Author: Simon Hammond

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Catching a Fish

For many years the work of the American writer Elizabeth Hardwick remained partly occluded by public histories: that of the New York Review of Books, which she co-founded along with Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein in 1963, as well as her relationship with the poet Robert Lowell. A reassessment however has been underway, aided by the publication of her Collected Essays in 2017 – the Uncollected Essays are due later this year – and now Cathy Curtis’s biography A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick. In Anglophone literary circles, Hardwick is in the ascendence, and increasingly heralded as one of the last century’s finest stylists. This is with good reason: show the uninitiated a Hardwick essay, and within a few lines they will readily declare her to have written one of the finest sentences they have read (who else would describe Edward VIII as ‘that being of perfect, blowsy immanence’ or look at a South American journalist’s ‘careful, neat dress’ and see ‘the melancholy mending done at home by mothers and sisters’). The implication though is often that her work amounts to a style detached from the subjects she wrote about.

Hardwick’s brackish, adamantine prose however was a product of the labour required to puncture the liberal platitudes which she saw filling America’s literary pages with anesthetising frequency. ‘Sweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene’, Hardwick observed in her 1959 indictment ‘The Decline of Book Reviewing’, ‘a universal, if somewhat lobotomized, accommodation reigns’. She cut an enviable if understated figure, combining an aesthetic and moral integrity that earned the respect of her contemporaries Mary McCarthy, who became a friend, and Joan Didion, who offered praise none too lightly. But unlike McCarthy, whose tendency towards polemical stridency rarely escaped the liberal fictions she satirised, and Didion, whose conservative politics hampered her ability to discern anything other than moral anomie (at least until her fierce dislike of Reagan initiated a late political awakening), Hardwick never lost sight of the material violence of post-war America. ‘Failure is not funny’, she insisted in her signature 1963 essay on the journalist’s life, ‘Grub Street: New York’. ‘It is cockroaches on the service elevator, old men in carpet slippers waiting anxiously by the mail slots in the lobby, neighbourhood walks where the shops, graphs of consumption, show only a clutter of broken vases, strings of cracked beads, dirty feathers.’

Born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1916, Hardwick was in many ways an unlikely candidate to become a defining voice of New York letters. Southern origins – even more than the constraints of gender – provoked initial doubts about her ‘mental qualifications’, as she later quipped; later it only added to her mystique (Darryl Pinckney recalls ‘the captivating cadence of her speech’ in an encomium for the NYRB). Her family lived at the run-down North End of the city which, even before the depression, was populated by the uprooted and the rootless. Her father was often looking for work; her mother’s axiom was never to get into debt. In ‘Lexington, Kentucky’, published in 1969, Hardwick evokes the inevitable gravity of lost southern grandeur, a landscape of ‘old pipes, broken clothesline, Coke bottles and the debris of hope’. It was this early education in poverty and hopelessness that made her impatient with the world of east coast intellectuals – as much as she found a home among them – who, as she wrote in an acerbic 1959 essay about Boston, pursued history ‘with its long, leisurely, gentlemanly labours’. Instead, as she writes in her flawless third and final novel, Sleepless Nights (1979), she was interested in lives where ‘history assaults you’.

The granddaughter of an ardent confederate, Hardwick knew how the South was produced in the imagination, and how being on the right side of history was a fiction that one might cling to at great expense, especially as a journalist. The essayist is not absent in her writing, nor a character as in New Journalism – but rather historically implicated. Few among her intellectual milieu wrote on racial tensions with such clarity. Uniquely, she discerned in the 1965 Watts riots a grandeur and a historical trajectory: ‘riots were a way to enter history, to create a past, to give form by destruction’ she wrote in ‘After Watts’. Compare this to Didion’s account in ‘The White Album’ of visiting Huey Newton in jail: listening to Charles Garry’s question ‘Isn’t it true…Huey, that racism got its start for economic reasons?’ she hears the ‘weird interlocution’ and notes only the heat of the small room and the fluorescent light that burns her eyes.

Elizabeth, the protagonist of Sleepless Nights, gives a brief portrait of her mother, ‘who had lived in so many towns it was as if she did not know who she was’, and of her father: ‘He was political, and he got up early in the morning to listen on the radio to the fall of Madrid and the signing of the Munich pact’. A reviewer once accused Hardwick of failing to ‘make sufficient distinctions between the real and the literary’, but for Hardwick, they were on a continuum. Early in the novel, Elizabeth asks: ‘Can it be that I am the subject?’ From that tentative, probing position she arrives at a literary form that decouples novel and author. If the novel’s events come close to Hardwick’s own life, it bears little resemblance to the current vogue of autofiction. It does not so much narrate the self as use the self’s fictions to generate an impersonal history. Her father hovers in the wings, not quite making his entrance; Hardwick is interested, instead, in characters who rarely make their way into the pages of fiction: ‘store clerks and waitresses…old spinsters, solitary music teachers…those who have known the scales of disappointment.’  

Moving to New York in 1940 for graduate study at Columbia, Hardwick published her debut novel, The Ghostly Lover in 1945. It returned to the hushed, stagnant world of Lexington in the 1930s – one quite unlike that of Faulkner’s mythical southern landscapes – and so impressed Philip Rahv that he invited her to write for Partisan Review, the house journal at mid-century for many of the figures who became known as the New York Intellectuals. Hardwick’s first contributions were as a short story writer, with ‘The Mysteries of Eleusis’, an essayist with ‘Poor Little Rich Girls’, where she remarks on the fashion in contemporary fiction (if not in life) to punish ‘the pampered, fast living, rebellious girl’, and as a book reviewer of Richard Wright’s Black Boy, which opens with the enduring line: ‘To be a Negro in America is a full time job’. Hardwick wrote with authority and insight about literary history, contemporary culture and politics for Partisan Review, and subsequently for The New York Review of Books, founded in response to a sense of the diminishing quality of literary writing in America – it aimed to fulfil her clarion call for a literary culture that valued ‘the unusual, the difficult, the lengthy, the intransigent, and above all, the interesting’.

Hardwick has been often criticised for not taking a more outspoken position on the women’s movement (Vivian Gornick’s recent essay, in the New Republic, revising her earlier dismissal of Hardwick, is an interesting reckoning in this respect). Seduction and Betrayal (1974), a collection of essays on literary women who spent their lives as background figures to narcissistic men, was accused of lacking a feminist consciousness. It is framed not as a case for feminism, but rather an investigation into the power of male authorship and the way women have searched for freedom – through desire – and been betrayed in the process. If Hardwick was resistant to sloganeering, and more concerned with individual psychology than political organising, she nevertheless wrestled with the impetus that drove second-wave feminism, ‘the shakiness of marriage’ and the vulnerabilities that it opened up. What she offered was a lucidity of vision, delineating the intimate connections between gender and destiny as well as the wrenching contradictions of female experience. Thus, we find, in an essay on Renata Adler’s Speedboat (1976), ‘the girl, perhaps worried that her autonomy is out of line, like an overdrawn expense account, announces that she is going to bear a child’. See also, in her 1953 essay ‘The Subjection of Women’, for the power of compression: ‘childbearing and housekeeping may be repetitive and even intellectually stunning’. Hardwick was finely attuned to the ways in which ‘choice’, as enshrined by the feminist movement, was largely a delusion. She recognised that writing one’s life as a woman was a project undertaken against the grain, an act that would require a recalibration of the work of writing.

‘Biographers,’ Hardwick writes in a 1982 essay on Katherine Anne Porter, ‘the quick in pursuit of the dead, research, organize, fill in, contradict, and make in this way a sort of completed picture puzzle with all the scramble turned into a blue eye and the parts of the right leg fitted together’. The result is often a scarecrow portrait, a masquerade history that does not advertise itself as fiction. Cathy Curtis, a former Los Angeles Times correspondent, acknowledges Hardwick’s admonishments in A Splendid Intelligence. She nevertheless diligently proceeds to narrate the life of a woman who believed that memory was better mined in fiction and that history cannot be neatly compiled. As in her first biography of the painter Grace Hartigan, Curtis is interested in documenting the challenges of achieving artistic excellence as a woman, of the tricky, tiresome balance of creative freedom, economic stability and intimacy in what were, in the forties and fifties, still male dominated spheres. Her endeavour, a muted feminist one that she sets out in the opening, is to tell Hardwick’s life without reducing it to a companion piece to Lowell’s.

The biography is slim – half the size of those of Didion, McCarthy or Susan Sontag – and whilst it offers a satisfactory chronological account of Hardwick’s life and work, it is liable to prompt quiet indignation among the initiated, and not only for its choice of title (at which Hardwick would have flinched). Reading it, one finds plenty of finely researched information and nice turns of phrase. But it is ‘sweet to be pierced by daggers at the end of paragraphs’, as Hardwick writes in Sleepless Nights. One yearns for writing with the intellectual daring of its subject. Curtis’s principal sources are Hardwick’s own letters and work, and there are few revelations for those familiar with them (Hardwick’s daughter Harriet refused to speak to Curtis, fittingly perhaps, since Hardwick did not think highly of oral history). The readings of the work are consistent if often cursory. More might have been made of the intellectual culture Hardwick participated in through Partisan Review and the New York Review of Books were Lowell to be displaced more fully from the centre of Hardwick’s life. The book’s limitations are exemplified by its over-familiarising use of ‘Elizabeth’: a biographical convention that Hardwick would have treated with scepticism, suggesting intimacy with a subject that refused such ease of address. This style lends itself too readily to the neatness that Hardwick opposed; it falls straight down the shaft of memory into the realm of those easily recoverable narratives favoured by book publishing and liberal feminism.

In ‘Grub Street: New York’ Hardwick rebukes members of the literati who congratulate themselves on reading a James Baldwin essay in the New Yorker, appreciating its style but quickly forgetting its incendiary content; a denunciation that is interspersed with a lyrical description of Socialist Labor Party leaflets strewn on the entrance to a subway station: ‘The pages are not thrown away in resentment or disagreement, but cast down as if they were bits of Kleenex: clean white paper with nothing at all written on it, falling into the gutter.’ Style is seductive, as most difficult things are; it can also be a smokescreen (one has only to think of the relation between the idealisation of Didion’s early sentences – the bread and butter of any liberal feminist education – and her conservative politics). Today we might note the rise of a shiny, acerbic style of criticism, largely written by those with an Ivy League education. This criticism shows every sign of its authors having read Hardwick, along with Didion and Sontag, but employs a learned mordancy as if words were something you could simply bite and chew. Deconstruction is a natural way to parade knowledge acquired in prestigious places (and to refuse the accessible voice that the literary marketplace demands of women).

‘Nothing is easier to acquire,’ Hardwick observed, ‘than the prevailing taste’. She saw that a thought had to be constantly wrenched away from platitude, and that the essay proved the best genre to slip out of the net of expectation for women in the second half of the twentieth century. ‘We would not want to think of the essay as the country of old men’, she wrote in 1986, ‘but it is doubtful that the slithery form, wearisomely vague and as chancy as trying to catch a fish in the open hand can be taught’. Hardwick was no collaborator; individuality, she saw, came at a cost. Even the New York Review of Books was principally a venue for publication rather than a workplace (at least from what one gleans from the pages of Curtis’s biography). Hardwick was the finest editor it seems, of her own sentences, but she nonetheless believed in writing for a public that expanded far beyond a coterie of intellectuals; an intellectual culture worthy of its name was at stake in every sentence she wrote. It goes without saying that she would have looked on the current state of education and literary culture with an excoriating disregard, but her work might well be one of the best defences of literature, as the discipline sits precariously, at the centre of the humanities, ready to be dispatched to the side lines.

Read on: Erika Balsom ‘Camera Lucida’, NLR 129.

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Kaboré’s Defeat

Slowly but surely the headlines are building a new conventional wisdom: coups are back in Africa. Al Jazeera labelled 2021 ‘the year military coups returned to the stage in Africa’; following the Sudan putsch, the BBC asked a rhetorical question about whether ‘military takeovers’ were on the rise ‘in Africa’. CNN evidently responded yes to that question, since its own query was about why coups were ‘making a comeback in Africa’. This is just a sample from the larger outlets, and the buzzword buzzes farther afield across the international media-sphere, think tanks and academia.

Obviously, ‘Africa’ here is a generalization. In the 54 countries of the continent, there have transpired of late five or six events that fit the description of a military coup, two of them in the same country (Mali) and one closer to a constitutional than a military coup (Chad). More significantly, all but one of these events took place in the same region, West Africa – and even more specifically, Francophone West Africa. The exception is Sudan, and the West African cases are Mali, Guinea and Burkina Faso. One final detail: in all three cases, one can hardly speak of a ‘comeback’. Within the last fifteen years – a time-horizon perhaps too vast for the media – there were coups in Guinea (2008), Mali (2012) and Burkina Faso (2015). Niger, which has not featured in the most recent spate, had a military coup in that period (2010) and escaped a slipshod attempt just last year.

And this is not counting a type of coup that generally goes unnoticed in the media – the constitutional coup, again a speciality of Francophone West Africa, which witnessed a string of them beginning with one in Niger in 2009. (Chad, mentioned above, is a less clear-cut illustration of the phenomenon). These take the form of brutal modifications or – as in the Nigerien case of 2009 – scrapping of the constitution so that the reigning president could seek a new term despite a legal bar. With the exception of Cote d’Ivoire, these constitutional coups ended badly everywhere they were attempted, twice by way of a military coup (Niger 2010, Guinea 2021), and twice through popular resistance (Senegal 2012) and insurrection (Burkina 2014).

The most recent of these ‘coups in Africa’, the one in Burkina Faso, should therefore be understood against this background. Most of these Francophone West African coups played out in the struggle between politicians determined to stay in power come what may, and citizens aspiring to be true citizens, i.e., people governed by law, free elections and political participation – two diametrically opposed ambitions. But not all of them fit this description: the Malian and Burkinabe coups tell a different story. In other words, the category ‘military coup’ is not a very helpful one, since different military coups carry very different meanings. Of the three last coups in Francophone West Africa, the one in Guinea is part of the democratic struggle story, since it was a response to the constitutional coup previously made by now-ousted president Alpha Condé. But the ones in Mali and Burkina Faso are both ‘defeat’ coups, meaning that they are responses to failure in war. Even then, each occurred in a highly specific national context, and their consequences will not be the same.

The stage, for both countries, is one of an intense security crisis triggered by an asymmetric war of attrition conducted by Jihadists, loosely affiliated to the Islamic State and Al-Qaida, against the states of the central Sahel (Burkina, Mali, and Niger) – since 2012 for Mali and Niger, and after 2015 for Burkina. Mali was defeated by the Jihadists from the start and was saved only by France’s Operation Serval (early 2013). But since then, the Jihadists have developed a war of attrition strategy that has had a devastating impact on all three countries, effectively removing the state from large swathes of territory, including the districts surrounding the capital in Niger, the entire north and centre of Mali – roughly half the country’s surface, though sparsely populated – and over a third of the territory in Burkina Faso.

‘Removing the state’ here concretely means that these regions are war zones in which normal life has become impossible, populations are mass-killed or subjected to levies by Jihadists and other armed groups, and national defence and security forces are severely degraded. Given that this process has not only lasted year after year, but actually expanded slowly and relentlessly, there is no other word for it than defeat, if one of a creeping rather than a single-blow sort. And defeated regimes are always on shaky ground – a vivid lesson of history the world over. Losing patience, populations in the Sahel turned against their regimes in Mali and Burkina, though not in Niger, where anger boils in the most affected region (the west) but not elsewhere. They also turned against the French, who have been involved in the fighting since the days of Serval – later Operation Barkhane – but equally ineffective, succeeding only in stoking the skin-deep resentments which many Francophone Africans nurture against the former colonial master. In December last year, a Barkhane logistic convoy from Cote d’Ivoire to northern Mali was attacked by enraged citizens when it crossed Burkina Faso and western Niger.

Faced with the failures of elected governments, populations openly or secretly wish for a military takeover, especially since they ascribe the failures to the kind of corrupt shenanigans by which often dubiously elected leaders run public affairs. Acutely aware of this, rulers become suspicious of the military, which does not help in times of war. This is the congeries of issues out of which – unsurprisingly – sprang the Burkina coup.

Of the three Sahel countries, Burkina Faso was the one with the more promising politics. More than Malians and Nigeriens, Burkinabes have national and patriotic feeling. In Mali, northerners literally live in a different country from southerners; Niger is divided between easterners, still carping long after the fact about how westerners hogged political power for the first three decades of independence, and westerners who now feel they are a maligned minority. Such riving internal geopolitics, though they exist in Burkina too, are bridged there by the intense sense of common destiny that brought about such unique events as the unseating of President Maurice Yaméogo by the people in 1966, the revolution of 1983, and the unseating of President Blaise Compaoré in 2014. In 2015, the people defeated a coup intended to restore Compaoré. It was out of the citizens-led processes of 2014-2015 that came the constitutional regime overthrown on 24 January.

The coup is popular. Unlike his colleagues in other Francophone countries of the region, ousted president Roch Kaboré was elected and re-elected in comparatively free and fair polls. Though his government inevitably had critics and naysayers, Burkinabe politics since 2015 were the most liberal in Francophone West Africa in terms of citizens’ freedoms and respect for opposition. But the security crisis became its albatross. Kaboré made it his ‘absolute priority’ and donned the mantle of defence minister, in addition to the presidency, but no discernible strategy or set of reforms accompanied the posture. By 2022, upward of 1.5 million Burkinabes were displaced from the east and north of the region – playground of Al-Qaida-affiliated Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM, ‘Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims’) – and over 2,000 people died in countless attacks. The military suffered many setbacks, the latest of which, in the locality of Inata at the Mali-Burkina border, triggered rage across the country, after details revealed that beleaguered gendarmes had holed up there without food supplies and logistical support. They were forced to hunt in dangerous terrain to feed themselves, despite the huge funds the government claimed it had allocated to defence. To the shock of the nation, 53 gendarmes were killed in the attack and the army base was totally destroyed by Jihadists who took the time to film their exploits.

Burkina’s defence sector was clearly in need of urgent reform, but none was forthcoming. Early in 2021, frustrated French president Emmanuel Macron went so far as to tell journalists – on the record – that President Kaboré was refusing to reform his army for fear of a coup. Many in the Burkinabe military also believed as much. When the coup began to unfold, the coup-makers circulated a six-point list of reforms that they deemed indispensable for war against the Jihadists. It has since transpired that these demands, which led some to believe that the ‘mutiny’ (as it was first presented) was just ‘khaki unionism,’ a manoeuvre the coup-makers employed to dupe the government until they could act at night. Still, they were significant especially in that they asked for the resignation of some of the top-brass close to Kaboré; they had been voiced by junior officers for months, but were ignored in a context where the military was deeply divided along generational lines.

But the popularity of the coup is also based on worrying myths. Many in Burkina believe that former despot Blaise Compaoré would have better dealt with the Jihadist crisis. There is an ill-founded conviction – once shared by Kaboré himself – that the Compaoré regime had connections with Jihadist groups that protected Burkina from attacks. The fact that the first terrorist attack in Burkina – a ‘classic’ city-centre bombing that hit Ouagadougou in January 2016 – occurred after the failure of the pro-Compaoré coup of 2015 gave rise to notions that ‘the terrorists’ thought Burkina was free game now that their ‘ally’ was definitively out. In fact, Jihadists had voiced threats against Burkina as early as 2013, due to its alliance with the French, a firm policy choice of the Compaoré regime (when he was toppled the following year, he was airlifted out of the country by French special forces). Mindful of the intense anti-French feeling that courses through Burkinabe public opinion, Kaboré accepted French help but made a show of limiting it to a minimum. Nonetheless, he had accepted it, and that was a contemptible sin for the most vocal sections of Burkinabe public opinion. France has proved incapable of vanquishing the Jihadists despite having the resources of a great Western army. That impotence looks suspicious and has bred theories, bolstered by past French mischief (real or imagined), that the former coloniser may actually be using the militants to destabilize the Sahel and take control of the untold riches in the region’s grounds.

Such sentiments and the pressures they create in the political field have already pushed Mali into the arms of Russia, which Malians – at least those in the south – see as the right kind of foil for the country that they consider their only true enemy, France. Russian flags are waved at the mass demonstrations that the junta in Bamako organises to ramp up support at each challenging turn – recently, the punishing sanctions imposed by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Russian flags were also waved in the popular rejoicing that erupted in Ouagadougou after the coup was completed – but nothing suggests they were issued by the new powers that be. Burkinabe public opinion has long been taking its cue from Mali. Two days before the coup, a demonstration in support of ‘the Malian people’ had been forbidden by the Kaboré government, and the Russian flags were probably ready by then. Some suspect they are supplied by Russian stooges. The instability of Francophone Africa, and the anti-French paranoia in many of these countries, is a geopolitical boon that Russia is happy to exploit in the context of the emerging Cold War 2.0 with the West.  

Although an agent of the Russian mercenary outfit Wagner – funded by ‘Putin’s chef’ Yevgeni Prigojin – has already tweeted that they were ready to respond to a call from Ouagadougou and help where France had been ‘totally unsuccessful,’ it is not clear that Burkina will go the way of Mali (and of the Central African Republic, now all but a ‘Wagner state’). As a polity, Burkina has been much less damaged by the Sahel crisis than Mali. Kaboré was not a target of the heated passions – exploited to the hilt by populist politicians such as Choguel Maïga (rewarded with the post of prime minister) or religious demagogues like Mahmoud Dicko – that brought down Mali’s Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta in August 2020. Anger was at his incompetence, not his rottenness, and Burkina’s presidential democracy allowed no removal of the head of the executive branch by way of a vote of no-confidence. The junta in Ouagadougou claims for now the role of Cincinnatus, not – like the Mali junta – that of Caesar: that is, they want to be saviours in times of war, not opportunist dictators. Their leading man, 41-year-old Lt.-Colonel Paul-Henri Damiba, is the author of a monograph on the ‘uncertain responses’ (his incertaines is perhaps better translated as ‘unclear’) of West African armies confronted by terrorism, that reads in turn like a student thesis and a deeply – if coolly – frustrated analysis of the passive and obsolete roles to which the Sahel armies are consigned by their governments. He also deplores the lack of ‘national defence strategies’. I have heard the same lament, in precisely these words, amongst army officers in Niger, who – mindful of the suspicions of their rulers – meander only briefly, and in a low tone of voice, into the topic. (I never dare to press them).

The first political move of the Ouagadougou junta has been to discuss with the Kaboré government the terms on which cooperation may arise – in sharp contrast with the witch-hunt and acrimony that followed the Mali coups. The political class and civil society organisations fully expect to participate in the political process triggered by the coup. And in his first public speech, Damiba has insisted that Burkina ‘now more than ever needs the support of its partners’, pledging a rapid return to constitutional governance. If ECOWAS is wise, they will take advantage of this auspicious disposition and make of Burkina Faso a counter-example to Mali on how to end a ‘defeat coup.’ But clearly the more important development for the country itself – and the region – is whether this action will finally make the fight against the Jihadists effective.

Read on: Rahmane Idrissa, ‘Mapping the Sahel’, NLR 132.

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Enter: Monsters

In an introduction to Frankenstein, written for a new edition of the work in 1831, Mary Shelley recounted a question she had been asked frequently in the thirteen years since the novel’s publication: how had she, ‘then a young girl, come to think and to dilate upon so very hideous an idea?’ A prying concern permeates the query, as if the monstrosity of the work’s content must indicate perverse conditions of production, some titillating mistreatment inflicted on the nineteen-year-old Shelley that could justify the creation of a new category of monster. For Julia Ducournau, director of the Palme D’Or-winning Titane (2021), the fallacy of the question would be obvious. No backstory is necessary: to be a young girl is monstrous inspiration enough.

Ducournau’s triumph at Cannes last year surprised Anglophone soothsayers of French film awards; her use of the cinematic grammar of body horror seemed to demarcate her as a director in the derided tradition of cinéma de genre, and, with only one other feature under her belt, more established auteurs such as Ryu Hamaguchi and Asghar Farhadi were touted as likely victors. Effusive critical responses to her first full-length film, Grave (Raw, 2016) were eclipsed by breathless tales of viewers collapsing at an early screening; news reports, untroubled by the distinction between correlation and causation, explained the syncopal episodes as a result of watching ‘the scariest, most disgusting film ever made.’ When confronted with this characterisation of her work, Ducournau replied, incredulously: ‘Seriously? Have you ever seen Cannibal Holocaust?’

Born in Paris in 1983, to a dermatologist father and gynaecologist mother, Ducournau graduated from both the prestigious Lycée Henri IV and the Sorbonne, before studying filmmaking at La Fémis. Biographical instruments often make crude tools for criticism, yet Ducournau’s family trades shed light on her thematic passions. Her female protagonists experience abdominal discomfort as an early sign of uncanny afflictions. As a result, they are examined by doctors (who are sometimes also their fathers) who heavily imply that menstruation, or its absence, is the cause. The insufficiency of this diagnosis is immediately evident to the viewer, who understands that something far more troubling is at work. Ducournau repeatedly highlights the dismissive reaction to extremity by figures of authority – the parent, the teacher, the doctor – who then rely on ambiguous categorizations to explain events beyond their comprehension. A similar attitude has typified the reception of her films which, like her characters, exist in an experiential gulf between definition and event yet are quickly filed under a single polymorphous label. Inexplicable abdominal pain that develops into infernal itching and the gestation of a hybrid car-baby? Call it hormones. An insatiable desire for human flesh, activated by the consumption of pickled gizzards and that seems to run matrilineally through a vegetarian family? Call it a feminist vampire flick.

That Ducournau offers her viewers tableaux of visceral, churning, bone-crunching pain is undeniable. But her work cannot be reduced to such sequences. Across her oeuvre so far there is an abiding concern with the process of physical transformation, particularly as undergone by girls on the cusp of pubescence, and young women propelled suddenly into maternity. In the short film Junior (2011), the eponymous protagonist (played by Garance Marillier) is a tomboy adolescent, revelling in her own androgynous presentation, unconcerned by hair grease, zits, or the merciless rivalry of schoolgirl cliques. A supposed bout of gastric flu, welcomed by her family doctor for its ability to ‘clear her out’, is quickly revealed to be a misdiagnosis as she begins to shed her entire epidermis, picking at sheets and flakes of skin, poking her fingers under the peeling ridge of her own spine (the French idiom être bien dans sa peau, to feel comfortable in one’s own skin, inverted and literalised as metaphor for the grisly metamorphoses of puberty). Fully exfoliated, she recovers and returns to school, glossy and bright, only to find herself the subject of her male friends’ sexual attention. The film ends with Ducournau’s refusal of the received idea in horror that the expression of female sexuality is coeval with initiation into victimhood: Junior (who continues to refuse her birth name Justine) kicks her new tormenters in the groin and skips home to begin a new flirtatious relationship with her best friend.

Mange (Eat), a telefilm co-directed with Virgile Branly in 2012, continues Junior’s preoccupation with the cruelty enacted within the transitional, unsupervised spaces of school: the canteen, the corridor, the yard. Laura, an overweight teenager, is made the subject of an obscene classroom chant by her peers, her name daubed on the walls, her telephone number distributed on flyers advertising parts of her as ‘for sale’. Fifteen years later, Laura has developed and recovered from bulimia, lost weight, grown up, and become a successful lawyer with a handsome police officer for a boyfriend. The arrival of the architect of her high school misery, now a highly-strung stay-at-home mother, at her support group provokes a demonic apparition of Laura’s teenage self to appear, encouraging her to seek revenge. This Laura duly does, setting out to ruin her nemesis’s life with cocaine, binge eating and extra-marital affairs. Laura, of course, falls into her own traps, losing her job, relationship and role as cool stepmother (to a daughter played by Marillier) along the way. No anagnorisis follows the successful completion of her mission, however, and the ruined Laura ends the film smirking to herself in an insalubrious hotel room in the company of her own shrieking eidolon, the viewer left uncertain whether their shared lust for vengeance has been satisfied or merely awakened.

Grave, Ducournau’s first feature film, shares certain thematic concerns – the inevitable passage through trauma into adulthood, the twinned grotesque and hedonistic pleasures of hunger and sexuality – with her earlier works, yet is a substantial development in cinematographic style. Marillier is cast once again as a character named Justine, this time a first-year veterinarian at a desolate northern French campus university, attended in the past by her parents and, in the year above, her elder sister. All the members of the family are vets, all are also vegetarians, or so Justine thinks until her sister forces her to swallow a preserved rabbit kidney as part of a vicious week of hazing for the new students (the title of the film recalls the everyday phrase ‘c’est pas grave’, or ‘no big deal’ – the attitude of Justine’s sister who swallows the specimen with a shrug). The taste of flesh prompts Justine to develop an insatiable hunger for meat and, after accidentally amputating her sister’s thumb in a waxing accident, she succumbs to her new cannibal appetite and gnaws on the digit. Marillier’s transformation from petulant girlhood to vampiric huntress in a lab coat is achieved via a series of mood swings in her character – confidence and shame, desire and repugnance, intimacy and betrayal – the unsettled motion between them encapsulating the dizzying experience of the first flushes of adult agency, the result of asking and then confronting the answer to the terrible question, ‘what do I want?’

Grave heralded not only Ducournau’s arrival as a significant new director, but also the reconciliation of the categories of genre and auteur filmmaking held, by some, as oppositional tendencies within French cinema. In collaboration with her director of photography, Ruben Impens, Ducournau has developed a cinematic language in which bodily mutation translates into visual elegance. Multiple sources of artificial light direct attention to the prickled and bitten surface of skin, wide-angle shots of the desolate dawn greys of the northern French countryside render the aftermath of a deadly collision picturesque, a single shallow-focus shot immerses the viewer in the bodily abandon of dancing – such elements of Grave comprise the vocabulary of Ducournau’s style, and the fundamentals of her second feature.

Where Grave is a declaration of the potential for emancipation through monstrosity, Titane is a film about the humanisation of a monster. It is also a film about a young woman’s sexual attraction to cars, and the terrible consequences of consummating that desire (the two central horrors of Ducournau’s features could be summarised with some accuracy as pregnancy, and the experience of being a vegetarian in France). As a young girl Alexia, played in adulthood by Agathe Rousselle, causes a car accident which leaves her with a titanium implant in her skull, and a desire for physical proximity to petrol engines and Autoglass. Two decades hence, she works as a dancer at a heavy metal car show where she is pursued by a simpering fan across the car park. In a scene characteristic of Ducournau’s ability to conjure the threat of violence from mundane objects, the fan’s neck lingers over the blade of the electric window as he begs for her number, then chances a kiss. Having teased a decapitation Ducournau instead gives us a honey trap: Alexia returns the kiss passionately, while loosening her metallic hair pin, arranging her victim’s ear just so, plunging the weapon in. A rendezvous with the backseat of a flaming Cadillac follows – a sex scene which echoes without imitating Cronenberg’s Crash – impregnating Alexia with a cyborg foetus who grows with preternatural speed. The inhumanity of her actions has deadly repercussions, triggering a fatal case of mechanical reproduction in Alexia as well as her swift transition from murderer to serial killer.

The rampage that ensues, however, is brief. Alexia misjudges the number of residents in a house share and, visibly exhausted, botches the job. Ducournau has described the scene as a comedic ‘pressure valve’ allowing for a release of tension, but it also injects a highly referential style: Caterina Caselli’s 1966 hit ‘Nessuno mi può giudicare’ (Nobody can judge me) soundtracks the massacre, evoking Tarantino’s use of music at his most adrenalized moments of gore, while Alexia’s stalking of a naked female victim through the house recalls the chase scenes of numerous mid-90s teen slashers. The fun is manic, unsustainable, a hyperactive moment shortly before which Alexia realises the fact of her hybrid pregnancy, panics and attempts to employ her hairpin in lieu of an abortifacient. Returning blood-smeared and nauseous to her parents’ home, she locks them inside and without hesitation sets fire to the building and goes on the run.

The remainder of the film takes place after Alexia, in an attempt to evade capture, deforms herself so as to resemble nineteen-year-old Adrien, the son, missing for a decade, of Parisian fireman Vincent, played with virtuosic sinuosity by Vincent Lindon. The shared effort by the two characters to avoid the evident deception at the heart of their relationship, at turns comic and pitiable, becomes a non-verbal expression of their deep need for one another. Both are committed to bodily fictions, Vincent in his refusal to accept his own physical decline and reliance on gurn-inducing steroids, Alexia in her attempts to bind away her breasts and growing belly, to not merely disguise herself as, but to become, Adrien. In Titane, the burdens of gender are not worn lightly but nor are they more consequential than logistical frustrations. Alexia-Adrien shows no attachment to either sexed self, only to survival which is dependent on the love of Vincent and on the ability to do what his son did not: to stay.

Alexia’s fugitive journey takes her from south to north, the cool marine blues of her past life washed over with a neon fuschia in Vincent’s world, an electric imitation of fire’s warmth, used to particularly memorable effect in a party scene at the brigade’s headquarters. The song ‘Light House’ by the band Future Islands mixes in and out of aural focus, as Vincent, surrounded by his recruits, unclenches and sways. It is a moment with a cinematic parallel in Claire Denis’ Beau Travail (1999), which concludes with an astonishing acrobatic dance by Denis Lavant, whose character’s demise lends urgency as well as pathos to his movements. Where Denis keeps Lavant in the centre of the frame, his whole self in view, alone but for his reflection in mirrored walls, Ducournau shows us only the bust of Lindon’s loosening body, the camera kept at shoulder height, the viewer brought into the dance, inebriated by the slowed and fluid motion, the institutional rigour of the Sapeurs Pompiers dissolving frame by frame. Ducournau has made her name through the unflinching depictions of bodily pain, but both Titane and Grave pay equal attention to such horror’s antithesis, the pleasure and self-surrender of dance.

What is at stake in a cinema that invites you to look away? Only watching. Ducournau’s films demand second and third viewings – braced this time for the crunch, the snap, the bite, the challenge is to keep one’s eyes open. In doing so, the reward is often comic delight, a conjoined anticipation of and release from the worst possible thing approaching, happening, then being over. And if it is over, if we are still here, could it really have been that bad? Where Ducournau’s films declare a statement, it is this: once lived through, horror loosens its grip; our compulsion to repeat a trauma is akin to picking a scab, we don’t do it just to hurt ourselves, we do it because it feels good. In her acceptance speech at Cannes, Ducournau thanked the jury for ‘letting the monsters in’, they might well have answered her, ‘c’est pas grave.’

Read on: Hal Foster, ‘On the First Pop Age’, NLR 19.

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Against Concepts

On November 29, 1944, the last Nazi forces on Albanian territory fell to the National Liberation Army led by Enver Hoxha’s Communist Party, making Albania the first country in Europe to defeat its Fascist occupiers without major outside help. By May 1945, Yugoslavia became the second. Both governments declared their commitment to Soviet-style socialism, and the two grew so close that in 1948 they seemed to be on the point of merging. Yet Yugoslavia unexpectedly fell out with the Soviet Union, leading Albania, loyal to Stalin, to cut all ties with its neighbour. A year later, Greek Communists to the south lost their civil war with British-backed monarchist forces, and across the Adriatic, Italy joined NATO. Albania was surrounded by enemies.

At the time it was Yugoslavia rather than Albania that found itself internationally isolated. But the former would go on to become one of the world’s most outward-looking countries, forging tactical alliances with the Eastern and Western blocs while becoming a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement. Hoxha’s Albania, by contrast, would progressively shed allies, breaking with the Soviet Union in 1960 and with China in the course of the 1970s. While the rest of the nominally Communist world opened up to its bourgeois rivals, Albania proclaimed itself the last true standard-bearer of socialism, beset not only by Western imperialists, but also by Eastern revisionists who had cravenly abandoned the project of Lenin and Stalin.

All of which is to say that by the time Lea Ypi was born there in 1979, Albania was hardly a typical Communist country. By most accounts, it was exceptional in its lack of freedom. While Yugoslav workers and intellectuals were travelling the world, while the Central European masses were enjoying cheap cars, cheap gasoline, and ample vacation time in country houses and spas and on Croatian beaches, and while even non-conformist youths of the Soviet Bloc could enjoy officially sanctioned rock music, Albania’s diplomatic isolation translated domestically into social confinement. The state did what it could to keep Albanians from visiting or learning about the outside world or buying the strange goods produced there – at least until December 1990, when Albanian Communists proved not so out of step with their time after all and followed their regional counterparts in relinquishing their monopoly on power, acknowledging the newly discovered necessity of radical market reforms, and tasting the benefits of privatization for themselves.

For those few anti-communists who paid attention to the differences between Communist-led countries, it was precisely Albania’s exceptional status that would serve as concrete proof of socialism’s general failure, as if the purity of Albania’s communism were evidence of an ugly truth that underlay all fine-sounding attempts to share ownership and mitigate exploitation. Meanwhile, for most of the world’s left, Albania’s retrograde past has always seemed irrelevant to any emancipatory vision of the future. Even for those willing to recognize the positive elements in Eastern Europe’s often-tragic Communist history, Albania seems to hold little worth remembering.

In her recently published memoir, Free, Ypi makes a case for memory – emphasizing that when we look more closely, even the most repressive historical periods become more complicated and more interesting, both more maddening and more inspiring. The repression in Communist-led Albania was real, but so were the people who lived through it, struggled with it, and even found some sense of freedom within its bounds. Ypi shows formally isolated people avidly following world events on Italian radio and Yugoslav television, which inspire them to wide-ranging political reflection. She equally shows us the austere solidarity of people who, while not blessed with much consumer or electoral choice – and in spite of the ever-present risk of misusing their apportioned freedom and ending up in prison ­– were able to find ways of working together to improve their lives. (Although she doesn’t explicitly compare this with the situation in Communist-led Central Europe in this period, one might observe how much less solidarity remained in those societies, where governance relied more on consumption-induced apathy than exhortation to collective work).

As for what came after Albanian Communism, Ypi shows how the scope of everyday political imagination actually narrowed with the onset of parliamentary democracy, when anything smacking of socialism was summarily banished from respectable discourse. She depicts a newly emerging set of freedoms, both exhilarating and perverse, which were accompanied by new forms of domination. If post-communist Eastern Europe offered inspiration to the neoliberal crusade to liberate (read: impose) markets in every corner of the world, Albania’s experience could have also provided leftists with excellent arguments against that crusade, if only they had been paying attention.

Ypi paid attention because she lived through it. Yet she made her academic career writing mostly about other subjects. As a political theorist, currently based at the London School of Economics, she works in the abstract realms of – predominantly Western – European thought. But something happened when she set out to write a book about these ideas in Albania. As she writes in the epilogue, Free ‘was going to be a philosophical book about the overlapping ideas of freedom in the liberal and socialist traditions. But when I started writing…ideas turned into people’. It’s to her credit that in turning her attention to people, Ypi nevertheless doesn’t lose sight of ideas. The result is a memoir that reads like a novel, about a girl – Ypi’s younger self – coming to terms with the thought-world that swirls around her as voiced by her family, friends, teachers, as well as occasional bureaucrats and experts. Ideas become all the more interesting when they lose their purity and analytic consistency – when they don’t just confront one another as rational arguments, but ‘love and fight each other’, as Ypi puts it.

We meet the confident Marxism-Leninism of Ypi’s grade-school teachers, who impress ideas like equality, solidarity and self-determination on young minds decent enough to believe in such things. We meet the cautious progressivism of Ypi’s grandmother, who once rebelled against her upper-class upbringing but found no place in a post-war order that only accepted one form of leftism. We meet the rebellious radicalism of her father, in love with revolutions that have not yet happened but disappointed by those that have already taken place. We meet the increasingly shrill market-liberalism of her mother, who runs with the spirit of history after 1990, until her running takes her to work cleaning bathrooms in Italy. We meet the pragmatic technocratism of an affable Dutch privatization specialist who moves into the neighbourhood in the early 90s and sees the world in categories as inflexible as the orthodox Marxist-Leninists before him.

Free is also a bildungsroman of sorts, a story of how a post-communist left intellectual comes of age – of how, despite society telling her (like so many others) to love the freedom of the market, she could dare to be dissatisfied. It is a compelling narrative, in part because its endpoint is by no means an obvious one. Ypi’s generation in Eastern Europe is, in some respects, a lost one. In a recent interview, Ypi reflected that if she had been just a few years older – enough to develop a visceral dislike for the regime – she would likely have become a right-winger. If she had been a few years younger, she would have entered the new era with little memory of the past, perhaps less committed to fighting the spectres of the fallen enemy, but all the more prone to accept post-communism as the natural state of affairs.

Instead, she finds herself one day in December 1990 as a true-believing eleven-year-old Communist hugging a statue of Stalin, only to flee in horror when she sees its head has been cut off by protesters demanding what she believed the system had already been offering them: ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. By the time she reaches the age of rebellion, the new system is firmly in place, and the echo of the protesters’ calls sounds as empty as the bank accounts of the two thirds of Albanians who have been tricked into investing in pyramid schemes. She is too young to see the new order as her own, but too old to regard the old order as if it belonged to another world. The 1980s were too real to ignore; the 1990s too painful to accept.

This task was made harder by the fact that the revolution of 1990 was, in Ypi’s words, ‘a revolution of people against concepts’. Protesters marched not only against the individuals who had oppressed them, but also against the ideas that had cloaked their oppression. They blamed their ruined lives less on the specific way their unique society was organized than on the ideas of ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ as such. And when protesting bore fruit, history in general was supposed to have reached its end, resolving and rendering obsolete the great battles of ideas that had plagued the decades and centuries before.

‘The owl of Minerva had taken flight and, as usual, seemed to have forgotten us’, Ypi writes. Rather than illuminating the passing epoch with its wisdom, as Hegel imagined, the owl not only steered clear of Albania but, I would add, seemed to have fled the earthly scene entirely. What remained of absolute knowledge was expertise – the unquestionable certainty that ‘structural reforms’ would be applied everywhere, while ideas about changing the world in any other way would be banished. The transition to free-market democracy was not understood as an idea among other ideas, to accept or reject, debate or defend. It was simply reality, to be realized more or less perfectly, faster or slower, but preferably as fast as possible: ‘There was no politics left, only policy.’

When I first visited Eastern Europe – Slovakia in 2000 – I felt as if I were entering a realm of collective madness, so effectively had reasoned debate been substituted by conjuration, incantation and denunciation. In educated circles, the word ‘socialism’ was enough to void any proposal, crush any vision; the words ‘Europe’, ‘the West’, and ‘reforms’ were enough to win any argument; and the ‘transition’, the unquestioned reality that shaped all personal effort and public governance, struck me as little more than a figment of a few experts’ imagination. I failed to see how the policies of ‘transition’ – the privatization, mass firings, destruction of infrastructure and cutting of social programmes just when they were needed most – would bring anyone closer to the ideals of prosperity and democracy that were supposed to justify all this transitioning.

Not that collective madness is especially unusual. I suspect that an outsider entering Albania circa 1955 would have been just as dumbfounded by the twisted rationalizations and groundless illusions that were passed off as official truth. Madness is always madness to someone else, and recognizing it takes someone who is alienated enough to reside, at least partially, in an alternative system of rationality. This is how Ypi depicts the dying days of one madness and the birth of another – by presenting each system through the lens of opposing rationalities. The clarity of true believers runs up against the coded criticism of dissidents; pragmatic strategies of survival run up against frustrated outbursts, when people dare for a moment to imagine that everything could be different. Sometimes it seems that the self-contained systems will win out. Albanian Communism has an answer for every one of its problems, until suddenly all its reasoning fails. Shock therapy, then, appears as the perfect metaphor for the subsequent period – because what is shock therapy, in the eyes of an observer who might walk in from the street, but a mad scientist’s cure for madness, a cure as mad as the disease?

Since the supposed necessity of post-communist ‘transition’ still justifies so much policy today, there is obvious value in complicating its narrative and relativizing its claim to truth by telling of the ignored or forgotten suffering it entailed. But what value is there in returning to the days of Communist rule which today’s right continually invokes as a caricature, and which the left would rather forget? In her epilogue, Ypi reproaches Western friends for denying that 1980s Albania had anything to do with real socialism and could have any bearing on their own beliefs. But of all the questions raised in her book, this one may be the least clearly answered. Her sensitivity to the complex motivations that underlie contradictory ideas seems to give way here to a blanket condemnation of the Western left for ignoring the legacy of Eastern socialism. I, for one, raised as a good Western leftist, have no desire to concede the title of ‘socialism’ to the oppressive system into which Ypi was born.

Yet this can’t be an excuse for failing to engage with the past. Even if the system established was not socialist, the movement that brought it about was. It involved people who genuinely believed in socialist ideals, who integrated these ideals into one or another system of ideas, and who made concrete decisions about how to bring them to life. How can we find the right concepts for insisting that Stalinism was not genuine socialism, while recognizing that Stalinists formed a significant part of the movement whose legacy we carry on today? Can we work toward something new by working through the real contradictions, hopes, tragedies and fits of madness of the past?

Ypi seems to suggest that her method of writing about ideas as lived by real people could offer a way forward. Albanian Communism treated people as abstractions. Ypi’s father and grandmother were not permitted to work toward their own conception of socialism; they were condemned by their abstract position as descendants of the bourgeoisie. And then, after 1990, the rejection of nearly all grand ideas left them lost in a reality that they were not licensed to question or debate. Ideas without people were replaced by people without ideas. Can we put them back together?

Read on: Robin Blackburn, ‘Fin de Siecle: Socialism after the Crash’, NLR I/185.

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Something Mild

The latest film from Paul Thomas Anderson has various things in common with his work of the past fifteen years, an unignorable run started by There Will Be Blood (2007) and continued with The Master (2012), Inherent Vice (2014), and Phantom Thread (2017). Like its predecessors, Licorice Pizza takes place at a carefully presented historical moment (Southern California in 1973), and derives key details from an existing source, the early life of the producer Gary Goetzman, here given the surname Valentine. Like Anderson’s other recent protagonists, Gary (Cooper Hoffman) is male and largely defined by his professional activities, in this case as a teenage entrepreneur, and his central relationship, with the twenty-five-year old Alana (Alana Haim), has elements of the collaboration. Other areas of overlap include a running-time that exceeds two hours, and an original score by the composer and Radiohead member Jonny Greenwood used alongside familiar music: McCartney’s ‘Let Me Roll It’, Bowie’s ‘Life on Mars?’ Yet for all the continuities, the recourse to dependable methods and motifs, what defines the new film – and makes it such a monumentally frustrating experience – are properties not previously evident in Anderson’s body of work: obstinate optimism, conceptual muddiness, and a near-total lack of stakes.

It’s clear enough what Anderson is inviting us to care about. In the first scene, Gary spots Alana at his high school, where she is assisting a yearbook photographer. First he takes her for dinner at his favourite local restaurant, then he enlists her as his chaperone for a trip to New York, where he is performing a skit on a talk show – as things turn out, his last hurrah as a child actor. Back in Los Angeles, specifically the San Fernando Valley, Gary, who loves a scheme, and Alana, whose life is going nowhere, start a business selling water beds, while their downtime is devoted to activities that make the other feel either jealous or cared-for.

Anderson is familiar with the ways of pairs – the oscillations between caginess and receptive warmth, hostility and fondness, enmeshment and estrangement. His short, Cigarettes and Coffee (1993), screened at Sundance when he was twenty-three, portrays both of the kinds of duo to which he has repeatedly returned: in a roadside Nevada cafe, a young man seeks the advice of an older acquaintance, while a few tables over, lovestruck newlyweds bicker. Sometimes Anderson’s films are presented almost baldly as exercises in double portraiture, as with The Master, in which a wayward seaman falls in with a cult leader, and Phantom Thread, about the relationship between a dressmaker and his latest muse. But even when he adopts the outward form of the ensemble or the epic, his chamber-piece proclivities still tend to win out. The ‘Goodbye 70s… Hello 80s’ party sequence that marks the turning-point in Boogie Nights (1997) comprises, among other two-handed scenarios, a chance encounter that ends in marriage, a summit about the future of the porn industry, an abortive come-on, and a man killing his wife and then himself. Anderson’s next film, the vast Valley snapshot, Magnolia (1999), is engaged exclusively with one-to-one dynamics – marital, parent-child, employee-boss, romantic, legal, medical.

Even There Will Be Blood, a feverish depiction of the California oil industry, is really a battle-of-wits-in-variations, with supporting characters taking turns to be bested or rejected by the burgeoning magnate Daniel Plainview. During the thirty-minute passage concerned with the sudden appearance of a man claiming to be his ‘brother from another mother’, Daniel doesn’t cross paths a single time with his otherwise constant antagonist, the preacher Eli, his son is packed off to boarding school, and his sidekick sidelined. In Anderson’s work, three rarely gets a chance to be a crowd. Look past the running-times and period trappings, the yawning vistas and snaking cast lists, and the standout American director of our times is almost exclusively interested in what happens when two people go head-to-head across the space of a desk or dining table.

It’s usually a lop-sided affair, with one key-term recurring. In the first scene of Anderson’s first film, the gambling drama Hard Eight (1996), the drifter John mocks the suspiciously generous Sydney as ‘Mr Helpful’. Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood both end with a struggling youngish man turning up at a large house, and telling its ageing male owner, ‘I need help’, with diverging consequences (a hug; a bowling-pin to the skull). The same syllable occurs many times in Magnolia, most prominently in the stories of the cop Jim and the nurse Phil, who says at one point ‘this is the scene of the movie where you help me out’, and with Inherent Vice, Anderson adapted the only Thomas Pynchon novel in which that concept plays a significant role, starting on the very first page. Anderson’s most recent film, Phantom Thread, marked a return to the Hard Eight formula, favour-giving as offered, even enforced, with Alma telling Reynolds that she wants him ‘flat on your back, tender, helpless, open, with only me to help.’

Help with what exactly? The immediate context is often practical – money, a favour. But the broader purpose is to locate a better way of getting by. Alma, for example, believes that Reynolds is refusing to accept, let alone embrace, his vulnerable true nature – a tendency towards repression avidly abetted by the other woman in his life, his stern-faced sister Cyril, whose promise to leave Reynolds ‘on the floor’ is altogether more aggressive in tone. Jim, the Valley cop who likes to ‘help people’, assures the erratic Claudia that she deserves more – and is capable of more – than her prevailing routine of cocaine, hook-ups, and self-censure. Without such interventions, left to their own vices, Anderson’s characters derive their feeling of relief, and perhaps a sense of purpose, not just from quick fixes and cathartic outbursts, but from controlling their environments and silencing dissent, from moments of victory and phallic domination – literally, as with Eddie in Boogie Nights, who wins an industry prize for Best Cock, or symbolically, in the case of Daniel Plainview’s ‘drilling’.

Then there are the many acts of bragging, the assertion of status or even existence: ‘I am a star’, ‘I am an oil man’, ‘I am strong’, ‘My name is quiz kid Donnie Smith from the TV’, ‘We. Are. Men’. What seems to need allaying is the threat of futility or inadequacy, the possibility of being ‘stupid’, ‘weird’, ‘strange’, ‘an idiot’, ‘a loser’, becoming ‘a laughingstock’ or suffering ‘a crying spell’. Some of Anderson’s characters remain trapped in a cycle, chained to their worst impulses, and confront the end credits with defences intact. But in the stories with apparently happy endings, there’s a willingness to abandon current compensations and find a different way to mitigate a basic anxiety – to do something to help that might actually help.

Anderson’s most gifted contemporary, Noah Baumbach – who is a year older, and made his debut a year earlier – has displayed a similar concern with lost and suffering figures and the bonds they struggle to forge, but Anderson is working more consciously in a tradition. He has spoken with rapture of numerous double-act films, notably F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise, which bears the subtitle ‘A Song of Two Humans’, and Jonathan Demme’s postmodern screwball romance Something Wild. Perhaps the closest he has to a precursor is Bernardo Bertolucci, a specialist in tales of contretemps, including an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Double, as well as a film concerned, like Phantom Thread, with an obsessed creative Englishman, living in a large empty house, who is liberated by a foreign employee-cum-muse (Besieged), and another, Me and You, about the alliance between a spotty, strong-willed fifteen-year-old and a troubled woman in her mid-twenties which makes prominent use of Bowie in his science-fiction mode (in that case, ‘Space Oddity’).

Anderson has never cited Bertolucci’s example, though it’s hard to watch the seduction guru Frank berating his comatose estranged father in Magnolia, or hear Lancaster in The Master use ‘pig fuck’ as a curse, without recalling Paul’s speech to his dead wife towards the end of Last Tango in Paris. Whatever the case, the true kinship between these writer-directors – other than a liking for method actors and a precocious start that gave way to substantial achievement – is a shared strength, their ability to exploit psychological terrain (more overtly Freudian in Bertolucci’s case) as a route to the analytic and the sensual, a way of delivering a lesson that is also an experience. Anderson, for his part, has displayed increasing discomfort with one half of the equation, and Licorice Pizza suggests how far he is willing to go in response. His desire to get closer to his characters, to forgo distance in favour of immersion, results here in something close to a rejection of insight and even meaning. (It seems telling that the title, borrowed from a chain of record shops, possesses no claim to relevance.)

It’s the result of a conscious process, an act of serial adjustment that has now reached a point of over-correction. In his early work, from Cigarettes and Coffee to Punch-Drunk Love (2002), Anderson used a range of devices to impose his perspective on the material. His characters said silly things while his narrative techniques nudged us to notice delusion or myopia, by presenting an image at odds with a voiceover description or through the use of the Robert Altman jigsaw framework, that grants the viewer a version of omniscience. Anderson wanted to get his message across, and one obvious advantage of the ironic method is legibility of attitude. Magnolia, for example, portrays two deficient fathers with terminal cancer, is bookended with a narrator reflecting on ‘coincidence and chance’, and uses Aimee Mann songs with lyrics that provide comment on the action: ‘can you save me?’, ‘it’s not going to stop / ’til you wise up’.

The oddball romance, Punch-Drunk Love, represented a partial reaction – though half the length of its predecessor, it was still a winky affair (‘he needs me, he needs me, he needs me’, Shelley Duvall sings on the soundtrack). But since There Will Be Blood, Anderson has tended towards an altogether stricter style. Action is presented from two perspectives (at most). Music is used to connote a period of time or enhance the emotional atmosphere. Inter-titles are kept to a minimum. The fourth wall is respected. In Phantom Thread, Anderson steers the audience with organic patterns of detail (the atmosphere at meal-times, the recurrence of dairy products) and moments of pointed dialogue, such as Reynolds’s account of his childhood. Otherwise, the vehicle of expression is the showdown – Reynolds accusing Alma of oppression, Cyril advising him that his moaning hurts her ears.

Licorice Pizza, by contrast, offers neither an overarching framework nor much in the way of local clarity. While Gary and Alana amuse each other, and Anderson appears convinced that something powerful exists between them, there is no clue as to what. The forms of help exchanged are hardly meaningful. His absent father is never discussed, nor is her fractious home life. Gary’s occasional advice to Alana derives narrowly from prior experience – with casting directors, for example, when she dabbles in acting. And it’s Alana who recognises the implications of the OPEC crisis for a business reliant on rubber, though again this is not reflective of her personality, merely the fact she’s an adult. The episodes of verbal combat are difficult to track, with the air of a word-association game and very little paraphrasable substance. So we are asked to make do without the one thing that has underpinned all of Anderson’s previous work – a definable dynamic.

Anderson has talked with awe about how, in Something Wild, Demme showed ‘how loose you could be with the rulebook’. But that is to emphasise the film’s impudent tone and narrative surprises at the expense of its rigorous character-drawing, evident right until the final shot, which reveals that the apparently reformed rebel Audrey has parked her car beside a fire hydrant. It’s a far cry from the anything-goes aesthetic of Licorice Pizza, where causeless chronology rules, details are introduced then abandoned, and the sense prevails of a story that begins afresh with almost every scene and might conceivably go on for ever.

In the one scene where Anderson seems to place a hand on the tiller, Alana sits dejected on a kerb. Gary is making penis jokes with his friends to her right, while to her left their latest customer, the Hollywood hairdresser and playboy Jon Peters, is trying to pick up a couple of women out for an early-morning game of tennis. Behind her, in an office window, is a poster for the local politician Joel Wachs – a passionate progressive and, as it turns out, gay. She resolves to volunteer for his campaign for city council. But even here, the things Alana is spurning – adolescent horseplay, middle-aged predation – have played little role in her fate. And though Alana’s new career is the closest the film offers to what Anderson calls a ‘gear shift’, referring to the mid-point swerve in Something Wild from joy to peril, it yields neither a change in mood, nor any increase in ethical seriousness.

Wachs may have designs on reforming L.A. land use, but Licorice Pizza fails to extend the surprisingly trenchant, committed, and fine-grained critique delivered in There Will Blood, The Master, and Inherent Vice, which draw on the story of L. Ron Hubbard, and the work of two political novelists, Upton Sinclair and Thomas Pynchon, to scrutinise the exertion of American power at home at various points between 1898 and 1969. Almost as soon as Alana enters the Wachs headquarters, she calls on the endlessly adaptable Gary to shoot promotional videos, and City Council corruption becomes another opportunity for nostalgic scene-setting and a backdrop to yet more bickering.

The danger with Anderson’s initial approach was a tendency to the traits – bombast, bravado – which he liked to skewer in his characters. His motto seemed to be, ‘I am a major film-maker’. There Will Be Blood realised that statement by legitimate means, and he found the balance he was seeking in the first hour of The Master, and for long stretches of Inherent Vice and Phantom Thread. It seems that at this point he would rather do too little than too much. He recently praised the way that Billy Wilder didn’t feel the need to ‘put a hat on top of a hat’. But Licorice Pizza serves up a bewildering spectacle – the director of the six-hatted breakthrough Boogie Nights and twelve-hatted follow-up Magnolia aspiring to a hat-less state, an authorial reticence that borders on the abstinent. (The extremity of the shift recalls the claim, in Boogie Nights, that Eddie ‘can fuck hard or he can fuck really gently’.)

For all its surface busyness, Licorice Pizza is marked by the things it doesn’t provide, in terms of either drama and technique – voiceover, flashback, revelatory dialogue, explanatory cross-cutting, enriching context, escalating discord. Gary’s early declaration, ‘I’m a showman’, is basically right, and his occasional out-of-his-depth moments, or tendency to be ‘braggy’, reflect adolescent gaucheness, not delusional fantasy. When Alana calls him ‘idiot’ in the film’s final seconds, it isn’t a tool of emasculation but a term of endearment. This is the first film that Anderson has made in which a male character doesn’t cry. It’s also the first that contains smiling in both the first and last scene (the smile that clinches Magnolia is especially hard-earned). And though it isn’t quite grins all the way, the emotional range is starkly narrow, leaving an aftertaste that’s not so much licorice as supermarket mozzarella.

It seems odd that the film is so taken with its creaseless hero when Alana is clearly the more fruitful creation, not just in her impulsive behaviour and pained uncertainty and listless lifestyle, but the familiar pathos of her paper-thin assertions: ‘I have integrity’, ‘I’m a politician’, ‘I’m cooler than you’. There’s a similar, and similarly tantalising, glimpse of Anderson’s strengths, the power to illuminate and elate, to fuse the incisive with the energetic, in the sequence devoted to the whim-driven motormouth Jon Peters, played with almost unhinged flair by Bradley Cooper, an actor in the tradition of ragged intensity of earlier Anderson collaborators Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joaquin Phoenix, and Daniel Day-Lewis. Entitled, vain, and openly aggressive, Peters is a mix of Frank, the agonised philanderer in Magnolia, and the wild-eyed drug dealer who pops up at the end of Boogie Nights. ‘Do you know who I am?’ Peters asks Gary, and then, after he receives the answer he is looking for, ploughs on: ‘Do you know who my girlfriend is?’ (Barbra Streisand.) For a brief passage, Licorice Pizza sparks into life, illustrating and at the same time embodying a lesson taught by all of Anderson’s previous films. We can tame our wildest excesses, or at least reach some form of accommodation, but we can never escape who we are.

Read on: Peter Wollen, ‘Speed and the Cinema’, NLR 16.

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Ultra Vires

Remember the campaign, conducted by the European Commission (EC) and the EU Parliament (EP) with the help of the Court of Justice (CJEU), to teach Poland the rule of law by withholding its share in Ursula von der Leyen’s precious, the Next Generation EU (NGEU) Corona Recovery Fund? EU legalese being not by accident notoriously difficult to understand for anyone but the Court itself, hard thinking reveals that ‘rule of law’ means two things here: independence of the national judiciary from the national executive, and recognition by both of the supremacy of European over national law, including national constitutional law, whatever the European law may be, which in case of doubt is a matter for the CJEU to determine, and the CJEU alone.

Poland, according to Brussels, needs to be taught a lesson, and not just because of the government’s packing of the constitutional court with judges dear to the heart of the majority party. Both the constitutional court and the government believe in a narrow interpretation of European legal supremacy, rather than the broad one preferred by the EC, EP and CJEU. As a result, the Polish constitutional court is likely to find certain, but not all, legal commands emerging from Brussels to be ultra vires, transgressing the limits of European jurisdiction, thereby violating not only Polish law but also the European Treaties to the extent that EU member countries have in the Treaties ceded only some but not all legal powers to the Union.

Making it worse and ringing alarm bells all over Brussels among right-thinking ‘pro-European’ Europeans, is that in order to legitimate their lack of obedience to the rule of law as defined by Brussels, the Polish constitutional court, supported by the ‘anti-European’ Polish government, likes to invoke a recent decision by the German constitutional court, the Bundesverfassungsgericht (BVG). Having long been seen as a paragon of both political independence (thanks to its careful appearance management) and EU loyalty, the BVG recently declared the CJEU ultra vires for finding the BVG in breach of European law, in particular for failing to affirm loud and clear its general supremacy over national law on an issue relating to the powers of the ECB to commit national central banks to support specific supranational monetary policies. Embarrassed by itself, the German court declared itself satisfied that the ECB had stayed within its competence and would refrain from pursuing the matter further.

This, however, did not satisfy the EC. Under pressure in particular from Green German MEPs, it declared Germany to be in breach of the Treaties for its constitutional court having suggested that the EU’s vires may perhaps have at least some limits after all. To set an example, the EC started a Treaty infringement procedure against Germany – parallel to the several infringement procedures against Poland and Hungary – to let everyone know that invoking the German court won’t get them their money, and that in any case Brussels applies the rule of law even-handedly, to rich and poor, big and small alike. Infringement procedures can end up at the CJEU if the country in question fails to satisfy the Commission that it has mended its ways and forthwith renounced its life of sin.

So far, so good. Then, on December 2, a few days before the new German government was to be sworn in, the Commission all of a sudden dropped its case against Germany, without much ado and so inconspicuously that the German press hardly noticed, or could pretend not to notice. Germany, according to a Commission press release – the only available official document – had formally recognized ‘the autonomy, the supremacy, the effectiveness and the uniform applicability of the law of the Union’, together with ‘the values anchored in the treaties, especially the rule of law’. Germany had also ‘acknowledged the authority of the European Court of Justice’ and the principle that ‘the legality of actions of the Union’s organs … can be reviewed only by the Court of the European Union’. Above all, the German government had ‘committed itself to use all means available to actively avoid (aktiv zu vermeiden) a future repetition of an ultra vires finding (eine Wiederholung einer Ultra-vires-Feststellung)’.

It is symptomatic of German politics, and of European integration today, that the Commission and the German government managed to shield the settlement of the infringement procedure and its terms from public attention. The only response in Germany up to now has been a draft question submitted to the government by a member of the Bundestag, asking whether it was true that the government had undertaken to influence the future jurisdiction of the constitutional court; which legal means the government believes to have at its disposition for the purpose; whether the government considers such influence compatible with the principle of separation of powers; and whether it considers it generally illegitimate for the constitutional court to review legal acts of the CJEU. The fate of the draft is not yet decided.

The case, however, may be closed anyway. In June 2020 the ten-year long tenure of Andreas Voßkuhle as president of the BVG came to its scheduled end. Voßkuhle, a law professor with a mind of his own, had widely been seen as a driving force behind the court’s ultra vires decision. He was replaced, on a proposal of the Bundestag, by Stephan Harbarth, who had been appointed to the court at the end of 2018, initially as Voßkuhle’s vice president. In March 2020 Harbarth let it be known that he expected to be Voßkuhle’s successor. He was elected the same year, and appointed by the Bundespräsident after Voßkuhle’s term had ended. Publicly Harbarth was presented, and welcomed, as the first practicing lawyer on the court. While he had been a partner in a big, American-owned law firm since 2006, however, he had also been a Bundestag member for the CDU from 2009 to 2018, when he resigned from both the law firm and the Bundestag to move to the BVG. In his time as an MP he held influential positions in the CDU, the party as well as the parliamentary party, a mover and shaker mostly behind the scenes, while remaining a partner at his law firm. Harbarth became known largely for being one of the Bundestag members with the highest outside income, at the end of his time in parliament reporting more than 400,000 euros per year (then members did not have to report exact figures, having only to assign themselves to discrete income categories, of which 400,000 and above was the highest). Harbarth’s additional earnings on a few occasions became a matter of public debate, as political opponents and journalists questioned how his additional income could have possibly been payment for work done, given his duties as a member of parliament.

That the BVG should stop throwing spanners into the wheels of the rule of European over national law is no minor matter, and apparently the expectation is that an experienced politician, Merkel mainstay and world-wise practicing lawyer like Harbarth understands this better than an academic who only understands the law. What is at stake here is what has been called ‘integration by law’, which has over time evolved, more or less by default, into the most important mechanism for bringing about the Treaties’ ‘ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’. This is because the now 27 member states are unlikely to unanimously agree on a revision of the Treaties to extend the power of the Union, not least because some would need to have the revision approved by popular vote. Thus, an alternative route to supranational state or empire-building has to be found, bypassing the need for a formal Treaty revision and in particular circumventing Article 5 of the Treaty on European Union, which states that ‘the limits of Union competences are governed by the principle of conferral. The use of Union competences is governed by the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality’, and that ‘under the principle of conferral, the Union shall act only within the limits of the competences conferred upon it by the Member States in the Treaties to attain the objectives set out therein. Competences not conferred upon the Union in the Treaties remain with the Member States.’

Originally this was understood narrowly and specifically, referring mostly to issues of the common market and of competition law, and later extending for example to the regulation of European arrest warrants. As political integration got stuck, however, Commission, Parliament and Court began to read a less specific conferral of competences into general declarations in the Treaties of intentions and ‘values’, like those committing the EU to democracy, human rights and the rule of law. On this basis, Commission and Parliament claimed a right to intervene deeply in the national politics and legal orders of member states if they determined this to be necessary in pursuit of European values. Moreover, in case countries objected in defence of their own interpretation or of their national sovereignty, it was to be for the CJEU to decide under yet another principle, that of the supremacy of European law – a principle, by the way, that is not set out in the Treaties but was posited long ago by none other than the CJEU itself. Retooled like this, integration by law became a passe-partout for deep EU interventions into the domestic orders of member states, to make them adhere to general principles like democracy and the rule of law as interpreted by the EU, and to cooperate with European integration as directed, again, by the Union.

The way this works can be seen by comparing the cases of Poland and Germany. Germany was accused because its constitution allowed its constitutional court enough independence to rule against the national government – in other words, for its government not preventing the court taking a view different from that of the government, thereby upholding the rule of law. When, upon pressure from Brussels, the German government promised that it would see to it that the court would from now on rule in line with the national government, thereby committing itself to curtailing the independence of the court, and with it the rule of law, proceedings were ended on the grounds that the country had promised to respect the supremacy of European law. Poland, on the other hand, is accused of, and is already being punished for, not allowing its court enough independence to rule against the national government, thereby curtailing the rule of law, this time however by allowing the national court to challenge the doctrine of the universal supremacy of European over national law.

As a remedy, Brussels expects the Polish government to change the composition of the constitutional court so that it will rule in favour of European law supremacy in future, in which case it will pass the rule of law test, which in fact is a cooperation-in-integration-by-law test. Until it does so, the EU will withhold the financial support to which the country is entitled under the Treaties, breaking the law in defence of the law – a Schmittian Notstand. As a side effect, hardly unintended, the domestic opposition to the Polish government, led by a former Polish prime minister voted out of office for strict adherence to EU neoliberal economic recipes and compensated by his Brussels friends with one of the five EU presidencies, will be able to claim that by voting for them and for the supremacy of European law, Polish citizens will again benefit from EU financial support. In effect this turns the battle over the rule of law into an instrument of imperial elite management aimed at national regime change.

To recapitulate: under current EU doctrine, protecting the rule of law requires in some countries repression of national courts by national governments, while in others it requires their liberation. The German government satisfied the Commission by promising to ‘actively’ discourage anti-European, pro-national tendencies on its highest court, thereby undermining domestic in favour of supranational rule of law; while the Polish government drew the ire of the Commission by encouraging anti-European, pro-national tendencies on the part of its constitutional court, thereby undermining domestic but also European rule of law, as interpreted by the CJEU. Whereas German undermining of domestic rule of law is forgivable because it serves European rule of law, Polish undermining of domestic rule of law is not because it undermines European rule of law.

How does integration by law fit the worldview of the new German government, and what are its prospects for the future of the ‘European project’? The coalition agreement’s section on Europe, which comes at the very end of a very long document, reveals the handwriting of the Greens and their Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, in calling for nothing less than a constitutional convention to open the way into, in literal translation, ‘a federal European federal state’ (einen föderalen europäischen Bundesstaat). Nobody in Europe aside from the German Greens wants this in earnest, and Baerbock was told so in no uncertain terms on her inaugural visits to Warsaw and Paris. Baerbock will also have to learn that for Germany, integration by law rather than by convention is the ideal method to build a German-dominated European state or empire: rule-based rather than politics-driven, proceeding through juridical authority instead of political legitimacy, based on ‘values’ and derived, with juridical expertise and authority, from norms rather than interests, drawing for legitimacy on obedience to the law instead of political consent, and engineered behind closed doors by academically trained specialists. It also makes it possible to single out individual dissenting countries for correctional punishment, something difficult to do at a constitutional convention. The only problem is that Germany’s indispensable European co-hegemon, France, has little enthusiasm for this approach, historically and culturally preferring politics over legalism, discretionary over rule-bound decision-making, and personal leadership over the impersonal application of legal norms.

In fact, the French political class seems increasingly disillusioned with the preferred German route to ‘Europe’, which it sees less and less as leading toward a ‘European sovereignty’ modelled on the French that can be projected worldwide.  Instead the impression is growing that integration by law would end in nothing better than government by bureaucracy supervised by a supranational legal expertocracy – suited perhaps to building an international neoliberal market but unable to found an imperial state capable of acting on a global scale. Indications are that recent political pronunciamientos in the run-up to the French presidential elections on the value of national as distinguished from European sovereignty are related to growing doubts over German-style integration by law.

And there are further signs of fracture. Shortly before the holidays, two weeks after discontinuing the infringement procedure against Germany, the European Commission started several additional such procedures against Poland. At issue were various judgments of the Polish constitutional court that insist on the primacy of Polish constitutional law over European law where in the Treaties member states had not conferred specific competences to the EU and by implication the CJEU. Preparing the decision, von der Leyen was quoted by the EU’s PR office as saying that ‘EU law has priority over national law, including constitutional law’, a principle which according to her ‘had been accepted by all EU member states as members of the European Union’. Rhetoric like this has the potential of waking up hordes of sleeping dogs in national capitals, as it offers a taste of what a prominent, politically unsuspicious German European law specialist – a profession with a deeply rooted déformation professionnelle making it condone even the most daring deployment of law in furtherance of ‘ever closer union’ – has found himself prompted to call a ‘coup d’état from above’, by means of integration by law in its new, extended version.

Even the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, usually a faithful foot soldier for EU-Europe, took issue with the new infringement procedures against Poland. On December 23 it asked, under the title of ‘Political Justice’, and an extended quote seems justified here: ‘If the Polish constitutional court was in reality as independent as it is supposed to be, what should the Polish government then do against the court decision that is now the occasion for yet another infringement procedure? The government is after all not allowed to dismiss a decision of the constitutional court or to influence its future jurisdiction.’ And further: ‘Basically the EU Commission urges the Polish government to do that for which it rightly criticizes it sharply: to exert political influence on the judiciary, now only in the opposite direction’. It is indicative of the rotten state of the political public in the biggest and most important country of the EU that there is no mention in this comment of the amazing parallels with the infringement procedure against Germany that had been dropped only a few weeks ago, on assurances by the German government to the Commission that it will ‘actively prevent’ another ultra vires verdict of the constitutional court.

Read on: Alain Supiot, ‘Law and Labour’, NLR 39.

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The Antarctic Connection

This short New Year memoir meshes theorizations of two very different subject areas: geopolitics and interaction rituals. The genre, however, also calls for a dose of merry nonsense, which very much includes all sociological jargon. Yet, as-we-all-know-who-theorized-it, rituals must be performed and emotions generated – even at the scale of world-systems theory.

The emotion in this case is an entirely happy one. It was prompted by the ritual New Year postcard arriving from the South Pole itself, more precisely, the NSF Amundsen-Scott camp in Antarctica.

We met in 1992 in the long line at the ex-Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. The occasion was purely bureaucratic and at the same time fabulously historical. Confirming one of the boldest predictions of Randall Collins, the USSR had collapsed; and we now needed to claim our new citizenship from among no less than a dozen successor nations. This geopolitical fact was finally forced upon me earlier that morning by the fashionably dressed official at the visa section of the French Embassy:

– Your passport is still valid, but the issuing state has expired…

Desperately pressed for time, I flagged down a taxi in the middle of Georgetown and asked the driver (who looked distinctly Ethiopian to my Africanist eye) if he knew the location of the ex-Soviet embassy. The cabdriver turned to me with a broad, cordial grin and replied in perfect Russian: Konechno, znayu, dorogoi tovarisch! – Of course, I know, dear comrade! What a country it was! Do you remember the Ukrainian girls? Borsch and sour cream at the student canteen? He was in fact Ethiopian, with an engineering diploma from Kharkov Polytechnic in Ukraine.

The consular division of the ex-Soviet Embassy occupied a distinguished-looking mansion near Dupont Circle. A few dozen petitioners formed two lines. Following my instantly revived Soviet instincts, I quietly joined the much shorter one. An official-looking woman emerged from the ‘Strictly Service’ door of the consulate to collect our petitions and passports. She approached me with frosty directness:

– Young man, are you Jewish or scientist?

Astonished by this dichotomous categorization, I could only meekly extend to her my – still valid – Soviet passport. Barely glancing at it, the woman immediately ordered me into the much longer line:

– Here stand only the Jews who had long emigrated to Israel and gave up their Soviet citizenship. But now with all our democratization (she could not help a snort) they can get the new Russian citizenship and travel back (oh, she knew all those tricks) without a visa. But your government service (stress) ‘blue’ passport was issued by the Foreign Relations Directorate of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Clearly, you are a scientist.

As a document-carrying scientist, I had to accept the logic of her arguments.

The scientists’ line behaved in recognizable Soviet ways. The people were frustrated by the waste of time and the whole bizarre procedure of having to choose a new citizenship. Yet since the frustrations were directed at the consular officers behind the bullet-proof windows with the dusty blinds unceremoniously drawn down before our faces, the common emotion generated among us was a form of solidarity and even fraternization. This exponentially increased as we learned about the structural homologies of our trajectories and positions. Everyone originally came from one or another of the intersecting Soviet academic institutions; and presently we all found ourselves in roughly the same precarious situation at American universities as post-docs, visiting fellows or lecturers. And, of course, we were cursing, as usual, the ‘Power’ (Vlast) that ‘broke up the country but kept its old habits’.

Vladimir Papitashvili introduced himself first as if begging my pardon for standing ahead in the line. He turned out to be a geophysicist, and his work (about which he was as passionate as any good scientist) consisted of tracing the signs of climate change, which is why he had travelled around the world doing his research. Once in 1984, on his way to Antarctica, as Papitashvili fondly reminisced, he had stayed at a different, much more hospitable Soviet Embassy. The polar expedition had a long trip to make from Leningrad. Their heavy Il-18 transport planes had to refuel often, first in Simferopol in the Crimea; next in Cairo, Egypt; then in Aden, Southern Yemen; and again in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania; and ultimately (at this point I gasped, because I knew this route) …. in Maputo, Mozambique.

The Ilyushin-18 turboprop airplanes, painted bright red for the polar conditions, were a common sight in Maputo during their seasonal expeditionary migrations. The airfield at the 26th parallel in the southern hemisphere was situated in the capital of a newly liberated African country pursuing a ‘socialist orientation’. Mozambique offered the southernmost friendly airport that Soviet planes could use before making the final leap to the coasts of Antarctica. Polar expeditions usually had to wait a few days there for good weather along the route, because the heavy planes could not return to Africa from somewhere halfway. The explorers, facing a year amidst the polar cold and night, did not seem to mind spending a few days on the beaches of the Indian Ocean.

To my new friend, Maputo seemed a strange place, beautiful and warm but also (he carefully searched for the word) … adventurous. Once their plane was parked for the night at the airport, it was surrounded by a bunch of wild-looking young Soviets, some of them bearded. They were dressed in civilian pants, short-sleeves and sandals, yet were armed to the teeth. These volunteer guards were provided as a diplomatic courtesy to fellow countrymen pursuing an important scientific mission.

Of course, it all sounded damn familiar to me. Oh, how we hated the ‘volunteer’ night shifts assigned by the Embassy’s Komsomol committee. Who would want to feed mosquitoes all night long, sitting under the wings of the bright-red IL-18 while keeping guard against possible attack by Renamo rebels and South African saboteurs? We carried a hodgepodge of surplus weaponry procured from our friends at the Soviet military mission, because we were actually listed as civilian personnel. (I got the vintage Degtyarev machine gun stamped with the production date of 1942, the year of Stalingrad.) On these improvised patrols we really felt more like bait.

That was all in a previous and rather surreal life. Here, in a new and also quite surreal American life, I realized that I was standing next to the very same man whose expeditionary equipment I had once been prepared to defend to death. We hugged and yelled, to the amusement of our fellow scientists. Papitashvili and I turned out to be old acquaintances. Which, by the way, would not be the end of the coincidences. Twice again Papitashvili and I would be neighbours at various American campuses, drawn together by our nomadic trajectories in search of fellowships and grants.

At last, the stern-looking official came out to deal with our petitions. Having barely glanced at our Soviet passports, she immediately got to the business of state-imposed categorization and essentialization based on the tell-tale endings of our ethnic surnames: All right, Papitashvili, you must be a Georgian; and you, Derlugyan, are Armenian, aren’t you?

Papitashvili burst into hasty chatter, trying to explain that it was his father who had been Georgian but he himself was born in Kirovabad, Azerbaijan. (Oh? The official raised her eyebrows.) There, in Azerbaijan, his Russian mother worked at the railway station, while his father was serving his military draft, but they had divorced when young Volodya was just one year old. I learned later that the Papitashvilis were a princely Georgian lineage, who in the Soviet period had turned their cultural capital into the high status of old intelligentsia. The relatives from Tbilisi had disapproved of the junior’s affair with a Russian working-class girl from the railroad depot. But the child was eventually half-accepted into the family. During his student years in Leningrad, Vladimir could procure coveted free passes to the Bolshoi Drama Theatre – the famed ‘BDT’, a cult destination for the Soviet intelligentsia – where his uncle was none other than Georgi Tovstonogov, the revered Chief Artistic Director. Yes, Papitashvili was a typical Soviet: born in Azerbaijan to a Georgian father and Russian mother, he attended university in Leningrad, then worked for sixteen years in the heart of Siberia, in Yakutia, at the Institute for the Study of Permafrost. Of course, he knew hardly a word of Georgian.

Next came my turn to explain that I really did not know Armenian, although I knew some Ukrainian because that is what my maternal grandmother spoke to me at home in Krasnodar. The official interrogated me with a tone of bureaucratic suspicion in her voice: Krasnodar? Is that where the Cossacks are?

I felt as if the silver-capped bandoliers were already growing across my chest and replied proudly: Yes, we are the Kuban Cossacks!

The official shrugged: Haven’t you seceded along with the Ukraine? You should really ask the Ukrainians for a new passport.

I stood speechless. Had we really seceded from Russia? Who could know in those crazy days. Did I miss the news? The USSR emigrated from me in my sleep. Barely regaining the ability to speak, I asked meekly if the lady would, please, make sure that the Krasnodar territory was no longer part of Russian Federation. After all, it had been for the last seventy years… She looked at the map on the wall and said apologetically: All right, I am sorry, Krasnodar is still in Russia. It was the Crimea that had separated along with Ukraine. (Ah, the neighbouring province, and another Black Sea resort which for a Muscovite like herself must have all appeared the same.) Then she turned her head to Papitashvili and added: And Yakutia is also still in Russia although they now call it by some different name…

– Sakha! The Republic of Sakha-Yakutia, suggested Papitashvili, and hurriedly added: But my propiska registration is in the city of Moscow.

– Very well then, said the official: A hundred dollars from each of you. Cash or money order only.

– For what?! we cried in unison.

– For the stamp in your passports confirming your Russian citizenship.

– But does one pay to become a Russian in Russia?

At this point she finally burst:

– Look, dear scholars, you are all so smart, but this is not Russia, we are in Washington! And we have to pay for everything. Do you realize how expensive it is to renovate the consulate building? Look, look over there: the ceiling is cracking already over our heads. So, a hundred dollars each, and two standard 4×6 passport photographs. Or go to San Francisco, there the consulate charges 85 dollars.

Papitashvili sighed and reached for his wallet, but I simply did not have a hundred dollars, not even in the bank. The times were indeed desperate. I just scoffed:

– Big deal, Russian citizenship! I will apply for Armenian, because I am a Derlugyan, or Ukrainian because my mom is a Kuban Cossack and I can speak Ukrainian. Or, even better, the newly-appointed Kyrgyzstan ambassador is Rosa Otunbaeva, right? She is also a scholar and wrote her dissertation on the Frankfurt School. Otunbaeva has a stamp, and so far no embassy to renovate. I don’t mind becoming a Kyrgyz sociologist, especially if this comes for free. I just don’t have hundred dollars…

The official stared at me tenderly: Young man, do not attempt anything you might later regret. Russian citizenship is a valuable thing. Allow me a minute.

She went through the doors again, and returned a moment later to announce magnanimously:

– Given your difficult material circumstances, the Consul has consented to granting you the confirmation of Russian citizenship at the older rate of 50 dollars. Cash or money order.

And that is how Papitashvili and I, the children of multi-ethnic Soviet parents, became the new Russian intellectual diaspora working in America. He is still following his satellites and drills holes in the middle of Antarctica, only now he is doing so as the head of the American NSF expedition (a good third of its personnel are former Soviet scientists anyway). And every winter/summer, Papitashvili sends his season’s greetings from almost exactly atop the South Pole.

С НОВЫМ ГОДОМ!  HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Read on: Georgi Derluguian, ‘Recasting Russia’, NLR 12.

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Law Man

There was admittedly something strange about the man. As a young US Marine scanning the rubble of the Reich Chancellery in 1946, he spotted a bronze bust of Hitler which he took back with him to Dallas, idly telling himself he would one day return it to a German museum for safe-keeping, but which rested in a box in his Manhattan apartment for the better part of a century. Psychological speculation in the case of Ramsey Clark, who died this year at 93, is very nearly pointless. How did the Attorney General under Lyndon Johnson – in which capacity he prosecuted the likes of Dr. Spock for protesting the Vietnam War draft ­– become a welcome guest in Hanoi and Tehran, the legal defender of last resort to enemies of the US state, a reliable champion of Palestinians, Kurds, and other stateless peoples; a man who would come to denounce American imperialism with incantatory consistency – who once publicly mourned not being able to procure a copy of Pablo Neruda in Santiago after Pinochet’s coup?

A certain puritanical streak ran in the family. Clark’s Mississippi great-great grandfather was an ersatz southern ‘general’ who owned 67 slaves but did not allow alcohol in the house, except for cooking purposes. Clark’s grandfather was a judge in Dallas who was responsible for uprooting prostitution from the city. His own father, Tom Clark, was a militantly anti-union Attorney General under Truman, who later appointed Clark senior to the Supreme Court. Ramsey Clark’s first taste of a major legal event was as an observer at the Nuremberg tribunals. He had little doubt that they constituted a liberal show trial, but still believed they could become the foundation of a more just world order. In Clark’s view of himself, he was never a fringe character in American politics but rather the bearer of the true cross of American liberalism, the one that had been destined to prevail in the long run, and which his own liberal contemporaries – Robert Kennedy, above all – would have duly taken up if they had only stayed alive.

But Clark was less significant for the road-not-taken he thought he represented than for the function he served in the projection of US power. Not since Roosevelt’s second Vice President, Henry Wallace, who immolated his career in 1946 with a speech denouncing the Cold War in its infancy and who co-founded the still-born Progressive Party, was there such a high-level dissenter from the ranks of the postwar American political establishment. Clark was a driving force for civil rights inside the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. But after his time in office, and failing at two bids for a seat in the US Senate, he joined with many of the radical liberals whom he had formerly had in his prosecutorial sights. By the 1980s and 1990s he was a jack-in-the-box figure on television, who, once the smoke from the bombing had cleared, predictably popped up to defend figures from Slobodan Milošević to Charles Taylor when he was not protesting the illegality of the US invasions of Grenada, Panama, and elsewhere.

Liberal capitalist states have a different way of digesting dissidents than their rival regime-types. When they are low-level soldiers or technicians, prison or execution is the blanket solution as it has been for most communist, socialist, theocratic and monarchic states. But for high-level state defectors, the solution has been to incorporate them as court jesters. In the postwar Communist world, the highest-level defector from a regime was Milovan Djilas, who was second-in-command of Yugoslavia in January 1954, minding the state while Tito was on holiday, when he denounced his own regime in a thinly fictionalized parable. When Tito returned home, a show trial began, with Djilas, his old comrade, in the dock. Belgradians were stunned by the live broadcast of his circular self-defence (‘I did criticize every aspect of the system, but I’m not against the system as a whole!’). After seven years in prison for this ‘hostile propaganda’, Belgrade let him leave for England. Like Clark, Djilas criticized his regime for not living up to its own ideals – post-war Yugoslavia, in his view, instead of building a classless society, had merely manufactured a ‘new class’ of communist elites. Likewise, Clark portrayed America as a country that professed to uphold ‘the rule of law’ at home and ‘rules-based order’ abroad, but was in fact the most lawless actor. For all of the clarity of this insight, however, when it came to his actual understanding of law, Clark was a naturalist in the mould of Martin Luther King. Jr, who believed that there was a higher law that America needed to adhere to, and with which the formal law of the country simply needed to be brought into alignment.   

Clark’s finest and loneliest hour came during George H.W. Bush’s Persian Gulf War. Along with Neil Young (cf. ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’) and the American political left at its historical low watermark, Clark had little trouble detecting the capacity for mass-murder behind the patrician mumble and mountains of thank-you notes. In The Fire This Time: U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf (1992), Clark documented in full detail the carnage of Desert Storm on Iraqi civilians, and called for the president to be impeached on the grounds of having violated the US constitution by going to war without congressional consent, something which Bush had openly boasted about (‘I didn’t have to ask Senator Kennedy, or some liberal Democrat whether we were going to do it. We just did it.’) America could be ‘liberated’ once this justice was meted out. It was almost touching how much Clark expected to be listened to about constitutional niceties amidst the Bush administration’s endless trumpeting about how the US was operating under a heavenly edict from the UN Security Council.

Whatever the extra material incentives behind the Persian Gulf War, the most important motivation was ideological. As Peter Gowan argued in NLR at the time, the rhetoric behind the war neatly captured the migration of US domestic legal language to the international sphere, with the ‘criminal’ Saddam Hussein’s invasion triggering ‘the standard procedures of a police response’. The projection of a depoliticized international arena, with the US simply acting as a custodian of liberal norms, was meant to be the main attraction of Bush’s ‘New World Order’. (Never mind that the opposition to Saddam Hussein inside Iraq was fiercely opposed to any kind of intervention). Clark himself fell prey to some rather under-nourished theories about the war. He believed George H.W. Bush’s administration had intentionally encouraged Saddam to start the conflict in order to claim his oil fields, a highly untenable conclusion considering how little encouragement Saddam required. He widely publicized his desire to revise the Ottoman-Anglo Convention of 1913, which had granted Kuwaiti autonomy in the first place, and his determination to expose the ‘Zionist plot’ of the Kuwaiti Emir, Jaber al-Ahmad al-Sabah, was no secret. (As Wikileaks revealed in 2011, the US Ambassador April Glaspie’s meeting with Saddam in 1990 may have been ambiguous, but she did in fact attempt to get him to nudge away his troops from the Kuwaiti border.) The value of Clark’s account was not what he exaggerated or distorted, but what he didn’t: the mass abuses committed by the Kuwaiti regime which expelled its minority populations during the conflict, the US backing of Saddam and his periodic genocidal adventures until it no longer required his services, the newspeak of ‘smart’ bombing, and the UN-US imposed sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, many of them children.

For his pains, Clark became a favourite horse to beat in the liberal press. Christopher Hitchens declared him a Saddam apologist, and went on to make the perplexing argument that, while Saddam in principle deserved the best possible legal representation, Hitchens himself was personally pleased that such a slapstick figure as Clark had turned up for the job since it would mean the opposite. Norman Podhoretz meanwhile tarred Clark as a nihilist, driven by ‘hatred of the United States and automatic support for anyone opposed to the United States, for any reason whatsoever in any context whatsoever’. Neither of them paused to consider the service he was rendering their war project. Clark did his best to raise the standards of the liberal show trial – and even more grizzly execution of Hussein – to standards that could pass muster of ‘justice having been done’ in wider world opinion. He was hardly the thorn in the side of the Iraq War he was often portrayed to be, but rather an unwitting partner in the projection of US hegemony, who bore the message: ‘See, in America, we have fair trials, and even let our own dissidents defend our state enemies’. Clark did the regime the further favour of treating the project of US hegemony as a kind of episodic phenomenon, to be treated on a case-by-case basis, in a fanatical legalistic fashion that often made it seem as if the demand of formal justice – the sanctity of due process – was somehow independent of other political values.

I saw Clark once in midtown Manhattan, when I was covering a meeting of semi-active Tamil Tigers in the ballroom of the New York Bar Association. The two dozen men and women who showed up visibly sagged with a sense of duty. A photo of Prabhakaran rested between engravings of Lincoln and Chester Arthur. After a few words from Visvanathan Rudrakumaran, the Prime Minister of the Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam, Clark strut into the room and delivered a short speech while standing under the LTTE flag emblazoned with crisscrossed AK-47s. He misattributed some banalities about world peace to Wallace Stevens and seemed to have gotten the landscape of Jaffna mixed up with that of Kurdistan. It felt like he was performing a ritual blessing, like one of Tolstoy’s hermit monks, an image only undercut by his this-worldly beardlessness. The moral fervour was undiminished. His death was barely noticed on the major networks. The New York Times obituary was long and dull. They could at least have honoured him for the legal propriety he tried to inject into American savagery abroad.

Read on: Peter Gowan, ‘The Gulf War, Iraq and Western Liberalism’, NLR I/187.

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Fragments of Revolution

In the tattered remains of a Punjabi literary magazine, I chance upon a faded black-and-white photograph. A Sikh man stands between a newly married Sikh couple, holding a book in each hand. His bearded face is scratched beyond recognition. The bride stares solemnly into the camera, while the groom – clean-shaven face creased in half – angles away, perhaps for another camera. ‘Comrade Buggar Singh,’ the caption announces, ‘is handing out a new form of dowry to the couple’. It is two novels in Punjabi translation, Mother by Maxim Gorky and The Hurricane by Chou Li-Po. The photograph dates to the political tumult of the 1970s, when Mao-inspired Naxalite insurrections burned through large swathes of agrarian India. ‘Looks like the Sino-Soviet split never transpired for the villagers in Punjab’, I say as I turn the photograph towards Bant Singh, a peasant who had held on to this fragment despite the threat of police violence. At the time, the discovery of small magazines in a raid was tantamount to the discovery of illegal arms. But fifty years later, the elderly comrade can recall neither this dowry ritual nor the name of the magazine. Still, he grins widely. The irony is not lost on him.

The Sino-Soviet split, compounded by the Indo-China war in 1962, played a key role in splintering the Communist Party of India. In 1964, the breakaway CPI (Marxist) was formed, swiftly followed by the defection of a Maoist contingent that organized the Naxalbari insurrection of 1967 and formed the CPI (Marxist-Leninist) in 1969. The latter judged that India was a semi-feudal and semi-colonial state, and that guerrilla warfare was the only revolutionary response. The Naxalite theses and tactics seemed especially incongruous in Punjab. Newly integrated into the Green Revolution, the Punjabi villages teemed with tractors, tubewells, fertilizers, seed farms and credit cooperatives. Attempts to import Maoist tactics into this capital-intensive landscape triggered even more splinters in the communist ranks, while the targeted killings of landlords and policemen offered little effective opposition to the structural violence of the new regime, orchestrated by US state agencies and subsidized by the Congress government. When he finally spoke, Bant’s voice was a distant murmur. ‘Every public meeting would start with cries of Workers of the world unite! But why didn’t the parties ever start by uniting themselves?’

Maoism however still managed to seep into Punjab’s cultural life in several exhilarating, often erratic, ways. Numerous small and underground magazines sprang up in this period, disseminating homespun cultural revolution across the countryside. Many were outlawed and destroyed by police. Today only fragments of them survive, scattered across obscure rural locations, often still shrouded in secrecy. After weeks of inquiries, I had finally arrived in Dhilwan, a village of roughly 500 houses located in Punjab’s Malwa belt, today afflicted by the Indian agrarian crisis. Here the springtime of the Green Revolution – premised on high rates of mechanization and productivity – has long transitioned into an autumn of endemic landlessness and peasant suicides. Bant had waited for me all day under the slow churn of the ceiling fan on his veranda, a flimsy plastic bag by his side containing archival remains of an armed revolt that had failed to transition into the promised revolution.

Along with communist biographies and party programs, the bag also contained two stapled copies of Rohley Baan (Raging Arrows) from the mid-1970s, their yellowed paper so brittle that I could scarcely pry them open. The magazine was published by the Punjab-Himachal state committee of the CPI (M-L), a splinter group that attempted to turn the neighbouring Himalayan foothills into a guerrilla base. The title is a homage to the arrows fired during the Naxalbari insurrection, but the cover features neither those Bengali insurrectionaries nor Mao himself. Instead, a red icon of the tenth Sikh guru, Gobind Singh (1666-1708), adorns the front. Famous for waging war against the oppressive Mughal administration, Guru Gobind is depicted in full regalia, wearing a heron plume in his turban and a quiver on his shoulder, holding a quill in one hand while a hawk perches on the other.

In the crumbling heap of stapled paper, I also discovered a stray photograph of Krupskaya – likely torn and saved from Lenin’s biography. Bant’s jagged annotation in Gurumukhi read, ‘Lenin di patni’ (Lenin’s wife). Stuck to the back of Krupskaya’s photograph, there were two crinkled passport-sized photographs. When I enquired about the identity of this other woman, Bant strained at the tiny face, then glowered at me. Half-jokingly, he replied that I should have the civility not to broach this in front of his son. A few minutes later, he gently deposited the two photographs in the left pocket of his shirt. I returned the famed Bolshevik into the company of her unlikely comrades. Spread out on the plastic table, Bant’s archive resembled a jigsaw puzzle, but the edges of these pieces had long frayed beyond repair. One no longer understood how they fitted together.

***

After hours of torrential rain, a steady stream of peasants, activists and writers begin trickling into the small farm in Talwandi Salem, an obscure village in the Doaba belt. It is the birthday of Avtar Singh ‘Pash,’ the prolific revolutionary poet who came to prominence in the early 1970s. Pash was the editor of Siarh (Furrow), an iconic Maoist literary magazine. In its pages, one finds anti-imperialist boliyan (a folk musical form) next to assessments of Maoist land reforms; an interview with a local Dalit labourer alongside a marsiya (an elegiac poem that commemorates the martyrs of the Karbala) dedicated to Salvador Allende. In the mid-1980s, when militants leading the charge for Khalistan – a separate Sikh state – threatened to kill Pash, he fled to California, where, working illegally at a petrol pump, he started another magazine, Anti-47 – handwritten and distributed to diaspora as far flung as Norway and England.

In recent years, Pash’s farm and its tubewell have become totems for the Punjabi left. In the 1970s the Naxalites held numerous secret meetings here, while in a basement dug nearby, Pash assembled a makeshift library, festooned with photographs of Mao, Bhagat Singh and Ho Chi Minh. It was also here that Pash was killed in 1988, aged 38 – like many of his comrades, by Khalistanis. ‘It was a cold March morning. He was sharing a cigarette with a friend near this tubewell’, Sant Sandhu, poet and Pash’s neighbour, whispers into my ear. In 1970, Sandhu had smuggled out Pash’s first poems from prison to be published as his first book, Loh Katha (Iron Tale). ‘Two Khalistani militants ambushed them, shooting several rounds into their backs. Pash died crawling under this mango tree’. Someone passes me hot jalebis and a cup of tea, as members of the Punjab Khet Mazdoor Union (a union of landless labourers, predominantly Dalits) unfurl the gleaming sickles on their red flags. ‘Now, we stand here in his place’.

Surinder Kumari Kochhar, a 78-year-old veteran, holds tea in one hand and a PKMU flag in the other. In the late 1960s, she published the first periodical of Punjabi Maoism, Lok Yudh (People’s War), edited by her father, Gandharva Sen, a communist stalwart who had previously been on the frontlines of the anticolonial struggle. It was an underground magazine – its press hidden in a manhole dug at the centre of an orchard. Surinder worked the press all night, and in the early hours young Naxalites would come to pick up fresh copies and then transport them across the region. Many of them would be later tortured and killed by the police. She grows wistful, but suddenly remembers the buzzer installed in the manhole to warn in case of a raid. ‘At night, if you put your ear close to the ground, you could hear me moving the rollers’. As the light began to fade, I could hear only the rickety buzz of a tubewell – enduring emblem of US neo-colonial aid – that now serves as a makeshift memorial to a revolutionary poet.

***

In 1972, the short story writer Gurvel Pannu founded Sedh, a Punjabi journal of Marxist theory and culture. The first issues included engagements with the writings of Sikh gurus, Roland Barthes (an entire issue was dedicated him), medieval Sufi thinkers, Eric Fromm, contemporary Naxalite poets, Charles Bettelheim amongst many others. In a series of landmark essays, the literary critic Kishan Singh warned against the wholesale embrace of Leninism, and instead suggested that Marxism in Punjab must discover its own ‘local roots’. His celebration of Gurbani (compositions in the Sikh religious scripture Guru Granth Sahib) as a counterpoint to Marxist-Leninism provoked heated debate. Gurcharan Sehensra, historian of the old guard, responded to Singh’s call for provincializing Europe with characteristic irreverence: ‘When the Punjabi bourgeoisie can find inspiration in the Western regime of the Green Revolution, why can’t the Punjabi workers find strength in the tradition inaugurated by the Paris Commune?’

In these literary magazines, discussions around universal history and difference played out with great intensity. In Hem Jyoti – a monthly so popular that booksellers used to hoard and sell its copies at marked-up prices – translations of Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Jean-Paul Sartre and George Jackson, were published alongside work by emerging Punjabi writers; assessments of the Moscow Writers’ Conference and the Afro-Asian Conference in between local accounts of literary seminars taking place in Punjab. The integration of Punjabi villages into the global regime of the Green Revolution was accompanied by a growing desire to imagine a literary world-system anchored in the peripheral experiences of Punjabi peasants and guerrillas. In the postcolonial mainstream, such experiments were widely censured. The 1972 issue of Indian Literature, the journal of the state-sponsored National Academy of Letters, famously criticized the ‘invasion’ of Naxalite poets, lamenting, in particular, the ‘sudden’ capitulation of Hem Jyoti to Maoism. ‘No amount of Maoist ideology (can) act as an alibi for a creative vision’ concluded the official indictment.

The sentiment prevails to this day. The intimacy between literary experiment, critique of political economy, and political agitation still confounds contemporary critics, who tend to dismiss it with accusations of crudity and propaganda, showing little interest in either recovering this history or taking stock of its afterlife. To borrow a phrase from Michael Löwy, the cultural memory of Punjabi Maoism continues to flow like an ‘invisible underground river’, silently irrigating Punjab’s social world. On occasion, its currents can still rise to the surface and flood the land. Over the past year, hundreds of thousands of farmers and farmworkers in Punjab and elsewhere blocked railways and roads, overran barricades and borders, and erected blockades around the national capital. Long into the night, troupes of Punjabi women across these blockades were seen singing poems by their Maoist forebears, including Pash. Last month, the BJP-led government finally conceded defeat, and agreed to repeal the controversial farm laws. The Bhartiya Kisan Union (Ugrahan), a left-leaning Punjabi organization, marked the anniversary of the blockades by paying tribute to those who have died in the struggle. During the two-minute silence, a song by the Dalit Naxailite Sant Ram Udasi reverberated from the stage.

***

Pulling up a piece of cloth tied behind his turban, Dilbagh Singh bellowed: ‘It is true that people are dying. It’s a disease, after all.’ After a short pause, he added, ‘But you know, sorrow does not stem only from Covid-19. We are now sad all the time.’ ‘And why is that?’ I shifted in the backseat of the Uber, curious to find out. ‘It’s because we have completely lost touch with the world of literature.’ I slipped the tangled headphones back into my shirt’s pocket. ‘So what kind of books do you like to read?’ Navigating a hairpin bend, Dilbagh answered, ‘Lal Singh Dil is my favourite, so is Pash’. I was struck by the uncanny pairing. Marginal and monumental in equal measure, the two poets are rarely discussed together. Dil, a landless Dalit poet, was betrayed by his upper-caste Jat comrades during a guerrilla action. After months of brutal police torture, he fled Punjab, converted to Islam and spent the next decades working as a watchman, a domestic servant, an imam, and a herdsman in several other states. Six years after Pash was killed, Dil was discovered running a ramshackle tea shop near his native village.

‘And what about Amarjit Chandan?’ I prodded Dilbagh to complete the trinity of Punjabi Naxalites. ‘I have heard his name but have never got around to reading him’. Born in Nairobi in 1946, Chandan inaugurated the Maoist tradition of underground literature in Punjab. But when the movement faltered, he fled to Frankfurt and then to London. His dispatches for Economic and Political Weekly ended abruptly – the final article reported on the infamous 1981 racist arson attack at New Cross Road, Deptford – and he later broke with Maoism. In 1994, Chandan re-surfaced with typical panache, when a letter containing his new poems arrived at John Berger’s alpine home in Quincy in the midst of a nationwide French postal strike. The resulting friendship with Berger catalysed Chandan’s emergence as a poet, essayist and translator. His severe criticism of the Naxalites – at the Karachi Literary Festival 2018, he again described them as ‘individual terrorists’ – perhaps explains his relative obscurity in a literary world that bears his imprint.

‘What are you reading these days?’ Dilbagh changed gears and wrested control of the conversation. ‘A novel by Jaswant Kanwal.’ ‘Which one?’ Dilbagh seemed visibly excited. ‘Raat Baaki Hai.’ Reflexively turning around in his seat, Dilbagh let out a rapturous cry, ‘Waah! Kya baat hai!’, the kind of reaction reserved for poets when they recite a particularly moving couplet. I scrambled to echo his adulation, ‘Bilkul, bilkul!’ (Sure, sure!). At one point, Kanwal’s 1957 novel The Night Remains – a literary chronicle of the Muzara Lehar, the sharecroppers’ movement for land redistribution – was so popular that excerpts would be read out on loudspeakers in the villages. The book precedes his more famous saga of Punjabi Maoism, Lahu Di Lo (The Dawn of Blood), published in Singapore and smuggled into India in 1975. By the time Dilbagh turned back to face the road, the car, already out of control, pushed headlong towards a concrete divider in the highway. As Dilbagh swerved, we ended up missing a crucial right turn onto the flyover, the first of four we missed that day.

Read on: Kheya Bag, ‘Red Flags in the Forest’, NLR 118.

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In Buffalo

Eugene V. Debs Hall, Buffalo. Photograph author’s own.

Socialism is a story on the streets of the twenty-first century city. A lot depends on the teller. There was a mayor’s race here on November 2. One of the candidates called herself ‘a proud socialist’, a ‘democratic socialist’. Her opponents called her a ‘radical leftist’ and ‘dangerous’. An editorial cartoon in the daily newspaper in June, shortly after she upset the four-term incumbent mayor of this Democratic city in the Democratic Party primary, depicted her benevolently extending City Hall to a throng of outstretched arms. By October, the incumbent having decided to run a write-in campaign premised on the unique peril posed by this upstart, the newspaper decided that it too found her a ‘threat’. She is four feet eleven inches tall. In her pitch to voters, socialism amounted to advocating an economy and society that worked for everyone; she seldom used the term. Leftish commentators nationally rhapsodized about socialism taking the reins of power in Buffalo, and got almost everything wrong. The Erie County Democratic Party chair said talk of radicalism was ridiculous: ‘she sounds like FDR’. ‘Write-In’ came out ahead on November 2, an indistinguishable heap that didn’t officially return the incumbent mayor to City Hall until late November, once his votes were separated out from those for Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, the Buffalo Bills’ quarterback and a few candidates who also ran as write-ins, though mostly invisibly. Election night returns were robust enough, though, to relieve some contributors to the newspaper’s letters section that Buffalo had been spared from becoming North Korea on Lake Erie.

Words are pesky when they have no agreed-upon meaning.

Young woman waiting for the bus: ‘Socialism? I heard that word back in school, in history class, but …  I can’t remember.’

Young man waiting for the bus: ‘I know exactly what it means. To be sociable, you know, just socializing, talking with people, over the internet, just everywhere, everywhere.’

Old man getting on the bus: ‘I wish you’d asked me first. [gruffly] I’ll tell you: Joe Biden.’

***

Socialism is a history in fragments in a fragmented city. Walking distance from my natal home there is an empty lot. There are many, actually, but 1644 Genesee Street, next to Ike and BG’s BBQ and across from Island Food Mart, a bodega defenced by door and window grates, once denoted the East Side Labor Lyceum. The building is said to have survived until 1991, though I don’t remember it. A stone’s throw away, a small but handsome brick structure where I checked out books as a girl has not been a library for decades, but the central library downtown yielded a few details. A Sanborn map from 1939 is allusive: a deep, narrow building; a ‘Hall’ on the second floor. A squib from the Buffalo Courier in 1915 announces that the lyceum’s cornerstone would be laid on April 11 of that year, a Sunday. ‘Preceding the ceremony there will be a parade of children and men and women interested in the project.’ A ‘Socialist organizer of Buffalo’ got top billing among the speakers, who also included a Presbyterian clergyman and Mrs. Frank J. Shuler, representative of the Woman Suffrage party. A reminiscence in the Courier Express from 1950 mentions ‘the old time Socialist soapboxes … They used to hold forth regularly, orating from improvised stands at Main and Mohawk, Main and Genesee and other points throughout the city’. The card catalogue in the local history reference room discloses little more, but the librarian found regular announcements of meetings, socialist lectures and card parties at the East Side Labor Lyceum while scrolling through a news database. A dissertation on the role of interior spaces in the formation of working-class consciousness reports that Buffalo had a kind of floating lyceum, a regular lecture series or salon under various roofs, as early as 1904. A sentence in a Daily Worker story from 1924 mentions a Labor Lyceum in another part of the city’s East Side, this one at 376 William Street, near Jefferson, the commercial drag of black Buffalo by the time of my youth. That address today is also an empty lot.

Nothing marks the radical past. Labor Lyceums, typically the undertakings of socialist German immigrants, replaced saloons as primary spaces for union meetings, educational events and working-class entertainments in many industrial cities around the US in the early twentieth century, but I hadn’t thought about their existence in Buffalo until I stepped into a saloon, sort of – the Eugene V. Debs Hall, a former Polish bar, beautifully restored last year and, once the state approves its liquor license, one of two taverns that remain in an East Side neighbourhood that used to be thick with them. People, some my relatives, once crowded the streets of this area; wildlife is common now. A deer loped across the street toward my car the night I visited the Debs Hall to talk with its founder and principal manager, Chris Hawley. The flock of wild turkeys that also frequent the neighbourhood must have been sleeping or shy.

Hawley is a senior planner for the City of Buffalo. He lives in the back of the tavern with a cat named Sputnik, whom he rescued from certain death on the street, and bikes to City Hall, fifteen minutes away. As an avocation he researches the histories that have been erased in what, in so many other ways, is a landscape of memory. Ten years ago, thousands of preservationists from across the country gathered for a conference in Buffalo, marvelling at the works of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, at the daylight factories and grain elevators that had inspired Le Corbusier but, even in those cases, abstracting the architecture from the lives that had built and animated it. Hawley wasn’t in his present job at the time. He was born here forty years ago, into a family that, on one side, traces its early twentieth century heritage to skilled work and upward mobility from the beginnings of the once-gargantuan Bethlehem Steel works; and that, on the other side, preserved the silences of a working class left to fend for itself – the railroad worker killed on the job, his widow with eleven children, the rough boarders to whom she’d rent out the children’s beds, the violence of everyday life. Hawley’s parents were part of the migration out of Western New York to the Sun Belt. He began unearthing labour histories when he moved to Buffalo after university, piecing together the shards of experience that help decipher a project like the Eugene V. Debs Hall today.

Workers associations were numerous when the building was erected in the Broadway/Fillmore district not far from the city’s vast railyard and stockyards in 1899. It was always a bar, and because, according to a 1901 report by Temperance advocates, all but six of Buffalo’s sixty-nine labour organizations met in saloons or halls connected to saloons, it’s possible that the proprietors of this place augmented their income by renting space to unions. In any event – even allowing for the contradictions of the saloon as a male space, a white ethnic (here specifically Polish) space, a drinking and so potentially disabling space – the bar would have been a communal hearth, locus for workers to forge bonds against the fragmenting processes of industrial capitalism. Especially once it was spruced up in 1914, it likely played the social role of so many taverns, as a site for small wedding parties or funeral repasts, christening fetes and other celebrations. By then, Hawley says, ‘Buffalo was a hotbed of the Socialist Party. Debs had come here in 1898 to form the first local. There were twelve locals in the city, several in the outlying towns; mainly they met in taverns or other halls.’ The East Side Labor Lyceum was a step up, built by the Socialist Party specifically for socialists. He has a picture of its drum corps, a cartoon from 1917 of ‘The Regular Meeting of the Branch’, a reproduction of its mission statement: ‘Dedicated to intellectual advancement of working people and to prepare them for the abolishment of the system of exploitation and profit.’

Graduate student, political philosophy, 30-ish [coolly]: ‘Socialism is the first stage of state control of all means of production and distribution. It’s command central … Socialists are communists.’

Firefighter, middle-aged: ‘Socialism is the practice – the practice – of equality.’

***

Whatever else it was, the recent mayor’s race was a public confrontation with inequality. The dominant boosterist story of contemporary Buffalo is abbreviated as ‘Renaissance’. In the miserablist press the story is typically abbreviated ‘disaster’. Neither suits the whole.

Deer are not wandering everywhere in the city, and even where they tread, the grassy plots represent progress from the thousands of firetraps, shooting galleries and condemned hulks that a working class stripped of its livelihood – by the collapse of steel and then domino-like deindustrialization – had once called home. Buffalo’s population was 532,759 in 1960; it is now 278,349, a bit higher than in 1890. The latest census reflects an uptick, driven most dramatically by new migrants. On the East Side, which for decades has been predominantly black with a Polish remnant, the newcomers include at least 10,000 (possibly 20,000) Bangladeshis, many who fled the high costs of New York City and then encouraged relatives from the old country to join them, transforming some abandoned Catholic churches into mosques and community centers. Not far from the Debs Hall, a Spanish-speaking enclave has taken root, climate refugees from Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Rita. The bones of the walkable city have not been obliterated. Housing is typically two-story, two-family wood-frame residences, ‘the Buffalo double’ in the vernacular, like my grandfather built a bit farther east in 1924; or the lower profile, extended ‘telescope cottage’. Until the pandemic-fueled real estate price boom, a house could be had here for $25,000 to $50,000, often less. Residential lots tend to be long and narrow, and as in every poor urban district I know, what people call ‘good blocks’ might be a cross-walk away from blight; ‘good houses’, alongside vacant or tumble-down properties; side streets intact with contiguous houses whose owners are trying, bracketed on each end by broad stretches of near-nothingness – the radial commercial streets that lead downtown and are mute testimony that for sixteen years the city’s first black mayor, incumbent Byron Brown, has not tried very hard for what is considered the black side of town.

Supporters of his challenger, India Walton, pointed out that the mayor’s enthusiasm for bulldozing vacant buildings was excessive (his five-year plan of ‘a thousand a year’ ultimately totaled 8,000); in any case, it had no second act beyond some incongruous suburban-style housing here and there. The city’s poverty rate – about 30 percent, persistent across his tenure – is most starkly visible on the East Side (though hardly unique to it). Among black city residents the rate is 35 percent, three points higher than their rate of home ownership. A stinging report by the University of Buffalo’s Center for Urban Studies comparing the state of black Buffalo in 1990 and the present, called ‘The Harder We Run’, concludes: ‘Everything changed, but everything remained the same.’ For some of us crossing town on broken pavement or riding laggardly buses, low-boil rage is a familiar emotion.

And yet, and yet …

Man in a wheelchair, on disability, in front of his group home off Broadway: ‘I don’t know about socialism, but I think the mayor’s done a good job. You look at the Medical Campus, it’s beautiful. Look at the waterfront, it’s beautiful.’

Retired housing cop, East Side homeowner: ‘I’ve got nothing against India Walton or her campaign. I’m for the mayor for three reasons: affirmative action (I remember what the police department was like before, okay?); property values (I bought my house fifteen years ago for $30,000, someone offered me $170,000 the other day, that’s $140,000 of wealth); and the waterfront (I mean, it’s beautiful).’

Less than two miles from the Debs Hall, the university’s Medical Campus and the expansion of hospitals and other medical facilities have generated jobs, optimism and angry battles over displacement and disrespect in the nearest, largely black residential community. On Main Street and its downtown environs, long-abandoned hotels, department stores and office buildings have been repurposed or are in the process, with apartments priced and designed mainly to attract a niche public: empty-nesters sick of their suburban baggage, young professionals attracted to the city’s craft beer and arts scene, medical workers and students, a few pro football players, notable because they’ve long been associated with suburban residency. The transformation is by turns welcome and aggravating: welcome because no one yearns for the time when a plastic bag blowing across Main Street could symbolize downtown; aggravating because of the revivalists’ apparent contentment with the clichés of inequity. Years of official rhetoric notwithstanding, there remains the reality of the child growing up in a landscape of destitution, crossing over to one of increasing plenty. Farther west on the lakefront, the Canal district offers the city a glimpse of its long-obscured Erie Canal history along with myriad pass-times. The Outer Harbor is for now a relatively unspoiled stretch of nature trails, parkland, marina and beach where on any given summer weekend Buffalo shows up in rainbow streaks: women in plaid shirts and cutoffs towing boats from the water, latin families grilling skirt steak, mixed couples kissing, black elders watching the sun set from folding chairs, women swathed in black reclining under trees with their children.

All of this development has been accomplished with public money on what in large part was or is public land. ‘Socialism for the rich’, Walton’s supporters sometimes said breezily. The bon mot is inadequate when socialism for everyone is ill defined; it seemed especially counterproductive here, given its note of derision in a political context where ‘socialism’ was deployed most often only to deride.

What the phrase discounted, grievously, was not only the full experience of people and place but also the shape-shifting emotional aspect of urban life, the feeling for the city, which doesn’t resolve the contradiction represented by the man in the wheelchair exalting the nice new things while foot-padding along a street deprived of any of them, but does help explain it. ‘I’m Josh’, he said twice to be sure I remembered his name. His friend Marcus was more critical of the incumbent mayor but similarly admiring of the waterfront. What their expressed pride tacitly acknowledged was a sense of ownership: the lake as ‘the wealth of the people’, in Chris Hawley’s phrase, once befouled, effectively privatized by steelworks, now recovered as a zone of pleasure.

Disconcertingly, this store of collective wealth did not figure much in anyone’s electioneering – even though grass-roots action had been critical in determining the shape of the waterfront’s recovery as a public asset; and developers, who’ve already taken their bites, are perched to take more and ruin it.

Kelly, campaign volunteer for Brown, middle-aged: ‘A free for all, that’s what I think when I hear the word, just unrealistic … I think some of it is very fair, like universal health care. But it’s undefined; I think enough people when they use the word don’t know what they’re talking about, including me.’

***

A column inch in the Buffalo Morning Express for November 6, 1919, reports that in the steel company town of Lackawanna, just south of the city line, the Socialist ticket’s candidate scored a surprise victory as mayor amidst heavy repression against striking steel workers; his first order of business, ‘re-establish free speech’. Until India Walton’s surprise primary victory, no one remembered John H. Gibbons. Few know anything about Anna Reinstein, whose name graces another library I used as a child, in a town just east of the city line – Anna, a Polish Jew, politically radical, a doctor who came to Buffalo in 1891 and began practicing gynaecology. When she was honoured in 1941 by the Erie County Medical Society for fifty years of practice, a local paper noted: ‘Incidentally, she is the wife of Boris Reinstein, a former Buffalo druggist, now a commissar in Russia.’ Chris Hawley has a photograph of Boris seated at Lenin’s elbow. ‘Incidentally’ is a nice touch. Boris left Buffalo to serve the revolution in 1917, and never returned. Anna was a member of Buffalo’s Communist Party when she was arrested with forty-two other party members in an anti-Red roundup in 1920. When, at the same time, eighty-three mostly immigrant alleged anarchists were arrested on the East Side and in surrounding towns, a left-wing paper ridiculed them for ‘phrase-radicalism’. Confusion about aims and definitions, an undisciplined language, only encouraged a crackdown, it argued. Clarity would unlikely have deterred police raids. The first Red Scare … The second Red Scare … Decoupling words from meaning is a tactic and legacy of hysteria. Anna and Boris’s children climbed the social ladder, the son buying up land and getting into development; they secured her name on the library, but sealed the archive of her letters and papers, which became available only in the 1990s.

Socialism, in the deceptively mystic serenity of the Eugene V. Debs Hall’s setting, is a reclamation project. Of place, first, and, with it, confidence in the neighbourhood’s future; of social bonds, frayed by post-industrial fragmenting processes; of local labour history for workers largely unmoored from it. The professed goal is to make a social space, a political and cultural space. In conviviality – the exchange of knowledge, the appreciation of experience, the practice of economic cooperation and mutual aid – the class might see itself, and begin to act for itself if only, as a start, through that act of seeing. Much depends on who will be seeing whom, and how.

The hall itself has a spare elegance. A high tin ceiling, a leaded glass transom across big front windows hand-painted with the hall’s name and Debsian red banner, the original dark-panelled wainscoting, the original patinaed bar and tables, a refinished floor which Hawley and friends uncovered from beneath layers of asbestos tile whose evidence is burned into a diamond pattern on the wood, the ghost of ages of spilled beer and dirty mop water seeping through the seams. Above the barback mirror a photograph of Debs is flanked by small black busts of FDR and Marx. Atop the gleaming Art Moderne cash register, a purely decorative effect, sits an unassuming cast iron bust of Debs in his prison clothes.

Try not to get nostalgic, I thought. Balancing past and present is a delicate business, not unique in a city where memory has been a balm against so much loss. ‘Sentimentality is the only reason we exist as a city’, Hawley says. ‘There’s no reason it’s survived except that people love the place.’ That is simultaneously true and not. Love may be a bet on the future, but all bets are not equal.

This part of the East Side, where some people clawed to stay alive and others settled because property was a bargain, is now an area ‘in transition’ because others volunteered to save one remarkable architectural landmark – the Central Terminal, whose 1929 Art Deco tower looms above the grassy flats – and still others have drawn up a redevelopment plan around it. After decades in the dark, the tower now lights up the night sky in dramatic colours. The plan for creating a Civic Commons around it strikes all the right notes until you get to the word ‘destination’. If history is a guide, the commons will be contested. Ironically, but that feels like the wrong word, in his official capacity Chris Hawley authored a new rezoning plan for the city that does not have inclusionary mandates for affordable housing. That was supposed to be worked out by the mayor, he says. ‘Development without displacement’, the cry of poor and working-class residents everywhere, may well be raised within shouting distance of the Debs Hall. Stripped of its disguise as a mark of shame, vacant land is also the wealth of the people.

Alexandria, activist, 19, immigrant from southern Sudan: ‘You know the African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child”; socialism means this to me. Buffalo is the child, and the people are the village who must raise it.’

***

Formally, the Debs Hall is a social club. Unlike taverns, Hawley discovered, non-profit social halls tend to survive their founders; he and the 250 founding members – who each contributed $250 to buy the property and, for that, get $1 off beer for life – take the long view. Membership is $10, ‘open to anyone who has an interest in the labour history of Buffalo or the United States’. There is no political litmus test. Hawley is a member of Democratic Socialists of America, as is India Walton – the plainest explanation for how socialism entered the discourse this political season. An outside wall of the building bears her portrait. (As the only member of city administration who’d backed her publicly, Hawley figured his support ought to be big so that if he were fired that would be big too.) The local DSA chapter meets there, as have the Buffalo Lighthouse Association and neighbourhood koi pond enthusiasts. Any community-based organization can book the hall for free. Walton’s canvassers converged there during the campaign. Volunteer bartenders encourage their networks to come out. Hawley has made presentations around the city about labour history and the hall to groups as obscure as the Greater Western New York Bottle Collectors Association. It is, he says, an explicitly socialist hall (the Connolly Forum in Troy, NY, may be the country’s only other) ‘because the ideas are still relevant … how to empower everyday working people to better their lives collectively.’ But ‘if you look at the old socialist halls, they weren’t sitting around all the time talking about socialism; they were interested in whatever the working class was interested in’.

Segregation, and not just by colour, splinters the nominative singular. It always has. The Walton campaign lost the election (out of inflated fears of socialism, ‘defund the police’ and inexperience), but in spotlighting poverty, land use and uneven development it succeeded in organizing a coalition that crossed barriers of colour, ethnicity, age, income, geography, education, national origin. It did not juice turnout on the East Side or ‘win the working class’, as some have reported, unless one wants to write out most of the city’s unions and all of Brown’s working-class voters, including the firefighters, police and other city workers in historically Irish South Buffalo, which powered his victory. But it felt like something new, as if the ground might be shifting. The Debs Hall is in a majority-white slice of a district that, overall, is 48 percent Asian (mainly Bangladeshi), 24 percent black, 8 percent latin and 13 percent white. Walton lost the district by about 650 votes. Almost 17 percent of the people in that white slice are officially poor, and as in the rest of the district, and the East Side, and the city, or anywhere actually, what it means to be poor is as open for political redefinition as what it means to be a socialist or even working class.

Back when John Gibbons became the region’s first and only Socialist mayor, to be a steel worker meant all the things it means to be poor today: to live always on edge and to die young, your housing substandard, the rent too high for your income, your education inadequate, your psychic and physical environment unhealthy. At the time of the great strike of 1919, steel work meant compulsory twenty-four hour shifts every other day. Organized labourers changed what it meant to be a worker by challenging and ultimately changing factory conditions. Henry Louis Taylor of UB’s Center for Urban Studies argues that the point of attack now is the set of ‘conditions that make some neighbourhoods the factories that produce low-wage workers’: change the conditions and so too what it means to be poor.

People tend not to recognize that workers died to change their conditions, died to ‘bring you the weekend’, as an old union slogan once put it. Maybe because work still leaves them poor, running behind, or because it’s absurd to think ‘dying for the weekend’ might ever have been meant literally. Maybe because, as for so many in this region who are linked by ancestry to vanished industry, death was normalized but collective struggle was not. My father’s father, who built the house not so far from the Labor Lyceum, was a railroad machinist: his lungs gave out in early middle age; his daughter died at 4 of diphtheria; a son was stillborn. I grew up with pictures of the dead, knowing my father assumed responsibility for the family at 17; it didn’t seem weird. My grandmother seemed happy. I think she was: my father became a tool and die maker and didn’t die young, and nor did his wife or his children, and nor did my grandmother, who was never alone. No one talked about historical context.

A century after the heyday of Labor Lyceums, socialism is fetishized, like democracy. As words, like any other, even the most abstract – ‘God’ comes to mind – they are animated only in practice, experience. It would be interesting to observe an election that prompted discussion about democracy. In Buffalo the incumbent mayor, so intimate with cronyism, might have had a problem with that one.

Hawley often begins telling people about Debs the man by saying he was imprisoned in 1920 for giving an anti-war speech and ran for president from behind bars. He begins telling about the Debs project’s first labour history memorial with the story of Casimer Mazurek, a 26-year-old decorated World War I veteran shot to death when Lackawanna Steel guards opened fire on 5,000 men, women and children on a picket line in the opening days of the great steel strike. In both cases, he reports, listeners are amazed. The many whose family histories intersect in some way with steel often know almost nothing beyond that convergence. A plaque, sponsored by the Debs Hall and the Area Labor Federation, sits propped against a wall in the tavern, awaiting deployment. When it is finally erected to commemorate the violence, the failed strike, and the success, twenty-two years later, of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee at Bethlehem Steel, it will be the first public historic marker to recognize the labour history of Western New York.

Lola, university student, political science/pre-law, 19, at a picket line of striking hospital workers: ‘Socialism? It means you’re for the people.’

Jackie, her mother, gift shop manager: ‘I think the word, … I think it’s evolving.’

Read on: JoAnn Wypijewski, ‘Politics of Insecurity’, NLR 103.