Dead and Alive, page 10
So here was the epic mode – the fantastical analogy for a present political misery – but right up next to it, unexpectedly, was the intimate, the bathetic, the comic:
[She] went back to rolling the joint, twisting one end into a little hat. She took out her lighter and set the little hat on fire. Watching the slow, dark burn gave me a tingle on my cock, which I put out with a scratch.
The girl in question is Mona May and she’s impossible. The narrator is a young man in a failing state but he is also just a kid in love with a (slightly older) woman who happens to drive him up the wall:
I looked at my face in the mirror, and asked myself a serious question: what am I doing here? If I could put up with her arrogance, her stupidity, her hallucinations, her mid-life crisis…what should I expect in return? At the very least, if I loved her, was still obsessed with her, then there was no reason for me to be here, since my presence clearly causes some kind of disturbance in her world.
Angst! Romance! Sex! Dicks! And illustrations, though these I could not see in the PDF, and had to content myself instead with the tantalizing captions. (‘The leftover particles of shit that stuck to our bodies resulted in certain deformities. Marital relations suffered, and many died.’) Using Life is a riotous novel about a failing state, a corrupt city, a hypocritical authority, but it is also about tequila shots and getting laid and smoking weed with your infuriating girlfriend and debating whether rock music died in the seventies and if Quentin Tarantino is a genius or a fraud. It’s a young man’s book. A young man whose youth is colliding with a dark moment in history.
In an attempt to draw more attention to Naji’s cause, Mona recently translated three very short, flash-fiction-type stories for PEN’s website. They published one, ‘The Plant’, which begins like this:
I will not come through the door or the window, but as a plant you cannot notice with your naked eye.
I will grow day after day, to the sound of your singing and the rhythm of your breath at night. A small plant you will not notice at first, growing beneath your bed.
From door to bed, to bathroom to closet, standing or sitting against the mirror. Through all these acts, and to the sound of your humming, I will grow. A small green plant. With grand slim leaves sneaking out from beneath your bed.
I read this voice first as the spirit of underground resistance, then as the essence of pervasive dictatorship, and then back to resistance once more. The second story, unpublished, was called ‘Ambulance’ and began like so: ‘She was sucking my dick when suddenly she stopped to ask if I had given grandmother her medicine.’ The last, also unpublished, was called ‘Normal’, and it opened this way: ‘One time as I was heading back to Sixth of October city, a prostitute showed up on the way dressed in the official uniform, a black cloak without a headscarf, and instead she had bangs and black hair falling over her shoulders. She was carrying a huge neon bag.’
Mona seemed a little perplexed that PEN had chosen only one of these shorts, but I could understand it. An imprisoned writer is a very serious thing indeed and should not be treated lightly, so it puts an activist in a certain sort of bind when the writer in question turns out to be lightness itself. Naji’s prose explicitly confronts what happens when one’s fundamentally unserious, oversexed youth dovetails with an authoritarian, utterly self-serious regime that is in the process of tearing itself apart. It’s very bad historical luck – of the kind I’ve never suffered. It’s monstrous. It’s ludicrous.
But the fact that the punishment does not fit the crime – that prison is, at this moment in Cairo, the absurd response to the word ‘pussy’ – is exactly what shouldn’t be elided. In another historical moment, or so it occurs to me, young Ahmed would be at that PEN dinner, sitting right next to me, having come over from Cairo for a quick jaunt to see writer friends in Bed–Stuy, and he’d be a bit bored by the solemn speeches, sneaking out the back of the museum to smoke a joint perhaps, and then returning to his seat in high humour just in time to watch a literary giant whom he didn’t really respect come up to the stage to receive an award. That, anyway, is the spirit I detect in his novel: perverse and brilliant, full of youth, energy, light! Some writers, in the face of state oppression, will write like Solzhenitsyn. Others, like Naji, find their kindred spirits in the likes of Nabokov and Milan Kundera, writers who maintained their instinct for unbearable lightness and pleasure, for sex and romance, for perversity and delight, in the face of so much po-faced violent philistinism.
‘I think I understand now,’ writes Naji, in Using Life, ‘that the bullshit inside of us is nothing but a reflection of the bullshit outside. Or maybe it’s the other way round. In either case, the outside bullshit eventually seeps inside, and settles into the depths of our souls.’ But on the evidence of his own writing the bullshit has not yet settled in Naji, not even in his jail cell. He is part of a great creative renaissance in Cairo, of young novelists and poets, graphic novelists, and – perhaps most visibly – graffiti artists, who have turned the city’s ever-increasing walls into a staging site for political protest and artistic expression. Since 2014, President Sisi has cracked down on this community, with new restrictions on the press and multiplying arrests of artists and writers, and yet the Egyptian constitution guarantees both artistic freedom and freedom of expression. Naji has been prosecuted instead on Article 178 of the Penal Code, which criminalizes ‘content that violates public morals’.
An attempt to appeal was rejected in February. Naji’s last appeal is on 4 December. Hundreds of Egyptian artists and intellectuals have signed a petition in support of Naji but there are also loud voices who feel that his example should not be used in a ‘freedom of literature’ argument because they see his writing as not really literature, as fundamentally unserious. Using Life is certainly comic, sexual, wild – the work of an outrageous young man. We should defend his freedom to be so. ‘Falling in love in Cairo,’ I learn, from his novel, ‘you have to prepare for the worst. You just can’t walk over to her and say, “Mona May, I’ve got the jones for you.” Words like these could get a man hurt.’ Over here, in New York, words won’t get you into too much trouble – not yet, anyway. What would we dare to write if they did?
And then ‘not yet’ became ‘now’. By 2025, words used in New York could get you not just detained but deported. You didn’t have to commit a crime. You only needed to be perceived – by the Secretary of State – as a threat to US foreign policy. The legal precedent offered by the Trump administration turned out to be the McCarthy-era McCarran-Walter Act, otherwise known as the ‘Immigration Nationality Act of 1952’. This put in place immigration restrictions for ‘subversives’ and communists, the original targets being Jewish Holocaust survivors suspected of working for the Soviets. As such, it was opposed, at the time, by the American Jewish Committee, who rightly viewed the act as anti-constitutional. When words become crimes – and everyone starts shutting their mouths – ‘solidarity’ proves one of the hardest words to say. But not for Mahmoud Khalil, the detained Columbia student, whose own words model the principle: ‘As a Palestinian student, I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand by hand, and you cannot achieve one without the other.’
Some Notes on Mediated Time
Hannah sent the WhatsApp a series of photographs. They were of Hannah with her newborn daughter, Emily, in her arms, and of each of us visiting Hannah and her newborn – but Emily is now fifteen. We all peered, astonished, at the photographs, on our separate devices, in our separate worlds. How young we looked! How absolutely childlike. Except we were not especially young, even then. The queer kids, the club kids, the sell-outs, the procreators, the artists, the nine-to-fivers, the unemployed, the rich and the poor, the black and the white and the neither – we and everybody we knew was thirty or thereabouts. We all still dressed like teenagers, though, and in the minds of the popular culture were ‘slackers’, suffering from some form of delayed development, possibly the sad consequence of missing such key adulting experiences as a good war or a stock market crash. We defended ourselves against such critiques but privately were a bit sheepish about living at the End of History. We felt history belonged to other people: that we lived in the time of no time. We had some very peculiar ideas about time generally – it was like we were incapable of properly gauging its passing. Take that moment my brother called me to announce he was having a baby, aged twenty-seven. I reacted as if he were a teenage father. Really couldn’t have been more astounded. This tendency to be utterly amazed by any sign of time moving forward has continued. I don’t think it’s just me. It felt like all of us were twenty-seven for the longest time! Basically, until we were thirty-eight. Then suddenly forty was bearing down on us all like an avalanche. Time did not seem to be passing at all really until we moved into a new age bracket – as defined by advertisers – and then it seemed to pass all at once in a great panic-inducing swoosh. We thought our lives would be reasonably paced and tell a story full of meaning. Instead it’s just been one thing after another, and there are no neat conclusions, except the certainty of death. And over the years, as each perfectly boring, predictable milestone has been met with dumbfounded shock, from the first grey hairs to the menopause, I have often had the thought: Did the Ancient Greeks think of time this way? The Taíno Indians? Do the Masai? Are farmers and peasants and monks this amazed to be forty? Is this reality? How much of all this is mediated? And how much mediation is too much?
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The only way I can access WhatsApp is on my laptop which is like trying to play Mario Kart on a loom. I have no memory now of how I managed to download it in this way and if this computer ever breaks, I know I’ll never be able to figure it out again, so a lot of my continued social existence and ability to know which kid’s friend’s birthday party I need to buy a fucking gift for relies on the shelf life of this 2018 MacBook, built for obsolescence. Soon, very soon, I will be obsolete myself. I notice time passes strangely on WhatsApp, too. It’s a clear fact that whenever I join a WhatsApp group, time warps, a year passes in the blink of an eye, and I end up seeing the people in that WhatsApp group about eighty per cent less than I previously did, and yet still seem to hear from them constantly. There appears to be an inverse relation between the intensity of any particular WhatsApp group and the possibility of actually ever hanging out IRL with someone from that group.
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A lot of people feel that the archetypal movie of our collective youth was The Matrix, because it so precisely mirrors the feeling of unmoored unreality into which we came of age. But for me it is The Truman Show, and the crucial scene comes at the very end. Up to that point, the matrix, the image machine, the Baudrillardian[*1] simulacrum – whatever you want to call it – has attempted seamlessness, and almost achieved it. Every suspicion of Truman’s has been met with a defence, with a fresh storyline, and every crack in the narrative plastered over with a plausible patch. Space stops at the horizon; every day is pretty much like the one before. When life events happen, they are both sponsored and timed to what is effectively a bourgeois calendar: now you graduate, now you date, now you marry. The persistent sense of unreality that has haunted Truman all his life finally breaks as he makes his escape in his little boat upon a sea that turns out to be ankle-high, amidst clouds that turn out to be painted. He finds the door. He opens it. The movie ends there. We never find out how Truman, habituated to living in TV time, adapts to existing in real time.
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As a kid I had a persistent sense of unreality. Throughout my childhood – basically until I got to college – I watched up to nine hours of TV a day, more on weekends. I woke up early to watch the breakfast shows and ran back from school for the Australian, British and American soaps, followed by the news, light entertainment, quiz shows, and then whatever comedy I could find, stopping around ten, if somebody made me. Only if somebody made me. With all due respect to eighties parents, TV raised us. It taught me how to fall in love, have a fight, have sex, travel, dress, eat, work, succeed, fail. It taught me that life was narrative, that it had a three-arc structure – a beginning, a middle and an end – and each section would have its own epiphanies, providing opportunities for learning and growth. That there was such a thing as ‘your moment’, that you were the star of your own show. That if you could go back in time and change that one thing then you would. Should! It impressed upon me the importance of a voiceover and a soundtrack, to measure out time or to make it go more quickly. I believed in flashbacks and reruns. I believed in snappy dialogue and death scenes. Above all I believed that the show must go on. The passing of the seasons – which must have been of the utmost significance to the distant peasants in my bloodline – that all meant very little to me, that is, unless you were referring to Christmas Specials and Halloween episodes in which case, I was all ears. All eyes. My only other activities: playing the Atari, singing, reading. Aside from tap-dancing, I don’t recall breaking a sweat or participating in any form of physical activity until I was in my early twenties.
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Sporadically, sensing the thinness of my televisual reality, I would try and anchor myself in ‘real’ time. As a teenager, I interviewed an elderly neighbour about her time on the Kindertransport. I asked my father about liberating Belsen. I asked my mother about sleeping in a piss-stained bed shared with many siblings in a tiny Jamaican hamlet on the same stretch of land upon which her ancestors had been enslaved. At the kitchen tables of my friends, I heard about the brutality of Indian partition, about Shell’s battle with the Ogoni people of Nigeria. In comparison with such world historical dramas, late twentieth-century Willesden felt, to me, relatively safe: urban-suburban, almost green, dull, unreal. Or maybe I allowed myself to live in fiction. I was certainly living cheek by jowl with more fraught realities. The first boy I ever kissed slit a cab driver’s throat eight years later, followed by a decade in jail. And I knew very well – I could see – that only a quarter of a school like mine was expected to reach any kind of further education, and that I was not in that quarter, demographically speaking. Still, I grew up coddled by wall-to-wall fictions, determined to live within them, to the point that when 1984 finally arrived, it felt (to me) like an anticlimax. If it was a dystopia, I didn’t notice. 1984 was, to me, primarily the year of Thriller and Band Aid. It was also – in our flat, at least – the year of Margaret Thatcher’s battle with the miners, which I understood as a Star Wars-like struggle between good and evil, in which evil, inexplicably, had won, prompting my father to weep at the evening news. But whatever was going on in Northern Ireland, for example, did not permeate my reality – not unless the bomb was on English soil. And 1984 was not the year of Bhopal, no, not to me. An American company could kill eight thousand Indians on a single day during 1984 and I wouldn’t know much about it until I was in my late twenties. No doubt it was a line item on the news, but it wasn’t part of the growing superstructure of images, mediating reality, which, many years later, 9/11 produced and perfected. This world of mediated images amounted to an (almost) perfectly integrated system, enveloping the children raised within it, organizing and structuring not only our sense of the time of our own lives, but also of historical time, and even global time. Bhopal wasn’t part of ‘1984’ as we conceived of it, in the West. Nor, for that matter, was the whole continent of Africa. As seen through a child’s eyes – and a worrying proportion of adults – the point of what was then referred to as ‘the Third World’ was that it was set to a different clock. It was in that benighted place that people still starved and had flies sitting in the corners of their eyes, as we had seen on Blue Peter.[*2] We, meanwhile, were aspiring to live like the up-to-date Americans of Back to the Future, to join them on their neo-liberal arc of progress and personal discovery, in which things would only ever get better and better. The black boy sweeping the café in Michael J. Fox’s town becomes the mayor of Michael J. Fox’s town. That sort of thing. But in the Third World none of that was possible, because ‘they’ were still tied to the rhythms and the rules of the earth, like peasants. Droughts were still a thing over there. And terrible weather events. Whereas we lived in a large box wallpapered with clouds in which the sea was relatively calm and clear and only a couple of inches deep…And yet, if you happened to be raised in a black or brown household, then the seamless wallpapered clouds were partially disrupted by the existence of a little door, that had been left ajar. I peeked through it. Weren’t those people, over there, in the other world, on the other timeline, also black and brown, like us? Weren’t we them? Weren’t they us? How had we ended up on separate timelines? When and where was the rupture?
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Whole regions of reality were blocked off by TV screens advertising the new Atari or Barbie’s Dreamhouse or alerting me to the existence of Eddie Murphy. The adults around us, meanwhile, worried a lot about TV, as a medium. Not about it blocking out Northern Ireland, the poisoning of distant Indians, or the role of the IMF in Africa’s famines – no, they worried about it poisoning our minds. All the guns would make us violent. All the horror movies would render us sociopathic. All the visions of glamour would make us want things we could never have. Also, it was bad for our eyesight. We were forever being told to go outside and do something else, anything else – why don’t you pick up a book, for God’s sake? TV was making us stupid, it was a form of brainwashing, it was trash. OK, Boomers…
