet in the end. Portraying the elites as witless arseholes, driven by greed, celebrity fame and right-wing (fascist) propaganda is not serving the anti-capitalist aim of the novel, if indeed it has one. 

 

Which brings me to the second caveat: as the aforementioned ‘praise’ by literary critics from the mainstream, corporate media – who else? – cleverly subverts the aim of the novel as a ‘brilliant meditation’, ‘a political and social satire’, ‘stark realism’, ‘thriller and tragedy’ and ‘passionate concern’ dishing out all the literary bon mots, in order to make sure that this is a novel and not a real life documentary. For if it were the latter, it would be simply incredible, for things like this do not happen in Australia – we all know that! As such we can rest assure that Flanagan’s wicked world will continue to feed the writer with material to make up more outrageous stories we’ll love to read. Were it some sort of Brechtian manifesto, Flanagan would be swiftly accused of Marxist tendencies and mainstream book publishers and the literature industry would put the brakes on. No agitators please! 

 

A third concern: while writers routinely get into the heads of their protagonists about whom they know next to nothing in reality, so they must make it up the best they can. Is the pole dancer capable of inner monologues that speak of profound philosophical, social and political concerns? As Chomsky says, nothing is impossible, but many things are unlikely, and I think this proposition belongs to the latter category. Brecht at least splits his ‘good woman’ into good female and bad male, while Flanigan dives deep into the female psyche only. Can this be done? Freud famously (or infamously) based a whole new field of study on it, called psychology. Perhaps women are more interesting than men? I have a female protagonist in one of my manuscripts and my wife says that sometimes I don’t get it. Maybe men should be banned from writing novels altogether. Does Flanigan do a service to womanhood? I kind of doubt it. 

 

In general I dislike the literary technique of Deus ex machina (or if you prefer Diabolus ex machina) or Olympic point of view of the narrator, first because, as the phrases suggest, a god-like point of view is ridiculous as much as any god is, and second , while it may be an acknowledged art form to be able to be inside the heads of all your characters in a novel, it renders the whole enterprise equally ridiculous because in reality this is not possible – i.e. I prefer a good story to be believable, e.g. as in social realism where only the narrator’s point of view is on display. As in real life ‘one’ can, of course, always speculate what goes on in the heads of other people but a writer should leave it at that. One can tie ‘oneself’ in knots when for example speculating about what goes on in Flanagan’s head when he takes on the personae of Gina Davies, Wilder, Richard Cody, Moretti, Tariq, Athens, Ferdy and a few more. Does such a writer suffer from multiple personality disorder? Probably not when you can use this technique as a writer who scores a hit when doing so. Is that what readers enjoy so much? That Cody conjures up the lurid idea that a clueless Aussie stripper turns into an Islamic terrorist? That she finds the murdered Tariq in the boot of a car during a walk-about? That she can walk into her strip club and shoot Cody when Sydney is crawling with police looking for her?

 

Having lived for a while in Sydney myself, in the neighbourhood of Darlinghurst, in the early 70s, there is of course a certain fascination with it. My wife’s auntie owns a small flat in Kings Cross where we stayed, when on holiday many years later with my wife and daughter. I don’t remember the sleaze described by Flanagan in such great detail – certain readers might be encouraged for a bit of sex tourism – but of course we didn’t frequent Kings Cross at night. Sydney, then and now as a metropolis and melting pot of many ethnicities – somewhat clichéd by Flanigan in portraying Greeks, Italians and ‘Asians’ in minor roles – makes a great backdrop for The Unknown Terrorist outdoing the American genres of Chicago and New York. Portraying the Doll as a European-type ‘darkie’, playing the fair dinkum Aussie who sees Sydney as the universe, what with the beautiful Bondi beach and the great ocean, and the mansions in Double Bay, Mosman and Vaucluse, the Opera House and the high-end shopping centres where Gina buys branded luxury clothes, bags and accessories – all that has an allure that Flanagan’s mastery prose brings to life. Still, I prefer Auckland to Sydney, with the former having fewer rednecks than the latter. An interesting sideline is that neither Sydney, nor Australia as a whole, ever had any Islamic terrorist attacks to speak of. The recent lethal stabbings at the Bondi shopping centre were the random work of a local psychopath. New Zealand, of course, has the Christchurch massacre carried out by an Australian neo-Nazi. There is a hint in the novel that the bombs left in the Homebush Olympic Stadium may have been planted by ASIO to whip up anti-Islamic sentiment. One wonders if any of the ASIO spooks read the book and filed away Flanagan as a potential threat. Since the book was published nearly 20 years ago, one can safely assume that no untoward action was taken, especially as Flanagan was able to increase his public profile ever since as one of the icons of contemporary Australian literature (see my review of his latest offering: Flanagan, Richard (2023). Question 7, also on this blog – I consider this book as so much better because the narrator just speaks with one voice, his own).

 

THE PULSATING UNIVERSE

 THE PULSATING UNIVERSE

 When the universe collapses back into a gravitational singularity – into a single black hole – the next thing to happen is another BIG BANG. So, a new universe is created. The first question is, how many times has this happened in the past? The second question is, what came first, the chicken (the universe) or the egg (the singularity)? Since time is extinguished in the singularity, the first question may become irrelevant. The second question may also be irrelevant because all information is equally extinguished. Nevertheless, we cannot resist the third question, namely did humans exist in previous universes and will they exist in future ones? For even when all information is extinguished in the singularity, it either means that nothing is impossible or everything is possible, including the eventual arrival of the human species. If the human species is the ultimate evolutionary aim of the universe – for only we can conceive of it – perhaps there is a parallel to the gravitational singularity, namely the human singularity, as the human species collapses back into itself as single idea. On the other hand, since we know that the universe exists without human input, and as such, that the universe may be indifferent to the existence or non-existence of the human species, there must at least be the possibility of the human species incorporated into the beginning of the universe. Since we have no idea why we are here, or what it is that allowed us to evolve, we equally have no idea what the human singularity is all about, similar to the question as to what the gravitational singularity is all about – and yet we can ask. Perhaps we are born from the contradiction that we can ask questions to which there are no answers? The convergence of all and nothing, even in the multiple black holes (non-singular singularities), where infinity meets zero, approximated in mathematical formulae, is in itself a non-singular pulsating phenomenon, lacking a human equivalent. Perhaps human evolution, as we know it, is approaching a semblance of a non-singular human singularity, at least in the sense of being on the cusp of some sort of self-inflicted extinction that begs the question of a human intelligence that can conceive of the universe but cannot conceive itself other than some sort of primitive life-form that exists only for the sake of domination over a natural environment that evolved long before humans arrived on the scene, and doing this by means of enslaving the human potential for vast profits of the 1%. Obviously, the universe is indifferent to this human non-sense, and yet, since the universe in its singularity has the potential for everything and nothing, is there something we humans don’t know about ourselves, something that will instil an intelligence in the 99% so that we can live in peace and prosperity for another millennium? If in a previous universe the human condition was part of it, at least for a miniscule part of the time, how did they manage it? Since our present-day human imagination knows no limits – which is another trait of the human singularity – we can escape and time-travel to any place and time we can think of, even pass on our adventures to the next generation and to the next, immortalized of sorts, we are nevertheless always caught short by our mortality that extinguishes all imagination, all information, everything indeed, as in a black hole. Maybe a human life is nothing else but a microcosm of the eventual collapse of matter, dark and bright, into itself, into a singularity, at least as far as our language faculty is concerned. The remaining ashes do not speak. What remains is recorded history of self-importance, some literature, some poetry, some mathematical equations, edifices, military campaigns, sickness and disease, triumph and abject failure, rusting technology, artificial intelligence, sex and procreation, science and religion, fake and fury, all the words in the lexicon – all amounting to everything and nothing, pulsating in a never-ending cycle of universal time without time. Furthermore, since the BIG BANG proceeds without any prior blueprint, i.e. having no information to proceed with, all subsequent events must be based on random selection, subject only to the laws of nature, of which we understand only a fraction. As such human evolution is also a matter of random selection or events: for example, the claim that language emerged as a random mutation some 150,000 years ago. Examining the recorded history since then, we can only conclude that random selection shaped the chaotic state of affairs witnessed at present, unable to blame individual stupidity and/or criminal behaviour, for the movers and shakers of history are destined to do what they are doing, with only very narrow margins to influence their destructive decisions. As mentioned above, the only hope seems to be that another random mutation in the human gene will somehow deliver us, not from evil but from an evolutionary destiny that is based on some unfortunate combinations in the DNA of randomly selected individuals, not to speak of the unfortunate learning paradigms that evolved in parallel fashion, giving us a potent mix of nature and delusional nurture, designed to shoot ourselves in the foot – not that anybody or anything really cares, cf. Melania Trump as a case in question. The surprising observation is that how it is possible that a relatively small minority of the human species can exert almost absolute power over the majority that slaves away to meet the insane demands of their masters. As the masters of the universe – or so they think of themselves – compete to discharge their divine duties, usually in the name of some patriarchal god (or ideology) who in turn created the whole pulsating universe by magic, thus upping the ante in being responsible to do god’s (or chief ideologist’s) work, fighting to the death, if necessary, for god and the nation. Vast armies and weaponries – designed by eager scientists -  are employed to enforce the status quo, bringing endless suffering to the subservient masses, celebrated as heroic sacrifices. Not surprisingly perhaps one must include the Frankenstein scientists who on one hand define singularity in terms of mathematical formulae – not that I know much about the religious affiliations, if any, of the masters of the singularity, Penrose and Hawking, but since everyone always harks back to Einstein one must point out his bizarre saying of ‘science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind’, a stance that presumably only belatedly caused him to ask President Truman not to use the atomic bomb, Truman being a good man who is both religious and scientific. Obviously the more fanatical scientist cum ideologues like Oppenheimer, von Braun, Khan and all the others had no scruples whatsoever. One would expect that fair dinkum scientists are atheists, given that there is zero scientific evidence for the existence of any god or divinity. However, occasionally there scientists like Higgs who was annoyed when his boson discovery was sensationalized by moronic science journalists as ‘Gods’ particle’ saying that such nonsense is incompatible with scientific thought. By all accounts Higgs was an unconventional scientist. If all soldiers (from the generals to the foot soldier) and all MAD scientists of the world would unite and lay down their arms, most problems in the universe would be solved immediately. But that would require a random mutation of sorts. In the meantime, we are stuck in this vicious cycle of the masters of the universe, commercial, political and scientific, claiming universal rights to achieve their goals by slaughter, even though in the greater scheme of things they are as insignificant as a lump of rock hurtling through space and time. There must be a part in the masses’ DNA that compels them to strive for a piece of the 1%, be it via adoration or consumption of goods that the advertising industry tells them they need, for history tells us that so far that all attempts to unite the workers and to rise up have failed. Claiming a universal truth for the workers is as elusive as claiming a universal truth for justice and equality. Manipulation of the working classes seems to be an easy undertaking in that they are made to believe that they must submit for their protection to the great leaders, presidents, generals, CEOs, kings and queens, and what have you, lest the universal sky will fall on their heads. It seems easy to convince them that the rich and famous deserve what they have, indeed applaud them for their achievements, in the magical belief that one of them (me) too could make it one day, like winning a billion or two in a lottery. Alternatively, everyone is sucked into the Hollywood high-noon scenario of the good guys in the West fighting a desperate battle to defeat the bad guys in the East, for one last time. As such the human universe is pulsating like a human heart, pumping blood to sustain the body and brain, the latter of which has the capacity to comprehend itself to a certain degree, as much as comprehending the whole of the pulsating universe to some degree. Both must succumb to the singularity about which nothing can be known. So, even if you do care, there is probably little chance you can change the course of history, let alone the natural course of no return of our little universe to its singularity – and start again and again and again.

FOUND IN TRANSLATION: A CASE STUDY AND REVIEW OF LUCY JONES’ TRANSLATION OF REIMANN’S GESCHWISTER INTO ENGLISH

 FOUND IN TRANSLATION: A CASE STUDY AND REVIEW OF LUCY JONES’ TRANSLATION OF REIMANN’S GESCHWISTER INTO ENGLISH

 

 As might be expected from the title of this essay, the purpose is to debunk the myth of ‘lost in translation’, not so much in the cinematic version, but in the maxims of linguistic relativism, of which an extreme version is stated by Kramsch (2009):

 

The more people speak English around the world the less people understand one another. So it’s this irony that we’re moving into an era where more and more people speak English and yet less and less do they understand one another because through English they are thinking, they speak English but they think French, or they speak English and they think Hindi. And so it becomes an invisible multilingualism behind the English that they speak and I think applied linguistics has a lot to contribute to that understanding of what it means to have a multilingual mentality, a multilingual competence.

http://pterodactilo.com/numero6/?p=541A

 

Equally, in an essay by Thomas (2002) entitled ‘Roger Bacon and Martin Joos: Generative Linguistics’ Reading of the Past’ the likes of Chomsky and Joos are accused of being hardcore apologists for Bacon’s assertion that ‘the substance of grammar is one and the same for all languages, even if there are accidental variations’  while a more reasonable stance would be that of the American (Boas) descriptive tradition that states that ‘languages could differ from each other without limit and in unpredictable ways’ which Joos in particular took issue with. While Thomas has also other axes to grind (including the suspicion that Chomsky and Co. have misunderstood Bacon), the main point seems to be that Generative Linguistics is treating descriptivism unfairly in its dismissal of it. 

 

Having brought up in the descriptivist tradition myself at the University of Auckland in the 1980s – and having been sidelined as a pro-Chomskian linguist (Sperlich, 2006) – I have noted the irony of Austronesian descriptivists in particular in that they put a lot of effort into reconstructing proto-languages, assuming that modern Austronesian or at least Oceanic languages evolved from a single proto-Austronesian or proto-Oceanic language. While mainly concentrating on proto-phonology and a proto-lexicon, there is implicit the notion that a single grammar was at the heart of it. Indeed, there is research into the accusative to ergative drift in Polynesian languages (e.g. Hohepa, 1969), as an example of a syntactical evolution. 

 

What really sets the two opposing camps apart in modern parlance is the question of how language arises from the brain. While Chomsky and Co. argue for biolinguistics which presumes that there is a language faculty in our brain like a physiological organ, and as such makes all humans alike in their acquisition of language (a combination of nature and nurture), while the other camp (functionalists, pragmatists, cognitivists and other) claim that language is a learnt behaviour (à la Skinner) or at least a product of cognition that arises purely as ‘nurture’ (in terms of cultural communication). If so, then given the many cultural permutations, both past and present, plus the many idiosyncrasies of individuals, we could conclude, that ultimately, we cannot truly understand anything anyone is saying, even so we follow certain learnt cultural and sub-cultural norms like addressed in pragmatics, e.g. Levinson’s (2000:76) conversational implicature:

 

Speaker’s maxim: Do not provide a statement that is informationally weaker than your knowledge of the world allows ….

 

How such a maxim is interpreted by various cultures, let alone individual preferences, does set up an almost impossible cross-cultural, cross-linguistic communication, as claimed by Kramsch above. As a cynic one can, of course, argue that this is indeed the case, given the present state of the world and its history as a never-ending battle ground, in words and deeds. Talking past each other even within a single language would be evidence for language per se not working at all. On the other hand, there cannot be any doubt that language as a uniquely human feature, however acquired, has set us apart from the animal kingdom, elevating us to a degree whereby we can understand nature, harness nature, and even rise above nature. If the latter is the case, we do indeed live up to the mythological analogy whereby ultimate knowledge is the preserve of the gods and as such humans cannot be permitted to attain it. Given the astounding progress in technological innovation, from space travel to sequencing our DNA, we should hold language as the sole source of such knowledge in high respect. That we shoot ourselves in the foot by potentially making the planet uninhabitable for us, we can also lament the power of language to sink so low. 

 

Let us now assume that linguistic relativism is the cause for all the negative aspects of a learnt language use, we can understand Chomsky’s effort to debunk Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour as a potential tool for the fascist enterprise that manipulates our behaviour to such a degree that we can become concentration camp operators. Not that language as a biological organ in the brain prevents us from genocidal stupidity but at least it reinforces the maxim that all people are born equal, and that racism, sexism and classism are learnt behaviours that can be unlearnt in the right environment that is in harmony with nature (even when nature is indifferent to human needs). As such we can only expand Marx’s call for ‘workers of the world to unite’ to people of the world to unite and use our languages for the common good. For while languages may initially divide us, it is a lucky coincidence that we can understand all languages of the world if we put our mind to it. The idea is not that we should all speak the same language (as dreamt up by advocates of Esperanto) but that we celebrate the diversity of language, based on criteria that are logical and understandable. For example, we can appreciate the Innuit languages for having an intricate vocabulary for snow and ice, and associated metaphors and figures of speech, which native speakers of Ecuador have no idea about. When two such speakers meet in their respective environments, they soon figure out what is what and why, and how to TRANSLATE from one language to the other. 

 

And so, I come to the main point of this essay: TRANSLATION between languages is possible because we share a common humanity and possibly a universal grammar in our heads that allows us to fully acquire and/or learn a second/foreign/heritage/etc. language. People who live in areas where different languages border each other have always been bilingual and ever since the world has become a global village (at least in the positive sense) all languages border each other, and we all should become polyglots. Unfortunately, there are people, and even linguists, who seem to discourage the acquisition of another language as an impossibility, giving credence to those who do try but find it too hard or claim to have no talent for languages. For the latter category of people, there is however an easy solution: read it in translation. There is nothing lost in translation, but everything is found in translation. Obviously, translation as a professional activity requires skills that can only be obtained by prolonged study and practice, including the absolute conviction that translation from one language to the other renders the original as good if not better in the translation. Of course, one can argue about the finer points and critique translators who do a bad job because the job is poorly paid or develop an aversion to the original text because they come to disagree with the content. 

 

In any case it occurred to me that after reading Brigitte Reimann’s Siblings (as reviewed in my blog https://wolfgangsperlich.blogspot.com/2023/09/ ) I should obtain the original German version and then compare it to the English translation. Being bilingual between German and English (the former being my native language) and being trained in both descriptive (mainly Oceanic) and generative linguistics, and being a lexicographer, I should be able to make a reasonably good fist of it even though I am not trained as a translator per se (but having worked as a p/t translator on occasions, mainly reviewing technical translations between German and English and vice versus). Also being of an age whereby I experienced the German divide into East and West (residing in the latter) and for a time in the 1970s living in West-Berlin, I have a personal viewpoint. Finally, as self-proclaimed socialist and connoisseur of socialist realism in world literature I am acutely aware of the importance of TRANSLATION to make literature a universal enterprise that can be enjoyed by all despite of not knowing the various languages of the originals. Indeed, contrary to the linguistic relativists, I am convinced that, for example, reading Dostoyevsky in English or German has taught me more about aspects of Russian culture than I would have learnt by studying Russian language. In other words, language does not determine culture and culture does not determine language. Of course, there are feedback loops, but they can always be disentangled from language in terms of diachronic research. Taking Russia as an example again, the various upheavals in her cultural and political history are no doubt mirrored to some degree in the vocabulary of the Russian language, but nobody can seriously claim that it has influenced or changed Russian syntax. Similarly, I read that OED has now included ‘Chinese dragon’ as an entry to differentiate between the Western concept of dragons as monsters and the Chinese concept of dragons as auspicious symbols. Such cultural vocabulary items are no doubt of value for cross-cultural understanding, but this has nothing to do with cross-linguistic understanding of say, English and Mandarin, as languages per se, especially at the level of syntax. Again, by reading Chinese Literature in English translation will inform me about aspects of Chinese culture more than studying Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu or Hakka (just to mention a few Chinese languages).

 

As such a mono-lingual English speaker will derive great cultural and political understanding about the two Germanies in the 1960s, especially from the point of view of East-Germany, when reading Reimann’s Siblings. It is my contention that not a single word was lost in the translation from German by Lucy Jones and if anything, a great deal was gained. To back up my claim, let us look at some examples from the two texts.

 

Memorable literary openings are legendary, from Dicken’s ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times …’ to Reimann’s ‘Als ich zur Tür ging, drehte sich alles in mir’. Such openings are memorable because of the succinct language used: simple syntax and simple words to express a clear and straightforward meaning. No doubt Lucy Jones was aware of this when she translated it as ‘As I walked to the door, everything in me was spinning’. 

 

Now, if you were into English-German/German-English comparative syntax, you would notice that Jones translated the past-tense ‘drehte’ as the past-continuous ‘was spinning’. Given that German does not have the continuous/progressive aspect, should Jones have used the literal translation of ‘span’ instead? Is this a case of linguistic relativism? Will the German learner of English never truly understand the English language because he/she cannot conceive of a continuous/progressive aspect? Will the English learner of German feel pity for native speakers of German because they lack a piece of syntactic equipment that is so obviously useful in English? Is English therefore superior to German? Or perhaps it is the other way around? Don’t English speakers understand that verbs in themselves express continuous versus non-continuous action? Are they so simple minded that they need a syntactic overlay that makes it clear that the verb ‘to spin’ is always a continuous action? We Germans are clever enough to do without it. So, in my mind it is easy to see how linguistic differences end up as bizarre cultural and cognitive differences that are said to be impossible to bridge, giving rise to the worst kind of propaganda used by insane political and religious fundamentalists all too well known in the present tense as in the past. 

 

The point that Jones, as a good translator, knows is that idiomatic language is perfectly transferable from one to the other language by using the appropriate syntax that may or may not differ between the two languages. When syntax does differ, as in the opening sentences above, there is no point in asking why that should be – is it a question of diachronic syntax? – and simply employ synchronic syntax that achieves idiomatic expression. Nothing is lost, everything is gained. 

 

The same argument applies to the next sentence (with glosses): 

 

Er sagte: “Das vergesse ich dir nicht.” 

 

He said:  “This forget    I   you not.”

 

He said, ‘I won’t forget this.’ (as translated by Jones)

 

If anything, this demonstrates how different German and English can be, putting paid to the myth that since German and English are closely related languages – English is said to be a Germanic language – it should be comparatively easy to learn each other’s languages. Sure, there are many similarities in syntax and lexicon but so are many differences. Comparing English to Mandarin, one can say the same, precisely because there is a universal grammar that has many possible surface realisations – hence differences in different languages – but the differences are neither ‘without limit nor unpredictable’ as claimed by linguistic relativists, i.e. differences are not logically impossible. The Mandarin equivalent of the English sentence above is much more similar in syntax to English than to German, and nobody in typology would argue that English and Mandarin are related:

 

            Zhè wǒ bù  huì wàng jì.

 

            This  I  will not  forget 

 

Perhaps Jones should have had a closer look at the German verb ‘vergessen’ which also has the connotation of ‘forgive’ and as such can take a dative object ‘dir’ as in the perhaps better English equivalent of ‘This (betrayal) I will not forgive you’. Note the semantics of the English ‘forget’ which implies and as such often is in the future tense as in Jones’ ‘I won’t forget this’, i.e. in this context it would not be idiomatic English to say it in the present tense ‘I don’t forget this’ while in German the present tense use is OK as it also implies the future. These intricacies of possible translations do however not distract from the basic message which as clear in the German version by Reimann, as it is in the English one by Jones. Incidentally, you may note that the Mandarin verb ‘wàng jì’ (to forget) also doesn’t take a dative object (like English) and would require a different verb like ‘yuán liàng’ (to forgive) as in:

 

            Zhè wǒ bù   huì yuán liàng nǐ

 

            This I   will not   forgive   you

 

This types of comparative analysis in terms of translation are not focussed so much on syntax but more on equivalent idiomatic expression            which may be based on quite different syntactic constructions. Translation does not mean ‘literal translation by glossing every word and syntactic function’ which is reserved for purely linguistic-syntactic comparisons. Nevertheless, a good translator will be aware of the syntactic implication and will choose an idiomatic translation that is as close as possible in terms of syntactic construction. 

 

One way a translator can clarify difficult or unusual words or expressions, is to append notes, an exercise also known as annotation. There is an ancient scholarship attached to this idea, namely hermeneutics which deals with the interpretation of texts, especially biblical, philosophical and legal. So, not only do we translate between languages we also have to interpret what we say and write in our native language. We all know that in the legal profession there are endless arguments about what such and such a law really means, how it is interpreted, how it is applied. Apparently dating back to Socrates, words have the power to reveal or conceal and can deliver messages in an ambiguous way, so we need arbiters to decide which is which. Does this extend to translators in the modern age? Is Reimann an apologist for Stalinist atrocities? Why does she betray her brother to stay in the DDR? Is the capitalist system of the West (as in West-Berlin in the 1960s) an obscene display of ill-gotten wealth? On which side is Lucy Jones, the translator? Perusing her not insubstantial online presence, not too many clues emerge. Most reviews of the Siblings are very complimentary with brief comments on a translation job well done. Only in one review in the LRB by one Michael Hofman is there a mention of her translation being ‘flawed’ without any explanation given followed by a quite bizarre exposition on Reimann’s life and work in the ‘totalitarian’ DDR. To Jones’ credit, she deflects various interviewers’ suspicions that a published writer in the DDR must have towed the party line and written in the genre of socialist realism prescribed by Soviet Russia. Readers being puzzled by Reimann’s apparent defence of socialism over capitalism are reminded that socialism (Marxism) is a universal idea, applicable to any place at any time. I doubt Jones is a Marxist by persuasion, more likely a sort of middle-of-the-road British Labourite, who can be unequivocal in her condemnation of the DDR’s Berlin border wall, as she writes in footnote 13, that ‘the alternative would have been to face a mass exodus’. Well, isn’t Reimann’s novel pointing to the other ‘alternative’ that there were sufficient numbers of real socialists in the DDR to keep the utopia afloat? As to her footnotes in general she says (having used them extensively in her translation of Reimann’s diaries):

 

I carried that approach over to the translation of the fiction, as I felt that the flow should be smooth, and I didn’t want readers to get lost in rabbit holes trying to figure things out, because it took me quite some time to understand certain contexts, and I did extra research with a separate document open. Then I thought, if I can give readers the benefit of my research in a small, succinct footnote, what could be better than that? I tried to keep them short, and I think there are only thirty in total, none of them longer than two lines. They were a last resort—only included if the translation couldn’t somehow reflect a reality that contemporary readers would understand. Footnotes are quite unusual, but they have had a bit of a revival even in fiction, with both advocates and detractors. However, I think it’s good to help readers understand something in a few words—which might otherwise take them out of the story if they had to look it up—and the good thing about endnotes is that readers can ignore them if they choose to, as they are separate from the text.

 

https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2023/04/19/great-material-for-a-novel-lucy-jones-on-translating-brigette-reimann/

 

As to technical details concerning translation in general or in the context of the Siblings, I have not found many clues either. There are some comments when asked how she dealt with Reimann’s humour:

 

I mean, I have to say what I’ve translated aloud, and try it out on other people. I might test a line or two on real-life people around a dinner table. When David Sedaris does a reading, he’ll draw a skull in the margin if nobody laughs, and then he’ll edit the joke out, because it didn’t work. Something could look great to you on the page, but then it’s dead in the water when you say it aloud.

 

https://www.exberliner.com/books/lucy-jones-brigitte-reimann-siblings-translation-ddr-interview-penguin/

 

There is also the mention that she wants to mirror Reimann’s immediacy of ‘voice’ which is supposed to be an outstanding feature of her writing. I am not sure what ‘voice’ exactly means, apart from the grammatical term that distinguishes between active and passive voice. I suppose it is true that both German and English versions convey a sense of the present, of being with and in the story, of sharing the ups and downs of the narrator, of being conflicted, of being a real human(ist), a real socialist. To that degree Jones must have absorbed many of the doctrines of her German teacher at the University of East-Anglia, WG Sebald, who as a noted academic, writer and translator transcended both English and German worlds of literature. Not that I know much about Sebald, except from the incredible coincidence of being sent – while writing this essay – a link to an essay about Sebald, written by an old high school (Gymnasium Hohenschwangau) friend of mine from whom I hadn’t heard in ages. Perhaps Jones could translate it into English:

 

Zum 21. Todestag. Il ritorno della memoria, oder: Die Reise zu W. G. Sebalds Grab, von Peter Winkler (2022)

 

            https://www.literaturportal-bayern.de/journal?task=lpbblog.default&id=2882

 

Life is full of surprises, as seems to be the case with Jones’ ‘education’ that led from one unlikely place to another:

 

https://transfiction.eu/lucy-jones/education/

 

So, what about the rest of the translation, word by word, having only touched on the first few sentences? Since some commentators mentioned the supposedly clever ending of the novel which returns to the beginning, closing the circle, as it were, let us look at the translation equivalent of these last lines:

 

Mein Bruder musterte mich stumm und mit einem Ausdruck von Neugier, und nach einer Weile sagte er, fragend und in einem Ton, der mich mit zitternder Hoffnung erfüllte: “Was seid ihr bloss fur Menschen?”

 

To provide some context for those who haven’t read the novel, Elizabeth’s brother has been persuaded not to leave the DDR for the BDR, so this is the conclusion. First, I present my version on how I would translate this final passage into English:

 

My brother eyed me silently with an expression of curiosity, and after a while he said, questioningly and in a tone which filled me with a trembling hope: “What kind of people are you anyway?”

 

Now for some fun let’s try Google Translate, since automated translation is all the vogue these days:

 

My brother looked at me silently and with an expression of curiosity, and after a while he said, questioningly and in a tone that filled me with trembling hope: “What kind of people are you?”

 

And here is the real thing by Lucy Jones:

 

My brother eyed him silently with an expression of pensive wonder. After a while, he said quizzically, in a tone of voice that filled me with trembling hope, ‘What kind of people are you anyway?’

            

Given the straightforward text in German, one can only expect differing nuances in translation which nevertheless reveal something of a certain style of translation. The Google effort is of course very bland but does a good job as a basic translation. Translation machines are getting better by the minute but as they are based on statistical matching, they lack all originality (I have written on this subject at various times in my blog). One of the questions of translation is if the translator should, if at all possible, improve on the text by leaving out or inserting words or phrases to arrive at an idiomatic expression: an example here would be the question why Reimann put an ‘und’ (and) in the first part of the sentence, seemingly being unnecessary, as both me and Jones left it out. Only Google dutifully left it in place. Next the question on how to translate the verb ‘musterte’ which in German is quite uncommon, with a miliary connotation, i.e. when called up for military service there is a close inspection of their health which cynics compare to buying a horse, checking its teeth. Both Jones and I chose ‘eyed’ while Google looked at its data base and found that ‘mustern’ is most often translated as ‘to look’ – majority use rules, which can be quite boring. “ … mit einem Ausdruck von Neugier’ I go with the boring and fairly literal Google translation of ‘… with an expression of curiosity’ while Jones throws in a much more stylistic ‘… with an expression of pensive wonder’. Well done, I say.  ‘… fragend …’ (from ‘Frage’ = question) is literally translated by me and Google as ‘questioningly’ and on reflection I find this awkward and much prefer Jones’ ‘quizzically’. We all agree on the ‘trembling hope’. For the final punchline both Jones and I hit the jackpot by adding the colloquial emphatic ‘anyway’ while Google fails miserably. 

 

I could go to town and annotate Jones’ text from beginning to end – and might have to do so if the text attains biblical proportions, or better still, becomes included in the Marxist literary canon of social realism, perhaps with the likes of Brecht and Gladkov (the latter mentioned by Reimann’s protagonist and as explained in detail in Jones’ footnote 1.). At this stage I can only say that Jones’ translation is an excellent piece of work, as good if not better than the original text, notwithstanding, of course, that Reiman wrote the novel and Jones merely translated it into English, making an important work of German literature accessible for English speakers. That something akin is already in progress for the German versions, might as such not be a surprise. Having discovered a partial, original handwritten manuscript of the Geschwister in 2022, the new version published in 2023 makes use of this material, amending the earlier published versions. In an extensive addendum to the novel, the editors explain how they re-inserted words, phrases and passages that had been cut from the earlier publications in the DDR. It’s not that there was whole-scale censorship at play that forced Reimann to cut out unpalatable sections – indeed the consensus seems to be that surprisingly (sic) there was not much censorship at all, apart from some minor improvements which Reimann herself had credited the editor with ‘Er verbessert und streicht auch nicht …’ (He improves and he doesn’t cut.). Reimann herself struggles with her manuscript and makes various stylistic changes (like cutting unnecessary adjectival phrases) but as the current editors (2023) discovered, there were some cuts that might have been ‘suggested’ by the literary authorities at the time, like some phrases that implied more people leaving the DDR than generally acknowledged, as well as some remarks about her loyal friend Joachim, including his admiration for Tito (the then Yugoslav president) who by then was persona non grata by the Soviet authorities on account of Tito’s independent politics. It seems questionable though that some of Reiman’s own cuts were re-inserted and changes were reversed, on the spurious grounds that if there was evidence of ‘politisch Misliebiges geglattet oder der frische Erzahlton Reimanns nach damaliger Mode ‘litererarisiert’ werden sollte (p.212)’ (smoothing out undesirable politics or making Reimann’s narrative tone more ‘literary’ according to the fashion of the time). How can the current editors be the arbiters of such self-imposed criteria? Apparently, the now famous author of The Master and Margarita had some protection from Stalin himself. Should we burn Bulgakov’s oeuvre because Stalin liked some of it? Should we do the same with Reimann’s novels because they passed the Soviet-style censorship of the DDR? To make such literary works more palatable for the contemporary (capitalist) market by cutting, improving, and changing the text in its original published form, may just be the beginning of it. I say, leave the text alone but if you wish to publish an annotated version in the tradition of hermeneutics, go ahead – it may be of interest to those who desire a particular interpretation that suits their own ‘knowledge of the world’ – or the lack of it.

 

 

REFERENCES

 

Hohepa, Patrick W. (1969). The Accusative-To-Ergative Drift in Polynesian Languages.

The Journal of the Polynesian Society Vol. 78, No. 3 pp. 295-329.

 

Sperlich, W. B. (2006) Noam Chomsky. Reaktion Books, London.

 

Other online sites about Jones and Reimann consulted:

 

https://monocle.com/radio/shows/the-monocle-weekly/the-monocle-weekly-61/

 

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n05/michael-hofmann/no-room-at-the-top

 

https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/books-and-authors/jenny-erpenbeck-talks-about-RjZ_m31xo6i/#google_vignette

 

https://wordswithoutborders.org/contributors/view/lucy-renner-jones/

 

Flanagan, Richard (2023). Question 7. Knopf.

 Flanagan, Richard (2023). Question 7. Knopf.

 

Connecting dots. It would be very unkind to compare it to drawing the outline of a picture by connecting the numbered dots, and yet, maybe it is just that, for in addition there is the colourful writing, in this grey Tasmanian way, telling us what life is all about: who will love longer? From Chekov to Kafka, from HG Wells to Rebecca West, from Szilard and the Martians, from Ferebee dropping the atomic bomb to Flanagan’s father in the Japanese POW camp, from Richard Flanagan the child to Richard Flanagan the epic survivor in the river, to Oxford scholar, to Japan, to genocidal Tasmanian history, to writer – connecting the dots that draws the outline of a mask that Richard Flanagan wears in public. That’s life. But what a life! Made for autofiction! A story worth telling, as perhaps opposed to those stories that have never been told – and will never be told – as in the people without a history (cf. Eric R. Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History). Of course, the latter insists that the common people who are not in the history books should be and must be as they are the silent forces that move history. As a Marxist one can only agree, but as a novelist one must avoid the tedium of an ordinary life lived. And so, it is sometimes a bit boring to read about his family life in the backcountry of Tasmania, brothers, sisters, uncles aunts, father and mother, grandmother, acquaintances that drop in and out. But boy oh boy, when the 21-year-old Richard Flanagan is rescued from near death in the Franklin River (described in too much agonising detail), a life not ordinary, as a novelist takes off. His penchant for historical context (having studied history no less at miserable Oxford), for the real movers and shakers of recorded history is fairly obvious, especially when pointing to the possibility of a novelist, HG Wells, having changed the world via a literal chain reaction of events. The last 100 years or so of a history of science ending in Frankensteinian, Dr Strangelove horror movies, including the latest of the greatest, Oppenheimer, just postdating Flanagan’s novel (the latter being rightly criticised for not addressing the horrors of Hiroshima). For Flanagan Hiroshima is a trigger word, for while his father was liberated by it, the global consequences stare us in the eyes, with a minute or so to go to a final midnight on the doomsday clock. Leo Szilard, as a key dot in his chain reaction discovery – and who was inspired by HG Wells in the first place who had conceived of the atomic bomb – only belatedly realised that the genie had escaped the bottle, lobbying Truman and Co not to use the bomb, but -alas – the generals calculated with deadly accuracy that not to use it would only prolong the war and cost many more lives than the lives lost in Hiroshima. Flanigan, while agreeing in principle that the bomb should never have been used, grapples with the calculation: his father would have died in the prison camp for sure, were it not for the bomb. Flanigan’s perhaps ill-conceived visit to post-war Japan to meet with former prison guards, resulting in the bizarre meeting with the aged guard that his father had named Lizard (a convicted war criminal released in 1956) whom he convinces to hit him in the face - as was the custom in the camp – was cut short by a 7.3 earthquake. There are moments when Flanigan caves in to the commonly expressed Allied idea that the Japs deserved what was coming to them – a bit like that the Germans deserved the carpet bombing because after all they had voted for Hitler. This in stark contrast to the genocide of the Tasmanian Aborigines, so starkly described by Flanagan, the contradiction of British slave convicts slaughtering the Aborigines, as if for sport, dog eats dog, human debasement that is plastered over by a British history of British settlers who committed some crimes but by and large brought civilisation and enlightenment to people in darkness. As a migrant from Germany living in New Zealand/Aotearoa – which is often compared to Tasmania – I am painfully aware that migration (forced and voluntary) as a colonial enterprise in the so-called New World is not just a historical fact that should be moved on from, but has repercussions that endure to this day and will endure forever. The descendants of indigenous peoples – not necessarily defined these days by bloodlines but by adopting such an identity – are only now waking up to the possibility that history must have consequences, that historical wrongs must be put right, that the descendants of the colonizers  - not necessarily defined these days by bloodlines but by adopting such an identity – must face up to their responsibilities and start singing that lyric by Midnight Oil ‘let’s give it back to them’. Flanagan does hint at the possibility that he can adopt an Aborigine identity, not only because he is on their side but also because he has absorbed an Aborigine mentality by living on their land which affects his soul, like the endless rain sprouting moss on his body, turning his feet into roots, so that he becomes a fixed part of the ancient landscape, or what is left of it. The ancient idea that you are the product of your land – to which you will return on your death – has however equally long been usurped by the idea of the migrant who uproots his existence from his/her land and moves to another land to put down new roots. Sadly, this is hardly ever done by invitation, but by conquest, or else it is done from desperation as refugees that are uprooted and driven from their homelands. There are no easy solutions to all of these conundrums, apart from Flanagan’s sigh, à la Chekov, at many chapter endings: ‘that’ life’ – perhaps the French version would have added a bit of sophistication. Flanagan the literary and science historian must have done considerable research weaving the two together, and together with his personal history he has achieved a notable outcome: a plea for humanism in the face of a fast deteriorating world of hate and war, asking us to face up to the dismal, recorded past in order to save ourselves and live in comparative peace and tranquillity, as the Tasmanian Aborigines had done for 40,000 years or so without ever writing a word about it. Quo vadis, Richard Flanagan? Or better still, from one who also went more native than the natives, as they say: D'où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?

A FICTIONAL REVIEW OF ZADIE SMITH’S THE FRAUD

 A FICTIONAL REVIEW OF ZADIE SMITH’S THE FRAUD

 

There might be some literal truth in the saying that sometimes fact is stranger than fiction. If, of course, someone tries to turn fiction into fact, then we are presumably faced with a fraud, or are we? This is the conundrum faced by the main protagonist, Mrs Touchet:

 

It was time for Mrs Touchet to decide what she really believed. To separate fact from fiction once and for all (p.386).

 

Smith’s historical novel asks the question multiple times, on multiple levels. What is history? Fact or fiction? The histories of Jamaica and England? The hapless butcher claiming a minor throne to the acclaim of the common man? The life of a novelist? Dickens revealed? The good Jamaican Andrew Bogle (same name real Jamaican hero has) who supports the claimant through thick and thin against all the evidence? Can we truly believe what is wrong to be right? Self-deception? History littered with men who are obviously on the wrong side of history but believed themselves to be absolutely right? Is it some sort of pathology? When Governor Edward John Eyre proclaimed martial law and had scores executed, including Paul Bogle, was Governor Edward John Eyre a very sick Englishman – as most upper-call Englishmen seem to be in one way or the other in Smith’s historical novel? Does the semi-fictional Mrs Touchet compose The Fraud in the way Madame Defarge knits in The Tale of Two Cities? What exactly does Zadie Smith think of Charles Dickens, one of the greatest of the great English novelists – like herself? 

 

As such her novel is an astounding treasure grove of literary, social and political history, unearthing facts and fiction from the archives poured over by expert scholars studying the Victorian era - and relaying it all to a grateful Smith. In terms of world history, no sensational finds come to light, and given that the Tichborne Trial was a major tabloid infotainment of no consequence, there is only the rich substrate, amusing and tragic at the same time. Like Wolf’s Europe and the people without history Smith brings to life the common man, or shall we say woman, who like Mrs Touchet as a relatively well-to-do housekeeper is a fierce feminist and abolitionist but does not appear in any history book. Then there is the Jamaican connection, true to Smith’s own, on the Hope sugar estate run down by the Lord of Buckingham, giving voice to Johanna the virtual slave woman, ranting and raving about injustice and retribution only to be convicted to run the treadmill. The lives of the unrecorded multitude versus the historical facts of the few who so cruelly oppressed the many. Andrew Bogle, born on the Hope Estate in Jamaica, transported to England as a servant, having migrated to Australia only to meet the Claimant with whom he returns to England – all the while with his roots in Jamaican soil, a story so enigmatic, one is lost for words lest one invokes Smith’s descriptions of him as a man who only ever lost his temper once, namely when his employer, Sir Edward, reads the news to Bogle about the 1840 conflagration in which ‘one hundred and ten negro houses … were consumed’ and that afterwards ‘much silver was found melted and calcined with the earth of the jars in which it was kept’, with Sir Edward’s rejoinder that he had suggested to Lord Buckingham many times to have the earth dug up to unearth the stolen silverware. Not that Bogle said anything, he merely crushed a glass tumbler in his hands, impotent with rage. Such imagination, such fiction – while mixed with recorded fact – has a powerful effect on the reader, who like me, lives in an age of world-wide conflict with atrocities committed every day, as seen on digital media on the other side of the earth, where comparatively nothing much happens apart from brown people protesting that the new right-wing government is hell-bent on revoking the historical rights gained in the Treaty of Waitangi. Jamaica like New Zealand has the King of England as their Head of State with large parts of the citizens wondering what the hell this is all about. Of course, we read about the UK everyday as well - in the Guardian to which Smith contributes on occasion – where yet another right-wing government causes havoc. I am not sure what Smith’s political leanings are other than to read on Wikipedia that she is a ‘sentimental humanist’ whatever that is supposed to mean. Given her rise in the literary and academic Western world – strangely enough not in Jamaica as far as I can make out – she no doubt has to make many compromises in order not to annoy the liberal establishment. Will she vote Labour? In The Fraud the most radical politics are voiced by the Irish – who else? – especially by one John de Morgan, a Marxist agitator of some repute who – according to Smith – quotes John Balls’ famous line of When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? – a line also used by Smith in her novel NW – and thus reducing Mrs Touchet to tears. Given Smith’s academic interest in Middle English literature, one wonders if the Ball quote also reduces Smith to tears. If so, being a ‘sentimental humanist’ as noted above, might become clearer, i.e. Christian liberation theology mixed with a bit of Marxism, a combination I have always considered somewhat odd, if I may say so. Since Jamaica is rich in indigenized Christianity, notably Rastafarianism, one can also see where Smith is coming from, literally and spiritually. Maybe this is Smith’s forte as a litterateur, à la Dickens, a social reformer who is conservative in his politics. A sort of Blairian Labourite who joins the left wing on special occasions.

 

More quibbles: imitating the episodic literature of the Dickens era makes room for many a clever title but also wastes a lot of paper what with every episode having to appear on a new page (and the ‘new’ episode is often just a continuation of the previous story line). Save the rainforests, I say!  Of more concern is the sex between Mrs Touchet and Mr Ainsworth, her cousin. While I’m all for sex, here it seems an odd interplay, somewhat out of place. The real Mrs Touchet did indeed have a child by her cousin, so they must have done it but why the descriptive details? When Ainsworth dies – the real Mrs Touchet died long before him – she takes his hand and reminisces that the last time she held his hand, ‘or held it down, so with her other hand she might enter him, and hear that gratifying, boyish gasp’. Well, sounds rather biblical to me, of begetting and so on. Times are a’changin: the Pope is reported to have said that sex is a gift of God, but good Catholic folk should avoid porn. So, what is this particular sexy piece of fiction supposed to achieve? Should have been best left to the Victorian age where such procreative activities were strictly conducted under the blanket in the dark of the night. Dickens too kept his sex life hidden from public, if not from his poor wife. Maybe Smith is into sex and death, à la petite mort? Probably not. Just a literary Ausrutscher, I would say in German (I say this in retaliation for Smith referring to Marx as ‘the notorious German’ (p.437)). Most concerning, I think, is the whole vehicle of the novel: why rehash a tabloid story from Victorian times to make a point? Sure, this affords a wide range of fictional and factual story lines, but so could have any other issue of the times, e.g. focus on abolition in the English and Jamaican contexts: Mrs Touchet and Ainsworth can be kept as protagonists. Paul Bogle as a man of historical import would have made a fascinating topic to explore. The Tichborne story does not frame the novel very well even when ‘fraud’ as a question of fact and fiction is explored. As a ‘historical novel’ it is precisely the key: what is history/herstory? The Tichborne Trial is a sideshow best left to the caricaturists of the time – as Smith briefly alludes to at one stage. Interestingly, Ainsworth shows no interest in the trial: he, the supreme novelist in his own estimation, has much more important things to do, i.e. write novels. 

 

Bringing Ainsworth back to life is one of the great achievements in this novel, in my estimation anyway. The intriguing question of how literature works: why was Ainsworth a well-received author in his time but is now totally forgotten? How, on the other hand, did Dickens achieve such heights to be included in the eternal canon? Is it random selection or is it survival of the fittest, a literary-social Darwinism? Ainsworth’s novels are trashed by all and sundry and yet he makes a reasonable living writing them. Has it always been like that? There must be millions of writers today who make no or only a marginal living by their scribblings, and then there are the Smiths who make quite a good living in addition to getting tenured jobs at universities. Who decides who is a good writer? Demand and supply? Supply and manufactured demand – as all goods manufactured under good old capitalism? In Dicken’s time even the illiterate paid a dime to have the latest episode of A Christmas Carol read to them – how did this happen? Are literary critics appointed by the establishment the sole arbiters? The Booker Prize judges? Do the readers lap it up having no ability for critical thinking? Smith presents Ainsworth’s first page of his Tower of London – to show how bad it is? To show his mastery of the English vocabulary? To belittle his tendency to construct snake sentences - full of insertions – as evidence of a cluttered mind that gets side-tracked at the drop of a penny? Ainsworth obviously loved obscure historical details lifted from even more obscure literary sources – doesn’t Smith do the same? Is Mrs Touchet who loved Ainsworth the alter ego of Smith? Will Zadie Smith be a Dickens or an Ainsworth in a hundred years’ time? I wish her good luck!

 

 

Hann Bay, Senegal: from coastal idyll to industrial dumping ground – in pictures

 Hann Bay, Senegal: from coastal idyll to industrial dumping ground – in pictures

 Amongst the general insanity gripping the globe, one of the more devastating picture essays recently published by the Guardian, is the one entitled above, with the further information below:

 

Dakar’s nine-mile-long Hann Bay used to be known as one of West Africa’s most beautiful, lined with traditional fishing villages, villas and tourist attractions. But for the last 20 years it has been at the centre of the city’s industrialisation, with 80% of the city’s industry nearby. Today it is one of Dakar’s most polluted areas, with canals spilling raw sewage and chemicals on to the beach and into the sea.

 

The degradation of the natural environment at its most visual extreme is hard to fathom from a distance, e.g. from Auckland, New Zealand/Aotearoa where the urban environment is by comparison pristine. I suppose a trip to the local landfill would be equally disturbing, seeing mountains of waste bulldozed into a designated valley, but to see this scenario transported to a beach promenade in Auckland would be unthinkable. It is not that I’ve not seen with my own eyes random rubbish dumps – often of considerable proportions – in otherwise relatively clean and green environments, like on various Pacific islands, or alongside nature walks in Malaysia or Oman. I am equally aware of the saying (about Germany) ‘you are so clean, but your gases can’t be seen’ that points to the much wider issue of industrial pollution that is managed to be largely ‘unseen’ in the suburban gardens, where lawns are kept tidy and roses bloom – ignoring the much more sinister implication of the saying. So, what about Dakar and Hann Bay, having never been there? Why do these pictures alarm me so? Is it the people in the pictures who simply traverse the unspeakable landscape or else scavenge for recyclables? The latter being the poor of the poorest, they have no choice. Do the people have a choice who own and run the nearby polluting factories? One would think so, except to say that they would argue that their profit margins would shrink to next to nothing if they had to install expensive anti-pollution measures, thus robbing Dakar and Senegal of its already precarious economic base. Who is to argue with such devastating logic? Combined with corruption in high places, the government no doubt turns a blind eye on what must be an unbearable environmental disaster. Who knows, maybe the stuff churned out by the factories there turns up in Auckland bargain bins? Are we all to blame? Is there a solution? As a Marxist group of activists in New Zealand, Shane Walsh et al., wrote a pamphlet (2018) entitled ‘Everything’s fucked but the point is to go beyond that’ we might agree and call for a global revolution of sorts, for anything less is pointless, e.g. the rubbish on the beach of Hann Bay is the result of a cheap battery in a hardware store in Auckland. Hauled to the people’s court of the global environment I plead not guilty and blame the people of Hann Bay: how can you do this, allow this to happen?  I tend my garden to keep New Zealand green, why can’t you guys do the same for Hann Bay? Sure, I have enough leisure time to read the Guardian on-line and after being shocked by this pictorial essay – and even write a blog about it – I can turn to the ‘gallery’ just below the last pic that shows a dead cow amongst the rubbish on the beach, and choose between pictorial content about ‘Putting pandas on a plane’, ‘Grubby and extreme – Mulletfest 2023’, ‘Snuggle up: 10 of the best cosy fashion pieces’, etc. Is this mishmash of content a sign of the times? The Dickensian best of the times and the worst of the times? As my intellectual despair will neither reach the rich nor the poor, all I can do is wondering why the saying ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ gained such currency, surrendering to insert the word ‘not’ when failing to see the utopia that is ‘the point beyond’.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2023/dec/04/hann-bay-senegal-from-coastal-idyll-to-industrial-dumping-ground-in-pictures

 

ALWAYS A TIME FOR WAR & TERROR

 ALWAYS A TIME FOR WAR & TERROR

 

“It is time for war”, says Netanyahu. “The greatest happiness is to vanquish your enemies”, Genghis Khan is supposed to have said. The Guardian reports with some glee that ‘Large-scale warfare occurred in Europe ‘1,000 years earlier than previously thought’. It would have been depressing to think that there was a distant time when there was no warfare. The Green Party Vice Chancellor of Germany, Robert Habeck says “Israel’s Sicherheit ist deutsche Staatsräson” (Israel’s security is German raison d'être). He argues that the Holocaust necessitates post-war Germans to do whatever is necessary to support Israel’s security, and her right to defend herself against Hamas, including a reoccupation of Gaza. And since Hamas is the elected government of Gaza, a war against Hamas is a war against Gaza, just like the Allies fought a war against the Nazis, meaning Germany. Bombing the hell out of Dresden – killing mostly civilians – obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki – killing mainly civilian – were, and still are, considered, if not justified but at least necessary to avoid prolonged bloodshed. As such contemporary Germans (and Japanese for that matter) always seem to be in a difficult position, having to justify the defeat of their evil ancestors. So, if Hamas gets defeated, will the people of Gaza have to justify their own suffering, their own defeat, since they were governed by a terrorist organisation that attacked and murdered Israeli civilians? Didn’t the Nazis enjoy a measure of popular support amongst the German population? Doesn’t Hamas enjoy popular support from the people of Gaza? Are the people thus to blame, and do they deserve everything that is coming to them? Worse, any German civilians that did not support the Nazis were either murdered by them or used as human shields. Same for Hamas? This constant analogy made by German and Israeli politicians in power is of course highly questionable but cannot be questioned. The historical contexts are clearly miles apart and as such not comparable in any way. All that seems to count is the present context: a terrorist attack that requires revenge: you killed 1,400 of us so we kill 14,000 of you – randomly selected, as the Germans did with the partisans. It sounds totally insane but there is method in the madness: if you manage to randomly kill civilians you demonstrate that the state (as the tsar in Russia) cannot guarantee the safety of his subjects, a revolution might be triggered. Hamas saw the Israeli mass demonstrations against Netanyahu and might have calculated that this is the right time for a ‘terrorist’ attack, triggering regime change in Israel. Obviously, it was a terrible miscalculation, at least in the short term. People who insist on the Nazi-Hamas analogy will ascribe the even more insane statement by Hitler and Co. that all Germans deserve to die because they failed miserably in the noble effort to ‘vanquish their enemies’. If there are any historical similarities between the 3^rd Reich and Israel, it is the tragic descent into genocidal racism: Nazis defining the Jewish race as sub-human, and in a repeat of the cycle of violence, Zionists defining Palestinians (and Arabs in general) as less than human. The Palestinian journalist Arwa Mahdawi asks in a Guardian headline “Is it too much to ask people to view Palestinians as humans? Apparently so.” The propensity of so-called humans to de-humanize a perceived enemy may be some sort of primitive defence mechanism lurking just below the thin veneer of civilisation, and if so, the meaning of life is reduced to the ‘survival of the fittest’, a never-ending fight to the death, defending against disease, pestilence, vermin, weeds, wolves, witches, and the knives aimed at our backs. Unfortunately, the history of mankind is littered with evidence to support such a sad notion. A sideline of this evidence is the undeniable fact that such de-humanization is often accompanied by religious fanaticism which elevates the stakes to the level of divine retribution, what with martyrdom as the ultimate cause célèbre. That we, as humans, have been doing this for at least 5,000 years – evidenced by mass graves and broken skulls – is testament to the saying that we learn nothing from history – only to repeat it again and again. Given the technological advances in the weaponry employed – not to speak of the technologies that rape the earth – one must be sympathetic to a deep depression amongst people who harbour a faint belief that a better world is still possible. A faint belief in the peaceful coexistence of humans, joyfully accommodating mother nature as far as she showers us with her bounties of food and shelter while keeping a scientific eye on everything that can go wrong, with the motto of prevention being better than the cure. But wait a minute, there is no time now for such clichés, my friend, for now is time for war – as always.

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/nov/02/large-scale-warfare-occurred-in-europe-1000-years-earlier-than-previously-thought

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBtAtsdco-8

 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/07/palestinians-human-rights-israel-gaza