This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. […] This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940)
Is it that, surveying the immense garbage dump of history, today’s mountains of nonbiodegradable plastic, this particular angel finds itself incapable of singing the praises of the present to which it has been assigned and, mute, is therefore unable to vanish?
Frederic Jameson, “History and the Messianic” in The Benjamin Files (2020).
In The Arcades Project, Benjamin writes, “The coming awakening stands, like the Greeks’ wooden horse, in the Troy of dreams.” Waking waits for the right moment to attack the land of sleep and liberate it. The wakers want to be freed from sleep’s grasp and the only way this can happen is to invoke the incomplete past so that it might be renewed beneath the gaze of the present moment, changing both past and present. For history is not a succession of finite moments but a chain of breaks. And waking, in Benjamin’s understanding, is memory’s rebirth at the fleeting intersection of past and present, an instant that flares like a spark: reality ceases to be a stage on which history repeats itself and becomes a living substance in which the gunpowder of history detonates.
Haytham El Wardany, “When Waking Begins,” trans. from the Arabic by Robin Moger, The Paris Review, 3 November 2020: link to the article.
The recent recognition of Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January, buried in an avalanche of catastrophic news cycles, and the celebration of Imbolc – the Gaelic festival marking the beginning of Spring – on 1 February, reminded me that it had been a year since I contributed to this blog. (And now over a year since the British exit from the EU on 31 January 2020, when Covid-19 was already in circulation but the consequences of the virus were still – seemingly – unforeseen). Outside, it is snowing (9 Feb). Going through the motions of their allotted “once per day” exercise, locals move ploddingly on solo expeditions through Storm Darcy and the desultory conditions of the latest national lockdown in England. The Met Office warns that the weather may drop to a ten-year low this week. A minor note of interest in the relentless, chaotic unfolding of 2020-21, towards which many of us have only been able to look mutely on, mullet-eyed and defenceless at the onslaught.
In a recent BBC podcast the creative director and cultural commentator Gaylene Gould puts it succinctly: “The world has tilted on its axis – global pandemic shut down the whole world. And then across that same world we saw Black people, and people who are subjugated to legacies of violence, rise up.” The anchor for her observations is a visit, during lockdown, to the Kara Walker commission in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall. Fons Americanus is Walker’s take on the Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace. In her version of the fountain, Walker has replaced the original celebratory imperial symbolism and iconography commemorating Queen Victoria with allegories of the Black Atlantic, marked by figures invoking the slave trade and histories of imperialist violence. The monumental work – as Gould observes – has gained even greater significance in the wake of the re-emergence of the global Black Lives Matter movement and, in particular, the interrogation of histories of enslavement and the architecture of the ruling elite represented by the toppling of slaver statues in the US, UK and elsewhere.
The work confronts this moment in history, this space of the interlude.
Is it a necessary activation of the radical potentiality of the present, of “time filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit]” in Walter Benjamin’s formulation? (Benjamin, Theses, 1940). This moment feels paralysing, muddy, congealing, demoralising, lonely… but if we take Homi Bhaba’s point that “The state of emergency is also always a state of emergence” (Bhaba, Location of Culture, 1994), can we think about what that “emergence” might look like in terms of possible futures? This standstill may yet produce new forms of historical reckoning, new futures, with Benjamin’s caveat – and this is where Bhaba is riffing from: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” (Benjamin, Theses, 1940). For the afterlives of slavery, of imperialism, of colonial violence, have been relief-etched on the memory of 2020, from murder of George Floyd on 25 May 2020 in Minnesota at the hands of the police, to global Black Lives Matter protests reminding us of the repugnant history of similar unlawful deaths around the world and the ways this reflects centuries of violent oppression, to the toppling of slaver statues and the exposure of histories of white supremacy (and governments’ unwillingness to engage with those histories), to the health inequalities evident in the disproportionate number of deaths of coronavirus deaths in deprived communities, amongst disabled groups, and in Black, Asian and minority ethnic groups in England (as reported by Public Health England) and elsewhere, and much, much more besides.
Back in April 2020, when London was rattled by the shocking proliferation of coronavirus and had settled begrudgingly into the reality of its first full lockdown, the Financial Times published a widely shared (and remarkably prescient) article by Arundhati Roy called “The pandemic is a portal.” She reports that, at the time, Covid-19 deaths worldwide numbered around 50,000. According to figures from John Hopkins University (reported in the New Scientist on 9 February 2021), the worldwide covid-19 death toll had passed 2.32 million, with the number of confirmed cases at more than 106 million (though the true number of cases will be much higher). In her account, Roy describes the shocking spectacle of the “brutal, structural, social and economic inequality” in India that the pandemic – named as such by the World Health Organisation on 11 March 2020 – revealed. After lockdown was announced on 24 March, Roy writes, “… millions of impoverished, hungry, thirsty people, young and old, men, women, children, sick people, blind people, disabled people, with nowhere else to go, with no public transport in sight, began a long march home to their villages. They walked for days, towards Badaun, Agra, Azamgarh, Aligarh, Lucknow, Gorakhpur — hundreds of kilometres away. Some died on the way.” Worse still, the plight of the poor with no choice but to stay in the cities: “…sealed into cramped quarters in slums and shanties.”
In one of his podcasts from the series Grounded, Louis Theroux came up with an apt metaphor for his experience of pandemic lockdown (Grounded with Louis Theroux, series 2, episode 17: in conversation with Riz Ahmed – well worth the listen). From the comfortable insulation of his West London home, Theroux describes the unhomely experience of this twilight zone as “a bit like being in a hotel and someone’s being tortured in the next room, but you don’t really know that it’s happening – you just have been told that it’s going on, and so there’s a surreal sense of dissonance with what you acknowledge to be the facts.” Theroux’s is a privileged position, of course, but the dread and disquiet he conveys here is palpable in London.
The sound of the first lockdown – devoid of the constant low-level hum of traffic – was eerily punctuated by ambulance sirens. Yet in the intervals between, in that window of time when the skies were free of planes and peals of spring birdsong rang out through the temporary stillness of urban space – when the virus, in Roy’s words, brought “the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt” – the rupture also held promise. Roy concluded her article by imagining the pandemic as “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world.”
Wearily trudging into year two of the Tory government’s mishandling of the crisis, it’s difficult to imagine a future in England that’s other than bleak and overburdened with resentment and suffering. Recently, sometime around Christmas, there was a marked number of police sirens in the streets. I looked up the local news for clues and found out there was a lack of ambulances and hospitals had to resort to police cars to transport patients. Hum. Grrrrrrgh. Meanwhile, an image of 200 people queuing for food at a soup kitchen in sub-zero temperatures in Glasgow on Monday (8 February) went viral on social media (see here and here).
NHS staff member, Dr. Rachel Clarke, recently reported in this Guardian article that:
It’s late January. The wards and ICUs are overwhelmed, awash with the virus. The patients seem younger, the new variant more virulent. We are drowning, drowning in Covid. The sight of a doctor or nurse breaking down has become unremarkable. Too close, for too long, to too many patients’ pain, we have become – just like them – saturated. Behind hospital doors, tucked away out of sight, we seem to suffer as one.
During the purgatory of this third lockdown, Clarke observes that “…instead of unity, community and a shared sense of purpose – that extraordinary eruption of philanthropy last springtime – we seethe like rats in a sack, fractious, divided.” For choosing to reveal conditions on the frontline of the NHS, Clarke receives appalling abuse from “Covid sceptic” online trolls. Crowds of deniers turn up to hospitals to chant “Covid is a hoax.” Inside, patients are sick and dying. Some patients beg staff to delay intubation, since a likely end to the treatment is death, according to this NHS consultant anaesthetist. The last person many patients will see is a masked professional. According to Clarke, “…they will never see a human face again. Not one smile, nor pair of cheeks, nor lips, nor chin. Not a single human being without barricades of plastic.” If a video call can be arranged, family members may only witness a distressing sight of their loved one fighting for breath, lungs and throat swamped in Covid pus. Funerals have migrated online. Saturation is a fitting expression.
Meanwhile, in Brexit news
More images of bare life. As if the omens weren’t bad for the 2020-21 transition to Brexit, drivers found themselves stuck in the cabs of their trucks in Kent in the days leading up to Christmas. Heading for the Dover-Calais crossing, drivers were stalled in nightmare queues when France announced a 48-hour ban on passengers and freight entering from the UK (on 21 December) due to a new, virulent Covid strain (there have been a number of these mutations in the past few months). Delays in providing Covid testing meant many hauliers had to miss Christmas since the backlog took days to clear. Perishable goods were spoiled. The new Covid variant had already led to new UK government restrictions for British Christmas celebrations. The headlines in the Sunday papers on 20 December told the story: “Will this nightmare ever end?” (The Mail on Sunday), “Lost Xmas” (Sunday Mirror), “Johnson U-turn leaves nation’s plans for Christmas in tatters” (The Observer), “Christmas in cancelled by surging mutant virus” (The Sunday Times), “Christmas cancelled for millions” (The Sunday Telegraph), “Fast spreading Covid-19 wrecks Christmas” (Sunday Express).
Seemingly without irony, the closure of the border by France was met with exaggerated disgruntlement and outrage by British commentators, many of the Brexit persuasion. Amusing, but by no means surprising, to see the penny drop that border closures were possible all along, so the Brexit slogan of “taking back control” of British borders seemed – maybe?! – not worth the four years of bitter wrangling and grief. And, also, more practically speaking, closing or at least imposing restricting on UK borders back in March 2020 might have been a good idea…?
But I digress. So, when the truck-drivers were freezing in their cabs, grateful for any scraps of food they could glean from passing locals and attentive charities, No 10 announced “we have taken back control” on Christmas Eve – 24 December 2020 when the Conservatives announced they had secured a UK-EU deal. Since then, musicians have heavily criticised the governments failure to secure visa-free travel for performers. The failure of the negotiation “‘will make many tours unviable, especially for young emerging musicians who are already struggling to keep their heads above water owing to the Covid ban on live music,” according to a letter to The Times signed by a list of prominent signatories from the pop, rock and classical worlds. The Irish sea border is under renewed scrutiny with the Northern Ireland Protocol coming into force on 1 January 2021. The shellfish industry is facing ruin. Blocks on wholesale distribution of pharmaceuticals from the UK into EU member states have led firms to take their production lines across to Europe. Daffodils have been left to rot in Cornish fields and fruit and vegetable shortages could follow due to restrictions on (and lack of incentives for) migrant workers. There is more: much, much more that does not bode well. And the sirens keep punctuating the passage of Spring.
But who, really, is to know? According to Nick Cohen, writing in the Guardian, “the only real conspiracy is the conspiracy of silence.” The media coverage of the economic and social crises brought on by Brexit is piecemeal. The government is tight-lipped on the matter. The promised opening up of trade deals with the rest of the world is stalled. The “world,” according to Cohen, can sense the UK’s neediness. The Labour opposition have been instructed to keep schtum on the matter, according to this Guardian article. Brexit – and there is no surprise here – is a barrier not a threshold.
