A short quote: Politics, in our times, has become the enemy of love. A long quote: In the prison of these days when to praise freedom is to be derided as not showing affection for the nation; when those whose job it is to find truth are warned by the powerful to praise power, not question it; when in the desert of our politics, to show compassion for our fellow humans is to threaten our national borders with invasion; when, if forbidden by politics, by public discourse, by the ranters and ravers of the opinion pages, the fat-fed dogs of talk radio, to speak of kindness and goodness as touchstones of civilisation, perhaps we can do worse than seek to reaffirm ourselves in love stories. For crammed into love stories are not just assignations, betrayals, setbacks and occasional ecstasy; not only hate and pain and horror, to say nothing of death and forgetting; but a better idea of us, a larger idea of our humanity. Crowded into love stories between the discovery of ourselves in others and of others in ourselves, we glimpse something else, a boat, and on the boat, jammed between the polytarp thrown over the shivering, the sunburnt and the silent, caught between the briny largeness of the sea and the sky, terrifying and hopeful, breathing in the nauseating oily drifts of diesel fumes, stands a tall 23-year-old Iranian called Reza Barati who dares dream that freedom and safety will soon be his as the boat approaches the Australian territory of Christmas Island. But the sky darkens, the idea cannot hold, the ocean shimmers and transforms into something terrible, and all that remains of that dream for Reza Barati is a white plastic chair he now holds up in front of him, seeking to ward off the inexplicable blows of machetes and bullets and boots – a white plastic chair, all that a rich nation that prides itself on a fair go, on its largeness of spirit, has left for Reza Barati to defend his life against those who have now come to kill him. In this desert of silence that now passes for our public life, a silence only broken by personal vilification of anyone who posits an idea opposed to power, it is no longer wise for a public figure to express concern about a society that sees some human beings as no longer human; a society that has turned its back on those who came to us for asylum – that is, for freedom, and for safety. And so, with our tongues torn we are expected to agree with the silence, with the lies, and with the murder of Reza Barati. Will our prime minister say of this death what he so recently said of human rights abuses in Sri Lanka, “We accept that sometimes in difficult circumstances, difficult things happen.” It would be condemned as not showing affection for our national team were a public figure to repeat the story of the Tamil woman, Vasantha – as reported by the BBC at the time of the prime minister’s comments – who describes being “kicked, beaten with batons and pipes, burned with hot wires and cigarettes, submerged in a barrel of water until she thought she would drown, suffocated by having a petrol-soaked plastic bag put over her head, before being repeatedly raped by men in [Sri Lankan] army uniform”, the torture and rape going on for 20 days “before a relative could find her and pay a bribe for her release”. It would be even more foolish to not accept that human beings crowded like animals without hope in a compound on a hellish island is perfectly right and civilised, as is the language of politicians of both parties who now publicly boast that it is good and necessary to be cruel. This is the most wicked poison to ask any society to drink, and yet we are drinking it, and drinking it to the full. Yesterday I went to one of Western Australia’s beautiful beaches. Swimming there, a line by Camus – a man who loved beaches and sun – kept playing over and over in my mind. In the depths of that terrible winter, Camus wrote, I felt there lay within me an invincible summer. And bobbing out there with a teabag-bellied man, two Sikhs and some tattooed women, I felt how Camus’ line is what I feel when I read love stories. Humankind survives and prospers through a paradox so terrible we generally refuse to acknowledge it: on the one hand as groups, we sanction and promote the most terrible crimes to benefit the group’s interest. Every day states and corporations do things which, were we to do them as individuals, would lead us to be sent to jail. Or, at the very least, to be despised as a human being without a shred of decency or goodness. On the other, we jog along individually through acts of kindness and goodness. By and large, occasional acts of violence aside, we do not as individuals behave with each other as we do as groups. That is our saving grace. This paradox is also, I think, the hidden dynamic of love stories. And perhaps it is because love stories point to the fundamental divide within us – between the mystic echoes of the individual soul, which craves freedom, and the dictates of community, which demand conformity to codes and practices we frequently find objectionable and sometimes profoundly wrong. In a sense this is a war that is waged in every human heart, and each human life makes its way through the rubble-strewn no man’s land that arises in our souls in consequence, trying to live as best we can.
Posted on: Thu, 27 Feb 2014 20:37:08 +0000
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