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.

Coming Out to Heaven: Dispatch from the Clouded Mountain

Coming Out to Heaven: Dispatch from the Clouded Mountain.

The first of Oscar Wilde’s Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, published in the original and only issue of the troublemaking Alfred Douglas’s suggestively titled magazine The Chameleon, is this: “The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.”

I have tried for far too long and with far too many false starts to write about this particular episode. Having been reminded of Wilde and put in mind to make reference to him, I found myself repeatedly frustrated at having not read more from the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray. I was lacking perhaps the most important of a series of metaphors that would form the framework on which to build an account of my first experience of Heaven.

I have at last embarked upon the exercise of rectifying this appalling gap in my literary knowledge – helped along the way by Frank Harris’s excellent book on the life and confessions of his old friend – so perhaps I can make some headway.

One is reluctant – and not without reason – to attempt to act as the ventriloquist for a community. Nevertheless, if we allow that it is occasionally so tempting that it becomes unavoidable: I am fairly sure that there must come a time in the life of anyone who is anything other than straight when one is compelled, by a mixture of naive boldness, peer pressure and a stifled sense of adventure, to step out of what we stupidly call the ‘comfort zone’ and experience something new. (By the way, find me someone who would describe stagnation and boredom as being comfortable feelings. I’m not sure I’d want to meet them.)

Some embrace it, others reject it. Some find themselves huddled in a corner writing copy. But I speak with some small amount of assurance when I say that, when one has abandoned the once cosy and comfortable closet, one tends, sooner or later, to end up in a gay club.

I was tempted to draw on C.S. Lewis’s vastly overrated Chronicles of Narnia to describe the experience, but the analogy doesn’t quite work. The children in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe have first to enter the closet, and that is precisely the wrong way around. This left me with something of a quandary: Do I invoke Philip Pullman’s sublime His Dark Materials trilogy to attempt to describe the experience, or opt for Lewis Carroll’s inferior but better-known works.

The latter will probably serve me better. The windows cut by the Subtle Knife in His Dark Materials share an essential quality with the knife: they are subtle. They are hard to see, because they often open onto one part of another world that bears no stark or easily distinguishable difference from your own. By contrast, Alice’s tumble down the rabbit hole would, were Carroll’s surrealism not quite so insufferable, have been rather more jarring. The experience of entering Heaven was certainly more jarring than it was subtle and mysterious.

I began with Wilde partly because my impression of nightclubs is that they embody that quip about the artificial, and partly because he embodies a lesson you should possess and carry with you as you take your first tentative steps into the other world, and partly because most of his Phrases and Philosophies rely on paradox which, according to Mr Best in James Joyce’s Ulysses, is... well, I’ll quote him.

“Of course it’s all paradox, don’t you know. Hughes and hews and hues, the colour, but it’s so typical of the way he works it out. It’s the very essence of Wilde, don’t you know.” Heaven is far from “the tame essence of Wilde,” but my experience of it was certainly paradoxical; something I had to hate but had to love, too. Well, “the wise contradict themselves.”

I was compelled to brave Heaven by the recommendation of another Oscar; my friend and colleague Mr. Yuill. (His excellent new blog can be found quickly germinating at oscaryuill.wordpress.com.) I say recommendation, but it was given with a caveat: “99% of the time it’s a shit night.” All the same to me; I’ve never enjoyed clubs, but, imbued with and driven on by almost forty pounds worth of scotch courage, I set off from a very poorly attended event at the Star of Kings and, via a quick stop at my flat in Queens’ Park, found myself queuing for entry.

It should have come as no surprise: I got lost as soon as I was inside. The internal geography of Heaven can be described as resembling a warren without drawing on any work of surrealist fiction, and I soon found myself wandering and wondering. Not foundering, I hope, nor quite wandering aimlessly, but wandering and wondering nonetheless, amid a cacophony of sound and seemingly pattern-less movement.

I claim to be able to sit down and write in almost any place and at almost any time, and, spotting an unoccupied sofa in the corner next to the bar, I resolved to push my way through the crowd to get to it. This I managed, but not before running into the (very drunk) deputy editor of the newly relaunched London Student; the only familiar face I was to see that night. He was barely intelligible, and the encounter proved a fruitless one. The same cannot be said of the sofa, where I remained for nigh on four hours, pausing only to restock on whiskey, and documenting anything and everything that came to mind.

My almost neurotic refusal to indulge in the whims of attraction leaves few opportunities for distraction. There was the moment when a man saw fit to drop his trousers in front of a small audience – I thought then and I think now that the description “small” applied to more than just the crowd – followed by the entrance of a not-unattractive man, sans shirt, with his arm around another gentleman dressed in a very impressive three-piece suit. But aside from that, and the sudden death of the phone I’d intended to rely on to get me home, my time in the club was fairly uneventful.

(It’s a tangent, but I’m not at all sorry to keep doing this: in Wilde’s moving letter to Douglas, De Profundis, he expresses the remorse born from a belief that his trial had been the trial of his name, and its verdict one that disgraced his family. I cannot claim anything like that level of anguish, and my comparatively inconsequential trials exist only in my head and involve only myself, but it occurs to me, having read De Profundis and now in writing this, that I’ve not ‘come out’ to my own family. So: Mum, dad, if you’re reading this, take it as a compliment that I never felt the need.)

It was pleasing to note that Heaven has, in an expression of solidarity and moral responsibility that those at the top of FIFA and the IOC have yet to show, banned Russian vodka from the premises. I believe this is a step that has been taken by all establishments owned and operated by G-A-Y, though the news media showed far more interest when they were discovered rejecting people who looked too straight. (That is a policy I have a certain amount of interest in combating, as ‘looking gay’ or, more accurately, ‘looking bi-‘ is something I’ve apparently yet to master.) 

As to whether Heaven itself is in any way cliquey; that is a subject on which I feel I am not qualified to judge. All I can say is that, in my – admittedly limited – interactions with people there (another double please, sir), I did not see anything that hints at that sort of exclusivist sentiment.

Not that the implied criticism necessarily holds true in the first place. For all we like to think we live in a tolerant, accepting, modern society, clubs like Heaven are still amongst the few places in which this culture  (if indeed culture is the right word), which used to be so completely subversive, is allowed to thrive and to express itself with relative impunity. I could be accused of being pessimistic, but name me a single ‘mainstream’ club in which you are likely to see two people of the same sex holding hands, kissing, or showing affection and attraction for each other with the freedom that was on display in Heaven.

But freedom and comfort are two very different things. As someone whose first introduction to the ‘other side’ came through the historical novels of Mary Renault and, though to a lesser extent, the Nightrunner series by Lynn Flewelling, my disquiet and uncertainty comes not from societal expectations or the risk of condemnation. It comes in part from my anti-social nature and my dislike of crowds and clubs and dancing, but also from one of my deeper, darker secrets. I am a closet romantic.

Or rather, I am and I am not. It’s another of those contradictions; praised by Wilde before his trial, regarded as a necessity by the likes of Christopher Hitchens, and certainly present in figures from Orwell to Auden and Samuel Johnson. (I may never be able to claim that level of talent, but I am already some way toward matching the description of Auden once given by Louis MacNeice: “Everything he touches turns to cigarettes.”)

It is obviously futile to hope for anything quite so romantic and quite so picturesque as the gardens of the school at Mieza in Fire from Heaven. And even if it were possible to delicately walk the line between innocence and the other on the Street of Lights in Rhiminee (a reference to the colour codes that have played such a fundamental part in the history of LGBT movements, though it is interesting to note that Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, believes the legend of the green carnation to be little more than a myth), a nightclub is certainly not the place for tentative steps and cautious emersion. I knew this before I entered Heaven and I have known this for a very long time. I did not hope or expect to be proved wrong, and yet I must acknowledge that part of me did. No one is entirely free of doublethink.

Whilst it is an experience I would not now do without, nor one that I would never have again, I did leave at the end of the night thinking that perhaps I had come some way toward understanding, albeit in a metaphorical sense, what it must have felt like to be one of the boys hired for enjoyment by Gore Vidal and his friend, the equally fabulous Tom Driberg.

The best version of the story I know is found in Christopher Hitchens’s memoir, Hitch-22, the relevant paragraph of which I will republish here so that the reader might better understand what I mean:

“Through Tom I was eventually to meet Gore Vidal, and also to learn how when in Rome the two of them would hunt together and organise a proper division of labor. Rugged young men from the Via Veneto would be taken from the rear by Gore and then thrust, with any luck semi-erect, into the next-door room where Tom would suck them dry.”

I suppose I should restate the metaphorical nature of my realisation. I entered by one door on one day and I left on the next and by the other, and with a vague sense of uncertain satisfaction. It was an experience that I should have had some time ago, though if I am to venture back again I will have to make myself a little more presentable and a good deal richer. And perhaps, when I next find myself on the long and meandering road home in the early hours of the morning, I will find myself more willing to embrace the paradox.

(I close with Wilde’s poem, Harlot’s House, not because I think it a fair description of Heaven, but because... Just because.)

We caught the tread of dancing feet,
We loitered down the moonlit street,
And stopped beneath the harlot's house.

Inside, above the din and fray,
We heard the loud musicians play
The 'Treues Liebes Herz' of Strauss.

Like strange mechanical grotesques,
Making fantastic arabesques,
The shadows raced across the blind.

We watched the ghostly dancers spin
To sound of horn and violin,
Like black leaves wheeling in the wind.

Like wire-pulled automatons,
Slim silhouetted skeletons
Went sidling through the slow quadrille,

Then took each other by the hand,
And danced a stately saraband;
Their laughter echoed thin and shrill.

Sometimes a clockwork puppet pressed A phantom lover to her breast, Sometimes they seemed to try to sing. Sometimes a horrible marionette Came out, and smoked its cigarette Upon the steps like a live thing. Then, turning to my love, I said, 'The dead are dancing with the dead, The dust is whirling with the dust.' But she--she heard the violin, And left my side, and entered in: Love passed into the house of lust. Then suddenly the tune went false, The dancers wearied of the waltz, The shadows ceased to wheel and whirl. And down the long and silent street, The dawn, with silver-sandalled feet, Crept like a frightened girl.