If a society is to ‘come to terms with its own raced history’, painful memories must be ‘“re-membered”… [or] they will haunt the social imagination and disrupt the present’ – Catherine Hall, ‘Histories, Empires and the Post-Colonial Moment’
Two or three weeks ago I was feeling so ready for sunshine on my skin, to embody a version of myself I had been slowly allowing to emerge during a lot of self reflection over winter. Despite identifying as a bit of a hermit, the fear associated with the pandemic creates a whole different kind of isolation and grief that has really thrown me off. More than used to staying home and working on uni assignments in my room, I’ve found what I thought would be easy actually quite paralysing and upsetting. I think the pressure to still be ~productive~ despite the collapse of all normalcy has induced more anxiety than the lack of social interation outside my house.
I glimpsed the self I imagined I could be on the day I took a prescription to someone in self-isolation. I was lucky to source a bike the day before the lockdown so I have been able to feel a greater sense of freedom and availablility to my communities than if I could only get around on foot. It turned out to be a much longer journey to the pharmacy than I realised and I had to navigate some completely unfamiliar gnarly London roads on bike for the first time. Even without the usual level of traffic it felt like a baptism of fire getting past all the road works and the watchful gaze of builders. I never really got to have a bike punk phase so I’m enjoying it while the roads are quieter. Hopefully I’ll still be cycling after the pandemic has eased.
The sun was shining all day and I got to be a tank-topped bike-top after a winter folded away inside feeling lonely and powerless. I’m hoping for more days like that one where I can get outside to help other people and feel some usefulness and autonomy rather than just doing repetitious laps for my state-sanctioned daily exercise. I hope it doesn’t completely rob us of an entire summer.
I feel like the last day or two things have finally hit me how serious this is and how little the UK government cares. It took no time for the virus to reveal the invisibilised inequalities of our country. The flow of capital always takes precedence over the actual lives of the sick, disabled, elderly and poor but an emergency like this makes this fact so unbearably present. I fear the UK has become so numb to death by systemic neglect. I hate that this level of disaster will be what puts that into perspective. Even as we endlessly plumb the depths of fucking despair and tragedy we still carry on stuck inside our capitalist realism paradigm. Exponential suffering unless we curb it now (preferably yesterday).
Anne Boyer’s words are clearer and give me that bitterest-sweet glimmer of hope and trust in our human capacity for solidarity in the middle of ongoing fucking catastrophe.
The way social distancing works requires faith: we must begin to see the negative space as clearly as the positive, to know what we don’t do is also brilliant and full of love. We face such a strange task, here, to come together in spirit and keep a distance in body at the same time. We can do it. I am writing this because I want the good in us to break through the layers of hateful nonsense we’ve been drowning in. I think we can be good, but we also must prepare for an amplification of evil’s evil. The time when the invisible becomes visible is at hand.
Yesterday I went to the launch of Matt Colquhoun’s new book ‘Egress: on Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher’. Unfortunately I was way too tired to bring my full brain to the conversation and haven’t had a chance to read the book yet but I left with some thoughts that seem well timed as a last IRL big group thing before figuring out what the hell to do next. My sleepy memory interpreted it as something about putting intentionality into the words friendship and community, overcoming the barriers put between us by the strain of life under this system – “touching from a distance”.
I feel like a virus can really bring out a hunker-down mentality that’s so easy to fall into when we’ve been groomed into such suffocating individualism as alienated subjects under capitalism. We live on an island with a political impulse to self-isolate, to compare other human beings from outside the white body politic as contagions and threats. That’s why I think Anne Boyer’s words are so important to reframing this – distancing is going to be a form of community care now. Acting in the interest of people we will never meet and with no immediate or obvious benefit to ourselves is unfortunately not something we are encouraged to do. A virus doesn’t give a shit about border politics and fincancial flows and yet lives are being put in danger because state responses put these things first. Capitalism is an abstract force and likewise we can’t see a virus. Like whistleblowing doctors, leftists have to constantly fight against normalcy and complacancy rather than allow the dangers of these things to remain invisible and over-looked. The inherent distance put between us under capitalism will now manifest physically, become a measurable 2 metres, and we will have to reach across it more consciously and carefully than ever.
Navigating all of this is going to be a new challenge cause the situation is going to change rapidly. Maintaining bonds and actions of solidarity when we’re not able to be in the same space as one another is going to take extra thought and creativity. Social distancing contains the danger of reaffirming our alienation, loneliness and individualism but is also a necessity – an act of care in defiance of the ‘business as usual/keep calm carry on’ plan revealed by Boris and his government who would gladly wash its hands of the citizens it deems least productive.
Another bit from Boyer: “fear educates our care for each other — we fear a sick person might be made sicker, or that a poor person’s life might be made even more miserable, and we do whatever we can to protect them because we fear a version of human life in which everyone lives only for themselves. I am not the least bit afraid of this kind of fear, for fear is a vital and necessary part of love.”
I read Ghosts of my Life by Mark Fisher just after his death. My best friend and I discovered his writing and fell into the rabbit hole of theoretical and musical references head-first. As huge Burial fans and moody bitches with a ~no future~ mentality it was just like… next level. I mean, discovered a bit behind the curve but one of those pivitol books you come across in your life.
Reading ghosts and capitalist realism in the aftermath of the author’s suicide, Fisher’s work felt more urgent and personal (an injury to one is an injury to all). The shape and description of hauntology reminded me of hiraeth – a homesickness defined with a sense of loss, yearning for a home (a Wales) that can never be. For me it was the sense of loss of being left behind by someone who couldn’t see a future; of escaping and hating yet missing my hometown where that happened; of coming from an area of Wales that is intensely haunted by futures that didn’t manifest – with a high body count in poverty, illness, suicide and addiction.
I was also reading about the Miner’s Strike and LGSM around this time which has been one of the few things that bridged the schism between my semi-closeted hometown self and my current guilty-for-getting-out metropolitan self.
When I started making this mix in like… 2018? I was writing an essay about Handsworth Songs for uni (something that got increasingly harder to do with my own mental health struggles and knowing even lecturers and established academics were being pushed to the brink). Handsworth was a critical moment of dub-inflected Black british cinema that linked the bloody history of the british empire to the riots of the 1980s. As I came across Fisher’s response to the film written in the context of the 2011 riots, time folded and back further into that old colonial wound when the Windrush scandal broke.
My friend was deep in PhD research and co-hosted a walking tour of Brixton’s radical Black and queer history. The stories of riots, Brixton Fairies, Olive Morris cracking buildings and lesbians on the front line overlapped with our own recent history of queer squatting. Walking and remembering rewrote the internal map I had of my neighbourhood with a deeper bodily sense of the landscape of resistance.
The legacy of empire and Thatcher’s neoliberalism has deeply affected the communities in the places I have lived in and cared about at both ends of the M4. It feels so real and present as we face down a seemingly undying Tory government. Hopefully its not too much of an indulgance in nostalgia for like… 80s/90s aesthetics n politics – but its music n vibes for remembering a long history of interconnected struggles and I like that it sort of captures a v specific time in my life.
Tracklist: Ghosts – Japan (yes on the nose) The Gospel Comes to New Guinea – 23 Skidoo Mother – Dirt Youth Club 12s Dub – Yaba Radics Alpenrausch – Monoloake Statement – Test Dept Father Can’t Yell – Eric Random & the Bedlamites As the Veneer of Democracy Starts to Fade – Mark Stewart Hatch the Plan – Andy Stott UK Will Not Survive – Rainer Veil Cateract – AL-90 Ghosts of my Life – Rufige Kru Jerusalem – Mark Stuart & the Maffia Ticket – Coby Sey Home Away From Home (Andy Stott Refix) – Arthur Russell Didn’t My Lord Deliver – Paul Robeson Comrades in Arms – Test Dept & the South Wales Striking Miners Choir (sorry can’t remember what track I put under this bit) Insurrection – Hiatus feat. Linton Kwesi Johnson This Life – Tim Hecker
Spoken bits: All Out! Dancing in Dulais 1985 Handsworth Songs 1986 Will Paynter and Paul Robeson – Transatlantic Concert 1957 Voice of striking miner, Alan Sutcliffe
Still alive, just trying to cultivate a slightly less paranoid brain by getting off sosh. Wondering what friends afar are up to but generally glad to be out of the feedback loop. Here’s january and early february in phone photos. It’s been a really tough and lonely but also a very fulfilling beginning to the year. Latest hermit impulse is defs a chrysalis situation. I might kick my way out in spring as someone different – who knows.
I usually try my best to ignore Remembrance Day but it happened that I watched the Welsh language film Hedd Wyn (1992) a couple of days ago and it got me thinking about war which led me to thinking about imperialism.
Hedd Wyn / Ellis Evans was a shepherd, poet and a pacifist during WWI who resisted conscription but like many other working class men and boys was eventually forced to go to the front to die in a war between the elite. He submitted a poem to be judged at the Eisteddfod (a Welsh cultural festival) but ended up dying at the battle of Passchendaele before being able to find out that he’d won.
‘The trumpets were sounded for the author to identify themselves. After three such summons, Archdruid Dyfed solemnly announced that the winner had been killed in action six weeks earlier. The empty chair was then draped in a black sheet. It was delivered to Evans’ parents in the same condition, “the festival in tears and the poet in his grave”, as Archdruid Dyfed said. The festival is now referred to as “Eisteddfod y Gadair Ddu” (“The Eisteddfod of the Black Chair”)’ – (wiki)
Not gonna lie I was in tears by the end credits. Partly because after therapy I needed to have a good cry about death to a sad Welsh song, partly because it is potent imagery to me and its sad to have to think about how working class people have always been used as cannon fodder so the rich can fight over resources. (examples of resistance to avoid total bleakness)
That being said, Remembrance Day has obviously become about remembering something else. Now the memories of all wars since then have been collapsed into one another and weaved into a ‘support our troops’ wristband-wearing grand narrative, a competition to prove your patriotism is beyond anyone else’s. This top-down mourning is an ideological battleground that’s ever-shifting to meet the needs of those in power and legitimise ongoing imperialist interference in other countries.
There is no such memorialisation of the millions killed by colonialism on anything close to the same scale. Even now much of the violence that capitalism necessitates is displaced elsewhere. We conveniently forgot WWI was caused in part by the wane of European imperial control. This brought the turmoil required to sustain the wealth hoarded by Europe back to its borders. Its only when white people start having to kill each other that we are taught to care.
Anyway, I mostly agree with the message of the film and I’m glad his life story has become some sort of counter-narrative to the glorification of war that is so integral to British society. But I also think Hedd Wyn’s story risks becoming part of a powerful pacifist myth that Welsh people cling to as a way to avoid the accountability and scrutiny we need to take on as a western nation.
It’s a pretty common experience for white British kids to go through all their school lives not hearing about colonialism. It wasn’t until I had finished secondary school and became an anarchist and did my own political reading that I began to grasp the sheer scale and atrocity of it and how its still the bedrock for western society as it is rn.
I think Wales has it’s own unique ways of avoiding responsibility on top of just instilling ignorance in each generation of kids. The trope of Wales as this friendly, peaceful, spiritual, morally superior, tolerant land is so so convenient for washing our hands of the part we played in empire. It’s not just specifically Hedd Wyn’s story being repurposed as a means to whitewash the rest of our history. Wales has long been portrayed as the compassionate feminine Celtic heartland that tempers England’s conquering masculinity – but ultimately has never posed any real opposition to the British state’s imperial project. This kindness and friendliness is instead a well utilised myth for minimising Wales’ role in colonialism.
The fact that Wales has historically been oppressed by England and continues to be in an exploitative dependent relationship with the British state means we would prefer to turn the focus onto that rather than examine our complicity. I’ve noticed that more supporters for independent Wales seem to casually and uncritically refer to Wales as having been colonised by England. Maybe that’s acceptable to say (I think it’s a bit of yes and a lot of no but the yes is not discountable) but we can’t seem to accept nor articulate our ambivalent position as oppressed and oppressor.
The displacement of violence to the colonial periphery (the one created far beyond the Celtic fringe) means most white Welsh people are still disconnected from the reality of that history. It is almost too big and awful to comprehend, yet the descendants of the people we helped colonise are still left to struggle with the material and psychological consequences of racism in Wales.
A very white Welsh response to preserving our culture in the face of English interference was to set up a new colonial project but in the name of Gwlad Fy Nhadau rather than Great Britain. Y Wladfa was just another example of the hundreds of years old practice of European settlers attempting to preserve their own ways of life by displacing indigenous ways of life elsewhere. Continued denial of the hand we’ve had in the colonial violence against the very societies we’re trying to compare ourselves to stands directly in the way of our right to claim the position of colonised subjects.
Postcolonial theory definitely has its uses in articulating the uniquely exploitative dynamic between England and Wales. I don’t think this means the type of imperialism that Wales has experienced is the same process with the same consequences as the later form of British imperialism overseas. I do think making sure we reiterate this distinction holds us accountable and reminds us of our context in history. In fact part of the difficulty of tracing and remembering Welsh people’s involvement in Britain’s imperial history is the fact that Welsh agents of imperialism were recorded as being English – that’s exactly the duality we must grapple with.
(edited post 6/12/19 to beef it up and make it more coherent. I also had a bit of a worry that I wasn’t being fair or strong enough in my support for an independent Wales by denying the severity of a possible colonial relationship with England. But I think I just re-convinced myself that it’s still complicated and at the end of the day our majority white nation, like every other one, is yet to answer for its colonial crimes. The independent Wales I want to see is one that fosters real international solidarity with anti-imperialist struggles instead of just making rhetorical comparisons. Solidarity would begin with taking responsibility.)