GLASGOW’S MILES
BETTER reads the giant slogan bolted to the gas-cooler.
As you drive westwards along the broad truncal artery
through the East End of the city, it is impossible
to miss. It seems perpetually framed by sunset,
the light pooling up behind the blue metal, the
smiley-smile turning manic even as the night sky
comes down. Day after day, you gaze at the smiling
face, until you, too begin to smile, until at length,
there is a whole city of smiling faces. It is a
transmutative mirror logo inspired in the 1980s
by the Big Apple City’s yellow man, from the
place where the Liberty Lady burns through stone
into the sky…
This was penned a couple of years ago. A few
weeks after I had written these lines, I found
that the sign, which had been posted there on
the gas cooler for what seemed like a decade,
suddenly had disappeared and that as a consequence
my imagery, my words, had become anachronistic.
On September 11th 2001, something else burned
down from the same clear blue sky and, we are
told repeatedly in hyper-biblical fashion, ‘changed
all our lives forever’. Now we’re
at war. From the top-level restaurant, which is
the brain of Liberty’s Torch, a legion of
hardware zooms across the continents. Perhaps
that great shining idol, the Northern Economy,
will boom, and since (we are told) history has
come to an end, perhaps that boom will go on forever.
This, the stone tablets continue, is the epitome
of the clash of civilisations, or, in mythic terms,
the ordering of chaos, the beating back of beards
and barbarism, the epic battle between the inhuman
armies of Sardonic darkness and the clean, sky
scraping forces of light, of democracy, Christian
values, freedom, Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, the
Stock Exchange, shaving foam and the pursuit of
happiness. Hand me the mirror.
September-the-Eleventh, 2001. I came in from
work in my usual state of irritated semi-exhaustion,
to a sitting-room filled with images of towering
infernos and heroic firemen and a media, shooting
up with the immediacy and voyeuristic drama of
it all. Eyes still fixed on the thirty-two inch
proscenium space of the screen, I clumsily slit
open a letter which turned out to be from the
Scottish Arts Council. I unfolded the letter and
the larger-than-life head of the Mayor of New
York flashed up on the screen. My application
for a Writer’s Bursary had been successful
and at last, I would be able to properly write
my novel. This was something towards which I had
worked for years.
My friend, who was staying with us for a few days,
was in a bad mood. As we continued to watch (she,
almost swallowed up in the settee and I, still
standing, clutching onto my letter of good tidings),
again and again the ‘planes disappeared
into the sides of the Trade Centre, the towers
began to give out smoke like illicit Havana cigars
and, after a period of telescoped minutes, to
tremble and disintegrate, to crumble and smash,
to reduce along a hyper-real Zen trajectory to
‘zero’. White smoke billowed over
the Big Apple and into our sitting-room. My friend
declared that when people in the South die in
their millions, the media and politicians in the
North don’t give a shit. She went on to
postulate that President Bush’s gang of
thieves had arranged this destruction of the towers
and the partial destruction of the building of
the five-pointed star because from that synchronised
moment of air-fix impact, they would have effectively
absolute power. In a logic both relentless and
terrifying, she went on to explain that the Islamic
fundamentalists had been the progeny of the CIA
all along and that now perhaps they had got out
of control or perhaps not, but in any case, the
structures of democracy and governance within
the US, already weakened by a rigged election
result, would now effectively be liquidated in
the name of that great donkey’s head, national
security. Bush’s apparently fragile coup
d’état had found its very own (to
paraphrase the think-Abrams-tank ‘Project
For The New American Century’) ‘cataclysmic
event’. Perhaps this was its Kirov Conspiracy,
its Rene Schneider Murder, its Lusitania sinking,
its Ton kin Gulf Incident, its Reichstag Fire.
Octavian now had his Cassius.
I was irritated by this attitude, so soon after
the event. It was too developed, too paranoid,
too scary. Even though I like to think of myself
as a pretty-much-aware guy, there is some infantile,
tribal instinct within me, which hankers for bottom
lines, for black-and-white, for the comforting
fugue of dualism. I long to believe that even
Bush, Cheney and Co., even the United Fruit Company,
the sleek suits of Enron and the massed eagle
legions of Halliburton Texicana would baulk at
roasting alive their own people simply in order
to sharpen the diamond stylus of military capitalism,
if not from moral scruple then from consideration
of the level of political risk involved. Yet I
was possessed by a sinking feeling which was as
palpable as if I had just eaten a bum carry-out
from the Take-Away around the corner. Several
ingredients were responsible for my psychosomatic
indigestion: Firstly, the sheer Conradian horror
of mass murder. Following on from this was my
fervent prayer for the rapid and unequivocal emergence
of a Timothy McVeigh, Mark II. Never before had
I so longed for the appearance of the dear old
American Far Right. In any case, I knew that the
racists, the bigots, the fundamentalists of all
hues, the educated ignorant on all sides would
have gained massively in power, as they always
do from events of shocking negativity. I knew
that from then on, those with Muslim names would
have to justify themselves, their faith and their
continued presence in this country and on this
geographically unsound sub-continental peninsular
concept known as ‘Europe’. I knew
that in the months to come, the question constantly
would be posed, either explicitly or implicitly.
Silence would not be an option. One would be guilty
until proved innocent. I would have to have a
potted theory ready, up my sleeve, one which would
be measured, unparanoid and most importantly of
all, loyal. Otherwise, as in some tale from the
Arabian Nights, my buttoned-down, straight ‘n’
narrow shirt-sleeves would turn as if by magic
into those of a billowing, duplicitous kaftan,
into the robes of Wizard Saruman, the Great Traitor
of the North and West. I deliberately refer to
Tolkien here, because it seems his fictional epic
is everywhere, from the 24 carat gold plate of
the Oscars to the dreams of our children, playing
out endlessly and pornographically on the silver
screen, a psychotic echo and parallel of the foetid
meta-reality of politics. The moment we venture
into this territory, like the winningly blue-eyed
Frodo, the moment we cross by the scarecrow’s
withered arms, we are entering a land of distorted
mythic archetypes. Of course, I knew in advance
that anything I said or wrote would never be regarded
as ‘balanced’ or ‘objective’.
Objectivity, politically-determined, is a reassertion
of tribal and economic dominance: a subconscious
censorship.
Now, a couple of wars on, and tens of thousands
of dead later, what point have we reached, here,
in Glasgow, in my street, in my house, on the
page? In some ways, we’ve been through all
this before. Fifteen years ago, when ‘That
Book’ came out, for many progressive Muslims
it felt as though we were trapped between a rock
and a very hard place (I might’ve said,
between the Devil and the deep blue sea, but since
Lucifer is wholly copyright of both Disney and
the Islamists, that might have been construed
as either reverse blasphemy or plagiarism; yes,
I was one of the few people with a view on the
matter who had actually read the book). The period
following was a very awkward one for writers like
me, in that people invariably tended to seek one’s
views on what had become known as ‘The Rushdie
Affair’ as a pre-requisite to a discussion
of one’s own work. But unpleasant and demoralising
though that episode undoubtedly was, The Clash
of Civilisations: The Sequel: The Evil One Returns
with an Even Longer Beard Than Before is a far
more dangerous affair for the world than the debacle
over ‘The Satanic Verses’. Since 2002,
it seems as if we have dived into an incipient
war economy. Shipbuilding may return at last to
the Clyde in the form of orders to build a fleet
of aircraft carriers. I have a doleful sense of
lights going out, all over Eurasia. And the ground
has been well-prepared. The decimation of organised
labour, combined with the constant misinformation
that political engagement makes no difference
is having the effect of reversing some of the
gains of the Enlightenment and its Revolutions,
on a very deep-rooted, subconscious level. Nonetheless,
millions demonstrated against this illegal war
in Iraq and continue to believe its whole dynamic
to be one of international criminality. The Spaniards
unceremoniously booted their wacko side-kick government
out of power. Yet most anti-war demos, in the
USA and elsewhere, go unreported or barely reported
– except, that is, on the internet. During
this whole, dark period, the web has been the
busiest medium of dissent and the biggest source
of alternative news. Yet there remains no real
power political vehicle for all this chatter,
scribbling and tramping and scrambling around
amongst the chips and the rain. Yet to stop doing
these things, to give up the ghost of progress,
would be to admit definitive defeat, to expedite
Armageddon.
Wilful blindness also exists among some Muslims
in this country. In some quarters, Male Infantilism
Rules OK; a kind of football consciousness where
holy books are lined up against one another, prophecies
compared on a purely literal level and disparate
groups of people homogenised into convenient terraces
which invariably have theological, rather than
economic, labels sprayed onto the concrete. These
people stare at you blankly when you question
the formation, bankrolling and arming of most
of the variants of Islamic fundamentalism over
the past 80-plus years by the US and Britain,
via client oligarchies like those in Saudi Arabia
and Pakistan. Chances are, they remain blissfully
unaware of Mossadeq, Lumumba, Sukarno, Allende,
Iran-Contra, Drugs-for-Guns, Grenada, Panama,
the CIA-ISI-Mujahideen operational axis, etc.
And what of Indonesia, 1966 or Bangladesh, 1971,
or Sudan, today? You see, all this rebounds on
the writer. We do not live or write in a vacuum.
They are shocked when I quote them the work of
the C8th Iraqi Sufi saint, Rabia-al-Basri, a woman
who advocated the burning of Heaven and the drowning
of Hell since until such simplistic dualities
were jettisoned, there would be no prospect of
us perceiving anything but the most superficial
truths and deluding ourselves into believing that
these comprise the whole. It is the closing-down
of intellectual possibilities, the false refuge
of nativism that alarms me most. Muslim states
and the hegemonic patriarchs that are in charge
of them need to stop using religion as an excuse
for underdevelopment, for systemic despotism,
oppression of minorities and indeed of majorities.
They must stop raping and murdering women. Their
use of religion is pornography of the word. Robust
civil societies are those, which engage with heresy
and history, which ask the unanswerable, which
see, in words, more than merely a surface meaning.
And writers – like Sufis – are explorers
of the unanswerable.
From the ‘other side’, I found my
voice closed-down in a different way. A British-based
airline had hired a subcontractor to record a
series of programmes for their worldwide in-flight
entertainment schedule on the subject of writing.
These programmes were presented by Melvyn Bragg,
in discussion with various others, including journalist,
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. This particular episode
of ‘Words’ was recorded in July 2001
and featured three of the stories from my book,
The Burning Mirror. The programme was scheduled
to go into the aeroplanes in October 2001. In
April 2002, I finally got round to asking for
a CD. After receiving no response from the airline’s
sub-contractor, I discovered, third-hand from
an ex-employee of theirs, that after September
11th, the tapes had been prevented from going
into the aircraft. After several requests, I finally
managed to obtain a CD almost by return of post
after I had hinted politely that I had not been
able to request one earlier since immediately
after the recording I had been so busy writing
for newspapers like The Scotsman (at that point,
I had written only one review article for The
Scotsman - but hey, I can play psyops, too). My
stories concerned love, music, kebabs, alcoholism
and a kind of pantheistic Sufi catholicity. Furthermore,
the item was juxtaposed with a piece on Jackie
Collins; really, it’s hard to imagine a
more innocuous schedule. But none of this mattered.
I believe that in a climate of corporate cowardice
mixed with cynicism, I was put into the box marked,
‘Outsider’, ‘Enemy’ -
and I wasn’t even consulted or informed
about the decision. My voice, despite having been
given the seal of approval by none other than
that High Priest of Literati, Melvyn Bragg, was
silenced. Censored, silently. Consider whether
a discussion of the latest novel of a writer of
Northern Irish origin would be cancelled because
of a bombing in Ulster, or whether a discussion
of Jewish diasporic British writing would be cut
as a result of some Levantine massacre. Of course
not. The suggestion is ludicrous, is it not? So
what’s the difference? This is the thin
end of a very heavy wedge. In a recent report,
writers’ organisation PEN states that since
‘9/11’ governments in many different
parts of the world have used terrorism as an excuse
to intensify the oppression of press and writers
in far, far worse ways than anything that happened
to me.
While visiting NYC last spring, when I asked
an expatriate Pakistani friend, a doctor, how
things were in Pakistan, he glanced around furtively
and then advised me to lower my voice on the bus,
and not to mention the word, ‘Pakistan’
aloud, since people would be listening and one
never knew. At the time, apart from the driver,
and ourselves there was one woman on the bus.
After that, I found myself like a Mafia don, referring
to Pakistan as ‘the old country’.
‘Paranoia strikes deep’, yet in the
face of the Patriot Act, this is hardly paranoia.
If, as Amnesty International reports, 90% of those
held in custody in Iraq are innocent, then what
of Guantanamo Bay, and what of the USA and the
UK? When one phone call can lose you your job
or cause you to disappear, it is no longer paranoia.
It is Le Carré, Solzenitsin, Arthur Miller,
Primo Levi. It’s been going on in Northern
Ireland for decades. If the men come through my
door tonight, who will know? When reality is fiction,
then what happens to fiction?
With a rising sense of paranoia, then, you can
feel this as you walk along the pavement. You
can read it between the lines in the Press and
you can perceive it if you slow down the reels
of Hollywood flicks. Like still waters, these
lines supposedly run deep, back almost a thousand
years, to the time of the First Crusade. Once
again, they have been laid bare and celebrated
through flags, those ominous tribal skins in which
we wrap our nakedness. Meanwhile, history, the
acquisition and apportioning of gold as a means
to absolute power, continues unabated. But those
who see history, and the world, as a conflict
of theological blow-torches seem too easily to
forget such inconvenient ‘details’.
All writing is knowledge; all writing is history.
Those who would have us believe that history is
dead would prefer that we didn’t read, far
less, write. To paraphrase Napoleon, History is
written out by the victors.
Once again, I fear, the European Right has succeeded
in linking the issues of sovereignty and immigration
and confronting its own demons, its own ‘Heart
of Darkness’ in the faces and the voices
of those whom it perceives as irredeemably ‘Other’.
Of course, the genetic and cultural dynamic has
always had the nature of a so-called ‘primitive’,
multivalent epic. We are all begat from those
whom we would class as ‘Other’. When
we kill one another in either word or deed, we
are destroying simultaneously the wellspring and
the offspring of our own stories. This manifestation
of information control is not so unrelated to
what George Steiner calls, ‘the censorship
of the market over what is difficult and innovative,
over what is intellectually and aesthetically
demanding’. Bread, circuses and the Praetorian
Guard.
The lurid images of West Virginian anti-heroine
exercising her dominatrix fantasies, her ‘right’
to the pursuit of happiness, on hapless Iraqi
POWs were illustrative of a more basic fact. Those
pictures, beamed around the world, portrayed the
fundamental relationship between the West and
the Rest, and in particular, the brown, the Arab,
the Muslim ‘Other’. The fact that
she and her torturing, rapist, male, pimp-controllers
felt able to pose pornographically before the
slavering lens of the military camera demonstrates
that the West is now perceived by the military
and corporate- organised Right Wing as being so
hegemonically powerful that at base it no longer
gives a damn about image. Bush et al’s insincere
semi-apologies were merely a dissimulation for
the use of those images and the process of dealing
with their aftermath, perversely, as proof of
the West’s inherent moral superiority: Harry
Truman reading passages from the Bible before
dropping the atom bombs. Hollywood ‘Heart
of Darkness’ arc resolutions do not make
it better for the Rest, for the Congolese or the
Vietnamese or the Iraqis. All we know is the torturer’s
humanity; we squint into grainy childhood photos
as she squints back, and as she smiles at the
lens, we also smile and now we are the lens, the
blank film plate. We empathise with her ‘Deer
Hunter’ existence. Perhaps, one day, she
and her smile will be portrayed by Julia Roberts
to the haunting melody of ‘Cavatina’.
Yet seldom are we permitted to learn of the Iraqis’
home lives, as though, like Tolkien’s Orcs,
they do not possess even the possibility of dramatic
sympathy, as though, like the Tasmanian aborigines
of the C19th, they are not really human at all.
All we see is a comic strip of women beating their
chests and ululating and sweaty beardies raising
their fists and slobbering slogans. Seldom do
we hear anyone, for example, quietly crying or
talking about the diurnal mundanities of their
lives. There is no soundtrack harmonic with their
dilemmas. Compare this with the pictures of individual
Londoners after the death of Princess Diana, or
individual New Yorkers following the Trade Towers’
destruction. Caught like flies in our peripheral
vision, we see hordes of dark barbarians being
wild, out of control, superstitious, dissonant
and ritualistic. Then we have the disgusting on-screen
decapitation of an American civilian apparently
caught up in the war; it is as though the perpetrators
are attempting consciously to recreate one of
those gigantic Orientalist oil paintings, with
bloodied heads on golden trays. World politics
has been distilled to a pure malt snuff movie;
the photographs possess the fake – the fatal
- honesty of a Himmler, a Heidrich, a Goebbels.
I use these names deliberately; the Islamist terrorists
were trained by the CIA, and the CIA drew heavily
on the techniques of the likes of Klaus Barbie
and other Nazis, whom they considerately and assiduously
protected after the end of WW2. Was this what
our grandparents fought for?
And still, we do not see – are not permitted
to see – the body bags. No one is screaming
on the tarmac at the returning Tommies or GIs,
or if they are, then we are not being permitted
to hear their screams. Just as we are not permitted
to hear the sound of breaking bones and hearts
as human beings are hit by cluster bombs and depleted
uranium warheads, bombs which are made in Britain,
right here, under our anaesthetised noses. How
many ziggurats will have to fall in Sumeria before
blood is assuaged? I hear that some dunderhead
nominated Bush and Blair for the Nobel Peace Prize!
In this context, in 2004, the only good soldier
is a deserter.
The ‘embedding’ of reporters in the
military machine rendered possible a subtle pretence
of investigative journalism, when all the while,
it was khaki bonding – or even, on occasion,
khaki-bedding - the writers with the soldiers.
So what we end up with is loudmouth at one end
and a warrior-priest at the other and both are
engaging in an elegant charade of interrogative
discourse. It is notable that during the Kelly
Affair one of the main criticisms of the ‘Today’
programme was that it wasn’t scripted. The
hacking down of alternative websites, the constant
deployment of talking heads cosily imparting received
wisdom (whose wisdom, received from whom?) represented,
as a post-coital Elizabeth Bennet-on-mescaline
might’ve intoned, “a veritable orgasm”
of “spies and lies”. Meanwhile, the
vast numbers of Arab journalists on the ground
throughout Iraq during and after the invasion,
were not even acknowledged as existing, let alone
consulted. Oppositional voices were accessed hardly
at all. On the other hand, with a few notable
and brave exceptions, the glorified psyops unit
known as the US/UK mass media rolled up a constant
celebrity circus of rabid, slavering warmongers.
This was pornography of the word on a massive
and systematised scale.
Iraq is where it all began. All this writing,
this ‘Western’ civilisation, this
zero, this money, this alphabet, this Jehovah,
this Abraham. The word, ‘Iraq, meaning ‘root’,
derived from ‘Uruk’, which was the
first ‘rainbow city’, a focus of commerce
and creativity where the two rivers met –
the ‘Big Apple’ of the ancient world.
The wheel, the polis, the very geometries of civilisation
and yes, of Smiley-Smile, were all laid out in
Iraq. Iraq is the Ur-text. Around 1000 CE, when
the Latin and Byzantine Empires torched the academies
of the Mediterranean, the Hellenistic philosophers
fled to Baghdad and Nishapur – Iraq and
Iran. In Iraq, the Arabo-Persian symbiosis of
Indian, Egypto-Greek and Fertile Crescent science,
art and philosophy ultimately created modernity.
In so many ways, European culture is Iraqi culture.
Why does that concept sound heretical? How does
an artist – a writer – respond to
all this? Directly, here, now – in an attempt
to stimulate real discussion, to open wordless,
no-go areas out into discourse. And also tangentially,
subliminally, through fiction, poetry, drama and
whatever else comes to mind. When the Fourth Estate
is either unable or unwilling to engage effectively,
or is co-opted by the State apparatus, then the
work falls to novelists, dramatists, poets: their
power, as artists, is the power of suggestion.
This is an inversion of Mediaeval stonemasonry;
instead of constructing physical edifices to transmute
spiritual imagination, artists today, to some
extent, seem to be drawing tracks through the
unconscious in an attempt somehow to alter the
nature of materiality. But this leads us into
the broader discourse of the diminution of the
numinous in our society. As Borges said, “censorship
is the mother of metaphor”.
From autumn 2001, I found myself writing alternately
various long stories and novellas based around
the complexities of deepest England and re-working
my novel, ‘Psychoraag’, which is set
between Scotland and South Asia. I only partially
realised it at the time, but now I see that for
me this period involved a process of creative
refusal. I was refusing to allow myself to be
drawn along the dominant dialectic of the day,
the comfortable dualisms so beloved of those ex-State
Department hacks, those scapular propagandists,
Fukuyama, Huntington et al. The refusal to accept
a superficial simplicity in search of the dissonant
balance between multilayered complexity and immanent
unity, which, I sense, may be a more accurate
denotation of reality, is a political literary
act, a bursting of mental bonds, an attempt to
re-form the architecture of truth. Facing the
imperial structures within which we still exist,
where the Gentlemen’s Club has simply signed
up with Companies’ House, in the numinous
sense I am a samizdat writer: I fingerprint language.
Freedom needs constantly to be fought for through
a variety of means; subversion, opposition and
complex subtextualisations and co-options of elements
of the state – of which we are all, of course,
a part. As writers, in the sense meant by Walter
Benjamin, through the code of language, we can
help create and drive those freedoms, freedoms
of the mind and spirit which become inseparable
from physical liberty and which are always conditional.
As individuals, we must look at those things
for which our taxes, our labour, have paid if
we are ever to have a hope of turning around from
the goal of bio-chemical global annihilation towards
which military capitalism is leading us. As writers,
on some level, we must write about them. The two
are inseparable. Misinformation – the manipulation
of words, the unmusical decomposition of those
sacred units of strangeness - has the ultimate
aim of massaging the minds of subject populations
so that when the time comes, they are led, like
the lions of the war which someone decided to
name, ‘Great’, to the machine of slaughter,
to engage in killing other subject populations.
By which time, neither of these supposed adversaries
will have any capability of questioning the orders
barked out by those in command, and all of them
perish, never having seen behind the donkey’s
mask. Yet the paradox remains that as ‘language
animals’, we use these same hermeneutic
tactics. There may be sacrality, but there is
no inherent progressiveness in the Word. Perhaps,
then, as individual writers and readers, it will
be the mundane that yet may save us and our minds,
and show us how to deconstruct the image of the
barbarian, and in this strange metatheatre, perhaps
allow us at last to pass through the ‘mirror
of Herodotus’.
*(Keynote speech given to the Write to the Point
Conference, Glasgow University, 2004)
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