Rubble, Art and Activism
By Cian Thomas Ennis
“You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go”
An Excerpt from Suicide in the Trenches by Siegfried Sassoon
Last night as I attempted to sleep, I planted my cheek onto her chest, and quickly sank into a slumber. When the realm of the unconscious was reached, I was met with provocations. My dream shifted between two diametrically opposed images, that of a utopian dream, and that of its Other. The two of us were transported from the sanctity of the bed, onto the banks of the Seine in Paris. We sat as if we were in a kind of eternity. An eerie presence loomed over this fantasy. In the distance, I could hear the clatter of steel as it was heaved across stone, and began to hear the bombs. The bombs were first dropped far from where we were sitting, sounding like a pebble falling into a well. We sat sipping our coffee, smiling when we caught each other's eye. The sounds persisted, and slowly, ever so slowly moved closer towards us. As if a cut had taken place in a film, I suddenly found myself clamouring out of the dense rubble. When I emerged from the debris, she was gone, buried beneath a community of an entire people. I heard screaming and took note of the tank lurching towards me. I was in Gaza.
Yorgos Lanthimos latest foray into the world of film, Poor Things, is a contemporary interpretation of the monster movie, in which our protagonist, Bella Baxter, navigates a pastiche of Victorian society in a struggle to achieve a sense of who she really is. Bella essentially acts as an empty vessel, existing simply to absorb the signs of the world. As a direct result of the focus placed upon aesthetics in the film, with its meticulously designed mise-en-scene, it may be easy to escape the references to class that the film propagates. Bella Baxter exists in what to most is a chimera, a delusional state in which she only understands the world through her position of class privilege. This all changes in Act 2. Bella is crestfallen when she observes, from the vantage point of her ivory tower, the emaciated bodies of the poverty stricken, and the dead lumped together in mass graves. Bella, who is yet to be rendered callous by an unforgiving world, quickly attempts to engage in philanthropy to alleviate this injustice. Bella accumulates a box of cash as reparations for a class system that creates this suffering, yet she is quickly duped by sailors who take the money for themselves, ensuring the pain in the dying’s stomachs persist, while Bella returns to a room lined with jewels and silk, distraught at the inequality of the world. Bella, like many who believe in the virtues of philanthropy, did not question the structures which uphold this wealth divide, rather throwing notes into the wind, in an attempt to consolidate her identity as a decent person with her upper-class social position. Bella, in demonstrating her capacity for empathy, is now allowed to return to her own individualistic character development. The plight of the starving persists, yet her character gains further depth at the behest of the most vulnerable in society.
Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism, ruminates on notions of (in)action in his writings on ‘reflexive impotence’. Fisher notes that British students are politically disengaged, stating “They know things are bad, but more than that, they know they can’t do anything about it. But that ‘knowledge’, that reflexivity is not a passive observation of an already existing state of affairs. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy” (Fisher, 21). We feel a responsibility to become educated on social issues, yet once we are armed with academic texts, we simply stare into the void with tinted spectacles, afraid of making the leap and grappling with the madness of capitalism. We have become clouded by a collective depression, believing that it is futile to engage in political agitation, feeling comfort in our own inertia. Ireland, although we may claim that our hands are clean, directly benefits from our allegiance to Western Imperial hegemonic powers. We are granted safety from this relationship, and by virtue of this we have a kind of ‘freedom’, the right to assemble, organise and engage in free speech but this solely exists in the political domain, not in the economic, and it is here that we become paralysed, “falling into hedonic (or anhedonic) lassitude: the soft narcosis, the comfort food oblivion of Playstation, all-night TV and marijuana” (Fisher, 23). Workers and students are condemned to the fetters imposed on them by the so-called free market with its authoritarian requirement to engage in it, and as a direct result of this the people utilise their small freedoms to escape their mental prisons, instead of standing in solidarity with those who are incarcerated in physical ones. I do not wish to condemn any soul for indulging in these desires. I am no hypocrite. I am more so pleading for a reality in which this hedonism is accompanied by the ferocity that comes with collective action. What is essential is art that can catalyse, and Poor Things unfortunately leaves us ruminating on character, instead of the structures that design it.
Sarah Kane’s play Blasted does not provide its audience with the leniency to return to one’s abode and wrestle with questions of the self, rather it disturbs you to such an extent that it physically requires you to take morally righteous action. Kane’s provocative in-yer-face style of writing does not allow the bombs to be perceived as some distant and abstract entity. She pulls them from the digital realm and places them in your living room, compelling you to recognise the severity of what is taking place. Blasted begins in a “very expensive hotel room in Leeds - the kind that is so expensive that it could be anywhere in the world”, portraying the relationship between the malevolent Ian, and his much younger partner Cate (Kane, 3). Ian is the personification of the nefarious acts that humanity is capable of, with this culminating in his eventual rape of Cate. The realist component of the play is obliterated when a soldier enters the hotel room and inflicts unspeakable war crimes upon Ian, almost as if it was retribution. Kane superimposes the genocide that was taking place in Bosnia, specifically Srebrenica, at the time of the play’s composition onto the very fabric of British society itself. The crimes committed by the soldier sadly were a far cry from fiction, as Kane in her composition recreated real crimes against humanity in an effort to shift this sadism from the abstract into the real. This form of dramatic technique pleads with the audience’s basic humanity to act, rather than contemplate, to protest, rather than engage in frivolous discourse, to occupy, rather than campaign. Kane in illustrating this brutality eradicates any semblance of complacency within us, allowing us to abandon our ‘reflexive impotence’.
When people are reduced to numbers the sympathy we have for them is inherently eroded. Numbers do not laugh, they simply exist to be added or subtracted to. Born in Gaza by director Hernán Zin did not allow me the virtue of this abstraction. The documentary, released in 2014 while Israel was engaging in one of its periodical mowings of the lawn in Gaza, follows the life of ten children and the harrowing tales of their entrapment within the world’s largest open air prison. These children, while detailing the terrors that they were subjected to, reveal information about revolting human rights infringements upon the Palestinian people, speaking about these crimes with an eloquent stoicism that few have the fortitude to possess. Their innate emotional resilience to oppression is one of the most admirable feats of rebellion that I have ever had the privilege to witness, yet they are merely children. What does a child need stoicism for? What world did we construct where a child is too damaged to cry?
The night before I embarked on my first march, I had a dream. I was on the banks of the river Jordan. Three Palestinian girls stood in front of me. They sang Irish folk songs. I was judge and jury. I was responsible for who lived, and who died. I heard the bombs in the distance. The girls sang, ever so beautifully. I could not choose. I awoke when the bombs were just across the river. I could not save them.
The following day, I marched. I, along with my comrades, united in our animosity towards the ‘reflexive impotence’ of our government, had become active, and even if it was just for an hour, attained the coveted mantle of ‘activist’. We screamed, and by the time we had reached the Dail, our bellowing had rendered our throats grimy, yet we persisted. Condemning our leaders as complicit in a war against peace. Speakers took to the stage to engage with the crowd, and it was clear this movement was led by grass-roots activists, normal people who possess an uncompromisable moral compass. I did not believe this movement had a face, rather a populist hydra, until a Palestinian girl took to the stage.
She was only 19 and had been studying Pharmacy in Gaza. She spoke with sorrow about the death of her friends. Presenting gifts they had given her, knowing that this was all she had to remember them by. She spoke of how they would eat and laugh in the cafeteria. I thought of my friends and how I could not cope without them. She was simply another victim, forced to be courageous in the face of the most depraved evil.
My eyes were red from the salt of my tears as I went to meet the girl who I was drinking coffee with on the banks of the Seine. I thought of the future and our newfound affection for one another, immersing myself in the excitement of what shall come. I am safe, and so is she. We are afforded the liberty to engage in these fantasies. It is not the bombs that would tear our relationship asunder, rather something innately human.
I am reminded of the words of Frank Barat in regards to my anxieties surrounding this essay. Barat wrote in his introduction to Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé’s book On Palestine, “When things are radically wrong, writing does not feel the most obvious response for an activist” (Chomsky and Pappé, 6). That is because it is not, a writer can only exist when they are afforded the peace to create. I implore you, dear reader, to take to the streets if you already have not. It is only there that we may answer the cries that reverberate from Gaza across the oceans, across borders, through open windows, and into our homes. It is a necessity that we cry back, and hopefully, with the aid of one another, we may illuminate even the darkest corners of this wretched world. Free Palestine.
Bibliography
Born in Gaza. Directed by Hernán Zin, Netflix, 2014
Chomsky, Noam and Ilan Pappé. On Palestine. Penguin, 2014
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Zero Classics, 2022
Kane, Sarah. Complete Plays. Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2017
Poor Things. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, Searchlight Pictures, 2024
Sassoon, Siegfried. “Suicide in the Trenches”, Selected Poems, Faber & Faber, 1968, pp. 28
