In the Gap

I’m able to place, with quite some precision, where my first voyage around Kendrick Smithyman collapsed. Somewhere between “Flying to Palmerston” and “Research Project”, I gave up: my copy of Peter Simpson’s Selected Poems has a spine all broken and detached up to this point and then, beyond, is untouched and elegantly new. Smithyman, in my first encounter, was too difficult, too obscure, too demanding to count as what I considered real poetry. (In those stupid judgements I wasn’t alone; my copy is marked, as almost all my teenage purchases are, with the tell-tale vivid of the remainders sale upstairs at Dunedin’s UBS). The further Smithyman travelled from his early ‘contaminations’ – Auden, of course, Dylan Thomas, alas – the less his work fitted into my own sense of what poetry should be and what it should do. These weren’t, in other words, poems which shouted at me things I already believed, the demand, it seems to me now, of most latter-day Romanticism.

Re-discovering Smithyman some years later as a gauche and homesick student at the Baillieu Library in Melbourne, all those supposed vices had transformed themselves into virtues. Smithyman was worth the wait. Here was a poet at once intellectually absorbing and emotionally engaging, lyrically deft and formally inventive, and, above all, demanding, and with a fine ear and sense for what demands were needed.

We were/are all of us
Alienated. That’s how we belong.
He was deaf, deafened by such a distance –

out there, if you took a firm line
You’d fetch no landfall until
Chile. Think of that now! after
An afternoon at an old German pub downriver,
Pub and museum of a folk.

This was their cargo’s way,
crooked as a founder’s motives.
The distance which you swallow at a gulp –
it was their distance.

(“Movements for Coastal Voices”)


The detailed carefulness of “[t]hat’s how we belong” sticks with me, as does Smithyman’s commitment to a poetics capable of wit and mischievous humour while all the while recognising the complexity and difficulty of material produced in the New Zealand social formation. As he argued in Poetry Yearbook (1954):

Society is complex in its activities and its relationships, and the members of a community are complex. A section of the poetry of and advanced and intricated community must inevitably be complex, and because complex, obscure – which is not to say that most of the obscurity cannot eventually be understood in the major part. …

We have to reckon in short that the mirror which art holds to nature may be a dark glass reflecting a paddock where undoubtedly dark horses are capering.

It’s fitting, given the first gaps in my Smithyman experiences, that I’ve had to live through another, shorter, one on my way to encountering Scott Hamilton’s exciting selection of unpublished Smithyman poems, Private Bestiary. The first print run of this selection sold out very quickly – unusual, surely, for a poetry collection – and it was some months between my order and the book actually arriving here in Wellington. It’s worth the wait again.

Surely there is
a moral in those sandhills
if I had wit enough to tell it.

These “first steps into a private bestiary” (there are supposedly hundreds of uncollected Smithyman poems and drafts in his archives) is enormous fun: the poems themselves are beautiful – and often strikingly surprising – and the introduction and notes helpful and provocative. (Those who know the Reading the Maps blog will recognise the house style: erudite, engaging and engaged, witty, occasionally rambling).





Private Bestiary builds the case, already present in Peter Simpson’s selection, for reading Smithyman not as a self-consciously ‘difficult’ poet aiming for obscurity, but instead as another example of the Wordsworthian model of “a man speaking to men”, communicating about issues and themes of great difficulty, to be sure, but never in a needlessly off-putting or sterile manner. The great theme Private Bestiary selects and presents is the recognition that “there is / a rabid violence / in the earliest stories,” the violence of colonial settlement and expropriation.

This recognition is accompanied by an essential counter-tradition, the only way it can be given useful life: Smithyman’s poems – and it took the introduction and notes to bring this fully alive for me – are packed with the details of working-class Pakeha and Maori rebellion, the Red Feds, rebel unionism, unofficial history. There’s little pleasure here for liberal guilt or piousness; plenty of material to provoke the ‘rumour of another history.’

***

“Form fascinates when one no longer has the force to understand force from within itself. That is to create.”




There is difficulty in these poems, though, but it’s worth learning to seek in that difficulty the source of their pleasure. Smithyman’s formal experiments; his densely allusive world of private reference and location; his word-plays and asides building to a sense of menacing over-reading and excessive signification: all of these, I recognise now, are part of a pattern and artful design in the work – the source of the stimulation – instead of a flaws in pieces which could be perfected by a little lyrical smoothing out and simplifying. The broken, improvisational associations and asides of the poems in Private Bestiary point somewhere.

The strain here, and its symptom, an occasional obscurity, is History itself:

But whatever portion of this faculty we may suppose even the greatest Poet to possess, there cannot be a doubt that the language which it will suggest to him, must often, in liveliness and truth, fall short of that which is uttered by men in real life, under the actual pressure of those passions, certain shadows of which the Poet thus produces, or feels to be produced, in himself.




That language of real life, in the poems selected here, stresses both the dishonesty of Pakeha myths of origin, the anxious elimination of colonial history from our minds (“We are a myth of our making”) and its insistent presence, coupled sometimes with other social orders about, in this piece from 1965, to erupt:

A view of our circumstance is
narrowed: this side, unreal safety.
Down in the valley men console
in a thoroughly public bar.


*****

The other, compelling, case made in Private Bestiary is for Smithyman as regionalist. The Northland Smithyman loved so much may as well be a foreign country to me, so different are its signals in botanical detail, historical reference and climate from my own stock of South Island memories and affiliations.

That sense of regional detail and particularity is useful, though: there’s nothing like an alienation effect or two to force the re-thinking of important issues.

There’s a politics to this aesthetics, too:

This is a political parable,
a harbour at low tide. Almost dark,
we’re only visitors, we don’t know twists and turns,
ins and outs of waterways or limits.
Like everyone else who doesn’t belong, we’ve heard
about disputed grounds, land claimed (and handed) back,
bad feelings, tensions, even death threats.

Yesterday afternoon, having made some of these notes earlier in the morning, I went to the premiere of Operation 8, a very important documentary about the “anti-terror raids” from 2007. I won’t write here about the politics of that particular – and ongoing – event, except to make the minimal observation that it represents a particularly shocking and disturbing injustice and assault on civil and political rights.



What struck me, amidst all the horrifying details of police maliciousness and media and Labour government connivance and complicity, was the ignorance so essential to the whole story’s success. There are the telling details of throw-away ignorance, to be sure – notably here the inability of most journalists covering the case to learn Tame Iti’s name – but a deeper, structural racism and ignorance (what might be glossed, following Smithyman, as provincialism against regionalism) sustained the entire media and police fantasy of a terrorist plot in New Zealand.

Time and again in the documentary people from Ngai Tuhoe being interviewed made reference to earlier land seizures, to sovereignty never ceded, to confiscation, struggle and resistance. They had a coherent, and detailed, narrative, reaching back to Rua Kenana, the 1860s East Cape wars, and further still. Each of them articulated demands for self-determination, and placed their own (extremely trying) current situation in an historical context of racism and oppression. Against this, the wildness and extremity of the Dominion Post’s coverage – and of the vocabulary from Bush’s “war on terror” translated into the New Zealand context – sounded maliciously fanciful and bizarre. The narrative those Tuhoe campaigners took for granted, though, was one which, I imagine, many viewers would have struggled to recognise, still less comprehend. National stories submerge the recalcitrant details of resistance.



The Ureweras are the site of plenty of Pakeha projection and fear, and those caught up in the October raids are the latest victims of that paranoia and its historical background. There’s important and detailed historical work – Judith Binney’s massive history, most obviously – which counters this, but something of the distortions of a nationally-minded pose remain.

Smithyman’s work reminds us of the ideological fictions which make up the imagined community “New Zealand”, of the regional specificity of so many of our struggles and campaigns, of the patchy – and often inconclusive – process of colonisation, of the presence of historical injustice pressing upon the present:

One thing for sure, Turuki isn’t going
to ride through here again; he’s been dead
a while since, somewhere over behind Ohiwa.
Things aren’t better than they were?
No way. No way at all.

("Moutain Stop")

I don’t find the familiar in this collection, then. No way. No way at all. And, for that very reason, it’s a New Zealand voice of a kind I’m finding more useful than ever.




Sources

You can – and should – buy a copy of Private Bestiary from Titus Books here.

Rebel Press have put out an oral history of the so-called “terror” raids, The Day the Raids Came. You can buy that here.

The line on form’s fascinations I’ve taken from p. 3 of Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (1981).

Zainichi as Bare Life

Everyone knows it yet
It’s not on the map
It’s not on the map so
It’s not Japan
It’s not Japan so
It might as well vanish
It doesn’t matter so
We do as we please

(Kim Si-Jong, “Ikaino Poems”, 1975)

Translation opens us to other worlds, certainly, but it can also perpetuate exclusions. The first time I read Yu Miri’s Goldrush its Zainichi context was lost on me, neither surname nor Pachinko-parlour setting, at that time, setting off any of the appropriate cultural cues amidst my own ignorance and confusion. It’s hard to image what Stephen Synder in his (excellent) translation could have done to make this context more apparent, without resorting to those cumbersome notes and appendages which signpost what’s supposed to work unsigned, and, besides, the blithely arrogant under-reading of that initial experience (“aren’t I multicultural, one of those rare folk who consume literary fiction in translation!”) may well mirror broader patterns of Zainichi invisibility and exclusion.



Yu herself, anyway, refuses the label of “Zainichi writer” just as assertively as her Korean surname reminds Japanese-language readers of her own inescapable insertion into social ways of inscribing ethnicity and attendant racial oppression, and her darkly humorous, exacting stories can be read for their unsettling and probing observations on heterosexuality and sexual oppression or the nuclear family and violence as much as for any insight into Korean experience. Yu’s achievement, Lisa Yoneyama argues of Fullhouse, is to “probe for clues with which to disturb” the “problematic arrangements” of the modern family. Far from denying the importance of the Korean struggle, though, for Yoneyama – and I think she’s right – writing of this kind “can be disconcerting and threatening to those who desire to maintain the stabilized boundaries of family, ethnic community, and national polity and history, for they reveal and criticize the mutual imbrications of racism and bourgeois family values.”



It’s been quite a few years since I spent time being productively disconcerted by Yu’s writing, but I’ve gone back to her these last weeks after engaging with the scholarship of Sonia Ryang. A displaced intellectual and powerful writer, Ryang is an engagingly precise and provocative guide to the complexities of the situation for Koreans in Japan, and her scholarship – a model of lucidity, engagement and sheer intellectual excitement – stirs up all manner of questions official politics would prefer left unanswered.

Zainichi, in the usual liberal phrase, are described as “second class citizens” in the Japanese system: Ryang polemicises against the complacency behind this common-place. Zainichi are, of course, not citizens of any kind, second-class or otherwise, and part of their oppression stems from their systematic exclusion from all parts of Japanese political and social life. To be Zainichi is, Ryang suggests, to be reduced the quality Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life”, invisible, outside the rules and governing possibilities of the political world.

Besides, what is it to be Zainichi? We’re so used to talking about Chongryon-affiliated people as “North Koreans in Japan” that it takes the shock of Ryang stating the obvious to re-focus discussion: there are no North Koreans in Japan; Japan does not recognise the DPRK, and there are no official channels for DPRK citizenship, outside of diplomatic circles, to be maintained abroad.




DPRK-affiliated Zainichi are, then, doubly invisible. Mainstream anthropology, as Ryang points out, in framing most of its studies of Zainichi as studies of ‘outsiders’ in Japan, perpetuates this disenfranchisement. When considered from within, as a diaspora without homeland, the political priority and possibilities for Zainichi seem rather different.

There’s very little attention given, in media reports and elsewhere, to the historical complexity of the situation which led to their being ‘North Koreans’ in Japan: in insisting on this complexity, Ryang turns it to usefully activist and anti-racist ends. If most studies of diaspora look at the outsiders, what about turning attention to the host societies?

A society such as Japan that firmly stands on the belief in its monoethnicity might be unfit to be a host society for modern diasporas. I state this with a certain urgency: it is public knowledge that since 9/17, North Korea has been roundly demonised and Chongryun-affiliated Koreans marginalised and isolated. The current situation creates constraints not just on the diasporic community but on Japanese society as well (Ryang, “Visible and Vulnerable: the Predicament of Koreans in Japan”, 79)

***



The Zainichi struggle is, though, as anyone who knows the grubby history of Chongryon will be aware, not just a matter of exposing the lies and racism of the ruling order: it’s also a question of questioning, and opposing, stifling nationalisms and orthodoxies within the community itself.



Ryang takes the question of naming – the honmyo (true, Korean, name) and tsumei (‘passing’, Japanese, name) – and subjects this site of so much well-meaning, or not so well-meaning, dogmatism to useful interrogation:

It is all very well to condemn passing names as the legacy of colonialism. But as long as there exists strong discrimination against Koreans in Japan – whose mark is most clearly discerned by name rather than skin colour or accent, for example – the use of a name is no simple matter. When a subject prefers a particular name – no matter how compromising such a deployment may be in the eyes of the nationalist orthodoxy – how can others (ethnic community leaders, teachers, parents, or even the nation-state or history) force them to use another name? Whether a Korean name is honmyo for an individual is not a given, since otherwise it would be tantamount to assuming that one’s alien registration name has to be one’s real name. After all, who decides which name is true to the person? The law? The community? Parents? Teachers? Or the person herself? Rather than assuming that the “true self” exists in “true Korean names”, we should withhold conclusions about the authenticity of names. (Ryang, “Introduction, 14).

It’s not just the insistence on complexity which is inspiring; Ryang insists on individual agency and the capacity to struggle.

The very ambiguity of the question of names for Zainichi points to some of the political possibilities of the position they inhabit. Issuing ‘anthems from nowhere’, residents of the imaginary country which, in the words of footballer Jong Tae Sae, is “another country in Japan”, Zainichi, in their very in-between status, defy the nationalisms which disfigure the region:

More recently, as the association with either North or South has waned, the term zainichi, meaning “existing in Japan”, has become common currency for representing Koreans in Japan. This name does not come without problems, in my view. To begin with, the term is parodic; it inverts the reality of the treatment of Koreans by the Japanese state. In this system, Koreans are treated as outsiders and their exclusion is justified on the basis of that they do not have Japanese nationality. By calling them zainichi, as if they merely “exist” in Japan, the name obscures their clear disenfranchisement. Although calling oneself zainichi chosenjin or zainichi kankokujin no longer denotes exclusive association with either the northern or the southern regime, the contours of zainichi life are becoming more complex and volatile. The parody name zainichi condenses this complexity: in spite of the diversity of names for Koreans in Japan, not one captures them properly. (Ryang, “Introduction”, 11).



This condensed complexity inspires anti-racist organising and activism, from Zainichi groups in the United States to Tokyo.

There’s plenty in Ryang’s thought I disagree with: her writing consistently down-plays the importance of the struggle aspect of class struggle, and accedes too easily, perhaps, at times, to claims of Zainichi invisibility which in turn erase their obvious contribution, and importance, in Japanese working-class politics. (For an example of this, see her brilliantly argued but, to my mind, one-sided piece “The De-Nationalised Have No Class” in Japan Focus.)

It’s unusual, though, to encounter academic writing which combines accessibility and political urgency and intensity with carefulness and rigour. Now, while the humanities are under such sustained attack, her work stands out as an example of the sort of practice I want to take up and defend.

Sources

I’ve quoted from two collections here:

Sonia Ryang and John Lie (eds.), Diaspora Without Homeland: Being Korean in Japan (Berkley: University of California Press, 2009).

Sonia Ryang (ed.) Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin (London: Routledge, 2000).

Lisa Yoneyama’s essay is in Koreans in Japan. The Kim Si-jong quote is taken from Melissa Wender’s article in the same volume. Ryang has also published a number of other very useful books; one I’ve found particularly helpful is North Koreans in Japan : language, ideology, and identity (Boulder, Colo. : Westview Press, 1997).

With thanks to Shomi, who introduced me to Yu Miri's writing, and whose 2005 conference presentation started me thinking about translation in the Zainichi context.

地震

Fukushima, for me, still brings associations of calm and tranquillity, and red leaves. We holidayed up there in Autumn 2008, staying in what the Japanese call a pension, a wee B&B in the country. The red leaf viewing season was just starting up. It was extremely still, ordered, and quiet.



*

All sorts of images and stories cluster together in my mind when I think of Christchurch’s last earthquake. Most are to do with people I know and love, or with areas where particular memories have attached themselves. Others are more general , like those faces attached to media reports and newspaper headers.

Some of those stories now get re-processed into a new narrative and a ghastly sort of retrospection.




*

A week after Christchurch’s last earthquake this comment appeared on 2-channeru, the unmoderated sewer of the Japanese internet.

Under the discussion “Earthquake-hit New Zealand rejects Korean rescue team due to a concern with foot and mouth disease” on e of 2-chan 's users wrote

Koreans will behave disgustingly to get praise, which only lead to their bad reputation. If accepted help from Korean, NZ will forever demanded to thank Korea. New Zealand knew this and that’s why they rejected Korean team.

Korean monkeys have vanity, but not sincerity, modesty, respect towards others.

Even though half of Korean population are Christians, their Christianity has produced evil Christians who are totally different from Christianity.

There are no other shameful people like this.

The discussion continued for some time

*

If you can love a city, I love Tokyo.



It took me a while to work out why William Gibson had put that on his twitter feed and then, as the flow of comments, panicked questions and re-tweets of civil defence instructions built up to a rush, it all became frighteningly clear.

Loving Tokyo has always, in more of less macabre ways, involved feigning indifference or excitement about natural disasters and the dangers of living on earthquake-prone, unstable islands. Inhabitants of Edo used to boast of their city’s devastating fires, and Edward Seidensticker’s Low City, High City reports, with quite some high conservative-aesthete pride, that, after one of early Tokyo’s many massive fires, Ginza stores re-opened with parts of their property still burning.

Isn’t some of the attraction of Neo-Tokyo, from Akira to today, in this sense that we – those who know how to love Japan – are already in that future, already living in a post-apocalyptic landscape? It takes real devastation, and the hurt of real loss’ humdrum details and complications, to dislodge that self-indulgence.

*



Junichro Tanizaki, initially at least, exhulted in the Great Kanto Earthquake:

When the earthquake struck I knew that I had survived, and I feared for my wife and daughter, left behind in Yokohama. Almost simultaneously I felt a surge of happiness which I could not keep down. “Tokyo will be better for this!” I said to myself […] Tokyo too would be rebuilt in ten years, into a solid expanse of splendid buildings like the Marunouchi Building and the Marine Insurance Building. I imagined the grandeur of the new metropolis, and all the changes that would come in customs and manners as well. An orderly pattern of streets, their bright new pavements gleaming. A flood of automobiles.

Retrospection, again: we’ve all now, after this weekend, seen a flood of automobiles.

*

関東大震災



150 000 people died in Kanto Dai-shinsai, the Great Kanto Earthquake of September 1923. Thousands died during the quake; half of Tokyo was destroyed, and Yokohama was almost completely ruined. After Kanto Dai-shinsai, around 1.5 million people – over half Tokyo’s population – were left homeless. Many more people died in the fires which followed the earthquake:

It was not long before the place turned into a veritable sea of fire, and one of the most horrible and shocking events ever recorded in the annals of human tragedy followed; hell was indeed let loose on earth.

That’s the official government narrative, from the Home Office 1923 publication The Great Earthquake.

A different kind of hell was let loose after this. Rumours spread that Korean day-labourers and migrants had started the fires, and were poisoning water supplies. Gangs of thugs carried out pogroms in Korean areas, beating and killing perhaps as many as several thousand.

Eventually, to avoid international attention, the army was used to restore order. But the massacre served a valuable role for the Japanese state and, amidst the chaos, the secret police took the opportunity to abduct and murder scores of communists, trade unionists and Korean activists.

Shintaro Ishihara's name for Koreans today? Sangokujin, outsiders who, as he stated in 1999, might be a danger in the case of natural emergencies. This is the man who runs Tokyo.

*

On the Establishment of Righteousness and the Safety of the Country



Earthquakes and tsunami in 1257 came close to destroying Kamakura. Plague, famine and riots followed. Kamakura’s Buddha is a major tourist attraction now; it’s also all that stands from the historic city after the earthquakes of 1257, 1369 and 1494.

It was out of the upheaval around the 1257 quake Nichiren’s Lotus Sect of Buddhism developed and, after its initial period of persecution, shaped Japanese culture and society.

*

人間の国

Government bungling, bureaucratic ineptitude and shonky practice led the novelist Oda Makoto, after the Great Hanshin Earthquake, to ask “Is this a human country?” Ten years on, critic Uchihashi Katsuto echoed this question.

Japan is an enormously wealthy country, and yet official responses to the Great Hanshin Earthquake were unable to deliver simple necessities like shelter, food, and emergency supplies. Survivors stayed, trapped, while rescue workers were kept waiting.

All this occurred in a city dotted with unsafe buildings and structures made in a social world characterised by yakuza influence, corruption and profiteering. The sins of the building industry stand as a symbol of the underside of the ‘boom’ imagery of the Showa era.



1995 was, of course, the same year that Aum released Sarin gas in the Tokyo Subway system. It’s unsurprising, then, that imaginations in the early years of the Heisei era turned towards the apocalyptic.



*

Another image from the Great Hanshin Earthquake. Speaking to the Kobe Shimbun in November 1995, a 59-year-old Korean man linked surviving the earthquake to developments in an anti-racist consciousness:

Since the tragedy and disaster was a common, shared experience, we have come to enjoy mutual safety and conversation when we meet on the street. Those people who used to adopt a certain attitude have stopped assuming it.

The newspaper itself took the opportunity to editorialise for foreigners’ voting rights, by no means an easy political position to assume:

Without mixing with people from other cultures and experiencing their cultures, we cannot find uniqueness and strength in cities like Kobe and Osaka […] the uniqueness of this international consciousness is a significant factor necessary to rebuild the areas. We can even go so far as to say that without the cooperation of foreign residents, it would be impossible to rebuild Kobe and Osaka. In order to reconstruct our cities, we need to build a new society of coexistence and choose a path of reconstruction together with our foreign residents.

*

H. Porter Abbott, in his Introduction to Narrative, uses the term “narrative jamming” to describe “this experience of indeterminacy, of wanting to know and not being able to know…itself a kind of pain.” Those experiences which most steadily resist narrativizing – I mean here of course death above all – are the ones on which we bring the most insistent narrativizing impulses to bear.

Perhaps this is why most reports on disasters, when they strain towards profundity, are so often empty, so often pompously bare. It is, certainly, why I’ve offered you these fragments of earthquake anecdotes, and feel the need to write something on earthquakes while, at the same time, realising there’s nothing of value I can add now.

It’s also why, I think, what moved me most in the weeks following the disaster in Christchurch were reports on everyday experience more than poems or services or silences produced to mark our distress. The day the quake struck I was following a discussion at Giovanni’s blog on twitter and speed and communication; what followed matched the post as a sort of horrible hidden polemic, as each of us re-posted requests for confirmations of loved ones. In later weeks, I’ve been moved by friends’ accounts of makeshift toilet arrangements, dog anxieties, silt build-up.

An anxious night on Friday, then, as the phone lines jammed and Skype gave out and not everyone was on Facebook or Twitter or email. All our immediate friends and family are safe and accounted for, and I’m very grateful for that. There are comrades from groups we worked with when we lived in Tokyo – in the unions, in the socialist press – still missing, though, and I think of them and their families. We all worry about what’s next, about the reactor, about Fukushima and beyond.

As places for donations and workers’ aid become available, I’ll post their details here.

*

If you can love a city, I love Tokyo.

The Rev. Jan Cheong-Woon from the Asia Pacific Workers’ Solidarity Corea sent a message to his Japanese colleagues over the weekend. It ended with an old slogan, and a good one for these days:

We have had a terrible reminder of the destructive power of nature.

Long live international solidarity

Sources

I’ve taken the Tanizaki quote from Seidensticker’s Low City, High City. The official statement on the Great Kanto Earthquake is from de Boer and Sanders, Earthquakes in Human History (Princeton University Press, 2005). The Kobe Shimbun quotes are from Yasuko Takezawa, “The Great Hanshin Earthquake and Town-Making Towards Multiculturalism” in Graburn, Ertl and Tierney (eds.), Multiculturalism in the New Japan (Berghahn, 2008).

The 2-chan quotes are taken from Rumi Sakamoto’s very helpful “Koreans, Go Home! Internet Nationalism in Contemporary Japan as a Digitally Mediated Subculture”, published at Japan Focus. I’m not linking to 2-channeru itself for obvious reasons of political hygiene.

To the North, to the North

January’s Artforum has an interesting short essay by Joan Kee (not, unfortunately, available online). She subjects Ryu Hwan-gi’s 2002 painting Soldiers Longing for Return to the kind of close reading socialist realist works rarely receive, and comes up with some valuable reflections along the way. Prune the inevitable prose tics of Pyongyangology (Kim Jong-il as the “diabolically shrewd heir”, “one of the world’s most secretive countries…”) and there’s writing with real insight and use.

Ryu Hwan-gi is one of the DPRK’s foremost artists, and Kee reads this work against the resistance of its generic conventions to interpretation:

Socialist-realist works have an uncanny way of plunging their viewers into a narrative and then leaving them there without hope of an exit. This tends to close down interpretation so the work can be read only within the bounds of allegory.

Soldiers Longing for Return slips this particular allegorising knot, Kee suggests, by way of its size, depicting this scene on what is, for a socialist-realist work, a relatively modest, small-scale representation. That, and its stray details from domestic life, make “a case for an alternative domesticity cast squarely within the frame of the martial.”

I won’t rehearse any more of Kee’s argument here; it’s worth you looking up the essay to follow her thoughts there.

Instead, I’d like to leave a stray detail of my own, one which came up through this reading of a reading. Do we need finer distinctions within the groups of work we call socialist realist? Kee’s right that it’s worth registering the fact that “so many paintings produced outside the neo-liberal metropoles remain firmly wedded to socialist realism”, although I don’t find her political account of that continuity convincing. More important, perhaps, are distinctions which touch both problems of representation and of ideology.

Debates about Socialist Realism (the boy meets tractor school of film, as the joke goes) have lost most of their intensity on the left in recent decades because the Stalinist state capitalisms which were the approach’s patrons and producers are mostly gone. The line that the two qualities socialist realism had was that it wasn’t socialist and wasn’t realist fits that era, but repeating it again now won’t take us further.

More precise, maybe, to read this image with the Juche idea as the masterplot we’ve got in mind, instead of the Russian and Zhdanovite narrative the term Socialist Realism carries along inside itself. If Socialist Realism of the ‘classic’ kind carried out the ideological work of romanticising and celebrating a non-existent freedom (murals of happy workers decorating factories where bureaucratic exploitation flourished), North Korean art more often contributes to reinforcing a sense of history at a standstill, representing the present as endless re-runs of the first years of the Korean War. The repetition of martial themes in North Korean art is one thing; their exaggerated grotesquery of war’s dangers and destructiveness is quite another.




It’s a Sea of Blood, as the title of the famous film and opera goes. Labelling something propaganda is a first step; specifying the aims and influences of that propaganda, as any good advertising student knows, requires more detail still.

Against that context Ryu’s image and its turning of “the very private space of the bedroom into a public space.” What we’re being hailed as here, though, I don’t fully know.

Links

There’s an in-depth Al Jazeera documentary on the DPRK’s film industry you can see here.

And meanwhile the struggle to think about what Courbet called “real realism” continues: Gene Ray’s essay on "Dialectical Realism and Radical Commitments: Brecht and Adorno on Representing Capitalism" in the last Historical Materialism is very fine, and a good antidote if you’ve started at too many monumental lies for too long.

Stood Loyal Right Through

For a hundred and fifty-one days a lockout
The kids and Mum get a knockout!
The union funds pay, then run out
Hey, when will men have liberty
To stand together in unity?
A thousand votes but the company:
Lockouts! Knockouts!
Watch out, they’ll get the cops out!

This weekend is the start of a series of sixtieth anniversaries, all part of the complex story of how in 1951 Waterside Workers’ Union members were locked out of their job for 151 days. The lock-out and its supporting strikes – massive struggles in their own right – were part of one of those shameful episodes which give the lie to the idea that New Zealand history is a story of peaceful negotiation and social consensus. Lives were lost, democratic rights abolished, and people persecuted, all in the effort to smash the threat that the WWU’s confidence, militancy and idealism posed to the Cold War order.




So, it’s sixty years this Sunday since WWU members started to refuse overtime; sixty years Monday week since Holland’s National government declared a State of Emergency, suspending the most basic of democratic rights, and criminalising aid and publicity for the wharfies.

The heroism, dedication and courage of the men and women who fought that battle deserves celebration whatever its wider significance or consequence – reading reminiscences and accounts of the Lock-Out is an education in the power of ideas when combined with organisation, and a reminder of the astounding moral and intellectual resources workers’ organisations can summon in their defence. It’s a reminder, too, of the ruthlessness of those with power when their power and authority is threatened: Holland’s government made it an offense to provide food for locked-out workers’ families, and outlawed and censored any reporting or advocacy of the WWU’s side of the story (the vast bulk of journalism, liberal and otherwise, was perfectly happy to self-censor anyhow).




There is wider significance to this story, though. It’s one of those terrible defeats which contained within it the lineaments of a victory: if the watersiders hadn’t fought, what then for workers’ organisation and rights in the years following 1951? If National hadn’t faced 151 days of militant union activity, what confidence might they have had then, proceeding unchallenged? More than these mitigating factors, the WWU’s battle kept alive an ideal and example of self-activity and a vision of workers’ control in a Cold War-world determined to obliterate any trace of that tradition. Rosa Luxemburg, just before her own death, wrote about this peculiar kind of defeat:

What does the entire history of socialism and of all modern revolutions show us? The first spark of class struggle in Europe, the revolt of the silk weavers in Lyon in 1831, ended with a heavy defeat; the Chartist movement in Britain ended in defeat; the uprising of the Parisian proletariat in the June days of 1848 ended with a crushing defeat; and the Paris commune ended with a terrible defeat. The whole road of socialism – so far as revolutionary struggles are concerned – is paved with nothing but thunderous defeats. Yet, at the same time, history marches inexorably, step by step, toward final victory! Where would we be today without those “defeats,” from which we draw historical experience, understanding, power and idealism? Today, as we advance into the final battle of the proletarian class war, we stand on the foundation of those very defeats; and we can do without any of them, because each one contributes to our strength and understanding.

An important reason to celebrate, then, is to keep alive the memory of those men and women from whom we draw “historical experience, understanding, power and idealism.” The ‘enormous condescension of posterity’ has been more than usually condescending with this story; more often than not it’s been positively slanderous. Some years ago reviewer Don Aimer tried to wrap his contempt for the watersiders and their example in feminist garb:

It was all very well for the males to write up the dispute as a sort of industrial charge of the Light Brigade, an act of courageous defiance against intolerable odds in the face of fascist oppressors, but it caused a great deal of family disruption (interesting to contemplate were the values which required young people to give up their studies to earn money so that their fathers could remain staunch), marriage splits and hardship which continued in years for some cases.

Some concern, this, which erases the record of women’s involvement in the struggle as organisers, agitators, and leaders. Women were central to the lock-out, in both more traditional domestic roles and supporters, and as they developed or learnt new roles as fighters and campaigners. Women organised rallies, confronted police violence, spoke for the watersiders’ cause: they were, in other words, activists and active subjects in their own history, not the objects for our pity and pious ‘concern.’ Rona Bailey, who took great personal risk supporting the WWU, remembered: “People have asked me since whether I regretted being involved in all this because of the strain and stress. My reply was always ‘Never!’ It was a privilege to be involved in the struggle, and a phenomenal learning experience as well.” The distinguished feminist playwright Renee, whose play Pass It On pays tribute to the women fighters of 1951, recorded “today I think of all the women who stood loyal right throughout those 151 days and after. And I say to you, those women were not just marvellous, they were walking bloody miracles! Pass it on.”



Walking down Cuba Street in the weekend I imagine the scene sixty years ago, when unionists were attacked by police for holding a peaceful march, and batoned and beaten for trying to express their views.



*

For a hundred and fifty-one days, they shut up.
The secretary’s put in the lock-up
The country is told there’s a muck-up
They lock us out, then call it a strike.
The union is wrong unless it moves right
And working men must never unite
Or they’ll lock out, knock out,
Watch out, they’ve got the cops out.

Who did defeat the watersiders, then? One way celebrating and commemorating this great struggle can contribute to “our strength and understanding” is if it prompts us to reflect on these questions.

The standard liberal answer to this, usually, is that the watersiders were out of touch with the values of the mainstream of their society and, mislead by a waywardly militant leadership, they found themselves fighting an impossible struggle. Even the poet Bill Sewell, in his beautiful collection The Ballad of Fifty-One, echoes this line:

The men in the sitting-room
In shirtsleeves and braces,
a smoko getting out of hand,
and Jock full of headstrong phrases,
his head, his head, in the sand.

This misses the context and dynamics which led to the lock-out, though. One vital lesson for us from the ’51 is that we don’t pick whether to fight or not: the other side will do that for us. The question is always how that struggle is pursued. Having identified a union not prepared to go along with the Cold War consensus, New Zealand’s employers and the government were determined to provoke a fight with the watersiders in order to see them defeated. Sid Holland, in his own words, set out a challenge which had to be read as a provocation:

And I issued them what would be interpreted as being an ultimatum. And said that the government would be loath to take any extreme action, but we felt that, if conditions of emergency did exist, that we would require the powers of such a proclamation to deal with the situation.

Contrary to the liberal view, it’s a fantasy to imagine that a workers’ movement committed to democratic organising and political independence could have avoided a show-down.

The WWU’s leader Jock Barnes summed this up well, in his introduction to Dick Scott’s history, 151 Days:

"As surely as night follows day, an offensive by the Holland Government against the workers of New Zealand was inevitable. And years of inspired press propaganda had made it clear that the New Zealand Waterside Workers Union would be objective number one. Its record of progressive thought and militant policy, not only for its own members but for the working class as a whole, had made that certain ... The intended blitzkrieg developed into a long and costly offensive. While thousands of workers, their wives and children, suffered dearly, money power took some mighty blows. It is still licking its wounds. The boss is always the worker’s greatest organiser, and he educated tens of thousands of workers in the fundamentals of capitalist economy... The working class can thank those who fought for the conditions they still enjoy. Every day suffered by a miner’s wife and children, every further day that a freezing worker, watersider or seaman stood and fought back, reduced the chances of a general offensive."

More uncomfortable reflections follow this. Reading around the history of the lock-out, it’s soon clear that the National government would never have been able to sustain its attacks had it not faced a divided union movement, a supine parliamentary Labour opposition (Nash was “neither for the watersiders nor against them”, a position as baffling then as it is now), and a mainstream union leadership – in particular around Fintan Patrick Walsh – more concerned with neutralising the political challenge they saw in the WWU than with facing the threat the government’s offensive posed to all workers.



All this suggests, then, that most of the lessons we’ve learnt from 1951 are wrong. One of those lessons, for decades now, has been that unions can’t win in head-on confrontations with the government. Reflecting on the divisions within our own side – and the politics which hampered effective solidarity being sustained in that struggle – throw up questions of relevance for today. Tom Bramble, who edited Jock Barnes’ memoirs Never A White Flag, draws out the political conclusions from these questions:

Can it seriously be proposed that the New Zealand union movement has benefited from this cautious strategy? Union membership continues to fall, workplace union organisation is in disarray if not collapsed in many former strongholds, and cynicism about unionism is widespread. Over the long term, passivity is far more damaging to the union movement than defeated upsurges, for it saps the very life from the unions and lends no lessons to union activists other than frustration and resignation.

This 60th anniversary year is one in which we face new anti-union legislation, a Tory government, and uncertain economic times. I pay tribute to the bravery of the women and men of the ’51 and, in their examples, activity, and legacy, I think we can all look for lessons in our own time.




Sources

The images I’ve scanned from my copy of Dick Scott’s classic 151 Days: History of the Great Waterfront Lockout and Supporting Strikes (Wellington: New Zealand Waterside Workers’ Union, Deregistered, 1952).

The quotes from Bailey and Renee are taken from pp. 44, 48 of David Grant (ed.), The Big Blue Snapshots of the 1951 Waterfront Lockout (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2004), as are the lines of the anonymous poem “151 Days” (p. 21), although I first learnt these from Tony Simpson’s older Road to Erewhon.

Don Aimer’s lines are from New Zealand Books March 2005, p. 19, and are chosen only because I have them easily to hand: there are worse sentiments expressed by others elsewhere.

Tom Bramble’s questions are from p. 26 of his excellent introduction to Jock Barnes, Never a White Flag (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1998).

Bill Sewell's The Ballad of Fifty-One was brought out by HeadWorx in 2003, just before his tragically premature death. The quote I've taken is from p. 69.

Tokyo Compression

Alienation is one obvious masterplot in which to fix Tokyo Compression, Michael Wolf’s unsettling, voyeuristic images from the Odakyu line.

This certainly is how I first read these photographs, and how at first I framed them for others.



...in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind...the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another…the worker’s activity [is] not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self... (Marx, 1844 Manuscripts)

There’s no doubt Tokyo Compression provide us with a shock of recognition. Here’s one part of Tokyo’s “deep acidic loneliness…the city full of lonely people”, an unsettlingly specific catalogue of one part of everyday life which, to work, requires a sort of generalized lack of specificity, as commuters avoid eye contact or acknowledgement of physical presence in order to make it all bearable.



Rail networks link and connect, too; they’re prime sites for thinking through movements of people and goods, the working of a city and “the coordination of existential data (the empirical position of the subject) with unlived, abstract conceptions of the geographic totality.” These are images from a basic unit of Tokyo experience.

But masterplots lay traps. I sent these images on to a friend in Tokyo and got an angry response in return. She rejected the pity and disgust these photos worked to programme, the way they framed her as an outsider peering in on others, trapped like animals in a zoo display, presented without any agency or chance for choice or activity of their own.



I’d missed one obvious way of reading, mislaid by my own masterplot into a naïve, and patronising, underreading.

There is, to be sure, an ethical discomfort we should feel as viewers here: these are photos of people who clearly were uncomfortable being photographed (something Wolf has acknowledged and attempted to think through), and photos which place us in a very specific – externalised, cooly distanced – relation to what we’re gazing in at.



Remember, though: Glotzen ist nicht sehen.

I’d missed another point.



The city is a construction in space, but one of vast scale, a thing perceived only in the course of long spans of time…Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequence of events leading up to it, the memory of past experience. (Lynch)

These are images at pains to stress their own framing and devised nature – beautiful, certainly, in their use of stray detail and compression to ‘hold’ a moment – and that very self-consciousness sets off other questions.

Where’s the movement? Trains contain commuters, but they also carry them: they transport, they connect. A nicely practical aesthetic question, then: what does it mean to look at still shots like this, to see a rail network as it stops? What might be missing?

That becomes another way of asking, as I think more on it, about the possibilities of seeing alienation on its own, or whether we need to reach for the wider, dynamic totality of which it’s a part. That’s one way of saying there’s more to cities:

To be modern…is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one’s world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air. (Marshall Berman)



Like everyone else I have felt the also the chaos of the metro and the traffic jam; the monotony of the ranks of houses; the aching press of strange crowds. But this is not an experience at all, not an adult experience, until it has come to include also the dynamic movement, in these centres of settled and often magnificant achievement. (Raymond Williams)



Is that, finally, then, again a question of politics?

The reactionary nature of any realist aesthetics today is inseperable from this commodity character. Tending to reinforce, affirmatively, the phenomenal surface of society, realism dismisses any attempt to penetrate that surface as a romantic endeavour…Film is faced with the dilemma of finding a procedure which neither lapses into arts-and-crafts nor slips into a mere documentary mode. (Adorno)



The rail unions in Japan are about to start their annual Spring Offensive. That points towards another masterplot, of course, and one I wouldn’t know how to narrate off these images. I’ve left them hanging here, with counter-quotations which came to mind as I bothered over my friend’s reply, and the shallowness of my own first way of seeing, as a way of trying to keep the questions which came up at work. They’re hard questions, but old ones.

Sources

Thanks for Michael Wolf for permission to reproduce these images, and to David McNeill, who drew my attention to them in the first place. You can buy Tokyo Compresion here.

The line on Tokyo as the "city full of lonely people" is from Carl Shuker’s masterpiece The Method Actors, p. 126.

The Adorno quote is from “Transperencies on Film”, in J M Berstein (ed), The Culture Industry (Routledge, 2001), p. 182.

Marshall Berman, All that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity (Penguin, 1982), p. 345.

Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (MIT Press, 1960), p. 1

Williams, The Country and the City (Paladin, 1975), pp. 14 – 15.

The Rent Due for a Skull

This is a political parable,
a harbour at low tide.

Like most self-absorbed bookish people, I was a particularly narcissitic and introverted youngster. Who am I? is, naturally, every teenager’s favourite question, and one with a particular charge for those of us located in social formations shaped by white settler colonialism.

This painting helped with that query, and it still does.



Dunedin Public Library bought McCahon’s Otago Peninsula in 1947, shortly after it was first shown at Modern Books, and it’s been with them ever since. In the late 1990s and early 200s I worked at the library and, each day, made sure I’d look at this painting. It moved me intensely then, and still does, as much for what it represents as for its own artistic achievement.

What it represents is where, more or less, I’m from, and is the part of the world I feel the greatest attachment to, but McCahon’s appeal as a tool for teenaged myth-making suggests other, more symptomatic, affiliations for me now.



Most obviously, there are no people. That’s self-absorption again, sure (“people seemed rather profane”), but also it indicates a choice in political fantasies: South Island myth instead of “natural occupancy”. The fit between personal story and wider ideology seems so neat now, the gestures of affiliation so dishonest, I’m struck by how strongly they’re still felt.

Because, of course, this isn’t a landscape without people at all. The road out along the peninsula was built by convict labour and those convicts were prisoners of a one-sided war, victims of the government’s attack on the settlement at Parihaka in Taranaki. Prophets Te Whiti O Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi led resistance to land confiscations and the assaults of the Crown on their people’s land.

The response, as today’s Ministry for Culture and Heritage gloss it:

In 1879 the government began to survey 16,000 acres of the confiscated Waimate Plain without setting aside Maori reserves. In response, Maori, led by Te Whiti and Tohu, began ploughing land occupied by settlers. Arrests followed, but the pace of protest continued to grow. Parihaka became a symbol for many Maori, and its people received food and other supplies from many tribes throughout the country – including those as far away as the Chatham Islands.

On 5 November 5 1881 a force of almost 1,600 Armed Constabulary and volunteers, led by Native Minister John Bryce, invaded Parihaka. The Maori inhabitants, numbering about 2,000, put up no resistance. Instead they greeted Bryce and his men with bread and song. They were dispersed and Te Whiti and Tohu were arrested. The soldiers then systematically wrecked the settlement, and Maori tradition speaks of brutality and rape.

We visisted the memorial to the fallen on our way out to Taiaroa Head.








Their followers were scattered in convict gangs around the country. In Otago they were kept, in what must have been awful - and awfully cold and dark - conditions, and many of them died building the road out to Portobello.



You can still see the secure doors into the hillside, reminders of this act of confiscation and war.



I’m shocked, and chastened, to think how often I’ve been driven unthinking past these signs of colonialism’s recent - and unresolved - foundational acts of violence.

In actual history it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play the great part.

Colonial violence manages to be both pervasive and invisible. Here is the memorial to the dead and their unmarked graves, in the Northern Cemetery not far from my parents’ house, and on the way to my old high school.



Recognising that, and reflecting on its implications for what comes next, is essential. Most of the sneering done against white liberal guilt is part of a rear-guard action opposing not guilt but recognition of historical wrong (cf local variations on what Paul Gilroy calls postcolonial melancholia). You can’t feel for this part of the world and not learn to see it historically; I can’t think back on my earlier veneration for McCahon’s Otago Peninsula without seeing now some unconscious evasion.



But this isn’t enough, is it? Guilt paralyses, disabling more productive political responses (to say nothing of ‘white’ or ‘liberal’, two other terms I’d reject for reasons I’ll leave for another day). And I still love that painting, and for some of the reasons I first loved it too. Recognition of historical wrong-doing is essential, as is reparation from those responsible and, within our movement, support for the struggle which continues. Remembering all the variations on “the stain of blood that writes an island story” is one task but isn’t, on its own, enough.

Another peninsula memory suggests itself. This season last year, just back from Tokyo, in Dunedin for a friend’s wedding, we stayed overnight at a crib (holiday house) at Ōtākou. It was a marvelous night: swimming in early evening sunlight, enjoying a barbeque, drinking and talking with friends under the stars. It’s hard to think of many other situations where people of the kind I know could afford a beach-front holiday house. That party and that largely Pākehā gathering’s relaxed sociability was possible, though, because we were on Maori land. I mean this quite literally: it's Ngāi Tahu land. Te Runaka o Ōtākou administer the land on which the cribs are leased, and it is their conditions - no fences, no expensive developments, accessibility - which makes the area so affordable and friendly, a centre with a rich history of working-class holidaying and recreation (my own grandparents in the 1960s had something similar). Ōtākou is a centre for Kai Tahu, of course, and, from it, they’ve created quite special possibilities for Pākehā.

That particular hospitality is not an experience from which I want to generalize too glibly but, given the status of the foreshore in current New Zealand politics, it feels like one which matters.

So that, readers, is how I spent my summer.



A Note on the South Island Myth

Since it’s deployed in the more-or-less orthodox fashion above, I’m putting a wee note here to indicate it’s more complicated than all that (all that being, among other things, Stephen Turner’s line from Quicksands we all seem forever to be quoting about how “the will to forget the trauma of dislocation and unsettlement has taken the form of a psychic structure”). There’s much more at work. See Richard Reeve’s very thoughtful piece on the myth and contemporary poetry.

I should also make it clear here, if the text above isn’t, that what I’m criticizing is my own initial imaginative investments in McCahon, not McCahon’s own relationship with Te Ao Maori, some of the tragic complexity of which Ian Wedde has explored elsewhere.