Stephen Fry is Right - We Need to Grow Up

If his critics are right, and if gradation and shades of grey either do not or should not exist, then I have the same right as a victim of a brutal gang rape to be outraged by comments made by Stephen Fry in an interview with US chat show host David Rubin. The same right? No, the same obligation. If his critics are right, I should by now be writhing, crippled by anger. I should have been hurt; I should have been triggered.

For, if his critics are right, rape is rape and abuse is abuse and not only are there no questions left to be asked or answered but anyone stupid, anyone insensitive enough to doubt that inherent truth is a monster; a relic of a less progressive age; a hideous ogre.

So I should be triggered.  I should be. We are all supposed to read from the same Newspeak dictionary, that wonderful thing that frees us from the pain of difficult thoughts by depriving us of the language used to express them.

I have been abused; the victim, I bellyfeel, of sexcrime; and damn the blackwhiters and crimethinkers who duckspeak otherwise.

It – this abuse - has happened on no less than four occasions. Sex whilst one party is inebriated, intoxicated and incapable of giving proper consent, is rape, is it not? That, the exploitation of my own past-penchant for illegal and mind-altering substances, accounts for three of the four; three ‘days-after’ spent regretting to my core that I was too fucked to say no.

The fourth occurred long before. It would be more accurate to call it the first. I was twelve or thirteen, perhaps fourteen, and visiting my uncle in his care home. It was his birthday; we took him a cake and balloons (of which he was once terrified; the chance of bangs and loud noises triggers those occupying his place on the spectrum but he grew up and away from that fear). We were to spend time celebrating with him and his carers and his fellow residents.

Whilst most went into the kitchen, to cut the cake with deliberately blunted knives, I stayed in another room with two of those fellow residents. One was a woman rocking quietly and with earnest intent in the corner. I don’t mind saying that I found her disconcerting; I did. And the other was a man, huge and black. Not fat, just huge. And I found him endearing by comparison. He looked kind and friendly, smiling absent-mindedly as he turned some toy over in his hands.

I was about to leave the room and find the others when that man stood up. I assumed he’d had the same idea and I waited for him to leave first.

Except that he wasn’t leaving, was he. No, he was walking over to me and, pressed up against the wall by his bulk, I felt one large hand, warm and calloused, find its way inside the waistband of my trousers.

It didn’t last long; the hand was hurriedly withdrawn when the rocking woman screeched from the corner. “No! What have we told you about touching!”

And I left the room, nonplussed and a little breathless but otherwise unaffected. I’ve never forgotten the experience and I’d never want to. Looking back, and thankful to that rocking woman who had so alarmed me, I think it is probably the first time the old adage about appearances was made real to me. They can be deceiving. The value of that experience vastly overmatches the occasional chill I get from the memory of it.

I have a vivid imagination. I could ponder here, in writing, what might have happened had the rocking woman not been there. I could speculate as to what might have occurred had I encountered that man not in a care home with my family but in an empty house or a secluded alleyway. It would have been unpleasant. Dare I say worse?

No, I dare not say worse, because that would imply that there are different forms of abuse or severities of rape. And that would be inconceivable, unconscionable in this enlightened day and this progressive age where we are all survivors; where there is no acknowledgeable qualitative difference between an unwanted hand on your cock and a rape at the hands of Jimmy Savile or an entire Somali militia.

It is as if we now live in a culture dedicated to the propagation of trauma. Whereas once we would have looked for ways to overcome what has happened to us, we are now encouraged to feel it as keenly as we can and for as long as we can; to let it define us; to adopt it as an integral part of our identity. We are encouraged to free associate with feeling and to expand our own to encompass the pain and sadness of others.

I say that what happened to me was bad but that it does not begin to compare with what has happened to others. But this new movement would have me say that it does compare, moreover that is the same and so I should feel worse about it. When there is no gradation, when we do not consider relativity in these matters or discriminate between cases, we are forced to elevate the banal and the moderate in order that we not exclude the extreme from this single, unified standard we now operate by. It is all a case, as Fry decries, of black and white, Good and Evil, with all moral nuance dispensed with.

I don’t doubt that this movement, and related cases like #Rhodesmustfall which encourages black students to inherit offences against their ancestors, is sincere in its belief that such conflations are in our best interests and that they serve the common good. It takes a sincere belief in good to breed the most sinister and harmful thoughts and ideologies. As Voltaire is thought to have said “l meglio è l'inimico del bene;” They make the best the enemy of the good.

But to understand that is to understand the need to fight against it, to know that the sacrifice of nuance and of good sense and intellectual rigour contributes only to the conflagration of the crimes these movements rail against. Seldom is it a commitment to harm and to evil that drives authoritarian regimes to suppress dissent; they do it because they know that they are right and the dissenters just don’t get it!

But which of the two most resembles the Ogre? It is not Stephen Fry, who argues against the trivialisation of rape that his opponents accuse him of and is undoubtedly better equipped than they of the moral arsenal needed to condemn it. No, the Ogres are the reactionary forces that believe that they are right regardless of their ability to justify it, and who prefer to fall for the easy temptation of censorship than take the difficult path to enlightenment.

As Auden said:

“The Ogre does what ogres can,

Deeds quite impossible for man,

But one prize is beyond his reach:

The Ogre cannot master speech.

About a subjugated plane,

Among its desperate and slain,

The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,

While drivel gushes from his lips.”

Saudi Arabia is Going to Execute a Poet.

On the Perversions of our ‘Allies’ and a Defence of a Poet.

(This piece was originally written for The Heythrop Lion's 'THIS' Magazine

 

There are few occasions on which the United Nations is able to disgrace itself more effectively than when it comes to making appointments to committees and sinecures. Iraq, for example, was due to take the chairmanship of the special committee on disarmament in 2003; a move prohibited not by any common sense on the part of the U.N. but because the US-led intervention in that same year made such an appointment impossible. Iran has recently been re-elected to a seat on the U.N’s Commission on the Status of Women. Robert Mugabe, the subject of a wide-ranging travel ban, was asked to be an ambassador for tourism in 2012, and the Human Rights Council  - which counts amongst its membership such bastions of human rights as Pakistan and Uganda and the Holy See – is currently chaired by Saudi Arabia.

It should come as no surprise that the U.N., which makes no firm commitment to anything save the moral imperative to create ever more useless, ever more profligate committees, will express no opinion on the matter of Saudi Arabia’s chairmanship. Rather more depressing, though, is the silence on the part of our own government (which, by taking part in tactical vote-trading with Saudi Arabia, ensured that country’s elevation to its current lofty position) on the crimes against humans and human rights being committed almost every day by the head of the UNHRC.

The Kingdom’s recent history – and by recent I speak of the past few months – is a hideous collection of sundered heads and bloodied bodies. The execution of the prominent Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr was at least granted some coverage in the Western media, though the Obama and Cameron administrations declined to condemn it in anything but uncertain terms. The sentencing of the human rights blogger Raif Badawi to 10 years in prison and one thousand lashes (a punishment that has had to be staggered given the very real chance that it might have killed him) has received less attention than that, possibly due to the fact that it did not cause embassies to be closed or burned, but it, too, has been covered.

But whilst the first example can be understood in the context of Saudi Arabia’s prosecution of its not-so-cold war with Iran, and both cases can be seen as the desperate actions of a regime seeking to re-establish sure-footing following the death of King Abdullah and the destabilizing effects of Islamic State (and how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!), it is the impending execution of the Palestinian poet Ashraf Fayadh which speaks most clearly to the character of the House of Saud.

It serves no purpose as an act of geo-realpolitik. Nor is it part of a wider attempt at suppressing political dissent. The sentence of death in this case, for the related but distinct crimes of apostasy and ‘spreading blasphemous ideas’ in his art (charges he denies), are symptoms of a deep-rooted loathing of art and music and freedom of thought and expression; a loathing which is a necessary consequence of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi or Salafist iteration of Sharia. It should be of great concern to all of us that that is the iteration which we in the West are made to import into our own countries, often through Saudi-printed and Saudi-approved copies of the Quran with which we stock our prison libraries, and also in the form of ‘generous’ donations to mosques and madrassas made by the Saudi state. The exporting of evangelization and religious coercion, often in radicalizing forms, is one of the largest and least spoken-of facets of Saudi trade policy.  

(And it is no coincidence that the same aversion to aesthetics and thought can also be found in wide swathes of Pakistan, in Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan and in the territories in Iraq and Syria governed by Islamic State. But, of course, it has nothing to do with Islam.)

I cannot attest to the quality or beauty or insightfulness of Ashraf Fayadh’s poetry. I cannot read his works in the language in which they were written and I am increasingly of the opinion that poetry can never be properly translated without suffering some essential loss. I cannot even support Ashraf’s claim that he is innocent of the charges levelled against him. Fortunately, I do not need to. For it should go without saying that apostasy and blasphemy are not considered crimes under any sane system of justice, and the decisions by the Saudi authorities to deny Ashraf anything like a fair trial, not to mention access to a lawyer, are so obviously in contravention of international law and of human rights as enshrined by the UNHRC – yes, again, the very body now chaired from Riyadh – that there really is, on our side, no case to defend.

But there is undoubtedly a case to be prosecuted, and every passing day on which the wider international community remains silent is one in which our supposed commitment to support human rights and values is side-lined by spreadsheet morality; by concerns over arms deals and oil exports. Remember when, following the attacks on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the streets of Paris were treated to a parade of world leaders, all of whom voiced their commitment to uphold the rights of freedom of thought and expression? Well, where are they now? Where is their support now?!

It should be beholden upon all of us, and not just those who claim to speak for us, to combat the forces who prefer and who act in the hopes of achieving an unfeeling, unthinking, beauty-less world. But it should be particularly important for us, we subjects of this disunited kingdom, to speak more loudly and with an especially firm commitment to purpose in matters such as this. For we have known its antithesis, and it has cost us dearly in the past.

The case of Ashraf Fayadh bears the hallmarks of the affairs of both Salman Rushdie and Oscar Wilde. The facts of the former should be so well-known that they need no restating here – the sentencing to death of a writer for the crime of writing is abhorrent to us, isn’t it? Laws against blasphemy and ‘offensiveness’ are loathsome and infantile, are they not?

But the second might perhaps require something more by way of explanation. Indeed, its inclusion here caused me to think and think again, but I have concluded that it is right to include it and the point it makes is more than salient. For the ruin of Oscar Wilde, like the attack on Mr. Fayadh, are both proofs that can be used against W.H. Auden’s fatuous claim that ‘poetry makes nothing happen.’ And both are examples of individuals sent down by forms of love. To quote from Alfred Douglas’s fateful poem: a love ‘that dare not speak its name.’

The ‘Shame’ spoken of and felt (and, yes, acted upon) by the likes of Wilde and Bosie, which was a crime (and remains a crime in places like Saudi Arabia), is just as natural and vital to us as the ‘crime’ for which Ashraf Fayadh has been condemned. It is natural to us because it is of our nature! The dignity of our species, in other words, demands that we use and are able to use, free from fear of punishment, our ability to think and to write what we think, and to portray beauty, and to practice it and feel it with all the pain and reverence and hard work befitting any fundamental Love. To deny the freedom to think is to deny the freedom to love. They are, in that sense, two forms of the same virtue. And it allows one to accuse the House of Saud, and religion, as being opposed to love. Which it is; which they both are.

I have penned a poem – The Ballad of Burning - which shares its sentiment with that expressed within this piece.  I had thought to close with it. But as there is a place set aside in this august journal – a poets’ corner, of a kind - for works of rhyme and rhythm and metre (and sometimes those that lack the same, but that is an argument for another time), I have decided instead to close with the words of another.

Part of the title of this piece is taken (and then reworked) from Percy Bysshe-Shelley’s polemic, published posthumously, entitled ‘A defence of Poetry.’  It is amongst the most eloquent cases ever made for art and for the meaning and the importance of art. I encourage the reader to peruse it in its entirety, but it closes as follows:

“Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

The point, if I have done my job, is clear. And I hope that you will join with me, and with the good people at PEN International, and Amnesty International, and the innumerable poets and writers and musicians and ordinary human beings in doing what our government is too cowardly to do on our behalf: condemn this sentence, condemn this crime, and work for the freedom of Mr. Ashraf Fayadh.