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The loneliness of Pier Paolo Pasolini

Yes, it’s another, perhaps overdue, (mis)translation. There have been others which I didn’t feel did justice to their progenitors, so it’s taken this long to produce one I was prepared to release into the wild.
I really wanted to keep Pasolini’s own word solitude, not least because my favourite football stadium is also curiously called by that name. But it’s clear from the subject matter that what he’s discussing isn’t some kind of autonomous security so much as its opposite, a loneliness even within a crowd, and even when that crowd has an overtly amatory intent.

Pasolini, it is no secret to reveal, was an ardent, one might say addicted, pursuer of impersonal sex, especially among the back streets of Rome where, in the 1970s, such activity from a famous gay man could easily provoke a dangerous response. Indeed, it is generally considered, except by some conspiracists, that this is the way by which he met his horrific and premature end.

The poem I think speaks for itself, even when muffled and garbled by my mistranslation. There is little requirement for exegesis here, except perhaps in relation to the very final phrase, fratelli dei cane, which taken literally means brothers of dogs.

Decades on from Pasolini’s demise, I think he might appreciate the new acerbic allusion this phrase has accrued with the ascent of the right-wing Fratelli D’Italia party to rule in Italy. Their political opponents have, on occasion, used this as a term of abuse. It may even be the case that they are overtly quoting Pasolini. Solitudine is not, after all, an obscurely known text in Italy.

And if not this poem, it may be that they reference instead Pasolini’s Lettera del traduttore, or ‘translator’s note’ as we might say in English that he wrote to explain and introduce a (mis?)translation of his own – that of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. The whole letter is worth reading from the point of view of anyone interested in mistranslation or indeed translation. As this academic article indicates, it revolves around a central metaphor of a translator as a dog gnawing and worrying at a bone. Translators therefore are a kind of fratelli dei cane, he suggests.

Solitudine gives us another more personal meaning for that phrase, however, one embedded in the risky sexual practices he sought on those dangerous back streets of Rome in the years of lead, when political extremists like the Red Brigades and their right-wing equivalent, not to mention various mafias, brought continual terror to the country, a terror only compounded for a famous gay man in overt pursuit of anonymous sex in a devoutly Catholic nation in dark, windy, trash-filled alleys.

Pasolini captures the risk and the addiction, that such pursuit held for him, but also the inherent hollowness it left inside. I hope I have managed to convey a sense of his words, partly a confession but also a kind of mental dérive through his own sexuality.

Mostly I’ve preserved his somewhat unorthodox orthography. Finally, I am happy to accept the status he anointed both of us with, that of a brother to the dogs. I have gnawed at the bone of his poem as he chewed at the Oresteia. I hope that I have not disgraced him.

Loneliness (mistranslated from Solitudine, by Pier Paolo Pasolini)

You have to be really strong
to love loneliness; you need good, strong legs
and extraordinary resilience; you can’t risk
colds and flus and sore throats; you shouldn’t fear
theft or murder; if you must stroll
throughout the afternoon, even throughout the night,
you need to know how to do it without thinking; there’s nowhere to sit;
it’s some kind of winter; with a wind that cuts through the wet grass,
through the damp and muddy stones and rocks;
nowhere can comfort be found, there’s no doubt about that,
and besides, there’s a whole day and night ahead
with no responsibilities, no limits at all.

Sex is just an excuse. No matter how many encounters there may be
­- even in winter, when the roads are abandoned to the wind,
among the expanse of trash piling up against distant buildings,
there are many – they’re still only moments of loneliness;
warmer and more alive is the kind body
which anoints you then departs,
whereas the lover who deserts you is colder and more deadly;
this is what fills you with joy, like a miracle wind,
not the innocent grin or shady arrogance
of those who then depart; carrying away their youth,
so enormously young; and in this way it’s inhuman
because it leaves nothing behind, or rather, it leaves only
the same mark in every season.

A boy with his first lovers
is nothing less than the fertility of the whole world.

And the world comes to him like this, appearing and disappearing,
like a shapeshifter. Everything else remains the same,
but you could wander through half the city and never find it again;
the act is over, repeating it becomes a ritual. And so
loneliness grows bigger even if a whole mob
was waiting for their turn: the disappearances grow –
leaving is fleeing – and the next one looms over this one
like a duty, a sacrifice to the death wish.

But as time passes, fatigue makes itself felt,
especially just after dinner time,
yet for you nothing changes: you just about manage not to scream or cry;
and it would be serious if it weren’t just fatigue,
and maybe a little hunger. Huge, because that would mean
that your desire for loneliness could not be more satisfied,
so what’s waiting for you if something no one calls loneliness
is the true loneliness, the kind you could never accept?

There’s nothing in the world you could eat or drink,
no possible satisfaction that’s worth this endless walking
through these poor streets, where you have to be both strong
and disgraced, a brother to the dogs.

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AI is a horse with three legs

A lot of people are extremely concerned about the prospect of AI superintelligence, and the possibility that it could supersede and perhaps even destroy humanity.

I spent a lot of the past four years or so researching this exact topic.

But increasingly it’s coming to look like AI is actually shit. In other words, it’s not going to take over the world and send Terminators to kill us (what I call the Skynet Complex). And nor are we going to luxuriate in Star Trek-style indolence while AI does all the heavy lifting.

AI can replace *some* human performance, but as we are learning, it’s usually inaccurate, unreliable and expensive. Most companies who’ve used AI have lost money on it.

But as Cory Doctorow notes, AI is an enormous danger. It’s going to destroy our global economy as it eats up all the investment and provides almost nothing except environmental degradation and water shortages in return.

It’s a combination of the world’s biggest nothingburger, tulipmania for the digital age, and the displacement of people in work by unreliable, fantasising, digital plagiarists.

We should stop AI now, not because it might kill us like Terminators, nor because its creators stole all their training material, nor because it’s an environmental disaster. But because we’re betting the global economy on a horse with three legs.

See what Cory says here.

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Where exactly did the Roman Empire end?

Like a lot of questions about history, this is both superficially straightforward and on closer reflection highly philosophical. I have a very straightforward answer for you, one that I have never seen referred to in print or pixel before, but let’s take the complex route first.

We’d need firstly to define what we mean by Roman Empire. The Ottomans, the Germans, the Venetians, the Bulgarians, the Russians and a whole host of other civilisations all considered themselves in one way or another to be true heirs of Rome. Should we consider them as true continuations or not?

Then we’d need to consider what we mean by where. Where is a subset of when in this instance. If we define the Roman Empire as ending with the sack of Rome by Alaric the Visigoth in 410 CE, then obviously the empire fell at Rome itself. But Alaric was dead within a few months, and there was still an emperor in Rome over 60 years later.

And what of what we now call the Byzantine Empire, but which knew itself as the Roman Empire? Founded in Anatolia in the fourth century due to a split of the Empire into Eastern and Western administrations, the empire based in Byzantium (later Constantinople, later Istanbul) continued until it was overran by the Ottomans in the fifteenth century just as its Western twin was overrun by the Ostrogoths in the fifth.

For me, as for themselves, the Byzantines were Roman. Greek-speaking, yes, but Roman all the same, with a continuity of culture all the way back to the founding of Rome as a city state in the eighth century BCE. So if we consider the Byzantines to be the last vestige of the Roman empire, then surely it fell when Constantinople was captured by Sultan Mehmed II (known understandably as ‘the conqueror’) in May 1453 CE?

Close but not quite. Some of the Byzantine empire still stood even as Constantinople was sacked and burned. One standout was the Maniot territory in the Peloponnese in Southern Greece, which at the time Constantinople fell was under the command of the wonderfully named Despotate of Morea, which in practice meant two Byzantine leaders (who promptly fled.) The Maniot people did not flee however, and the Ottomans didn’t bother invading this mountainous and difficult territory until 1770 CE. But with the departing despots so also departed any vestiges of ruling Byzantine (and hence Roman) culture. This was a Maniot defiance of Ottoman rule, not a Byzantine one.

Then there was the principality of Theodoro, which was a sliver of Crimea under Byzantine rule sandwiched between the coastal Genoese colonies and the inland Khanate of Crimea. Technically again, this was Byzantine territory. But in reality, it was populated by Goths.

What? Yes, in fact the Ostrogoths had been in Crimea for over a thousand years, since the FOURTH CENTURY CE! Byzantine rule (following the fourth crusade) was merely yet another imperial vassalage for the Goths of Crimea. At various times they had fallen under the nominal rule of a bewildering range of imperial powers, including the Huns, Khazars, Mongols and Genoese. Ultimately, they were merged into the neighbouring Khanate in 1475 CE, and became part of the Ottoman empire. So, not exactly the last stand of Rome.

Which brings me to my own answer to the question, where did the Roman Empire end? The Empire of Trebizond was a secessionist state of the Byzantine imperium. Formed during the fourth crusade as an opportunistic power grab by a local potentate, the Trebizond empire sustained only a little longer after the fall of its parent state at Constantinople. The Trebizond secessionists were if anything even more aggressed by the combined threat from Turkmen and Ottoman forces than the Byzantines were. Throughout the 1440s and 1450s, they repelled repeated attempts at invasion.

The end finally came in 1461, a mere eight years after the fall of Constantinople. There is a wonderful, almost contemporaneous painting depicting the departure of the Byzantines from Trebizond following King David’s surrender to Mehmed II:

So what happened exactly? Mehmed swooped in from the west to isolate Trebizond and place it under siege, which continued for a month. To achieve this, his forces had to go into the high hills immediately behind the coastal city and outflank it, so that they would be unable to receive either reinforcements (which David hoped would come from Christian Europe) or supplies via the harbour.

Trebizond was a high walled city located between two freshwater sources flowing into the Black Sea, so a physical attack was ill advised. For Mehmed, it was easier to maintain negotiations while besieging the city. And the inhabitants were well aware of what had happened to Constantinople for refusing to negotiate.

This map, take from Wikipedia, gives a good sense of the geography of the time:

The formal surrender would of course likely have taken place in the citadel or the palace (both currently under archeological exploration at the time of writing.) However, this followed an agreement between David and Mehmed for a negotiated surrender. With their forces primarily located to the east of the city, adjoining the freshwater river that is now only a dry river valley in the modern city, it is possible that Mehmed’s forces first entered the city via the lower gate closest to the harbour and market, but more likely that they entered through the double gate closer to the citadel.

Amazingly, this gate is still standing, entirely unremarked upon, and can be found down a narrow cobblestoned alleyway strewn with graffiti and with children’s laundry drying at head height. There is no plaque or commemorative item of any kind to inform you that this place was the geographic spot where over 2200 years of continuous Roman culture came to its final end. And yet, that’s exactly what it is:

The inner gate of Trebizond’s double gate, where 2,200 years of Roman culture came to an end.

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To be everything and more

I recently came across Jonathan Frantzen’s tribute to David Foster Wallace (written in the usual compelling Frantzen style, and interwoven with a trip to Robinson Crusoe’s island).

Buried in there is one of Frantzen’s typical hidden gems: “To be everything and more is the Internet’s ambition, too.”

As AI looms, I concur with his concern that the virtual world is rapaciously eating away at us all. Perhaps we all need to go outside more, though maybe not as far as an inhospitable island off the coast of Chile.

Many bytes have been spilt over this ongoing encroachment. Is it a bad thing? Is it an inevitable thing? Is it dystopian? Is it dystopian but will eventually become utopian?

The general public seem to harbour suspicions. Courting reduced to swiping instantly on a phone app cannot but feel like some kind of awful diminution and commodification. And yet according to research, a tenth of straight people and a quarter of gay people have met their partner online.

This is the kind of efficiency and scalability and global connectivity the internet rightly boasts about. But it doesn’t seem to make most people as happy as it makes the tech oligarchs who profit from such seismic societal change.

We could look at Wikipedia too, the extraordinarily ambitious project to get the world to collaborate in collating the sum of all knowledge. Obviously they haven’t achieved that, but such an overweening ambition drove the project to where it is today, having displaced encyclopedias like Britannica early on, and spoiled many a pub argument by providing instant answers to disputes of an esoteric nature.

Does it matter that Wiki pages about Marvel’s cinematic universe are much more detailed than pages about ancient philosophy? Yes and no. The open source model panders to the interests of the editors not some abstraction of relative importance. But perhaps their interests also reflect (broadly) those of the general public.

And with the ‘internet of things’, one by one the appliances in our own homes and environment are becoming dully sentient, speaking to one another, integrating with systems we rarely if ever see or comprehend.

This is convenient, apparently. It is convenient for our fridge to order our shopping, for the heating in our homes to decide when and how much heat to provide, for our cars to drive themselves, leaving us all feeling that strange combination of privilege as passenger, and cargo without control.

As with all societal change of this scale, or at least all that we’ve been experiencing since the industrial revolution two centuries and more ago, the technology changes the world so quickly that it unnerves many. We never asked for this. We are unsure how it will change our lives. The promises of the techbros often come with dystopian undercurrents, as we see with the online dating revolution.

No wonder then that people like Frantzen might want occasionally to step out of that and into a former world, one of no surveillance, one where dangers can be fatal, one which somehow feels more adventurous and alive. I think many of us harbour similar desires, however hazily constructed.

But as he writes, the internet wants to be everything and more. And its rapidly growing offspring AI wants that even more and may at some point even be able to achieve it.

The irony of Frantzen’s argument is that in seeking to escape the world, he found he missed it deeply. The parallel he draws between the physical island of Selkirk/Crusoe and the mental island on which his friend Wallace was trapped is not unreasonable.

As usual, binary thinking won’t help us. Let’s leave that to the technology which thrives on ones and zeroes. We will need to find a new, tech-enabled way to engage with the world and each other. I wish the tech oligarchs would ponder that possibility a bit more.

I don’t wish to be stranded on either a desert island nor a digital one. I would like to be able to connect with people. The internet both does and doesn’t permit this, because it wants to be everything and more. It interpolates itself between us. And that, I fear, will likely cause many more people to end up on that third type of island, the one which David Foster Wallace was tragically unable in the end to escape.

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Think in 5-D: Learn a Language

There are around 140 language families on the planet. Nearly half of all people speak a language from only one of those families as their native tongue, never mind all those who speak them as second or subsequent languages.

That family is Indo-European, and it includes English, Spanish, Hindi, Russian and some other very big hitters in terms of global speakers.

As the world continues to globalise, we will inevitably lose languages and even entire language families. Some projections suggest we might be down to only five or six major languages by 2500. Of those, only probably Arabic and Chinese stand a chance of being non-Indo-European languages spoken by anyone.

Once upon a time, I scoffed at learning my national language, Irish. What’s the use? Who gives a shit about old myths? Anyhow, it was all tied up with politics and my limited brain could only just about accommodate French.

Now I regret that decision, like I regret not maintaining my knowledge of Attican Greek and Latin, not properly learning Italian, Russian or Turkish, and being so scared by Hebrew and Arabic that I gave up on day one.

Because languages aren’t just interchangeable modes of communication. Each one expresses an entire culture, and even more, a wholly unique way of conceiving of the world. To speak more than one language is to see the world in multiple dimensions at once.

I envy my five year old his bilingualism. It’s a gift I intend to jealously defend for him, and no doubt on occasion even against his future wishes.

If you want to save culture and add literal dimensions to your brain, learn a language. Start today.

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Spy Wednesday

A little late but a quick poem for the day that’s in it.

Spy Wednesday

We had the guy on camera since the weekend.

How could we not? The crowds alone had triggered

warning levels demanding our attention.

His known associates were mostly no ones.

Hookers and fishermen, small time farmers,

with nothing much to lose. Not radicals

but enough of a concern to warrant action.

Phone masts tracked him. A website signaled.

He’d booked dinner for his friends on Friday night.

We had him now. So when one approached us

and tried to sell him we could afford to laugh

at the demand for crypto and escape. We’ll send

our men to seize him in the garden. Perhaps

he knows we’re already onto him.

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The Gamification of Living

Well, it has been a while, hasn’t it? I’ve been neglecting this blog because the internet isn’t real life and I’ve had rather a lot of life to be living in the past while. All will become clear anon. Or, at least some of it might. In a world busy throwing privacy away, I’d like to preserve a little for nostalgia’s sake.

John Lennon famously quipped that life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. Or, as the old Jewish saying has it, man plans and God laughs. These days we might say life is what happens when you’re not online, but of course so many of us are online, some almost perpetually.

Life does now happen online, or at least a simulacrum of it. An entire generation has met partners online at this point. People do business with one another entirely via electronic comms and screens. I’ve even seen funeral notices where it was stated that the deceased would be greatly missed by his Twitter followers. Seriously. Even death occurs online now.

Anyhow, that brings me to the brief point I wanted to make somewhat circuitously. The metaphors of the online world have long since infiltrated what we might, in a binary mode, call the real world, or at least tangible and palpable world. Even as a kid, I recall hearing the GIGO phrase – garbage in, garbage out – which originated with the computer programmers of the Seventies, complete with their punched cards.

Fifty year on, and the metastasis of such metaphors is ubiquitous. So much so that the UK even now has an official government department for ‘Leveling Up’, which is not, disappointingly, helping gamers to beat their high scores, but in fact relates to the latest attempt to resolve or in minor ways at least mitigate the outrageous inequity in that nation.

But it does all rather leave a strange taste in my mouth, like that of slowly smouldering silicon chips. Marriage or kids are not ‘achievement unlocked’. Getting a new job is not ‘leveling up’. I entirely understand that the gamification of so many aspects of modern existence would lend its baleful influence to the very language we speak of course. But the concepts simply do not map across.

Why? Because we are human. And when we game, those of us who do, we are not human. In fact I’d go as far as to say we’re not fully human when we attempt to filter our human functions through this electronic portal at all. We’re cyborgised, both enabled and constricted by the facilities and limitations of the internet and its penumbra of pervasive techno-enhancements.

Do you look at your phone or out the window to check the weather? Do you tell someone happy birthday in person or simply click a like on social media instead (which kindly reminds us)? How many people have driven down the wrong road or even into a canal because they listened to Google Maps rather than watch their environment? (And how many more once Elon’s self-driving cars become the norm?)

At the risk of sounding like the Luddite I am, human life encompasses more than the electronic bottlenecks our techno-cages impose upon us. If Divorce (or marriage for that matter) is ‘Game Over’, then what are we actually saying about our view of relationships?

Am I being too literal or serious? Perhaps. But unlike in a game, where one can respawn, try again with a new strategy, life is both linear (no spawn points) and picaresque (no reassuring story arc).

Sometimes we level down. Or sideways. Or into an entirely new mode of being. We shouldn’t allow the metaphors of gamification to erode and dissolve and mask the glorious unpredictable muddiness of our human existence.

We are animals, sometimes even thinking ones. We should remember that more. We are not automata grinding out levels in a game called life. Or, at least those of us who don’t work as loot farmers in China for American World of Warcraft players are not.

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Do Europeans Fear the African Columbus?

I’ve been researching the ‘discovery’ of the Americas recently, particularly the history of Columbus, Vespucci, and Magellan, as well as the conquering of the Aztecs by Hernan Cortes.

What strikes me, reading the letters of Vespucci or the affidavits of Columbus, is their braggadocio of adventure. It’s all couched of course in careful obsequence to lordly funders and rulers, and pious devotion to the mother church, who one suspects had at best tenuous command in small, rickety ships traversing unknown oceans. But it’s easy to discern their sense of excitement, of being the first to see and claim terra incognita, to place the first footsteps on a new world.

They were, in short, adventurers who had little concern about the indigenes they encountered other than a kind of sociological curiosity to describe them as they might describe sea routes or the local flora and fauna, all filtered through their world view of manifest destiny and medieval Catholicism, and their barely-suppressed exhilaration.

But it was, as we now recognise, a somewhat dark and bloody history, replete with dehumanisation and erasure of the peoples who already lived in those locations, and interspersed with crimes of violence, atrocity and domination.

The Capture of Tenochtitlan by the forces of Hernan Cortes, signifying the end of the Aztec Empire

Much of the evidence of those times now exists as absence. In searching for the Taino indigenes of the Caribbean, one finds only their diluted bloodlines. Their civilisation, culture, language and polities are long since effectively vanished. Similarly, some 97% or so of Argentina today is of at least partial if not total European descent. In Uruguay, it’s just under 90%. In neither country is there a significant indigenous population remaining.

Somewhere, buried perhaps in the genetics of modern Turks, still echoes the bloodline of the Hittite empire too. But the Hittites were builders and the Taino were not. The Hittites left correspondence and monuments by which we can remember them. The Taino did not. In some ways, the Hittites are more current three millennia after their demise than the Taino are, who died out in only the past few hundred years.

Downstream over five centuries from those heady days, we might believe we are now in a position to consider them sanguinely, if you will forgive a pun in bad taste. We are now almost a century into the process, or thinking, of postcoloniality, of decolonisation. The spokes now speak to the hubs. The empires strike back.

Today, the flows of people which cause the most contention are those into Europe and the European-founded states in North America and Australasia. It’s unsurprising that this would be so. Firstly, those nations habitually top tables for metrics like income, quality of living and education, happiness, security and so on. Who wouldn’t like to live in countries with those qualities?

And of course those coming to them are by definition coming from countries which lack those qualities. They suffer poverty, war, poor educational standards, insecurity in general. They aren’t happy, or they wouldn’t be moving.

But also, they are adventurers like Columbus, Vespucci, and Magellan. They are primarily desperate young men with little to lose and much potentially to gain. They travel embedded within their own cultures, religions and languages. The increasingly loud and paranoid concerns from European nationalists is that they may also come as conquerors like Cortes.

As a scholar of uchronia, or history which never happened, I am always intrigued by the what ifs. What if Ming China had not turned its back on the world in 1433, but had instead beaten the Europeans to colonise the Americas by over half a century? Would Admiral Zheng He now enjoy the oscillation between celebration and opprobrium currently offered to the memory of Columbus?

Or what if it had been Africans or Amerindians who had first embarked on transcontinental sea travel and had arrived in small boats at the shores of a frightened and uncomprehending European populace not unlike the fleets of dinghies which now traverse the English channel daily? Would the cities of Benin, Lagos, Accra now boast the wealth of imperial buildings and infrastructure we instead find in London, Amsterdam, Paris and Lisbon?

We would be in a very different world perhaps. Or more likely, we would not. The processes of colonialism would most likely have remained intact. The resulting erasures, atrocities and domination would likely still have occurred, only with the positions of the colonised and colonisers reversed.

What evidence for this is there, outside of my fevered imagination of the multiverse? Well, firstly one might consider the Bantu Expansions of the 11th to 17th centuries. On encountering the sparse populations of existing pastoralist and nomadic peoples of central and southern Africa, they largely either wiped them out or absorbed them, resulting in an African variant of what we might call the Argentina model.

And we don’t even need to look to history for examples of Chinese colonialism. It continues today, as Tibetans, Uyghurs and those in various South and East China Sea islands can testify.

In short, history teaches us that cultures do clash, and that all too often, if not indeed most of the time, one of those cultures is going to come off worse, often to the point of eradication. The process of cultural evolution, which exists both in isolation and in free associations via trade, commerce and technological development, continues ever faster in the globalised and techno-enabled world in which we find ourselves. Cultures do not atrophy by themselves. History indicates that when they die, it is not by suicide but more commonly at the hands of conquerors and colonisers.

The bafflement of the political class in Europe at the inexorable rise of ethnocentric, hypernationalist and insular right-wing parties is itself therefore baffling. History suggests that this is a manifestation of resistance to perceived colonial attack. The rhetoric on all sides illustrates this very clearly, whether it is assertions of Europe as being inherently white and Christian, and Islam an existential threat, or the counter-rhetoric of inflammatory Islamic preachers demanding Sharia law in Europe, and the misplaced triumphalism with which Indians proclaim ownership of London.

Is it a sense of folk guilt which fuels the suspicion of Europeans encountering the African Columbus or subcontinental Vespucci today? Postcolonial theory suggests as much. But perhaps it is also something more deeply felt – an existential fear that they are instead meeting columns of modern-day Cortes.

Diversity by definition is divisive. It is not inherently a strength, otherwise the late Roman Empire would have been stronger than its earlier iteration. But diversity could become a strength if we could somehow harness a collective expansion of in-group sensibilities, a magnification from the gigatribes of nations to the teratribe of humanity.

For that to occur, however, a sea change in perspective is required by everyone. Those intent on building fortresses around their cultures need to understand that no walls can stand against the march of human adventure and ingenuity. And those who set sail for new worlds must leave their small-minded cultural and religious preconceptions at home in the past.

Only then can we truly move beyond zero-sum colonial mindsets.

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Reticence (a mistranslation)

It’s been a while since my last (mis)translation. Not for the first time, I have traduced a Brazilian.

Leda Beatriz Abreu Spinardi (often known by the mononym Ledusha), is a poet, translator and journalist. This poem comes from her self-published second collection Risco no Disco (‘Scratches on the Record’), which first appeared in 1981 and was republished in 2016. Risco no Disco also later became the title of her poetry column in the Folha de Sao Paolo newspaper in the late 1990s.

This collection was the one that made her name, and characterised her, and perhaps a generation of young urban Brazilian women who were emerging from the Seventies towards the equal rights they would finally achieve with the Citizen’s Constitution of 1988.

Ledusha’s poetry, both feminist and feminine, reflected a women’s perspective within the movement of marginais poets and musicians who came of age and defined a generation in the Eighties.

Reticence

my love
away from you
I come upon disrespectful poems
away from you
my desire destroys doors
and quotations
away from you
I cover myself 
with such mischief 
you could only compare it
to how unfaithful 
some metaphors can be.

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I’ll culturally appropriate whatever seems appropriate

I guess I’ve been quiet for quite some time on this blog. It seemed to me wise to adhere to a particular wisdom that takes various forms in various cultures.

“Whatever you say, say nothing.”

“It’s better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt.”

Or this one, from the Hávamál:

I’ve been reading the Hávamál for the first time recently. I’m somewhat of a Norse wannabe. I like the mythology. I can relate to the sense of bone-chilling cold, the strict code of honour and morality. These are familiar things to me. But I am, somewhat unusually for people from the Atlantic Archipelago, entirely lacking in Norse genetics. I’m a wannabe.

My kids on the other hand are of Viking descent (and no doubt other things too). Both have clear blue eyes. One is blond. The other is descended from a town literally founded by Vikings and named for its fjord. I however, am pure Celt. This is less of a boast than a lament on my part. How astonishing it would be to have a diverse lineage. How interesting it would be.

Nevertheless, when Professor Bryan Sykes of Oxford University tested me some years ago, I proved to be almost entirely of North-Eastern Irish origin. The slight question mark was in relation to the possibility that I might have had some Icelandic heritage. However, that’s because the settlers of Iceland came from Norway and, en route, realised they’d forgotten a crucial component for settling a new land – women. So they – erm – collected a few in Antrim en route across the Atlantic.

Thus was a nation born. However, the likelihood that a stray Viking of Antrim descent returned to form part of my lineage is tiny. I accept the fact that my ancestors most likely never traveled further than the Hebrides in thousands of years (and most likely not even that far.)

As an Irishman – a very Irish man genetically in fact – I have a patrimony worth valuing. One of the oldest mythologies in the world is mine to claim. I can also lay claim to other aspects of Irishness, however constituted or conceived. The invention of whiskey and the pneumatic tyre alone justifies the existence of my people I would suggest.

Nevertheless, I choose not to be so parochial. Indeed, I was not raised to be parochial. The education I received valued the cultures of Judeo-Christianity, of Greece and Rome, of the (mostly Italian) Renaissance, and the (mostly Anglo-German) Enlightenment.

By the time I reached university education, postcolonialism was assuming its position in the canon. (I was later to teach this at Trinity College Dublin.) I was exposed to the (English language) literature of Africa, India, the Caribbean.

Later again, I began to find certain other cultures of interest. I was intrigued by China and Tibet, and visited both. I’ve since spent a lot of time exploring Buddhist thought. I likewise found the ancient Mesoamerican cultures fascinating and visited Mexico to witness their ruins and remains, where I encountered their nation’s founding mestizo mythology – the value in a blended culture.

More recently, I have found the palimpsestic cultures of both Turkey and Israel to be absolutely intriguing. Anatolia, arguably the omphalos of the world, has given home to the Hittites, the Hellenes, the Byzantines, and later a series of Turkic arrivals, culminating in the Ottoman Empire, which arguably led the world for centuries.

Likewise, the history of the land variously historically known as Judea, Palestine (and various other monikers) has had an outsized influence on the culture of the entire world. The Abrahamic monotheisms all stem from this slender sliver of land. Some of the cultures there are of extremely ancient origin. Jericho, for example, is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities on the planet.

And the persistence – against enormous odds – of the Jewish people, and in a less attenuated timeframe the Palestinian people, remains astonishing in light of the many, many cultures which have come and went in the meantime. I was educated among Jewish people, and work alongside them. They are an industrious, imaginative and above all, hopeful people. I likewise have Palestinian friends. They too have sustained their culture through enormous trials.

ALL of these have influenced me. They have influenced my thinking. They have influenced who I am. It would be foolish of me to argue otherwise. Likewise, many other cultures, ancient and modern, distant from my birthplace and blood or closely proximate, have also. (It would be beyond foolish, for example, to deny the influence of the English on me. I was educated in their system, watched their TV, imbibed their culture and ultimately lived there teaching English culture to English kids in England.) I don’t believe I am alone in this. Arguably, only the isolate cultures of the Andaman Islands or the inner Amazon could truly argue for their cultural purity.

It is for this reason that, even as I taught postcolonial theory and literature, I innately rejected the concept of cultural appropriation. All of these cultures, ideas, practices are within me. No one loses if I choose to eat Jamaican jerk chicken, or strike a Hindu yoga pose, or chant a Tibetan mantra, or listen to urban American rap, or read 19th century Russian literature. No one. If anything, the people embedded in or descended from those cultures potentially gain a friend, an ally.

So I’ll culturally appropriate whatever seems appropriate, if you don’t mind (and even if you do.) Tonight I will read the Hávamál. I’m not a Viking and never will be. I may be related to some of their descendants, and have visited the lands they inhabited, but that’s not important. What’s important is that I value these cultures, in my own way.

Don’t let anyone police what you find interesting.