Behind the Donkey’s Mask
(4,350 words)
(keynote speech given to the Write to the Point Conference, Glasgow University, 2004)

GLASGOW’S MILES BETTER reads the giant slogan bolted to the gas-cooler. As you drive westwards along the broad truncal artery through the East End of the city, it is impossible to miss. It seems perpetually framed by sunset, the light pooling up behind the blue metal, the smiley-smile turning manic even as the night sky comes down. Day after day, you gaze at the smiling face, until you, too begin to smile, until at length, there is a whole city of smiling faces. It is a transmutative mirror logo inspired in the 1980s by the Big Apple City’s yellow man, from the place where the Liberty Lady burns through stone into the sky…

This was penned a couple of years ago. A few weeks after I had written these lines, I found that the sign, which had been posted there on the gas cooler for what seemed like a decade, suddenly had disappeared and that as a consequence my imagery, my words, had become anachronistic.

On September 11th 2001, something else burned down from the same clear blue sky and, we are told repeatedly in hyper-biblical fashion, ‘changed all our lives forever’. Now we’re at war. From the top-level restaurant which is the brain of Liberty’s Torch, a legion of hardware zooms across the continents. Perhaps that great shining idol, the Northern Economy, will boom, and since (we are told) history has come to an end, perhaps that boom will go on forever. This, the stone tablets continue, is the epitome of the clash of civilisations, or, in mythic terms, the ordering of chaos, the beating back of beards and barbarism, the epic battle between the inhuman armies of Sauronic darkness and the clean, skyscraping forces of light, of democracy, Christian values, freedom, Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, the Stock Exchange, shaving foam and the pursuit of happiness. Hand me the mirror.

[top]

September-the-Eleventh, 2001. I came in from work in my usual state of irritated semi-exhaustion, to a sitting-room filled with images of towering infernos and heroic firemen and a media, shooting up with the immediacy and voyeuristic drama of it all. Eyes still fixed on the thirty-two inch proscenium space of the screen, I clumsily slit open a letter which turned out to be from the Scottish Arts Council. I unfolded the letter and the larger-than-life head of the Mayor of New York flashed up on the screen. My application for a Writer’s Bursary had been successful and at last, I would be able to properly write my novel. This was something towards which I had worked for years.

My friend, who was staying with us for a few days, was in a bad mood. As we continued to watch (she, almost swallowed up in the settee and I, still standing, clutching onto my letter of good tidings), again and again the ‘planes disappeared into the sides of the Trade Centre, the towers began to give out smoke like illicit Havana cigars and, after a period of telescoped minutes, to tremble and disintegrate, to crumble and smash, to reduce along a hyper-real Zen trajectory to ‘zero’. White smoke billowed over the Big Apple and into our sitting-room. My friend declared that when people in the South die in their millions, the media and politicians in the North don’t give a shit. She went on to postulate that President Bush’s gang of thieves had arranged this destruction of the towers and the partial destruction of the building of the five-pointed star because from that synchronised moment of airfix impact, they would have effectively absolute power. In a logic both relentless and terrifying, she went on to explain that the Islamic fundamentalists had been the progeny of the CIA all along and that now perhaps they had got out of control or perhaps not, but in any case, the structures of democracy and governance within the US, already weakened by a rigged election result, would now effectively be liquidated in the name of that great donkey’s head, national security. Bush’s apparently fragile coup d’état had found its very own (to paraphrase the think-Abrams-tank ‘Project For The New American Century’) ‘cataclysmic event’. Perhaps this was its Kirov Conspiracy, its Rene Schneider Murder, its Lusitania sinking, its Ton kin Gulf Incident, its Reichstag Fire. Octavian now had his Cassius.

[top]

I was irritated by this attitude, so soon after the event. It was too developed, too paranoid, too scary. Even though I like to think of myself as a pretty-much-aware guy, there is some infantile, tribal instinct within me which hankers for bottom lines, for black-and-white, for the comforting fugue of dualism. I long to believe that even Bush, Cheney and Co., even the United Fruit Company, the sleek suits of Enron and the massed eagle legions of Halliburton Texicana would baulk at roasting alive their own people simply in order to sharpen the diamond stylus of military capitalism, if not from moral scruple then from consideration of the level of political risk involved. Yet I was possessed by a sinking feeling which was as palpable as if I had just eaten a bum carry-out from the Take-Away around the corner. Several ingredients were responsible for my psychosomatic indigestion: Firstly, the sheer Conradian horror of mass murder. Following on from this was my fervent prayer for the rapid and unequivocal emergence of a Timothy McVeigh, Mark II. Never before had I so longed for the appearance of the dear old American Far Right. In any case, I knew that the racists, the bigots, the fundamentalists of all hues, the educated ignorant on all sides would have gained massively in power, as they always do from events of shocking negativity. I knew that from then on, those with Muslim names would have to justify themselves, their faith and their continued presence in this country and on this geographically unsound sub-continental peninsular concept known as ‘Europe’. I knew that in the months to come, the question constantly would be posed, either explicitly or implicitly. Silence would not be an option. One would be guilty until proved innocent. I would have to have a potted theory ready, up my sleeve, one which would be measured, unparanoid and most importantly of all, loyal. Otherwise, as in some tale from the Arabian Nights, my buttoned-down, straight ‘n’ narrow shirt-sleeves would turn as if by magic into those of a billowing, duplicitous kaftan, into the robes of Wizard Saruman, the Great Traitor of the North and West. I deliberately refer to Tolkien here, because it seems his fictional epic is everywhere, from the 24 carat gold plate of the Oscars to the dreams of our children, playing out endlessly and pornographically on the silver screen, a psychotic echo and parallel of the foetid meta-reality of politics. The moment we venture into this territory, like the winningly blue-eyed Frodo, the moment we cross by the scarecrow’s withered arms, we are entering a land of distorted mythic archetypes. Of course, I knew in advance that anything I said or wrote would never be regarded as ‘balanced’ or ‘objective’. Objectivity, politically-determined, is a reassertion of tribal and economic dominance: a subconscious censorship.

Now, a couple of wars on, and tens of thousands of dead later, what point have we reached, here, in Glasgow, in my street, in my house, on the page? In some ways, we’ve been through all this before. Fifteen years ago, when ‘That Book’ came out, for many progressive Muslims it felt as though we were trapped between a rock and a very hard place (I might’ve said, between the Devil and the deep blue sea, but since Lucifer is wholly copyright of both Disney and the Islamists, that might have been construed as either reverse blasphemy or plagiarism; yes, I was one of the few people with a view on the matter who had actually read the book). The period following was a very awkward one for writers like me, in that people invariably tended to seek one’s views on what had become known as ‘The Rushdie Affair’ as a pre-requisite to a discussion of one’s own work. But unpleasant and demoralising though that episode undoubtedly was, The Clash of Civilisations: The Sequel: The Evil One Returns with an Even Longer Beard Than Before is a far more dangerous affair for the world than the debacle over ‘The Satanic Verses’. Since 2002, it seems as if we have dived into an incipient war economy. Shipbuilding may return at last to the Clyde in the form of orders to build a fleet of aircraft carriers. I have a doleful sense of lights going out, all over Eurasia. And the ground has been well-prepared. The decimation of organised labour, combined with the constant misinformation that political engagement makes no difference is having the effect of reversing some of the gains of the Enlightenment and its Revolutions, on a very deep-rooted, subconscious level. Nonetheless, millions demonstrated against this illegal war in Iraq and continue to believe its whole dynamic to be one of international criminality. The Spaniards unceremoniously booted their wacko side-kick government out of power. Yet most anti-war demos, in the USA and elsewhere, go unreported or barely reported – except, that is, on the internet. During this whole, dark period, the web has been the busiest medium of dissent and the biggest source of alternative news. Yet there remains no real power political vehicle for all this chatter, scribbling and tramping and scrambling around amongst the chips and the rain. Yet to stop doing these things, to give up the ghost of progress, would be to admit definitive defeat, to expedite Armageddon.

[top]

Wilful blindness also exists among some Muslims in this country. In some quarters, Male Infantilism Rules OK; a kind of football consciousness where holy books are lined up against one another, prophecies compared on a purely literal level and disparate groups of people homogenised into convenient terraces which invariably have theological, rather than economic, labels sprayed onto the concrete. These people stare at you blankly when you question the formation, bankrolling and arming of most of the variants of Islamic fundamentalism over the past 80-plus years by the US and Britain, via client oligarchies like those in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Chances are, they remain blissfully unaware of Mossadeq, Lumumba, Sukarno, Allende, Iran-Contra, Drugs-for-Guns, Grenada, Panama, the CIA-ISI-Mujahideen operational axis, etc. And what of Indonesia, 1966 or Bangladesh, 1971, or Sudan, today? You see, all this rebounds on the writer. We do not live or write in a vacuum. They are shocked when I quote them the work of the C8th Iraqi Sufi saint, Rabia-al-Basri, a woman who advocated the burning of Heaven and the drowning of Hell since until such simplistic dualities were jettisoned, there would be no prospect of us perceiving anything but the most superficial truths and deluding ourselves into believing that these comprise the whole. It is the closing-down of intellectual possibilities, the false refuge of nativism, that alarms me most. Muslim states and the hegemonic patriarchs that are in charge of them need to stop using religion as an excuse for underdevelopment, for systemic despotism, oppression of minorities and indeed of majorities. They must stop raping and murdering women. Their use of religion is a pornography of the word. Robust civil societies are those which engage with heresy and history, which ask the unanswerable, which see, in words, more than merely a surface meaning. And writers – like Sufis – are explorers of the unanswerable.

From the ‘other side’, I found my voice closed-down in a different way. A British-based airline had hired a subcontractor to record a series of programmes for their worldwide in-flight entertainment schedule on the subject of writing. These programmes were presented by Melvyn Bragg, in discussion with various others, including journalist, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. This particular episode of ‘Words’ was recorded in July 2001 and featured three of the stories from my book, The Burning Mirror. The programme was scheduled to go into the aeroplanes in October 2001. In April 2002, I finally got round to asking for a CD. After receiving no response from the airline’s sub-contractor, I discovered, third-hand from an ex-employee of theirs, that after September 11th, the tapes had been prevented from going into the aircraft. After several requests, I finally managed to obtain a CD almost by return of post after I had hinted politely that I had not been able to request one earlier since immediately after the recording I had been so busy writing for newspapers like The Scotsman (at that point, I had written only one review article for The Scotsman - but hey, I can play psyops, too). My stories concerned love, music, kebabs, alcoholism and a kind of pantheistic Sufi catholicity. Furthermore, the item was juxtaposed with a piece on Jackie Collins; really, it’s hard to imagine a more innocuous schedule. But none of this mattered. I believe that in a climate of corporate cowardice mixed with cynicism, I was put into the box marked, ‘Outsider’, ‘Enemy’ - and I wasn’t even consulted or informed about the decision. My voice, despite having been given the seal of approval by none other than that High Priest of Literati, Melvyn Bragg, was silenced. Censored, silently. Consider whether a discussion of the latest novel of a writer of Northern Irish origin would be cancelled because of a bombing in Ulster, or whether a discussion of Jewish diasporic British writing would be cut as a result of some Levantine massacre. Of course not. The suggestion is ludicrous, is it not? So what’s the difference? This is the thin end of a very heavy wedge. In a recent report, writers’ organisation PEN states that since ‘9/11’ governments in many different parts of the world have used terrorism as an excuse to intensify the oppression of press and writers in far, far worse ways than anything that happened to me.

[top]

While visiting NYC last spring, when I asked an ex-patriate Pakistani friend, a doctor, how things were Pakistan, he glanced around furtively and then advised me to lower my voice on the bus, and not to mention the word, ‘Pakistan’ aloud, since people would be listening and one never knew. At the time, apart from ourselves and the driver, there was one woman on the bus. After that, I found myself like a Mafia don, referring to Pakistan as ‘the old country’. ‘Paranoia strikes deep’, yet in the face of the Patriot Act, this is hardly paranoia. If, as Amnesty International reports, 90% of those held in custody in Iraq are innocent, then what of Guantanamo Bay, and what of the USA and the UK? When one phone call can lose you your job or cause you to disappear, it is no longer paranoia. It is Le Carré, Solzenitsin, Arthur Miller, Primo Levi. It’s been going on in Northern Ireland for decades. If the men come through my door tonight, who will know? When reality is fiction, then what happens to fiction?

With a rising sense of paranoia, then, you can feel this as you walk along the pavement. You can read it between the lines in the Press and you can perceive it if you slow down the reels of Hollywood flicks. Like still waters, these lines supposedly run deep, back almost a thousand years, to the time of the First Crusade. Once again, they have been laid bare and celebrated through flags, those ominous tribal skins in which we wrap our nakedness. Meanwhile, history, the acquisition and apportioning of gold as a means to absolute power, continues unabated. But those who see history, and the world, as a conflict of theological blow-torches seem too easily to forget such inconvenient ‘details’. All writing is knowledge; all writing is history. Those who would have us believe that history is dead would prefer that we didn’t read, far less, write. To paraphrase Napoleon, History is written out by the victors.

Once again, I fear, the European Right has succeeded in linking the issues of sovereignty and immigration and confronting its own demons, its own ‘Heart of Darkness’ in the faces and the voices of those whom it perceives as irredeemably ‘Other’. Of course, the genetic and cultural dynamic has always had the nature of a so-called ‘primitive’, multivalent epic. We are all begat from those whom we would class as ‘Other’. When we kill one another in either word or deed, we are destroying simultaneously the wellspring and the offspring of our own stories. This manifestation of information control is not so unrelated to what George Steiner calls, ‘the censorship of the market over what is difficult and innovative, over what is intellectually and aesthetically demanding’. Bread, circuses and the Praetorian Guard.

[top]

The lurid images of West Virginian anti-heroine exercising her dominatrix fantasies, her ‘right’ to the pursuit of happiness, on hapless Iraqi POWs were illustrative of a more basic fact. Those pictures, beamed around the world, portrayed the fundamental relationship between the West and the Rest, and in particular, the brown, the Arab, the Muslim ‘Other’. The fact that she and her torturing, rapist, male, pimp-controllers felt able to pose pornographically before the slavering lens of the military camera demonstrates that the West is now perceived by the military and corporate- organised Right Wing as being so hegemonically powerful that at base it no longer gives a damn about image. Bush et al’s insincere semi-apologies were merely a dissimulation for the use of those images and the process of dealing with their aftermath, perversely, as proof of the West’s inherent moral superiority: Harry Truman reading passages from the Bible before dropping the atom bombs. Hollywood ‘Heart of Darkness’ arc resolutions do not make it better for the Rest, for the Congolese or the Vietnamese or the Iraqis. All we know is the torturer’s humanity; we squint into grainy childhood photos as she squints back, and as she smiles at the lens, we also smile and now we are the lens, the blank film plate. We empathise with her ‘Deer Hunter’ existence. Perhaps, one day, she and her smile will be portrayed by Julia Roberts to the haunting melody of ‘Cavatina’. Yet seldom are we permitted to learn of the Iraqis’ home lives, as though, like Tolkien’s Orcs, they do not possess even the possibility of dramatic sympathy, as though, like the Tasmanian aborigines of the C19th, they are not really human at all. All we see is a comic-strip of women beating their chests and ululating and sweaty beardies raising their fists and slobbering slogans. Seldom do we hear anyone, for example, quietly crying or talking about the diurnal mundanities of their lives. There is no soundtrack harmonic with their dilemmas. Compare this with the pictures of individual Londoners after the death of Princess Diana, or individual New Yorkers following the Trade Towers’ destruction. Caught like flies in our peripheral vision, we see hordes of dark barbarians being wild, out of control, superstitious, dissonant and ritualistic. Then we have the disgusting on-screen decapitation of an American civilian apparently caught up in the war; it is as though the perpetrators are attempting consciously to recreate one of those gigantic Orientalist oil paintings, with bloodied heads on golden trays. World politics has been distilled to a pure malt snuff movie; the photographs possess the fake – the fatal - honesty of a Himmler, a Heidrich, a Goebbels. I use these names deliberately; the Islamist terrorists were trained by the CIA, and the CIA drew heavily on the techniques of the likes of Klaus Barbie and other Nazis, whom they considerately and assiduously protected after the end of WW2. Was this what our grandparents fought for?

And still, we do not see – are not permitted to see – the body-bags. No-one is screaming on the tarmac at the returning Tommies or GIs, or if they are, then we are not being permitted to hear their screams. Just as we are not permitted to hear the sound of breaking bones and hearts as human beings are hit by cluster bombs and depleted uranium warheads, bombs which are made in Britain, right here, under our anaesthetised noses. How many ziggurats will have to fall in Sumeria before blood is assuaged? I hear that some dunderhead nominated Bush and Blair for the Nobel Peace Prize! In this context, in 2004, the only good soldier is a deserter.

[top]

The ‘embedding’ of reporters in the military machine rendered possible a subtle pretence of investigative journalism, when all the while, it was khaki bonding – or even, on occasion, khaki-bedding - the writers with the soldiers. So what we end up with is loud-mouth at one end and a warrior-priest at the other and both are engaging in an elegant charade of interrogative discourse. It is notable that during the Kelly Affair one of the main criticisms of the ‘Today’ programme was that it wasn’t scripted. The hacking down of alternative websites, the constant deployment of talking heads cosily imparting received wisdom (whose wisdom, received from whom?) represented, as a post-coital Elizabeth Bennet-on-mescaline might’ve intoned, “a veritable orgasm” of “spies and lies”. Meanwhile, the vast numbers of Arab journalists on the ground throughout Iraq during and after the invasion, were not even acknowledged as existing, let alone consulted. Oppositional voices were accessed hardly at all. On the other hand, with a few notable and brave exceptions, the glorified psyops unit known as the US/UK mass media rolled up a constant celebrity circus of rabid, slavering warmongers. This was a pornography of the word on a massive and systematised scale.

Iraq is where it all began. All this writing, this ‘Western’ civilisation, this zero, this money, this alphabet, this Jehovah, this Abraham. The word, ‘Iraq, meaning ‘root’, derived from ‘Uruk’, which was the first ‘rainbow city’, a focus of commerce and creativity where the two rivers met – the ‘Big Apple’ of the ancient world. The wheel, the polis, the very geometries of civilisation and yes, of Smiley-Smile, were all laid out in Iraq. Iraq is the Ur-text. Around 1000 CE, when the Latin and Byzantine Empires torched the academies of the Mediterranean, the Hellenistic philosophers fled to Baghdad and Nishapur – Iraq and Iran. In Iraq, the Arabo-Persian symbiosis of Indian, Egypto-Greek and Fertile Crescent science, art and philosophy ultimately created modernity. In so many ways, European culture is Iraqi culture. Why does that concept sound heretical? How does an artist – a writer – respond to all this? Directly, here, now – in an attempt to stimulate real discussion, to open wordless, no-go areas out into discourse. And also tangentially, subliminally, through fiction, poetry, drama and whatever else comes to mind. When the Fourth Estate is either unable or unwilling to engage effectively, or is co-opted by the State apparatus, then the work falls to novelists, dramatists, poets: their power, as artists, is the power of suggestion. This is an inversion of Mediaeval stonemasonry; instead of constructing physical edifices to transmute spiritual imagination, artists today, to some extent, seem to be drawing tracks through the unconscious in an attempt somehow to alter the nature of materiality. But this leads us into the broader discourse of the diminution of the numinous in our society. As Borges said, “censorship is the mother of metaphor”.

[top]

From autumn 2001, I found myself writing alternately various long stories and novellas based around the complexities of deepest England and re-working my novel, ‘Psychoraag’, which is set between Scotland and South Asia. I only partially realised it at the time, but now I see that for me this period involved a process of creative refusal. I was refusing to allow myself to be drawn along the dominant dialectic of the day, the comfortable dualisms so beloved of those ex-State Department hacks, those scapular propagandists, Fukuyama, Huntington et al. The refusal to accept a superficial simplicity in search of the dissonant balance between multilayered complexity and immanent unity which, I sense, may be a more accurate denotation of reality, is a political literary act, a bursting of mental bonds, an attempt to re-form the architecture of truth. Facing the imperial structures within which we still exist, where the Gentlemen’s Club has simply signed up with Companies’ House, in the numinous sense I am a samizdat writer: I fingerprint language. Freedom needs constantly to be fought for through a variety of means; subversion, opposition and complex subtextualisations and co-options of elements of the state – of which we are all, of course, a part. As writers, in the sense meant by Walter Benjamin, through the code of language, we can help create and drive those freedoms, freedoms of the mind and spirit which become inseparable from physical liberty and which are always conditional.

As individuals, we must look at those things for which our taxes, our labour, have paid if we are ever to have a hope of turning around from the goal of bio-chemical global annihilation towards which military capitalism is leading us. As writers, on some level, we must write about them. The two are inseparable. Misinformation – the manipulation of words, the unmusical decomposition of those sacred units of strangeness - has the ultimate aim of massaging the minds of subject populations so that when the time comes, they are led, like the lions of the war which someone decided to name, ‘Great’, to the machine of slaughter, to engage in killing other subject populations. By which time, neither of these supposed adversaries will have any capability of questioning the orders barked out by those in command, and all of them perish, never having seen behind the donkey’s mask. Yet the paradox remains that as ‘language animals’, we use these same hermeneutic tactics. There may be sacrality, but there is no inherent progressiveness in the Word. Perhaps, then, as individual writers and readers, it will be the mundane that yet may save us and our minds, and show us how to deconstruct the image of the barbarian, and in this strange metatheatre, perhaps allow us at last to pass through the ‘mirror of Herodotus’.

[top]