Professionalised, Individualised Art Speaks Only to the Dead: Clear Visions will Come Only from the Periphery

PROFESSIONALISED, INDIVIDUALISED ART SPEAKS ONLY TO THE DEAD: CLEAR VISONS WILL ONLY COME FROM THE PERIPHERY: Hassan Mahamdallie, British theatre director, playwright, political and investigative journalist

Michael: You spoke at one point about the necessity to make visible those that were invisible and then you spoke quite a lot about the actual visionary power that those on the periphery have and can deploy, and that it should in fact be utilised. Could you talk a little bit more about that power of the periphery?

Hassan: Although I don’t usually talk in these terms, but if you talk about common humanity, let’s talk about it in terms of the environment or the Age of the Anthropocene which we are supposed to be going through: there are these big problems which we face as a species. Where do you go to try and find a solution? It seems to me that most of our effort is either divided into ignoring that there is a problem (which is locked into some kind of circular argument), or trying to find a solution, but we always try to find solutions in the wrong place. You and I know that clarity comes from the unexpected sources. Trouble is, that as a society, and this is affecting arts and culture, the unexpected sources are the ones that we usually try to erase from the conversation to begin with. So if we do want to find a path out of the crisis that we are in we have to find a way of placing some value in those unexpected places, in those unexpected people, otherwise the crisis will go on to whatever the consequences are. So you and I know that when actually as a journalist you talk to people who have been through a process, like a mother whose child has been killed by the police, and she decides to campaign about it, usually when you talk to those people, although they are thrust into a situation that is not of their making, often times you find they do have a kind of clarity about them. Maybe it is because they are kind of seeing the world for the first time in its entirety whereas in the rest of their life they didn’t really have to; they’re at a vantage point, or they are forced to being at a vantage point where suddenly they have a clarity on what’s around them, they see all the power relations between people in a completely different way. Those are the people that it seems to me that we need to go to. It’s not because I fetishise them, it’s because I truly believe that that’s where the solutions to some of the problems we face are going to be found – yet we spend vast amounts of time either trying to ignore that there’s a problem in the first place or looking to the wrong people to try and solve the issues. So there has to be some kind of radical shift in focus and power towards those people for us to get out of the impasse that we are in; and that’s my basic understanding, then I try and translate what that might look like on the cultural field. That’s why I developed these different ways of looking at how artistic or cultural values are generated. 

Michael: But you’ve also indicated that this is not just a problem about the centre and about the machinery of the arts industry as industry and its dominance and elitism but there are some fatal flaws within the arts and the artistic community itself: perhaps too much self-valorisation, and perhaps not enough reflection that the arts have been and continue to be used in some pretty injurious ways – and not just in terms of creating or manufacturing a dominant culture, but actually promoting prejudicial messages. Can you talk a little bit about, maybe, “evil art”?

Hassan: Well, it’s not so much that. I suppose that artistic expression is expression of the ego or the id or whatever it is, it’s a very self-centred thing, yeah? So, I think artists unless they check themselves continually literally believe that they are the centre of valued human activity and have incredible self-regard. I understand that’s what you need to go on stage, you need a certain amount of self-regard to think that something you have to say is of interest to someone else or can make a difference or whatever it might be, and of course that’s what motivates you. But I think we artists have to hold in check somehow, balance out, that egotism with some kind of awareness of where they sit within a spectrum of change; that’s the first thing. Secondly, I believe that artists can sketch out possibilities and put them before an audience, but they are part of a process and the process starts with social change. So if you look through the history, let’s say from 1968 onwards, you look at Europe and the radical events of 1968, art lagged behind the social processes; it does, it tends to lag behind, so for artists to say “we are the generator or originator of social change” is I think is plain wrong.

Michael: Well that I find very interesting because that would be counter-intuitive to a lot of people who present as artists, particularly those who present as arts activists or as “artivists”, this presumption that they are, because of their intellectual acuity or whatever, they somehow are the vanguard of social change. And you have posited a very different position in saying that they can’t really be that; they need to be enabled by other people and other socially advanced sectors in order to become those provocateurs.

Hassan: I believe that, yeah. I mean I have worked in arts for a long time and I value the arts, I love being in the arts, but that’s the conclusion I have come to, you know what I mean? I don’t believe artists are always progressive; I mean the notion of being liberal and progressive I think are both contested terms these days; they’ve kind of turned into their opposite, let’s put it that way. So the liberals and the progressives can be as elitist or intolerant as people that they think they are on the opposite side of the spectrum to. For example, most of the liberal elite in France has turned out to be the Islamophobic vanguard in French society, in terms of hoisting up la cité [the city] as some kind of enduring product of the Enlightenment or the French bourgeois revolution or whatever it is. So, that’s suspect. But also when ordinary people in London look at artists, right, they may look at them in different ways: some will look at them and say “they are very removed from us” as middle class or whatever. But also if you look at the social cleansing of London from what it was, which was mixed working class and bourgeois neighbourhoods living side by side or integrated as it were fifty or a hundred years ago, it’s been socially cleansed completely so that London is becoming a bourgeois playground rather than a place were working class people live out their lives, and certain areas which had been very poor were cleansed by property developers and the poor forced out to the margins, and the shock troops of that process of gentrification have been artists who have gone in first to these poor areas, rented warehouses, produced their art. That has primed those areas for redevelopment, forcing poor people out.

Michael: Is there any self-awareness about this? I mean not in any analytical way, but just in terms of maybe a class adherence?

Hassan: No I don’t think there is a self-awareness, and partly because it is buttressed by certain arguments which have confirmed for the artists that they are in this special, wonderful place, right? So the old argument about creative cities, that you regenerate creative cities through artists and culture and stuff like that, that is the ideological underpinning for what these people have done. So what I am saying is that there is no particular reason that artists should think of themselves as being on the side of the angels. Now, I am hyper-critical in one sense because I care about art so much, but the lack of self-awareness is incredible, and partly it’s a reflection of class confidence because the arts particularly in the UK – though I’m sure it’s the same everywhere else – is become more and more the profession of not just middle class at it might have been in the past but of the upper middle class. There is a survey done in the UK about the demographic around artists and it’s clearly becoming a much more rarefied profession than it ever was. I came into the arts for the first time as a professional in 1984, right? I’m one of the very few working class artists that came through that generation, yeah? There’s absolutely no way that an equivalent of me today in 2018 would have got into the arts, into an acting job, into a paid career as an actor and then a director. So it’s becoming more rarefied, it’s becoming more homogenous.

Michael: And that’s because of these gatekeepers?

Hassan: Yeah, partly, and partly it’s to do with as state arts funding has contracted over the years, those people have clung onto their positions of privilege. And in one sense, the more of those arguments around that there should be more diversity and quality in the arts, the more there is a kind of rear-guard action by those guys, not as individuals but as a social class, to actually protect what they think is theirs – and they believe that the arts is theirs. So to be conscious as an artist, you have to be in one sense hyper-critical because there is an immense amount of complacency that I think we have to shake ourselves out of.

Michael: So there is a distinct class of people who view art as their patrimony, their personal patrimony? And I am using the masculine word deliberately here. Could you talk a little about the intersections of gender and class and race within this context?

Hassan: If you look at the patterns of who works in the arts, what positions they have in the arts, how the arts are structured, clearly to me the arts are structured to make it easy for middle class people to exist within the arts. It’s structured generally for men to have the highest positions in the arts and if you look at it clearly that’s what happens, you know what I mean. You think about a lot of professions, for example dance, how it’s probably gendered in terms of women – and a lot of the arts are gendered in terms of women being the majority part of the workforce – but at the top at the managerial level are men. So male choreographers, male curators…

Michael: Journalism is pretty similar.

Hassan: Yeah, exactly, because in its substance, it’s the same class occupying all those professions. So you do find it gendered, you find it in terms of race, you find it in terms of disability. I mean, it’s incredible really when you think of it that Western visual art is dominated by visions of a version of the human body that probably goes back to ancient Greece, yeah? The visual arts does take on big themes like mortality and what it is to be human, all these kinds of things, but it completely erases, it homogenises the body into this kind of notion of the perfect body, so immediately in dance, who can be a dancer, who can’t be a dancer, who has “a dancer’s body”? There are very few artists who step outside that zone and look at the body in all its forms, so disability is ever-present but not necessarily in a good way in the history of art. So you find that disability has to continually force itself onto the agenda in the arts, whereas really it seems to me that disabled people have a lot to say about the question of humanity, what it is to be human, mortality, to survive as an outsider, whole issues of mental health and all these kinds of things, right? These are really central questions that we need to be addressing but the people who have a good vantage point in terms of addressing those questions are locked out of the arts. One thing I do see is that the arts is incredibly over-professionalised: in the UK for example, in order to be a visual artist you have to have an MA; even administrators have masters’ degrees in the visual arts, so it’s incredibly rarefied, professionalised, because the middle class likes to have a profession. A hundred and twenty years ago, in the middle of London, what’s the most popular form of art? Music-hall. All the other arts were just things that the bourgeois did in their little private clubs and museums. The biggest art-form was music-hall which was the dregs of society hauling itself onto the stage and debasing and making a mockery out of itself and all of society; that was the most popular art form, you know what I mean? That was an outsider art form.

Michael: So art as craftspersonship has deliberately been downgraded and transmuted into this more rarefied creature?

Hassan: Yeah, it’s a profession.

Michael: What about the current, or it’s certainly very current in Africa, neo-colonial debate? To what extent has art, even now – and we’ve just heard the suggestion from Meriam that Picasso wouldn’t be tolerated in this day and age in the conventional halls of art – to what degree has art in the West acknowledged its heritage in Africa, or the East, or elsewhere? Or to what extent has there been any admission of that or access to that or transformation by that, or to what extent is it trying to pretend that it is hermetically sealed?

Hassan: I mean I think if you talk about the history of modernism in art, if you have any ounce of intelligence you will understand that the major ideas around it, the conceptual ideas around it originated in Africa. There is no doubt about that, obviously, if you talk about Picasso.

Michael: And yet you will go to Paris and you will have exhibitions of African art that will be called “arts primitifs.”

Hassan: [Laughs] Yeah, the French are good at that, aren’t they? They are crazily, racistly honest. But if you look at sculpture, if you look at the history of modernism, clearly, it borrows or is inspired by symbolic representation in African art particularly. I mean if you talk about the West, you talk about West Africa which is obviously where – and there is a big row on now about the Benin bronzes, of which there are ten thousand or something in the British Museum, locked away in their archives, whether they should be returned to Nigeria as it is now, and of course it should be. But no-one talks about how those bronzes stolen from Benin in army raids many hundred years ago triggered or laid the foundations for European modernism.

Michael: And even before that, if I may, if you look at the Ife sculptures: there was no such thing approaching that level of skill in Europe of the time which was the Mediaeval Era. You could say both Europe and Africa were going through a Mediaeval phase at that point but conceptually Europeans could not sculpt like that; they had these very wooden, formulaic, boxlike figures.

Hassan: Yeah, it’s true. If you talk about European visitors to Benin for example in the 16th Century, one of them gong to Benin City and saying “this is the most advanced city I have ever seen,” because he was Dutch, “comparable to Amsterdam.” If you like, the west of Africa was as developed, probably more than Europe was at the time, and in one sense it’s the irony that those African civilisations had to be destroyed for Europe to progress itself, and that’s the kernel of it. Also, if you look at the Enlightenment, it is quite clear that, the caricature of the Western European Enlightenment being put across at the moment by ideologies bears no comparison to what actually happened in the Enlightenment. And as everyone knows now, if they don’t acknowledge, is that much of the knowledge and understanding of philosophy and medicine that laid the foundations for the European Enlightenment came from the Arab world, which in itself built upon ancient Roman and Greek philosophies and then developed and translated, it found its way into Europe, right? Oxford University is full of Arabic archives, which was the foundation of European learning because the Arabic texts were the salvation of European learning. They even have Europeanised names for Islamic scholars and philosophers. So all this is clear to anyone who has an ounce of understanding about history – but we live in a society that is in complete denial about that, and you have to ask yourself why? Why is it in complete denial about its roots? And partly I think it’s because of the rise of the nation state in the West and what needs to be done to make a nation into a nation. You probably have more sophisticated concepts than what I have in relation to South Africa, but the nation state arises in a state of denial about its past, the foundation of the nation state is always a founding myth, yeah, and in one sense that myth, that falsehood is coming back to bite Europe on its arse.

Michael: So in that particular storm that we are in at the moment and sitting on that cusp with this reversion to these myths, you suggested that there was almost like a functional role for art to perform in service of that broader progressive project in challenging that myth.

Hassan: Everyone knows, it’s a kind of consensus, that if you are in the middle of something you have a distorted perspective of it. We’re in the middle of a storm in the Western world, but all we can feel is the sound and the fury, signifying nothing, to use Shakespeare. But clearly there are other people in the world that do not have this notion that they belong to the greatest civilisation in the world – what Europeans are prone to believe about ourselves – who have a much clearer vision about what’s going on. I mean, I spoke in my speech about this Palestinian guy I know: he has a clear vision about the confusions that the UK are going through at the moment which it seems to me that very few people have. He’s a complete outsider, he’s a very talented guy and he makes a living for himself, but who asks him what he has to think about what’s going on in the UK at the moment? No-one’s going to ask him – but if you did ask him, you are going to find out some extraordinary things. As I say, it’s about looking for these extraordinary people in these extraordinary places that if anything is going to progress us, it is people like that. What you find is, maybe it’s true historically, is that the more society plunges itself into crisis, the more it turns in on itself, so every viewpoint in that society is a very individualised viewpoint. So in theatre for example, there are so many plays about what I would call formations of identity, on all sides, but they are all tiny, tiny stories. If I go and see another one-woman show about “me and my mum” or “me and my grandmum” and slideshow of “my grandmum in World War Two” or black-and-white photo of “the grandmum I didn’t know”…

Michael: So this is the loss of the social?

Hassan: Yeah, it’s an individualistic outlook that is reflected through theatre and the visual arts, and I don’t know about other art-forms; maybe music is a bit more immune to it because it’s a much more diffuse art-form. But if I hear another individualised story about how important my life is, I’ll throw myself off of a cliff! But what is it reflecting? It’s reflecting this turning in on ourselves. What’s going to be the counter-force that stops us turning in on ourselves? It’s going to have to be what we have labelled as “the other” as a derogatory label. It’s not going to come from within: if it was going to come from within we’d be sorting ourselves out already, but we’re not. The other thing is that if you look at the arts in the West is that they’re talking to society that no longer exists – if it ever did – and it’s the most extraordinary thing if you just sit back and look at what world is the art world, and I’m talking in general terms here, who is it communicating with? It’s communicating with the dead, with the past! And that is the most extraordinary dysfunction in terms of the role of art in human history, to be talking literally to the dead as though they were alive in this kind of post-colonial nostalgia that infects the bricks and mortar of European society, this notion of greatness and such-like, they are literally talking to a society that no longer exists. Now that is really weird for someone who analyses the social function of art in terms of its dialogue with society. It’s the most extraordinary spectacle, but nobody wants to say it; it’s like The Emperor’s New Clothes, it’s bizarre!

[ENDS]

Women's Cultural Rights are a Prime Site of Attack

WOMEN’S CULTURAL RIGHTS ARE A PRIME SITE OF ATTACK: Karima Bennoune, UN Special Rapporteur on Cultural Rights

Michael: I was interested in what you were saying in your opening address around the, you said, I quote here, “embattled humanity has never needed its artists as much.” Speak to us a little bit about that embattled status. Where are we at at the moment? There is this general feeling of despondency amongst progressives.

Karima: I think people who have been working in the field of human rights from whatever political position they may come from are looking around at the world and wondering what is happening to the vision that they have been defending. Chetan Bhatt who teaches human rights at the London School Economics has been talking about how we can no longer take for granted the centrist consensus around human rights in the world; there are not that many actors, there are not that many states anymore that stand up and openly defend basic concepts of human rights and dignity at the UN that we have taken for granted. I think we are seeing greater division, greater polarisation, we are seeing attacks on the concept of the universality of human rights from the far-right, sometimes from the far-left, from governments, from non-governmental actors – even in academia – and we are seeing governments and world leaders including of very powerful countries openly expressing hate, openly giving voice to views that we thought had been consigned to the waste-basket of history at least as far as being acceptable official discourse. The human rights we talk about, one of the main tools being the mobilisation of shame, and of course certain kinds of shame are very negative in terms of shaming around the body and so on that women human rights defenders have worked on. But in the human rights field more generally the mobilisation of shame has meant trying to expose the human rights abuses of governments as a way of holding them to account because they will be embarrassed – but that was presuming that they would be embarrassed if exposed. And I think that in some ways we are in a post-shame universe now when we have world leaders openly either proclaiming that women are inferior to men or openly proclaiming discriminatory views about entire groups of people, about entire continents of people, about entire religious groups and so on. So how do we mobilise shame in a post-shame universe? But there’s also so many reasons to be optimistic and that’s what I try to focus on: the human rights defenders all around the world, the cultural rights defenders in my area who are continuing to come up with creative initiatives, who are continuing to push back. I think about a wonderful Bangladeshi publisher [Ahmedur “Tutul” Chowdhury] I’ve just met who faced an attack on his life for having published the works of the late Avijit Roy, the assassinated writer, and this publisher survived that attack, has had to go into exile, and the amazing part about the story is that – and people may be wondering where is the optimism in that – he has gone back to publishing on the internet [Shuddhashar: here] with limited means, but he continues, and I think that’s a reminder to all of us that we have no right to give up in the face of the current moment; we have to be inspired by examples like that.

Michael: You talk about fragmentation and yet at the same time a lot of these ideologies that are eroding this universality doctrine are themselves monolithic, they have pretentions to undifferentiation. Perhaps talk a little bit about that.

Karima: I think that universality is about human dignity, it’s not about homogeneity. In fact my report for the General Assembly was both about universality and cultural diversity and how neither of these concepts is a weapon against the other; they are in fact interlocking concepts. But we have to be very clear that there is a distinction between cultural diversity which is a recognition of the complexity of human reality and the multiple identities and expressions that human beings have in the world and that is a very positive thing, versus cultural relativism which is the attempt to use culture – or the claim of culture – to justify the violation of human rights, or discrimination or hate. And that is never acceptable, that is never the same thing as cultural diversity, so what universality is really countering is the attempt to use arguments of particularism against the basic framework of human dignity, the attempt to use culture not to amplify rights but to diminish them. And so I think that we really have to have this holistic vision, we have to defend a universality that is thoughtful, that is recognising plural and diverse and multiple forms of human existence and expression, but is rigorously committed to human dignity and equal rights for everyone whatever group he or she might fit into.

Michael: I think generally people recognise this drift into pretty outrageous populism right across the world, whether it’s India or Brazil – which I think are much more concerning than the United States for me personally because, given the scale of their populations and the depth of the reaction involved. But speak a little bit about what you’ve red-flagged, how this drift has started to erode progressive traditions within academia, as that’s particularly worrying.

Karima: So let me talk about the academic issue. One of the things that I have been very worried about and I think it’s especially the case in the English-speaking world, though from what I understand it’s also a problem elsewhere, has been a real move away from supporting concepts of universal human rights to finding all sorts of justifications based on particularism for violations of human rights, in particular women’s human rights, and giving into cultural explanations for these rights [violations]. And while it’s certainly useful to question hegemonic impulses – certainly the historical attempts to use certain human rights concepts in a way that involved imposition on people – what has happened is that even human rights defenders on the ground in the global South are questioned by some of these academics primarily in the global North as somehow not being authentic. And I hate this discourse of authenticity, [challenging] authentic representatives of their own society. So for example a very prominent academic in the United States who in the field of Middle Eastern studies challenged a Palestinian rap group [DAM] that had taken on honour violence in Palestine in the name of somehow some form of anti-imperialism or post-colonial critique. And I have to say I find this bizarre, and this is an academic who is very prominent indeed in her field, and this is the kind of thinking that is questioning the right to cultural dissent. Cultures are not monolithic and I always prefer to use cultures with an “s”. And the thing is white people in the West cannot presume that they are the only ones that have the right to dissent in their own society or in their own group; everyone, it is a universal right to cultural dissent, and that’s where I really worry about the direction of some academic argument that we’ve seen, and I have called for in my report, with great respect for academic freedom, for academic institutions and academics themselves to really find creative ways to tackle this problem and to support the concept of universality and the vision of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in their work.

Michael: Again and again in a variety of different reports including the one we’ve just seen from FreeMuse, the state emerges as the primary perpetrator of violations of artistic and associated rights – but the growth of this populism, the vile nature of this beast, has shone quite a light on sub-state actors, particularly those masquerading within the cultural field. Perhaps you could explore that a little?

Karima: So, women human rights defenders have been telling us all for years that a vision of human rights that only looked at the state was a very thin vision; certainly state responsibility is at the heart of the human rights framework but there are many other actors that can violate human rights: non-state actors, individuals, individuals in the family, community actors, religious leaders, and now we have seen increasingly in a range of fields, transnational corporations, and the list goes on. And I think we need to have not a 20th Century vision of human rights but a 21st Century vision of human rights where we recognise the need to hold to account all these actors, and certainly we want to keep coming back to the idea that the state has primary responsibility for respecting and ensuring, for promoting and protecting and fulfilling human rights, but we also have to find creative ways to hold these other actors to account or we will have a very thin narrative of human rights in the world. I am also very concerned about transnational corporations because they are increasingly powerful and sometimes more powerful than states and its very difficult for states to hold them accountable. And I know there are efforts under way to develop a treaty about the human rights obligations of transnational corporations; I think that’s going to be a very long project. But again I think it’s really important in the human rights area to look at this wide range of actors and that’s why in my reports I regularly make recommendations primarily to the state but also to a range of other actors. And indeed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights talks about the responsibility of all actors in society and all individuals for advancing human rights.

Michael: You’ve spoken about the gap between the arts rights justice sector, which is emergent and is perhaps a little bit behind similar developments in journalism protection, and more formal systems such as that which you are engaged in yourself. And you’ve said that obviously these arts rights justice activators need to be more involved in those formal engagements. Certainly we’ve seen many more lawyers and legislators get involved in this type of field, but still there’s a gap. I’m guessing from the arts rights side that there is some suspicion of these global fora, especially because of the glacial speed at which many of them move. How do we close this gap?

Karima: You know that’s a terrific question and I want to be the first to say that this is a two-way street and my hope is that more arts rights, cultural rights organisations, artists and cultural practitioners themselves, cultural institutions, will begin to see the United Nations and the United Nations human rights system in particular as a relevant set of fora for their work but my hope is also is for the United Nations human rights system to recognise more centrally the importance of cultural rights including artistic freedom and the role of artists – including sometimes as human rights defenders – so it’s really a two-way street. And I recognise that many people might not see the UN as relevant – but great harm can be done to artistic freedom and cultural rights at the United Nations if the sectors most directly affected by those rights issues are not there to defend those rights and to speak from their experience. And what I have called for is the creation of something like an NGO coalition or civil society coalition for cultural rights at the UN. And we see such similar coalitions in the areas of freedom of expression, and freedom of religion or belief for example. There is so much that could be done: these organisations could take the floor if they have consultative status at the UN; they could take the floor in interactive dialogues with me and other rapporteurs in the Human Rights Council; they can submit shadow reports so when countries where they have concerns are coming up for review in front of the United Nations treaty bodies they could be submitting alternative information to the information that the state submits; many of these treaty bodies have complaints mechanisms and they could also be sending and working together to sit in a systematic way to send cases to these different bodies. So we could develop a really thorough, rigorous, vibrant jurisprudence in these areas at that level. And I am the first to recognise the limitations of the UN system; I am myself very frustrated with the lack of implementation – but if we don’t get in there and fight for cultural rights at the UN and if we leave the UN human rights system to the enemies of human rights, we can’t expect that there will be much progress. So, just as I want to work more in the artistic and cultural fields, and in the fora where artists and cultural workers are themselves working, I hope that they will come and join me and other actors more frequently in the UN human rights system.

Michael: How does your office interact with other rapporteurs, in particular the one on religion?

Karima: The two rapporteurs that I would say that I most often work with are indeed the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, currently Ahmed Shaheed from the Maldives, and the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression, currently David Kaye from the United States. And I think it makes sense because you will see that there are big areas of overlap. I know that Ahmed Shaheed and I have shared many, many concerns about making sure that freedom of religion or belief is not the same thing as freedom of religion: this is about the right to believe or not to believe, to be a religious person or not to be a religious person, to have a different kind of world view, to change your religious belief, to leave a particular religion, to dissent from a particular religion and to express that dissent. And there are so many cultural rights cases affecting artists in particular but also affecting members of minorities, bloggers, women’s human rights defenders, that are coming up in this area of intersection, and so that mandate has been a very important partner for my mandate and I look forward to that work going forward. And I think one of the things we need to be really thinking about and grappling with is the overlap between religion and culture because there are often many cultural practices which are overlaid on religious beliefs and after a while it is hard to know where religion ends and where culture begins. And this really about recognising the human dimension and human agency and responsibility in creating some practices, which means also those practices can be changed by human beings, so I think that’s a really interesting area of intersection.

Michael: And gender, of course.

Karima: And gender absolutely, and I have done a great deal of work with the Working Group on Discrimination Against Women. One of the two areas that were highlighted by the Human Rights Council when my mandate was created: so this mandate is about making sure that everyone enjoys cultural rights without any discrimination, and two particular sectors that the Council highlighted were gender and the cultural rights of persons with disabilities, and so women’s cultural rights are at the heart of what we are doing. There was a dedicated report on women’s cultural rights done back in 2011 by my predecessor, and I did a report on diverse forms of fundamentalism and extremism and the cultural rights of women in 2017. When I go on mission, it’s an issue that I really focus on because what we’ve seen is that women’s cultural rights are a prime site for attack on universal human rights.

Michael: So it’s almost like a mine canary, it’s the first thing to show signs of distress?

Karima: Absolutely! It’s the most likely place to see a cultural relativist argument. Women are most often saddled with being the banners of, or the standard-bearers for what is called culture, which is often a very static vision of culture. And my predecessor Farida Shaheed argued for us to really shift our paradigm from seeing culture as primarily negative for women – unfortunately as she recognised, it has been used that way very often – but shifting from that to women’s equal rights to participate in culture which includes deciding which cultural practices to not to particulate in or to leave behind because they are no longer acceptable under our evolving understanding of human rights. I mean, think about it:  in your own country [South Africa], systematic racial discrimination in many countries including in the United States used to be justified on cultural grounds; there was a cultural and even religious justification used for apartheid. We would absolutely reject those today – and appropriately so. And in the same vein, it is completely unacceptable to try to justify discrimination against people, against women, against people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or intersex on the basis of culture; those are also completely unacceptable arguments. We need to recognise today, and this goes to the heart of cultural rights which is not about culture as a static thing which doesn’t change; it’s about cultures as dynamic. Again what my predecessor and I both said is that our cultural rights mandate isn’t about defending a thing called “culture”; it’s about defending people’s right to participate in cultural life which includes participating in the process of how culture should change over time in accordance with…

Michael: Because it inevitably does…

Karima: And if it doesn’t, humanity’s in trouble. What was the old thing about sharks dying when they stop moving? Human culture needs to evolve; humanity evolves, that’s simply a reality and it needs to evolve in accordance with our contemporary understanding of human dignity. I think that’s really how we carry forward the vision of the Universal Declaration of Human rights into its next seventy years. And if there is a tendency sometimes in some parts of human rights circles to see cultural rights as somehow peripheral, silly, trivial matters – not at all; it goes to the heart of who we are as human beings, how we live in this world together, how we express ourselves, how we remember what has come to us from the past, and how we go forward and what we pass on to the generations to come.

[ENDS]

Building an Alternative to the Death of the Social Requires Time, Distance and Disengagement

Meriam Bousselmi of Tunisia is always fascinating to talk to as she has such a lovely, ingrained philosophical sensibility - and I found myself quoting what she said in this interview at Safe Havens 2018 in Sweden last December frequently over subsequent months. I also like the way she switches between languages when one appears insufficient, though for the reader that requires a little translation,

Michael: Meriam, you occupy a bit of an unusual space in that you are both a lawyer and a theatre director so you occupy the intersection of the spaces we have been talking about. Talk a little bit about how that evolved, how did you straddle both worlds which are often seen as being quite antagonistic or different worlds.

Meriam: I think first since I was a child my ambition was to write books so I really fell into books and I had this ability to be sensitive to the words and the movement of words and I can’t say why I chose that but it was my destiny in a way. But at the same time I had this strong feeling for justice and injustice and I wanted to become the president of the [Tunisian] republic, to change the world and to make myself more famous – which is not working now. And it was the orientation when I got my baccalaureate to choose to orient myself to enrol in a political science and legal university but before I was at university, I started already my career as a writer and play director in the amateur field but then I was in the professional field because I produced some texts, some books and some plays and I stated also to be in international workshops, atelier, projects. So it was both in parallel because I also got for five years training as a dramaturge and mise en scène in the Centre de Arabo-Africaine de Formation et Recherche in Hamra in Tunisia and I had my career as a lawyer. I wanted first to make my political career, so first year of political science I wanted to build my political party so I went to all the parties to see what are the strategies. And then I failed because I realised politics is about compromise and diplomacy, and I am a radical and I could not get what I want in a very direct way, so I said I will seek this through my art and through my work as an independent, and how can I build these inbetween spaces. Actually, I was very interested in these inbetween spaces; sometimes it can be very difficult with both careers as a lawyer and as an artist, they are freelance careers, lifetime jobs, not just office jobs. But I am working in these in-betweens and I have this ability to make the bridge and to try to be a facilitator in both sides. But we also need more creativity in our work; I think we are really missing (there are good project managers, project leaders, administrators) but there are not a lot of creatives, there are not a lot of people having a vision, the possibility to look at things from another perspective, to challenge the structures.

Michael: So you see yourself as a connector, connecting these disparate blocks and trying to build something?

Meriam: Yes, I have this ability because I have training from both sides to fly or to move freely between both sides, but also to create that which is inbetween. Like for example now I am working in research and I am talking about the staging of injustice , so I see how the concept of justice is not just a state institution, justice is a value and we have legal constructions of justice all over the world but justice is also part of the fictional construction of artists and writers and philosophers – and how both these words are communicating, how we’ve moved from a value of fictional construction, from an artistic construction, a creative construction to the state and visa-versa. So to explore what is inbetween and to explore the potential of this inbetweenness because people tend to be organised in entities and not explore what is inbetween because it is unknown. So I like to be in this un errant – it’s a kind of wandering – but I think it’s a very interesting wandering because it’s challenging to me but it’s also inspiring to others, also because I bring different performative languages in both sides. When I am with lawyers, they say “yes, the artist!” and when I am with the artists they see me as the lawyer [laughs]. So this inbetweenness is really je voi sais qua commune rechesse [I know you]; I see this as something rich and something I need to explore with more time and more tools to do my work.

Michael: You certainly have seen this rise from within progressive academia of the need for a multidisciplinary approach – but we’re up against a reactionary mood globally that is about compartmentalising, trying to roll back this notion of the interconnectivity of disciplines into discrete compartments that can be better managed I guess by this rightist and populist demagoguery. So navigating those inbetween spaces, those grey areas, in an environment in which there is this drive to make everything black-and-white…

Meriam: Exactly, this binary narrative or binary approach of the world, I think this is a classical way of knowledge, a classical way of education and a classical way of reflecting the matters of the world in terms of le science dures, le science molles [hard science, soft science]. I think today we need another kind of knowledge, another kind of education, another kind of reflecting the world because with the new media and internet and all this facility today to get information, before if you want to learn something, you have to look for the books, you had to travel, information was not accessible to everyone; today you are at your home and you can connect to several bibliothèques [libraries] in the world, you can connect to several articles, you know what is going on, then you have this, le savoir, the knowledge is not anymore that you are specialised in philosophy or you are specialised only in chimie [chemistry]. If we go back to the Greeks, the philosophers were also the scientists, the birth of science, the birth of knowledge was wide…

Michael: So we went from a situation where knowledge was always a polymath thing, a multiverse, and now we are coming back?

Meriam: Overspecialisation. And now we are coming back. We don’t have another solution because the complexity of the world needs a perspective where you can have different levels of analysing what is going on, a situation or a fact or a change in society. We cannot for example look at what is going on today with the rise of right-wing or popularism or liberal democracy without having notions of what is happening on the economic side, what is happening with the cultural side, what is happening with group psychology: you have to look at it with different eyes and to have this scientific knowledge, you have to look widely, you have to look at the inbetweenness, the intersections, in order to understand. It’s also a very speedy change; we don’t have the time to recognise how our societies are changing.

Michael: There are uncomfortable inbetween spaces as well, particularly for those who are stateless or undocumented migrants, that sort of thing. How do you navigate those spaces – because you actually want some sort of solidity, you want some document, you want a home of sorts?

Meriam: I am in a search, and I am observing and I am trying to make an interpretation of what are the changes, to be more reflective of what the changes are and what is behind this changing and where this changing is leading. And I think the main important question today we are neglecting, a lot of artists as well, and this is where I am not happy, is that we are driven all the time to react to the immediate questions, to be more [engaged] in comments like journalists and not visionary, not having the time to think of what will remain, what is the next, what is the alternative? It’s not enough to be critical because it doesn’t add a simple scratch to the system; it’s good…

Michael: But you need to build an alternative.

Meriam: Exactly. And for that you need time, and you need distance, and you need other tools, and you cannot be immediate. Today if you are an artist you are invited to talk about the release of your new book, you have one hour, we will ask you for fifty minutes about your idea about what is going on with the right wing, what do you think about the situation in Yemen, what do you think about the situation about immigration, did you hear about the new robot who feels more human, and what is your fear about the future – so everything, and then ten minutes about your book! So you have to be the expert of everything and nothing, so you have to collect information and some words work better so you have this performative language as well to give a proximative answer and to give this idea that you know everything. No-one dares to say “I don’t know, I’m sorry I am working, please ask me about my field. I need one year or two years, and I was just concentrating on that” – and it’s not the topic of the day. No-one dares to say that because we have self-censorship, we have this pressure to not forget that artists they are all the time making this self-censorship because they want to succeed and if I make this, will it be good for my career or not? If I have this space, I have to show that I am engaged. I mean for me sometimes today, disengaging seems to be the most clever way to say “no” because when the mainstream narratives instrumentalise the vocabulary or instrumentalise the notions that come up from the left or from the defenders or the opponents to the mainstream narratives, this is a problem. Who is engaged? Everyone is engaged. You ask everyone, he will vote for a right-winger and he will say “yes I paid twenty euros, yesterday I went to see a Syrian group playing music to support Syria,” I mean, it’s crazy. Everything is confused and everything is instrumentalised. Radicalism today is be completely against, to disengage, voila! 

Michael: I was very intrigued by that brief conversation we had on email before we came here. We were just playing around, I guess with some ideas around poetry and philosophy and the notion of death. And that’s the ultimate question that confronts us all, but one of the themes that has raised up in this conference is the death of the social, how society, and the notion of solidarity is dying off and how we are really facing that. Can you perhaps reflect a bit on that?

Meriam: Yes, for me we live in times when we think that we are engaged but we are superficially engaged, we are engaged because we – I don’t want to say all of us, but I can say the majority – a lot among us, they are making business out of victimisation, out of playing the role of the hero who is going to save the victims. So this binary way to look at for example artistic freedom: we have people displaying victimhood and people displaying as the saviours, the heroes, the one who will save the world. This is not a balanced situation because in both sides there is an interest. The big difficulty today when I think about poetry and philosophy is to produce beauty and value. We live in a neo-liberalistic society where everything is tout le monetaire, everything is monetised, so nothing is outside of money. I would like with you tomorrow to make a conference in South Africa or in Tunisia but we need for that to get the money, and to get the money what do we need? We need this applications proposal, we need to master the language…

Michael: Of the donors, to speak in their terms to their interests.

Meriam: Exactly. Already we put for ourselves frames because we have to get the possibility to do it. So pure beauty, this poetry of art for me, I don’t want to politicise art; I think art is political but I am against politicising art; art is important in itself because it’s useless, its way [is] to challenge the structures, the conformists, the orthodoxies, to bring new sight, to bring this pause from everyday life, to bring a moment of release, it’s in itself giving you space to rethink your life. So why should I again politicise art and say we are supporting Syrian artists at risk – because what means artists at risk when everyone is at risk, everyone who is producing in any country is at risk because he is challenging, whatever he is doing. When Paul Klee put feet to the pillars when he was six years old and his teacher said “please you have to draw the aqueduct” and among twenty pupils, one child, Paul Klee, chose to put shoes to the pillars and since then the aqueducts are walking; he opened something in reality that no-one before him saw, no-one drew aqueducts with shoes; it’s completely a new opening in the world. And when you open something like that it is creating for you the ability to see the world in another way, even in your everyday life. So poetry for me is a high form against what we can sell and what we cannot sell, and I think beauty today, the ability to produce beauty, which is not saleable, which is not a product…

Michael: It’s not prettiness; it’s truth.

Meriam: Absolutely. It’s like Kafka says: it’s like the knife which is scratching my mind in order to make me see the reality of what I am and what the world is, and I think it’s this difficulty of saying we are missing solidarity because solidarity means that I believe in you; I don’t do it because I am waiting for something else, I am not waiting for recognition, I am not making money, I am not doing a network, I am not selling a concept, I am not applying a concept. Solidarity for me means, for example, those people during World War Two they were hiding children and they never say it and after fifty years someone found some documents [but] but they did it because it was their ability to judge.

Michael: So when you say I believe in you, it means I see you, I actually truly see you. 

Meriam: Exactly. And I judge that I am in a position to do something in order to allow you a chance, or the ability to get something, but I don’t do it out of an obligation. I do it out of trust.

Michael: You are not a symbol for me, you are not a tool in my design. You are different to me, you are your own, but I see you as your own.

Meriam: Exactly. And it’s me who is taking the risk, it’s not the other who is at risk, and the balance of the relationships are different then and this is beauty. Beauty is to recognise the human in you – and this human is enough, that makes me stand up and say I judge for myself that it is my duty in these circumstances that if I have something to do for you I will do it and I don’t need anyone to tell me or to give me the tools to do it, I will find myself the tools to do it. And this kind of beauty is what is missed because we are in very indifferent societies, and very egoistic, individualistic societies, which is why we also need this balance with a big movement, because if we look at the last five to ten years we have this rise of this movement for artistic freedom. It started with journalists and then moved now to artists and is now moving to female or feminist discourses; these movements which are from civil society they are part of the system. For me everything needs to be explained by economics and one of the most important books I read in my life from a contemporary writer and Nobel Prize winner, the Bengali writer Amartya Sen, wrote a book. He’s a scientist but he was very interested to understand why there is this injustice and inequality in the world and he tried to look at what is going on in the economic structures, and how economics shape values, and I think his book The Concept of Justice, is a very interesting as a vision of how our world is shaped and what the economical system makes wrong. He will open a window for making counter-narratives, but counter-narratives that are based on the money they get from this system so it’s just like performing all the time that we are trying to make the change. But why this change never comes when all of us are willing to change the situation, is because it’s just performative, and what makes things change is solidarity, so out of institutions, out of the big mass movements, what we shape in a collectivity is the exception, and beauty also is an exception. As I said what will remain when we read the texts coming from the Greek era, or I read Lalla [the poet Lalleshwari], or I read Omar Khayyam, the same guys left this world one thousand years ago but I stay connected to their writing, so human beings will always face the same difficulties in another context and with other tools, but we have the same existential questions and we can connect through that. Me or you as artists we are so excited to get recognition, to see that others are interested in our work, but a book is written to go through time, traverse le temps; a book is passion, it has time, it has no problem to stay there for five thousand years and someone will read it later. The writer is in a hurry, the book is not in a hurry, the painting is not in a hurry, we are in a hurry, humans are in a hurry. That is why also this kind of responsibility if we see how we are shaping policies, and how we are doing architecture, how we are treating with nature, with overproduction, with climate change, we are just interested in tomorrow and today but not in the long-term. The programmes we are selling here [at Safe Havens] or trying to do, they are maximum two years, nothing after two years. Ask our colleagues: after two years, what are people supposed to do? They will try to be the heroes of their lives and find a solution to stay and if not, they have go back. Do you think that it is easier to go back and to start from the beginning, how difficult for them to restart again from zero after leaving and coming back with nothing? No-one has an answer. I am for the second time in Malmö; I am so happy to be here and to exchange with colleagues and to have more open-heart conversations and these small tables were a good idea, but since last year I am asking the same question and no-one has an answer. As a student, I don’t want to get a fish every night, I want you to teach me how to hunt my fish. This is the investment we have to do as writers or as architects or whatever, because the word is not only today, it’s also the future like other people before us in humanity made a transmission of knowledge, of architecture, of books that we read and we seek in it consolation, we seek in it wisdom, we seek in it healing to continue.

[ENDS]

The Lonely, Contemplative Life of the Writer

This interview with my lovely, whip-smart friend Kagiso Lesego Molope, recently published online, was conducted at the Safe Havens 2018 conference of the organisations that protect persecuted creatives, held in December in Sweden.

Michael:  My obvious first question is: aren’t you tired of talking about your experience of snow? It’s been twenty years [in exile] now, right?

Kagiso: [Laughs] I still can’t get used to it; I don’t know why. Ja, there is something that makes me uneasy about not being able to see the ground, that’s really my big problem with snow; I don’t mind watching snow fall, or even how cold it is anymore, but there is something about not being able to see the ground that makes me really uneasy; I didn’t grow up like that, I always know where the ground is, but it feels very strange. Have I been talking a lot about snow with you?

Michael: It seems to come up every time we meet, but I guess what I was asking is: because you’ve essentially been abroad for so long, aren’t you tired of talking as if you are a new arriviste, someone just fresh off the boat, as if that is going to be your defining experience forever?

Kagiso: Ja [sigh]… I guess what I’m saying when talking about the cold is having been in a country for twenty years and still struggling to feel like it’s mine. I feel lonely. I think that if I had found a community and I’d felt really embraced by the place then I wouldn’t still be feeling like I’m just arriving, but that feeling is still there; I don’t think that’s the same for other people.

Michael: So that’s a metaphor for some kind of social coldness?

Kagiso: Ja, it is actually; it’s funny because I have thought of it that way. I talk about the cold as if it’s the weather, but I’m actually talking about a very introverted people who find it very difficult to include people they didn’t grow up with, people whose paths they don’t understand. I think everywhere you go, people are much more comfortable with you when they know who your people are; they know, ok, you are so-and-so’s child and you grew up in such-and-such a school; people like to make the connections when they meet each other, especially in Canada. It makes them uneasy to not know where you come from and to not be able to relate to a really large part of who you are, so they exclude you; it’s easier than actually taking the time to learn; I think that’s what happens. Anyway, I’m not saying that’s all of Canada, it’s just the part of Canada I live in. A lot of people grow up in the same city and then they go away to university but then they come back; it’s a very big part of Canadian culture; you go back to where you were raised to raise children, and so that means people are always going back home, so I think it’s very odd to them that someone…

Michael: Would traverse the world and uproot themselves?

Kagiso: Ja. And just not go home, because going home is what everybody does. So I am constantly trying to belong, so in talking about it, I always sound like I am just beginning to enter the country – but in a lot of ways, I am. I mean, in terms of time I’m not because I’ve been there two decades, but socially I feel I am always trying to enter the country, I’m always trying to be a part of it in ways that it won’t let me in. It’s an ongoing struggle for me and I think a big part of the struggle, honestly, is that I’m so very proud to be South African and I talk about being South African, and I talk about myself as a South African person, and I write about South Africa – a really big part of what I do in my work is rediscover South Africa in all its different ways. So it goes both ways: a part of it is I think the country has not embraced me; but I think another part of it is that I also embrace my country so much I don’t talk about it like a place I don’t love because I love my country. But I think northerners – in North America and Europe – don’t understand why you would love Africa because their understanding of Africa is that it’s a very harsh place, you know? People will always ask “but it’s so dangerous in Africa, aren’t you glad you left?” That’s the only thing they seem to know about the country and about Africa, it’s so corrupt and there are these problems and those problems, but people don’t understand that your home is your home and everywhere has problems but you will talk about a place that you love.

Michael: Tell me about those expectations through the lens of hair and dress: because you’ve had that experience of having all these expectations projected on to you that as an African woman you are supposed to look and be a certain way.

Kagiso: Absolutely. I think that most of the immigrants of African descent in Canada have been from the Caribbean and people have one picture of what people from the Caribbean look like, so people think, oh Bob Marley, dreadlocks, or they think well, you are African then you should look more African and wear African dress because that’s what we’ve seen in movies and that’s what we expect Africans to look like. There isn’t this understanding in North America that there are cities in Africa, and by that I mean that you are always placed in the past; I think they always place Africa not in the modern age and they still have this idea of all of Africa as being a very primitive place. I mean they have the same idea about First Nations people within Canada, so I think it’s just a matter of this imperialist look on the world: where there are no Europeans there is no civilisation. They don’t know an Africa that has lights, let alone…

Michael: Aerospace companies and satellites…

Kagiso: Ja. Part of also not being embraced is you don’t fit people’s idea of what an African looks like and what an African talks like. People always say: “You don’t sound African.”

Michael: So apart from not being them, you are also not the kind of other that they want you to be.

Kagiso: [Laughs] Exactly! So you can’t win, so here’s what you do: you either deny who you are to fit into the image of who they need you to be, to be embraced, or you refuse all of that and be isolated, and those I think have been my choices. And at the very beginning I was very desperate to be included and I was wearing dreadlocks – and I don’t like dreadlocks – but I did a couple of different things like wear head-wraps, because sometimes you just long for a friendly embrace so sometimes it is just helpful when you are trying to not be isolated and lonely to have people say “you look really nice, so come to my house for dinner.” But then you realise it doesn’t work for you and you stall and you go back to who you really are and then you end up alone – and then you end up like me talking about not belonging, twenty years later.

Michael: So tell me about your community, in other words the people that you commune with in Canada. What does your community look like?

Kagiso: Ah, I don’t really have a community, I mean I’m in grad school right now so I suppose that would be my new community, but my community is all over the world. Two of my closest friends live in two different countries in Europe and my other really close friend lives in the US.

Michael: So your community is not a geographic community, it’s a community of minds?

Kagiso: It’s a community of minds, ja, all three of those people are writers and all of them I met in some writers’ space, so those tend to be my community.

Michael: So what is it about writers? Obviously they work in the same field as yours, but there must be something else to that writing in that you’re continually trying to interpret your environment and they’re on a similar journey?

Kagiso: Absolutely; I mean they lead very contemplative lives and I think it’s nice to be around and talk to people like that you’re always sharing ideas about how you see the world and how you see yourselves, because we have to engage in that work personally to be a writer and to grow as a writer, your spiritual self and how you feed that and how you take care of that part of yourself. Those are conversations I can have with writers, especially fiction writers. Fiction writers have to be involved in the growth of the people they write about so they have to also be very actively engaged, they have to show up in their own personal ways in order to do well in their work. But one writer friend who actually isn’t a fiction writer said something to me recently that really stuck and that was that the writer in society is not traditionally deep in the community; the writer is always a little bit on the outside because you have to be further out to have a clearer view of your society. So I agree with it and think it is true and I think you’re not going to write honestly about the society you live in if you are too steeped in it, so that’s part of the isolation as well. If you look at it that way, then it seems ok, but some days it just seems too difficult because everybody wants people around them [but] I think it becomes too hard to be part of a community as a writer. Most writers I know, their community is composed of other writers and artists or they really just don’t have friends where they live and their friends are all far away.

Michael: So to some degree it is a lonely choice because writing is a solitary task in and of itself and does require some remove from those around one. What are the trends in writing that are exciting you at the moment; are there any? It may even be something old that you discovered, not necessarily something new?

Kagiso: Um, I don’t know if this is new, I don’t think it is. There are two things. There is a large group of black women in South Africa writing memoirs; that’s very exciting for me because we didn’t grow up reading books about black women so for us to say that our stories matter, and I was writing alone in the world. I think that’s very powerful and I think there is going to be a generation of young girls growing up with these books about African women, by African women, for African women and that will be very empowering.

Michael: Karima [Bennoune, UN Special Rapporteur on Cultural Rights] indicated that the very first point of ingress against any culture by a hostile force invariably assaulted the cultural rights of its women first, so if this new layer is being developed it’s going to have to be quite tough because it’s at the forefront of whatever gets thrown against that society by people who disapprove of it.

Kagiso: Aha, absolutely. It’s funny, you know, when I was growing up under apartheid, my father used to say that the future of South Africa was in black women’s hands and I think it’s because he had four girls and he really needed to say that [laughs]. But I think it’s a very powerful movement that’s happening and I think it’s coming up against a lot of criticism and I think they’re not being embraced by the larger publishing houses – but they just don’t care. So there are a few young black women writers who are building their own publishing houses so there’s one called Impepho which was started a few months ago by a woman called Vangile Gantsho and she is a poet, and then there is BlackBird which is an imprint of Jacana, and then [name unclear] who just started her own publishing house. So that is happening and it looks unstoppable when you look at it from that perspective.

Michael: Presumably what that means is first of all a greater diversity of voices in more vernacular languages, but also I’m presuming very soon we are going to start leaving biography behind and start getting into all sorts of genres, science fiction, philosophy, science, or what have you?

Kagiso: Ja, absolutely. There’s no limit. And it’s already happening. You get Pumla Gqola, she writes a lot on African politics, so that’s really exciting. I haven’t read a lot of science fiction but I know that there are a couple of people who want to write science fiction, but right now part of the trend is really addressing trauma and linking black women’s trauma to apartheid, because there is sort of this tradition in South Africa where everything bad started in 1994 [with the first all-race elections] but then you get these women who survived apartheid and want to talk to how their personal trauma is very much linked to the world they grew up in, to broader societal trauma. And I wholly support that. When I started writing in the early 2000s, I remember a really big publishing house in South Africa coming out and saying “we are not interested in apartheid stories, apartheid was in the past and we are excited only about black writers who are writing about South African politics now and South African society post-‘94” and I thought it was just appalling and obnoxious because they were calling on us to just forget the effects of the past, but also they wanted us to participate in their project of forgetting apartheid – which is not going to happen. So what I do like about what a lot of the black women are doing is they are addressing those issues which come from growing up under the apartheid regime and looking and linking them to how life is now.

Michael: Could you critique this prevalent notion, which has become a trope, of the “strong black woman”. There’s a demand that you have to be a strong black woman; you can’t be a contemplative black woman, or a mousy black woman, a shy and retiring black woman, or a black woman riven with self-doubt; you just have to be this uncarved block of solidity. Because on one front, environmentally, you have to be strong, but that denies you the full spectrum of your humanity.

Kagiso: Exactly. And part of what I like about the poetry from black women coming out now is them presenting themselves as sad, depressed, traumatised people – and able to handle all kinds of things – but also able to acknowledge the difficulties they face and to acknowledge that we fall apart sometimes. That is dehumanising to say that someone has to be this one thing; it’s taking away your humanity; we’re all complex, we all have feelings, life gets very hard for us – especially hard for us with everything that we have to deal with. I’ll give you an example of This Book Betrays My Brother: I went to Durban to the writers’ festival to promote the book. I got harassed in the session that I was giving about the book and I had to run out because it felt physically unsafe for me to be there. And when I told the organisers about it, they said “ja, but you’re a black woman, you guys are so strong, you can handle it.” But I have a right to be afraid and a right to be protected. But they compared me to another black woman who came there and had been harassed and had not complained and I felt like I was failing at being the black woman at that festival, I was not being the right black woman, I was failing at black womanhood [laughs]. And I think a lot of us are fighting against that image of what a black woman looks like because we shouldn’t be told what a black woman looks like or how she should behave, it should be up to us. But essentially it denies you the right to be human, it denies you the right to seek safety when you need it, to fall apart when you need to.

Michael: This ties in in my mind to this rising tide of reactionary black populism and its idealised version of black history and particularly pre-colonial history in which black people obviously never fought over anything, in which all wars that they ever waged were obviously on the side of the angels. This to me seems to fundamentally deny black people agency – under the guise of granting them agency. It’s about this projection of this idealised human.

Kagiso: Mm-hmm. It is under the guise of granting them agency.

[ENDS]

Politics in Flux

As we brace ourselves for what is shaping up to be rough and wild national election, I thought it interesting to reflect on where these major sea-changes originated, with the rise of the Chinese-funded, black-chauvinist, right-populist EFF to kingmaker status in several metro municipalities back in the local government elections of October 2016. This was a cover story in the black woman's magazine Destiny, “Inside Our Fiery City Councils,” Johannesburg, December 2016.

Michael Schmidt

As the brutalist apartheid architecture of the Joburg Metro’s Council building, its narrow windows looking down like gun-ports, gives way to its replacement, a giant R280-million drum-round lekgotla structure with huge transparent windows emphasising openness, so tight one-party dominance in the country’s heartland has given way to dynamically shifting coalitions.
At the second sitting of the new Council – still in the old chamber, now filled to bursting as it has expanded dramatically from the apartheid era’s 50 councillor’s seats to 270 seats – proceedings on 13 September were more polite than in the National Assembly the same week, but the country’s new opposition-in-waiting, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) provided most of the expected colour, in their red overalls and doeke or construction helmets, in their stand-up comedy, and in their jiving dances.
The week before the meeting, large-framed Protocol Officer Frans Sheleng, who was a council labourer under apartheid before rising up through the ranks, had told me: “We took advice from Parliament on disciplinary issues and dress code. Those hardhats they [the EFF] have, they throw, and people could get hurt. We have to supply water bottles, but they throw those also. We are considering whether we need a sergeant-at-arms… but we don’t want to go that route.”
Yet the mercurial nature of the second sitting gave fair warning that politics will hereafter be as unpredictable as Joburg’s formerly regular-as-clockwork weather. This is especially so because the unseated African National Congress (ANC) seemed unable to reconcile to the fact that although it is the largest party with 121 seats, it has no clear majority and is now easily outvoted by the ruling Democratic Alliance (DA) with its 104 seats, its one-seat-each coalition partners, the African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP), Congress of the People (COPE), United Democratic Movement (UDM), and Freedom Front Plus (FF+), with its separate agreement with the five-seat Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) – but only when given the tactical support of the 30-seat EFF king-makers.
Perhaps the locations of the main parties’ Joburg offices are telling: the DA sits on a leafy block of Rissik Street downtown; the ANC is wedged between fast food outlets on Gandhi Square; while the EFF is located on De Korte Street, in the hipster boondocks of Braamfontein. With a whopping 49% of Johannesburg’s residents under the age of 34, this is a distinctly young city and the EFF seems to understand that more than most.
A Fighters song rhyming Mandela with Malema got a few in the DA seats grooving, but left the ANC bloc very unimpressed; while another song, sung after the EFF forced the DA to receive a delegation of its own employees, aggrieved at not having been paid for elections services (including one of whom had allegedly been run over by a DA councillor’s car), had some in the ANC jolling along delightedly. 
Although the DA and ANC religiously applauded their own speakers, the EFF and minority parties readily shifted their praise to whomsoever seemed most deserving, so the red bloc clapped when DA Speaker Vasco da Gama (freighted with history, as his namesake was the first European to round the Cape in 1497) shut down one of his own party’s councillors who had not properly asked to be recognised.
After his acceptance speech – delayed to the second sitting in respect for ANC councillor Nonhlanhla Mthembu who died during the first sitting – the DA’s new Executive Mayor, bald hair-products king Herman Mashaba, chided the ANC, sitting grumpily in the opposition seats for the first time since democracy came in 1994, for quibbling about not being in power. Veteran municipal journalist Anna Cox of The Star said that previously, the ANC had always jeered at the opposition after it effortlessly steamrollered policies over the DA, so it would be fascinating to see how the parties behaved now the tables were turned.
ANC caucus leader Geoffrey Makhubo, who surrendered his finance seat on the Metro Council after the elections, responded with umbrage to Mashaba’s characterisation of the “World Class City” as one in decay, saying “The ANC built this city into what it is today… It attracts 10,000 people a month looking for opportunities – and the mayor calls this decay.” He then went on to grumble about the ANC being, as he incorrectly put it, the “majority” party. Mashaba drolly riposted that Makhubo “seems to need more time to accept the result of the election. We hope he accepts it by 2021,” he said, meaning the end of his own five-year term. 
The EFF’s witty Silumko Mabona jibed the mayor, in reference to his cosmetics empire, asking him, “What is Black Like Me in your programme? We elected you beyond political and racial lines but it seems you are sleeping on the job.” He then claimed that the DA leader’s emphasis on resolving the housing crisis in the city was borrowed directly from the EFF’s election platform – and yet he received DA applause. The EFF’s councillor for Alexandra, Musa Novela, had a go at the ANC, quipping that “we must thank the Son of God for visiting Joburg,” a reference to the frequent pre-election ANC boast that the party would “rule until Jesus returns.”
The Johannesburg over which the DA coalition now rules is a metropolis with all the hubris and squalour of a frontier town, ranging from the poplar-lined avenues of Houghton, one of the continent’s wealthiest enclaves, to the dregs of an inner city that reeks of urine like an elephant house at a zoo. Yet this powerhouse of the African economy, with a population close to 4,5-million (three quarters of them black), generates 16.5% of the country's wealth and employs 12% of the national workforce.
Its Metro controls a R45,3-billion operational expenditure budget and a R9,5-billion capital expenditure budget over 2016/2017 – and Mashaba has already worked out ways to spend what remains.
The DA played a slick game, with Mashaba spelling out a policy that attempted to balance an anti-graft, clean city, pro-business approach with poverty alleviation. 
But a woman leader who knows poverty intimately and looks set to become one of the most strident voices in the chamber is the Patriotic Alliance’s sole councillor, Leanne Williams. Hailing from Eldorado Park, Williams is the child of a father who ran off when she was five, and fell pregnant at 19 – but at 24 she decided to turn her life around; today she has three degrees, and prior to joining the PA was head of risk at a leading bank. 
In the chamber, she told the councillors that the DA’s economics seemed “more like witchcraft” when they failed to address backyard dwellers, pit toilets and the scourge of drugs. To wild EFF and ANC applause, she said “Some of us are here to represent the marginalised – and not white privilege!”
She told Destiny later: “My ambition is not to become a politician when it is about seat-warming.” Dismissive of the three mainstream parties, which she predicted had already peaked, she said the new coalition politics, far from being indicative of political maturity, was a sign of decay, citing “the DA-EFF Kardashian marriage,” and the lack of focus on empowering the marginalised, especially women who in the Metro were mostly reduced to backbenchers. 
One woman who is not a backbencher the DA’s MMC for Community Development Nonhlanhla Sifumba. Born and still living in Orlando West, home of Winnie Mandela, Sifumba described herself to Destiny as liberal-minded and insatiably curious. Although she grew up in a politically-charged environment of regular protests which she participated in as a child, she embarked on a bewildering array of jobs before cutting her teeth in politics proper with the Independent Electoral Commission in 2006, and enlisted as a DA councilor in 2011.
Asked whether she saw her portfolio, which covers sports and recreation, libraries and information services, arts, culture and heritage, city parks, zoos and cemeteries, as a soft portfolio, Sifumba said, “No: this social part is critical to people’s life; it’s the heart of the city. People want to live in a beautiful city, so actually I am the MMC for Happiness.”
A half-hour trip by Gautrain to the north, Tshwane may be the country’s executive capital, but despite its population of around 3-million (also three quarters black, but with a larger white percentage than Joburg), and its R28,3-billion opex and R4,5-billion capex budgets, its Metro is altogether more modest than Joburg’s. Its offices are currently situated in the four-storey Sammy Marks shopping mall, which is half a construction site, overlooking two other diggings, that of the chamber’s new home (a prosaic purple-trimmed concrete block), and that of the new Women’s Monument at Lilian Ngoyi Square which commemorates the 1956 women’s march on the Union Buildings. 
Metro Executive Mayor “Just call me Solly” Msimanga of the DA scored points with his new electorate by outlawing the hated “blue light” convoys in the capital – except for those of President Zuma and his Cabinet – and courted controversy by instituting forensic audits into what he claimed was capital overspend by the previous ANC administration. 
The balance of power in Tshwane – where the security fencing around the Paul Kruger statue gives notice of a divided city – is only slightly in the DA’s favour – with 93 seats to the ANC’s 89 which, while still not a majority, gives the ruling alliance of the DA, ACDP, and FF+ together 98 seats, meaning again, the 25-seater EFF holds the swing vote. 
ANC Tshwane caucus leader Mapiti Matsena complained at the first sitting on 30 August – at which unpopular ANC mayoral candidate Thoko Didiza was noticeably absent – that “mayoral council does not represent the demography of the City of Tshwane… it is without women...” But this is patently untrue – and one of the most powerful elected women in the country is now Tshwane Metro Speaker Katlego Rachel Mathebe. 
Born in Kimberley but raised in Mabopane in then Bophuthatswana, she was politicised in Shoshanguve as a member of UDF affiliate Young Christian Students, and on graduating in Port Elizabeth, worked for a wide range of entities mostly as a financial officer. When Thabo Mbeki was ousted, she joined COPE, becoming a Tshwane councillor for the party in 2001, then joining the DA.
Mathebe told Destiny that her election as speaker came as no surprise because “as a young girl, I had the conviction that I cannot tolerate injustice… and what was happening in Tshwane, this was not what I fought for: I fought for liberation as in the right to vote, but also for a classless society… to reduce the difference between poor and rich… I cannot fold my arms and see the country going the wrong way, especially with the levels of looting.”
Mathebe was forced to adjourn the chamber at the first sitting after the EFF and ANC scuffled over black hairstyles at the Pretoria School for Girls. She stated that racism in the city was derived from economic inequality, which the DA has sworn to address by reducing unemployment and by tackling the city’s racialised spatial planning – which the ANC had failed to address. While she believed she had the respect and support of all the parties, ANC and EFF backbenchers holding on to past grudges kept provoking each other, so Tshwane was going to bring in EthicsSA to train councillors in civic virtues.
The unelected officials I spoke to seemed comfortable with DA assurances that, bar a little tweaking of priorities, the ANC-set long-term strategies for the cities – Tshwane Vision 2055, and Joburg’s Growth & Development Strategy 2040 – would remain largely unchanged, while their integrated development plans (IDPs) would by law have to take guidance from ward level every year. But Anna Cox told me she’d heard dark mutterings in the hallways of sabotage along the lines of “we don’t work for the DA,” and said there had even been rumours of an attempt to bug Mashaba’s office. Time will tell if the ANC’s assiduous cadre deployment over the past two decades works for or against democracy in future.

[ENDS]