Funeral Music

I was at a party on Saturday night when someone came in and said that a van had driven into the Berlin Christopher Street Day parade, killed one person, injuring more. I’ve never been to CSD; go, instead, to the Internationalist Queer Pride demo that, since 2021, has been organised in contradistinction to the corporatisation and pinkwashing of the main CSD demo, whose organisers had called the police to remove pro-Palestinian marchers. Since 2023, this has meant outspoken support for the victims of the genocide in Gaza, and all the attendant policing that involves. So to me Berlin Pride also means cops pepper-spraying and pain-gripping people on the street. Well, it’s in the tradition. In the sun, the heatwave having finally come back after the week’s rain and thunderstorms, finally setting off after several hours, marching past the newly-converted Rheinmetall weapons factory, formerly a builder of car parts, the first time arms manufacture has taken place in Berlin since the Second World War; Rheinmetall, sender of weapons to Israel, to Turkey, to Saudi Arabia, for use in Syria, in Gaza, in Yemen, part of the government’s shift towards increased weapons production since Olaf Scholz’s 2022 Zeitenwende speech and its 100 billion euro fund for war, the willed and ever-expanding horizon of war. The march monitored, not for our own safety, but for the safety of the city’s “white” citizens, by vanloads of armed cops with their machine guns pointing down to the ground; the same cops who let another van drive through or past the protective barriers in the Tiergarten to plough into a path of queers that evening. Not protecting us from the world, but protecting the world from us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After the parade, in the evening, people start heading off to the parties. The killing happened around ten p.m. and I didn’t find out till around midnight. People had been arguing in the kitchen about the World Cup. Guatemalan funeral music by the San Lucas Band was playing, out of tune, slow. Then Ornette Coleman. The music soared. I felt the world drop out. I don’t quite know how to describe that simultaneity—of hearing that music, which I love and which to me is the sound of possibility and joy and collective potentiality, of what Coleman means by harmolodics, infinitely transposable in whatever register, whatever instrument, whatever key—you could call it queer if you wanted to do that—of hearing that music at the same time as that news. I don’t know what it means, I’m not writing to turn this into a metaphor or an allegory or to makes sense of it, I’m writing it because I have to, I’m writing it to register the loss. Mourning is about revision and return, repeating that initial moment of knowledge, replaying it. It’s a loop, yet it develops; it moves forward, yet it stays in the same place. I’m writing this two days later but I’m still in that kitchen, the world is still dropping out, Ornette is still playing, the San Lucas Band are still playing, and I’m still in that kitchen. I don’t know who they were, the person who was killed, I don’t know their name, and I mourn their absence, that gap. The driver of the van attacked people with a knife or a machete after ramming the van into people on the path and fled. And I don’t know who they were either. And I’m still in that kitchen and already I’m thinking, if it’s an Islamist attack, queers will be used as convenient propaganda—never more convenient than when dead—against whoever it is the state wants to kill, deport. Whoever it was who drove that van could equally well have been one of the white supremacist AfD supporters at the counter-protest staged earlier that day. And if it’s not an Islamist attack, we’re just dispensable: they’ll gloat, those other AfD supporters, CDU supporters, and all their unaffiliated supporters, privately, in their homes, or publicly, online: they’ll cheer the death; they’ll smirk at our loss.

So say what. Stay alert. Some platitude of the sort. Mourn, but don’t let them use us, use you.

---

I wrote those last lines the same night. The next day, the news comes out in more detail. Wanted posters on digital screens. Perpetrator, Islam, terror attack, plastered everywhere, all over the newspapers, all over the city, and the victim still not even named. The year before, the Chancellor had described raising a queer flag over the Bundestag as akin to treating it as a “circus tent”. Today, the national flag is lowered to half-mast in a gesture that passes as “solidarity”. But I don’t really know what’s worse. This half-mast show, as if there were some sort of unity between the national flag and a flag that should negate the idea of the nation, of this nation, entire. Already the videos coming out, this instrumentalised commentary that is the opposite of mourning, that is like spitting in the faces of the dead. Already the voices of the AfD and its cheerleaders in the right or the so-called “centre” raising themselves. A white blonde Woman on Welt says “Political Islam kills” and talks about Hamas and “irregular migration”, as if that had anything other than precisely fuck all to do with any of this. “Deport all dangerous individuals”, says someone else. (The attacker was born in Germany.)

---

So mourning is once again becoming a weapon against those it’s supposed to protect. But you still have to mourn. Where does that feeling go. Who becomes a part of the “we” imposed like an unwanted national flag, vampirically, over the bodies of the dead. The flag doesn’t absorb the blood that flows from the body, it doesn’t stanch the wound. Rather, it is the very thing that sucks the blood out: blood spread into its colours, blood the basis of its being.

It’s not my nation and it’s not my flag. But these are, I feel, my dead, not the dead of those nation and flag who opportunistically claim them; not directly, but still, my dead, and I mean that internationally— these dead, not dead to be recuperated by nations and borders but dead who belong beyond those borders; my dead, in whatever way one might take that to mean, without taking any ownership. The person who was murdered was visiting from Poland with her daughter; the killer was German. No nation owns that death.

These dead my dead, because, yes, whatever it was Donne said about diminishment and involvement and nothing in itself entire, yes, that, perhaps, but more specifically: this person is dead because they were queer or they were seen as queer or they were in a queer space, a space that was, for that moment, queered, and because those have been or are my spaces, too. And because of that, because when I heard the news the world dropped out, because this next day and the day after I still can’t get it out of my head—because of all this, I still have to mourn.

I tried to do that by writing a poem. This is hardly a poem. On the afternoon of the next day I pace around inside and it starts to rain and I stay inside and eventually I cycle over to the vigil by the Brandenburger Tor. It starts to rain again, then it stops, then it starts again. This is hardly a poem. Soon after I arrive they finish clearing away the barriers by the gate. A tourist takes a series of selfies in the vacated space, oblivious, smiling away. On the ground on the raised bit of pavement there are rainbow and trans flags, placards, candles. By now, early evening, some hours after the vigil began, swelling to ten thousand people, the crowd is small, but still present. People stand here, they linger, they don’t just pass by, the group becoming in its silence rather than its noise a crowd. “And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour” and the opening of the seal signalled the end of whatever world and you know all the noise that will follow. Here, it’s quiet, respectful. I realise I haven’t brought any flowers with me to lay so I leave nothing but my temporary presence. People look dazed. Some quietly crying. Older gays and younger queers, mainly but not exclusively white. Some Zionists holding up a sign saying “this is what happens when you globalise the intifada” are eventually persuaded to leave. Then I notice after a while that the rainbow flag carried by the woman sitting quietly near the centre has a Star of David in the middle. Next to me are some people with a keffiyeh and a keychain with Palestinian flags. Who do you think I felt safer standing next to.

And it’s not, not really, my safety that’s the issue. Or not the me, not the we, the state might take me to be.

---

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to think of Tiergarten now without thinking about the attack. About its political uses by the predictable barrage of right-wingers calling for “re-migration” and denouncing Islamist terror as proxy for their racist nationalism. About the Zionist flags I saw at the vigil. About the feeling of the ground opening up, the world dropping out, and at the party, when I heard the news, I didn’t know what to say or what to do so said my goodbyes without comment and I left, quietly, as if ashamed.

The driver of the van attacked people with a knife or a machete after ramming the van into people on the path and fled. Later, when he ran at them with the same weapon in an allotment in Spandau, the cops shot him. As if this was some sort of satisfactory conclusion. But likely, it’s only the beginning. They will talk about “protecting” us and there will more cops on the parade to police us and to police real or imagined threats, and white blonde women and straight men on Welt will say things like “political Islam kills” and talk about Hamas and “irregular migration”, and the head of the Alternativ für Deutschland will condemn the killing knowing full well that many of their supporters are delighted by it on all counts, the cops killing the Muslims killing the queers, two birds with one stone.

“And many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.”

---

 

Recorded by ethnomusicologists, the music of the San Lucas Band was nominated for a Grammy Award and the musicians were displaced and probably killed in the Guatemalan Civil War, with its genocide of indigenous populations and activists. The Kaqchchikel musicians, survivors of the Mayan populations decimated by the conquistadors and their massacres and the diseases they brought, tried to bend the western instruments they’d been left and the funeral march melodies and dirges they were playing into the microtonal inflections their own traditions encompassed. It’s as if you can hear the music break under the strain, and yet it stays together.

The evening of the Monday after, the sirens seem to have not stopped sounding. Cops on my road. As if their music were any less sickening or inappropriate than whatever threat it is they are supposed to protect whatever “we” it is they think they are protecting us against.

I refuse it, I refute it, I am not that we.

The vigil was silent but after it I needed to hear something, and so, over these past days, I listened to ‘Atomic Peace’ and ‘Altruvista’ and ‘I Want to See You’ by Alice Coltrane, recorded after John Coltrane’s death, and to ‘Vigil’ by John Coltrane, recorded in watchfulness before his own, and I listened to John Corigliono’s AIDS Sympony, its first movement, titled Of Rage and Remembrance, and I listened again to the San Lucas Band, and they all finish playing. For now, Coltrane’s Meditations is the only purgation that will do, for each sound that comes out on the record sounds like it’s about to break in two. There is no mourning here that is not screaming. No screaming that is not mourning. Multiphonic. Flame. Flowers by a monument in the rain. Flowers by a grave.

And then again silence.

Not to let such a death be used, and not to let it be in vain.

25^th-28^th July 2026

For the victim of the attack on Saturday

and for all those it will be used against

to study war

From Daybook.

In 2003, mass anti-war protests against the choreographed build-up to the illegal invasion of Iraq. The protests politicised a whole generation of us.

Twenty-three years later, the US and Israel launch another illegal war off the bat, with no pretence at UN presentations, consultations, weapons inspections, by a president at once pursuing a Nobel peace prize and illegally invading multiple other countries with the only justification being that this is what he wants to do. Just because he can. A “pre-emptive strike” when there is no sign of any impending attack is not a pre-emptive strike at all. The phantom idea of Iranian nuclear weapons which don’t exist, from a nation that seems intent to blow up the entire nation, the entire region, the entire world. But isn’t that what this entity, this holding corporation we call America has always done, Democrat or Republican alike? The Democrats just use a bit more window-dressing, a bit more “due process”: vacillate, qualify their condemnation, tacitly agree.

The term “regime” is used exclusively in western media to describe that of the late Khamenei, killed in a strike, but perhaps people might reflect, it should be used on the world’s richest nation, the world’s most feral, venal, viral empire, one of the most internally unequal countries in the world, a country that illegally invades others, just because it can.

Their justifications shift day by day. Pre-empted by Israel, to pre-empt Israel, to destroy nuclear capability, to enact regime change, to destroy the army and the navy, to liberate the people, to protect American interests: just because they can. Military commanders declare a crusade, the US President “anointed by God” to bring about Armageddon. I’m not making this up. The Secretary of Defense and his Crusader tattoos.

And so what it comes down to is this: At least one hundred children die in a bombing of a girl’s school in Minab. To linger with the horror of it. The numbers rise each day and they are replaced in the newspapers by columns on the deaths of three US soldiers and disruption to the flight paths of western travellers. As if one life were worth a hundred. As if anything could ever justify this. 

We’ve seen it all happen before. This has been daily life in Gaza for three years now, and we’ve seen it all happen before. We were there on the streets or in front of our screens during the Iraq War in 2003 and we watched the bombs fall on TV like fireworks, we sat and we watched it all and sometimes we spoke and we shouted and wrote poems or essays and the carnage went on, and we’ve seen it all happen before.

As if this attack will save lives, as if it will not kill many, many more to add to the thousands already killed on the streets in Iran in protest for the last three months, the millions killed by the US and its proxies across the world for the last three centuries. As if one can declare war on an entire country just to boost one’s approval ratings before the mid-terms. As if one has the right to dictate the way the world works, and we’ve seen it all happen before.

As if the trail of carnage, destroyed lands, destroyed lives that is our present reality will prove anything different.

And that is the way the world works, they will say, because they make it.

And we’ve seen it all happen before.

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On the video the smoke rising in Tehran and the birds fly in front of the camera away. Where they go to, where they’re flying: some place, perhaps, where people might hide or fly or flee, some dream of that; that flight, that movement, from bombs in the sky to border regimes and death in the ocean, that incessant movement, that structures this world, its blocs of power, its people in the cracks, the possibility for people’s war diminishing as the people are massacred, by whoever, regimes internal or external; to have to believe in the movement of the people nonetheless, whatever that might mean; to believe, at the very least, that people wish to survive and that there are others in the world who wish them to survive too, who don’t wish death on their heads, bombs in the sky, extraction and crusade and a customary sadism, experienced in “outraged futility” as we protest or we scream, or experienced in customary banality and swiped away from onscreen—the tremulous, held-in banality of this evil that burns the world in its wake.

And now we are politicized, and then we were politicized, and now we know it all, or some of it, and then we could see it coming, and now we are bamboozled, and we are taken by surprise, and in 2003 that movement of hundreds of thousands of the street stopped nothing, whatever our will, and yet to keep trying, to owe the dead at least that, and for the living, too, to owe them that, though here as the first spring flowers poke from the earth and the birds outside begin in profuse strains their song, death from the skies is the only skylark’s flight poetry can see.

“When weapons come from the US, do they strike us more gently than when they come from the regime’s killing machines?”

Don't let it happen here: Mingus / Minneapolis

Charles Mingus recorded this version of Martin Niemöller’s anti-fascist warning in 1965.

And today, sixty years later in Minneapolis when people intervene to help their neighbours, to come to the aid of those in their community, to attempt to ensure due legal process, they are pushed to the ground by the agents of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and shot ten times, shot four times, shot in the body on the ground, shot in the head, when pulling away in a car. Alex Pretti. Renée Good. A nurse, a poet. The observer is the new target. To be a witness a fatal act.

The Associated Press detailed that Pretti had embraced a person who had just been shoved by an agent. An agent then shoved Pretti, and the two fell back, still embracing.

They shoot down good and they shoot people embracing.

Sharing footage of death has been a necessary way of contending with the lies the administration tells in public. Evidence, reproduction, to show that this happened, even as the state doctors the photos and footage it itself releases. The image, when our eyes can’t be trusted, and the word: the lies told about the image. “I didn’t say that”. “He didn’t say that”. The image and the word. The reproduction of the image becomes a weapon, and, as a weapon, its consequences are fatal: loops of death. The line between witnessing and horrified voyeurism that for the past years of live-streamed genocide has become a part of the texture of observation. What does this do to solidarity and how we conceive of it.

Beyond these ethical questions, questions of representation, questions that matter for our conscience and our consciousness as artists, yet in ways that we find sometimes impossible to track, what matters is what you do. In Minneapolis, protests, marches, a general strike. The resistance of communities to the violence perpetrated on them, in their name.

Mingus’ recitation plays over footage from a demonstration shot for Thomas Reichman’s 1968 film Mingus. His biographer, Gene Santoro, writes:

Mingus figured you had to stand for something. The powers that be would come for you anyway. He was busted a few times with other marchers and spent time in the Tombs, New York’s downtown holding tank.

Mingus also shows Mingus facing eviction from his loft at 5, Great Jones Street, where he’d hoped to set up a music school, in 1966, and from which he was evicted after a crooked landlord set him up for a fall. The film’s last scene shows the press and cops crowding round as his instruments, his scores, his life are taken out of the building, and he’s taken to the police station after they find needles and a rifle in his belongings. He was released: no shots were fired; he planned music for a ballet called ‘My Arrest’.

The following year:

Charles Mingus, a well-known jazz musician, was arrested with two other persons late last night in a demonstration by a group of 200 hippies outside the Charles Street police station in Greenwich Village. Mr. Mingus, who was accused of scuffling with a civilian and two policemen who attempted to intervene, was charged with three counts of felonious assault. The demonstration began with a march by the hippies from Washington Square Park to the Charles Street station. It was touched off by rumors that an itinerant musician had been arrested earlier. These were later said to be unfounded. At the station the hippies sat down and began singing. The police moved the group half a block to the corner of Greenwich Avenue, where, they said, Mr. Mingus engaged in a scuffle with a motorist who had objected to hippies sitting on his car.

Mingus recorded ‘Don’t Let it Happen Here’ in March 1965, introduced by Ralph Ellison for a TV performance, and again in December, in the version released on Music Written For Monterey 1965. Not Heard... Played In Its Entirety At UCLA Vols. 1 & 2. That same year, sixty years ago, the assassinations of James Meredith, Malcolm X. Mingus fires his rifle into the ceiling and notes that it’s the same kind of gun that killed JFK. The right wing and liberal state alike claim a monopoly on violence, at home and abroad, and the vigilante forces that operate outside it, but with its tacit approval. In March 1965, FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe murdered the Civil Rights volunteer Viola Liuzzo, shooting at her car as she ferried from the march on Selma. It was rumoured he’d assembled bombs for the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. Liuzzo grew up in one-room shacks with running water: her activism was the result of experience, of solidarity, the opposite of the KKK’s violence, as today, citizens turn up for their neighbours while others cheer on the forces of hatred. Gary Thomas Rowe received immunity.

The state assassinates people in private, and its agents murder people in public, on the highways and on the streets, whether they are activists or not. Fred Hampton. Sandra Bland. The state becomes and remains fascist because it assassinates and decimates the opposition. But this process of becoming is not some sudden leap of the cliff, though it can feel that way. The state becomes and remains fascist because the potentials for fascism are already there. In his book Late Fascism, Alberto Toscano looks at the analyses of police violence against populations of colour in the writing of Angela Davis and George Jackson to argue that fascism is a differentially-distributed experience. For some, the experience of the state is that it is already fascist. And then it spreads. The tree rotten from the inside will eventually collapse and take down everyone who’s placed their trust in it.

In Reichman’s film, Mingus delivers a sardonic monologue, tinged with furious irony and ironic fury.

I pledge allegiance to your flag—not that I want to, but for the hell of it, I pledge allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, the white flag, with no stripes, no stars. It is a prestige badge worn by a profitable minority.

“If they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night”, James Baldwin wrote to Angela Davis a few years later.

The movement of the people in the streets can be clamped down on, it can be diverted, dispersed, thousands dead, arrested. The empire hovers over the regime, at home and abroad. The empires, plural, their vassals, their dregs. In Venezuela, in Iran. Invasion, kidnapping or ‘deals’ in exchange for extraction, of oil, of wealth: gangster capitalism, the continuation of decades of imperialism by all and any means, already dividing up the land piled up with rubble and with the dead. Fifty per cent of profits from new mineral and oil projects in Ukraine will go to the US; under the aegis of the US-led “board of peace”, the UAE plans a collaborative open-air prison marketed as a ‘safe zone’ in Gaza; the British government denies its complicity in the genocide in Sudan. But the movement doesn’t stop.

Mingus’ delivery in the TV performance is halting, as he fumbles the number of people genocided—death exceeding the weight of statistics—and over the collective noun to use—the politics of solidarity—speaking out against “those who killed…the other people with me.” And in that very awkwardness lies its clarity, its power. “And I say the only way we can avoid this is to look and speak out now. And don’t…let…it happen here”. From an opening lament spread between the brass instruments in the band as he recites Niemöller’s text, Mingus strikes up a propulsive piano figure and the band blares into collective improvisation. On the march, on the move. Fluency in fracture and the stammered statement of fact. The movement doesn’t stop. And though they may breathe in breaths strained, asphyxiated, observed, occupied, a breath that comes in gasps, a breath in combat, the people—continue to breathe.

Festivals and Funerals / After the end of the world

It can be both too easy and to difficult to pick out what is world historical amidst a barrage of doom, defeat, and pessimism, the constant absorption of shock as a new norm. It now seems that the pandemic rolled out in the middle of what we can now understand as the Trump era: first as tragedy, then as tragic farce, the two elections of Donald Trump as president of the United States. Last night, as the US presidential election took place, I had a fever dream that I lived in the DDR, experienced, my dream notes say, as “a benevolent but spirit sapping simulacrum”, everything soundtracked to ‘Holiday for Strings’, which I think I heard the Sun Ra Arkestra play this weekend. 

In the waking world, yesterday, alongside the election result in the US, in Germany, a terror plot to establish a Nazi state. In Gaza, in Lebanon, the mass slaughter without end. In a talk on the Society of Black Composers, before the results of the election had come through, Harald Kisiedu opened by discussing the recent rise of the AfD in Germany, while noting that, in 1967, a survey suggested that seventy per cent of white Americans thought Civil Rights reforms were taking place at too quick a place. Sixty years on, from Trump to Björn Höcke, ‘remigration’ is the trope of the day. As Kisiedu suggested, the creolizing influence of Black music within German culture fostered during Weimer was one of the first targets of the newly legitimized Nazi regime, part of the creeping force of ‘degenerate art’. Today culture perhaps plays a less obvious role as target of fascist discourse. What musical culture do contemporary German fascists have? Schlager for days. Disco hymns to tolerance with their lyrics re-written to fascist ends, sung on holiday islands. That’s the fascist festival. Celebration of sadism. Celebration as sadism. At his rallies, Trump picks and choose any number of songs as if distinctions of genre or sound or tone have no real meaning, dances alone, as if dance itself were not a communal form but the disconnected moves of a man exercising a form of arbitrary, illogical power. “Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. [sic] Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?”

An email I received the other week asks whether, in such times, music is “spur for revolutionary consciousness” or instead for “self-preservation”? What kinds of community does it create? The music that claims--or perhaps, no longer even claims--to be the most revolutionary plays to the smallest audiences, and the music for mass audiences turns even the images of mass politics, mass resistance, into spectacle, colludes with dictatorial regimes, covers over, keeps up the charade of democracy (Julius Nyerere: “The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.”) Here music is both powerless and, in a time of culture wars and the apparently serious use of the term ‘cultural Marxism’, (left-wing) culture is at once endowed with a seriousness and an impact it has not seemed to have for years and turned into a kind of hollow charade, a parade of within the increasingly totalized culture industry.  Thinking of Trump’s victory in the election, and the parade of stars, from Beyoncé to Cardi B, who came out in support of Kamala Harris, Harmony Holiday writes: 

I believe that, in a final assessment, when it’s all underground or sea, black music will be one of the only redeeming elements of this empire, the poetics of inevitability black music insists upon, so much [...] It is black music that governs the US, that gives it a legible pulse and makes it a real place and not a full time amusement park for disaster capitalism, but when that music grows too shallow and ‘popular’ to face its own heartbreak, and change, [it] starts pretending to be hard and declaring itself a winner of a race everyone is losing and limping through [...] You thought this was a party and not a funeral.

Festivals and funerals, the two terms on which Jayne Cortez’s poetry collection of that name turns, thinking of the funerals of leaders, of activists, of musicians she’d attended and witnessed and absorbed in the years of assassinations at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s: Fred Hampton, George Jackson, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, John Coltrane. How to turn the funeral into the means for organizing, the spur to continue, rather than the dead end of grief, as Jackson put it shortly before his death in Blood on My Eye. 

People’s war is improvisation and more improvisation [...] Improvising on reality is the key principle underlying the building of a united left and raising the consciousness of the people. Even funerals can be used as an issue, since there will be so many of them. . . . [They] should be gala affairs, of home-brewed wine and revolutionary music to do the dance of death by. 

Today no one even speaks of people’s war, or of a united left for that matter, though improvisation is still an issue. But the question remains: how to prevent the funeral parade of American death and its global export from being presented as a festival, a celebration, ringing hollow as the last vestiges of this latest failure to prevent a Trump presidency are cleared away, the memes and tropes, Brat Girl Summer and the rest, and then how to prevent the reaction from sinking into a simple despair or a simple numbness, a seeming inevitably, each time a shock is felt its impact less keen. And to reckon with the fact that, for all the lies and manipulations, Trump’s election to power is token not simply because of election-mongering, voter fraud, the entire atmosphere of intimidation and violence, the billion-dollar power of right-wing tech bros, the Elon Musks of this world, the official and the unofficial media alike, not simply because of the crushing force of the oligarchy and the latter-day robber barons and their running dogs, but because people, voters, actively and sadistically desire these people to be in power, because people hate women, because people hate migrants, because of the sadism of that desire, whether on the part of the rich who vote in their own class interest, the feeling of strength in what is in fact classed and raced and gendered strength, or the illusory feeling of strength from those who vote against their own interests, the feeling of strength in what is in fact a condition of weakness, even at the cost of their unfreedom. How to fight that? How to go beyond it? If we are now living in what is, essentially, a fascist world, what do we do? These are both new and old questions.

When a US flag was flown during an Archie Shepp performance at the Donaueschingen Festival in the late ’60s--thus implicitly positioning Shepp as avatar of jazz as US imperial export, of Willis Conover or Nicholas Nabokov, of the Congress on Cultural Freedom, rather than that of his own politics, deeply opposed to US imperialism and domestic racism--Peter Brötzmann tore it down. And, as John Szwed recounts, during a concert in Central Park Ra’s Arkestra gave in Central Park: “At one point [...] the Arkestra hit a screaming space chord, and the large American flag stretched across the back wall of the band shell fell down. With that, Sonny abruptly ended the concert.”

As Ra famously put it, “it’s after the end of the world...don’t you know that yet?” After the end is where to begin. The end of history. The end of the idea of the end, that we have somehow transcended or gone beyond both the fascisms of the past and the freedom dreams of the past, those forbidden black and red dream of communism and socialism and abolition. The radical tradition, the continuity that preserves memory even in its transformation.  

A few days after the Brexit vote and a few months before the first Trump victory in June 2016, Sean Bonney wrote:

Nothing stops. Nothing speaks. [...] Now, a couple of days after the referendum, it looks like [the civil] war has started. It won’t be declared. Every declaration, every sentence spoken by every public figure has been a lie. [...] We’re deep inside the apocalypse now. 

What’s needed,

a collective effort to get us through to the other side. No sleep. No dreams. Just a grim determination to defeat those fascists who would murder us, to cast them intact into the hell of worms.

After the end of the world, within its ending. After the end, in the beginning.

"Make the Suckers Back Back": An Amiri Baraka Music Compilation

01 // New York Art Quartet - Black Dada Nihilismus (3:39)
Album // New York Art Quartet (ESP 1004, 1964)



02 // Sunny Murray - Black Art (6:35)
Album // Sonny’s Time Now (Jihad 663, 1965)



The connection between modern poetry and music – specifically, jazz – was obviously not one that started with Amiri Baraka, but it was brought to a kind of fruition in his work that can be argued in some way to have sparked an entire generation and style of doing the poetry-and-music thing which has its legacies in – among other things – the hip-hop and slam poetry movements, and the work of Gil Scott-Heron, Kain, Wanda Robinson, The Watts Prophets, Sara Webster Fabio, Jayne Cortez, The Last Poets, et al. Whereas, in earlier collaborative efforts (witness Kenneth Patchen or Jack Keroauc's recordings with musical combos), poetry had tended to sit on top of a jazz background, easily rolling along on its atmosphere – the jazz restricted and smoothed down by having poems in front of it, the poetry similarly smoothed down and, perhaps, distracted from by the jazz combos – Baraka's aim was for a kind of synthesis in which the two – music and poetry – were placed in active dialogue. The energies that Keroauc tries to replicate in spontaneous pieces such as 'Old Angel Midnight' find themselves pushed back down, rather than dialogically or even dialectically invigorated, by accompanying music; and though a little-known poem such as Ray Bremser's 'Drive Suite', a sequence dedicated to Cecil Taylor, and purportedly written underneath the piano that Taylor was playing in a club, has a visual and textual energy intended to reflect the energy and multi-directionality of Taylor's music – suggesting exciting mutual influences, inter-disciplinary encounters and endeavours – it's not, it seems, until Baraka' first recordings with musical groups during the mid-60s, that those energies and potentialities are liberated into fused or excitingly tense and crashing encounter, poetry and music sharing performative space in far from token, genuinely exploratory fashion.

That said, Baraka's reading on the first track, 'Black Dada Nihilismus', is restrained and quiet, even hesitant – which suits the sombre mood perfectly, no doubt influencing the contributions of the New York Art Quartet as they play around and under him. It is not the rhythmically-thrusting, angrily energised thing it would become later on (a change also reflected in Baraka's solo reading style, without music – compare the available recordings from 1964, say, with the readings from the 1979 film 'Fried Shoes, Cooked Diamonds'), but a threat all the more sinister and urgent for being understated. 'Black Art', released as part of a Sunny Murray album put out on Baraka's own Jihad record label, ups the ante – Albert Ayler's staggeringly wide vibrato, Don Cherry's inquisitive, pithily constant melodic investigations and Sunny Murray's freed-up drums force the poet out of that place of quietly terrible contemplation into active exhortation, the gleeful, horribly gleeful vocal imitations of aircraft, machine guns, police sirens setting off a chain of similarly multifarious, emotionally complex responses from the horns. The words are, finally, as shocking as the music, the music as shocking as the words; there is a sense of something on the cusp, of a moment of potential transformation which is longed for and even revelled in, but also shocking and violent, involving intense personal, as well as more broadly social and political ruptures that are embraced almost against themselves.

03 // Jihad Singers - Beautiful Black Woman (3:19)
04 // Jihad Singers - Nineteen Sixty Something (4:29)
Album // Black & Beautiful, Soul & Madness (Jihad LP1001, 1968)




Put against these two recordings, the doo-wop songs recorded for an album credited to the 'Jihad Singers' (or ‘The Spirit House Movers’) might seem rather tame: certainly, they don't possess the same lyrical strength, tending to exhortation rather than complication, striving for a kind of declamatory urgency of utterance that sometimes falls flat in unintended bathos: "The white man / at best / is corny!" A piece like 'Beautiful Black Women' pushes a notion of idealised femininity in which women must be entirely beautiful (the fat, ugly and old have little place in Baraka's rhetoric of this period, except as occasional targets of ire and scorn) and exist entirely to support their men in what is essentially, a reinforcement of the heterosexual family model (with added polygamy – for men only, of course). Such idealisation combines with notions of racial purity that we might find equally problematic - and, lest we forget, round the corner from this, Baraka’s virulent misogyny of this period ("the world cant beat you/ and my slaps are love") and the anti-Jewish, anti-Irish, anti-Italian slurs (however based the latter are, in, say, economic conditions relating to store ownership (cf. James Baldwin's essay 'The American Negro is Anti-Semitic Because He Is Anti-White'), useful methods of ensuring there is no inter-racial co-operation between different groups of oppressed people). Nonetheless, the way in which all these problematic hatreds fuse with more progressive notions of throwing off oppression is, undeniably, incredibly uncomfortable and hard to untangle, and it certainly should not be apologised for. All that said (of course, 'Beautiful Black Woman' is hardly the most despicable example available), I've picked the piece because its combination of Baraka's spoken word with a version of Smokey Robinson's 'Oooh Baby, Baby' seems a potent example of the concept Baraka would go on to articulate in his 1967 essay 'The Changing Same', in which R & B, free jazz and the Black Arts movement are seen (I should say, heard) as part of a continuum of Black expression, the related urges of the sacred and the secular (made earlier explicit by Ray Charles' use of gospel stylings for secular lyrics, of course) generating and embodying, encouraging and being encouraged by a revolutionary potential, the constrained desire and physical oppression and repression that threatens to burst out into social upheaval. As Baraka points out in his liner notes to the album's reissue, the music might have "seemed a classic R&B du-wop send-up," though at the same time "we also had a clear vision of what we wanted to say regarding the Afro-American struggle for equal rights and self-determination[...]we thought of ourselves as cultural workers, revolutionary artists 'pushing the program' as some of our cultural nationalist comrades were wont to say." That element of parody would thus appear to be poised somewhere between the intentional and the non-/unintentional; certainly, the lo-fi sound quality and the somewhat rough-and-ready nature of the performances (particularly Russell Lyle's saxophone playing, which can be at times rather undirected) are nowhere near the level of actual R&B big-sellers like The Impression's 'Keep on Pushing' or Martha & the Vandella's 'Dancing in the Streets' – tracks with the potential to inspire socio-political ferment through the hidden codes or meanings which their ostensibly harmless lyrical and musical material secretly contained, or could be adapted towards.

05 // Wha's Gon Happen? (7:43)
06 // Who Will Survive America? (3:06)
07 // It's Nation Time / Pull the Covers Off (4:13)
Album // It’s Nation Time (Black Forum/Motown Records 457, 1972)



That ‘changing same’ impulse finds perhaps its finest expression in Baraka’s recorded output on his next release, the 1972 album ‘It’s Nation Time.’ This time the record label is Black Forum, a Motown subsidiary who also put out various Black Power related speeches, attempting to give that kind of ethos a slightly more mainstream availability, perhaps. Given this, the recording quality is higher, the band – or, I should say, bands – seem better rehearsed, and the whole forms a kind of two-part suite which plays very nicely as a record, rather than as a raggedy collection of separate numbers. The poetry is mostly from various pamphlets put out around this time, in which Baraka’s Black Nationalism is at its most assertive (though, paradoxically, this pushes them formally closer to Beat Poetry than to anything else – they’re certainly a far cry from the carefully tortured, almost Creeley-esque placements of the poems in ‘Preface to a 21 Volume Suicide Note’ and ‘The Dead Lecturer’); as their sentiments go, they’re fairly reprehensible (no “crackers” or “old people” will “survive America”), and faintly absurd – the fantasy, on ‘All in the Street’, of a kind of retro-futuristic African city seems almost to be posited as a genuine political programme (intriguing though it is to view it in relation to Afro-futurism, and, particularly, the work of Sun Ra, a close associate of Baraka’s for a time). That said, the combination of an R & B group, a ‘New Music’ group (playing not-quite-free jazz, but something approaching it, particularly in the vocalized and sensuously slippery stylings of Gary Bartz, who made several Black Power-tinged records of his own around this time which still hold up pretty well), a chorus of male and female voices, and a group of African drummers – these various groups sometimes uniting, sometimes playing on different songs – remains remarkably cohesive and satisfying, the occasional hesitancy in transition (which could easily have been edited off the finished records) only a momentary slip. If nothing else, the sheer urgency and street-toughness of ‘Pull the Covers Off’ still packs some punch today (“attack attack, make the sucker back back”), even if the sensation of listening to commands to “put some on your cracker / put some on your devil” is inevitably somewhat masochistic for all us 'honkies' out there listening...



08 // You Was Dancin' Need to Be Marchin' So You Can Dance Some More Later On (4:09)
09 // Better Red Let Others Be Dead (3:47)
Album // 45" record by The Advanced Workers with The Anti-Imperialist Singers (Peoples War JPU-1001 (1976))

The two tracks released as a 45" six year later on People's War make up the recorded legacy of a band – full title, ‘The Advanced Workers with the Anti-Imperialist Singers’ – which apparently gigged around Newark, fusing funk with Baraka’s declamatory, some might say strident, Marxist sloganeering. While the music is fine – certainly better-played and better-sung than the rather rough-and-ready doo-wop of the Jihad singers record (which is no surprise, given the participation of musicians from Parliament, Funkadelic and The Commodores) – one might argue that the blend between form and lyrical content misses precisely the subjective urgency – which is inextricably political – that Baraka had earlier identified in the blues. I should say that 'subjective' here does not imply merely, say, the solitary individual self-pity of the suicidal singer-songwriter strumming away in their room – the kind of mythology that Nick Drake's early death, say, might play into – but an often collective undercurrent of emotions provoked, constrained and released by social and political factors that are always entangled with questions of love, sex, death, and oppression. Once a more stable notion of community is organised out of fracture and individual alienation – the move made by Baraka some time in the mid-60s, as he entered his Black Nationalist phase, accompanying the decisive break from Greenwich Village – the attempt to speak to a 'we' becomes an over-riding concern which might seem unpleasantly hectoring. Indeed, there are real problems here; a sense that the pudding must be constantly over-egged, that the community must be exhorted, verbally forced, to actually exist, let alone to act. Somewhat schizophrenically, this can lead to Baraka both praising the inherent, natural goodness and beauty of the black man as already existent (see the photo captions in 'In Our Terribleness'), and invoking that goodness as un-realized potential which must be invoked and summoned up. The problems of putting such poetry into practice might be best illustrated by the footage from Jean Luc-Godard's abandoned 'One AM' (later refashioned by D.A. Pennebacker as 'One PM'), in which we see Godard and the crew travel down to Newark to witness a performance by Baraka and cohorts, in the street outside the Spirit House. Godard hangs around the fringes of things, looking as if he doesn't quite believe what he's seeing – the detached, amused outsider, a Gallic cigarette hanging from his mouth; while Baraka, for all his reputation as an artist who could actually in some way also function as a community leader, facilitator and negotiator with those in political power (the alliance with mayor Kenneth Gibson), hangs back, hesitantly striking a xylophone, leaving it to others in his group to move in and out of centre-stage (or road), blowing 'ethnic' flutes and improvising generic Islamic-tinged Black Arts lyrics. The social contradictions manifest here are almost too many to name: the simultaneous sense of gleeful performance for the white cameramen and women (perhaps Baraka's awareness of this contradiction is why he holds back) and barely-disguised suspicion and hostility towards them (after the performance, the 'musicians' troop back inside; there is no suggestion that Godard & co. will be invited back in with them); the emphasis on African roots finding its expression only in a kind of dabbling (it's clear they don't really know how to play the ethnic flutes) which is arguably as unconsciously racist as the appropriations practiced by the likes of Picasso earlier in the century; the fact that, for all the claims to creating communal art (which were, to a certain extent, true, it seems – read, for instance, the passages about the Watts Riots in Horace Tapscott's autobiography, ‘Song of the Unsung’), the street is deserted save for Baraka & co. and Godard & co., and the faces that we do see, peering out from behind windows are simultaneously amused and apologetic – an old woman and a child, both equally baffled by the whole occasion. Given all that, and given the harmful separatist notions which perhaps prevented the kind of coalition that could have caused genuine revolutionary change in the United States at a certain point in the mid to late 60s (the direction Malcolm X was heading in before his murder by, shall we posit, a combination of black separatism / religious extremism and something between government approval and active involvement), Baraka's embrace of Marxism, his entry into the left that he earlier seemed to flirt with in the fairly early essay 'Cuba Libre', would seem a step in the right direction. But his insistence on doctrinaire preaching, on pushing a form of Marxism-Leninism-Mao-Tse-Tung thought of a sloganeering variety, would hardly seem the best way to enter into the third world liberation, women's rights, and class struggles that he does endorse; though perhaps it contrasts positively with the widespread vagueness elsewhere of left-tinged peace and love sentiments that one might see as regrettable hippie hangovers. The fact that Baraka's analysis often seems borrowed from an earlier time, something even approaching that Communist Party line which Ellison satirised in 'Invisible Man' – his active admiration for Stalin, his notion of the 'black belt south' as a separate nation which should seek independence – could not have helped matters, though the legacy of the Black Arts has continued to inform his writings on music and collaborations with musicians – the latter actually increasing in the last twenty years – serving to prevent mere doctrinaire haggling, his poems becoming performative, near-musical things in themselves in ways which might dialogue with rap or with slam poetry (see his appearance on the TV programme 'Def Poetry Jam', or his collaboration with 'The Roots', included in this compilation). And it's hard not find the People's War tracks exhilarating, to enjoy the perversity of their combined slogans and funk (even as Baraka perhaps doesn't see that perversity), even to be exhilarated and inspired by the conviction with which those slogans are delivered, the hopes that they contain.

10 // I Love Music (3:12)
11 // Class Struggle In Music I (5:25)
12 // Class Struggle In Music II (6:43)
Album // New Music, New Poetry (India Navigation 1048, 1980)



‘New Music / New Poetry’, from 1980, sees Baraka move into the position which he’s pretty much held to this day – that of a kind of guardian of the African-American tradition, somewhat like a less-conservative Stanley Crouch (Crouch initially beginning as a poet very much influenced by Baraka, though his lectures and rants tend to outweigh the actual poetry he manages to read – see the album ‘Aint’ No Ambulances for No Nigguhs Tonight’). At this time, though, both were championing the same breed: a generation of ‘young (or not so-young) lions’, including the likes of Arthur Blythe and David Murray, whose rough-edged fire still gave their music a free jazz ferocity, even as the forms they adopted moved closer to the regressive models that Wynton Marsalis and Co. would enshrine and turn into museum pieces at the Lincoln Centre (with Crouch’s support). Here, the combination of Baraka’s strong delivery, his confidence in the musical potential of poetry that has been very specifically crafted, as notation, to foster that kind of delivery, Murray’s roaring saxophone (sometimes restricted to repeated melodic figures, sometimes leaping outside that restriction) and McCall’s complementary drumming, mostly works well – though the repeated backdrop to ‘Dope’ actually smooths over the incendiary, bitingly satirical power that Baraka imparts the poem on an exceptional solo reading from around the same time. Lyrically, we are presented with a mixture of celebrations of black music, sarcastic and crude insults thrown out at various real or perceived enemies, and directions on the correct political line to take: ‘I Love Music’ is perhaps a lesser piece than the more famous Coltrane poem ‘AM/TRAK’, but Baraka’s howled imitations of Coltrane’s multiphonic squalls are intense and even frightening, while the moments when he locks in with McCall’s drum pattern on the first ‘Class Struggle in Music’ would seem to indicate poets and musicians working off the same (invisible) page.

13 // The Roots - Something In The Way of Things (In Town) (7:04)
Album // Phrenology (MCA, 2002)



14 // William Parker Ensemble - People Get Ready (12:080
Album // The Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield: Live in Rome (Rai Trade, 2007)

There have been numerous live projects with the likes of Murray since then, including a jazz opera, but we have to skip forward into the next century to hear the next substantial recording, in which Baraka, taking on, in context, the kind of wise old griot role he had played in Warren Beatty’s film ‘Bulworth’, intones a poem of urban despair and dread, suitably backed up by the Roots’ gloomily atmospheric soundscape. Baraka is here very much as ‘poet’, rather than as rapper or even proto-rapper, but the symbolic significance of his appearance on a hip-hop record should not be underestimated, even if it took a decade or so since the original, radical explosion of hip-hop as global phenomenon for such collaboration to happen. It would seem, in the main, that Baraka’s musical heart still lies with jazz and R & B, rather than with hip-hop, in any case, even if he recognises the music’s historical, social and political importance. Both genres are combined in William Parker’s intriguing ‘Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield’ project, in which that ‘changing same’ principle is once more explored, Parker’s aim being to unveil the energies within Mayfield’s songs, look at them from new angles, unlock their still-relevant potentials. Baraka’s words serve both to connect to that Black Arts tradition which saw, for instance, David Henderson write a poem called ‘Keep on Pushing’ about the Harlem Riots, and to keep things in the present – however tenuously – with curses rained down on the likes of Berlusconi (the concert was recorded in Rome). If the music doesn’t, I don’t know, ‘match up’ to the originals, that’s because it’s not supposed to – it is something different, and whether wholly successful or not, it suggests a level of thought and engagement with cultural and political history that manages to avoid the recuperative and stultifying tactics of the jazz neo-conservatives. No longer at the forefront of proceedings, Baraka nonetheless does not seem extra baggage, an unnecessary guest: his shouts and recitations energise the music, providing punctuation or encouragement and giving some sort of purchase which can act as focus and rallying point: and the screams with which he ends a purposeful ‘People Get Ready’ indicate that he’s not easily slipping into a comfortable old age. We’d expect nothing less.



Donwnload Here

Caché (2005)

Starring: Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche, Maurice Bénichou
Music: None
Director: Michael Haneke
Screenplay: Michael Haneke
Director of Photography: Christian Berger

OK, so a quick run-down of What Happens In Caché. Auteuil and Binoche (he a TV intellectual; she a book publisher) start receiving surveillance footage of their own home, and creepy drawings, in childish hand, seemingly depicting some sort of nightmare incident from the past. The police refuse to help, as the video and drawings don’t constitute a direct threat, and Auteuil clams up, though it’s clear the un-wanted materials have something to do with some past incident in which he was involved. Turns out, then, that he can track down the source of the stalker material – said source, Majid, a now forty-something Algerian man, living in subsidized housing, was adopted by Auteuil’s family as a kid, after his parents were killed in the 1961 Paris Massacre, but kicked out and sent to an orphanage when a jealous Auteuil fabricated an incident involving the beheading of a chicken. Majid proceeds to commit suicide in front of Auteuil, who is subsequently confronted by M’s (un-named) son at work. After brushing him off, and returning home, our man tries to pretend that all’s back to normal, takes two sleeping pills and falls asleep in a darkened room. Oh, and it all ends with an ambiguous and contentious final shot, but we’ll get to that in due course.

The menacing stalker tactics employed by Majid are of course meant to seem creepy; the set-up being that we’re watching a thriller, the first shot maybe signalling an ‘enemy of the state’-style surveillance-paranoia movie: you're not safe even in your own home. But this, of course, is only a tactic to draw one in, so that one takes on the middle-class intellectual family's detachment (where everything is filtered through television, through radio, through newspapers, through books – nothing at first hand, nothing material), before the rug is well and truly pulled from under the feet of both characters and audience. Let’s take that moment when a news clip covering the Iraq war is seen in un-framed full-screen, before we pull out and see it safely boxed inside the television on which the characters watch (or don’t watch) it. (Haneke: "We fixed a neutral date and chose news items on television on that date. It had nothing to do with the content. But of course, you always see images of war, and that fit with the subject of the film.") Such a removal of the framing device prevents escape, prevents us from saying ‘it’s only a movie, it’s only a movie’ – I mean, for that moment, we are watching a news report, we aren’t watching a movie, we can’t just switch the tv off and go to bed. So now we see and hear the (socio-economic) realities that really underline a comfortable middle-class existence, with books and wine and dinner parties and Rimbaud. (The latter is here understood (in the brief snippet of Auteuil's TV show that we’re shown) not as the revolutionary poet that Kristin Ross shows him to have been, but as a flamboyant individualist, a gay colonial adventurer, his work discussed, not via the Paris Commune, say, or modernism, but family problems with his censoring sister (who, appropriate to the film’s overall theme and title, ‘hid’ (Cachéd away) the poems of his that shocked her). All very much ‘épater le bourgeois’ – and now Rimbaud’s work has been recuperated by precisely those bourgeois, subsumed into the ‘sophisticated’ wing of the culture industry.) The first time we see that Iraq news clip, our immediate reaction is no doubt: 'this isn't relevant to the plot; why is this still showing while the narrative conversation between Auteuil and Binoche carries on regardless?' Of course, though, the idea is that the clip is relevant, that the sort of activity it captures (imperialist, military exploitation under the guise of ‘humanitarian intervention’) does underlie everything we do, everything we allow our governments to do, by proxy, for us.



Take, too, the scene where Binoche takes a call from Auteuil at a book launch party and her conversation is heard simultaneously, and with equal prominence to that of the drunk intellectual next to her talking about Baudrillard, Wittgenstein, &c. These figures become just names, standing in for intellectual 'engagement' (Baudrillard as the classic example of someone who went from post-68 leftist engagement to post-modernist 1990s fatalism (for more on this, see Sadie Pant’s first book, ‘The Most Radical Gesture’)). Such names can be checked merrily, and harmlessly, while the plot, the repressed past, unfolds at the same time, via Binoche's phone-call. These people aren't necessarily right-wing – indeed, they’d probably consider themselves liberal or even leftist (the book Binoche is helping to publish is about globalisation, as we learn in the conversation between Auteil and his producer) – but underneath it all lie assumptions and reliances shared with the most bigoted and comfortable of the right.

And take the encounter with the black guy going the wrong way down a one way street on his bike – in the context of the narrative 'mystery' we're still trying to piece together, we suspect him as being part of a network of malignant kidnappers or schemers, an accomplice in a conspiracy of the ethnic 'other', the revenge of this repressed other against the white middle-classes (against the failed revolutionaries of 68 perhaps, that compromised generation who have become the new neo-liberal elite, standing for the very things they fought against - racism, imperialism, interventionism, sexism (take a look at Dominique Strauss-Khan….and take a look at Richard Seymour’s ‘The Liberal Defence of Murder’ while you’re at it.)). So, like Auteuil’s character, we’re drawn into that spooked mindset which doesn’t even realize its own (hidden) racism, its racial interpellation of every Black person on the street as potential mugger or rapist, every Muslim a potential terrorist. It’s an encounter with obvious symbolic levels which also fits in with the notion I started with: that the film draws us into a racist/paranoid mindset to reveal our own racism and denial of the guilty secrets that underline our system, our comfortable middle-class existence – not only the secrets of the past (the 1961 massacre), but, continuing into the present, Sarkozian racism, the banning of the hijab, fears of Islamic terrorism, Islamophobia, anti-black racism, &c. (All this can, of course, be seen in the reaction to the 2005 French riots and their 2011 British equivalent--in its most extreme form, with the hideous spectacle of David Starkey’s unconcealed racism on Newsnight, his invocation of all those hoary old clichés about the damaging effect of brutal, barbaric, ‘uncivilised’ black music (he’s talking about rap, they said it about jazz in the 1920s – “Playing that bloody jungle music all night”).



Even in broad daylight – the shoulder check, the near-collision in the street – things are still not quite out in the open. Auteuil doesn’t let loose with a racial insult. Caché. Everything is hidden – no more so than in the (in)famous final shot, in which an apparently crucial plot detail (the friendly meeting between Majid’s son and Auteuil’s, Pierrot) is smothered behind the credits and a seemingly innocuous diurnal scene – the school, which of course is already more than innocuous, contrasting as it does with the previous scene in which the Algerian kid is taken away. This school, then, is the kind of opportunity he was denied by Auteuil’s lie; it’s also a reversal of the first, extended shot of the film (the held frame with Auteuil’s house in the middle-distance), in which we look for narrative information, perhaps suspecting that this shot will contain the seeds for the mystery to come, that we may pick up clues which will come in handy later in solving it, only to realise as the film goes on that we won't find these; so, by the time of this final shot, we assume that this will be just another example of willful alienation and expectation-frustration, and switch off (oh, credits rolling, let's leave the cinema, maybe wait for the gag roll at the end), only to miss this potentially crucial detail. Pierrot hides from his parents (and from the audience) his reason for going AWOL, the night they (erroneously) thought that he’d been kidnapped by Majid; Auteuil, at the end, literally hides in the dark, under the bed-covers, narcotized by sleeping pills. In this film, things are hidden in plain sight. There is no ‘mystery’ in the detective-drama sense – indeed, viewed from that perspective, many things may seem too obvious, too immediately apparent – oh, yeah, Majid’s the stalker, of course – but then we're not so sure, and then it doesn't matter anywhere, because that plot was itself a MacGuffin, was itself hiding the metaphorical/ allegorical notions of colonial guilt. We miss the one-sentence discussion of the FLN massacre in our desire to catch what’s happening in the ‘main plot’. As Haneke says, how could you just forget a massacre like that? There’s how.



Such forgetting is, of course, a key part of the relation between generations, which is itself a key part of the film. Take the conversation between Auteuil and his mother, in which she tells him that she doesn't think about Majid any more. Auteuil's parents were non-racist enough to travel all the way to Paris in order to collect the boy and adopt him after his parents' death in the demonstration. (OK, maybe they thought of them perhaps in a slightly patronising way (“good people, good workers”), but still, they had enough of a sense of humanism to see that these others were not fundamentally evil or barbaric, that their progeny could even become one of their own.) Yet Auteuil himself is of the next generation who, perhaps as a sense of loss at the colonial empire gone, perhaps as a result of aggression and/ at failure channelled into immigration-related paranoia after the failure of ’68 and the institutionalisation (and recuperation) of socialist politics via Matterand, have become more racist than their parents, even as they flirt with post-modernism and liberalism/leftism, adopt that vocabulary.

Given this, I think we should take Majid's death as a moment of necessary abjection, in Kristeva’s sense of the word: that moment that brings us starkly up close to the real – a corpse, a woman's body (so often stigmatised as disgusting or ‘unnatural’, even as it is fetishised or adored), the repressed memory of the (literal) shit on which our entire culture is built, our foundational anal fixation (see Adorno’s ‘Negative Dialectics’) – and in this case, the real of colonial oppression, the dead Algerian before you on the floor, his blood and his body there on the floor before you. The Algerian man literally has to die in front of the French man, not in a 1960s film, now ‘historical’, portraying events that occurred at some temporal remove in a distant country (‘The Battle of Algiers’), but in a modern flat, in front of a pair of modern eyes. So when, before the deed, Majid says, “I wanted you to be here,” he’s not offering an explanation along the lines of “this is why I’m doing this” – that wouldn’t suffice – but forcing that internal shock of recognition, that internal jolt which forces one to look, to see: look up, face it, this is it, this is reality.



Coming back, then, to that closing shot, that possible 'revelation' (or MacGuffin): Robin Wood argues in his review that the film’s pessimism is “surely…qualified by that last shot, echoing the end of Benny's Video (in which the boy betrays his own father, an act that Haneke courageously sees as justified) and suggesting the possibility of collaboration, revolution, and renewal within the younger generation." This doesn't have to mean that Pierrot, the son (the clown-related name has to be significant here, but I’m not sure in what way, exactly) was in on the deal, for some reason deciding to torment his own parents; but rather, that he can establish friendly relations with the (un-named) Algerian son, instead of treating him with contempt or fear or threats or lies, as his father does, or with convenient forgetfulness, as his grandmother does. If a crucial strain of the film has to do with generational changes in race relations – from the patronising but well-meaning attitudes of the ‘50s to a contemporary paranoia masked with an apathy that cloaks the issues at stake with a veil (uh, not a hijab) of liberalism – then perhaps this ending suggests (as does ‘La Haine’s’ central grouping, its three musketeers of the banlieues – Arab, Black and Jew) the possibility of healthier interracial relations being established by the young. (This was, after all, the betrayed dream of ’68 – the young atoning for the sins of the old, making a new world free of stagnant prejudices, of repressed and repressive institutions and the damaged social relations these generated). It's a fragile moment, if that's so, and one which most will not even notice – but perhaps that's the point: Haneke's saying, look, look - the solutions, the possibilities, the glimpses are there, if you'd only get out of your paranoia and your fear and your racist shell & see them, 'hidden' right in front of your own face. That makes him sound far too manifesto-like, of course – I’ve followed Wood's conclusion too far, perhaps, expanded that point too much.

And yet...in an interview with Bright Lights Film Journal, Haneke has this to say:

"We all take sleeping pills as does Daniel Auteuil, although it may take many different forms: it may be alcohol, a drink before we go to bed, it may be sleeping pills, or we may donate money to children in the third world. But each of us pulls the blanket over our heads and hopes that the nightmares won't be too bad. For example, I am sure you oppose strict immigration laws that have been introduced in almost every European country. And yet what would you say if I were to suggest that you take into your home an African family? I think this is the case with all of us. All of us have knowledge that tends to lead to tolerance; at the same time we have selfish interests that are contradictory to this tolerant ideal."

If that’s nowhere near as hopeful as my suggestion of comradeship or, at least, of tentative inter-racial interaction not based on mutual hostility or suspicion, then it does at least act as a problematization, a jerking out of complacency, a foregrounding of the issues at hand, putting the political back into the idea of the domestic, making a political film not as explicit Pontecorvo-style engagement ('The Battle of Algiers' is, I believe, the only French film made about the whole Algerian crisis), but by showing complicity in every area of life, stripping away the layers of insulation into a single act of insistently present violence (tho' even this is viewed thru the video camera), and creating a nagging aura, an atmosphere of unease and uncertainty throughout which is far more than just cheap effect, far more than just some cheap scary thrill or frisson, a stimulus for its own sake. Chew on this:

"How do you behave when confronted with something that you should actually admit responsibility for? These are the sort of strategies that interest me, talking yourself out of guilt. It's like this: we all believe we're so fantastically liberal. None of us want to see immigration laws tightened. Yet when someone comes to me and asks if I could take in a foreign family, then I say, well, not really. Charity begins at home with the door firmly shut. Most people are as cowardly and comfortable as I am."

(And, yeah, check this cache also.)

“And that is the nature of the historical moment...": On the London Riots, August 2011

(Click the picture to enlarge)

Saturday 6th August, 2011: family members, community activists and local residents marched from Broadwater Farm to Tottenham Police Station, to protest the police shooting of local man Mark Duggan. Demanding to speak to a senior officer, they were refused dialogue, and stayed outside the station for hours, waiting to be spoken to, waiting to be heard. The arrival of a younger crowd and what seem to have been the usual heavy-handed police tactics (there were rumours that cops had attacked a 16-year old girl) then sparked off what turned into a full-scale riot, a riot which has since spread, in the past few days, to Brixton, Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham, Birmingham. Prime Minister David Cameron has returned from his holiday and is talking about authorising the use of water cannon and plastic bullets on protestors. Memories of Brixton and St Pauls in the 1980s come flooding back. Of course, seeing all this on the television and thru the prism of the internet is a totally different thing to seeing it on the ground – mis-information, wilful or not, confusion, rumours, outright lies, knee-jerk opinions and reactions abound, and one has to pick one’s way thru the mess. Seeing the disparity between what was being reported on ‘reputable’, ‘balanced’ news outlets, and what was actually happening in-situ, during the November 2010 education protests, is proof of that, if proof were needed. So what to make of it all?

The quotation that I’ve appropriated as a title for this post comes from Darcus Howe, being interviewed by a typically hostile and aggressive BBC journalist who, rather in the style of ‘Hard Talk’ frontman Stephen Sackur, attempts to force him into a ‘gotcha!’ endorsement of the riots. She doesn’t get that (instead, she’s deflected with the rather wonderful “I have never taken part in a single riot. I've been on demonstrations that ended up in a conflict. And have some respect for an old West Indian negro, and stop accusing me of being a rioter. You won't tickle me to get abusive, you just sound idiotic. Have some respect.”), but Howe does say: “I don't call it rioting, I call it an insurrection of the masses of the people. It is happening in Syria, it is happening in Clapham, it's happening in Liverpool, it's happening in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and that is the nature of the historical moment...” Howe is not, as I take it, arguing that the riots are genuine revolutionary action (he make it clear that he has never been a pure rioter, but a politically-motivated protestor), but he is saying that they are more than just mindless thuggery; that the political, economic, social and racial causes behind them deserve closer examination; and that the fact of these riots cannot simply be tut-tutted away by ‘non-violent’ liberals or rabid, racist conservatives.

Of course, the spark for the London riots *was* political – the shooting of Mark Duggan, which is just a single point on the edifice of racial profiling, unexplained deaths, and general brutality for which the police never do, and never are expected to answer (as if, perhaps, ‘it couldn’t happen here’ – yes, America, images of Miles Davis covered in blood outside Birdland, perhaps, or Thelonious Monk gifted years of mental trauma after an unjustified beating, or Oscar Grant, yes, how could we forget him? (ok, we'll grant you Smiley Culture, yeah, he died here, didn't he?)). But, in the transition to a full-blown riot, the original motivation becomes lost in a sea of other, individual and collective motivations – resentment at the poverty in which one finds oneself and the contempt with which one is daily treated; resentment at the lack of horizons, at the insistence that this is how it is and will always be, that *you* are the unavoidable by-product of economic policy and are regrettable but disposable, human cannon fodder/ 'collateral damage' in the worldwide war of free-market economics – anger even more personal than that, at a failed relationship or the way that is entwined with the social – losing one’s job and its personal consequences, failing to get a job, going back to the job centre to be treated with snooty derision, seeing oneself lambasted and parodied or just ignored in the news media, on the shiny televisual box that shapes how everyone thinks – maybe even a desire somehow to ape those action heroes one sees on that same box, to be a warrior, an action man, to engage in physical acts of violence as an assertion that yes, you are making a mark on the world, yes, *you are there.* It’s this super-abundance of motivations, and, at the same time, the negation this produces – the sense that one doesn’t quite know why one is doing this, why one is smashing this particular window or taking this particular object (beyond the fact that one is told all the time by big papa advertisement that it is desirable, you’ve gotta have it (the blackberry, the trainer), even if you can’t, can’t afford it, could never afford it) – that spreads, almost organically, in the riot: no programme, no specific relation between ends and means, no end(s) in sight, just this pure act, this open moment of negative possibility. The only alternative to poverty one is allowed is the spurious notion that one can somehow pull oneself out of poverty, be Alan Sugar’s apprentice, bawl out a tried-and-tested number on The X Factor, be mocked or paraded or degraded in the freak-show spectacle of Big Brother, exist in that other unreal-world of Z-list celebrity, Botox, bling, false smiles and breasts and lives – the only alternative is to be rich, to be born somewhere else, to get lucky; and the only *real* alternative, now, is to riot, to still be in the place and the situation in which one was the day before, but to transform it, yes, negatively, but still to transform it, for a few days at least, before ‘normality’ is restored by the big guns (plastic bullets, anyone?), before police sentences are slapped down (and Mark Duggan’s murderers are never touched, of course, of course), before Liberal/Tory condemnation dies down and we all forget about the temporary inconvenience of the England-Netherlands football match at Wembley being called off, or that we were worried the Olympics might be affected (O God forbid).

Hey, I’m not *celebrating* the riot: let’s face it, most of the internet commentators who seem to some extent to be sympathetic to the rioters, who, at least, don’t call them animals and scum and say ‘bring back thatcher’ and ‘this is like planet of the apes’, would be fucking terrified if it was *their* street that was on fire, *their* corner-shop window being smashed, because they don’t know what it’s like to live without horizons, without a university degree that enables you to talk about Marx and sociology and the real political causes of the violence etc etc, without the privileges they daily enjoy even as they condemn the system that extends them these. I’m not excluding myself, I’m talking about myself, in fact, what courage of convictions I possess I don’t know, it’s easy to type a few hundred words while the news unfolds on screens before you – but, yeah, let me carry on for just a moment. I’m not celebrating the riot, but neither am I going to fall into the other camp, of weak pseudo-pacifist condemnation of what those nasty urban youths are getting up to. As Chris Goode puts it in an invaluable blog-post working thru his own thoughts on the riots, the binary choice we are presented with – that Darcus Howe is presented with by that idiotic BBC journalist (does she call him ‘*Marcus* Howe’ at the beginning of the clip or am I just imagining things?) – between ‘condemning’ and ‘condoning’ what is taking place, absolutely fails to grasp the complexity of the actual situation. If the violence was motivated by an actual political programme, with specific goals in mind, then it would be truly scary for those in power, then it would be, perhaps, true *revolutionary* violence – the fact that it isn’t renders it brief, impotent, disruptive, but it still exists as an objective fact, in some sense mimetic of the latent, implicit, hidden and not-hidden violence that allows capitalism as we know it, as it infiltrates nearly every portion of our daily lives, to exist, to continue, to suppress, to exploit. One could see it, in some sense, as capitalism turned on itself – every day you are tell you can and should and must have the latest gadget or item of clothing, the latest craze invented as a distraction in a self-sustaining, never-ending circle of acquisition and consumerism – and so when you smash a window and you take that pair of trainers for yourself, without paying for it, you are at once negating the system by eliminating that all-important factor of money, and you are embodying its values, those advocated attitudes of dog-eat-dog, take-what-you-can-at-others’-expense; embodying those values and turning them against the system that spawns them. This doesn’t make ‘looting’ a revolutionary activity – not in the semi-motivated, indiscriminate sense of vague boiling rage that would seem (to this outsider) to characterise the riots currently taking place – but it does make it more than simple stupidity, more than the thuggery and hooliganism of the Bullingdon Club (we smash stuff because our privileged position in society allows us to) or the Reading Festival-goers, middle-class kids who go on a rampage at the end of three days of drink and drugs and pop music. In other words, we can *understand* the riots, understand and even be excited by the potential that is there, for genuine revolutionary ‘movement of the people’ (in Fela Kuti’s words), even as its direction into blind shop-window-smashing and building-burning remains un-channelled, its energies un-directed, un-fulfilled.

In ‘V for Vendetta’, Alan Moore’s anonymous anarchist instigator (following Robert Anton Wilson) pontificates on the difference between ‘chaos’ and ‘anarchy’.

Evey: "Is this the land of do-as-you-please?"
V: "No, this is only the land of take-what-you-want. Anarchy means ‘without leaders’, not ‘without order.’ With anarchy comes an age of true ordung, of true order, which is to say, *voluntary* order. This age of ordung will begin when the mad and incoherent cycle of verwirrung has run its course. This is not anarchy, Eve. This is chaos. Involuntary order breeds dissatisfaction, mother of disorder, parent of the guillotine. Authoritarian societies are like formation skating. Intricate, mechanically precise and above all, *precarious.* Beneath civilisation’s fragile crust, cold chaos churns. And there are places where the ice is treacherously thin."

Let’s say now that we’re witnessing chaos. But let’s say too that there is the potential for anarchy – or, if you don’t hold to that political persuasion, for that afore-mentioned revolutionary movement of the people. (The rioters are Black, Jewish, White, Men, Women.) Yes, the crack-down will begin and things will return to the way they were – but not even that, the charred buildings and the smashed windows that will take months to repair will provide a constant physical reminder of what happened – and, more importantly, tremors such as this, added to the more politically coherent protests and marches of November 2010 or March 2011, added to the Arab spring, added to everything, suggest that the earth-quake to come may be more than just a simple riot.