Interview With Guatemalan Writer David Unger

 “Brought up between three cultures and two languages, David Unger has managed to capture with much irony and passion the trials and tribulations of a Jewish family in 1980s Guatemala. The story of three brothers, of the shocks between civilizations that are so in vogue these days, and of the plurality of cultures that coexist in Latin America, Life in the Damn Tropics is a novel that one reads with much perplexity and immense pleasure.”

— Jorge Volpi, author of In Search of Klingsor

"In The Mastermind, David Unger’s compelling antihero reminds us of the effects of privilege and corruption, and how that deadly combo can spill from the public to the private sphere. Unger’s Guillermo Rosensweig is on a hallucinatory journey in which everything seems to go right until it goes terribly, terribly wrong. I couldn’t put this down."

--Achy Obejas, author of Ruins

1 How did the possibility of translating the new book come about?

In 2016, I published my most recent novel, The Mastermind (New York: Akashic Books), which is based rather loosely on real events that caused an existential crisis in Guatemala and almost brought down a left-of-centre government in 2009. It’s a book that has been translated into ten languages. At the time, I felt that I wanted to give back to my birthplace in a unique way. Over the years, I’ve translated 16 books, so it seemed that I should attempt to re-translate Guatemala's Nobel prize in literature author Miguel Angel Asturias’s first and most powerful novel. I contacted the Balcell’s Agency which gave me the green light, but due to some copyright issues, I had to wait until 2022 to publish my translation of Mr. President with Penguin Classics.

2. What do you think of the previous translation by Frances Partridge? What problems were involved after the last translation was over fifty years ago? 

Partridge’s translation is mostly workman-like but suffers, as I say in the introduction, with many Anglicisms and a failure to recognize many Guatemaltequismos—particularly Guatemalan words and terms that she didn’t fully understand. Mr. President is a very American novel, one that lends itself to translation in the American vein. Words like “coppers,” “blimey,” and “lorry” are acceptable terms in the English language but are not inviting to North American readers. Further, she didn’t have a clue about certain Guatemalan foods, birds and plants that have entered into the American vernacular through the immigration of nearly 60 million Latin Americans into the U.S. In some ways, she was hopelessly overmatched though I find that she also came through with some lovely descriptions, a la Bloomsbury style.

3 What kind of research, historical or otherwise, was involved?

Keith, I mostly tried to figure out what Asturias was saying and concentrated fully on the Spanish text. The novel is a depiction of the Estrada Cabrera regime (1898-1920) and mixes high and low language. There are surrealist bursts and many indigenous Guatemalan terms. I worked with two Guatemalan writers/friends who helped me decipher some 250 queries that I had. Both love the work of Asturias and were, indeed, helpful. At times, we were all stumped, and I had to make a leap of faith based on what I thought Asturias was getting at. It is an amazing novel that has a very strong narrative push though there are moments of exquisite descriptions. The Spanish version of Mr. President carries a glossary of about 200 words to help readers, but I wanted to create a version that wouldn’t pull the reader out of the novel to consult with this glossary. This was the main purpose of my translation.

4 Could you explain the importance of Mr. President in Latin American literature?

I am not the only one to say it—Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru’s Nobel Prize novelist) and Gerald Martin (Asturias’s most important scholar and the biographer of Garcia Marquez and soon Vargas Llosa)--, but Mr. President is without question the most important Latin American novel of the 20th century. It introduced surrealism and magical realism into writing and, at the same time, portrayed a dictator who poisons all aspects of society—the social fabric, the legal system, friendship and love—in order to maintain his power. The unnamed president of an unnamed country is only interested in his power, his vanity and his machinations. Does it sound familiar? Let’s mention Trump, Ortega and Bolsonaro. It is a novel that is really a rich tapestry of Latin American life, infused with betrayal, violence and abuse.

5 Given the current situation in Guatemala, would you not agree that the book's release is very prescient?

Definitely, all the reviewers in the Washington Post, Harper’s Magazine, The NY Times, The New York Review of Books express their astonishment about how accurate the novel is in depicting our Latin American reality. Guatemala, in particular, is a dysfunctional country thanks to the “Pacto de corruptos”—the Pact of Corrupt entities—that has a stranglehold on the country. We had primary elections ten days ago, and by surprise, Bernardo Arevalo—the son of what was a brilliant Guatemalan president in the 1940s—made the August 20th runoff. The industrialists, military officers and narco-traffickers are accusing him of being a Communist and that his Semilla Party (Seed Party) wants to destroy capitalism, the Church, marriage, the schools, tortillas, tamales, the volcanoes. Do you get my drift? These megalomaniacs don’t want to give up an ounce of their power. It is disgusting. But I believe that despite these forces of evil, he will succeed. He is a centrist with good values, and, most important, he isn’t corrupt.

6 What are you working on now?

I am at the airport (my flight was delayed) on my way to take part in the Guatemala International Book Fair (FILGUA). There I will present the Spanish version of my children’s book Sleeping With the Lights On (a fictionalized account of the U.S.-directed overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954) and discuss Mr. President with Miguel Angel Asturias’s son. I don’t think I have another novel in me—I don’t have anything new to say—but I will continue to write children’s books and translate. I’ve written four novels and, a collection of short stories, 4 children’s books and translated nearly 20 books from Spanish, and I am happy with what I have done.

 

About the Author

Guatemalan-born David Unger is an award-winning translator and author. His short stories have appeared in several anthologies and literary journals in the United States and abroad. He has translated thirteen books, among them works by Teresa Cárdenas, Rigoberta Menchú, Ana Maria Machado, Silvia Molina Elena Garro, Bárbara Jacobs and Nicanor Parra’s. He teaches Translation at City College of New York’s graduate M.A. Program and is the U.S. rep of the Guadalajara International Book Fair. He lives in Brooklyn.

 

BY DAVID UNGER:

Sleeping With the Light On

CHILDRENS, 2020

The Mastermind

NOVEL, 2015

La casita

PICTURE BOOK, 2012

The Price of Escape

NOVEL, 2011

Para mi eres divina

NOVEL, 2011

Ni chicha ni limonada

SHORT STORIES, 2010

Life in the Damn Tropics

NOVEL, 2002

 

Review: Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang-published by the Borough Press (£16.99).

In the process of writing, some authors are often taken in a direction they had not originally intended. This cannot be said about Rebecca F Kuang's Yellowface. From the first line to the last, Kuang's targets are clear, and she goes after them with skill and preciseness matched by few authors so young.

Satire as an attack weapon is as old as the hills, and Kuang uses it to deadly effect. Her targets include the publishing industry, plagiarism, literary envy, and the pressures on young writers in the social media age. Most importantly, she defends the writer's craft or, more precisely, against the racialisation of literature. Kuang said she found the idea that writers should only write about characters of their race "deeply frustrating and pretty illogical". Kuang believes that that problem is not just confined to the publishing industry but has become a political issue saying that the situation has "spiralled into this really strict and reductive understanding of race".

Given Kuang's hostility to reducing complex social, political and economic problems to that of race, you would have thought that several reviewers would have been more careful in clumsily and wrongly saying  this is a novel that tackles “white privilege” and “identity.”

The book is a multi-layered and complex satire on the publishing industry. Kuang openly challenges the idea that only authors of a certain race can write about their race, gender, or sexual orientation. In one part of the book, June is confronted by a Chinese American who believes that only a Chinese person can write about its history. She responds, "I think it's dangerous to start censoring what authors should and shouldn't write...I mean, turn what you're saying around and see how it sounds. Can a Black writer not write a novel with a white protagonist?"

James McDonald elaborates on this point: "Art is always an approximation, never fully successful, but when done well, one that embraces the otherness and the sameness of writer, reader and subject in the act of inquiry and compassion. To rope off subjects from artists is to deny the nature of Art itself and to deny activity that is fundamental to being human. A new form of censorship in publishing has accompanied the rise of identity politics. The new censors are called "sensitivity readers." Briefly, sensitivity readers function as the "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" inquisitors of the publishing industry, reading manuscripts and hunting for potentially "offensive" or "inaccurate" material. The imposition of upper-middle-class identity politics upon culture is censorious and philistine. But it is also reactionary. The ultimate targets of identity politics and the language of "offence" and "sensitivity" are the working class and its democratic rights. Concepts like "offence" and "sensitivity" are nebulous abstractions and subject to broad, not to say nefarious, interpretation. While today it may be deemed offensive to call someone "fat," in future we may be told that matters of class, class struggle and socialism are upsetting and offensive."[1]

The plot of the book is simple and well-crafted. June Hayward is a gifted but unremarkable writer going nowhere fast. Her friend is the beautiful and successful writer Athena Liu. She thinks to herself: "What is it like to be you? What is it like to be so impossibly perfect, to have every good thing in the world?" Unfortunately, Athena chokes on a pandan pancake and dies in front of her friend, who then steals her unfinished book manuscript and publishes it as her own after rewriting it.

Yellowface is Rebecca F Kuang's fifth novel at the tender age of 27, written in the first-person present tense. It is striking to hear that the Yellowface came about during a Harper Collins to strike with R.F. Kuang as a supporter.

Her previous books were cross-genre. Her Poppy War fantasy trilogy, set in historical China, was followed up by the Sunday Times bestseller Babel last year. Babel is well worth a read.  

Richard Bradbury explains, "At the heart of the book is a simple premise, which becomes a metaphor for the rise and spread of capitalism and colonialism. Translation theory understands that literally translating one word into another language is impossible. It contains translation theory, colonial history, the complicity of higher education institutions with capitalism, a revolutionary upsurge, and more.[2]

Kuang emigrated to the U.S. with her family at the age of four from Guangzhou, China, and grew up in Texas. She has a significant online presence and has also been the subject of intense social media debates, which has, like all good writers, managed to weave these into her novels in one way or another.

As Varika Rastogi writes, “Kuang—in no small part because of the role TikTok has played in her rise to success—is also deeply aware of the Internet being the "realm that the social economy of publishing exists on", and she deploys this novel as a means to assess how it can both heal and harm projects. A large part of Yellowface takes place in terms of Twitter discourse and Goodreads reviews. By placing us in the shoes of the targets of its vitriol and negativity, the author attempts to make us privy both to the mental impact such harassment can have on a person, as well as to the fact that "allegations get flung left and right, everyone's reputations are torn down, and when the dust clears, everything remains exactly as it was." However, if nothing changes, it is also because someone is making a profit.[3]

Yellowface is a superb and intelligent book. Kuang is to be commended for taking to the field of battle in the war against the racialisation of literature and her defence of the basic right of an author to write about whatever they want without fear of their books being burnt or pulped.

 

 

About the Author

R F Kuang has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford and is now pursuing a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Literature at Yale.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[1] Race, class and social conflict in the United States- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/06/race-s06.html

[2] Babel is a goldmine of revolutionary politics- https://socialistworker.co.uk/reviews-and-culture/babel-is-a-goldmine-of-revolutionary-politics/

[3] Racism, scandal, and the rat race of publishing: Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

Bob Dylan –The Stories Behind The Classic Songs 1962-1969-By Andy Gill Welbeck – £21.71

 "Whatever the merits (or otherwise) of his subsequent work, and notwithstanding in particular the greatness of Blood on the Tracks, it's upon his sixties songs that Bob Dylan's reputation ultimately rests: that extraordinary sequence of records which unerringly tracked the tenor of the times as he moved through his various incarnations as raw young folkie, prince of protest, fold-rock innovator, symbolist rocker and country-rock pioneer."

Andy Gill

"In the dime stores and bus stations, People talk of situations, Read books, repeat quotations, Draw conclusions on the wall. Some speak of the future, My love, she speaks softly. She knows there's no success like failure and that failure's no success at all.

Love Minus Zero/No Limit Song by Bob Dylan

"In those days, artistic success was not dollar-driven. It was about having something to say."

Bobby Neuwirth

"The riot squad they're restless / They need somewhere to go / As Lady and I look out tonight / From Desolation Row".

Bob Dylan.

"Of all nations, the United States, with veins full of poetical stuff, most needs poets and will doubtless have both the greatest and use them the greatest. Their Presidents shall not be their common reference as much as their poets shall. "If the time becomes slothful and heavy, he [the poet] knows how to arouse it . . . he can make every word he speaks draw blood. Whatever stagnates in the flat of custom or obedience or legislation, he never stagnates. Obedience does not master him, he masters it."

Walt Whitman

It would be a foolish man or woman who would disagree with Andy Gill's supposition that Bob Dylan's work from 1962-69 was his best and established him as Rock and Roll's only genius and Noble Prize winner. The book takes the form of a dictionary of songs in chronological album order, allowing the reader to pick and choose which song they read about. Each album has an introduction by Gill.

Gill looks at every Dylan song on the following albums: Bob Dylan, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin', Another Side of Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde On Blonde, The Basement Tapes, John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline.

Gill writes on the recording of Blonde On Blonde, "Given the lyrical malleability […], it's perhaps best not to try and ascribe too literal an interpretation to 'Visions Of Joanna,' which is more of an impressionistic mood anyway. If it doesn't matter to the writer whether it's the peddler or the fiddler who speaks to the countess, why should it matter to us? The song remains one of the high points of Dylan's canon, particularly favoured among hardcore Dylanophiles, possibly because it so perfectly sustains its position on the cusp of poetic semantics, forever teetering on the brink of lucidity yet remaining impervious to strict decipherment."[1]

The book chronologically covers Dylan's formative years in small-town Minnesota, his move to New York City, and the folk scene in Greenwich Village. It ends with the controversy surrounding his "electric" conversion up to 1969.

Gill's book examines Dylan's controversial early period when he was accused of betraying the folk scene. His move to electric was openly and vocally seen as a betrayal, culminating in the iconic moment from the 1966 tour of England at the Manchester Free Trade Hall. When Dylan plugged in his electric guitar for the second set, a fan shouted, "Judas!" Dylan snarled, "I don't believe you," before turning to the band and urging them to "play it fucking loud!". 

Andy Gill's Bob Dylan – The Stories Behind The Classic Songs 1962-1969, while well written and at times insightful, is limited when it attempts to place Dylan's work in a more precise objective context. The period between 1962-69 was an extraordinary political time. Gill does little to examine Dylan's place in this ferment. Gill does not seem that interested in exploring the relationship between art, artists and social liberation.

As Paul Bond writes, "The folk music scene was regaining ground with the decline of McCarthyism and was seen largely as a product of "the Left." The idea of music that was able to articulate social and progressive concerns brought many broadly "leftist" artists to folk. Many of the guiding lights of the folk movement, like Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and the editorial circles of such influential magazines as Sing Out! and Broadside, had some affiliation with the Stalinist Communist Party of the USA. The Stalinists took a somewhat proprietorial attitude to the folk scene, but it attracted many songwriters trying to tackle serious social and political subjects in song. They were motivated, as the opening editorial in Broadside (which published many of Dylan's songs) put it, by the idea that "a good song can only do good."[2]

He continues, "Dylan's rejection of what was weakest in the folk scene, which stood in the way of a more complicated way of representing the world, took place under conditions of intensifying political crisis in the United States. He seems to have used the weaknesses of the folk milieu as part of a general move away from tackling social concerns altogether. (Although he has continued to write topical songs since that period.[3]

It remains to be seen if Gill will write on Dylan's more contemporary work. As David Walsh wrote, "A perusal of Bob Dylan's lyrics, at least its first half a dozen years or so, reveals a lively imagination at work, and sometimes deep feeling. Dylan can be witty, satirical, insightful, and genuinely outraged at American society's injustices. The lyrics can convey physical and psychic longing, both for "the beloved" and for recognition by society at large ". As said earlier, Gill is not interested in placing Dylan's art in a social or political context. He does not seem that interested in Dylan's later work.

As Matthew Brennan writes of Dylan's later work, "Cutting himself off from the source of the inspiration for earlier impactful songs, the career ambitions and an unfocused iconoclasm were nearly all that persisted. Except for some of his more moving songs about love and heartache in a later period, evasiveness and vagueness would become Dylan's guiding principles. The protracted process has led to the current news about the sale of his catalogue. Now very wealthy, Dylan has nothing to say about events that are overtaking the circumstances of his younger days.[4]

 

 

 

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[1] https://davidmarxbookreviews.wordpress.com/2021/04/20/bob-dylan-the-stories-behind-the-classic-songs-1962-1969/

[2] Ceasing to be the voice of a generation Paul Bond-9 November 2005 www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/11/dyla-n09.html-

[3] Ceasing to be the voice of a generation Paul Bond-9 November 2005 www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/11/dyla-n09.html--

[4] Bob Dylan sells his songwriting catalog to Universal for a reported $300 Million- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/16/bobd-d16.html

Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen-Peter Apps-Oneworld Publications 10/11/2022-Paperback- 352 Pages.

Peter Apps's book on the Grenfell Fire is a well-written and empathetic account of the corporate murder of 72 people. The book combines a degree of humanity, terror and technical detail in one book. Apps is a journalist and editor for 'Inside Housing' and has  written significant articles on the Grenfell Inquiry on Twitter and in newspapers that few have matched.

The Grenfell Inquiry into the fire has lasted five years and has largely been a whitewashing of events. Apps is heavily critical of the Inquiry but not to the extent that he believes this was an act of social murder. It has been clear from the outset that the ruling elite has covered up the true nature of this crime. Such a cover-up has been compared to the one involving the Hillsborough football stadium disaster in which 97 people died.

The British ruling elite is an expert in denying justice using public inquiries. They are deaf to the demands of the survivors. Yet still, millions of people live in unsafe, dangerous housing. Still, the government even refused to implement all of the limited housing safety measures recommended by Moore-Bick.

As Charles Hixson and Robert Stevens write, "The Inquiry bore witness to endless self-justifications by corporate and government bodies, shamelessly passing the buck for the use of shoddy, dangerous and illegal materials on the refurbishment of the tower even as documents confirmed that residents' concern about safety was treated with contempt. It has been painfully obvious to everyone since the immediate aftermath of the fire that a small number of individuals are culpable for the mass deaths at Grenfell, including the owners/decision makers at major contractor Rydon, cladding manufacturer Arconic, Irish insulation provider Kingspan, manufacturer of foam insulation, Celotex, the Conservative Party-run Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), and its Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) which managed the tower".[1]

One of the most important parts of the book is how Apps writes about the night of the fire, as told through the experiences of the people involved. According to one writer: "They put a human context to the tragedy: the lives, loves, challenges, dreams of those who died or whose lives were changed forever by what happened".

Still, after six years since the fire, nobody has been charged, let alone jailed. As Peter Apps correctly states, "Grenfell can feel like a past story—it's not. It's something that needs to be kept in the public eye if we want to see the companies responsible held to account. Grenfell didn't have to happen. This was a problem people were worried about—adding combustible materials onto the outside of buildings. The book brings together the story about how a tower block in one of the richest parts of the richest cities in the world clad a building in material chemically similar to petrol."

Apps book shows that The Grenfell Tower Fire resulted from profiting, negligence and a lack of regard for people living in social housing. A raft of construction companies, regulators, the Tory-led council and the government, have blood on their hands.

As the Marxist writer Frederick Engles once wrote, "When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains."[2]

While Apps doesn't entirely agree with the concept of social murder, his book is well worth the read and would seem to have sold widely and deservedly so.

 

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[1] UK: Grenfell Tower fire inquiry hearings end with guilty evading justice

8 August 2022-wsws.org

[2] The Conditions of the working class in Britain-Frederick Engels

Some Thoughts on Art and Identity

One of the more reactionary and harmful dictums that seem prevalent in today's society is that artists should only write about their own skin colour or gender and not choose a subject, show a world or create a character that differs from the artist in skin colour or gender.

According to James McDonald in his excellent article Where is our Zola? "This position, taken up by selfish elements of the upper-middle class, ultimately boils down to a scramble for the limited number of dollars spent on Art, literature and music. "Stay in your lane" is the popularised refrain for this self-serving prescription, which is cravenly obeyed by a disturbing proportion of otherwise reputable artists.

Art is always an approximation, never fully successful, but when done well, one that embraces the otherness and the sameness of writer, reader and subject in the act of inquiry and compassion. To rope off subjects from artists is to deny the nature of Art itself and to deny activity that is fundamental to being human. A new form of censorship in publishing has accompanied the rise of identity politics. The new censors are called "sensitivity readers." Briefly, sensitivity readers function as the "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" inquisitors of the publishing industry, reading manuscripts and hunting for potentially "offensive" or "inaccurate" material. The imposition of upper-middle-class identity politics upon culture is censorious and philistine. But it is also reactionary. The ultimate targets of identity politics and the language of "offence" and "sensitivity" are the working class and its democratic rights. Concepts like "offence" and "sensitivity" are nebulous abstractions and subject to broad, not to say nefarious, interpretation. While today it may be deemed offensive to call someone "fat," in future we may be told that matters of class, class struggle and socialism are upsetting and offensive."

It is rare nowadays for any artist, let alone a writer, to go against the stream on this matter. To her eternal credit, the writer Rebecca F Kuang has opposed the idea that authors should not write about other races or gender. At the recent Hay Festival, Kuang spoke of the 'weird kind of identity politics in American publishing. It really does not make sense to categorise books this way. Kazuo Ishiguro: you'd never find his books in the sci-fi fantasy section, but The Buried Giant is.” Also at the Hay Festival was the world-renowned author Pat Barker[1] who said she distrusts publishers'' 'fashionable' efforts to boost diversity.

Kuang is a well-respected and best-selling author of books such as Babel and The Poppy War. Her most recent publication YellowFace" is a biting satire on the publishing industry. Saying of Yellolwface that "If I were a debut writer, I wouldn't have dared to write this book.

Kuang said she found the idea that writers should only write about characters of their own race "deeply frustrating and pretty illogical".  Kuang believes that that problem is not just confined to the publishing industry but has become a political issue saying that the situation has "spiralled into this really strict and reductive understanding of race".

As the Marxist writer Niles Niemuth wrote, "The American ruling class (alongside its European counterparts) is promoting racialist politics and racial division to undermine the class unity of the working class amidst the rise of social inequality to ever greater heights, the eruption of mass protests over police violence and the growth of the class struggle in the US and internationally. The push to present every social problem in the United States as a racial issue is a reflection of the deepening crisis of world capitalism and an effort by the Democrats, the trade unions and the pseudo-left to stave off a united, independent working-class offensive against the capitalist system."[2]

Kuang recently wrote that "You have to imagine outside of your lived experience – to write truthfully, with compassion". While it is doubtful that Kuang has read much Marxist material on Art, her comments are perceptive. They should open up a debate about the nature of Art in a capitalist society.

She would do well to take on board the thoughts of one of the most important Marxist writers, A.K. Voronsky, when he asked, "When does the artistic image appear convincing? When we experience a special psychic state of joy, satisfaction, elevated repose, love or sympathy for the author. This psychic state is the aesthetic evaluation of a work of Art. Aesthetic feeling lacks a narrowly utilitarian character; it is disinterested, and in this regard, it is when he writes organically bound up with our general conceptions of the beautiful (although, of course, it is narrower than these concepts). The aesthetic evaluation of a work is the criterion of its truthfulness or falseness. Artistic truth is determined and established precisely through such an evaluation."[3]

He continues, "There is no need to confuse the artist's special gift of insight with the desire to strike the reader by producing a beautiful turn of phrase, a special style, or a totally new work of Art. Such a desire usually leads to pretentiousness, deliberate overrefinement, excessive floweriness and artificiality. The work becomes incomprehensible, and the reader, like Turgenev's deacon, says to himself: "Dark is the water in the clouds," and "Thus be it beyond our ken." Many contemporary poets and prose-writers commit this sin, and they confuse the ability of the artist to see what no one else has seen with a desire to astound the reader."

Kuang does not hold out much hope that the publishing industry will change. If anything, she believes it will get worse. Noises made in 2021 to support change went out the window. She says there was “a lot of chatter, but no substantive support for those authors, no real commitment to diversify lists or the faces of people working on the other side of publishing."

When the staff at HarperCollins, her publisher, went on strike for better pay and working conditions while her novel was in production – Kuang co-hosted strike rallies for the union. When I asked her about her hopes for the publishing industry and her writing going forward, she answered, "I hope everyone unionises."It is hoped this militancy is reflected in her future work. I highly recommend Yellowface and all her previous novels.

 

 

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Barker

[2]Race, class and social conflict in the United States- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/06/race-s06.html

[3] — A. Voronsky, Art as the Cognition of Life

Hooked: Addiction and the Long Road to Recovery- by Paul Merson- Headline Book Publishing – September 16 2021

Hooked is Paul Merson's brutally honest and eminently readable memoir about his thirty-year addiction to drugs, gambling and drinking. This is not your run-of-the-mill footballer's memoir, as it was nominated for the Whitbread book prize and serialised in The Times newspaper.

Merson was a professional footballer winning two First Division titles with Arsenal and was arguably one of the finest players of his generation. But for all his football career and beyond, he was addicted to alcohol, drugs, and gambling. His addictions, coupled with deep depression, led him to thoughts of suicide 'I've come to realise that I'm powerless over alcohol ... I'm an alcoholic. My drinking and gambling have left a lot of wreckage.'I wanted to kill myself. I couldn't go on anymore. I couldn't see a way out.'

Fortunately, he managed to face his demons, saying, 'One day, I was walking home from the pub late on a Sunday evening, and I thought I've had enough of feeling like this, every day of my life. I rang up Alcoholics Anonymous the next day, and since then, I haven't had a drink.'

Merson estimates he lost over £7 million on gambling since becoming addicted, playing cards as a teenager. He even took the deposit he and his wife had saved for a new home and spent it on gambling. Although not mentioned in the book, when Merson was asked by Cambridge and Imperial College London researchers to have his brain hot-wired to one of their machines, it went haywire when he felt tempted to have a bet. His brain was docile when shown images of family life and beautiful natural scenery, and when shown dice throwing or a roulette wheel, it went mad.

Merson's story is by no means unique, as one person a day dies from a gambling-related suicide. It is estimated by the Gambling Commission that there are over two million people in the UK who have a gambling addiction. Most of these people run up large debts and are prone to depression; some end up killing themselves.

While Merson is heavily critical of the gambling industry, his book does not delve into the capitalist nature of the gambling industry. The industry is one of the most predatory enterprises, predicated on the mantra that the 'house' always wins. Merson's despair is felt by millions of people like him, and the betting companies like Bet365 prey on this despair and make millions out of it. It is no accident that Britain's highest-paid CEO has built her fortune on online gambling. Recently Denise Coates made an obscene £265 million.

As Jean Shaoul writes, "Gambling revenues are overwhelmingly based upon the exploitation of the poor as well as those on the threshold of poverty, for whom the dream of winning provides a means of escaping a world of constant nagging worry over how to make ends meet, horrendous journeys to work and then being exploited in low-wage jobs by highly paid bosses. General statistics for gambling, including online betting, show that just under half the UK's population (48 per cent) participate. After this, breakdowns focus on gender and age rather than income and social class. However, betting shops are most likely to be found in Britain's poorest communities, with the east London borough of Newham hosting 86 shops, including 18 on one high street, each with their permitted maximum of four fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs) that can take £100 bets every 20 seconds. This contrasts with 56 in the southwest London borough, which has a similar population but is considerably wealthier.[1]

Merson does not sugarcoat this terrible period of his life, and his book is an unflinchingly honest memoir of his battle with addiction. He is now recovering, having not touched a drop of alcohol or gambled. But his biggest problem is whether he could continue sober. In his own words, he says, "This is it. This is the last chance saloon." I hope he makes it, not because I am an Arsenal fan and Merson was one of a group of outstanding, talented footballers, but because he is trying to survive.

Perhaps more importantly, Hooked has opened up a national debate about addiction, depression and the damage they cause. As Shaoul states, gambling is an unhealthy industry emphasises social inequality, acting as a cash nexus, transforming everyone and everything into a commodity. Its growth is another example of social decay, a parasitic enterprise that appeals to the worst instincts: greed, individualism and indifference. Such diseased enterprises are the norm today, with governments embracing gambling at the same time as profits of the banks and other financial institutions have become ever more reliant on forms of speculation, divorced from the creation of social wealth, such as trading in currency futures."[2]

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[1] Britain’s highest paid CEO built fortune on online gambling- Jean Shaoul- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/12/05/casi-d05.html

[2] Britain’s highest paid CEO built fortune on online gambling- Jean Shaoul- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/12/05/casi-d05.html 

Lucy Hutchinson and the English Revolution-Gender, Genre, and History Writing-by Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille-Hardback-Published:10 October 2022-368 Pages

Yet after all this he is gone hence, and I remain, an airy phantasm walking about his sepulchre and waiting for the harbinger of day to summon me out of these midnight shades to my desired rest — Lucy Hutchinson, Final Meditation'

"I write not for the presse to boast my own weakness to the world" — Lucy Hutchinson.

Lucy Hutchinson and the English Revolution by Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille is an extremely important and long overdue evaluation of Lucy Hutchinson's historical writings and her Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson. The memoirs, although written between 1664 and 1667, were not published until 1806, and the Memoirs were largely forgotten in the twentieth century. It could be said that Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille rescues Lucy Hutchinson from the condescension of history.

Gheeraert-Graffeuille has had a little help in this rescue mission. The early 1980s saw more historians and literary scholars interested in Hutchinson and other female writers. Hutchinson's book challenges the assumption that early modern women could not write the history of the English Revolution. Gheeraert-Graffeuille shows that Lucy Hutchinson was a reader of ancient history and a gifted historian of the English Revolution. She should be ranked alongside Richard Baxter, Edmund Ludlow, and Edward Hyde.

The 17th-century philosopher and historian Lucy Hutchinson was the wife of Colonel Hutchinson, a regicide who sent Charles I to his execution in 1649. Without his wife's memoirs, this significant figure of the English Revolution would have been lost to history.

Lucy Hutchinson was born in 1620 to a class of landowning merchants. She had a comfortable childhood, and her father was a lieutenant of the Tower of London. Hutchinson was part of a  growing gentry, later among the most dominant class forces during the English Revolution. From a political standpoint, she dominated the marriage. She was able to pursue a significant political involvement that was not available to most women. However, she could not publish under her name using her husbands or remaining anonymous.

At the beginning of the English Revolution, the Hutchinson family rejected the Royalist cause and became firm Republicans. Her book Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson is an extremely important documentation of the English Revolution. While an intimate account of her husband's actions during the revolution, it is a highly lucid political and sociological analysis of British history's only successful social revolution.

Gheeraert-Graffeuille seeks to restore Hutchinson to the pantheon of writers of the 17^th-century English Revolution. Figures like Thomas Hobbes, one of the most important early materialist thinkers, tend to dominate mainstream accounts of the English Revolution.

Hobbes wrote at a time of war And revolution in Europe. Particularly endemic was the Thirty Years War. This war shaped Hobbes's world view leading him to write his world-famous view of the state of nature expressed in chapter 13 of Leviathan, in which he describes the life of man in a state of nature as "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short." The state of nature was how human society fell when civil society broke down. Ann Talbot said, "For Hobbes, the state of nature was not an abstract, theoretical construct. It was something that existed in large parts of Europe. Hobbes's response to these very real causes of fear was to attempt to construct a scientific and materialist theory of politics that was revolutionary in its implications and was to reverberate through the Enlightenment.

Hutchinson was a different type of thinker than Hobbes. As Chris Dite writes, "Hutchinson diverges from Hobbes. "Disorder" is not some wild state of nature but the corrupt existence of man-made hierarchies. "Order" is their destruction and replacement with something natural, good and just. Think of her order-and-disorder schema as a kind of "socialism or barbarism" for the first revolutionary movement of early capitalism."[1]

Hutchinson, according to Dite, sought to steer a middle course. He writes, "Two disastrous poles emerge in Hutchinson's account. The first is Oliver Cromwell and his Grandees, who successfully vie for a republican oligarchy. Hutchinson is too proudly independent to support their brutal centralisation, and she condemns them as corrupt slaves to their ambition. The second is the Diggers — proto-communists who "endeavoured the levelling of all estates and qualities." This is no less disturbing to Hutchinson, who viewed private estates — overseen by good-hearted landlords committed to justice for the poor and the mighty — as the model community. So this victorious Hutchinson — so attuned to the power dynamics of revolutionary change — finds herself too "virtuous" to further usher in any new world. As Cromwell's dictatorship fell apart upon his death, the monarchy returned to power in 1660. John was arrested on suspicion of plotting against King Charles II and died in prison."

Despite the woeful lack of media coverage, this is an important book. It rightfully restores Lucy Hutchinson's place amongst the great figures of the 17^th century, such as Hobbes, Harrington, Baxter, Edmund Ludlow, and Edward Hyde.

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[1] https://jacobin.com/2022/11/lucy-hutchinson-regicide-king-charles-i-memoirs-english-civil-war

Review: Prophet Against Slavery: Benjamin Lay, A Graphic Novel by David Lester, with Marcus Rediker and Paul Buhle- £8.99-Verso Publications.

 

"The barbarities and desperate outrages of the so-called Christian race, throughout every region of the world, and upon every people they have been able to subdue, are not to be paralleled by those of any other race, however fierce, however untaught, and however reckless of mercy and of shame, in any age of the earth".

William Howitt: "Colonisation and Christianity: A Popular History of the Treatment of the Natives by the Europeans in all their Colonies." London, 1838,

"If money, according to Augier, "comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek," capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt".

Karl Marx

It should be as given that this graphic novel about the early Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay will resonate with today's struggles against oppression and modern-day wage slavery.

The story of Benjamin Lay's life is long and complex. Still, it is to illustrator Daniel Lester and historians Markus Rediker and Paul Buhle credit that this graphic novel does justice to Lay's life and brings his remarkable story to a wider and younger audience.

Benjamin Lay was born to a Quaker family in Copford, Essex, in the late part of the 17th Century. He was born a dwarf and ran away to sea from an early age. It would not be an overstatement to say that Lay led a diverse life. He worked as a shepherd, glove maker, sailor, and bookseller. His worldview was a complex mixture of  Quakerism, vegetarianism, animal rights, opposition to the death penalty, and abolitionism. Lay, while being anti-slavery, was not anti-capitalist. He did shun the trappings of wealth that his business acumen brought him. While in America, he lived in a cave with a library of two hundred books. His 12 years at sea were a seminal period for him as he experienced the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade in the West Indies.

Lay saw slavery as an abomination and would dedicate his life to its abolition. His campaign was unorthodox, and his radical movement included what can only be called "guerrilla theatre" against the Quaker capitalist ruling elite who owned slaves. In a  Burlington Friends Meeting House in New Jersey, he enacted one of his guerilla actions at a prayer meeting denouncing the slave owners in the room. One of his more famous actions was soaking slave owner Quakers in fake blood. Lay said, "All slave-keepers that keep the innocent in bondage, pretending to lay claim to the pure and holy Christian religion, commit a notorious sin. Thus shall God shed the blood of those persons who enslave their fellow creatures." Such was the class hatred of the ruling Quaker elite. Lay was only "reinstated to the fold" in 2017. The Abington Quakers of Pennsylvania recognised him as "a Friend of the Truth". London Quakers followed suit by declaring "unity" with Lay's spirit.

As Sabrina Jones points out, "Arriving in Philadelphia, the Lays were dismayed to find the "City of Brotherly Love" was also rife with the buying and selling of "fellow creatures" by members of their faith community. For his dogged denunciation of Quaker slaveholders, Lay was thrown out of four Quaker meetings, including Abington Friends, near Philadelphia, where he eventually settled in a cave with Sarah and his library of hundreds of books. Though largely self-taught, Lay wrote a fierce polemic of a book. All Slave-Keepers that Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates was printed by Benjamin Franklin, who discretely left his name off it to avoid offending his Quaker clients. It was published without the approval of the Quaker leaders, who bought ads in the newspaper to disavow the book and its author."[1]

As Markus Rediker states in his book Lay despite heavily influencing 19th-century U.S. abolitionists, was lost to history. You might say Rediker rescued Lay from the condescension of history. For most of his life, Lay led almost a single-handed campaign against the Quaker elite, who made handsome profits from slavery. His initial campaign took place in America. In Prophet Against Slavery, Rediker explains the importance of Lay. "David Lester, Paul Buhle and I created this graphic novel to recover his inspiring life for our tumultuous times," He was a revolutionary, attacking rich men who "poison the earth for gain". He believed that human beings and animals were "fellow creatures" within the natural world.

Honestly, I have never been a great fan of graphic novels, but artist David Lester's book, while not an easy read, turns out to be a stunning visual experience. He keeps his storyline simple and lets his drawings give the reader a deeper insight. This graphic novel is adapted from the superb biography The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist by Marcus Rediker. Rediker did an essay for this book.

As Rediker highlights in his book Lay's significance was that he was one of the first radicals to call an end to all slavery in whatever form it took. He refused to consume anything produced by slave labour. Lay was opposed by a significant section of Quakers, who had grown fat on slavery. As Rediker points out, these Quakers played a massive part in the bloody rise of American capitalism. The New England Puritans and Quakers became some of America's most significant industrial leaders.

As Karl Marx wrote, "The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.[2]

Although only touched upon in Lester's book is Lay's acknowledgement of the importance of the English Revolution to his struggle against slavery. Lay had a  deep connection to the radicals of the English Revolution. Rediker said, "I've identified five major influences, and the first and the most important of these was a specifically radical variant of Quakerism. Now Quakerism goes back, actually, to the English Revolution. It began as one of many radical Protestant groups.

The others were the Levellers, the Diggers, the Seekers, and the Ranters. The Quakers are all part of this. Those groups arose during the English Revolution when royal censorship broke down as the king, King Charles I, and Royalists did battle with Oliver Cromwell and the Parliamentary side. These radical groups burst into print in that situation, offering from below their solutions to the day's problems. Quakers were part of this, and there was a man named James Naylor, who was an especially radical Quaker. I basically argued in my book that Benjamin Lay channelled this early generation of Quakers. They were very activist. They performed at street theatre. They were very confrontational. He managed a couple of generations later to reach back to them in order to revive that spirit of Quakerism."

It would appear that Benjamin Lay is many things to many people. Lester writes, "I think of this book as being an activist book. It's meant to propel activism, and Benjamin Lay's story is pointing activists to the importance of having a long-term view of social revolution. For Lay to do what he did for 27 years dedicatedly is inspiring. He had the integrity, fortitude and stamina needed to work in a situation where you might not live to see the results of your activism. In some cases, revolutions occur overnight. But we know that revolutions can backslide and can be full of problematic areas. So, you must be in for the long haul and know it's a long, messy road to social progress."

I can understand why Lay is attractive to elements within the Psuedo Left. Despite his seemingly revolutionary activism, Lay was no anti-capitalist, let alone an early Marxist. However, Lay's life and struggle contain lessons for today's workers in struggle and is an important introduction to students in schools and colleges and the wider public.

 

Notes

The return of Benjamin Lay-by Naomi Wallace and Marcus Rediker-Tuesday, 13 June – Saturday, 8 July 2023-Finborough Theatre-https://finboroughtheatre.co.uk/production/the-return-of-benjamin-lay/

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[1] https://www.dsausa.org/democratic-left/from-slaveowners-to-abolitionists/

[2] Karl Marx. Capital Volume One-Chapter Thirty-One: Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist-https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm

The Revolutionary Politics of Angela Davis-Naima Omar.Bookmarks Publication-£3.00-2020

This pamphlet is based on a series of articles written by Naima Omar. It includes a speech by Angela Davis after her release from prison in 1972 and an interview from June 2020 on the Black Lives Matter uprising. From a political standpoint, the Socialist Workers Party member Omar largely whitewashes the reactionary Stalinist politics of Angela Davis.

Davis was a political activist and writer from an early age, joining the Communist Party USA when she was fifteen. Her writings ranged from the struggle against racism and for prison abolition, for women's liberation to campaigning against imperialist war, and in support of Palestinian rights.

According to an article by Helen Halyard “ Davis has joined with other academics, such as Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, to promote the theory that blacks in America remain the victims of a caste system epitomized by the disproportionate number of African Americans in the US prison system. Davis and a section of the pseudo-left have latched on to the massive growth of America's prisons as a rationale for promoting racial politics to divert attention away from the more fundamental class issues. While referring to the capitalist economic system, Davis described the prisons largely in racial terms, at one point saying, "it was a way to manage black bodies in the aftermath of slavery."[1]

Her most famous work was: Women, Race, and Class, published in 1981. While useful from the standpoint of a historical study of female oppression, its heavy concentration on race over class stemmed from her philosophical outlook. Davis's central premise is that race, not class, is the fundamental division in American society.

From an early age, she was influenced by philosophers such as Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault. Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) was a leading representative of the Frankfurt School. After fleeing the Nazis, Marcuse came to the United States, where he became a university professor and wrote several books, including One Dimensional Man, that influenced the 1960s student movement. Marcuse, as is well known, worked for the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA, during World War II.

Marcuse's anti-working-class politics led him to believe a "proto-fascist syndrome in the working class" existed. He thought the "revolution" would not be made by the working class but by the young intelligentsia, small fringe groups or guerrilla movements. Its driving force was not the class contradictions of capitalist society but critical thinking and the actions of an enlightened elite. Davis's promotion of racial politics has absolutely nothing to do with Marxism. Her racial politics are the product of a strain of anti-Marxist thought going back decades, including postmodernism and neo-anarchism.

Suffice it to say the SWP mentions nothing of her reactionary political evolution. The pamphlet presents her as a radical activist still on the side of the oppressed. While mistakenly still seen as a figure of the left, she smoothly transitioned from left icon to "left" academia, securing a position at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has recently retired.

 

 

 

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[1] At University of Michigan symposium Angela Davis offers political cover for Obama- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/01/31/adav-j31.html