A review of On Seamus Heaney by Roy Foster

Although known for his active support of the South African anti-Apartheid movement and for his open opposition to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, Irish poet and Nobel-prize winner Seamus Heaney was not famous for his politics. This has led some sceptics to dismiss the political content in the poems of Seamus Heaney on the grounds of his willing proximity to centres and figureheads of power: from his tenureships in Oxford and Harvard Universities to his warm relations with American Presidents, including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama (although footage can still be found of a fresh-faced Seamus Heaney expressing his sympathy for the socialistic tendencies of the early civil rights movement in Northern Ireland).

Such critiques are valid in shining a light on the embedded nature of the arts, at least at an institutional level, in the power structures of capitalism, as well as the risks that trail in the wake of creative endeavour as a result, whereby after a period of time (as Adrienne Rich once wrote) the artist “simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage”, becoming a kind of living fig leaf to cover the “radical disparities of wealth and power” in their society. In this case, however, it would be a mistake to oversimplify or overlook the poems of Seamus Heaney in which political ideas are present and important. This is the weakness of an otherwise insightful new book by Roy Foster on the poems of Seamus Heaney.

Imperialism, Roy Foster and Seamus Heaney

In some ways, Foster is an unlikely candidate for elucidating the development and concerns of so complicated a cultural force as Heaney. Deeming Dublin’s 1916 Rising against British imperialism an act of righteous folly, an event he views as derailing the proper course of constitutional nationalism from achieving its promised reward, Foster has long been in the habit of articulating establishment positions on history (and revolution) with a consistency and quasi-literary aplomb that are in themselves impressive, if hardly winning. Such a tendency may partly be seen remarks such as: ‘the advent of apocalypse after 1968 is … an avoidable lurch into violence rather than the inevitable bursting of a boil’; and in the lapidary aside that the conflict in Northern Ireland ‘fed on ancient antipathies as well as recent injustices.’

Foster’s intention is to offer sympathetic clarification of Heaney’s evolving predicaments as a conscientious nationalist averse to armed violence, which these comments partly do, but they also bear hints of a cosmopolitan sanctimony entirely Foster’s own. We might qualify and contextualise Foster’s historicising by reference to another historian, Daniel Finn: ‘Ancestral voices do not call out to people from beyond the grave: they have to be summoned by the living to legitimize a present-day political stance.’ Foster’s reflexive urge to associate Irish anti-imperialism in general, and however subtly, with the “ancient antipathies” of religious prejudice is as much an act of de-legitimizing as any, and should itself be subject to critical scrutiny.

In a similar vein, it’s surely notable that Foster’s criticism, in Modern Ireland: 1600-1972, of United Irishman Wolfe Tone for his supposed ‘inability to recognise the sectarian underpinning of all political activity in Ireland’ in the lead-up to the 1798 rebellion, conflating revolutionary nationalism once again with religious sectarianism, stands in stark contrast to Heaney’s simmering memorial of the same in ‘Requiem for the Croppies’, whose propulsive beginning is:

The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley

No kitchens on the run, no striking camp

We moved quick and sudden in our own country.

Although Heaney would later refrain from public readings of this piece, lest it be interpreted as an endorsement of the IRA’s armed campaign (to which he was opposed), its atmosphere of inspired anti-imperialism still retains a quivering power and assurance, while the poem’s seemingly instinctive joy in the mass agency of the rebels (‘We moved quick and sudden in our own country’) immediately calls to mind the stirrings of civil disobedience in Northern Ireland, and elsewhere, in the late 1960s when it was written.

Seamus Heaney’s politics misread

If Heaney vacillated between a disdain for British imperialism as such and a distaste for the tactics and righteous rhetoric of the Provisional IRA, the combative spirit and perception of dignity in struggle that animates ‘Requiem for the Croppies’ persisted in his work, finding a guarded echo in his collection of a decade later, Field Work. In ‘The Toome Road’, Heaney (or at any rate, the expressive conscience that permeates his poems) meets:

…armoured cars

In convoy, warbling along on powerful tyres

This patrol disturbing the natural soundscape as well as the political ecosystem of a locale that, nonetheless, remains an ‘untoppled omphalos’, as the British forces swerve into view,

approaching down my road

As if they owned them.

The poem encapsulates Heaney’s groundedness in the landscape of his origins (it is not, contra Foster’s interpretation of Irish nationalism above, an expression of sectarian pride), as well as striking a clear chord of collective, political defiance against colonial incursion. Importantly, however, in its recourse to classical tradition – in ancient Greek, omphalos means, roughly, a navel and the centre of a social order – Heaney is also making legible and understandable, for an insulated intellectual elite typified by Foster as much as for onlooking political communities in Dublin and London more broadly, the feelings of anti-colonial resentment and communal pride-of-place that define the hinterlands of his first home, in the Derry/Antrim area.

Foster, then, is sometimes inclined to miss or misread the anti-imperialistic charge animating crucial sections of Heaney’s oeuvre.

The experience of empire, Civil Rights and republicanism creates a tension in Heaney’s career and legacy, about which Foster has little to say beyond suggesting that increasing demands on the poet’s time in later years had a debilitating effect on his personal well-being, and citing (fascinatingly, if without further comment) an interview in which the bard indicates his interest in new academic trends that stress, in his own words, ‘the connivance between the promotion of art and the prevailing structures of capitalist society’. No doubt a compelling study could be made of Heaney’s evolving attitude to such issues, and the spectrum of political stances his career incorporated, but they form only a peripheral part of Foster’s focus in this volume.

A richness in Heaney’s poems that escapes narrow politics

By following the line of critique outlined above too rigidly, of course, we risk diluting the richness of Heaney’s work, as well as overlooking the strong current of self-interrogation and self-reproach that courses through it. One of Heaney’s recurring fixations is that of the implication of the poet in the violences (and silences) of history: the sharded nature of his own reflective life. ‘I am the artful voyeur’, he famously writes, in pained remorse,

who would connive

in civilized outrage

at sectarian killing and sacrifice,

yet understand the exact

and tribal, intimate revenge.

For all the rootedness and consistency of its motifs, Heaney’s work refuses any easy faith in its own rituals, or in the integrity of his own position. I…

gather up cold handfuls of the dew

To wash you, cousin

and

plait

Green scapulars to wear over your shroud

… reads ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’, an elegy for his murdered relative, Colum McCartney, whose ghost returns in another poem a decade later to ‘accuse’ the poet: ‘“…for the way you whitewashed ugliness [and] saccharined my death with morning dew.”’ Questions of ethical complicity and redress, of failure and rebuke, haunt and define this most acclaimed of literary laureates, who never presumed to take the accomplishments of his craft for granted.

Where Foster’s study is exemplary is in its praise and foregrounding of the nuanced nature of the work, and its human value. Such qualities have not always given their due.

The development of Seamus Heaney as a poet

‘There is a Proustian exactness in [Seamus Heaney’s] evocation of the texture and detail of his early life’, writes Roy Foster, an ‘unerring memory’ that lends his every reminiscence a living gleam. Here, Foster’s interpretation of Heaney’s work is commendable for its clarity and concision, and noteworthy for its close-focussed appreciation of the skill and achievement of a figure widely regarded as Ireland’s national poet. The compressed format of the Princeton Writers on Writers series, it should be said, is a comfortable fit for Foster’s style, which favours suggestive aphorism over in-depth analysis (which would, in this case, perhaps be cumbersome anyway). As such, the volume serves as a fluent personal response to Heaney on Foster’s part, while also offering an accessible and stimulating reader’s guide to the work: elegant, career-spanning, and lucid, if also somewhat breezily assured of the durability of its own impressions.

Heaney emerges from Foster’s account as ‘a poet’ possessed of ‘a novelist’s perception of circumstance and psychology’, a writer ‘whose complexities stretch far beyond the charm of his early poems’, a ‘charm which itself is never simply what it seems’, an artist whose Catholic upbringing and ground-breaking explorations of his own memory and shaping landscapes Foster finds comparable, intriguingly (although sadly without elaboration), to those of Italian film director, Federico Felini.

Foster is a sensitive reader of the work, from the ‘lush and winsome wordplay’ of juvenilia to ‘the voice [that is] steadying and readying itself for a journey into another dimension’ in Human Chain (2010), Heaney’s final book. Additionally, On Heaney presents an often compelling trajectory of the poet’s development, emphasising his generosity as a public figure (a trait likewise acknowledged by cultural figures as far-flung as the writer, Dermot Healy, and the anti-apartheid campaigner, Kader Asmal), the emotional and intellectual nuance of both the books and the individual poems he produced, and the sharp, sometimes vexed awareness of cultural status and responsibility that increasingly accompanied his literary fame. Foster interweaves these strands of the Heaney story deftly, concluding he was possessed of ‘a strong sense of the shape of his life’ as well as the ‘completely defensible’, if frequently disguised ‘ambition of the major talent’.

Were Seamus Heaney’s poems influenced by Yeats?

Foster’s apparently effortless savvy and decisiveness in such matters is of course in great part due to his playing to his own strengths throughout. The case for Heaney’s ‘Yeatsian’ qualities and ‘Yeats-like’ development as a poet is made repeatedly, although not, to my mind, entirely convincingly. The Heaney canon is full of probing (and dutiful) responses to Yeats, in both prose and poetry: a landmark piece such as ‘Casualty’, for example, adopts the rhythm of the elder songsmith’s ‘The Fisherman’, albeit as much as a means of demarcating its own difference in approach and historical context as for any accompanying literary resonance.

In fact, the resemblance between the two writers is limited at best: only to the extent that Foster has written a biography of one national poet and now is presenting an interpretation of another (both, of course, having been awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature), does Heaney’s work appear to grow from and comes to mirror that of Yeats. In their sensibilities, their sources, their historical backgrounds and perspectives, they are hardly alike. Yeats, oracular and shape-shifting, is forever taking flight, searching for new myths to illuminate and inhabit, before passing on; Heaney, intuitive and cautious, is always hunkering down, his slow roots thirsting in the dark for something sure and known, whose existence he frequently both doubts and yearns for.

In this and in other respects, as Foster’s commentary suggests, Heaney’s work rings true, entering the world with a palpability and force all its own. The observational intensity of his poems is often unforgettable: from the ‘water’ that,

Honeyed

in the slung bucket

of a sunlit farmyard, to the ‘surface of a slate-grey lake’ that’s been,

lit

By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans.

Heaney’s poetry is as much a mode of memory as an act of imagination, giving dramatic life to the sensuousness of longing, both romantic and elegiac: a longing he often acknowledges as being somehow unreachable, ‘Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere’, impossible to bring to a state of fulfilment or permanent healing. Most people experience a version of this feeling, in love or mourning, in aspirations glimpsed or denied. For revolutionaries, it forms a prelude to the complex hope they carry: a realisation that the world to be won encompasses the irreparable losses of past sacrifice and unsuccess as well as the promised gains of mutuality and a common future: we bring them forward with us as we go. Heaney’s poem in dedication to his sons, ‘A Kite for Michael and Christopher’, captures something of this, blending a hard-edged vision with soft, sad faith:

Before the kite plunges down into the wood

and this line goes useless

take in your two hands, boys, and feel

the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.

You were born fit for it.

Stand in here in front of me

and take the strain.

Reading Heaney can be a way of preparing ourselves, and recognising one another; his work clarifies the frequent perilousness and hoped-for (never guaranteed) continuity of our own humanity. We would do well to pay heed.

A review of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and Queimada

If you are looking for a recommendation for socialist or revolutionary cinema, then you should start with The Battle of Algiers and Queimada by Gillo Pontecorvo, both of which are contenders for the best revolutionary film of all time.

He’s the most dangerous kind of Marxist, a Marxist poet.

Pauline Kael

Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1965-66) and Burn! (1969) are, in my opinion, the two greatest political films ever made.

Edward Said

When I’m asked if the film was difficult to make. I honestly explain that it wasn’t as difficult as it looks, even though you see a lot of people, because, once you have chosen this theme, you decide you must tell the truth.

Gillo Pontecorvo, talking about The Battle of Algiers

Despite a long career as a director, Gillo Pontecorvo made only five dramatic feature films and a dozen or so documentaries. In a profile of him written by Edward Said, ‘The Quest for Gillo Pontecorvo’, Pontecorvo described how he found it difficult to commit to a project. In the 1960s, however, Pontecorvo collaborated with screenwriter Franco Solinas to make two imperishable classics about the dialectics of imperialism and revolution: The Battle of Algiers and Queimada (or Burn!). The first of these is revered as one of the all-time great political films while the latter has been criminally neglected.

Together, both films still have so much to teach us about the age of anti-colonial revolutions in the 1950s and 60s as well as about the insidious stranglehold of big capital over post-colonial countries.

In the late 1930s, Gillo Pontecorvo was transformed from a handsome, young, tennis-playing bon vivant into a communist militant and resistance leader when confronted by the existential threat of fascism (‘the cancer of humanity’). His elder brother, Bruno Pontecorvo, was both a dedicated communist and a renowned nuclear physicist who defected to the Soviet Union in 1950. Gillo Pontecorvo, like many another, left the Italian Communist Party in 1956, after the Russian invasion of Hungary; Franco Solinas remained in the party until his death in 1982. Pontecorvo remained an independent leftist for the rest of his life. After Queimada, he made only one further feature film, Ogro (1979) about the Basque separatist group ETA.

I was reminded of Pontecorvo’s two films while reading Elaine Mokhtefi’s beautiful memoir, Algiers, Third World Capital. Mokhtefi was an assistant to the press and information adviser to Algeria’s president from 1963 – 5, Ahmed Ben Bella. Algiers was then ‘the capital of revolutions’. As Amilcar Cabral (a major figure in Africa’s anti-colonial movements of the 1960s) famously observed at the pan-African festival in Algiers in 1969, ‘Pick a pen and take note: The Muslims make the pilgrimage to Mecca, the Christians to the Vatican, and the national liberation movements to Algiers.’

Elaine Mohtefi’s memoir and the making of The Battle of Algiers

Mokhtefi writes ‘Every imaginable liberation organisation had an office in Algiers, from the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (the Vietcong) to the ANC, SWAPO, FRELIMO, the MPLA, student hijackers from Ethiopia and Palestinian liberation organisations’. The world she moved in was hectic and exciting, which she describes beautifully: ‘life was exciting and eventful. I was a fly on the window, looking in, beating its wings.’ Her memoir is unique both for its lack of bitterness or self-aggrandizement. She writes with love for Algeria and its people, one of whom, Mokhtar Mokhtefi, she married.

During the filming of The Battle of Algiers, there was a coup by General Henri Boumediene who ousted President Ahmed Ben Bella. This caused some consternation among supporters of the revolution. Fidel Castro was indignant. In France the former Trotskyist turned libertarian communist Daniel Guerin was equally perplexed. He was close to two advisers of Ben Bella who were the theoreticians of the autogestion movement in Algeria. Daniel Guerin was a fabulous character who had great faith in the people of Algeria to self-organise towards something vital,

You should make the land of Algeria a fertile experience of true socialism, that is of libertarian socialism. I have no confidence in your leaders, whoever they are. But I have always confidence in the depth and authenticity of the Algerian revolution.

There is a fascinating book published by AK press called Eyes to the South: French Anarchists and Algeria that discusses Guerin’s deep, lifelong engagement with Algeria. The author, David Porter, posits that Guerin’s classic text Anarchism: From Theory to Practice (1965) maybe have been in part influenced by the self-management experiments post revolution.

With the coup of 1965 there was a purging of left wingers in the government, but Boumedienne was eager to underline his Internationalist credentials by his open support for liberation movements worldwide. Algiers became a mecca for anti-colonial revolutionaries.

Elaine Mokhtefi describes as her brief cameo in The Battle of Algiers as her claim to fame: ‘I appear in that film of films for at least thirty seconds (!), clearly visible in the lower right-hand corner of the screen’. She also worked closely with Frantz Fanon whose writings are the theoretical underpinning for both of Pontecorvo’s films. According to Mokhtefi, a dying Fanon told Claude Lanzmann, ‘the lumpenproletariat of the cities and the poor, illiterate peasantry will take up arms and transform the world’. She also shares a lovely anecdote of another side of Fanon, in Ghana, where he was the first Algerian ambassador.

One night Fanon and I went dancing. A Ghanaian photographer focused his camera on us. Frantz caught him on the edge of the dance floor, and warned him to destroy the photo (it appeared nonetheless in an Accra newspaper a few days later). The FLN had placed a boycott on all French cigarettes. When I shared my Gauloises with him, we became partners in guilt, breaking the ban together.

People’s opinions of The Battle of Algiers can be radically divergent. I remember reading an egregious attack on Edward Said by Clive James who smeared him as a terrorist sympathizer. His proof: Said’s favourable opinion of The Battle of Algiers and no doubt his lifelong commitment to the Palestinian struggle. The Pentagon screened the film in 2003 to prepare its troops for the invasion of Iraq. It is often said the Black Panthers treated The Battle of Algiers as a manual of urban insurrection.

For every person who thinks that it offers excuses for terrorism someone else will point out that it takes away any imprimatur for violent revolution. It is tempting to quote the Wilde line: ‘diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.’ As Sohail Daulatzai writes in his book Fifty Years of “The Battle of Algiers”: Past as Prologue,

The Battle of Algiers is an itinerant film, a nomadic text that has migrated around the world, and has, echoing Edward Said’s ‘travelling theory’ been embraced by a diverse group of revolutionaries, rebel groups and leftists, as well as revanchist, right wing dictators, military juntas and imperial war machines. The film has always been a battleground for competing ideas about power and politics at different historical junctures and in varying places around the globe.

The importance of Franz Fanon’s revolutionary liberation theory for The Battle of Algiers

It is the writings of Frantz Fanon that inspire both films. Obviously The Wretched of the Earth is a key text, but also A Dying Colonialism, a work that Daniel Guerin compared with Trotsky’s A History of the Russian Revolution. The portrayal of female revolutionaries in the film is very influenced by Fanon’s essay ‘Algeria Unveiled’, which is the first chapter of the book. This examined the vexed question of the veil in the colonial situation. Fanon says that,

There is thus a historic dynamism of the veil that is very concretely perceptible in the development of colonization in Algeria. In the beginning, the veil was a mechanism of resistance, but its value for the social group remained very strong. The veil was worn because tradition demanded a rigid separation of the sexes, but also because the occupier was bent on unveiling Algeria. In a second phase, the mutation occurred in connection with the Revolution and under special circumstances. The veil was abandoned in the course of revolutionary action. What had been used to block the psychological or political offensives of the occupier became a means, an instrument. The veil helped the Algerian woman to meet the new problems created by the struggle.

We can see this dramatized brilliantly in a stunning sequence where three women make themselves up in European dress in order to carry bombs to three locations. Originally this scene had a lot of dialogue but Pontecorvo made the audacious decision to cut the dialogue and instead to use baba saleem music, a ‘piece that closely resembles a heartbeat’. 

There is so much tension in the scene but also a depiction of solidarity amongst the women. Pontecorvo manages to balance so many different elements: the humanity of colonised and colonisers within the pitiless logic of this struggle. We see assassinations, bombings and torture but nothing is ever crude or simplistic. I don’t think it will shock anyone to discover Pontecorvo’s support for anti-colonial revolution, yet the director of The Battle of Algiers doesn’t hesitate to show the horror of bombing a café or cold-blooded assassinations. In the café, before one of the women leaves her bomb under someone’s chair the camera lingers on the face of a child eating ice-cream. It is one of the many instances where Pontecorvo points to the awful toll of this kind of struggle. We see images of bodies under rubble and mourners keening the dead. The same music is played for the French and Algerian dead.

In 1964, two years after the achievement of independence by Algeria, former revolutionary fighter Salah Baazi arrived in Italy looking for a suitable director to make a film about the revolution. Italy was the biggest film producing nation in Europe at the time. He had three directors in mind: Francesco Rosi, who had recently made the masterpiece Salvatore Giuliano; Luchino Visconti, director of neorealist classic film about a Sicilian fishing community,La Terre Trema; and Gillo Pontecorvo, recently Oscar nominated for his harrowing concentration camp drama, Kapo.

The whole story of how Pontecorvo and screenwriter Franco Solinas came to make the film is fascinating. They had a project called Para, about a former parachutist in Indochina who is working as a journalist in Algiers during the war. The two even made a surreptitious trip to Algeria disguised as Journalists during the last months of the war. What became The Battle of Algiers is based on Saadi Yacef’s memoirs. He was the FLN commander in Algiers and, fascinatingly, plays a version of himself in the film. Thanks to Yacef’s prestige, Pontecorvo gained unprecedented access to the Casbah.

Pontecorvo was a most fastidious filmmaker. He worked on every aspect of the film to ensure it had the look and feel of a ‘found’ document of a struggle.  The Battle of Algiers is often discussed in relation to the Third cinema movement which proposed the decolonization of both the world and the medium of film. In the end, though, Pontecorvo was probably too much of a European auteur to fit into this film movement. Though he advocated a collectivist politics he was somewhat autocratic in his artistic approach. This would cause considerable turbulence on the set of Queimada when his working methods clashed with those of Brando. But every decision he made on The Battle of Algiers seems the correct one. It is a perfect a work of film art, if such a thing is even possible.

The Battle of Algiers is traditionally described as having two stories: one is the story of the defeat of the FLN in ‘battle of Algiers’ (1954-1957) by the Paras and the second is the chorale portrait of the growth of collective consciousness of the Algerian people that eventually culminates in victory over the French, the fourth biggest military power in the world. The closing scenes of the film are justly revered as some of the most astonishing ever captured on film. The pitiless logic of an anti-colonial struggle is represented by Ali La Ponte (a stunning performance by Brahim Hadjadj), unemployed boxer and street hustler turned implacable revolutionary versus Colonel Mathieu, the leader of the Paras. An intriguing aspect of Pontecorvo’s film is the very sympathetic portrayal of the Mathieu character whom film critic J Hoberman describes as ‘a Marxist in reverse’. Ironically, the actor who plays the representative of imperial authority, Jean Martin, was a leftist and a signatory to the petition of the 121 against the Algerian war.

Of course, the logic of Colonel Mathieu’s position is horrific: if you believe that Algeria belongs to France then you must accept to use of torture to defeat the secretive cell structure of the FLN. The film opens on a scene of a man who has been broken by torture to reveal the location of Ali La Pointe. Later, in the film, we see incredibly stark images of torture which recall the grisly scenes at Abu Ghraib.

Queimada an unjustly neglected classic revolutionary film

After the huge critical success of The Battle of Algiers, Pontecorvo was offered and turned down countless projects. With the war in Vietnam raging he was still keen to tackle further the topic of imperialism. Screenwriter Franco Solinas developed a story around the transition to a post-colonial situation. Queimada dramatizes the Hegelian master-slave dialectic in the curious Pygmalion-style relationship between Brando’s Sir William Walker, a British agent, and Evaristo Márquez’s Jose Dolores, a water-carrier.

Brando’s character is a variation of William Walker, the US adventurer who invaded Nicaragua in the nineteenth century. In the film, he molds the Dolores character into an anti-colonial revolutionary who overthrows Portuguese rule on the Island of Queimada, which ultimately helps facilitate the exploitation of the Island by the Royal Antilles’ Sugar Company. Jose Dolores and his band of revolutionaries eventually rebel against this new post-colonial administration and Sir William Walker (now under the pay of the Royal Antilles Sugar Company) has to return to the Island to put down the revolt.

Queimada is an amazing big-budget spectacle, a leftist Conradian style epic that has a fascinating central relationship between Brando and Marquez. Franco Solinas’ dialogue is brilliant: there are several bravura speeches by Brando, who plays a seductive, villainous, super-intellectual. There are traces of this character carried over from Solinas and Pontecorvo’s abandoned Algerian screenplay, Para. This was to have starred Paul Newman.

Marlon Brando is superb in the film, ‘the greatest actor in the history of cinema’ according to Pontecorvo. The filming process was notoriously difficult, with locations being switched from Columbia to Morocco late in the shoot. Also, fascist dictator Franco’s ludicrous preciousness about the perception of Spanish imperial history meant that the film became about the Portuguese empire and not the Spanish. Thus, the title changed from Quemada to Queimada.

Queimada dramatises both the transition from slavery to wage labour and from colonialism to post-colonialism. The film uses Brando’s incredible acting skills to great effect in two particularly powerful scenes. In one, Sir William Walker utilizes a very patriarchal metaphor to make the argument in favour of wage labour and freedom from foreign domination. In the other, he outlines the transformations than can occur over ten years and how these can reveal the contradictions of a century. He concludes: ‘and so often we have to realize that our judgements and our interpretation and even our hopes may have been wrong – wrong, that’s all’.

In the intervening ten years, Sir William has become ‘a changed man’, disillusioned, but he still pursues Jose Dolores with the savage counterinsurgency where he burns the island in a similar fashion to the behavior of the Portuguese centuries before. When the representative of Royal Sugar objects to this, Walker responds with a speech to General Shelton about the dangers of ships transmitting messages about successful revolutions around the Antilles,

Do you know why this island is called Queimada? Because it was already burnt once, and do you know why? Because even then, it was the only way to conquer the resistance of the people and after that, the Portuguese exploited the island in peace for nearly three hundred years.

That’s the logic of profit, isn’t it, my dear Shelton? One builds to make money. And to go on making it or to make more, sometimes it’s necessary to destroy.  You know that fire can’t cross the sea because it goes out! But certain news, certain ideas travel by ships’ crews.

The revolutionary politics of the film Queimada

Queimada features some extraordinary Carnival scenes that lead up to the assassination of the Portuguese governor of the Island. It is the world turned upside down. As historian Natalie Zemon Davies writes of the scene, ‘it is infused with African motifs, the slaves are brilliantly costumed, their children covered with white fluid to make them look like ghosts, and their cries and dances transfix the soldiers until it is time for the attack’. There are scenes of both ceremonial keening (after the death of the rebel Santiago) and brilliant celebratory scenes around the dead Portuguese soldiers.

We know from histories of the Haitian revolution that Voodoo songs and spirits played a huge role in consciousness raising. Historian Carolyn E Fick writes, ‘insofar as voodoo was a means of self-expression and of psychological or cathartic release from material oppression’ it was still necessary to ‘translate that consciousness into active rebellion and, finally, into the life-and-death struggle of revolution aimed at the total destruction of their masters and slavery, that emancipation could and did become a reality’.

Queimada dramatizes this brilliantly, when Jose Dolores looks on at the villagers dancing in celebration around the bodies of the vanquished Portuguese soldiers. When we see Dolores and his band of revolutionaries’ marching along the beach it is with a realBlack Jacobin–style majesty of a people transformed. Ennio Morricone‘s beautiful music provides perfect accompaniment.

In some ways the scenes of Jose Dolores’ capture from his mountain redoubt and transferal into custody recall similar scenes in Viva Zapata, which also starred Brando. Though Walker is seemingly the victorious character in this long dialectical tussle, it is Jose Dolores who seems the wiser, he is quoted by a villager as saying,

José Dolores says that if what we have in our country is civilization, civilization of white men, then we are better uncivilized because it is better to know where to go and not know how than it is to know how to go and not know where.

Walker, one the other hand, is essentially a spent, cynical character. Dolores refuses to concede to Walker when offered a chance to escape: Sir William is conscious of the implications of Jose becoming a martyr and then a myth. Speaking to General Shelton, Walker makes the observation,

Walker: The man that fights for an idea is a hero. And a hero who is killed becomes a martyr and a martyr immediately becomes a myth. A myth is more dangerous than a man because you can’t kill a myth. Don’t you agree, Shelton? I mean, think of his ghost running through the Antilles. Think of the legends and the songs.

General Shelton: Better songs than armies.

Walker: Better silence than songs.

Earlier, after the initial vanquishing of the Portuguese, Walker spoke to Jose Dolores,

Walker: Who’ll govern your island, José? Who’ll run your industries? Who’ll handle your commerce? Who’ll cure the sick? Teach in your schools? This man? Or that man? Or the other? Civilization is not a simple matter, José. You cannot learn its secrets overnight. Today civilization belongs to the white man – and you must learn to use it. Without it, you cannot go forward.

Walker’s questions strike at the pernicious reality of the post-colonial situation. European civilization is based on the predation of other countries (‘what civilisation?’ asks Jose Dolores). This recalls Eduardo Galeano’s passage about ‘Europe’s legacy’ in Mirrors: A History of the World, Refracted,

When Belgium left the Congo, a total of three Congolese held positions of responsibility in government.

When Great Britain left Tanzania, the country had but two engineers and twelve doctors.

When Spain left Western Sahara, the country had but one doctor, one lawyer, and one specialist in commerce.

When Portugal left Mozambique, the country had a 99 percent illiteracy rate, not a single high school graduate, and no university.

A systematic underdevelopment of the colonies they exploited was a feature of empire. When the slaves of St Domingue made the greatest slave revolution in history they were ever after punished cruelly by the French and the Americans.

The ending of the film is ambiguous: Walker is stabbed as he walks along the port towards his ship. He hears a voice saying: ‘your bag, senor?’ which is exactly what Jose Dolores says to him on two earlier occasions: once, when he first arrives; the second, when he first leaves the island. This time, it is another, who stabs him, perhaps in revenge for Jose Dolores?

The Battle of Algiers and Queimada are two very different, yet revolutionary, films. Whereas Battle has the incendiary bite of third cinema combined with Italian neorealism, Queimada is an awesome-looking spectacle, more expansive and intellectual. Together they make a fabulous double feature. Hopefully, someone will produce a restored version of Queimada in the future. Until then, you can watch it on Youtube, either the American or European version.

“Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics,” declared anthropologist David Graeber in 2013,

it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.)

Graeber, who died in Venice on 2 September 2020, was writing specifically of what he called “Bullshit Jobs” and in the process demonstrated many of those characteristics for which his life and work were already famous and now are mourned. His dissections of capitalist operations, ideological and material, had a bright-honed clarity and incisiveness: qualities magnified in turn by how intuitively he seemed to offer support, in practice (and in person when possible), to struggles for self-determination, from Seattle in 2001 to the heroic “social revolution” of Rojava in 2014. Graeber’s account of the anti-globalisation campaigns that erupted and expanded at the turn of the twenty-first century are particularly vivid in this regard, blending self-deprecating literary flair with an incendiary (and infectious) perception of the potential of mass power to derail what he categorised as the ruthless imperialism of Euro-American political and financial elites. “The IMF”, Graeber wrote, “was always the arch-villain of the struggle”:

It was their job to ensure that no country (no matter how poor) could ever be allowed to default on loans to Western bankers (no matter how foolish). Even if a banker were to offer a corrupt dictator a billion dollar loan, and that dictator placed it directly in his Swiss bank account and fled the country, the IMF would ensure a billion dollars (plus generous interest) would be extracted from his former victims. If a country did default, for any reason, the IMF could impose a credit boycott whose economic effects were roughly comparable to that of a nuclear bomb… [In] the world of international politics, economic laws are only held to be binding on the poor.

Graeber’s versatile irreverence for the institutions and narratives of neoliberal civilization made him one of the most radical (and humane) of anthropological and economic commentators. His writing dances, in furious delight, with the recognition of capitalism not only as a broken system, but one ready to collapse in ruins at the slightest pressure of “the poor”, whom he counted as his educators and comrades. There is “no possible way we could have an anti-capitalist revolution”, he observed decisively, “while at the same time scrupulously respecting property rights”.

In the days since his death, the internet and other outlets have hummed with personal tributes and reminiscences, a vast chorale of grief and celebration, that place Graeber without fail as a voice of warmth, insight and non-didactic solidarity among the internationalist Left. He had a gift for practicing what he preached, in short, but also for avoiding the instructional pretensions that so often accompany the analyses of Euro-American intellectuals, convinced not only of the complicated rottenness of capitalistic civilisation, but of the exclusive expertise undergirding their own pronouncements. If Graeber’s concerns were prodigiously far-ranging (from his intricately woven history of debt to his interpretation of “fun” as both an evolutionary and revolutionary phenomenon), his interventions were refreshing, always, for the humour, the air of dishevelled enthusiasm, which accompanied their presentation. His wit, his ability to demystify the reigning economic and political superstitions of our time, is often best encountered in full flow, as here:

[Rather] than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations….These are what I propose to call ‘bullshit jobs’…. It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen.

In a single stroke, Graeber dissipates the self-delusional fog that passes for capitalist thought, and does so with utter lightness and lucidity. As a result, and quite understandably, many of the re-prints and obituaries that have emerged since last Wednesday have emphasised the eloquence and egalitarianism that shine across his life and works. No doubt there is some justice in this perspective. Graeber’s writing flares with the freshness and powerful urgency of a true student of humanity in action, and rebellion itself: a person accustomed to thinking of themselves as a participant in a community, a part of a larger whole. “Odd though it may seem,” he wrote,

the ruling classes live in fear of us. They appear to still be haunted by the possibility that, if average [people] really get wind of what they’re up to, they might all end up hanging from trees.

“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world,” he elaborated elsewhere (once again evidencing his willingness to think in collective categories),

is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” With such gifts – of expression and vision, faith in the crowd and humility before its might – it’s surely no accident that he is credited as an originator (among others, as he often emphasised) of the rallying cry, “We are the 99%”.

Anarchism at the core of David Graeber’s politics

To give full service to David Graeber’s politics, it is essential to recognise the self-proclaimed anarchism that informed and motivated Graeber’s approach and grapple with its implications. “At their very simplest,” he noted, “anarchist beliefs turn on to two elementary assumptions”:

The first is that human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be, and can organize themselves and their communities without needing to be told how. The second is that power corrupts.

It is to Graeber’s credit that he applied such principles as readily in his critiques of leftist campaigns and organizations (in America and farther afield) as in his exposés of the violence and distortion inherent in so many of capitalism’s most prized practices and presumptions. In contrast to what he termed “Marxist sectarians”, for instance, with their “top-down popular front groups” and “old-fashioned activist organizing styles” seemingly designed to generate “steering committees and ideological squabbles”, Graeber was clear and characteristically persuasive in his fundamental commitments, declaring himself a glad member of the “horizontalist, direct-action-oriented wing of the planetary movement against neoliberalism”. For this branch (or root, perhaps) of “the planetary movement”, our chances of surviving and even defeating capitalist hegemony, a project necessarily both local and global in its coordinates, are infinitely greater if the campaigns – along with the modes of self-organisation and mutual aid – we adopt now foster and embody values of transparency, equality, democratic participation as a matter of standard practice. Vitally, for Graeber, such political tenets were neither lofty nor aspirational, but could be discerned over and over, and in concrete terms, throughout human history. “When you can actually test them, most of the usual predictions about what would happen without states or capitalism turn out to be entirely untrue”, he wrote, in a passage worth quoting in full:

For thousands of years people lived without governments. In many parts of the world people live outside of the control of governments today. They do not all kill each other. Mostly they just get on about their lives the same as anyone else would. Of course, in a complex, urban, technological society all this would be more complicated: but technology can also make all these problems a lot easier to solve. In fact, we have not even begun to think about what our lives could be like if technology were really marshalled to fit human needs. How many hours would we really need to work in order to maintain a functional society — that is, if we got rid of all the useless or destructive occupations like telemarketers, lawyers, prison guards, financial analysts, public relations experts, bureaucrats and politicians, and turn our best scientific minds away from working on space weaponry or stock market systems to mechanising away dangerous or annoying tasks like coal mining or cleaning the bathroom, and distribute the remaining work among everyone equally? Five hours a day? Four? Three? Two? Nobody knows because no one is even asking this kind of question. Anarchists think these are the very questions we should be asking.

As is arguably true of anti-capitalists in general, Graeber’s radicalism was most manifest, and most valuable, in his urge to frame new questions about the world – including our revolutions within and across it – rather than regurgitating pre-approved answers about the same. His working assumption, moreover, is compelling: that the more vigorously democratic (as opposed to hierarchical) and inclusively action-centered (rather than stage-managed and conciliatory) our radical practice is, the more cohesive, resilient, and effective our struggles will become.  Revolutionaries of all stripes would do well to take heed.

Graeber’s life and work seem to touch and illuminate so many strands of radical thought and endeavour that the notion of offering a final word on either seems flawed, if not plainly ridiculous. Indeed, the unflagging zest and comradeliness, insight and interconnection, of his approach are such that he seems one of the few figures in the present day whose utopian realism can truly be seen as living on, to be borne out and extended, in the actions of mass resistance and mutual support that flourish beyond his own individual, immediate involvement. No doubt this is at best a complex consolation to the friends, comrades, and shipmates on the voyage of his one life, now closed. But if nothing else, it reminds us that the greatest tribute we can pay to Graeber, and those from whom he himself drew inspiration, is to practice and develop the politics and political culture he exemplified when living.