On the bombing of an Afghan wedding.

The inspiration for this cartoon is here.

Departure.

Tori and her husband left the city last week. I had wanted to say goodbye to her, and we had agreed to have a final drink at the Cameo bar, but when the evening came she stood me up. The next morning I received a brief, incoherent text message, apologising and explaining that she had been too busy trying to find somebody to care for her cat at the last minute. I wondered why she did not ask me, although I dislike animals and would have refused. Tori’s departure unnerved me, and for a few subsequent days I felt drained and helpless and vaguely embittered. Marcin’s departure had torn my heart out, and I have lately experienced a strange kind of nostalgia for the pain which I felt back then, and a fear that my emotions no longer seem real, or have any sort of kick to them. I have never been one for crying, but I sometimes wish that melancholy could have its own bodily organ, which could be stimulated like a penis, producing easy tears which could then be dabbed up like come, leaving one feeling refreshed and untroubled. I appreciate now that I had rather taken Tori for granted after Marcin had left, and following her own departure I sense the shape of a great cold hole in the fabric of my life. I guess that lesser, inferior people will patch it up. It is at times like this that I wonder what it would feel like to abandon the city - Poland certainly seems more lively at the moment than it has in recent years - but I have not the heart for change, and I fear that however hard I would labour to accomplish a new life, it would be just as empty as the present one.

Noctes Ambrosianae (5).

Last night James, Tori, Olaf and myself were smoking outside the Standing Order on George Street.

James: Oh if only we were dead. How pleasant it would be, lying snugly together in the graveyard, fast asleep…

Tori: Why are you so gloomy this evening? Is it perhaps because somebody special is leaving?

Olaf: You’re leaving?

Tychy: She’s going to her husband’s farm in Portugal for the summer, to help him supervise the harvest. You’ll remember that idiot who was following her about - the one who couldn’t speak any English?

Tori: He can articulate his feelings when he wants to. I gather that he was rather unhappy about our last credit card bill.

Tychy: Well! She thinks that she’ll be sunbathing all day, but he’s of the alternative opinion that she’ll be tearing about in a combine harvester. It will all end in disaster. I hope that when they get divorced, Tori ends up with the farm.

James: Oh Victoria, please don’t go to Portugal. I can instinctively sense that you won’t enjoy it.

Tori: Why don’t you leave Edinburgh for a bit? When was the last time that you had a holiday?

James: I never go on holiday. I’m too delicate to travel and it jangles my nerves. Besides, everybody is here. Edinburgh is such a progressive cosmopolitan city - or at least it is for anyone under thirty, or for anyone who lives hand to mouth. Nationalism has never seemed so obsolete. Italians, Poles, Basques, Chinese, Brazilians, Australians - they’re just cards which the city endlessly shuffles. And if the city deals so many exciting and challenging hands - and it offers so many adventures - then why bother to relocate to another city? It’s just a different coloured pack of cards.

Tori: But that’s a terrible attitude. If all of these people were just as lazy - sorry, as “delicate” - as yourself, then nobody would travel and there would be no cosmopolitanism.

James: Well I don’t so much admire cosmopolitanism as hate nationalism. Paradoxically, in a world in which cheap air travel allows tourist-migration and travel becomes an unremarkable commodity, the incentive to travel accordingly declines, because everywhere is the same, with the same commodities, services, educational resources and black market drugs, and the traveller needs to work harder and harder in order to glimpse something truly challenging and authentic.

Tori: But you can glimpse new things, or at least you can if you do some work. You once told me that you were a Surrealist, and that the whole point of that was to provoke all sorts of new, authentic reactions from a world of boring conformity. Surely travel can be part of that?

James: I guess so. But I recently wrote a piece for the website about Herman Melville’s novella “Benito Cereno” [“On Babo and Black Leadership”], and part of my research involved using GoogleEarth to find Santa Maria, the island featured in the story. And I swooped down on to the west coast of South America, I poured over the beaches and islands, I zoomed in and shot out and dipped back down again, when I found the island I circumnavigated it, I measured it and calculated the time it would take to row around the harbour, and I studied a dozen or so photographs of its beaches and hills. GoogleEarth is only in its infancy, but it’s already an incredible educational resource. And, of course, people mechanically resort to cynicism and small-mindedness…

Tori: It’s often said that when somebody installs GoogleEarth, the first thing that they do is look at their own house.

Tychy: I look in my neighbour’s gardens…

James: You prove my point. There is an instinctive miserablism and churlishness to most people, and they seem simply unable to say, “wow, what a fantastic invention! Just think of all the opportunities which this provides! Thank heaven for progress!” As the technology elaborates, GoogleEarth will resemble a sort of universe in your pocket, an encyclopaedic dimension, a flying carpet which will deliver you to anywhere in the world. And the individual will be reduced to a blob plugged into a hyperreality, his consciousness swooping and diving around the world, all obstacles to human travel emphatically defeated.

Olaf: Thank heaven for progress.

Tori: On the subject of the website, which of you was responsible for the article about the Maltese basketball player? [“On Samuel Deguara”]

James: I would never write about anything as vulgar as competitive sport.

Tychy: He did write that one. I certainly didn’t.

Olaf: That pissed off quite a few people, didn’t it?

James: It was a good article. When I briefly met Samuel Deguara, who was competing in the championships at the Pleasance, I was reminded of a nightmare about a giant which I had experienced when I was a child. The article was about a small man’s terror of a giant, it was not about Deguara himself. But I was naïve, and I didn’t think that any Maltese basketball fans would notice our little website. When it comes to information about Samuel Deguara, there is a shortfall between supply and demand. That article is the most popular on the website - it attracts a good quarter of the visitors to Tychy - and I only wish that Deguara’s fans would set up their own websites, so that we would not get quite so much of his Google traffic.

Tychy: I often think that there should be a gentlemanly agreement between those over six foot not to play basketball. Their participation is unsporting. They have a very unfair advantage…

James: The solution would be to erect a special hoop for the tall at a greater distance from the ground.

Tori: But you would get anarchy. Somebody would insist upon another hoop for those under five foot, and then another would be installed for children, and then another for people in wheelchairs…

Tychy: The game would become far more complex and strategic.

Tori: Did you see that Rafael Nadal won Wimbledon yesterday? He is such a gorgeous guy. I cannot believe that a single woman in the world supported Federer in that match. Even his own girlfriend.

James: Nadal looks a pleasant chap, but I’m a little afraid that he is not quite compos mentis enough to appreciate his victory. He spends his entire life playing tennis. He must have a very stunted appreciation of reality. If I won Wimbledon, I’d be driven around for a month in a limousine full of Champaign and prostitutes and heroin, shouting “I am invincible!” at people in the street. But one suspects that this sort of thing is beyond Nadal…

Tychy: I think that the more you play tennis, the more the mind is erased. Rubbed out by the sheer boredom of it all!

James: Look at Tim Henman! The great comedienne Linda Smith once remarked that he was the human personification of the colour beige.

Tori: Enough of this! Nadal is a superman and, significantly, he’s also Spanish. That country has won both Euro 2008 and Wimbledon, and their entry to Eurovision was the best in the contest this year. Let us drink to Nadal’s health.

Omnes: Cheers!

Uproar.

Sovereignty or solidarity? The BBC at large in Zimbabwe.

With inflation presently at 9,030,000% and 40% of the population depending upon food aid, it seems unfortunate that the BBC’s man in Zimbabwe is John Simpson, a chap for whom the word “plump” fits as neatly as a bowler hat. Simpson’s quivering pink face inexplicably makes one think of dumplings. As he drives unhappily around Zimbabwe - vaguely resembling Billy Bunter in search of a lost cream bun - the very sight of him must reduce starving children to tears. He probably demolishes more at one luncheon than they have eaten for days. And just as Simpson’s physical appearance seems somehow to be a monumentally crass thing to present to the people of Zimbabwe, his presence in the country is effectively a statement that the BBC thinks itself superior to the nation’s people and laws.

At the time of going to press, Zimbabwe is the only example which one can find of a nation whose rule of law the BBC will blithely disregard. One would, of course, be generally happier if the BBC broke more laws. Imagine if the corporation firebombed rival American news studios, or assassinated rival news anchormen, and then harrumphed, “well, these prohibitions against murder only concern the natives, and cannot possibly apply to us!” The world would considerably benefit if James Reynolds, the BBC’s Beijing correspondent, evaded his minders, had a little wander in the wrong direction, and took a little peep - just a very little peep - at whatever is presently going on in Tibet. If Chinese military police stopped Reynold’s car at a roadblock in Tibet, he could surely get away with it by exclaiming, “bally Sat-Nav! I’m supposed to be on the Chichester bypass!” Yet when it comes to Zimbabwe, which, despite the economic apocalypse, is not conspicuously undemocratic or (politically) unstable when compared to other African nations, it seems that the laws of this (coincidentally) largely black nation are not worth salt, and that the natives cannot hope to hide whatever it is that they are up to from the omniscient and omnipresent BBC.

“Those who try to challenge our sovereignty provoke me. This is where you see my true colours. Zimbabwe is an African country. Its sovereignty is reposed with the people of Zimbabwe,” Robert Mugabe ranted to a rally at Highfield, Harare in November 2007. Whatever one thinks of the old cunt, it is plain that sovereignty has been a central issue in recent Zimbabwean elections. Many of Mugabe’s claims of persecution by Britain are sheer fantasy, and yet all of that hyperinflation has not been wholly caused by Mugabe’s strategy of distributing appropriated farmland amongst his cronies. Western leaders claim that their sanctions target only the Zimbabwean elites and foreign businessmen - and not ordinary people - and yet without the wealth created by the former, the result is inevitably a nation which is too pauperised and demoralised to effect political change (U.N. food sanctions inflicted similar damage upon Iraq and indirectly strengthened Saddam Hussein’s regime). Mugabe has been provided with enough material for him to present Zimbabwe as a nation victimized by a meddling West, whilst his electoral opponents, the Movement for Democratic Change, receive sufficient money from non-Zimbabwean donors for Mugabe to claim that they are in league with outsiders.

If sovereignty is a central issue within Zimbabwean politics, it is singularly unfortunate that the BBC has deliberately lapsed from its celebrated impartiality to report from Zimbabwe, despite being banned under that nation’s sovereign law. Indeed, the BBC seems to have appointed itself part of a liberation struggle, and its coverage assumes a tone of solidarity with the Zimbabwean people, based on the dubious presumption that they want or need their misfortunes to be broadcast, largely as entertainment, for teatime audiences in Britain. There is the awkward fact that forty-three percent of Zimbabwe’s population voted for Zanu PF in the March election (Cameron’s allegedly “popular” Conservatives enjoy a similar level of support in Britain), so the BBC is actually showing solidarity with little more than half the country, and contempt for the remaining losers who voted for a government whose laws the corporation are now breaking. If the BBC is going to be a participant rather than a spectator in Zimbabwean politics, why does it not go the whole hog and stand in the nation’s elections? Simpson would find reporting on Zimbabwe a lot easier if he was its President.

Even if the BBC was not banned in Zimbabwe, Simpson’s reports do not contain very much fresh news, and the corporation’s coverage of Zimbabwe is generally unimaginative and inadequate. However much the BBC portrays Mugabe as a totalitarian dictator, he is not - and over the last few years never has been - particularly important. If he dropped dead this evening, it would be a welcome development, but little in Zimbabwe would change. Liberal horror at despotic regimes is often suspicious because it propagates a fantasy of superhuman dictatorial power - as if one figure and a handful of assistants could really keep an entire nation under their thumb! Lately, the increasingly senile Mugabe had clearly forgotten which mass murderer he was supposed to be, and he had appeared at rallies with a prominent Hitler moustache. Yet during the latest election campaign, the moustache disappeared, to be replaced with a bombastic Timmy Mallett-style baseball-cap and extravagant multicoloured suit. A recent and widely ignored report by Human Rights Watch suggested that Mugabe had wanted to stand down after the March election - even though neither Presidential candidate had won and the law required a further runoff - but that the army had effective taken power in a “military coup by stealth” and had refused to dispense with Mugabe. This important story has received little coverage on the BBC. Even if Morgan Tsvangirai had satisfactorily won the March election, he would be unable to govern the country without appeasing the old military establishment, the so-called War Veteran militia, and half of those whom Mugabe had awarded with stolen land. In the absence of a politically powerful bourgeoisie, Zimbabwe can probably only be reformed for the better by a military coup lead from the middle and lower ranks of the army (the BBC never concern themselves with how and what all of those armed young men are paid, but the majority of the army must take an increasingly dim view of the hyperinflation). Yet the transitional “unity government” now advocated by most of Africa’s leaders - who would not relish the spectacle of a corrupt and undemocratic leader being kicked out of office (because a good half of them are not elected themselves) - would surely be one in which much of the country’s rotten and corrupt establishment survived.

Pussy.

Letter from a Sufferer of Virgina Dentata.

Dear Tychy.

The recent release of the film Teeth has finally given me the confidence to talk openly about my condition, and I believe that the readers of your website will provide a sympathetic audience for my story. Since pubescence, I have suffered from virgina dentata: a rare medical condition in which my virgina is filled with rows of sharp, gnashing teeth. The stigma associated with my condition means that I am often subjected to terrible discrimination. The most distressing feature of my affliction is that whenever I meet dogs in the street, my virgina begins to bark excitedly, which often provokes very cruel remarks from bystanders. There was a period, or rather a phase, during my late teenaged years when my virgina decided to become a vegetarian - allowing me a brief window in which I could enjoy normal sexual relationships - but my virgina quickly tired of munching upon quiche and stuffed peppers, and it soon reverted back to its customary behaviour. I have been fortunate to have a very sweet male friend who has provided me with a great deal of support. We had dated as teenagers, and despite my virgina eating some of his penis, we remained close companions, even though our relationship could only ever be plutonic. Last week, however, my friend invited me out for dinner and he insinuated that the evening would end romantically. I was uncertain of this, and so during dinner I made sure that my virgina had a good steak and lots of potatoes, followed by a hearty pudding, so that it would be too full to have any appetite for my friend’s advances. Yet when we were finally in each others’ arms, my friend revealed that he had dressed his penis in what could only be described as a little customised suit of armour. During intercourse there was a frightful racket and afterwards I found, upon examination, that the teeth of my virgina were bleeding. I always brush my teeth very thoroughly to avoid unnecessary trips to the dentist - he always kicks up a fuss about checking my teeth - but I had no alternative but to make an appointment this time. The dentist removed several of my teeth, and he warned that in future I may have to wear false teeth. This may ultimately be a good thing, because then I would be able to remove them before intercourse. I hope that sharing my story may provide strength for other sufferers of virgina dentata and I urge them to check out this website which I have established for those with teethed virginas.

Yours Sincerely.

Miss Penelope Triste.

On Samuel Deguara.

Samuel Deguara is seventeen years old and seven feet and four inches tall (or two metres and nineteen centimetres). He is a member of the Maltese national basketball team, which last week competed in the Activcity Euro C Basketball Championships in Edinburgh. Curiously, when one encounters Samuel Deguara, the first thing that one notices are his size 23 trainers - one of which could furnish a splendid hat for the average person - and only secondly do the eyes climb his legs - for quite some time - until finally arriving at the snow-capping peak of his great head. Deguara is not particularly distinguished amongst giants - the world’s tallest known man is a Ukrainian veterinarian who has reached eight feet and five inches. At dinner, Deguara does not take any more than his team-mates, but perhaps this is merely for show and back in his bedroom he feasts upon plate after plate of pasta. He looks perpetually clumsy and uncomfortable when traipsing around in that great body, like a man wearing several coats on a summer’s day. In common with other very tall people whom I have encountered, he is mild-mannered in temperament. I am not certain if this is an innate quality of giants, or whether Deguara is merely being pragmatic. Perhaps he has learned that the sight of a giant cheerfully throwing his weight about unnerves people. He probably regards us as we look upon children, and consequentially behaves with care around the little people.

He is surely hung like a horse and his girlfriend must always have a smile upon her face. If she were my size and they were naked together - and he turned unexpectedly - then he would slap her in the face with his penis, and probably knock out half her teeth in doing so. Perhaps there is little humour to these matters. Deguara would no doubt severely injure somebody if he attempted to have sexual intercourse with them, and even if his member was disproportionately small in relation to the rest of his body, then congress with the giant would remain a delicate task. If he got too carried away, then after his passions had been sated, he may discover that he had left his partner hyperventilating and with crushed ribs. One only hopes that at some stage in his life, fate presents him with either an equally gigantic woman or somebody with the necessary fetish.

Oh Samuel Deguara, if I befriended you, could I ever suspend my dread? The only time in my life when I have ever had a nightmare - rather than dreams which merely end abruptly and disagreeably - was when I was a child, and I can still remember part of the terror. In the nightmare, a giant chases me through my house (illogically, because of course he would not fit) and I awake as I am tearing up the stairs and he has just arrived at their foot. Today, informed by the insights of Freud, I recognise the uniquely deep and full terror I had of the giant as symbolising that of castration. In the dream, I am running to my bedroom because that is where one flees when the castrating father is on the rampage. The old memory of the scene on the stairs flits briefly around my head like a moth as I observe Deguara. I vaguely want to be chased by an incandescent Deguara, through some rooms and up some stairs, because I am psychologically no longer four years old, and I anticipate that when returned to the Oedipal moment, I may now have the power to talk my way out of it.

Some brandy and a cigarette.

On Babo and Black Leadership.

Herman Melville’s novella Benito Cereno (1855) observes a meeting between three symbolic leaders - Amasa Delano, Benito Cereno, and the slave Babo - who respectively represent America, colonial Europe, and the African diaspora at a juncture of encounter and confrontation. The depleted and aristocratic Cereno symbolises the Old World, whilst Delano is the quintessential (or stereotypical) American: a piratical Yankee entrepreneur, who charges for his “generous” offices to Cereno’s stricken ship on the grounds that he is “strictly accountable to his owners” and who then approves a swashbuckling assault upon the ship and a general looting of its “property” (272). The slave-owner Cereno’s sense of self-certainty is destroyed when he is mastered by his slaves, whilst, despite his apparent shrewdness, Delano assumes that the black slaves are “too stupid” to mutiny, and is consequently almost murdered (254). Babo is the most sympathetic of these three leaders, in the same sense that Iago is the most likeable character from Othello’s dramatis personae of bores and fools, simply by virtue of his superior wits. In contrast to the prevailing racist stereotypes of the day, Babo is physically weak and even effeminate, whilst his intellect is overwhelmingly his distinguishing feature. He gets the better of his captors and - in desperate circumstances and against disheartening odds - he sustains the elaborate pretence which gulls Delano into assisting the slaves. Yet although it is claimed that Babo never kills, he apparently orders “every” murder on the boat; and despite of his cunning, many of the slaves suffer and die under his leadership (301). Although Babo is often depicted as restraining the slaves’ excesses, such as Francesco’s thoughtless scheme to poison Delano, it appears that he leads the slaves with their active consent. Suspecting treachery in Cereno, Delano reflects that if his “story was, throughout, an invention, then every soul on board down to the youngest negress, was his carefully drilled recruit in the plot: an incredible inference”; and yet it transpires that there may actually be such solidarity amongst the slaves under Babo’s leadership (245).

Most of the following analysis of Babo is entirely speculative. We lack any direct access to Babo, observing him firstly through a narrative which ironically reflects Delano’s racist views and describes what we find is literally a performance of devoted servility; and secondly through the text of a deposition cited from the proceedings of a vice-regal court in Lima, which is very much history written by the victors and excludes Babo’s own account of the mutiny. Facing death at the end of the tale, Babo, like Iago, decides that the wisest option is silence (although even if Babo had cooperated with the court, it is unlikely that it would have admitted his testimony as evidence) (95). One wishes for a few moments alone with Babo, to hear his authentic voice and learn his own ideas and feelings about the mutiny. One should add that Delano, Cereno, and indeed Babo were all once living people, and that the bare events of the novella were cribbed, unacknowledged and largely unaltered, from a travel narrative written by the “real” Captain Amasa Delano, which was published in 1817. A “Babo” numbers amongst the mutinous slaves in Delano’s narrative (although his son actually leads this rebellion), and Melville’s novella preserves the bias of this original source in excluding Babo’s voice and demonstrating how heroic black leaders are typically written out of racist colonial histories.

It may be claimed that Babo’s character is based upon those of infamous rebellious slaves such as Toussaint Louverture and Nat Turner, but the former was inspired by the ideas of the French enlightenment, and the latter claimed to have conversed with the Christian Holy Ghost. Babo appears to be untouched by ideas such as Christianity, and his rebellion is presented to us as a total rejection of Western civilisation. One may protest that Babo has a good command of Spanish but, as we have seen, he never “speaks” to Melville’s (Western) readers. His refusal to have anything to do with this Other is symbolised by his alienation from “white” technology - despite his keen wits, Babo cannot navigate the ship that has fallen into his hands. He orders Cereno to “carry them to Senegal”, failing to acknowledge that the San Dominick is in no condition to endure the six to eight week middle passage (285). Babo’s plan entails approaching the Cape of Good Hope in winter: which would probably finish off the San Dominick for good. But even if Babo could reach Senegal and consign his memory of Western civilisation to the past, he has been forever changed by his encounter with this world. Babo was a slave in his native Senegal, but the hierarchy of this society has been levelled by the slave traders, and now he has emerged as a leader and the African “king” Atufal is reduced to little more than his henchman.

There is something hopeless to Babo’s longing to return to Senegal, and he surely knows, or suspects, that the San Dominick cannot reach Africa without sufficient provisions or a skilled crew. Does he know, in his heart, that he is leading his people to death? Melville’s narrative never attributes the mutiny to a specific material need, and one may consequently presume that these “unfettered” slaves rebel purely for the sake of freedom (291). Babo himself is a valuable slave and will certainly not starve under slavery. Indeed, at one point in the novella, Delano toys with the idea of buying Babo, and it seems likely that the slave would have a jolly old time at the table of this “generous” master (248). In the history of slave narratives, one encounters those such as Olaudah Equiano, who, after years of patient compromise with slavery, were allowed to “buy” their freedoms. Yet one can speculate that many of the slaves aboard the San Dominick would meet a far less agreeable fate than Babo after being traded in Callao, and that Babo demonstrates solidarity with his people in putting their futures before his own personal wellbeing. Under slavery, the slaves have a (theoretical) insurance from death and serious injury in the form of the “white” world’s recognition that they have monetary value. Indeed, when the slaves are recaptured, they are not put to death (apart from Babo) because they are expensive stock. But freed and lead by Babo, they are at risk of a lingering death aboard a lost ship. Perhaps these questions do not occur to the slaves. Or maybe Babo - or all of the slaves in concert - choose freedom and the possibility of death, rather than a life of slavery.

Babo probably has no profound sense of homesickness for Africa, and would otherwise be merely leading a familiar people back to a familiar place, had not a sense of solidarity needed to emerge amongst the slaves in reaction to whatever they found so alien or traumatic about “white” civilisation. This solidarity is only “African” in the sense that the slaves need a destination to flee to, and an alternative sense of belonging and identity to that of their masters. Whilst observing Babo, the foolish Delano recites a list of what he considers to be inherent characteristics of “Negroes,” including “the African love of bright colors and fine shows”, but the mutinous slaves may demonstrate more of a sense of class consciousness than the shared and innate “racial” characteristics identified by Delano (265). The slaves find that they are equal as slaves - in that they are all equally enslaved - and they consequently form a sort of impromptu proletariat. Babo assaults the capitalist exploitation of the slave system and, in this sense, he is only secondarily a “black leader,” and foremostly a revolutionary hero. Despite this distinction, he remains one of the greatest black leaders in Western fiction.