‘CONFLICTING CREDOS BUT THE SAME VISION OF THE WORLD’

This is a transcript of the first part of the talk I gave last week as part of the Criticise This! seminar in Ulcinj, Montenegro on ‘Rethinking the Question of Difference’. (The second part of the talk overlaps with the Milton K Wong lecture that I am giving in Vancouver next week; I will publish that in full.) The audience comprised mainly of artists, writers and critics, and the aim was to explore more deeply the philosophical and political underpinnings and consequences of contemporary ideas of social difference.

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There is a certain irony in being invited to Montenegro to give a lecture on questions of identity, difference and multiculturalism. Not only has the English language appropriated the name of this region of Europe for its description of an intractably fragmented society – ‘balkanized’ – but few events have more shaped our perception of these issues than the conflict that led to the break up of Yugoslavia two decades ago. The messy, bloody, monstrous events that marked that break-up have helped entrench the sense of the contrast between racism and ethnic chauvinism, on the one side, and cultural diversity and multiculturalism, on the other. They have helped entrench the idea that the best, indeed only, antidote to the evils of ethnic nationalism is the embrace of diversity, of multiculturalism. The celebration of difference, respect for pluralism, avowal of identity politics – these have come to be regarded as the hallmarks of a progressive, antiracist outlook and as the foundation of modern liberal democracies. We’re All Multiculturalists Now as the American sociologist Nathan Glazer, and former critic of pluralism, observed, almost wearily, in the title of a book published in 1998.

What I want to do is challenge this received wisdom about difference, diversity and multiculturalism.  I want to question what we mean by diversity, why we should value it, and how should we value it. I want to dispute what I regard as the lazy conflation of ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘diversity’ and to suggest that to defend diversity is not the same as promoting multiculturalism. Most of all, I want to contest the claim that racism and multiculturalism are concepts at opposite ends of a pole, and show, rather, that they are two sides of the same coin.

LLOYD BREVETT AND THE (OTHER) SOUNDS OF THE SIXTIES

LLoyd Brevett, the great ska and rocksteady bassist, died on Thursday. He was one of the founders in 1963 of the Skatalites, the pioneers of ska, rocksteady and bluebeat. The group were together only for 18 months, but in those 18 months helped transform Jamaican music. Brevett went on to play with, and for, some of the greatest Jamaican bands and producers of the Sixties, including the Wailers, Toots and the Maytals, Prince Buster and Lee Perry. ‘All my bass lines from all my recordings have been attributed to bass lines from Lloyd Brevett’, Bunny Wailer once said.

So, here are the Skatalites with Rock Fort Rock, the Wailers with Simmer Down (their very first single), Prince Buster with One Step Beyond, and Toots and the Maytals with Pressure Drop (I’m pretty sure that Brevett doesn’t actually play on this, but it’s my favourite Toots track – indeed, it would probably be on my Desert Island Discs list – so it had to be here):

THE LONESOME DEATH OF TRAYVON MARTIN

In 1963 Bob Dylan wrote ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, the story of the murder of a 51-year-old barmaid by the wealthy young tobacco farmer William Devereux ‘Billy’ Zantzinger, who eventually received a six month sentence for the killing. That sentence was handed down on the same day that Martin Luther King delivered his I Have a Dream speech in Washington, at the end of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Dylan was one of the marchers. Returning home to New York, he sat in an all-night coffee shop on Seventh Avenue and wrote his song. Influenced, as Dylan observed in his autobiography, by Brecht and Weil, the song (which came out the following year in The Times They Are A Changin’ album) is an excoriating assault not just on racism, but on the collusion of the authorities, the law and liberal opinion:

In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel
To show that all’s equal and that the courts are on the level
And that the strings in the books ain’t pulled and persuaded
And that even the nobles get properly handled
Once that the cops have chased after and caught ‘em
And that ladder of law has no top and no bottom
Stared at the person who killed for no reason
Who just happened to be feelin’ that way without warnin’
And he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished
And handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance
William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence.
Ah, but you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
Bury the rag deep in your face
For now’s the time for your tears.

WE SHOULD TALK ABOUT THIS

Actually, I seem to have been talking about this for much of the past two decades; ‘this’ being free speech, multiculturalism, Islam, Islamism, the issues at the heart of DV8’s extraordinary new show Can We Talk About This? now playing at London’s National Theatre. Lloyd Newsom’s company has, for more than quarter of a century, blurred the lines between dance and theatre as a way of, in the company’s own words, ‘reinvesting dance with meaning, particularly where this has been lost through formalised techniques’. It has always tackled controversial and difficult subjects, but the latest is likely to be the most challenging yet.

I was one of a host of people whom Lloyd Newsom interviewed in preparation for the show. I finally got to see the finished product on Friday. It was a strange experience having my words spoken back to me from the stage. The whole show is stitched together through other people’s voices, voices taken from those various interviews, and from interviews and debates on TV and on stage, including a spat between Shirley Williams and Christopher Hitchens on BBC’s Question Time and Jeremy Paxman mediating between Anjem Choudhury and Maajid Nawaz on Newsnight. You experience it in the audience as a tapestry of ideas, always moving and whirling like a dancer’s ribbon, but which builds up thread by thread, layer by layer, into a tightly woven, almost inescapable, argument. The voices are not recordings; every word comes out of the mouths of the dancers, which adds to the sense of perpetual motion. Their ability to dance and talk at the same time still leaves me breathless and bewildered.

The show opens, as most of those in the audience must have known, with a cast member demanding of the spectators ‘Do you feel morally superior to the Taliban?’  It’s a nod to Martin Amis who asked that same question to a hostile audience in a notorious debate at London’s ICA, back in 2007. It is hardly the most sophisticated of questions. Yet its very unsophistication reveals so starkly the spectre haunting the liberal moral swamp. Had the audience been asked ‘Do you feel morally superior to the BNP?’, or even ‘Do you feel morally superior to David Cameron?’, I have no doubt that a forest of hands would have been raised. As it happened only a handful were willing to admit that their values might have been a mite more elevated that those of the Taliban.

LIFE, DEATH, MORALITY AND THE CUCKOO CLOCK

I have been immersed in Nietzsche over the past week, from The Birth of Tragedy to The Twilight of the Idols. There are few writers who interweave such stylishness of expression with such brutality of thought. Central to all Nietzsche’s work is the insistence that without savagery there can be no creativity. As the eponymous prophet puts it in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘The highest evil belongs to the highest goodness: but that is creative’.

In The Birth of Tragedy, his first published work, Nietzsche draws a contrast between two aspects of the Greek psyche: the wild irrational passions personified in Dionysus and the disciplined and harmonious beauty represented by Apollo. The triumph of Greek culture, Nietzsche suggests, was to have achieved a synthesis between the two. Dionysus is the explosive, ungoverned force of creation, Apollo the power that channels that channels that force into creative wonders. The Greeks were both cruel and creative, brutal and innovative, physically savage and aesthetically sensitive. Abandon the brutality, Nietzsche suggests, and one foregoes the creativity.  ’The strongest and most evil spirits’, Nietzsche claims in The Gay Science, ‘have so far done the most to advance humanity’.

CAN WE TALK ABOUT THIS?

Lloyd Newson’s DV8 Physical Theatre has, for more than quarter of a century, blurred the lines between dance and theatre as a way of, in the company’s own words, ‘reinvesting dance with meaning, particularly where this has been lost through formalised techniques’. Past productions have included My Sex, Our Dance, If Only, Enter Achilles and To Be Straight With You. DV8′s new show, Can We Talk About This?, tackles the question of freedom of speech, censorship and Islam:

From the 1989 book burnings of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, to the murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh and the controversy of the ‘Muhammad cartoons’ in 2005, DV8’s production will examine how these events have reflected and influenced multicultural policies, press freedom and artistic censorship.

One of the characteristics of DV8 is the research that goes into every production. I was one of a score of people, including Salman Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Flemming Rose, Anjem Choudary, Maryam Namazie, Timothy Garton Ash, Mehdi Hassan, Maajid Nawaz and Istiaq Ahmed, whom Lloyd subject to interrogation, and whose words appear in the show.

LAY MY BURDEN DOWN

David ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards, the last of the great Delta bluesmen, who died this week:

ARTS FOR WHOSE SAKE?

Today Index on Censorship published its report, Beyond Belief – Theatre, Freedom of Expression and Public Order. Taking as its starting point the controversies surrounding Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s 2004 play Behzti - which was forced off stage by violent demonstrations by members of the Sikh community outraged by scenes in the play depicting rape and violence in a gurdwara – and her 2010 follow-up work Behud, the report explores the issue of the policing of controversial art. Among those contributing to the report are Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, Jude Kelly, Jatinder Verma, David Edgar, Michael Billington, Jonathan Heawood, Virgine Jortay and Jo Glanville. Here is the keynote essay, ‘Arts for Whose Sake?’, that I wrote for the report.

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ONE WAY OF  READING THE BEHZTI CONTROVERSY IS AS A MATTER OF miscommunication. When the Birmingham Rep decided to consult the local Sikh community about the play, it imagined that it was simply gauging the views of community elders about a potentially controversial work. As Trina Jones, general manager of the Rep at the time of the controversy, put in a panel discussion about Behzti, ‘We were clear that there were elements of the play that may upset folk… The purpose of that dialogue was really to share our concerns, not really to enter into consultations about the play itself; our intention was never to offer the play up for any development or change.’ Sikh leaders, on the other hand, believed that they were being consulted about the play itself, and that their views would be taken into account in determining its content and tone. Out of that difference of expectations, one could argue, emerged the Behzti controversy.

The problem, however, is clearly deeper than simply one of crossed wires. The differences of expectations were themselves an expression of the way that the role of the theatre has changed in recent years, as has its relationship to local communities. To understand the Behzti affair, we need to understand that change and in particular how two recent trends have combined to transform the very character of censorship. The first is a shift in the social meaning of theatre – and of the arts more generally – and in the perception of the role of the audience. The second is a change in our understanding of diversity and of how it should be managed. The consequence has been the remaking of censorship which, as Svetlana Mintcheva and Robert Atkins observe in the Introduction to their book Censoring Culture, has become ‘invisible’, operating increasingly as a moral imperative, or as the inevitable result of the impartial logic of the market, rather than as a legal imposition.

GIL SCOTT-HERON, 1949-2011

One of the most memorable gigs that I have ever been to was Gil Scott-Heron at the Brixton Academy.  Drinks, drugs and prison had ravaged both body and voice. But he could mesmerize like few others. He possessed a sharp, sardonic wit, an emotional palette of exceptional richness, and an ability to allow your spirit to take flight. He was undefinable, unique, inspirational.

And nothing, perhaps, better expresses those qualities, and his attitude to life and to politics, than the lyrics of the song that came to define him, ‘The Revolution Will not be Televised’:

You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and drop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,
Skip out for beer during commercials
Because the revolution will not be televised…

The revolution will not be right back after a message
About a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.
You will not have to worry about a dove in your bedroom,
a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight the germs that cause bad breath.
The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat.
The revolution will not be televised,
Will not be televised, will not be televised.

The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live.