Month: July 2021

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Seismographs of Struggle

It was not easy finding the exhibition Sismographie des luttes at the Centre Pompidou. There were no posters to announce its presence outside or in the main hall. When I visited one Saturday morning recently, I even wondered if I’d made a terrible mistake, and the show was already over. Asking one attendant I was directed to the fifth floor but the staff up there at the turnstiles looked at me blankly when I mentioned it. So I wandered through the permanent collection and out into a long corridor where, at the end there was a window looking out across Paris and to the left, with no signage at all, a single room held the exhibition.

It was all a far cry from the previous outings this exhibition has had around the world: in Beirut, Cali, Dakar, Rabat, New York. What the Pompidou effort suggests is a discomfort, embarrassment even, at dealing with the subject of colonialism head-on. This is not something that Beaubourg has been known for engaging with since it opened in 1977.

Taken alone the exhibition reflects only a fraction of the extraordinary project it draws from. This began in 2015 under the direction of Zahia Rahmani, a writer and historian based at the Institut national d’histoire d’art in Paris. For several years she has led a small team of researchers dotted around the world who have been working to track down a thousand journals dating from the 19th Century up to 1989. The oldest on the list dates back to 1817 – the Haitian literary and political journal L’Abeille haytienne – and the subjects they cover range from politics and race to culture of all kinds. Every region is represented. The connecting thread between them is their existence within and in some way in opposition to a system of colonialism or oppression.

‘People are not passive, that’s what interested me’, Rahmani said when we met recently, describing her motivation for seeking out these journals. ‘We should give history another path than that which consists in thinking that everything emanates from the declaration of human rights.’

There are so many striking journals in the collection, and to see them revived in this way is moving and inspiring. Some existed for only a few issues, such as Zimbabwe’s Black and White that dealt with racial politics in 1966-67, while others such as the literary journal Sur from Buenos Aires – which treated social problems and was briefly banned under Peron – operated from 1931 until 1992. Others remain in circulation today. The geographical and topical range is remarkable. Indigenous populations from Australia to North America have their place, so too do an impressive selection of feminist publications from the Middle East and Asia, such as the striking Seito founded in Japan in 1911 which tackled homosexuality, drugs and abortion. To go through the list is to have so many new doors opened: one wants to walk through them all. There is the Turkish Šehbāl for example, active from 1909 to 1914, that covered music, philosophy and women’s rights and contained many stunning photographs and illustrations, or the satirical Phong Hóa whose pages were full of sharp-witted cartoons, appearing weekly out of Hanoi from 1932 until it was banned by the French authorities three years later.

To better grasp the scope of the project, and delve further into it, one must turn to the two catalogues published by Nouvelles Editions Place, and above all the online portal SISMO, an invaluable resource that continues to expand as the team’s research goes on. Free to access, anyone can explore the entire list, which leads to full digitalised contents for some, and at the very least a dedicated page containing information on origin, lifespan, language and cover image – so often a gem of graphic design, such as the art nouveau illustrations of Althaqafat alisuria, a journal of Syrian culture from 1934, or the bold covers of Mozambique Revolution that ran from 1963 to 1975, throughout the war of independence from Portugal. 

But the exhibition allows us to see the journals as material objects, complete with yellowing pages and dog-ears that evoke the many hands they once passed through. In the Pompidou’s room a few glass cases display editions of selected journals, highlighting the myriad formats used, from the broadsheet The Black Panther that the party put out, to a review such as Proa set up by Borges in 1922 that mixed sizes, with one issue on display around A5, another just under A2. Seeing all this gives a real and palpable quality to the radical contents of these journals: aesthetic objects that were also instruments of struggle. As Rahmani put it, all those involved in these journals over two centuries

participated in an aesthetic that is not violent. Of course there is violence in the sense that people are fighting, but they are struggling to be able to preserve a culture, or even their language, the possibility of living together, and of not living under coercion. They find release through the journal because it is not a weapon, it is a negotiation . . . and that’s what the installation showed me, that over two centuries there is a temptation to still nevertheless seduce the one who oppresses you, by reminding him who you are.

The contents of the exhibition has varied according to the location, with each space tending to showcase journals that relate to the local context and hold events to encourage people to delve into the issues they raised. None of this at Beaubourg. The selection here is both minimal and flat – the journals are presented as artefacts rather than alive and still the source of relevant debate. Also missing is a table with computers allowing visitors to explore the journals beyond those displayed in the room, something that was a feature at the other locations.

The centrepiece of the exhibition at the Pompidou and elsewhere is a film installation, which is made up of two sets of three still images projected against two walls showing around 450 journals and 900 documents. This runs on a loop to a soundtrack composed by Jean-Jacques Palix, a mixture of instrumental music with archive extracts from speeches made in defence of causes related to the journals. We see covers, inside pages, photographs of founding editors or other key figures. There is also a seventh image projected between the two sets of three with short paragraphs of text telling us about a particular journal, or related quotes. The semi-darkness of the Pompidou setting is another underwhelming choice on the part of the museum. Other venues provided the film installation with the cinematic setting it demands. At the Beirut Art Centre for example, the exhibition was held in such a dark space that it encouraged visitors to sit and watch the film all the way through. And indeed it is worth taking the time to experience the powerful, cumulative effect of viewing these hundreds of examples of printed resistance over more than a century, from all across the world.

The thousand journals are in around 70 different languages, including Creole variations, Mohawk, Tibetan, Zulu, Uyghur and Laotian, to cite only a few. But 222 of the journals are in French, 217 in English, and 199 in Spanish. This forces the question of intended audience ­– employing the language of the ruling power meant that many groups had no chance of reading the articles defending their cause. And it is here that the double function of the journals is evident: their memorial function for history, and their active function, ‘aimed at trying to develop within the colonial system a sensitivity towards them’, as Rahmani put it. ‘What is incredible is how these intellectuals manage this transition, they speak the language of empire, they master it, but they address empire in a critical fashion. It is very courageous’. Courageous is, indeed, the overriding impression one has when looking and exploring all these publications, now given a second life.

Read on: Emilie Bickerton, ‘Planet Malaquais’, NLR 84.

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Back to the Present

In his 2011 essay ‘From Progress to Catastrophe’, Perry Anderson writes that ‘in one of the most astonishing transformations in literary history’, the historical novel ‘has become, at the upper ranges of fiction, more widespread than even at the height of its classical period during the early nineteenth century’. This, he observed, was somewhat paradoxical, for this renewed popularity coincided with postmodernism, the aesthetic regime, as Fredric Jameson put it, ‘of an age that has forgotten how to think historically’. Riding roughshod over the ‘classical form’, taxonomized by Georg Lukács in his canonical study of Walter Scott’s Waverly, postmodern- or meta-historical fiction had succeeded in reinvigorating a genre that, for thirty years after the Second World War, had contributed little more than a ‘few antique jewels on a huge mound of trash’. Linear historical necessity was jettisoned for ludic counterfactuals and chronological violations; romantic-nationalist aetiologies for imperial eschatologies; liberal faith that the clash of social forces would lead to progress with the suspicion that this was nothing more than a conspiracy of permanent catastrophe. Yet here was a case of a rising tide that lifted all boats: alongside these innovations in the genre, ‘more traditional forms have proliferated too’.

A decade later, the historical novel has cemented its status as a literary form. It is a matter of debate whether we have remembered how to think historically again, but owing to the contemporary political landscape, we have at least remembered that we ought to. That the genre, in both traditional and postmodern variants, continues to grow in popularity and respectability ­among Anglophone readers, writers, and awards-committees remains paradoxical, but perhaps no longer quite for the reason Anderson gives. Two defining features of today’s Anglophone literary culture are a moral imperative to enable historically marginalized voices to speak of, for, and by themselves, and an extreme scepticism about the ability of language to represent other minds, especially across the differences occasioned by marginalization. Whatever impact this moral-epistemic antinomy may have on narratives set in the present – where, perhaps not unrelatedly, memoir and autofiction increasingly hold sway – it is in principle fatal to the historical novel, a genre in which the possibility of representing ‘lived experience’ is by definition foreclosed. In her collection American Innovations (2014), the Canadian-American writer Rivka Galchen rewrote canonical short fictions as though they were narrated by women; the resulting pastiches provide a sharp commentary on the gendered assumptions baked in to putatively ‘universal’ works of literature written by men. But in her new novel Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch, Galchen attempts to transfer this approach to a real historical figure, only to get caught on the horns of this contemporary paradox.

Set largely in Leonberg, a small village in the Duchy of Württemberg, Everyone Knows tells the story of Katharina Kepler, mother of the mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, who, in 1615, was accused of poisoning the wife of a local glazer, Ursula Reinbold, and charged with sorcery. She was tried, arrested, had her property expropriated, and spent fourteen months in prison under the threat of torture before being acquitted in 1621. She died the following April, effectively ostracized from the community. Meanwhile, Johannes (defamiliarized as ‘Hans’ in the novel), who took an active role in his mother’s defence, completed his work on the laws of planetary motion, and three Catholic officials were thrown from the top window of Prague Castle, sparking what would become the Thirty Years War, by far the most destructive conflict, measured in terms of percentage of population loss, in European history.

We are reading about Katharina of course, rather than one of the tens of thousands of other women subject to witch trials in Early Modern Germany, because of her proximity to the world-historical figure of Johannes. In Galchen’s rendering, Katherina is a recognizable figure from small town life: a busybody and a know-it-all with a sharp tongue, a speciality in herbal remedies, and a worldview grounded in stolid, peasant wisdom. In another time and place, her combination of ordinary vices and virtues might have made her merely an endearing or irritating neighbour, but as an old woman in the Holy Roman Empire in the first quarter of the 17th century, it left her vulnerable to the kinds of opportunism, resentment, misunderstanding, and prejudice that led to the ordeal that marred her sunset years, and perhaps hastened her death. What makes her an ‘average hero’, in the sense Lukács extrapolated from Scott, is that by refusing to confess to the sorcery charge, she manages to retain her individual dignity in the face of enormous social pressure. What makes her a good candidate for a protagonist in our contemporary moment is that she is not just marginalized from history, but multiply marginalized: she is female, elderly, a widow, a peasant, and also – perhaps most importantly – illiterate.

Given this last fact, the most straightforward novelistic approach would be to employ third person point of view, which would allow Galchen the greatest purchase on her protagonist’s state of mind, as well as a stable chronological point beyond the action from which to telescope her story; in other words, to dispense with a realism of presentation for a realism of effects. This has been the procedure of a number of other recent historical fictions set in the period between the publication of the 95 Theses and the signing of the Peace of Westphalia – Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell Trilogy (2009-2020), Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll (2019), Éric Vuillard’s The War of the Poor (2020), as well as John Banville’s earlier Kepler (1981), which treats some of the same events. But as this narrative mode would give peasant Katharina a proto-bourgeois (one is tempted to say proto-novelistic) consciousness, and as it would preclude her from ‘speaking in her own voice’, Galchen chooses, in a somewhat postmodern vein, to foreground the ways in which our access to history is always already mediated, and in doing so paints herself into a narrative corner.

Dramatizing a detail from the historical record, Galchen stages the main part of the novel as Katharina’s first person ‘truest testimony’ to her neighbour, Simon Satler, a reclusive widower who is pressed into service as Katharina’s legal guardian and stenographer. The testimony’s plausibility as legal document is blunted by Katharina’s persistent impolitic comments, but worse than that, in order to convey information to the reader, she must tell Simon many things he already knows. (The text is littered with variations on the qualifying phrase ‘as I don’t need to tell you, Simon.’) Then, in order to account for his presence in the text, Galchen introduces a section from his point of view (‘I thought it would be clarifying if I, Simon, explained myself here’, he says, inaccurately), which further exacerbates the narrative’s ungainliness. When, in another awkward concession to the historical record, Simon bows out from participating in Katharina’s legal defence three-quarters of the way through the book, the narrative falls into the lap of her daughter Greta. Interspersed between these sections is a cache of other fictionalized documents, including duelling petitions from Johannes and the Reinbolds, the prosecutor’s summation, and dozens of transcripts of witness testimony from the villagers of Leonberg.

If Galchen’s intention was to centre Katherina, this cacophony of textual mediation produces the opposite effect. Once the trial concludes, Katharina’s rationale for telling her story disappears, and she more-or-less disappears with it. In an epilogue, which takes place ‘twelve or so years’ after the conclusion of the trial, Katharina’s acquittal – which should be the novel’s climax – is treated as an afterthought. ‘What a fool I am’, Simon writes, ‘to forget that a reader might not know the fate of Katharina’. Being a matter of historical record, Katharina’s fate is never in doubt, nor are we likely to take the charge of witchcraft seriously, which means our sympathies are never in doubt either. Whether our preferred explanation is that the witch craze was a remnant of pagan folk rituals interpreted through the lens of Christian demonology (Ginzburg), a displacement of the scapegoat mechanism from other victims – Jews, heretics – onto older women (Cohn), a femicide motivated by primitive accumulation during the transition from feudalism to capitalism (Federici), or something else entirely, it is likely that nearly all readers will hold the view that there are no such thing as witches, that anyone accused of witchcraft is ipso facto innocent, and that, as a corollary, anyone who accuses someone of witchcraft is motivated by some combination of superstition, misogyny, or malice.

This view is shared by some of the characters in the novel – by Simon, for example – but not, for what it’s worth, by Katharina herself. (For Katharina, witches are indeed real – the titular accusation is first uttered not about her, as one might expect, but by her – only she is not one of them.) In an interview, Galchen also expressed ambivalence about it. In the early stages of writing she thought, ‘The only way for this to be interesting is for [Katharina] to be a witch’. In the end, however, she opted for a more contemporary understanding of the figure, according to which, in the words of the interviewer, those who were accused of witchcraft ‘were often just successful or unpredictable women’. This metonymic substitution of personal qualities for supernatural abilities betrays a longing to preserve something of the witch’s power at a symbolic level while retaining our sympathies for her as a real victim of persecution. But as gruesome as they were, the witch trials were ordinary atrocities during a period that saw war, starvation, cannibalism, the plague, pogroms, mass rape, and the wholesale destruction of cities, most famously, of Magdeburg, where, over four days in 1631, some twenty thousand people were put to the sword. Just as being unsuccessful and predictable was no guarantee of safety, being successful and unpredictable was a liability that was not just limited to women, as the cases of Bruno, Galileo, and Johannes himself would illustrate. The witch trial is what creates the witch; much as we might desire otherwise, we cannot have the latter, even symbolically, without the former.

A further consequence of Galchen’s narrative strategy is that the trial produces not only the pretext, but also the conditions of possibility for Katharina to tell her story at all. With one exception, the speech of all the characters is mediated, directly or indirectly, by the juridical apparatus of the nascent European state system. That exception is Simon, whose narrative, having displaced Katharina’s, is mediated instead by the market. The epilogue takes place at the Frankfurt Book Fair, where Simon has come to hawk the ‘important manuscript’ we have been reading, or at least the bits of it he has access to. (In any event, this narrative device cannot account for even the existence of his sections, since Simon is ultimately unsuccessful in selling the manuscript, in part, because he has ‘not figured out how to describe it’ to potential publishers – a startling admission, coming so close to the end of Everyone Knows.) What the Frankfurt setting provides, however, is a direct, institutional connection from the early stages of capitalism to today’s literary marketplace. This, in turn, provides a glimpse of the moment at which enchanted ontology of the Middle Ages is swallowed whole by the commodity form, where it has been imprisoned ever since. Then as now, the battering ram of the new theological-economic order has been one commodity in particular: the printed book.

At the Fair, Simon runs into Johannes’ widow, Susanna, who has come to find a publisher for an unpublished manuscript from his Nachlaß. When Simon first sees her, she is standing between two stalls selling Luther’s pamphlets and Johannes von Tepl’s poem Death and the Ploughman. ‘So the stalls…sold books from a century ago’, he muses. ‘Why no interest in the awful and dramatic present?’ In the mind of one of the characters this thought is an anachronism, but the question of course is Galchen’s. Galchen has dusted Everyone Knows with allusions to our own ‘awful and dramatic present’ (largely to the pandemic) but these do not map neatly enough onto it to function as prefigurative allegory (the most obvious similarities – to #MeToo and to Donald Trump’s frequent references to investigations into his activities as a businessman, candidate and president as ‘witch hunts’ have the inverse moral valences). The part of the present that comes through instead is a comfortable nostalgia, a longing for what we have lost to progress, whose compensations are inevitably taken for granted and are thus – given the persistence in milder form of some of the real defects of the past (plagues, moral panics, gendered violence) – experienced as insufficient and disappointing.

The novel’s thematic contradictions are symptoms of this nostalgia, which emerges most powerfully in Simon’s final meeting with Susanna. The book she is selling is Somnium, an early work by Johannes which folds a treatise on lunar astronomy into a dream narrative. In the dream, a young astronomer, a student of Tycho Brahe, takes a voyage to the moon, with the help of his mother, a herbalist and healer with magical powers, that is, a witch. It is unclear when the details about Brahe and the mother-character were added to the original text, but in Everyone Knows, Susanna claims that they are ‘prophecy’ of the future rather than biographical details added after Johannes’ own work with Brahe and his involvement with Katharina’s trial. What is important here is the future orientation implied by the word ‘prophecy’, as well as the lunar voyage, which has led Somnium to be categorised as an early instance of science fiction. The presence of a real science fiction text in a contemporary historical novel should come as no surprise: Jameson has argued that historical fiction is really a species of science fiction, since the former is nothing more than the ‘time travel of historical tourism’. Of her rationale for writing Everyone Knows, Galchen has said: ‘I was desperate to escape…Even before the pandemic I was just like, I’ve got to get out of this moment. I’m leaving this year. I’m leaving the century. I’m leaving the US’. But as with spatial tourism, in temporal tourism, we always pack ourselves in our suitcase. Our contemporary science fictions are dominated by visions of apocalyptic catastrophe, whereas in choosing to time travel instead to early 17th century Germany, Galchen has allowed readers to escape to a world in which, despite all of its drawbacks, people could be said to hold out belief in and hope for the future. The catch, of course, is that what their future produces is us.

Read on: Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Witches and Shamans’, NLR I/200.

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Majidi in Context

Sun Children, the latest film of renowned Iranian director Majid Majidi, is easily his finest since Children of Heaven (1997). It is also his most radical work in years, taking aim at various aspects of contemporary Iranian society. It follows a group of underclass boys who enrol in school after Ali, the leader of the gang, is tipped off by a local crime boss that there is treasure buried beneath the school building. The children search for it while trying not to arouse the suspicions of the school authorities, yet the precarity of their home lives continually threatens to undermine their project. Drug rackets and addiction have torn their families apart. The parents are mostly absent; when they appear, it is to lambast the children for not working full-time. The school itself is the only institution in the area that caters to children from such backgrounds. Condemned to haggle for pennies from its small circle of donors, at one point the school is temporarily shut down for late rent payments. Like its students, it exists on society’s fringes.

The film’s depiction of Tehran’s poor however avoids didacticism. Instead, it provides an expansive portrait of the city that sheds light on its neglected corners. To find his protagonists, Majidi auditioned almost four thousand children from the city’s poor neighbourhoods – those selected give authentic, heart-rending performances. The narrative is fast-paced, aided by a stylistic trait of regular jump cuts, but the film widens its scope beyond the protagonists to broader political questions: society’s treatment of children, the effects of privatized education on the poor, the exclusion of migrants from the nation’s welfare system. One of Ali’s closest friends is an Afghan boy doubly oppressed by this configuration. Often employed as peddlers and hawkers, Afghan children receive low wages and face periodic police crackdowns in Iran. By attending school, the boy does not realize that he is committing an illegal act which may result in his family being deported.

This is one of several moments where Majidi contrasts the innocence of his child protagonists with the brutal world of politics, which is portrayed as corrupt and exploitative. When the school director signals his intention to run in the city council elections, his colleague tells him that he is bound to become ‘just like the rest of them’. The film is no less sparing in its depiction of the police: when a young girl is caught selling goods on the metro, they shave her head in an act of cruelty. But for Majidi this conflict between child and adult worlds runs both ways. In one of Sun Children’s most ecstatic scenes, the students climb the school gates to reclaim the building from the landlord who has locked them out. The children’s games, and the social ties which they engender, provide a bulwark against the practices of the adults around them.

Given Sun Children’s critical depiction of state authorities and rent-seekers, many western viewers will likely interpret it as a critique of the Iranian regime as such. Yet this is far from the director’s intention. Within Tehran’s predominantly secular and liberal film circles, Majidi is one of the few prominent figures with impeccable Islamic revolutionary credentials. He defends the Islamic Republic at every opportunity, describing the 1979 revolution as an attempt to realise spiritual ideals through political action. At the 2020 Venice Film Festival, he remarked that if the socio-economic situation in Iran compares unfavourably to that of other countries in the region, this was not because of the government, but rather the crippling sanctions imposed by the United States. Majidi is also one of the few directors who has made multiple high-profile visits to the Supreme Leader. It is believed that some of his productions have received financial and logistical support from the Revolutionary Guards.

How, then, should we locate his most recent film politically? It is not a straightforward question, for Majidi does not fit neatly into either reformist or conservative camps. In the 2009 presidential elections he voted for the reformist candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, yet he later cooperated closely with the conservative government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. His films stand apart from the social realism of reformist directors like Asghar Farhadi, Jafar Panahi or Mohammad Rasoulof, who are primarily interested in exploring gender roles and family dynamics among the middle classes. Yet they also diverge from conservative directors like Saeed Roustayi or Narges Abyar, who treat spiritual themes of sin and salvation through glorified depictions of the police, military and judiciary.

What most distinguishes Sun Children from both these traditions is its emphasis on issues of labour and working conditions. Child labour plays a pivotal role throughout the film, often in subtle and oblique ways. The protagonists make a living by recycling car parts and tires, while their friends sell cheap Chinese imports to commuters on public transport. Majidi foregrounds the arduous manual work of the treasure hunt, with Ali digging a long tunnel under the school over the course of several days. Work and play for the children often overlap, and although adults occasionally exploit this for their own benefit, they also allow the protagonists to forge bonds of solidarity which seem to bridge ethnic, national and gender differences.

Such themes align the film with the heterogenous ‘justice-seeking’ (edalatkhah) movement, which has become increasingly active in Iran in recent years. Like Majidi, this movement is religious and nostalgic. It campaigns for a return to the egalitarian values of 1979, demanding increased popular political participation and democratic accountability. Led by a cohort of young activists, many of them from poor backgrounds, the justice-seeking movement fills a void left by the defeat of earlier reformist tendencies. As Western sanctions have deepened inequality and intensified state repression, middle-class liberal activism has been beaten back. In its place, this more provincial, religious and working-class formation has emerged. Although the movement remains fragmented, localized and without strong national leadership, justice-seekers have won popularity in part thanks to their strong stance against economic sanctions and American imperialism.

Over the past decade, this coalition has developed through close interaction with Iran’s growing labour movement – itself an outcome of widespread discontent with economic liberalization and the sanctions regime. Students and even clerics have stood alongside a newly mobilized cadre of workers, occasionally joining them in demonstrations and sit-ins. Supportive activists frequently write for provincial and national news outlets, and, through their ties to local government institutions and police forces, are often able to negotiate the release of workers arrested during protests. In the disastrous final years of the Rouhani presidency, they often received the support of Ebrahim Raisi himself – at the time head of the judiciary and, with his eyes fixed on the elections, clearly intent on discrediting the government.

It is perhaps in this nexus between labour, religion and rights that Majidi’s latest work can be best understood. While justice-seeking activists typically marshal only limited support, and while their relation to the incoming Raisi government remains unclear, Sun Children has brought their concerns to the big screen. If Majidi has gained his respected status and political connections by defending the Islamic Republic against its foreign critics, he may now have become an important ally of those seeking to change it from within.

Zep Kalb & Masoumeh Hashemi, ‘Tehran’s Universal Studios’, NLR 121.