I’m not a Hollywood Star
Henri Alleg from: The Algerian Memoirs And , since our house was one of the few with a working telephone—the other lines had been cut for lack of payment—people would drop by often to make a call. Children rang the doorbell to bring us plates of festival cakes from their parents. We noticed that some only came after nightfall, as if they wanted to make sure that no one thought they were becoming too close to us… A minor incident ruffled this calm. Jean had returned from Ivanovo and was living with us after a stay with his grandmother in Avignon. Andre had stayed in the Soviet Union and was waiting to start university. Jean was going on eleven and was used playing with the children in the neighbourhood until one day he came home disgusted: “Do you know what Mohamed said to me? He said he spits on Europeans, Jews and Communists! So what the hell am I doing here.” We explained to him that Mohamed was only repeating things he had picked up here and there but that the majority of Algerians did not think like that and that all this would disappear in the new Algeria. But I was surprised. Never in all the years of my militant activity or during my stay in prison among Algerians had I been witness to a racist insult or attack and even less had I been the target of it. The abusive language of the child was a reminder that the old prejudices, fed and aggravated by the colonial system, had not disappeared. Such an attitude would develop like weeds, favoured by strained circumstances, and it needed to be checked. From Tunis, the GPRA had proclaimed that the ‘revolution’—this term was increasingly taking the place of the more apt ‘national liberation war’—was intended to be very deeply democratic and that all those who chose Algeria as their country would find a place in it, regardless of origin or beliefs. Once the country had been liberated, measures would be taken to fulfil these promises. The new policy was confirmed in the resolutions adopted in Tripoli by the highest FLN authority and, after Independence, by the measures legalizing the appropriation of the land of wealthy landowners and of vacant property, the organization of self-managed farming and industrial concerns, the display of sympathy for all liberation movements throughout the world, along with the hospitality extended to militants from Africa, Europe or Latin America, forced to flee their countries and relations of friendship and cooperation established with Socialist states. Rallies of hundreds of thousands of people celebrating the anniversary of the insurrection of November 1954, on May Day, or on the occasion of visits by Fidel Castro, Gamal Abdul Nasser and Zhou Enlai, demonstrated popular support for a political agenda that elevated Algiers to the rank of the capital of the progressive, revolutionary Third Front. I was continually bombarded by visitors from round the world—journalists asking for interviews and representatives of liberation movements and parties, curious to know our point of view on the current situation and the country’s future prospects. Many were from the Soviet Union, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria—countries that had cooperation agreements with Algeria. I noticed that, by and large, they focussed on the positive aspects that substantiated their confidence in the Socialist future of Algeria. I received guests who, as I knew, were travelling with fake Algerian passports—it was an open secret—and came to ask help from independent Algeria for their own struggles for liberation. This was how I came to know, among others, Alvaro Cunhal, secretary of the Portuguese Communist Party, who escaped from Antonio de Oliviera Salazar’s prisons; Manolis Glezos, hero of the Greek resistance who, at the height of the Nazi terror, raised a Greek flag over Parthenon; Santiago Carillo, secretary of the Spanish Communist Party; Enrique Lister, former general of Spanish Republican Army who had to flee Franco’s Spain; and Michael Harmel and Dr. Yusuf M. Daddoo, members of the African National Congress and of the South African Communist Party. I met Che Guevara who stayed in Algiers for several weeks. One evening, he came to see us at the paper and lingered very late into night, talking to the spellbound young editorial staff. They listened to him with emotion and extreme attention as if he embodied the Cuban Revolution itself and was going to divulge the secrets behind his victory. But he was neither a prophet nor a lesson giver. He answered our questions simply and mostly asked a lot of questions himself. From time to time, he would take a small inhaler out of his pocket and spray a dose into his mouth to relieve his asthma. When he was about to leave us, one of the staff asked him to sign his photograph. He pushed him aside curtly: “I’m not a Hollywood star. I don’t give autographs.”I often think of this reply when I see tens of millions of young people round the world avid for a different future displaying his image on posters and t-shirts. I wonder what he would have thought, knowing how adamantly opposed he was to personality cult. We all wondered what he was doing in Algiers and what he expected from the FLN. But the question was taboo and we did not ask him, knowing he would not answer. We learnt, but only much later, that Algiers was but a stop on his way to the heart of Africa, in search of a region where the conditions were favourable for him to carry out his protest of creating a revolutionary guerrilla centre in the continent. —————————————————– Henri Alleg is a French-Algerian journalist and Director of Alger republicain newspaper. His work The Question (1958) turned public opinion in France against the war in Algeria. adminhumanitiesunderground.org
The Political Economy of Reading
William St Clair Last year, some of us were privileged to hear the first John Coffin Memorial Lecture given by Robert Darnton entitled ‘The Devil in the Holy Water.’ In that talk, by offering a close textual and historical study of just one pamphlet, Darnton showed how much could be learned about Paris day by day when the French Revolution was actually occurring. In terms of ‘the history of the book’, that talk was at the micro end of the spectrum. This year I propose to move to the other extreme, the macro, looking at books and reading as a whole and over a long time span. I begin by suggesting some of the big questions that ‘the history of the book’ shouldaddress. What were the conditions within which books came into existence in the form thatthey did, and not in others? How were those books that did come into existence produced, sold, distributed, and read, in what numbers, by which constituencies of readers, and over which time scales? – again asking why these events happened in the ways they did and not in others? And what were the consequences of the reading of the texts that were inscribed in, and that were carried by, the books? What were the effects on the minds of their readers, and on the mentalities of the wider society within which the reading took place. By mentalities, a word adopted from the French, I mean the beliefs, feelings, values, and dispositions to act in certain ways that are prevalent in a society at a particular historical and cultural conjuncture, including not only states of mind that are explicitly acknowledged but others that are unarticulated or regarded as fixed or natural. And although I say ‘books’ for convenience, I include journals, newspapers, and other media. These questions are, of course, not new. However, although there has always been much interest in what certain texts mean, how they came to be written, and in the lives of their authors, less attention has been paid to the processes by which the texts reached the hands, and therefore potentially the minds, of different constituencies of readers. I draw many of my findings from the print era in the English-speaking world, roughly the four hundred years from 1500 to 1900, a long sweep of history with many changes. But, in one respect, that era forms a unity. For, during that time, paper imprinted with words or pictures was the only medium by which complex texts, and therefore complex ideas, could be carried in quantity across time and place. I choose 1900, incidentally, not as the end of the print era, but as a way of conventionally marking the moment when, with the arrival of radio and film, printed paper lost its uniqueness. During those four centuries, almost everyone whose opinions on the matter are recorded believed that the reading of books affected the minds of readers, the mentalities of the people, and the fate of the nation. Whether engaged in politics, education, religion, literature, scholarship, science, propaganda, advertising, or censorship, many of the leading men and women of the past tried to use print to spread their ideas and to advance their aims. This was particularly true during the period from the 1790s to the 1830s, that I have studied in detail, an extraordinary rich and innovative time as contemporaries knew. But, we should ask, were they right to regard books and reading as having power over minds? How can we investigate the validity of the assumption? Literary and intellectual history, two of the disciplines that have traditionally attempted to retrieve historic mentalities, have mainly been written in accordance with what I call the ‘parade of authors’ convention. The writings of the past are presented as a march-past of great names described from a commentator’s box set high above the column. In literature, we see Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth. In philosophy Hume is followed by Adam Smith, Rousseau, or whichever names the writer wishes to include. According to the parade convention, those texts of an age which have later been judged to be the best, or the most innovative, in a wide sense, are believed to catch the essence, or some of the essence, of the historical situation from which they emanated. It is a convention centred on newly written works that, for the most part, denies an active role to readers. Another convention that has come in more recently, I call the ‘parliament of texts’. This presents the writings of a particular historical period as debating and negotiating with one another in a kind of open parliament with all the members participating and listening. Thus, when news of the French Revolution reached this country, there was an outpouring of books and pamphlets that discussed the implications, and took the debate from questions of immediate policy to philosophical issues about the nature of human society, the role of the state, the justifications for political, social, and gender hierarchies, and much else. Under both of these conventions, the historian chooses the texts that march in the parade or sit in the parliament. Both approaches can be linked with critical and hermeneutic analyses of the texts which are not time specific, seeking to understand their rhetorical stance and ideological assumptions, and employing, for example, theories of myth to explain the enduring appeal of certain types of narrative. Some scholars attempt to test the truth of what the texts assert, although, sadly, that is out of fashion. And the texts can be situated in specific contexts. However, as ways of understanding how mentalities may have been historically formed by the historic reading of books, neither approach seems to me to be complete or satisfactory. For one thing, any study of the consequences of the reading of the past ought to consider the books that were actually read, not some modern selection. Nor, in describing the reading of a particular period of the past, can it be enough to draw solely on the texts written during that period, specially significant though these may have been. Much of the reading that took place in the past in the English-speaking world, probably most, was of texts written or compiled long ago and far away. In both parade and parliament conventions, newly written printed texts succeed their predecessors, engage with them, and in some cases defeat
Why Stephen Greenblatt is Wrong — and Why It Matters
Jim Hinch One year ago this month, Harvard Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt stepped to the podium at the Cipriani Club in New York City to accept the National Book Award for nonfiction. Greenblatt won for The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, a 356-page study of the transformative cultural power wielded by an ancient Latin poem called De Rerum Natura by a first-century BC Epicurean philosopher named Titus Lucretius Caro. Holding back tears, Greenblatt thanked, among other people, his publishers at W.W. Norton for committing to “the insane idea that they could sell a book about the discovery of an ancient poem by a Renaissance humanist to more than a handful of people.” In fact, by the time Greenblatt addressed the Cipriani Club’s gold-domed ballroom, The Swerve already had spent more than a month on the New York Times bestseller list, just as had Greenblatt’s previous book, Will in the World, a Shakespeare biography that came close to winning its own National Book Award (it was a finalist). Five months later, The Swerve won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. The book remains a strong seller on Amazon. Clearly, The Swerve spoke to far more than a handful of people. But as American book lovers gear up for another awards season — the National Book Award this month, followed by the PEN/Faulkner Award in March, then the Pulitzers in April — the acclaim showered on Greenblatt’s book about the discovery of an ancient poem raises profound questions about just what these awards really mean. Simply put, The Swerve did not deserve the awards it received because it is filled with factual inaccuracies and founded upon a view of history not shared by serious scholars of the periods Greenblatt studies. That such a book could win two of America’s highest literary honors suggests something doesn’t work in the awards system itself. The Swerve, in fact, is two books, one deserving of an award, the other not. The first book is an engaging literary detective story about an intrepid Florentine bibliophile named Poggio Braccionlini, who, in 1417, stumbled upon a 500-year-old copy of De Rerum Natura in a German monastery and set the poem free from centuries of neglect to work its intellectual magic on the world. This Swerve, brimming with vivid evocations of Renaissance papal court machinations and a fascinating exploration of Lucretius’s influence on luminaries ranging from Leonardo Da Vinci, to Galileo, to Thomas Jefferson, is wonderful. The second Swerve is an anti-religious polemic. According to this book, the lucky fate of De Rerum Natura is a proxy for the much more consequential story of how modern western secular culture liberated itself from the deadening hand of centuries of medieval religious dogmatism. “Many of [De Rerum Natura’s] core arguments are among the foundations on which modern life has been constructed,” Greenblatt writes in The Swerve. “Almost every one of the work’s key principles was an abomination to right-thinking Christian orthodoxy.” In other words, The World Became Modern when it learned to stop believing in God and start believing in itself. Here’s how Greenblatt describes the epic transformation Lucretius helped bring about: Something happened in the Renaissance, something that surged up against the constraints that centuries had constructed around curiosity, desire, individuality, sustained attention to the material world, the claims of the body. […] The transformation was not sudden or once-for-all, but it became increasingly possible to turn away from a preoccupation with angels and demons and immaterial causes and to focus instead on things in this world; to understand that humans are made of the same stuff as everything else and are part of the natural order; to conduct experiments without fearing that one is infringing on God’s jealously guarded secrets; to question authorities and challenge received doctrines; to legitimate the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain; to imagine that there are other worlds beside the one that we inhabit; to entertain the thought that the sun is only one star in an infinite universe; to live an ethical life without reference to postmortem rewards and punishments; to contemplate without trembling the death of the soul. In short, it became possible — never easy, but possible — in the poet Auden’s phrase to find the mortal world enough. Lucretius’s role in this cultural revolution was to inject, with a flavoring of poetic wonder, the idea that God and religious faith not only are unnecessary for personal fulfillment but in fact are incompatible with human happiness and the pursuit of truth. Among the influential themes Greenblatt finds in De Rerum Natura: there is no God, no gods, no creator of the universe; all religions are invariably cruel; the highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain; the chief enemy of pleasure is not pain but delusion. Prior to the revival of such insights, according to The Swerve, western Europe endured a long, suffocating era dominated by an obscurantist, pleasure-hating religious ideology. Greenblatt’s characterization of the Middle Ages, scattered throughout The Swerve, is summed up in an article he wrote for The New Yorker shortly before the book was published. The article synthesizes various passages from The Swerve: It is possible for a whole culture to turn away from reading and writing. As the Roman Empire crumbled and Christianity became ascendant, as cities decayed, trade declined, and an anxious populace scanned the horizon for barbarian armies, the ancient system of education fell apart. What began as downsizing went on to wholesale abandonment. Schools closed, libraries and academies shut their doors, professional grammarians and teachers of rhetoric found themselves out of work, scribes were no longer given manuscripts to copy. There were more important things to worry about than the fate of books. Lucretius’s poem, so incompatible with any cult of the gods, was attacked, ridiculed, burned, or ignored, and, like Lucretius himself, eventually forgotten. The idea of pleasure and beauty that the work advanced was forgotten with it. Theology provided an explanation for the chaos of the Dark Ages: human beings were by nature corrupt. Inheritors of the sin of Adam and Eve, they richly deserved every miserable catastrophe that befell them.
What’s in a Name!
Bhasha Singh [This is an excerpt from Adrishya Bharat, (Invisible India) Penguin Books, 2012. Translation HUG] Dabbuwali (Bengal), Baaltiwali (Kanpur), Teenawali (Bihar), Kamaai-Ka-Kaam Karne wali (Large swathes of North India), Tokriwali (Haryana-Punjab), Thottikar (much of South India), Paki/Peeti (Odisha)—the more you travel, the more the variations. These names bear a direct connection to their work. These are not qualifiers that designate caste or creed. These are names of containers in which Dalit women (and a few men) from all over India scavenge, place and carry shit and other waste products with their own hands. These words that immediately bring a look of visceral disgust on to the faces of the civilized world, since the stigma embossed on them is centuries-old, actually name human beings of flesh and blood. Believe it or not. These words have become their identity and most of them have forgotten their given names. The households they work for have lost track of their names too. As if their very faces ought to give away their profession and social position. Narayan Amma spent 60 years of her life at Anandpur, Andhra Pradesh: the last time she heard her name being called was in the 1950s when she was an adolescent. Thereafter she was Thotame. The universal Thotame. Right from the early hours of the day till afternoon she cleans the dry latrines of her area, bare handed—with the constant buzzing of the all too known phrases, phrases that define her too: “Thotame, wipe this, scrub that. Double quick!”So, a major chunk of her life passed by nameless, until one morning, the activists began to call her by her name again. Amazing! It was she who led the movement for eradicating the dry shit-holes of her area and even during that ongoing struggle would no one call her Narayana Amma. When asked, Savitri, a neighbourhood woman who routinely used the latrines, replied pat: “What’s in a name? We all know her job!” Shanti in Kanpur has an identical tale to tell—the universal Baltiwali that she is. Heera from 24 Parganas in Bengal is the ever active Dabbuwali; Indira at Tonk in Rajasthan is quite naturally the local Tokriwali. With a slight awareness of such geographical variations that tell us remarkably similar stories, we may have a vague sense of how Invisible India functions, goes about its business day after day, generation past generation. These women are so mired in the endless cycles of caste maltreatment, physical exploitation and economic disparity that we do not even know where to begin. Where do we start? Even these women have no clue when and how they got into these exploitative cycles and of ways to come out of these patterns. The heavy baskets of dirt and shit—ah, to even contemplate quitting this job means revolting against the grim fixed orders and expectations of husbands and in-laws. Clearly caste and patriarchal hierarchies are responsible for making this profession perfectly fit for women (around 95-98% of the womenfolk constitute this profession). As I have said, the story is more or less the same around India. The pain too, is similar: “The man does not work. Is a drunkard. Abuses me physically. So, it is my shit-cleaning job that actually helps run the household. How shall we make two ends meet otherwise?” It is important to realize how the caste system works and patronizes a whole support system for running these households: a few rotis and some money could lead to some bonus if these women agree to help in disposing off dead animals or do menial, ad hoc jobs during the ‘rituals’ of birth, death and marriage in the locality. And yes, during festivals—may be some old torn clothes too for them. With a tacit understanding that during trying times they will get some odd help from the exploiters. The women have this impulse to run the family in a sound manner, a compulsion that the men folk often elude. This, the exploiters know very well and use the knowledge to wage a kind of psychological warfare quite astutely. Naturally, there are a good number of women around the nation who do not wish to come out of this abusive cycle. Ghulam Muhammad of Ujjain had to fight tooth and nail with his own mother and sister so that they may relinquish cleaning these dry-latrines once and for all. The old mother kept on arguing that this very profession had maintained generations in her household. So, it would be criminal to quit. Vimla, Kamaiwali for the past 25 years in the Aishbagh area of Lucknow was also not ready to give up her job so easily. The pretty looking Vimla was as enamoured of her beautiful jewellery as she was of her job. She felt she had always nurtured and children with this, her job. Her daughter got married by her kamai. And then, how much of life was still left for such momentous changes! Her husband, a serial gambler, works for the municipality and anyway wastes all his money in drinking binges. In our one hour of exchanges, she told me at least 4 times that since 1985 she had bought off the jajmani of the 25 households where she works in 2 thousand rupees by selling off all her jewellery. Her working households are mostly poor Muslim families. Vimla, working thus for decades, does not see her work as part of a throbbing hellhole. It is this mental slavery and cycle of domination that is at the bottom of these women getting invisiblized all around us. The men work for municipalities and so their salary is assured and is comparatively higher than what these women make within this informal sector. The informalization is important to note. Why do women get into cleaning dry latrines and manual scavenging? If you ask Bezwada Wilson of Safai Karmachari Andolan or Manjula Pradeep of Navsarjan or Srilata Swaminathan (CPIML) or even D. Raja (CPI)—all will give you more or less the same answer—that since these