Author: Simon Hammond

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Smarter Empire

In June 2019, candidate Joe Biden pledged to wealthy donors that ‘nothing would fundamentally change’ once he was elected. In Latin America at least, he is keeping that promise. The evidence so far suggests a continuity of policy objectives: promoting corporate profits, minimizing migration, maintaining alliances with repressive right-wing governments and marginalizing the left. But the Biden team intends to avoid the excesses of his predecessor, seen as ‘counterproductive’ in ruling circles.

The roster of appointees suggests a strong affinity with both the Clinton and Obama administrations. Most have passed through the revolving door once or twice, as their official bios and company websites boast. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s resume includes top roles in Washington and at private equity firm Pine Island Capital Partners. Roberta Jacobson, the National Security Council’s new ‘coordinator for the southwestern border’, worked in Obama’s State Department before joining consulting firm Albright Stonebridge Group, where she helped corporations reach ‘new target markets’. Juan González, the pick for Senior Director for the Western Hemisphere at the NSC, also served in the Obama administration before being hired by the Cohen Group, where he helped to ‘accomplish client business objectives’ in Latin America. The choice for Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, career diplomat Brian Nichols, has three decades of experience strengthening US ties with right-wing governments and ‘defending the rights of American investors’ in Peru, El Salvador, Mexico, Haiti and Colombia.

The public statements of these recent appointees give a flavour of the administration’s stance. Jacobson has praised NAFTA and expressed her relief that Trump’s NAFTA 2.0 preserves most of the original. González has meanwhile touted Biden’s pivotal role in the Clinton administration’s Plan Colombia, the programme that ultimately funnelled $7.5 billion to a regime dominated by far-right death-squads, bankrolling an assault on political opponents and human rights advocates. Thousands of civilians – and counting – were murdered as a result. (‘I was one of the architects of Plan Colombia’, Biden boasted to CNN in 2019.) He has also talked up the President’s support for pro-corporate deregulatory schemes like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, his commitment to the Pacific Alliance of rightist governments, and his past efforts at ‘increased border enforcement’ in the region.

In keeping with that record, Biden’s repudiation of Trump-era immigration policies has been much more limited than media fanfare would suggest. As Felipe De La Hoz has noted, while the executive orders on inauguration day ‘looked sweeping on the surface’, they actually kept in place many of the Trump administration’s ‘most consequential restrictions’. As a result, ‘immigrating to the United States from abroad remains functionally prohibited, and asylum seekers can be ejected from the country in as little as an hour.’ President Biden deported hundreds of people in just his first two weeks despite having the legal authority to avoid scheduling deportations. The new Biden immigration bill focuses mostly on granting legal status to migrants currently in the United States (most of them, anyway), and says little about those who will seek refuge here in years to come. Even raising the refugee ceiling to 125,000, as Biden promises to do by 2022, would leave it lower than it was under George H.W. Bush.

Biden’s pledge of $4 billion for addressing the ‘root causes of migration’ in Central America might sound positive, but there is a small problem: one of the major ‘root causes’ is US policy itself. US-funded military and police forces, which would receive some of Biden’s $4 billion, have contributed heavily to the violence that forces Latin Americans to flee. Meanwhile, NAFTA-style neoliberalism has amplified economic misery. By eroding social supports and state capacities, it has made the region extremely vulnerable to Covid-19, which has so far killed almost 700,000 Latin Americans and driven tens of millions more into poverty. The devastation of the pandemic has been further intensified by US zeal for ‘intellectual property rights’, which amount to private monopolies for taxpayer-subsidized drug companies. The US’s protection of those monopolies has long inhibited access to medicines in Latin America, including Covid-19 vaccines. Policies like these often cancel out any positive impact of US aid programmes.

In Honduras, for example, the Obama administration’s support for the 2009 military overthrow of a mildly progressive president inaugurated the human rights nightmare that persists today. Hundreds of peasants, Indigenous activists and environmentalists have been murdered. The coup regime also instituted economic reforms that increased poverty and inequality, both of which were previously trending downward. Addressing the ‘root causes’ of migration in a place like Honduras would require a fundamental reorientation of US foreign policy. Even then, the lasting impacts of hurricanes Eta and Iota – along with other capitalist climate disasters – could only be assuaged through long-term reparations, including a far more welcoming approach to refugee resettlement. So far, the signs from Biden’s team are not very encouraging.

Biden has embraced the other right-wing regimes supported by previous US presidents. When Brazil’s center-left leader Dilma Rousseff was ousted in 2016 based on farcical allegations of fiscal misconduct, the Obama administration welcomed her overthrow as ‘a decision made by the Brazilian people’. Rousseff’s removal brought the radical right to power, with devastating consequences for workers, Indigenous groups, the LGBTQ population, Black people and the environment. Biden has pledged continuity with the Obama-Trump policy. On 8 February White House press secretary Jen Psaki remarked that ‘we are by far the largest investor in Brazil’ and will ‘continue to strengthen our economic ties’. A similar policy is being applied in Haiti, where Biden has backed pro-corporate autocrat Jovenel Moïse’s refusal to leave the presidency after his term expired on 7 February.

The complement to these right-wing alliances will be continued US subversion in Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia. On Cuba, González advocates a return to the ‘Obama doctrine’, which reopened diplomatic channels and travel in the hope of undermining the government. In contrast to Trump’s brash refusal to engage, he calls for ‘a policy of subversion by engagement’. The administration must ‘play the long game with Cuba’, in the words of former Clinton NSC official Richard Feinberg. This means ‘stitching Cuba to the fabric of the global economy’ via admission to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Supporting ‘private entrepreneurship’ will ‘gradually erode the foundations of communism’, pushing the country toward ‘a more market-friendly version of socialism’ and eventually back into the capitalist model. Such changes will also tame Cuba’s foreign policy, restoring the island’s subordinate role in the ‘system of collaborating neighbour states in the Western Hemisphere, where the United States is the natural leader’. Early signs suggest this approach will hold sway. The Biden administration’s line is that ‘Americans, especially Cuban Americans, are the best ambassadors for freedom in Cuba’, a curious assertion given the history of US and Cuban–American terrorism against the island. There is no indication that Biden will seek to end the embargo’s six-decade-long collective punishment of Cubans, though he may carve out more exemptions for influential US businesses.

Subversion in Venezuela, by contrast, might not require as much ‘engagement’. In Cuba the government is stable and the opposition isolated. In Venezuela, by contrast, the Maduro government faces a deep economic crisis (dramatically and intentionally exacerbated by US sanctions) and major public discontent. Betting on Maduro’s vulnerability, Biden continues to recognize the self-appointed ‘president’ Juan Guaidó. Under Obama, Biden courted Guaidó ally Leopoldo López – a so-called political prisoner arrested for inciting violent protests that killed dozens of people – who is now calling for Biden to lead a renewed international effort to topple Maduro. US support for the far-right forces of Guaidó and López is intended to prevent a deal between Maduro and the more pragmatic elements of the opposition. Such a deal might alleviate Venezuela’s economic crisis, but it could leave Maduro in power and thus derail the US’s regime change agenda.

In late 2018 Biden complained that Trump’s ‘intensified sanctions on Venezuela have been clouded by sabre-rattling’ and ‘clunky sloganeering’. At that time, those intensified sanctions had already killed an estimated 40,000 civilians, with an unknown number of additional deaths after Trump imposed harsher measures in 2019. But the goal of regime change had not succeeded. Trump’s crime in Venezuela was not his lethal denial of food and medicine to the population, but rather his ‘faulty execution’ of the policy. This critique informs Biden’s current roadmap for Venezuela, which hinges on refining the sanctions to inflict maximum political damage. Secretary Blinken argues that sanctions must be honed ‘so that regime enablers really feel the pain’, while González favours a ‘smart’ use of ‘multilateral sanctions’ over Trump’s go-it-alone programme.

Any modifications to Latin America policy under Biden will stem from two sources. One is the feeling that Trump’s cavalier approach threatened corporate profits and imperilled US geopolitical control. Bipartisan voices have argued that the unilateral economic war on Venezuela jeopardizes both aims. As Bloomberg Businessweek recently warned, ‘US sanctions have now become so sprawling and complicated that they’re more difficult to enforce or manage without risking serious impact on the American economy’. The closure of foreign markets and heavy ‘industry exposure’ to legal penalties is simply not good for business. There is also consternation that ‘the overuse of financial sanctions’ and their unilateral application may ‘undermine the dollar’s primacy’ as the global reserve currency, which acts as an enormous subsidy to US business. The Biden administration will therefore likely grant industry’s demands for a relaxation of some of the sanctions. For the same reason it may pursue a new round of pro-corporate investment deals including the old Trans-Pacific Partnership. Such agreements benefit corporations while also strengthening alliances with pro-US governments. For Biden, one of Trump’s greatest sins was his ‘disengagement’ from those alliances, which forfeited the chance ‘to galvanize a regional agenda that corresponds with US interests’.

A second source of policy change will be domestic political pressures. So far, the left has exerted some influence on Biden in two areas relevant to Latin America: immigration and climate policy. In each case, popular pressures have dovetailed with the interests of elite sectors that stand to benefit from a policy shift. Relaxation of the most vicious anti-immigrant policies will be a response both to the immigrant rights movement and to the companies who require a steady stream of migrant labour to ‘meet their critical workforce needs’, as recently advocated by the Chamber of Commerce.

US climate policy has urgent implications for Latin American and Caribbean countries, which are paying for rich countries’ emissions in the form of droughts, floods, and hurricanes. Biden’s initial gestures on climate have been somewhat better than his past record would suggest, reflecting both the growth of the climate movement and a new interest among elites in confronting the emergency. This elite constituency includes multinational capitalists plus US military and diplomatic officials. These groups are anxious to reestablish ‘credibility’ with international allies, and fearful that climatic destabilization will lead to ‘global exoduses prompted by rising temperatures’ as well as other outcomes that would endanger the arrangements upon which US global dominance depends. Whether Biden’s climate policy brings major changes or just minor revisions will depend on the extent to which these elite interests demand real emission reductions, and on the ability of the climate movement to increase its capacity for disruption.

Minor revisions aren’t always trivial: admitting a few more refugees and taking some climate action will have positive impact on people’s lives. Unruly popular movements may force bigger changes to policy. Yet given the magnitude of the destruction that US governments have visited on Latin America and the Caribbean, what stands out is the vast gulf between what Biden is likely to do and what is owed to the people of the region, who deserve far more than just a smarter empire.

Read on: Juan Carlos Monedero, ‘Snipers in the Kitchen’, NLR 120.

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How Does It Feel

The second best thing that happened to me in 2001 was spending an hour with Destiny’s Child in the basement of the Civic Centre in Peoria, Illinois. The best thing was driving to that arena in a rental car, doing 80 MPH on this flat earth and listening to Daft Punk’s Discovery for the first time. All of that land speed record fury road hogwash came true as I melted in their slipstream. The engine of Discovery moves like techno, but the frame is made of soul and disco samples from the Seventies. The singing is another thing altogether, filtered and transformed into mechanical birdsong, low on meaning and high on sentiment. With the Chrysler PT Cruiser’s built-in CD player working at its limits, I rode eternal with Daft Punk, shiny and chrome.

Later, the battery died because I left on the headlights and had to wait three hours for AAA. Such is the fall from machine grace. Daft Punk made it worth the wait, though, and thinking of them being gone leads me to some basic questions. How good were they? Almost impossibly. Is this breakup a stunt? Hopefully. Were they scammers? In a way, though only in the tradition of popular music’s cannibal contract.

Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo formed a vector; their direction only corresponded to positive developments in popular music and their magnitude was considerable. Some of that can be easily seen in their production of other artists, work they were picky about. They’re responsible for the acrid fry of Kanye West’s 2013 album, Yeezus, producing its four most important tracks, including the bug-zapping opener ‘On Sight’. Daft Punk worked on two hits from The Weeknd’s 2016 album, Starboy, while Bangalter produced a chunk of the 2017 Arcade Fire album, Everything Now. Why they decided to break up in 2021 – eight years after releasing an album they never toured – is a mystery as of now. The band has made no statement other than posting a clip from their 2006 film, Electroma, in which one robot self-destructs and the other walks into the sunset.

Go back to the band’s beginning, in 1992, and you’ll find the rapid reinventions of their twenty-nine year career visible in the first five. The teenage Bangalter and Homem-Christo first record as a rock trio named Darlin’ and release two songs on a compilation put out by Stereolab’s label, Duophonic, in 1993. They are unremarkable, tame versions of Stereolab’s German backbeat and guitar ostinatos. In May of 1993, Dave Jennings of Melody Maker calls the single a ‘daft punky thrash’. Discouraged but still very much eighteen, Bangalter attends his first rave on top of the Pompidou Centre in the Beaubourg. (If that doesn’t read, culturally, imagine attending your first rave on the roof of The Whitney.) There, he hears a Chicago house classic – Phortune’s ‘Can You Feel The Bass?’ – and nothing is ever the same. Long into the band’s career, Daft Punk cite Chicago house as their inspiration (and later recite the names of 40-odd house and rap producers on a track called ‘Teachers’).

A few months into 1994, Homem-Christo and Bangalter take a hard turn from Darlin’ and create the first three Daft Punk songs – ‘The New Wave’, ‘Assault’, and ‘Alive’ – for Dave Clarke’s SOMA label. The angry saw-tooth waveforms that show up twenty years later in Yeezus are there in ‘The New Wave’. There’s no melody of any kind but plenty of sweet agitation in the sounds. Produced in Bangalter’s bedroom, it comes across as entirely professional.

Homework, the first Daft Punk album, is released on Virgin in January of 1997, and the duo make two decisions: to tour steadily for the year and never be photographed without their masks. One live recording from that tour is released in 2001 as Alive 1997, and you can easily find a clip of their LA performance of ‘Rollin and Scratchin’. This is Daft Punk 1.0, working with a manually connected system, drum machines controlling the synthesize patterns via leads. At one point, Bangalter turns the knobs on a Doepfer filter and the music becomes harsh and asthmatic before dropping back into a comfortable, woody midrange. This method is part of ‘French touch’, a brief genre which matches these electronic sweeps with big, juicy samples of old disco records. That filtering move, which removes the spatial aspect of the music only to bring it back double, became the ‘drop’ of EDM and still plays a part in the structure of variously affiliated dance songs. The disco sample reached its apex with Daft Punk themselves and had mostly faded by 2005.

An instrumental called ‘Da Funk’, first released in 1995, becomes the duo’s first American single in 1997. Spike Jonze uses it to score a real shaggy dog story. Jonze films an actor wearing an enormous dog mask limping around New York on crutches, blasting the Daft Punk song from a boombox. The squelch on ‘Da Funk’ is slower than the Daft Punk average tempo, and the rhythm is built from two Seventies funk tracks by Barry White and Vaughn Mason. At the time, Bangalter revealed that the pair had been listening to Warren G’s ‘Regulate’, but critics were shy about tying the act to hip-hop. (Somehow, even though hip-hop is built from records played in discos, hip-hop is never allowed to coincide with disco.) Daft Punk ignore this, slowly compiling everybody’s best strategies, like dance consultants.

What they compile is an impeccable mille-feuille. The electric sugar of old soul and disco records forms the first layer, over which they stack deft keyboard melodies and electronically filtered singing. (Find the ‘Daft Punk Medley’, a brief piano rendition by Chilly Gonzalez, and you’ll hear how durable their themes are.) The third stratum is a family-friendly nostalgia, more Star Wars than Blade Runner. There is very little sex in Daft Punk’s world, no violence, and no explicitly stated politics. We are always returning, never arriving.

Michel Gondry directed the video for their next single, ‘Around The World’. There are no samples in this song, and the duo does beautifully without them. The song has only three words – around the world – sung into a vocoder, gently tootling as a bass line circles the keyboard figure. In the video, breakdancing men and swim-suited women move precisely, going upstairs and downstairs in sync with the bassline. There are skeletons and robots, too, but no sign of the band.

After Homework, the band refines their mission by working on a side project, Stardust. ‘Music Sounds Better With You’, the only song under the Stardust name, becomes a worldwide hit in the summer of 1998 and remains the central song of French touch. The track uses a bright burst of Chaka Khan’s 1981 song, ‘Fate’: three keyboard chords and a sharp, high guitar figure. Over this, Benjamin Diamond sings, ‘I feel like the music sounds better with you, love might bring us both together, I feel right’. Those are also the only lyrics, and the song repeats and rolls like a disco holding pattern. The clip introduces a tendency seen in many Daft Punk videos. The three men of Stardust are painted silver, playing keyboards and guitars on a cloud. In Stardust’s case, nobody played any guitar on anything at all, and this is where a benevolent deception enters.

In 2001, having become fully helmeted robots as a result of the Y2K bug (their story) Daft Punk launch deep into popularity with the best album they ever produce, Discovery. (Disco? Very.) In the 2015 documentary, ‘Daft Punk: Unchained’, you hear Les Inrocks founding editor Jean-Daniel Beauvallet describe Discovery as ‘one of the first post-sample albums, which builds music out of other sounds. Sampling means taking parts of a song, looping it over and over until it becomes music. But they changed them so much that samples became unrecognizable’. This reorganization of fragments was old hat for producers like DJ Premier and J. Dilla, who routinely atomized records and assigned those bits to the pads of an Akai MPC and created songs that bore no resemblance to their sources. Apart from the fact that nobody says ‘post-sample’, Beauvallet’s distinction can only be working to distinguish Daft Punk’s work from that of these Black American producers, who got there way before them. In light of this, and the fact that Black Americans supplied most of the samples on Discovery, Daft Punk’s elevation can be a slightly queasy affair, even for those of us who adore them.

Discovery is a patchwork of samples, just as much as Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique or The Avalanches’ Since I Left You or Jay-Z’s The Takeover. The band turns everything up here, including the contradictions. They use other people’s records more than ever – huge chunks of Edwin Birdsong and George Duke records power big songs – while also creating their most expansive melodies. Discovery is also where they solidify their fourth and most powerful layer – joy. Daft Punk are the least cynical pop act of the 21st century. They provide the emotionally moist sweep of rock without rock, the thrill of victory without the burden of a self, and the plush comforts of nostalgia without the indignity of aging. Daft Punk are a psychological car bomb that drives into your garage on a silver disco E-ZPass.

Discovery allows the assembly line to slow down for the first time. ‘Something About Us’ is a quiet storm R&B song, crooned through machines. It may be uncanny to have the robot singing a winelight love song, but not so uncanny it doesn’t work. ‘Nightvision’ is a placid instrumental that could be a NASA rewrite of Billy Joel’s ‘Just The Way You Are’, and its air-conditioned detention cell vibe may have inspired the movie Drive. (Homem-Christo went on to co-write and co-produce Kavinsky’s ‘Nightcall’ for that soundtrack.) But check your files – the duo cut up this very same Billy Joel song on Homework’s ‘High Fidelity’. The plan was always there. Not DJ big – Billy Joel big.

The success of Discovery rattles them, though, and they follow it up with Human After All in 2005, openly describing it as a reaction to Discovery’s painstaking construction. Created in a few weeks and only lightly edited, Human After All sounds like Daft Punk 1.0 with higher production values and more guitars. It’s harsh and claustrophobic, and they quickly move on to Electroma, in 2006. Like everything they produce, the movie looks exquisite but it’s atypically dull, a too-long riff on two robots hoping to become human. The robots (not played by Daft Punk themselves) commit suicide in the film, so it isn’t unfair to suspect that the band saw the end in sight long before this year’s announcement.

The negation of Human After All and Electroma leads to the synthesis of Alive 2007, the peak (and summary) of Daft Punk 2.0. The band toured the world in 2006 and 2007, some of it documented in vaguely legit videos available on YouTube, and on a live album released by the band. A recently uploaded set filmed in Chicago’s Grant Park in August of 2007 shows our boys at the top of a pyramid frame inside a larger triangle, all of it fitted with LED lights, screens, or both. To say this light show worked is to undersell a genuine miracle of cheap tricks and expensive gear. The show is a ninety-minute mastermix of their career, possibly recorded beforehand, possibly created in the moment. It hardly matters. Daft Punk managed to bottle the energy of a club night and unfold it in a setting no different in scope than a Van Halen show. You can hear this on the Alive 2007 album, where the band closes with an ecstatic blend of ‘One More Time’ and the instrumental track of ‘Music Sounds Better With You’, an almost too-pleasing combination of triggers. The music dissolves into a tumble of crackling electronic embers, dying back into brute sound genesis.

The two retreat and re-emerge to do a passable job on the Tron: Legacy soundtrack in 2010, their first experience with a string section and a professional studio. This pushes them towards their 2013 album, Random Access Memories, a radical detente between decades of affect and sound and strategy; and the first and last Daft Punk album made in an actual studio. Rather than ape Chic and Michael Jackson records, they hired the musicians who made them: Nile Rodgers, Paul Jackson, Jr. and John J.R. Robinson, amongst others. Paul Williams and Giorgio Moroder are also on here, being their most Seventies selves. Williams sings a saccharine monstrosity called ‘Touch’ and Moroder talks for nine minutes about his importance as an early synth adopter, a very strange choice for a track three slot.

The lead single, ‘Get Lucky’, co-written by Pharrell Williams, was a success and deservedly so. Williams plays the good-smelling lech of disco, staying ‘up all night to get lucky’, the closest to a sexual phrase Daft Punk gets. The rest of Random Access Memories is gorgeous audio best experienced without the lyric sheet. Daft Punk 2.0 was everything about Daft Punk that worked, torqued as far as the material allowed. Daft Punk 3.0 was the band facing off with its heroes and hitting an Oedipal block. How do you kill your idols when you’ve hired them? The strong parts of Random Access Memories stand next to the records they sampled but what makes the album work is also what kills it. Daft Punk lyrics were, from the start, little more than chanted encouragement cribbed from the psychic clipboard of the Eighties: good times, celebrations, togetherness, music and music and music. On Random Access Memories, the band conducts a group therapy session with lyrics that flicker between mutual soothing and despair. ‘I am lost, I can’t even remember my name’, ‘Where do I belong?’, ‘We will never be alone again’, ‘We’ve come too far to give up who we are’. They announce their self-destruct sequence throughout the album, choosing to end themselves rather than their elders. Random Access Memories is too nice to be great but it’s way too much fun to be bad.

The confusion around musical labour obtains once again in the video for ‘Get Lucky’, where the robots appear behind Rodgers and Williams, playing bass and drums. But Bangalter doesn’t play bass on the song – Nathan East does. And Homem-Christo didn’t play the drums – that’s Omar Hakim. This long-running misdirection around physical activity and instrumentation is obviously not accidental, another variation on Oedipal anxiety, more than a little childish. We’re just as good as the bands that play their own instruments, right? Look!

Daft Punk 3.0 ultimately feels most like Stardust, a successful one-off that spread rapidly and atomized. The band’s career makes the most sense if you see the 2007 tour as a goodbye, and all of the subsequent productions and creations as contract gigs. It’s a good way to find their philosophy. You don’t need any remixes of Daft Punk done by people outside the band, but you do need every remix and production Daft Punk did under their own name. The inhuman part was how consistent they were, but much of that came from relentlessly applying a sensibility – as human a strategy as there is.

Read on: Simon Hammond, K-Punk At Large, NLR 118.

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Saving Lagos

Lagos, with 22 million people, is one of the most populous cities on Earth. It is also one of the most polluted. On top of the low life expectancy caused by extreme poverty (which afflicts well over half the city’s population), pollution results in an estimated 11,200 premature deaths each year, 60% of which are children under the age of five. The main culprit in both cases is corruption – Nigeria’s Transparency International ranking recently fell by three places to 149 out of 180. According to a 2018 World Bank report, all the main drivers of pollution in Lagos can be traced back to failures of governance: ageing vehicles spewing sub-standard fuel imported from abroad without proper checks, factories (mainly cement, chemical and steel) which are allowed to operate with minimum oversight, overdependence on generators in the absence of steady electricity from the national grid, and deeply inadequate waste infrastructure.

The Guardian recently reported that ‘international dealers export to Nigeria around 900,000 tonnes a year of low-grade, “dirty” fuel made in Dutch, Belgian and other European refineries’ that vastly exceeds EU pollution limits and sulphur standards. Nigeria ‘is having dirty fuel dumped on it that cannot be sold to other countries with higher and better implemented standards’. Yet for all that, nobody would guess that the country possesses four domestic refineries, which collectively operate at about 6% of capacity despite the almost $400 million expended on turnaround maintenance in recent years. This is because the lucky few licensed to export crude – who are among the 29,500 millionaires of a population of 211 million – not only benefit from the contracts that they don’t execute but have an interest in those low-grade refineries abroad for that reason, thereby eating from both sides, at huge cost to the country.

Meanwhile, companies in the organized private sector are forced to produce most of their own energy, with damaging environmental consequences. Despite the billions of dollars thrown at the power sector over the years – $16 billion between 1999 and 2007 alone – the national grid is still only able to cover a third of the country’s needs. As a result, Nigeria has the largest number of private generators of any country in the world (entire factories in China are dedicated solely to producing them for the Nigerian market). These machines spew out black carbon, causing fatal respiratory and cardiopulmonary diseases as well as constant low-level noise, which one only becomes aware of when the generators are occasionally switched off and one feels a sudden release of tension.  

Lagos’s environmental depredations have led to rising temperatures and decreasing rainfall, along with more frequent storms. Until five years ago, my compound was served by a ten-foot deep well, because Lagos State Water Corporation (‘Sustainably meeting potable water demand through international best practice’, as its mission statement puts it) only reaches one third of the city’s households that are registered for state tax purposes – if they are lucky. In 2015 the well ran dry for the first time a month or so ahead of the rains in April. Every subsequent year this happened again, the water drying up progressively earlier until eventually there was none left before the end of January, whereupon we were forced to dig a borehole (as have two-thirds of Lagos households, irrespective of whether they are also served by the Corporation). In theory, this meant that we now had cleaner, perhaps even drinkable water. In practice, the indiscriminate digging of boreholes without government approval – there are no clear laws on the matter – means that many of them contain unsafe levels of E Coli in a city where the use of septic tanks is widespread.

Boreholes are the source of the ubiquitous, non-biodegradable sachets of ‘pure water’ relied on by eight out of ten Lagosians – packets which, together with other non-recyclable waste products amounting to 10,000 tonnes daily, have become another major pollutant. The name ‘pure water’ is misleading. One study found that, of 50 sachets bought from hawkers in all 20 municipalities of Lagos State, 58% were unfit for human consumption, containing a mixture of parasites and impurities. (The only alternative, however, is the vastly more expensive bottled water from the likes of Nestlé, whose chairman emeritus, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, once ridiculed the ‘extreme’ NGOs ‘who bang on about declaring water a public right’.) 60 million of these 50cl sachets are disposed of daily in the country as a whole. They are tossed into the open gutters, clogging drains and causing flooding when the rains hit; into canals that sweep them into the Atlantic, contaminating the fish we feed on; and from the windows of passing vehicles onto the roadside. The majority of Lagos’s inhabitants come from rural villages to which they will one day return. Their time here is transitory: working for poverty-wages so they can eventually retire back home. Consequently, they do not have much attachment to the city. If it is unkind to them, they are likely to reciprocate.

Ironically, it is the state government – the most progressive in the country by some way (although that may not be saying much) – which has apparently shown more concern for Lagos’s environment than its citizens. It is now over a decade since the Lagos State Waste Management Authority established a series of waste banks in strategic areas as part of its zero-waste initiative. According to Titilola Adeeyo, the then recycling manager,

We buy the pure water sachets for N5 per kilogramme provided it is clean and moisture-free. We buy the plastic bottles at N20 per kilogramme. We give the recycled bags to people who need them. The idea behind putting money value to pure water sachets is to discourage people from flying them all over the place thereby degrading the environment . . . The idea behind the buyback project is to create a job market for people just as unemployed Lagos residents can tap into the recycling business.

The state government also embarked on large-scale tree-planting initiatives. Since trees trap significant amounts of water, they can be used to clear storm-water runoff, which is reduced by one million gallons for every 1,000 trees. All told, 9.6 million were planted in Lagos between 2010 and 2020. Additionally, every compound was encouraged to plant at least one tree, although judging by my own neighbourhood few seem to have heeded the call. Indeed, first-time visitors to Lagos will be struck by how generally denuded it is of vegetation, as if covering everything in concrete were necessary to hold back the ever-threatening wilderness lurking just beyond the city limits.

That said, much of this is too little and in any case subject to the same corruption as elsewhere in the system. Both these initiatives occurred during the tenure of Governor Babatunde Raji Fashola (2007-2015) but have tapered off somewhat. Some of the waste banks have fallen into disrepair, many trees are dying due to lack of attention and the canals are in the same sort of shape that originally galvanised Fashola into action. Meanwhile, there are some who dedicate their lives to combatting the city’s environmental problems. One of them, Desmond Majekodunmi, runs the Lekki Urban Forestry and Animal Shelter, founded in 2013 on 20 hectares in what was once the wilderness but is now an oasis within the expanding city. It seeks to preserve the ‘natural habitats in urban areas for use as a field laboratory to interact with and learn from nature’, to ‘address the issue of limited green spaces in urban areas like Lagos’, and to ‘enlighten the populace to clear the ambiguity of climate change through practical learning’. As with Omobola Eko’s Urban Tree Revival Initiative, which organises an annual tree-planting day, emphasis is placed on environmental education for children, who comprise not just the city’s but the country’s largest demographic, numbering around 90 million.

In this context, it should also be remembered that it was these same young people who peacefully demonstrated over two weeks last October in what became known as #EndSARS – initially a protest against police brutality but that quickly extended to bad governance generally. The old men in government initially tolerated them because we were now a democracy and peaceful protest was a constitutional right, but eventually lost patience and ordered soldiers to shoot them at two rallies in Lagos. This appeared to work. The protestors disbanded and everybody went home. But the movement is rearing its head again and is threatening to stage another peaceful rally at one of the two venues – Lekki Toll Gate – where one brave soul known as DJ Switch (now in exile) filmed the killings as she lay on the ground, expecting any minute to die. The point is that they have no choice. The entire rotten edifice must be dismantled if we are to have any chance of not merely stopping but reversing the calamity we appear intent on visiting on ourselves.

Read on: Matthew Gandy, ‘Learning from Lagos’, NLR 33.

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A Gorgeous Parade

Film history is full of holes. Forget about the idea that ‘everything’ is available on the internet; everything isn’t available in the archives. The Deutsche Kinemathek estimates that eighty to ninety percent of silent films have been lost. Fire, censorship, neglect, the recycling of silver from the emulsion of nitrate stock: the reasons vary but the result is the same. Although the problem lessens dramatically beginning in the 1930s – a decade that saw the foundation of the world’s first film archives – it does not disappear. The farther away one gets from capital-intensive production, mainstream acclaim, or state-approved cultural patrimony, the more likely it is that a film will disappear or fall into material precarity, existing only as a bad VHS copy passed from hand to hand, and then as a worse digital file, uploaded and downloaded.

The reality of oblivion fuels fantasies of rediscovery. Rarely are these dreams as wholly fulfilled as in the case of About Some Meaningless Events (De quelques événements sans signification, 1974), directed, written, and edited by Mostafa Derkaoui. This debut feature, now streaming on MUBI, was shot in working-class areas of Casablanca by a group of young artists and intellectuals eager to ask what filmmaking could be in Morocco, a country where a national cinema had not yet truly been born. Their speculative, energetic answer was not to the liking of King Hassan II, a despot who was intent to clamp down on dissent and manage the national image following attempted coups d’état in 1971 and 1972. After a single screening in Paris in 1975, the regime suppressed the film and prohibited its export, consigning it to a clandestine existence. The ban was lifted in the 1990s, but when the Madrid lab holding the negative went bankrupt in 1999, the materials were seized as assets. They eventually wound up at the Filmoteca de Catalunya, where the film’s director and his brother, cinematographer Abdelkrim Derkaoui, supervised a stunning restoration. Now, nearly five decades after its first fleeting appearance, the film has finally entered widespread circulation, taking its rightful place as one of the great works of 1970s political modernism. Better late than never.

MUBI labels About Some Meaningless Events a documentary. Certainly, the film takes inspiration from the ethos of cinéma vérité, capturing life in a crowded neighbourhood bar and out in the street with a lightweight, sync-sound 16mm camera. Never do the filmmakers occupy a private interior; they remain at all times in public, subject to the vibrant reality that surrounds them. Like Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch, who in Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique d’un été, 1961) roam Paris, holding out a microphone to passers-by, asking if they are happy, Derkaoui’s crew seeks the vox populi. They conduct a series of interviews, posing questions that bear directly on the activity at hand: their topic is the cinema, and Moroccan cinema in particular.

According to Sandra Gayle Carter’s book What Moroccan Cinema?, at the time About Some Meaningless Events was made, the country had produced less than a dozen feature films. (Her volume’s ironic title telegraphs the enduringly fragile state of filmmaking in the nation.) Meanwhile, new waves were surging around the world and filmmakers from Buenos Aires to Havana to Oberhausen were composing manifestoes, setting out the way forward. It is against this double backdrop that Derkaoui, freshly home after completing a degree at the renowned Łódź Film School, hit the streets. Instead of proselytizing for a predetermined position, he canvases for opinion. What stories should a Moroccan national cinema tell? Should it aspire to the tremendous commercial popularity of the Egyptian cinema, or of karate films like The Big Boss (1971), starring Bruce Lee? Or should it follow the revolutionary example of Latin America and commit itself to formal radicalism and the project of cultural decolonization? Do Moroccans want to be entertained or to see the country’s social problems represented onscreen? The discussions are wide-ranging, broaching matters of genre, aesthetics, and audience. No consensus emerges, but one thing is certain: About Some Meaningless Events conforms to none of the examples mooted throughout its 78 minutes.

Crucially, the interviews are conducted not by Derkaoui himself, but by Abbas Fassi-Fihri, a journalist cast in the role of a director who is making a movie. Derkaoui orchestrates a mise-en-abyme: the inquiry on the future of Moroccan cinema is a film within a film, a documentary nestled within a fiction. The two layers are frequently indistinguishable, sharing a proclivity for handheld close-ups and a title – judging by the clapboard that appears onscreen, at least. When the production crew hangs out at the crowded bar, looking hip and flirting with women, it feels like a hundred stories are circulating through the smoky air, just out of reach. Every now and then a hint of one comes through in a line of dialogue without congealing into anything that lasts, as if the artifice of storytelling were trying and failing to break through the flow of life again and again. Why does one man wave around a crab and another, later, plop a fish in someone’s glass? What kind of appointment is the woman wearing the bright yellow faux fur coat in the midst of arranging? The bustle of the bar refuses to resolve into the tidiness of cause-and-effect narration, yet all of its unscripted vitality is the product of a staged conceit.

One plotline gradually does take root, rising above the collective din to tell the story of an individual. Early on, a young man appears alone on the street, smoking as he watches a bearded man get into a car and drive away. He hops on a scooter, possibly one that doesn’t belong to him, and departs, only to reappear in proximity to the filmmakers – suggesting that this character, whose name turns out to be Abdellatif, is more than just another member of the crowd. Later in the bar, he is there again, his gaze fastened on the same man from before, who now holds court at a table that reeks of corruption. When Abdellatif confronts the man and a brawl erupts, the direct sound usually present throughout the film disappears, leaving Włodzimierz Nahorny’s propulsive free jazz to fill the track, bursting with improvisational vim. Abdellatif fatally knifes the kingpin and the horns squeal. If the premeditated plotting did not make it evident already, the stabbing leaves no ambiguity as to the film’s fictional dimension. Little else can cleave documentation and fabulation like the difference between the obscenity of real death and the thrill of its dramatic contrivance.

The event transforms the nature of the film crew’s questioning. They turn away from the public and towards each other, gathering in the open air to debate how or if the stabbing should be incorporated into their film-in-progress. It transpires that the man was Abdellatif’s boss at the port. What motivated the violence? How does it relate to the broader context, to the exploitation of workers? What are the respective merits of fictionalizing the episode versus foregoing scripts and actors to shoot ‘sur le vif’? In a meandering and conflictual way, the conversation maps a series of issues leftist filmmakers were confronting internationally at the time: class privilege, the politics of form, and the ethics of packaging struggle and trauma for consumption. In what may well be a shot at Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969), one man complains, ‘Even the student protests have been recuperated by Hollywood!’.

The murder is a high-stakes eruption of contingency that demands narrativization, whether through the personal history of its perpetrator, the grind of social forces in which he is caught, or some combination of the two. It is the stuff conventional films are made of, an event pregnant with the promise of meaning. As About Some Meaningless Events winds to a close, the crew takes the bait, doubling down on their vérité methods in an effort to make sense of what happened. They interview Abdellatif’s colleague and ask a friend about his family background. Finally, they visit him in police custody. Abdellatif tells them some of what they want to know: the difficulty of finding good employment, the bribes his boss demanded, what life is like in a neighbourhood he is sure the interviewer knows nothing about. Ultimately, though, he becomes frustrated and turns the tables on the filmmakers, challenging their desire for knowledge and the importance they assign to the cinema: ‘And you think you’re changing something with your camera?’ Returning the gaze of the apparatus, he puts an end to the encounter – and to the film we are watching. A distrust of the ideological betrayals of fiction and a hope that a commitment to reality might mitigate them are palpable throughout About Some Meaningless Events. At the same time, Derkaoui never lets documentary off the hook either, making full use of the powers of the false to query any claims it might make to social transformation or political righteousness.

Writing in Cahiers du cinéma in 1969, Jean-Louis Comolli remarked that a certain kind of fiction film was beginning to look a lot like documentary. It wasn’t a matter of simply poaching a visual style associated with authenticity, as happens often today; these were works that left behind the script and the studio, gave up on big budgets and 35mm, and embraced an understanding of cinema and reality as reciprocally produced in the act of filming. It was here, and not in the idea of making contact with a pre-existing reality, Comolli argued, that the radicalism of ‘direct cinema’ resided. Whether occurring in films deemed fiction or those called documentary, these changed working methods released filmmaking from the stranglehold of the commercial system and its conventions, revealing their repressive character and opening new, counter-hegemonic possibilities of expression.

Comolli’s unorthodox revision of direct cinema as a concept untethered from the distinction between documentary and fiction, defined instead as a mode of production and a way of making meaning, sheds light on the reflexive gambit of About Some Meaningless Events. Against the repressive weight of Morocco’s Years of Lead, the film dwells in a wealth of microevents occurring in an everyday world lacking any centre of coherence, a world the film produces as much as reproduces. Certain of little, it traffics in an abundance that refuses the fixity of categories, troubling not just the line between documentary and fiction but, perhaps more importantly, the distinction between significance and insignificance. Rather than focus on a single (anti-)hero or an exemplary incident poised to neatly tie everything together, Derkaoui offers something else: a relentless self-questioning that takes place in and through a sea of faces captured in close-up after close-up, pushing in and out of a frame that rarely relinquishes its tight hold. The result of this insistent proximity to the hum of life is nothing like claustrophobia; it is a gorgeous parade of ungovernable particularity, a portrait of national heterogeneity and dissensus. Could it be an anti-authoritarian aesthetics? No wonder the king was so against it.

Read on: Emma Fajgenbaum on the ghostly realism of Pedro Costa.

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Myanmar Days

Demonstrators protest against the military coup and demand the release of elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi, in Yangon, Myanmar, February 6, 2021. REUTERS/Stringer

In Myanmar, coups come rather more naturally to the military than electioneering. The re-house-arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi (ASSK) and the shutdown of the National League for Democracy (NLD) in Myanmar last week mark a bitter juncture in the power-sharing arrangement between the Tatmadaw and the charismatic State Counsellor, whose international stock has now rallied to near pre-genocide heights. On the face of it, the dispute was over the election results of November last year, in which ASSK and the NLD triumphed at the polls. But to call what happened on 1 February a ‘coup’ is still a misnomer: the Myanmar military had never relinquished de facto power. It remained in a crouched position in its surreal fortress-country-club capital, Nay Pyi Taw, where it commanded 25 percent of the seats in parliament automatically, as well as control over the defence and interior ministries, and several other critical sectors of the state. On top of this, the openly Schmittian provisions of the 2008 Constitution – Article 417, in particular – grant the military the right to reassume power over the state in an emergency. There was never any question as to who decides what an emergency is.

Within hours of the Tatmadaw’s reassumption of control, solipsistic Western readings attached to events. Human-rights activists in and outside the country are by no means a monolithic group, but some argued that the Tatmadaw’s claim of an illegitimate 2020 election was inspired by Donald Trump. As if the Myanmar military needed tips from anyone on how to undo an election. The shutdown of the NLD was executed with such efficiency and speed that by the time it was being protested online and in Yangon, it was already a fait accompli. If Chinese state media were capable of tongue in cheek, its description of the events – ‘a major cabinet reshuffle’ – would be closer to the mark. The accompanying suggestion from some progressive outlets that Min Aung Hlaing, the chief of the Tatmadaw, and his cronies were driven by worries about being turned over to the International Criminal Court is likewise baseless. Part of the point of building the capital-compound of Nay Pyi Taw in the middle of the jungle was to banish any idea of an external intervention in Myanmar politics. Min Aung Hlaing is hardly the sort who spends his time shopping at Harrods or skiing in the Alps, where he could be picked up like an African general. When Min Aung Hlaing goes to Europe, he has been invited, typically by European military chiefs, and spends his days visiting the defence contractors who have armed his regime to the teeth.  

Why then did Min Aung Hlaing and the Tatmadaw radically shift course? However much the NLD may intend to demilitarize the parliament, and however strong their performance at the polls, they did not – and cannot – reach the electoral threshold to do so. It seems that the generals had thought that the arrangement with ASSK would stabilize their preferred future for Myanmar and help naturalize their privileges. They wanted to make sure that their political party, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), was on the way to being perceived as more than a front for the military, and rather as a legitimate, competitive political party. For their children, the point was for them to establish themselves in non-regime-friendly cities like Yangon as legitimate business-people. But these metamorphoses were becoming increasingly jeopardized. Ever since 2015, when ASSK’s NLD won 57 percent of the vote – a strong showing, though not the landslide Western media often made it out to be – the generals knew they had a problem. Instead of an adjustable power relationship, they came to see that they were at risk of becoming marginalized in an effective one-party state where the one-party was not their own. ASSK’s chutzpah in the face of the generals has been unyielding. For the past year, she has even apparently refused to meet with Min Aung Hlaing. She is now counting on people in the streets – not merely her own followers –  to risk everything to reinstate her. It is not an unreasonable scenario. ASSK has deep sources of popular support. First, she is the daughter of the founder of the country – Aung San, ‘the General’ – who remains a kind of George Washington-JFK-Che Guevara wrapped into one (it helps that he was assassinated in 1947 and could remain a hazy martyr of independence; the very military that kept ASSK under house arrest for 15 years was founded and led by Aung San). The second is that the Bamar majority, the largest identitarian group in the country, see in ASSK all of the promise of globalization and prosperity. It is difficult to spend much time in Yangon or the smaller cities in the Bamar heartland without being overwhelmed by the iconography devoted to her. Yet no less significant has been her adamant embodiment and propagation of Myanmar nationalism, narrowly construed as Bamar interests. One of the few things that she and the military junta agreed on was the prosecution of a brutal campaign of massacres, rape, and forced exile of the Rohingya groups in Rakhine state. To her credit, ASSK has never much dissembled about being anything other than a blinkered Bamar chauvinist. 

The trouble for the military is that, despite having fashioned the Constitution of 2008, they have lately been disserved by it. The Constitution, like its previous iterations, was designed with a first-past-the-post system that would keep ‘ethnic’ parties in the borderland states from having too many seats in the parliament. The chief minister of each state is still appointed by the President of the country, so that even an allegedly irredentist state like Rakhine, where NLD does not perform well, still has an NLD chief minister. The military made sure that the Constitution guarantees them 25 percent of the seats as a safety buffer. But the idea was that the military, and the constituents who work for industries associated with it – agriculture, mining, precious stones – would add to that vote share to make their party, the USDP, at least competitive with the NLD. Last year, Min Aung Hlaing even encouraged the military to campaign around the country and made some attempts to do so himself – a technically illegal activity since the USDP and the military are supposed to be separate – but in any case he was up against an NLD electoral machine that has been fine-tuning a get-out-the-vote campaign for a decade. Additionally, Myanmar’s first-past-the-post voting system, an enduring legacy of British colonialism, was not in Min Aung Hlaing’s favour. Successive Bamar-led governments have kept it in place since it helps suppress smaller ‘ethnic’ parties in the country. But now first-past-the-post is suppressing the actual – or now presumed – support of the USDP itself, which with just over 28 percent of the vote in 2015 would have won some 92 seats in a plurality voting system, as against the 30 it was actually awarded.

It is still too early to speculate whether 1 February marks the end of the military’s experiment with ASSK and the NLD. But there is little doubt that there is a constitutional problem in Myanmar that needs to be solved, both to make electoral politics more competitive, but also to deoxygenate the on-going civil wars in the border states, which would have more of a chance to de-escalate if Katchin and Shan and other borderland radical factions were less easily able to claim that they will never find justice or solace in the national parliament. The problem is that the NLD has little incentive to rearrange a system which puts such headwinds in its sails, while the junta do not think they are in an existential situation because Beijing is even more suspicious of the NLD and ASSK than they are. Viewed in a longer historical perspective, the events in Myanmar suggest that Samuel Huntington’s old vision of Third World authoritarian militaries midwifing – however more or less violently or against their will – bourgeois revolutions is a much trickier undertaking when the military itself wants to oversee every step of the procedure, and for its spawn to occupy the upper-echelon of the capitalist elite. Like Myanmar’s other hot conflicts, the inter-elite, inter-Bamar civil war is no longer behind closed doors.

Read on: Mary Callahan on the riddle of the Tatmadaw’s long reign.

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Writing Zimbabwe

The Bildungsroman has been one of the more durable genres of prose fiction. Conventionally depicting the protagonist’s journey from youth to maturity – ‘Bildung’ could be rendered in English as formation, development, growth or education – the historical meaning of its emergence has been much parsed: analogue of a dawning modernity, the rise of the bourgeoisie, or the formation of the modern nation state? With its parameters set in the context of the German Enlightenment in the late 18th century, it soon spread across the continent, becoming ­– at least for a season – the paradigmatic kind of European novel.

With the flourishing of the novel in Africa in the 20th century however, the Bildungsroman was adapted to a dramatically different experience of social upheaval and transformation. Intermingling with traditions of autobiographical writing, here its existential framework was ineluctably the radical reordering of African life by colonialism, the battle for independence, the pathologies and struggles that remained after its formal achievement. Major works in this vein included Camara Laye’s The African Child (1953), E’skia Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue (1959), Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not Child (1964), Wole Soynika’s Aké: The Years of Childhood (1981) and Nafissatou Diallo’s A Dakar Childhood (1982). In more recent decades, works such as Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Chris Abani’s GraceLand (2004) have kept the genre centre-stage in university curricula.

This inheritance however has been a subject of intense critical dispute. To what extent is the genre bound to colonialist notions of personal formation? How far can the developmentalism of such works be seen to reproduce, challenge or dismantle that complex legacy? Thirty years ago, these were questions much asked of the debut novel of Zimbabwean writer and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (1988). Written in the aftermath of Zimbabwe’s independence (it was the first novel to be published in the country by a black woman), it recounts the childhood and early adolescence of Tambudzai Sigauke, the daughter of a Shona family in rural Rhodesia in the 1960s, as she strives to break free of poverty and patriarchal village life. It is striking how differently the novel has been read: as a prime example of the Bildungsroman adapted to African realities, and as its undoing or refutation. Tambu’s evolution is profoundly Janus-faced. The price of gaining one of the few places for black students at a colonial mission school is an unyielding sense of anxiety and alienation. The novel’s title comes from a line in Sartre’s introduction to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth – ‘the condition of the native is a nervous condition’.

When a sequel, The Book of Not (2006), appeared eighteen years later, some of this ambiguity was resolved. Tambu’s continued education and first years of employment are portrayed in much starker tones, as she experiences continued injustice and cruelty amid the violence of Zimbabwe’s liberation war. Independence, when it arrives in the novel’s last section, is not matched by any parallel story of individual triumph over adversity; the novel seems instead to warn its reader against equating national independence with liberation of a more profound sort. It concludes on a note of uncertainty, with Tambu unemployed and adrift, unsure what her fate will be as a ‘new Zimbabwean’.

There is, then, a straightforward way to read This Mournable Body (2020), the final instalment of Dangarembga’s trilogy, which was published to much fanfare in the African literary world and shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year. Not as ‘inspiring’ or a ‘story of triumph’, as it was wishfully characterised in The New York Times, but as the final blow to any hopes invested in Tambu or in her homeland. A shadow of her plucky girlhood self, our protagonist is now eking out a precarious existence in a brutal, unforgiving Harare. Independence has brought no improvement in her circumstances. Scraping by in a filthy boarding house, she is kept down by white colleagues, misjudged by her fellow Shonas, and subject to all manner of casual, gendered violence. Meanwhile, the Third Chimurenga, ZANU-PF’s controversial property-redistribution program, is heating up in the background, portending national crisis on a world stage. As Tambu’s fortunes have faded, her dreams have coarsened too. The quest for self, at once social and moral – the Bildungsroman’s North Star – has degenerated into a desperate grasping at upward mobility.

Dangarembga then, seems once and for all to have traded in the Bildungsroman for another prominent African genre, the novel of disillusionment. By the work’s mid-point, Tambu is admitted into a psychiatric ward. Far from fulfilling any path towards freedom as a corollary to the country’s liberation, Tambu’s options after her breakdown speak to the country’s cruel fate – working in private security, the product of a decayed social infrastructure, or else a demeaning white-led tourist venture. The novel ends where the trilogy began, at the homestead of Tambu’s family, where in hope of advancing her career she returns to commodify the circumstances of her upbringing for western eyes. For readers once enchanted by her rise in Nervous Conditions, this is perhaps the literary equivalent of the despair wrought by the regime of Emmerson Mnangagwa, which rapidly dashed the hopes raised when Mugabe was finally ousted in 2017 after 37 years in power.

It is, without doubt, a wrenching book. Dangarembga is no less unflinching in depicting the country’s economic woes. Any charge of so-called ‘poverty porn’ that might be levelled – against the ‘urchins’ roaming the streets of Harare sullied by ‘used condoms and cigarette butts’ that ‘build thick puddles of charcoal-coloured water’ – would be misplaced. Her work might be better understood as showing how real lives become the stuff of trope. Dangarembga is also distinguished by the sincerity of her local commitments. Unusually for a writer of her renown she continues to reside in Zimbabwe; she was detained in anti-corruption protests last year (and was recently awarded PEN’s International Award for Freedom of Expression). Her own description of her trilogy, as provided by a recent essay, is indeed in expressly political terms: ‘In the social, moral, economic and leadership decay that marks Zimbabwe today, I am hard put to find any personal trajectory that can be described as upward in any sense, other than that of accumulating material possessions.’ In her telling, Zimbabwe is suffering from a ‘crisis of personhood’ wrought by decades of despair and brutalisation, disaffection with the political class, and the abjections of ‘greed, lust, dishonesty, bloodthirstiness and corruption’ that have taken hold.

In such circumstances, a literary genre that depends on the development of the individual clearly cannot function as normal. But it may be a simplification to read the trilogy’s culmination as merely a brutal inversion. In Dangarembga’s conception, her work serves as an inquiry into ‘what is required to reanimate those who have suffered social death’ and calls for a ‘national transformation through engagement with the person’. A recent lecture, given in memory of the anti-apartheid revolutionary Oliver Tambo, spelled out her vision of a renewed moral focus on the individual that doesn’t lapse into an individualism of an anti-social, neoliberal sort. Her proposals are a necessarily back-to-basics approach to the democratic imagination, insistent on rights to life, human dignity, and freedom from cruel or degrading treatment and punishment. Among other things, the lecture served as an important reminder that ‘critiques’ of rights – one of the scholarly conversations in which her work has been implicated – can ring hollow when your friends and comrades are imprisoned or otherwise disappeared.

Returning then to her trilogy’s bruising conclusion, where might the seeds of this personal regeneration be sought? One answer may be found in the growing references to the Shona philosophy of hunhu, a communalist way of thinking that emphasises collective moral responsibility and the interconnectedness of human beings. This mode of thought, which Tambu wrestles with as her path falters, insists on a kind of moral growth that cuts against the liberal-individualist foundations of the Bildungsroman. At the same time, it insists on just and respectful individual behaviour. Dangarembga is ultimately interested in a more complex question than rise or fall, win or lose. Instead, she is asking how those crushed by social and economic forces beyond their control can retain a claim to moral growth – and what sort of fiction that demands. Conceived in these terms, the novel’s climax can perhaps be read in a more guardedly optimistic way. Without revealing every detail, it is sufficient to say that Tambu goes from marketing her mother to embracing her, from grasping for a promotion to giving up her job. Though Tambu’s dreams have been blighted, and so too the initial promise of national liberation, a new, more complex and less commercialized kind of self-formation may be in sight.

Were the work less attuned to the material realities of Zimbabwe’s place at the bottom of the world’s economic pecking order, or the links between ZANU-PF corruption and the avarice of global finance, such a conclusion might appear quietist. The course that Dangarembga has plotted for Tambu and Zimbabwe is a purposefully modest one, informed by an awareness of how grand political pronouncements have been put to the test in Zimbabwe and failed. The powers of hunhu in post-independence, post-democratic Harare to open up a space whose value is not fully beholden to a rampant neoliberalism – in which cultures and selves are bought and sold – are of course limited, but they are not meaningless. This Mournable Body is, then, a novel that mines what humanist possibility it can find in the Bildungsroman, while never mistaking it for nearly enough. After a trilogy which collides the genre against the realities of Zimbabwean life, Dangarambga seems to nevertheless insist that it will continue building in one form or another, trying, faltering, and then trying again in a different register. She has dismantled the genre to recombine its parts, producing a remarkable fiction in the process.

Read on: Lola Seaton on the Bildungskritiken of Raymond Williams and Mark Fisher.

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Profits Before People

At the court of Vicenza, a small, well-to-do town in the northern Italian region of Veneto, a trial has just begun whose significance resounds well beyond its provincial setting. At stake, in fact, is one of the most expansive industrial contamination cases Europe has ever seen. Miteni, a chemical manufacturer based in the foothills of the Venetian Alps, faces prosecution for repeatedly – and over a period of several decades – disposing of toxic substances in the streams and rivers adjacent to its plant. Chemicals have gradually permeated the soil around their manufacturing site, accumulating in groundwater and flowing into aqueducts that serve some twenty municipalities in three different regional provinces. A population of around 350,000 unknowingly ingested poison for years – a veritable example of mass contamination, the latest in a growing catalogue of cases.

It is not just the size of the population involved that renders this trial unique (to give a sense of scale, imagine poisoning the entire population of Cardiff). Veneto is one of Italy’s most prosperous regions; its rolling hills, dotted with vineyards and Renaissance villas, even out into more populated plains to the south where factories, shopping centres, warehouses and motorways are the more usual features of the landscape. For years, the whole of northeast Italy has been a paragon of Italian economic success.

But perhaps the most notable aspect of this case relates to the chemicals under scrutiny: perfluoroalkylated substances, known as PFAS; an acronym all too familiar in Veneto of late, though it remains obscure to many.

Invented in the 1940s, PFAS names around 4000 distinct compounds, assembled by combining specific quantities of fluorine and carbon, and classified according to molecular length. In 1949 the American firm 3M patented two chemicals, known as PFOS (perfluorooctane sulfonic acid) and PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid) – ‘long’ molecules with water and grease resistant properties. In 1951, DuPont acquired PFOA, using it as a foundation for its signature Teflon product. PFAS’s versatility proved almost limitless: in Italy, for instance, textile manufacturers Marzotto began importing 3M’s PFOA in 1965, facilitating their entry into the emerging market for waterproof materials. Today, PFAS can be found in non-stick pans, plastic plates and food packaging. They’re used to waterproof leather, in fabrics branded as Goretex or Scotchgard, in fire-fighting foams, clingfilm products, and countless other everyday items.

The harm these substances cause is by now beyond question. Scientific literature on the matter abounds; an EU directive published in 2006 classified PFOS as ‘persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic’. Since 2009, the chemicals have been subject to restrictions according to the terms of an international treaty known as the Stockholm Convention, and in 2016 the International Agency for Research on Cancer identified PFOA as a possible cause of renal and testicular cancer.  

A closer look at the history of PFAS requires us to leave the Venetian hills momentarily and take a detour through the United States – West Virginia, to be precise. From as early as the 1960s, both 3M and DuPont were aware of the potential danger posed by perfluoroalkylated substances. In 1961, DuPont’s researchers observed that the chemicals caused significant swelling to the livers of rats, rabbits and dogs. In 1978, also at DuPont, high concentrations of PFOA were discovered in employees’ blood; it was subsequently noted that a number of workers overseeing the production of Teflon had given birth to infants with defects of the eye. Six years later, the company recorded significant quantities of PFOA in the drinking water used around its plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia. But none of these studies was ever disclosed to the American Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). They were merely added to an increasingly unsettling cache of company secrets.

It is largely thanks to the residents of Parkersburg that this information is now available. In the early 2000s they began denouncing DuPont, noticing that it had been dumping contaminants directly into the Ohio River. A lengthy legal battle followed these initial accusations, thanks in part to the efforts of tenacious environmental lawyer Robert Billot. DuPont ultimately agreed to settle the matter by paying over $300 million in damages to its neighbours. It was also fined $16.5 million – the most onerous sanction ever issued by the EPA – for withholding information that proved the chemicals’ toxicity and the firm’s own malpractice in handling them.

Arguably the most notable outcome of the litigation was the establishment of the first epidemiological laboratory dedicated to the study of the effects of PFOA exposure. Between 2004 and 2011 the EPA monitored 70,000 people who lived in the environs of the Parkersburg plant. Researchers now seem convinced of a relationship between PFAS and tumours of the testicles and kidneys, thyroid disorders, and various other diseases which, incidentally, are also being observed among the inhabitants of the Venetian provinces more recently in the spotlight.

The Miteni scandal is thus the second case of mass contamination by PFAS that has come to the attention of the public. In Veneto, however, the population in question is five times as numerous as in West Virginia. Considering the pervasiveness of the substances at issue, one can only wonder how many similar cases might emerge. In 2004 the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) began investigating the presence of PFAS in the continent’s river basins. The final report, published two years later, revealed the Po as the most polluted by some margin, adding that notable quantities of PFAS were also present in the most populated river basins in the United Kingdom. Whilst the Thames had shown lower than average emission rates compared to other European rivers, its concentration levels were amongst the highest.

The report forced the Italian Ministry of the Environment to commission an investigation from the National Research Council, which identified the levels of PFAS in Veneto’s rivers as the most alarming. It was at this point that the local Environmental Protection Agency was able to identify Miteni’s plant as the source of the PFAS emissions. Their investigation, published in 2013, was the first public revelation of widespread PFAS contamination in northern Italy.

The point we can’t lose sight of is that the plant had been operating since 1965. Back then it was known as Rimar, short for Ricerche Marzotto. It had begun producing PFOA for its parent company’s textile business, but the demand for the newly-invented compounds was such that in a short period of time the firm transitioned from textiles to the production of intermediate components for the pharmaceutical and chemical industries. In 1988 Marzotto sold the chemical plant to a partnership between Mitsubishi and the Italian company Enichem (giving the firm its current name, Miteni). The latter ultimately offloaded its stake in 1996, and in 2009 Mitsubishi sold the plant for the symbolic sum of  €1 to the International Chemical Investors Group (ICIG), an investment fund based in Luxembourg.

In all this time, contempt for environmental safety at Miteni remained constant, regardless of its ownership. For half a century it continued to spew chemicals without much afterthought, often using the industrial park the plant itself was built on as a dumping ground. Groundwater disperses at an average speed of 1.2 kilometres per year; as time elapses the contaminated area therefore expands. By now, the zone at highest risk reaches towns and villages within 40km of the plant.  

Admittedly, few ever paid attention to the issue during the 1960s and 70s. There would be accidents every once in a while, after which everything seemed to return to normal. As a testament of this routine, the older generation of residents here remember how the river Agno was often tinted with the pigments used by Marzotto by the time it reached towns and villages downstream from its factory in Valdagno.

That Marzotto operated unchallenged for years was not coincidental. In the decades following the Second World War, industrial development was the absolute priority for the European economy; Italy in particular was emerging from a history of backwardness and rural poverty. Between the 1950s and 1970s the steel, chemical and automobile industry transformed the country into an industrialized nation. Factories employed millions of people, creating a middle and working class accustomed to a certain quality of life. The toll of this wellbeing on the environment was hardly on the agenda. This is not a purely Italian story; the same occurred in Europe, Japan and the Americas. Pollution was visible, of course, but was considered collateral damage – a price worth paying for prosperity. Earth, water and air were entirely conceded to industry, bequeathed without obligations. Unions were preoccupied with altogether different questions: wages, the redistribution of income and social security. Only later did the environment – and its obvious connection public health – become a point of contention.  

Even when emission regulations became more stringent in the decades that followed, many firms continued to circumvent them. In the case of Miteni, the court’s findings reveal that between 1990 and 2009, Mitsubishi commissioned numerous investigations into the plant they had acquired in Veneto, knowing as a result that underneath it lay numerous pollutants, including PFAS. But just as DuPont had done, it chose not to disclose this to public health agencies – a cover-up that constitutes one of the charges the company will have to answer for in court.

Yet the presence of PFAS in Veneto’s drinking water would never have reached public attention – nor perhaps even a court of justice – if it hadn’t been for the pressure mounted by local residents. When the scandal was revealed in 2013 local authorities ran for cover, installing new filters in its aqueducts to mitigate the risks. The regional government ordered Miteni to install barriers to contain the toxic refuse, and to plan a comprehensive drainage operation around the site of its plant (the former injunction was respected only partially, and regarding the latter a project has yet to materialize eight years on). It also imposed lower than average limits on the presence of PFAS in drinking water, sparking an altercation with national authorities who at the time hadn’t even registered the issue. Locals might have thought the nightmare was over; only after a number of years did they realise this was far from the case.

Whilst it might be clear today that PFAS have caused an environmental and public health disaster of dizzying proportions, breaking the silence surrounding the case has proved no easy task. A handful of doctors from the Italian national health service were the first to notice startling rates of illness amongst workers and the general public in the affected region, leading local environmental associations to begin researching potential causes. After a randomised survey of local residents revealed disturbing levels of PFAS in the blood of the adult population, small civic initiatives and public assemblies began convening, along with the first protests in front of Miteni’s offices.

Under pressure, the regional health body initiated its first ‘health surveillance plan’ for residents of the most contaminated zone born between 1951 and 2002, beginning with the younger section of the population. In the first months of 2017 families in the province of Vicenza discovered that their children had quantities of PFOA in their blood up to ten or twenty times those considered safe. It was therefore possible to conclude that despite the installation of new filters, water remained unsafe to drink. Nobody had thought to inform locals of this.

For the inhabitants of the small Venetian province this came as a shock. It was only then that many discovered that those unpronounceable, colourless substances were suspected carcinogens and endocrine disruptors, with the capacity to interfere with hormones, affecting growth, development and reproduction. A group named ‘Mothers Against PFAS’ quickly formed; an association of parents representing their poisoned teenagers. They began studying chemistry and collecting data relevant to their growing case against Miteni. ‘The more we studied’, one of them recalls, ‘the more our rage grew.’

Somewhat paradoxically, Miteni continued its operations throughout this whole period. To be sure, it no longer produced the now incriminated PFOA and PFAS; it had, however, moved onto a new group of perfluoroalkylated compounds with shorter molecules known commercially as C6O4 or GenX. Several studies indicate that the latest generation of PFAS are no less harmful than their predecessors, even if official regulations have yet to provide clarity. Regardless, between 2014 and 2017 Miteni extracted GenX from wastewater imported from plants owned by Chemour (DuPont’s successor) in the Netherlands, until local authorities there warned the Italians of the potential risks involved. Shortly thereafter Miteni declared bankruptcy.

It is now clear that both the initial Japanese group and the subsequent proprietors from Luxembourg continued to produce PFAS at the plant up until they could guarantee handsome profits, without spending a penny on shielding the neighbouring population from the consequences of production. Then, as regulations became more and more demanding, and having squeezed all possible returns from the plant, they let it go under, dumping the cleaning costs onto the local community.  

This is precisely what makes the case of this small province in Veneto paradigmatic. A single thread ties DuPont to the Italian textile industry, Japanese investors and speculators in Luxembourg. Binding them is the toxic logic of profit; disdain for the safety of workers and the sacrifice of collective well-being at the altar of immediate, maximised gain. 

Translated by Francesco Anselmetti

Read on: Sharachandra Lele’s contribution to NLR’s eco-strategy debate.

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Winners All

After two days and one night, not to mention several weeks of mutual recrimination and blackmail, 27 national governments, the European Commission and the European Parliament declared themselves to be winners – all of them. A miracle? The first thing to learn about Brussels is that nothing there is what it seems and everything can be presented in an unending variety of ways. Moreover, the number of players and playing fields is huge and confusing, and they are working under an institutional framework called ‘the Treaties’ so complicated that no outsider understands it. Skilled operators find in it innumerable opportunities for obfuscation, procedural tricks, evasive ambiguity, pretence and excuses – differing interpretations and alternative facts cordially invited. And, importantly, there is on top of it all a deeply rooted tacit understanding among the members of that most exclusive and secretive body, the European Council of Heads of State and Government, that it is everybody’s duty to ensure that none of them has to return home looking like a loser, so all of them will remain willing to continue playing the game.

Take the Corona Recovery Fund. The first thing one must know is that it has nothing to do with Corona and everything to do with saving the Italian government from Signor Salvini. The second thing is that it has nothing to do with European solidarity either: every country gets something and nobody pays anything, as the fund consists of debt and debt alone: a supranational extension of the debt state. Moreover, nobody knows how that debt will be serviced and repaid, and nobody cares since this will start only seven years hence. Most likely repayment will be by new debt anyway or, through some arcane channel, by the European Central Bank. This, of course, would be illegal under the Treaties, but so may be taking up the debt in the first place. It also seems that all 27 national parliaments must agree to the fund, but nobody worries about this since they all get a share of the booty.

This doesn’t mean it’s all peace and friendship. Empires depend on a successful management of peripheral by central elites. In the EU, peripheral elites must be staunchly ‘pro-European’, meaning in favour of the ‘ever closer union of the peoples of Europe’ as governed by Germany with France through the Brussels bureaucracy. Germany and the European Commission have long suspected the present governments of Hungary and Poland of not being sufficiently ‘pro-European’. Similar suspicions exist in the so-called European Parliament, which does not covet members who are not in favour of ‘more Europe’. (‘More Europe’ is the raison d’être of this strange Parliament that has neither an opposition nor a right to legislate.) EP-members from Hungary’s and Poland’s liberal opposition parties therefore find ample support for withholding European money from their home countries’ non-liberal governments, to make voters there believe that they get more cash from ‘Europe’ if they vote for ‘pro-European’ parties. So why not make payments from the Corona Recovery Fund conditional on a country upholding the ‘rule of law’, defining ‘rule of law’ so that the policies of non-liberal elected governments do not conform to it?

Sounds good? Well, there are the Treaties. Under the Treaties, member countries, all of them, including Hungary and Poland, remain sovereign, and their domestic institutions and policies, for example family and immigration policies, are for their electorates to decide, not for Brussels or Berlin. When it comes to a country’s legal institutions, the only legitimate concern of the EU is whether EU funds are properly spent and accounted for. Here, however, Poland has an immaculate record, and Hungary seems still on or above the level of ‘pro-European’ Bulgaria and Romania, not to mention Malta. So what to do?

In Brussels there is always a way. The Commission has for some time tried to punish Poland and Hungary under a different provision in the Treaties that forbids member countries interfering with the independence of their judiciary. But this is such a big bazooka that member states hesitate to let the Commission activate it. (It also raises uncomfortable questions on the political independence of, say, the French Conseil d’Etat.) Now, however, comes the Corona Fund, and with it the idea of a so-called ‘Rule-of-Law Mechanism’ (ROLM) attached to it, on the premise that if you don’t have an independent judiciary, including a liberal constitutional court, and perhaps also if you don’t admit refugees as a matter of human rights and in obedience to EU distribution quotas, there is no assurance that your accounting for your use of European money will be accurate.

Can this work? Anything is possible in Brussels. The reasoning is similar to that with which the European Central Bank prevailed in the European Court of Justice against the German Constitutional Court (the PSPP ruling). The Treaties limit the ECB to monetary policy, reserving fiscal policy for the member states. But the ECB argued that monetary policy can today no longer be separated from fiscal policy, from which it follows that fiscal policy now falls in the domain of the central bank. In response, the German court, now cited by the governments of Poland and Hungary, insisted that European competences are strictly limited to what members have explicitly conceded in the Treaties, and if more European competences are needed the Treaties must be changed accordingly, which requires unanimity. This was the situation when the wrestling began in earnest.

Move I (the EU): We invite you to agree to the Corona Fund, including the ROLM and the possibility of you not getting anything unless you mend your illiberal ways.

Countermove (Poland and Hungary): We will never vote for this mechanism, so forget about your fund. Veto!

Move II: If you vote against the mechanism and thereby against the Fund, we’ll set up a fund for the other 25, and we’ll find a Treaty base for it, the Treaties are big and complex enough, paper is patient as the Germans say, and you won’t get a damn cent.

Countermove: That won’t be nice, it won’t be European (little they know!), and it would be illegal.

The chorus, impersonated by the German press, singing and dancing: See, money works; they do as they are told because they want our cash. It’s so good to be rich.

Enter the presidents, in the hour of truth, led by Merkel, dea ex machina, Mistress of the Closed Session, representing the country that happens to formally preside over the other countries in the second half of 2020, and informally anyway. Germany needs Eastern Europe for business. It also feels it cannot allow the Americans to have a monopoly on anti-Russian geopolitics. This precludes falling out with Poland over Polish sovereignty. After much back and forth, in the darkroom of intergovernmental diplomacy, Poland and Hungary agree to the Recovery Fund, complemented by a ROL document. According to it the Commission will issue a ‘Budget Protection Directive’ tying Corona and indeed any other EU subsidies to a national legal system independent enough to secure a correct accounting for EU moneys received. The Directive will not, however, take force until it is reviewed by the European Court. In the meantime – likely to last until early 2023 – the Commission will take no action under it, and money will flow to all 27. Once, and if, the mechanism has passed muster by the Court, the Commission may start proceedings against Poland, Hungary or both, to claim back money already disbursed, on the ground that the Polish and Hungarian legal systems are so rotten that they cannot generally be expected to render judgments in line with, well, the ‘rule of law’. Clearly this will take more time, and nobody knows what the world will be like then and what member states will by then be concerned about.

In Europe, grace periods work wonders. For the time being there is universal happiness: among the various Presidents, the Parliament (which got its amendment passed), the Commission (which gets a new toy with which to harass member states and feel important), the Court (its jurisdiction growing by the day), and the national governments including Hungary and Poland (who won’t talk about the informal assurances they received under the counter). The politics of deferment, Merkel’s favourite discipline, knows only winners – as long as it lasts.

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International Letters

A strong dose of idealism is needed to keep any magazine going. For Lettre Internationale, it’s no less than to counteract the ‘provincialism of the great cultures’ and induce them to ‘see themselves through the eyes of others’. How? By scouring the world for the best texts in any language and offering them in exquisite translation.  

That was the ambition of Antonín Liehm, a Czech editor who spent his life between France and the US after the crushing of the Prague Spring. On December 4, he passed away in that city, at the age of 96. Three-quarters of a century before, he had started his first magazine, Kulturní politika, along with E. F. Burian, one of the country’s most innovative theater directors. As the rubble from World War II was still being cleared, the 21 year-old Liehm churned out the culture-meets-politics platform at the mad pace of a weekly. The magazine was pro-communist, but not an appendage of the Party, and ran for three years before Liehm rubbed the government the wrong way by publishing a poem deemed an anti-state conspiracy.

In 1960, he took over the Litérarní noviny and transformed what had been a Stalinist mouthpiece of the Writers’ Association into the most popular intellectual journal of the country. The LN wove a critical politics out of reportage on culture, philosophy, film, theatre and literature – Sartre, Aragon, the New Wave. For a readership of over 130,000, it supplied uncompromising and provocative articles that shimmied past the censors via sympathetic connections. Within a few hours of its appearance every Thursday, the magazine was sold out.

In 1960s Czechoslovakia, Liehm later reflected, its place was akin to that of the Encyclopédie in eighteenth-century France: a venue for the taboo in pamphlet form. And it carried similarly profound political repercussions. Promoting the reform of communism, Liehm’s concoction was a crucial catalyst for the Prague Spring, and several of its writers were leaders in the uprising. A year after the Soviet tanks rolled in, the magazine’s editor, on the list of people to be ‘shot down’, found refuge in Paris.

In exile, Liehm cobbled together his finances by teaching film and literature at universities in France and the US while searching for another publishing venture.  Gunter Grass and Heinrich Böll showed interest in assembling an East-West magazine, but for Liehm, this was too parochial. Only something truly international would suffice, something that would take down not only the wall separating Eastern and Western Europe, but the pedestal on which the latter stood as well. For Grass, this was not German enough, and the two parted ways.

It was at sixty that Liehm founded the outlet for this vision: Lettre Internationale. Funding he scrambled together from the French Ministry of Culture and Polish and Hungarian émigrés, who were willing to support an intellectual journal of the type they knew from home.  It wasn’t a fortune, but it was enough to birth the magazine in a one-room office shared with another dissident leftist, Paul Noirot. What money there was all went to pay the translators, whose work had to be of the highest quality: the texts were to read as fluently in French as they did in the original. Without funds to commission writers, the magazine was assembled as a collage, anchored by central text, juxtaposed against others, and refracted through images and poetry interspersed throughout. 

But it was to be much more.  The foundational idea was an international network of publications, but one quite unlike the standard sort that offers simply the same fare in different languages. Moving past the intellectual divisions in Europe and beyond – not merely East-West, but also North-South – meant not standardization but localization: half of the texts in each issue were to overlap, while the rest could be determined on the ground. Perhaps only Le Monde Diplomatique’s global federation of partner editions provides a contemporary comparison. 

In the late 1980s, Leihm’s vision spread quickly, with the rapid appearance of sister magazines in Italian (Lettera Internazionale, 1985), Spanish (Letra Internacional, 1986), and German (Lettre International, 1987). When the East opened in the 1990s, the pan-European ebullience, buoyed by foundation funding, spawned even more – Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Russian, Croatian, Serbian, Bulgarian, and Macedonian versions, while smaller western countries, Denmark and the Netherlands, caught up.

But noble intentions alone don’t pay the presses and the idealistic aim struggled against the technology available at the time: the texts circulated, slowly, by post. Within a decade, the French version collapsed, and no edition ever appeared outside Europe, which remained the central geographic focus. Now merely six languages remain: the Russian edition has found refuge online, and the rest struggle to hang on.

Only in Germany has the project continued in full form, without qualification, under founder-editor Frank Berberich. With a circulation of over 20,000, the Berlin-based Lettre International is the widest-read literary magazine in the country. This is no small feat for a chunky periodical of 150 pages printed on broad A3 paper. As such, it’s very much a stay-at-home quarterly: even rolled up, it won’t fit into a handbag. In public, it can be seen mostly in the window of cafes or wine shops, like a Zagat sticker signaling taste.

But the uncooperative format is perhaps a needed concession to the magazine’s interdisciplinarity. In the tradition of Breton’s Minotaure, it showcases artworks between the articles, and the uncompromised size gives them their rightful due. Covers are typically head-turners (for example, a watercolor of an S&M orgy), while the pictorial contributions inside, from the likes of Ai Weiwei, Annie Lebowitz, or Georg Baselitz, offer a moment for breath between the texts.

Three-quarters of these are translations that range across essays, reportage, interviews, poetry, fiction, commentaries and analysis. European languages predominate, but authors outside the West are not in short supply. The point is discovery – German readers have Lettre to thank for the introduction of Slavoj Zizek and Liao Yiwu to their shelves – and disruption. The magazine darts between political perspectives and hovers around the contentious.  It was in an interview with Lettre that then Bundesbank board member Thilo Sarrazin first expounded his views on Muslim immigrants’ ‘unwillingness to integrate’, sparking a media frenzy and his eventual departure from public life. Recent issues have covered deglobalization and epidemics, the ganglands of Kosovo, the transformation of writing, apocalypse past and present, mutations of racism in America, the fraught Americanization of Europe, as well as the philosophy of touch – all from original texts in more than a half-dozen languages – and in its massive, obstinate format.

How should we conceptualize these internationalist endeavours? In The World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova mapped the global literary order onto an uneven political-economic terrain. If universalist vernaculars once facilitated literary communication across vast swathes of territory, the Herderian revolution of nineteenth-century nationalism swept them aside as authors embraced writing in one’s native tongue as both right and necessity. The outcome was a more localized literary space, bounded by nationalized languages. Yet if languages were increasingly homogenized within state borders, literary worlds remained vastly unequal beyond them, country power a determining feature of their global rank. The effect is a hierarchy, much as in the field of international relations.

Within it, what passes now as world literature is determined in the hubs of power – London, Paris, New York. These dominant centres host the publishing, reviewing, translating and prize-giving mechanisms that function as gatekeepers of taste and arbiters of the new. The result is not a Republic of Letters, but an Empire of the same. Outsiders, whether from social margins or peripheral countries, gain admittance only if they conform to the establishment’s criteria of taste. The parochialism is perhaps strongest within the current global hegemon: in the US, works in translation account for only 3 percent of all books sold. 

Liehm’s vision for Lettre – like his politics since the 1940s – subverted this order from the inside. He took a project, born on the periphery of Europe, and transposed it to Paris where he attempted to raze the inequalities on which the continent’s literary capital rose, for translation was supposed to go both ways. There are as likely to be Arabic texts that readers of Swedish should access as vice versa, he would comment. The success of the magazine’s offspring in Germany would not have surprised Casanova. The country’s linguistic power lags far behind its economic might; as such, interest in translation from its hinterlands is an understandable response.

Or maybe it is that Germany remains the last bastion within Europe of the once wide-spread feuilleton culture, still materialized as an extended section in weekend newspapers. These, as a rule, carry long-form essays on politics and arts that assume a far more literate public than even the London Review might expect of its readers. Perhaps only this, and the feuilleton’s ritual venue – the Sunday breakfast that stretches on until sunset, round a table covered in jam and breadcrumbs – can explain how a magazine as thick and uncompromising as Lettre can survive in an age of blogs. 

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Tram-Spotting

The Soviet Union had a rule that any urban area that reached a million people had to have an underground Metro system. This went alongside a developed network of trolleybuses and trams that served most cities, which of course had its gaps and failures – there was nothing in the USSR that did not. Yet ‘1 million = Metro’ was such a strong rule that it was open to abuse by ambitious local authorities.

In the 1960s, the city council in Yerevan, which had been lobbying repeatedly for a Metro despite having an urban population of less than half the magic figure, received a delegation from Moscow. Although a supposedly autonomous soviet socialist republic, Armenia couldn’t build a Metro without the capital’s permission, cash and resources. Yerevan’s city council accordingly organised enormous traffic jams to keep the Moscow Nomenklatura stuck for hours on their way from the airport to the city hall, and insisted that this proved that Yerevan would be in chaos by the time it had reached a million inhabitants. The government were sufficiently impressed, and since 1981 Yerevan has had a gorgeous, if currently somewhat dilapidated underground Metro network. Public transport in Britain is administered in a similarly centralized manner, but is more miserly in spirit.

According to the EU’s planning project ESPON, there are twelve urban areas with over a million inhabitants in the UK – Greater London is in a category of its own at 10 million, but Greater Manchester, the Birmingham-Coventry-Black Country and Leeds-Bradford-Wakefield-Halifax conurbations all have over 2 million people; at over a million are Glasgow, Merseyside, Tyne and Wear, Nottingham-Derby, Southampton-Portsmouth, Cardiff and the South Wales Valleys, Bristol and Sheffield.

Of these, none outside London and Nottingham has a fully integrated public-transport network where buses, trams and trains are planned and owned by the same body, and only London, Newcastle-Sunderland and Glasgow have true Metro systems of the sort you will find in cities and conurbations of their size in France, Germany, Italy or Spain. Some cities have trams, usually integrated with old railway tracks, such as Nottingham, Sheffield’s grandly named Supertram, Manchester’s Metrolink and the West Midlands ‘Metro’ between Birmingham and Wolverhampton. Liverpool and its satellites have an extensive S-Bahn-style network, Merseyrail, built in the 70s as a replacement for the dismantled Liverpool Overhead Railway; operators try their best to hide it from the tourists, presumably because they might expect better.  

To find such a failure in provision elsewhere in Europe, the only obvious comparison is Dublin (the Republic has inexplicably copied almost every foolish planning decision made in Britain since 1922). Elsewhere, you have to look quite far – the big cities of the former Yugoslavia are the nearest equivalent, where a decade of war in recent memory and a total economic collapse provide a better excuse. One of the less-discussed possible consequences of the coronavirus is that the already rudimentary British public-transport systems may soon go bankrupt.

Where they exist, these urban-rail networks have lost between 80 and 95 per cent of their custom since the start of March 2020. In Britain, where urban rail and Metro systems are funded largely out of ticket receipts and advertising – most around the world are funded by government grants – this has led to mayors like Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham raising the possibility that their systems will have to be abandoned. As a result, a bailout was organised for England’s urban-rail and tram networks (somewhat inaccurately called ‘light rail’) in May. Some money has been thrown to the Tyne and Wear Metro (a superb system, built in the 1970s as a part of T Dan Smith’s ‘Brasilia of the North’), West Midlands Metro, the Metrolink, the Supertram, and Nottingham Express Transit.

A similar bailout was later agreed for Transport for London, which had deliberately onerous strings attached. These were designed to humiliate Sadiq Khan, whom the government appears to consider a prime enemy after the vanquishing of Jeremy Corbyn – a telling obsession, given his centrist politics. As bankruptcy still loomed, a further bailout of TfL followed in October, after some grandstanding between Khan and the government, which initially planned to force a series of draconian fare hikes, before executing one of its trademark U-turns.

It is of course an odd time to talk about extending public-transport provision, given that local governments have at least temporarily been encouraging people not to use it, but to cycle or walk instead. But we still know there is only one plausible approach to ensuring city and town dwellers can move around in an allegedly soon-to-be zero carbon age – not just by cycling and walking, even less by buying electric cars, but by taking tubes, trams and trolleybuses, segregated from cars and roads. The cities that have lowered their emissions furthest are precisely those that have the most extensive, efficient, frequent and cheap transport networks.

The fact that there are so few of these in the UK is the consequence of the micromanagement of all infrastructure from Westminster – an Act of Parliament is, preposterously, required in order to fund a tram line – intersecting with a ruinously complex, expensive and wasteful system of contracting and procurement.

Local authorities can be criticised for a great deal, but the paucity of public-transport provision in the UK is not for want of cities trying to get funding for something more ambitious. Glasgow has repeatedly, over many decades, begged for money to extend its one-line 1890s Subway; such an extension has never been agreed, let alone commenced. In the 1970s, proposals for a Manchester Metro were thrown out by the government – the fact that the city’s public spaces are clogged up by what are basically railway platforms for the Metrolink’s heavily engineered tram-trains is a direct result of this. Most of the networks outside London, Newcastle and Glasgow date from the 1980s and 90s, and were attempts at putting back a little of what was lost in the 50s and 60s, when the Beeching Axe – wielded by a ‘modernizing’ Tory minister, Ernest Marples – slashed suburban lines, while tram networks were torn out to make way for buses and, mainly, cars.

The South Hampshire conurbation, where Southampton and Portsmouth, the two densest cities in England outside of London, have had to contend with a Tory county’s objection to any expansion of their local-authority boundaries, have had two proposals rejected in Parliament. A slightly goofy Monorail proposal was thrown out by Thatcher, and, much worse, a serious, costed and extensive Metro network which would at last have properly connected this interminable sprawl, with a line gradually being built westwards from Portsea Island to Southampton, was vetoed by Gordon Brown’s Treasury and replaced with a bus running in railway cuttings between Gosport and Fareham.

New Labour talked a great deal about public transport, but Brown seems to have had an animus towards urban rail and trams, spiking plans for Liverpool and for Leeds, whose transport is probably the worst of any big city in Britain. The latter’s problems were compounded under Cameron and Osborne when a truncated trolleybus, which would at least have given Leeds transport of the quality of, say, Sloviansk, went to a public enquiry and was thrown out in 2016. Some of this hostility derives from an early New Labour report on urban transport, which argued that buses should play the major role in expanding public provision. While their importance is considerable, refusing to back pretty much anything else was strikingly short-sighted – even before one considers the way buses are run as private fiefdoms by private companies, seldom integrated with trams and trains.

Yet what did get built sometimes became cautionary tales, making the situation yet worse. Only two new systems were commenced under the Blair–Brown governments – Nottingham Express Transit (NET, modishly), a good, publicly owned tram-train which is partly funded by a surcharge on car parking; and Edinburgh. This was a scandal in Scotland, as cost overruns and ineptitude on the part of its contractors meant that the system came in at half the planned length and thirteen years late; its expense has become notorious, though the single line that now exists is pleasant and popular. Le Havre’s recently constructed light-rail/tram system, longer than Edinburgh’s, with more stations and a 500-metre tunnel, took three years to build, at a cost of £347m – less than half the price of the Edinburgh system.

The enormous expense of building infrastructure in the UK has been as prohibitive as the Treasury’s refusal to invest outside of London and Manchester. It is often claimed this is due to labour costs, but the French counter-example makes this obvious nonsense. The labyrinthine public-private contracting systems that have been dominant in the UK since the 1980s are the real culprit. In this context, Manchester, Nottingham and Sheffield can be proud of what little they have.

One of the many possible interpretations of the profound shifts in electoral politics in the North and Midlands – dramatically instantiated in the 2016 Brexit vote and the December 2019 Tory landslide – can be derived from public-transport provision, or the lack of it. The cities, towns and suburbs covered by the London Underground, Merseyrail, NET and the Tyne and Wear Metro mostly voted Labour in 2019; but an electoral apocalypse hit the poorly served outer towns of Greater Manchester, the West Midlands and West Yorkshire.

Leigh, for instance, the Greater Manchester town that saw the largest overturning of a Labour majority in the country, held by Labour since 1922, is almost completely cut off from Wigan, Salford and Manchester except by unreliable and slow buses. Dudley, not far from the centre of one of the largest urban areas in Europe, is treated by government and residents alike as a self-contained provincial ‘town’. The‘left behind’ cliché has a very concrete meaning in places like this.

Britain is clearly being polarised between London – plus a handful of similar places with property booms and bankers, such as Manchester and Edinburgh – and everywhere else. The entrenched character of the current culture war rests upon people believing bizarre things about the people who live down the road, and upon inculcating a sense of parochial resentment in places that are in reality dense urban areas. The possible collapse of the urban-transport networks was clearly not planned by this government, and it is unlikely that they will be allowed to fail permanently. A situation in which they rust away, offering a skeletal service to ‘key workers’ (or the ‘metropolitan elite’, depending on the audience) is highly plausible. This will only aid a politics based on pettiness and paranoia.