My Blank Pages

Politics and History

I’m on holiday at the moment, and can’t post anything new. But writing about El Salvador two weeks ago, I was reminded of my travels as a journalist through Central America in the early 1990s, so here is another extract from my memoir My Blank Pages till I return to the maelstrom.

As some readers may remember, this (so far unpublished) manuscript was a written as a writer’s memoir. In these extracts, I trace the trajectory that took me from youthful rebel without a clue to a writer concerned with politics and history, and the relationship between the two.

The Book of Revolutions

In 1968 my father sent me a book called The Book of Revolutions as a Christmas present, which I still have. It’s a large-format hardback, containing the histories of five revolutions, with a red outline of a man holding a rifle and a gun on the black cover. The text is sober and informative, but some of the images are dramatic and quite gruesome. There are prints of mass drownings in the Loire during the French Revolution, a photograph of scattering crowds outside the Winter Palace, an artist’s impression of the executions of Irish Republicans in Kilmainham Jail after the Easter Rising, waxworks of the guillotine and the murdered Marat in his bath, which I later saw in Madame Tussaud’s.

‘After the triumphant speeches, and the toasts, and the celebration banquets how does it end?’ the author asked, before concluding, ‘For most of the revolutionary leaders, as we have seen, it ends in death or dishonour: comrade turns against comrade, civil war breaks out, repression and injustice are greater than under the old regime.’

I don’t know whether my father sent me that book to inspire me or disabuse my thirteen-year-old self of any excessive youthful romanticism about revolution that he thought I had. At the time, I was vaguely aware that I lived in a revolutionary era myself. I saw photographs and tv footage of the Tet offensive in Vietnam, the tanks moving into Czechoslovakia, and the pitched battles unfolding in Paris. That year my granddad added Bernadette Devlin to his list of reasons to despise the Irish, and even though I had no idea who she was, I saw pictures of bloodied civil rights marchers in Derry and understood that something was unfolding there that had some connection to the 1916 ‘row in the town’ described in my book.

Revolutions seemed to be taking place everywhere, and they exercised a fascination over my imagination that has never entirely disappeared. In books and articles, I have written about revolutions, insurgencies, wars, and civil wars, and this interest was not confined to the writer’s study. Though I have never been a part of a revolutionary organisation, I have been instinctively, but not ideologically on the left for most of my life. In 1972 I was nearly arrested demonstrating against the Springboks hockey team at the Leys School in Cambridge – a fate I only avoided by lying full-length on the ground and clinging onto the ankle of one of the demonstrators as the police tried to drag me away. This was the first of many demonstrations, strikes, sit-ins, picket lines, protests, and campaigns that I have been part of in various countries.

In 1979 I was a squatter-activist with the Dutch squatter movement in Amsterdam for twelve months. During those twelve months, I opened up abandoned squats for myself,and for Moroccan migrants, and I also took part in various protests and actions with the very politicised and militant Dutch squatter underground. On one occasion I took part in a mass occupation of the Amsterdam Town Hall in protest at the council’s housing policy. I was given the task of setting off a smoke bomb to cover their retreat – a mission that nearly backfired when the bomb initially refused to ignite, leaving me stranded by myself with a roomful of very angry Dutch burghers, holding the smoking device in my hand. I managed to get away, and marched euphorically through the streets with the squatters, as they sang revolutionary songs in Dutch that I didn’t understand.

The Amsterdam squatters took direct action very seriously, and I was up for it. I joined in the occupation of ‘Der Grote Keizer’ – an empty building on the Keizersgracht that belonged to a Dutch multinational, which the squatters turned into a fortress, with metal sheets on the windows, trapdoors on the stairwells, and stockpiles of petrol bombs, rocks, bricks, rockets, and smoke bombs. I went to kickboxing classes organised by the squatters and prepared to do battle with the police.

And yet throughout those twelve months of actions, break ins and evictions, I still spent hours writing poetry, and other bits and pieces. And no matter how often I marched, protested, or demonstrated, I never ceased wanting to become a writer, and because of that I always felt an internal distance from the movements and causes I associated myself with. I was not like Victor Serge, the great Russian revolutionary writer and novelist, whose novels read like unfinished dispatches rushed off from the barricades. Serge later said that his revolutionary activity never gave him time to complete his novels. I always put aside time to write, and I often felt as if these two sides of myself – the writer and the activist – were pulling in different directions.

From time to time, two versions of myself came together. In the summer of 1978, I co-wrote and produced a newspaper with a very good friend of mine, which we called The Daily Vacuum. To call it a newspaper is to give this tabloid parody and political pamphlet a great deal of credit. We had read Marcuse, Eric Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, and the Situationist International. The Situationist critique of the banality of everyday life was stamped all over the Daily Vacuum, from the frontpage headline SLEEPERS AWAKE with its poor-quality accompanying photograph of slave-like workers wearing overalls and sunglasses to its nebulous call for arms:

Our politicians and bureaucrats, the watchdogs, and witchdoctors, our ‘experts’, are no more than jailors who we have allowed to keep us in slavery. How long are we going to continue living out their desires at the expense of our own? How long do we continue to live by their rules, which have so far brought us nothing but misery and the possibility of total extinction through nuclear holocaust or ecological breakdown?

The obvious answer to all these questions, had we thought them through, should have been ‘a very long time’, and yet the ‘Righteous Brothers’, as we mockingly called ourselves, insisted: ‘Either we try to build the new world right here and now, or we settle for no world at all.’

How was this new world to be achieved? We knew, or thought we did:

THINK ABOUT IT! A mass attack is the one thing power cannot resist, alone we struggle, together we win.

Exactly what this ‘mass attack’ consisted of was not defined, and I don’t think either of us had the remotest clue as to how to start it. The rest of the paper consisted of a scabrous punk-like assault on racism, the commodification of sex, whaling, police corruption, and Northern Ireland. The satire was crude and scattergun, and didn’t always land. A speech bubble superimposed on Mick Jagger borrows from the Situationist détournement and proclaims ‘Culture? Ugh! The ideal commodity – the one which helps sell all the others! No wonder you want us all to go for it!’. There is a fake horoscope (‘Taurus: Get up. Go to work. Come home. Watch TV. Go to sleep. No change’), and a sports page covering the ‘Copulation Cup’ and the ‘Suicide Games’.

It's not clear who this angry, despairing screed was aimed at. Certainly, there was no obvious reason why British car workers should respond positively to our indictments of the ‘national death service’, or the Oxford ‘university machine’ that we accused of churning out ‘the new generation of mindless managers… indoctrinated with the values of a dying social order.’ And yet the two of us believed so much in its subversive potential that we cycled to the Blackbyrd Leys Estate – the home of many British Leyland car workers – in the dead of night and distributed the Vacuum in strategic places as if we were delivering samizdat leaflets.

I never found out what the workers of Blackbyrd Leys thought of my first attempt at ‘political’ writing, which was probably a good thing. Politics tended to infuse my writing more indirectly in those years. For a while, I fell under the spell of the American Beatnik-era poet Kenneth Patchen and longed, as he did, for some vaguely-imagined collective spiritual/moral awakening. Political writing was writing poems and songs, not essays and articles. Whenever I attempted to write more conventional political pieces, I tended to sound strident, over-earnest and declamatory. In New York I was a member of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), and I was given the task of writing a press release. A member of the committee patiently sifted through my earnest clichés and explained why phrases like ‘the suffering people of El Salvador’ were best left on the cutting room floor.

Within a few years such instructions were no longer necessary. By the time I began writing about the Palestinians and the Sicilian Mafia in the mid-1980s, I was no longer the sub-Situationist anarchist provocateur hazily extolling the poetry of everyday life. I no longer called for ‘mass attacks’, and I had learned how to write journalistic articles with reasonable clarity and precision. By that time the wellsprings of poetry had begun to dry up, and I had developed a calmer and less fervid prose style that seemed more appropriate for political and social issues.

I didn’t want to simply write about the world however. I didn’t want to ‘retreat into poetry’, as Camus once put it: I wanted to change the world by writing about it. Of course, I wasn’t naïve enough to think that books and articles could do that, let alone mine. Nor did I see myself as a revolutionary writer. But I did believe that writers could challenge the established order and contribute to the social and cultural transformation that the Daily Vacuum incoherently envisaged. I wanted to move and persuade other people , in the same way that so many writers had moved and persuaded me.

Politics and History

In his essay Why I Write, George Orwell describes the ‘feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice’ that impelled him to write a book. I have often felt that same urgency, and I have also written as Orwell did ‘to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.’ Such aspirations did not have to be prescriptive. In 1985 I saw the German Art in the Twentieth Century exhibition at the Royal Academy. I was dazzled and moved by the courage and creativity with which German artists had responded to their country’s disastrous history.

Most of them had produced what Orwell called ‘political’ art in the broadest sense, but what gave their work its power was the individual sensibility behind it. I always felt that the same applied to writers, and that it was incumbent even on the most politicised writers to speak in their own voice, and make their own judgements and their own mistakes.

In 1987 I saw Francesco Rosi’s Tre Fratelli for the first time. Rosi combined a poetic meditation on love, family, and mortality with a humane exploration of Italy’s ‘years of lead’, which reinforced my conviction that novelists, as well as artists and filmmakers, could make powerful artistic and political statements that could move the heart as well as the intellect, and that this combination was part of what it meant to ‘write well.’ I have been reminded of these possibilities many times since.

When I travelled through El Salvador in 1993, I accompanied the Salvadoran theatre group Sol del Río into the former guerrilla-zones of Chalatenango and Morazán provinces to perform San Salvador despúes del eclipse (San Salvador After the Eclipse) as part of a peace and reconciliation project part-financed by the Danish government. The play was written by a former FMLN combatant and writer named Geovani Galeas, who I had interviewed in San Salvador.

In the town of Chalatenango, I watched it performed in the Maryknoll mission hall. This was a highly-charged and emotional setting. In 1980 four nuns from the mission had been raped and killed by members of the Salvadoran security forces. I remembered that episode well, as I watched the play’s depiction of the bittersweet reunion of two couples from San Salvador who return to their country from exile. The drama describes their attempts to find common ground after the ‘eclipse’ of the civil war, despite their opposing political views. The audience watched this with rapt attention. In the final scene, one of the characters plays Dylan’s Blowing in the Wind on his record-player.

Many years ago, I had heard that song in the West Indies, as my alcoholic father sobbed drunkenly and played Joan Baez’s version. Now the song seemed to me to possess a power and universality that I had never heard in it before. Few members of the audience could speak English, yet all of them seemed to know the song and understand its meaning. Afterwards, there was a discussion between the actors and the audience, whose insightful responses to the play were steeped in the awful history it described. Most of the audience had lived through that history. I have never been, before or since, in a situation where writing felt so urgent and necessary, and if I ever have doubts that writing is worth doing, I only have to remember that night in the Maryknoll Mission to be reminded that it always is.

Not all the Sol del Río’s performances were so effective, in a former war zone that was unused to theatre and tired of war and politics. On the final day of the tour, in the village of Las Vueltas, the troupe acted out a short reading from the Persian epic The Conference of the Birds as a parable on the need to choose carefully when voting in the new post-civil war democracy. Until then I had helped the group move scenery back and forth. Now the actors gave me a minor part as a tree. I was covered in a sackcloth bag and palm leaves were attached to my hands for branches before the lead actor Saúl introduced ‘el árbol inglés’ – the English tree.

The parable was greeted with polite indifference. It was at that point that Saúl had the brilliant idea of performing his clown routine. From the moment he appeared on stage in his baggy trousers and floppy shoes, the audience began laughing hysterically. After twelve years of bombs, fear, and death, the people of Las Vueltas just wanted to laugh, and as I stood on stage pretending to be a tree and looking down at the sea of chortling faces, I realised that this was not just any laughter – it was a collective cathartic release. That night I sat under a tree talking to a young Basque volunteer who had come to fight with the FMLN, as Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up blared out from a makeshift disco in the village - an incongruous soundtrack to mark the incorporation of the last battleground of the Cold War into the new world order and the ‘end of history’.

These were not experiences that could easily be contained in five-minute radio packages or 1,000-word articles. My main reading during these travels was War and Peace. I often reflected on Tolstoy’s epic depiction of the ebb and flow of history in nineteenth century Russia, and the overlap between the private lives of his characters and the wider life of the nation. When I interviewed people for journalistic purposes, I always felt that I could never do justice to the history that they had lived through. I was conscious that my interviewees had wider stories that deserved to be told, and that I had not enough space to tell them.

What made the Belgian priest Father Rogelio Ponseele decide to remain for twelve years in a war zone on El Salvador where death was a constant possibility? How was the Guatemalan journalist Marco Tulio Barrios able to sleep peacefully at night, in a country where journalists like him were routinely killed? Why did the American volunteers in the International Peace Brigades come to Guatemala to accompany trade unionists and human rights activists to deter possible assassins? How could a Sandinista colonel and former revolutionary bring himself to order helicopter gunships to fire on a hospital in Estelí where anti-government rebels had taken shelter, and then lie about it afterwards?

It was partly because I asked myself these questions that I wanted to write books, both fiction and non-fiction. On the one hand, I wrote as a journalist in response to contemporary events that moved and angered me. In writing politically about the present I inevitably found myself writing about the past. I wouldn’t have written a book about terrorism had it not been for 9/11. I wouldn’t have written about the Moriscos had I not observed the new construction of the ‘Muslim enemy’ that took place in the years that followed 2001.

Reporting on the treatment of migrants at Europe’s ‘hard borders’, I invariably found myself writing about the history of these borders, and the ways in which these histories contradicted or departed from the expectations placed upon them, as dividing lines and markers of national identity. I was drawn to revisit Sherman’s famous march through Georgia, because the American military seemed to be everywhere in the early twenty-first century, fighting new wars that still bore traces of their predecessors.

I saw myself, not as a historian, but as a writer who wrote about history, and viewed the present through a historical lens. At the same time, I have often marvelled at the ability of historians to tell complex stories about the distant past, based on facts and details scoured from documents and local or parish archives, and I could not have written many of my books without their work. As a newcomer to many of these subjects, I relished the opportunity to enter a new world filled with people who were like me and yet entirely different. This is what fiction writers must do all the time, and to some extent non-fiction offers the same possibilities. While researching Blood and Faith, in the Spanish state archives at Simancas, I stumbled on a series of letters written by Spanish mayors to King Philip II at the end of the War of the Alpujarras in 1570.

These mayors pleaded with the King for assistance in looking after the expelled Moriscos who passed through Castilian towns and villages in a state of acute distress. No other historian that I knew of had used these sources in a book, and as I held these yellowed handwritten notes in my hands, I imagined the procession of half-starved, freezing women, old men and children who entered their towns and villages, and I sensed the horror and bewilderment of these lowly Hapsburg officials who inhabited an era so different from my own and yet who still expressed a humanity that is always present in every society, even when in societies when it is presumed not to exist.

Historians tend to be wary about drawing ‘lessons’ from the past, but I constantly saw precedents and warnings in the histories I studied, and I was always looking for moments when history seemed to come to life in a way that spoke directly to the present.

While researching Fortress Europe I was invited by the Polish Borderland Foundation to the 100^th anniversary commemorations of the birth of the poet Czeslaw Milosz, near the town of Sejny on the Polish-Lithuanian border. One afternoon, I wandered through the old Jewish ghetto whose inhabitants had been annihilated during the Shoah. My guide was an elderly American named Arnold whose father had once fled the Russian Pale disguised as a woman before World War I and went on to become a painter and decorator in the United States. Arnold showed me a photograph of his father taken shortly after his arrival in America – a sign that he had made it in the New World. During my own travels across Europe’s borders, I had seen many twenty-first century migrants do the same with their mobile phones.

Again and again, I have immersed myself in the past to write about the present. At the same time, I have often felt that written history doesn't tell me all I want to know. And sometimes I found myself looking beyond the events and quotations that had been documented and recorded. I wondered what Philip II of Spain thought when he went to bed at night, or what he felt as he watched an auto-da-fe. What did Sofia Perovskaya, the assassin of Alexander II, say to her lover Andrei Zhelyabov when they lay in bed together at night? What did these two infamous terrorists feel about the near certainty of their own deaths? What did the slaves of Georgia say to each other when they heard that General Sherman’s army was coming?

The answers to these questions were not always found in the archives. They required an imaginative effort to enter the lives of men and women who had lived in different times to my own, but who were still recognisably human. And that effort inevitably led me away from reportage and writing about history, and back to fiction.