Women in Dark Times (5 page)

She is not the only one. Accounts of honour crimes are full of sisters and sometimes mothers who speak out often after long periods of silence, which makes it even harder to do so, as their previous silence means that – internally if not always legally – they are complicit with the crime. In fact it is one of the most dispiriting aspects of modern honour killing that mothers often participate in the act. You will find no confirmation in these stories that women are by nature, and always, less ruthless towards their daughters than fathers, even if this fact can to a large extent be placed at the door of just how far they have been coerced by patriarchal law. But if you make this move, then you are obliged to recognise – as many of the killers later do in prison, interviewed by women journalists who are often also risking their lives – that men too are subject to its vicious exigency. That is, you have to wrench open the gap, as I believe it is one of feminism’s tasks to do, between all human subjects, men and women, and the worst versions of themselves, in order to glimpse the possibility of a better future. Such a gap is always, at least potentially, there. After all, if patriarchy were not effective, there would be no need of feminism, but if it were totally effective, feminism would not exist. Like all the women discussed in this book, a woman who speaks in this situation is also laying claim to a different order of language, to a far less certain reality open to the vagaries of the world and of the mind. Thus Heshu Yones, murdered by her father in England in 2003 for refusing an arranged marriage and trying to run away from home, writes to him before she dies: ‘I am not the child you wanted or expected me to be. Disappointments are born of expectations. Maybe you expected a different me and I expected a different you. Life being how it is, isn’t necessarily how it is.’
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Finally, I move to women whose creativity simply emboldens me, each of whom returns to these histories and takes them to their next stage. Artists – a film-maker, sculptor-cum-video artist, a painter – they are all, as I see it, the chroniclers of our present moment, but, like every woman discussed here, they dismantle, burrow deep beneath, the official line. As Europe tightens the net around its migrant communities, it becomes an act of love to allow people to tell their stories, culled from the interstices of histories which are either ignored and forgotten or used against them. Thus Lithuanian-born sculptor and video artist Esther Shalev-Gerz, filming migrants and misfits in the peripheries of the modern European city – Marseille, Aubervilliers, Bromwich – makes her unique contribution to a project of democracy which cuts across all national and ethnic lines. ‘What matters more than anything,’ states one of her interviewees, ‘what makes a space human, is to see the marks of History’ (an affirmation but also a plea). ‘I lived six years in a city marked by History. It was Berlin and that is why I was there.’
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She is filming in the Midlands but the voices, while firmly anchored to the historical and political destinies which brought them to where they now find themselves, could also be imagined anywhere.

For Israeli film-maker Yael Bartana, return is a far more concrete and perhaps even more disconcerting affair. Of the three artists, she is perhaps the one who gives to the lost history of Europe its most disturbing face. In a series of three films, a trilogy with the title 
. . . And Europe Will Be Stunned
,
she enacts a historic, even if impossible, demand: that the Jews of Poland should return, putting the call in the mouth of a young Polish left activist who clearly believes that the future of his nation, and perhaps the whole world, depends on his anguished plea. Here memory surfaces reluctantly in the mind of the nation, taking us back to the silenced legacy of the Second World War. An old Polish woman has nightmares as she lies sleeping under a threadbare quilt left by a Jewish escapee from that war: ‘Since the night you [the Jews] were gone,’ the young man proclaims to an almost empty stadium, ‘she has had nightmares. Bad dreams.’
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Bartana knows she is flirting with danger. Such memories are unwelcome. But she is also making a proposition, which lies at the core of this book, perhaps the most explicitly of all: that women should see it as one of their tasks to bring to the surface of history, both private and public, what the heart cannot, or believes it cannot, withstand. You cannot move forwards by pretending that the worst of history – yours most intimately, the world’s most brutally – is no longer or was never really there.

Finally, I come to the painter Thérèse Oulton, whose journey is so striking because of the way she has, in the past decade, turned her work and, with it, the world inside out. She was originally renowned for the almost lush density of her paintwork on the canvas. But if her paintings were beautiful, which they were, they also confronted you with something more viscous. Beauty at the edge of putrefaction, her work seemed to want not just to entice you but also to repel. There was, therefore, something always potentially violent about it, all the more effective for being so ravishingly occluded. Now, in her recent work, it is as if she has accepted her own earlier challenge. In paintings of minute, almost photographic detail, she demands that you lift yourself above the earth and take the lie of the land, which she captures in some of its most brutal modern transformations (soil erosion, factories and nuclear plants). Underneath which, as the mobility of her images still affirms, the world, like the mind, is on the move, sabotaging mankind’s brash omnipotence: ‘matter constantly shifting about, unfit to be the landscape of political control’.
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The need to dig deeper – and women’s capacity to do so – has been my constant refrain. Oulton, we might say, is taking me at my word. The depths are not only a metaphor. What are we doing, literally, to the ground beneath our feet? Laying waste to forests, uprooting communities. Capitalism, as Luxemburg was one of the first to state, ‘ransacks the whole world’, ‘ever more uncontroll­able’ and ‘with no thought for the morrow’.
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Thus Oulton brings us full circle. There is no sentimentality here. She is not claiming to preserve a world on the verge of being lost. Nor is there any suggestion that as a woman she is, more than anyone else, the custodian of the earth. But Thérèse Oulton is – like Esther Shalev-Gerz and Yael Bartana – asking us, in the textures of our lives, to take responsibility for what we see.

‘My ideal,’ wrote Rosa Luxemburg as a teenager, ‘is a social system that allows one to love everybody with a clear conscience.’ ‘Striving after it, defending it, I might perhaps even learn to hate.’
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‘Love,’ she then wrote to a friend at the age of forty-seven, when she was beset by illness, ‘was (or is?) always more significant than the object who stirs it.’
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Because, she continues, it has the capacity to transform the whole world. Luxemburg’s political and emotional energy can serve as a template for what follows, provided we remember that she does not leave hate out of the picture. ‘I think every human being knows how to hate,’ Monroe said in one of her last interviews in August 1962, ‘because if they don’t know how to hate, they wouldn’t know how to love or any of the in-betweens.’ (Arthur Miller had just dedicated
The Misfits
to Clark Gable as a man ‘who did not know how to hate’.)
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What all these women offer is a form of understanding, neither pure nor good, but equal to the ravages of the world that confronts them. This book is a celebration, since the future of feminism also depends on how we, as women, choose to talk about each other.

I

THE STARS

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Woman on the Verge of Revolution

Rosa Luxemburg

Here is the rose, dance here!

Luxemburg,
Social Reform or Revolution

I had to hold on with both hands to the wires of the cage, and this must certainly have strengthened the resemblance to a wild beast in the zoo.

Luxemburg, letter from Wronke prison,

18 February 1917

A cage went in search of a bird.

Frank Kafka,
Third Octavo Notebook
,
The City of K.: Franz Kafka and Prague

Rosa Luxemburg has become a heroine for our times. She herself would not have predicted it, not least of all because she saw unpredictability as lying at the heart of politics. For Luxemburg, we are the makers of a history which exceeds our control, as well it must if we are not to descend into autocracy and terror. Her vision of politics is suffused with something ungraspable, an idea that struck fear into her allies and critics alike. This does not mean that she was without purpose. Her targets were inequality and injustice and she had an unswerving idea of how they had to be redressed. She was a Marxist. This is just one of the reasons for returning to her today when the increasingly blatant ugliness of capitalism has given the language of Marx new resonance. She was – crucially – a woman, whose eloquence and militancy were fired from the heart, and who more than once found herself the target of the most vicious misogyny. And she was Jewish, a foreigner wherever she went, as she slipped back and forth across national borders – from Poland, to Switzerland, to Germany – for much of her life. Rosa Luxemburg was intrepid to a fault. As a young woman of nineteen, already at risk of arrest for her association with underground revolutionary groups in Warsaw, she left Poland hidden under straw in a peasant’s cart. A local Catholic priest agreed to organise her flight when he heard that a Jewish girl wishing to be baptised in order to marry her Christian lover had to flee to avoid the violent opposition of her family.
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Un-belonging was her strength. It must surely have played its part in helping her to soar mentally beyond the walls of the prisons where she often found herself, as her writings – her letters, pamphlets, journalism, political tracts – so amply testify (she wrote many of her finest letters and essays behind bars). ‘The fire of her heart melted the locks and bolts and her iron will tore down the walls of the dungeon,’ wrote her close friend, the socialist feminist Clara Zetkin, ‘[gathering] the amplitude of the coursing world outside into the narrowness of her gloomy cell.’
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A revolutionary thinker, Luxemburg shows us how constraint, notably the constraint suffered by women, can be the ground for the wildest imaginative reach. ‘As a woman, I have no country,’ Virginia Woolf famously wrote in 1938 in the face of advancing fascism. ‘As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.’
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For both of these women, despite the years that separated them, nationalism was a scourge. ‘The law of England denies us, and let us hope long will continue to deny us,’ Woolf declared, ‘the stigma of nationality.’
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Luxemburg did not live to see the rise of Hitler. But Woolf can be seen as one of her heirs, forging a link which Luxemburg embodied even if she did not explicitly make it herself: between being a woman at odds with the world and the struggle against the fanaticism of nations.

But if Rosa Luxemburg has become a heroine for our times, it is also because her revolutionary moment, spawned in those first decades of the twentieth century, now echoes with our own. It is hard to imagine today what it would have been like to be thinking about Luxemburg if the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya of 2011 – together with all that has followed – had not taken place. As we watched the peoples of these countries pour on to the streets, sometimes as though from nowhere, their revolutions seemed to have come halfway to meet her, calling her out of the past. ‘A month before, a week before, three days before,’ wrote Ahdaf Soueif in
Cairo, My City, Our Revolution
,
‘we could not have told you it was going to happen.’
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‘It was’, insisted Wael Ghonim, also in Cairo, ‘all spontaneous, voluntary.’
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As if we had gone back in time, even as time seemed to be pressing forward with a forcefulness that many of us had never witnessed before. For Luxemburg, such fragile, determined urgency would be welcome. She knew – she made it the core of her life and her work – that spontaneity was the only way that genuine transformation, in both the private and public world, could be born. Luxemburg is often talked about as if her private world was simply the backdrop to her politics, showing us the humane, real woman behind a will of iron. The gender stereotype is as glaring as it is inappropriate. Luxemburg was perfectly capable, when occasion required it, of being steely in her personal life. More important, as we will see, she lifted her deepest political insights out of the dark night – what she called the ‘bruises’ – of the soul. To cite the first epigraph of this book, ‘Just imagine,’ she writes to Jogiches in 1898, ‘it was precisely those bruises on my soul that at the next moment gave me the courage for a new life’.
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Today we know that the promise, so vivid on the streets of Cairo and elsewhere in those heady days of 2011, has not been fulfilled. Especially for the women who played such a crucial part in the uprising, and who are now fighting to preserve their precarious freedom. During the second revolution of July 2013 – which turned out to be no revolution but the return of rule by the military – women were surrounded and assaulted by groups of men who seemed to have descended on Tahrir Square with no other purpose. This has been a regular feature of the uprisings. In December 2011, Hend Badawi was violently accosted on the square as she was protesting against the interim military government. She is famous for shouting at Field Marshal Tantawi, de facto ruler and then leader of Egypt’s military council, when he visited her in hospital: ‘We don’t want your visit. We are not the ones who are the thugs.’
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Now spurned by the elders of her family, she continues struggling to complete her education and find her own path in the world. For Badawi, the revolution is as ongoing as it is radically incomplete. But Luxemburg would surely have recognised her description of the upheaval as something that plunged into the deepest core of her life: ‘I had the opportunity to mix my inner revolution with the revolution of my country.’
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