The unacknowledged legislators
Shelley wrote that poets – by which I think he meant all creative artists – were the “unacknowledged legislators of the world”, in part because through their art they can get closer to truth. How, then, do creative writers engage with issues of justice during and after periods of conflict and political change; and how does the idea of justice evolve and interact with other factors, and especially the need for stability and reconciliation? These are two question asked by Mike Newman in his book Six Authors in Search of Justice, which was published last year by Hurst and Co.
Newman seeks clarity about how justice might be approached in such circumstances, by examining how six writer-activists did so, and how their ideas changed as their circumstances and understanding evolved. His short book starts with a summary of different philosophical and historical interpretations of justice, which is followed by a chapter of around 25 pages each on Victor Serge in revolutionary Russia, Albert Camus in post-war France, Jorge Semprún in Spain from the Civil War through to the post-Franco era, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in colonial and post-colonial Kenya, Ariel Dorfman following the Pinochet coup in Chile, and Nadine Gordimer during the liberation struggle in South Africa.
All six were radicals in their context, embracing the need for transformational change. For example, Serge wanted to overthrow the capitalist system not just in Tsarist Russia but globally, Camus served in the French Resistance, and Gordimer’s fundamental belief in the equality of all peoples burned like an eternal guiding flame. All had an abiding belief in social and economic justice as a central element of the better world they sought. From his reading of their lives and their creative output, Newman maps the journeys they travelled, as their revolutionary dreams were enacted or frustrated, and explores the ways their ideas evolved.
Each lived through times of transition, and their ideas developed as they were confronted with changing political realities, which altered their views of what was appropriate and what was right, fair and just. During the Russian revolution, Serge agreed with Lenin’s view that their goals justified violence and the deaths of many who would stand in their way, to overcome resistance, demonstrate commitment, and in proportion to the fundamental nature of the transformation they sought. But later he became disgusted by Stalin’s use of terror tactics as a method of governing. He held that no revolutionary aims could justify trampling continuously on human rights, nor the use of secret trials, and came to the view that that Marxism and social justice were impossible without freedom.
Camus emerged from his initial belief that the execution of Nazi collaborators was a necessary ingredient of the post-war moment in France. Quite quickly, amid thousands of executions which were carried out in 1944, he came to abhor the scale and manner of what he understood as mainly a retribution process. He became a fervent believer that, even if retribution might have been necessary for a short period following the departure of the German occupiers, it should have been replaced as soon as possible by a project of reconciliation, in order to establish a just post-war order. This was an unpopular view among fellow cadres.
To take another example, Ngũgĩ, having grown up amidst – and been personally touched by – the Mau Mau rebellion against the British, held very powerful beliefs in the need to overcome colonial and then post-colonial domination by the imperial power. He shared with Gordimer an increasing disaffection as their new governments seemed to move away from the economic and social justice project, and become corrupted. He understood that the search for justice was an ever-more complex and comprehensive process, embracing social, economic, political, judicial and cultural dimensions.
For Newman, all six authors illuminate the fundamentally multi-dimensional and nuanced character of transitional justice, and this seems absolutely right. All six shifted from simpler to more complex notions of justice: for example from the fight against Nazism or imperial power, to the struggle for a just society, and for politics and culture emphasising fairness. All, to a degree, witnessed transitional and post-transitional governments fail to deliver and uphold the values which they increasingly saw as essential to justice. Values became more important than other structural factors. Accurate conjunctural and historical narratives were also essential, as they saw truth fall victim to change. As Newman writes, the “attempt to eliminate a particular form of injustice can produce new forms of injustice” which themselves need to be acknowledged truthfully and addressed. The process is a continuous one, not something to be achieved all at once by revolution – even one as transformational as the Russian revolution.
All six also came to understand that the process of achieving justice is contingent on circumstances, involves compromise, and that decisions of emphasis taken today will affect the future. This is perhaps most obviously seen in terms of the balance between punishment (and its close cousins, revenge and retribution), and reconciliation – an important characteristic of most “transitional justice” policies and programmes playing out today. Semprún wanted political stability after Franco, above all, even if this meant sacrificing socialist principles he had embraced throughout his life, and he accepted that crimes committed during and after the civil war could remain unpunished, provided they were at least acknowledged. But as political freedom became more and more bedded in in Spain, he became an advocate for a clearer and more balanced telling of a history in which all sides, including his own, had committed human rights violations.
Newman quotes the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s comment that fiction can illuminate the truth and ‘infuse the world with meaning’ – which brings us back nicely to Shelley. All six authors in Newman’s book used their art to explore and illuminate critical issues of justice and political moment in their times. But from Newman’s reading, they were generally undidactic in so doing, believing that – as Ngũgĩ put it – they were ‘not in art because of politics; [but] in politics because of [their] artistic calling’. By writing fiction, describing human characters dealing with human challenges and living out human relationships in a fictional context, they not only developed their own thinking but influenced the way their readers encountered and understood the real world. This is a fascinating book which, by exploring the way in which six real-life humans encountered their real-life circumstances, more or less achieves the same goal. For this reader, Newman’s book says emphatically that the search for fairness is a never-ending, multi-dimensional project – one that is intimately bound up with, and ultimately contingent on, freedom, and on people’s ability to shape and constrain the politics of their place and time.
Years
Years
Were I to live another ten
I’d reach the very brink of old,
the gorse would bloom ten times again,
I’d reconnect with long lost friends
and see my children’s dreams unfold –
were I to live another ten.
I’d turn my face to church and mend
my broken faith; in blazing gold
the gorse would bloom ten times again;
I’d visit towns like this and spend
my evenings looking in, alone,
were I to live another ten.
We’d make love, winter nights, and then
as springtime warmth replaced the cold
the gorse would bloom, ten times again.
The years ahead diminish when
I measure what they may not hold:
were I to live another ten,
the gorse would bloom ten times again.
Kent & Sussex Folio 2017
Blackberries in Ukraine
The news tonight showed fighting in Ukraine.
My eye was drawn, not to the scenes of war,
but swollen brambles glistening in the sun,
in the hawthorn hedge behind the soldier’s arm.
The camera didn’t catch him quietly claim
his harvest, but I somehow saw
his hand release the rifle, reach, and one
by one dislodge the berries to his palm.
Though I can’t wage his war, nor feel the pain
his comrades, enemies and he endure,
I taste the same sharp juice which dyes his thumb
and fingertips, and stains his uniform.
Were he to visit here, would what is strange
or – as for me – familiar strike a chord?
In foreign fabric, does he see homespun:
his world and mine lit by a single star?
Abroad, we introduce ourselves again
to what we know; to where we’ve been before –
and hear the chorus crows and doves have sung
at dawn since days began: discord and calm.
Gold Dust magazine, Issue 31, June 2017
The small things goddesses do
In ancient Greece, a goddess, nymph
or god was always near at, and
prepared to lend a helping hand
to make a herdsman from a prince,
a shipwrecked sailor reach the shore,
and war from peace, or peace from war.
Too neat, I always thought, too neat…
Until, collapsed from drink and stress
in a London park, and hauled to my feet
and then let fall, by CID,
an Aphrodite in a summer dress
appeared, with the warmest smile,
and sat with me as I revived
enough to shuffle, sheepish, home,
while she returned to the hills, alone…
And when they set the pumps to flood
the Athens park, beneath whose shrubs
we’d slept, and sent us scurrying with
our sleeping bags for higher ground,
Demeter, dressed in widow’s black,
emerged unbid from dawn to give
us carrier bags of bread and grapes,
then turn and walk away
without a further glance or sound.
So they were right, the poets, that
the gods descend in mortal shape
and influence the course we take:
slight variances of fate, perhaps –
no major shifts of plot; as acts
of kindness surely cannot not
impact how those they touch proceed,
nor how they impact those they touch
in turn…
But are they kindnesses?
We count as playthings merely, seen
from Mount Olympus, and I need
to ask those careless goddesses
who squandered intercession on
my undeserving youth, have I
exhausted all my share?
There’s neither shade nor sky. I watch
you slump against the hollow rim
of where what’s yet to come, or gone,
is dried and lifted by the wind
to fall and fleck the dunes; you dare
not dream nor raise your eyes beyond
horizons where the haze begins.
I do, and see that neither what
nor how we pray, makes any odds
at all to goddesses who change
the views they look down on, at whim,
between this arid lowland, and
a valley blessed by quiet rain.
Published in Anima, Issue 4, Summer 2017 http://www.animapoetry.uk/new-products/anima-issue-4
The scent of green
I’ve all I need: my books, TV, a view
of sparrows and squirrels in the apple tree;
and when they mow the lawn, I almost dare
breathe unlost summers in the scent of green.
Other girls never returned to their life before –
I quietly hid my uniform, away
from where my hands might search the wardrobe rail,
and placed my demob bag in the attic, to fade.
My family welcomed me to their routines,
but the clouds of peace hung heavy on our home
and no-one wanted more for me, nor seemed
to wish me to want more, than I’d once known.
I couldn’t wish what they did not, nor keep
my raw imagination under rein:
she flew too fast – and when horizons loomed
she shied, I fell; and never rode again
and half forgot I’d shared a bond, dark hours
and dreams with friends, and helped to win a war,
and danced the conga in Trafalgar Square.
Days pass. In here I’m safe; I’m fed; I’m warm.
Buzzards
I hear her first – a screech half stolen by
the wind; then glimpse her lift away; flat tail,
white band along the underwing, as sail-
like storm clouds race behind. Again her cry
guides me towards first two then, when they’ve flown,
four buzzards, where there had been one, aloft
above the skylark field, adrift but deft
in their control, each twice as wide as long.
Within a moment they have veered away
atop the wind; my spirit soaring free.
I’ve walked and worked this valley more
than thirty years; complained about the way
the world has changed, but never thought I’d see
four buzzards, where there had been none before.
Commended in the 2017 Fosse way Writers Competition.
The flower preserver
Dusk almost hid behind her eyes
as with a voice of quiet tears
she handed me the columbines
her sister’s unforgiving man
had picked, the day he reappeared,
still labelled in his brutal hand:
Our love is stronger than your lies.
They bring me flowers to preserve,
my clients: quiet memorials
to love, death, marriage, birth;
to people, moments, days now past –
parched, pastel talismans that pull
like tides upon the heart and cast
their fragile shadows on the earth.
I work in silence. When the shop
bell rings I read the blooms and how
they’re brought – a bridal bouquet dropped
with nonchalance, a frail fern leaf
less held than touched, the tightly-wound
ivy and easter lily wreath,
a chaos of forget-me-nots…
I give them what they come here for:
a clue to whom they may have been;
a bar to whom they might become.
I can’t preserve, much less restore
that April day, nor all those dreams
we shared under the springtime sun.
I’ve kept the primroses I wore.
A slightly edited version of this was runner up at the Shepton Mallet Poetry Competition, 2017
Catching the train to work
Today the blackbird sings for the first time:
a warp for the robin’s weft; their sonic loom
afloat in the drifted mist, its weight defined
by the delicate silence it’s lifted on.
Behind, the door latch gently clicks. Ahead: the dew-
drops pick out daffodils in liquid light;
the green and crimson perfect curve of new
rose stems, appearing overnight;
fresh honeysuckle leaves unfurl in rows
of twins on tendrils searching sightlessly;
my neighbour’s newly white-washed cottage shows,
in silhouette, her awkward apple tree.
I step into the dawn, and into zone
on overlapping zone of birdsong, cast
from slender branches, garden shrubs, the lone
oak’s healed stub, announcing winter’s passed.
A boy walks through this music more than four
decades ago. He feels, but does not see
the far-off ploughman, paused, eyes raised in awe,
transported by the moment touching me.
Today’s the magic Leaping Forward Day
which startles us with shoots and song each year:
unheralded, obscurity cedes way
to light, and in this moment, all is clear.
Runner-up in the 2017 Fosseway Writers Competition
Loss
I met you only briefly, twice,
perhaps a dozen years ago
beneath the pinnacles of ice
you feared. I wonder, often: did you sow
those seeds you held, into the melted snow?
You stood there slight, but this stood out:
you were a powerhouse of grief;
alone. And certain – way past doubt –
of utter undeception, in whose teeth
you’d lost your grip of comfortable belief.
So deep, so deep, you felt distress,
it stayed unburied, near to hand,
from where you vouched your forthright sense
the gods, with arbitrary spite, had planned
to visit drought upon and scorch your land.
I screwed my eyes against the glare
of highland light which bathed, and drained
all life, from the deserted square;
I wanted nothing, nothing more, right then
than for you to be healed and whole again,
and still, today, I think of you
abandoned – brittle, proud – by grace.
I pray you found a pathway through
the melting snow to reach a burial place
wherein to plant anew; a safer space.
(Published by Pennine Platform, 2016)
The wall
Long peace with France had softened us,
but life at home was never still.
God knows we fought, often enough,
and hard, about money, the mill,
your family – everything – until
we wore each other down, and learned
the art of never being where
the other was; and in return
somehow negotiated air
enough to breathe; and layer by layer
we built a wall: on your side home,
the church, community; you made
our children yours and yours alone.
On mine, the town, the milling trade,
the rarest snowdrops ever grown.
No other thrill can match the lurch
of coiled desire I felt each year
as new-bred snowdrop stems appeared,
and promised petals – unshed tears –
in unseen whites and greens emerged;
nor disappointment match my hurt,
that winter every snowdrop failed
to bloom, dissolving in the dirt,
and loosing suddenly a gale
of silence louder than I’d heard.
And then, as though you’d waited long
for this, you stepped across the wall
and stilled my silence, broke my fall,
and gave a plantsman lessons on
the way to shelter plants from storms.
James Allen (1832-1906) – the ‘Snowdrop King’ –
a miller and amateur plantsman, grew over 100
snowdrop varieties in Shepton Mallet, Somerset. But after
decades of intensive breeding, his collection was all but
wiped out by fungal and insect infestations.
A slightly edited version of this was runner up at the Shepton Mallet Poetry Competition, 2017
Phil Vernon 