It’s hard to know what exactly to say about the recent forcible removal of statues of slave traders and colonisers in public places in Britain and Europe.
On the one hand, it’s a great step forward towards racial justice and equity: putting up a statue of a person celebrates their contribution to the culture of the society in which they lived and worked.
Seeing the bringing down, dragging and (in some cases) the beheading of statues of Colston and Columbus and co., I feel like I’m watching the French Revolution in real time, even though I agree the repellent values they embody should not be respected.
But my Facebook and Instagram are filling up with videos of real people being actually killed, caught in the person-to-person crossfires that are cropping up everywhere. And beheadings and lynching are terrible things to hear of, because whether it’s audio or video these are our fellow human beings doing terrible things to each other, and having terrible things done to them.
The dominant culture propagated by the West for the past 400 years is being visibly challenged. The Colonisation and its underlying belief system is being questioned, and those who profited from it and furthered it in their time are being removed from their pedestals.
I see the red paint-spattered faces and shoulders of these men, and watch them being pulled down by ropes and trundled down the streets and thrown into the harbours where their slave ships docked, their petrified bodies kicked each step of their un-royal progress by people of all colours and creeds.
With these images in my mind, I think of the tumbril, that crude, terrible open cart in which the aristocrats were taken to the guillotine at the Place de la Concorde, through a howling crowd, who were rejoicing in their abrupt reversal of fortune.
J.K. Rowling
We are seeing living icons falling too: J.K. Rowling, whose unprecedented personal popularity rose with the rise of social media, and was partly created by her engagement with it, has now fallen from her plinth, and even though she has been responsible for her own fall, it’s not hard to see the parallels between her being verbally dragged and vilified on Twitter on the vast platform her own talent had created, and the stone men in their stone costumes being thrown into the sea. She, like them, was famous in her time for her philanthropy. It was the ‘tax’ she paid to occupy her exalted state.
To be frank, even a cursory check will show us the marginalisation and tokenism in the characterisation of the world of ‘Harry Potter’ where we saw one Chinese girl, two Indian girls (because they are twins), one West Indian man, one Irish boy, one Jewish boy, etc. Hogwarts was their home, and Hogwarts reinforced a lot of dominant narratives of race, as well as gender.
Cho Chang and Padma and Parvati Patil are all described as the prettiest girls in school, but they all behave like bimbos, in comparison with the intelligent Hermione and the brilliant Ginny, both stout examples of the ‘best of (Anglo) British.’ We would be accurate in seeing these portraits as identifying JKR’s socio-cultural narrowness of mind. It was there all the time. In plain sight.
Perhaps this represents Rowling’s personal ‘pushback’ response to the loss of Empire, and the rise of immigration in Britain. She herself did not have an international education: her school and university education was local, regional and provincial, and she was not hugely well-travelled when she wrote the books, 20 years ago.
Her current challenges on Twitter, in my opinion, are caused by her fame (and expectations of her wokeness created by it) outstripping her personal ideological evolution. She is being cast off because she will not recognise the validity of variations of gender identification diversity.
But she is really not a pluralist: over and over, in both gender and race, she portrays a rigid binary - two races: white and non-white. As if white is normative, and everything else is other (and undifferentiated). Which (I assume), is how she prefers it to be. If she didn’t, she could have created a more diverse world - in a magical realm of her own invention.
Those ideas of binary rigidity are not words to live by, or uphold in the modern world. They have no capacity to inspire or include the rainbow spectrum of human existence and experience.
In the late 18th Century in France, it was people power that was in the political ascendant, and being called an aristo traitor got you a death sentence. Today, in 2020, with its voracious and volatile identity politics, the current unpardonable public crime is racism.
People who exhibit this noxious quality are doxxed (search for and publish private or identifying information about a particular individual on the Internet, typically with malicious intent) and exposed, and rough and ready justice is dealt to them by a Twitter mob: a motley crew of genuine anti-racists, educated socialists and historians, anti-imperialists, Marxists, intersectional feminists, liberalist humanists, anti-fascists and anarchists, and people who just like causing chaos, some of whom have been paid to foment civil disorder by interested parties, and brought into the relevant town in buses.
Milan Kundera
We must take great care to select what we are replacing the torn down myths with, now, and consciously choose better. The writer Milan Kundera, brilliant witness of the dismantling of democracy and the rise of socialist autocracy in Europe during the Cold War, noted: “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, and its history. Then have somebody write a new culture, invent a new history. Before long, the Nation will begin to forget what it is, and what it was.”
Many things that have had a stranglehold on our imaginations are being challenged in the here and now: not history or culture alone, but mythology. Our selective memories and cultural narratives are being mass audited. History is being created, and we are here to see it, not just as witnesses or recipients or inheritors, but participants and co-creators.
No comments:
Post a Comment