'Poetry is the only place that I feel human.' An interview with Kurdish poet Bejan Matur

This interview can be found in the new issue of Wasafiri Journal of International Literature. 

Bejan Matur’s poetry is put down as if engraved rather than written. Her ideas are expressed with a carved simplicity, a resonant depth, formal control and an imagistic mastery which is at once varied and disciplined. What she writes about, however, is shocking in its jagged violence and unresolved grief. Matur was born in Maraş in Turkey and writes mainly in Turkish. She is of Kurdish-Alevi heritage and her experience has been one of injustice, discrimination, silencing, denial and erasure. She witnessed the massacre of Alevis in her hometown during her childhood and was tortured in prison during her university years. Her law degree remained unused as she lost faith in established forms of language, argument and authority to gain justice and convey the truth. In the aftermath of torture, she turned to literature.

Matur’s poetry is a declamatory reclamation of history, identity and land which, while it may be emotionally rooted in her past, reads as universal. She could have been writing a thousand years ago; she could be predicting the aftermath of wars to come, a thousand years from now. Her poems evoke felled civilisations, buried truths and broken links. Her narrators wander through a ravaged society in which the very stones are soaked with mourning because of man’s inhumanity and violence. Rubble and earth reverberate with grief, pain and longing. Nature absorbs what really happened but cannot speak it back.

Matur is a prolific and award winning poet whose work is gaining a strong English-speaking readership thanks to two volumes produced by Arc Publications. In The Temple of a Patient God (2004) contains an extensive selection of work from her first four collections: Winds Howl Through the Mansions (1996); God Must Not See My Letters (1999); Sons Reared By The Moon (2002); and In His Desert (2002). The poems have been translated by Ruth Christie, who also translated Matur’s most recent complete collection, How Abraham Abandoned Me (Arc Publications, 2012), along with translator Selçuk Berilgen.

Most recently the Poetry Translation Centre in London have produced the pamphlet If This is a Lament (2017), which contains a career-wide selection of Matur’s poetry in new translations by Jen Hadfield and Canan Marasligil. In this project the image of the razed homeland abounds: it is depicted as a place that never was; a charred forest; a cold, dead heart full of black stones. The landscape is alive, a repository for human suffering in which “almond trees and stones…recognised me” but cannot speak what they know. Nonetheless, nature can give comfort as well as reflect human pain. In the poem Glacier, “White light from the depth of the glacier/ floods into my skin.” Other people, however, provide less comfort. Even love is a morbid union, a joined march towards death where “together, our hearts decay.”

Matur’s cynicism comes not from iconoclastic contempt but from the devastation of cultural betrayal. Formal religion is nothing more than a justification for political and cultural abuses; a temple is “just a place”, she writes in the poem In The Temple of a Patient God. Ritual has lost its ability to safeguard against annihilation, so ceremonial robes are mere “roots swaying on the hanger”, symbols of death rather than protection, “wan shrouds sweeping.”

Words, appearances, the official version of events and voices of authority are not to be believed. But in the absence of those, what is there? “What words can we use to speak of pain,/ in what language can we ask to be forgiven?” asks Matur in Growing Up in Two Dreams. We feel the bitter irony of her writing in the language of her oppressor, following Ataturk’s excision of words of Persian, Arabic and Kurdish origin from the official Turkish lexicon.  Truth eludes language but the truth, let alone justice, is so slow in coming that there is no vindication when it does break the surface; truth is a “last gift” grasped “too late” by accident “when I looked back” and it represents only “harm”, Matur writes in I Know the Unspoken.

Despite Matur’s own lack of faith in language to convey the truth, the reader is struck loud and clear by her work’s ringing beauty, effigy-like strength and stillness, its eloquently expressed pain and its haunting quality of permanence, timelessness and universality. I meet her in London in the summer of 2017, during a busy week of readings and talks about If This is a Lament.

What were you like as a little girl?

I grew up in a Mediterranean climate, in the cotton fields, with all these oak trees around us, in a very large tribal family, with five sisters and two brothers. My father’s a farmer, he used to grow cotton, It was a very picturesque, beautiful scene and there was this feeling of beauty, of paradise. This was shattered and collapsed by the tragic events that happened to Kurds and Alevis, all these [military] operations I witnessed, this massacre [at Maraş] which happened when I was ten.

I was very different from my siblings and the villagers felt sorry for me, a little girl who was always carrying big, heavy books, sitting in the shadow if the oak tree, reading Tolstoy and Zola and Hugo. In my mind I was like the characters from the novels, while the others were living in a simple, pure, archaic world where life was real, strong and very earthy. I was writing poetry when I was very young and even then it wasn’t what I call “pink poetry”. It was very rebellious.

When I was a child, we had a big house, a family house. The women were cooking and doing their daily things and I was always on the terrace reading my book. When my mum called me to come and cook, my father always protected me. He said, “Don’t call Bejan, don’t bother her, she’s reading.” He always protected me and I always feel his eyes, his gaze on my shoulder. He was supportive to all my sisters and he sent us all to good schools – but I continued my education after that. It’s important, in that kind of society, when you have support from a father.

How did you come to be tortured? And how did that lead to you becoming a poet?

When people ask me this, I always give a little smile. Because it’s obvious in Turkey, it’s political: if you are a Kurdish Alevi, of course you’re put in prison. During my university time I was always asking questions because of this oppression and inequality. We weren’t treated as equal citizens as Kurds, as Alevis. It was a basic human rights problem: they treated Kurds like second class people. We were in a group with other Alevis, we were talking, so they detained us. And in the end, after a year, they couldn’t produce any proof [of wrongdoing] so they let us out.

I was tortured in detention during that year. I was locked in a very dark cell, darkness all around me for more than twenty days. This darkness was like mercury, very concrete, very strong. I had no light, I couldn’t see anything, I was trying to not lose my connection with my being. Then I found a strong feeling dragging me in a kind of shamanic ritual. I was trying to say something without words; it was a kind of humming. After a while I found words like diamonds in the darkness. They were shining like stars and I found them, but I didn’t have a pen and notebook so I couldn’t make notes. I wish I could have.

Writing poetry wasn’t in my control. It was the only way that I could heal. I couldn’t stop it. When I heard it, I had to write it. My early poems are darker, stronger. My latest ones still have a sense of sorrow, but they are not heavy.

You write your poetry in Turkish. How do you feel about that?

I have only my second language, Turkish, to write in. I was born Kurdish, I spoke Kurdish with my family, with my mother – I still speak in Kurdish with her. My first shock was when I started primary school, because I had to leave my mother’s language at home. I was forced to learn Turkish because the education system was in Turkish.

When people say my Turkish poetry sounds so beautiful and so soft, it makes me feel sorrow because my Turkish contains my Kurdish. I am writing in a different way compared to other Turkish poets and writers, because I have another layer of understanding, I come from a different world, I have a story to tell about the things I witnessed since I was a child and the things I read about in the history of my people. All these tragedies bring a feeling of elegy for me, which is what makes it different.

Turkish is the language I was tortured in – the police were speaking to me in Turkish. Some people say my poetry is revenge, artistic revenge, taking Turkish and using it back against them. ‘They’ try to ruin your being, they try to shatter your existence, paralyse you through torture, through killing, through oppression. And to tell them NO, I do exist, I am here, I won’t have you to ruin my being, because hatred is very destructive. In my writing I always try to keep the bitterness away. Poetry for me was a kind of tool by which I healed my soul and spirit, it was a kind of consolation or therapy.

I have begun writing more poetry in Kurdish, which for me is a language of music. It’s like lullabies. Language is not about grammar or vocabulary; your mother tongue is the music you remember from your early childhood. The sound of wind, the sound of your mum calling you when you’re playing somewhere, the sound of the river stream passing by your house – all this is language. Now I feel in my mind that these sounds are coming to me in Kurdish.

Do you see your work as political?

I don’t use any political terminology or political slogans. Nonetheless, my poetry is very political, because being political is about changing people’s viewpoint, showing them a different way of seeing things. When my poetry first came out, the first Turkish readers were shocked, surprised, because my viewpoint was not familiar to them. I was trying to show them that they have to recognise that we are here, we have a voice, we are people, we are  human, we deserve respect, we deserve understanding. When I go to my village or to Kurdistan or all these Alevi societies, the moment they see me they start telling their stories because they don’t have access to representation, they have no opportunity to speak about themselves. It’s a kind of responsibility I feel towards my people.

What is your process?

I don’t have a strategy to write, it just comes. Usually I hear the sound when I walk, it’s a real shamanic ritual for me. Then there are two different stages. The first is not in my control, it’s just a very strong inspiration that comes to me as a kind of music. If I have a notebook I make notes, but then I leave it, because I want to create a space, a distance between myself and my first emotions. Poetry is not just about the raw emotions, it’s more deep and philosophical. The second part is a very disciplined editing part. Editing, for me, is like making a sculpture. My first notes are like a piece of marble, then I bring it to my atelier, then I carve it. I don’t add, I carve until I reach the concrete essence of the poetry. It’s there, I know the shape, I know the sound, it’s waiting for me. And I throw away all the emotional stuff. I am very perfectionist about the things I published.

Your poetry has a mysticism and spiritual resonancet. Do you see yourself as religious?

I’m not a believer, I don’t believe in religion and I don’t believe in God. But I use all these allusions because it’s a cultural thing for me. The environment I grew up in has these references. I just give them new meanings; it’s a personal ontology, a personal mythology. The way I use God is very equal: I criticise him, I ask questions. That’s very Alevi, it’s in my blood.

You tackle huge cultural, political and historical themes in your work. Do you think poetry can make a difference?

Before, I thought that politics could change the world. I took a break from poetry [after her fourth collection] and did journalism for eight years. I went on TV as a commentator and my newspaper columns were very effective. They were shaking the country. But I came to hate all these ready political slogans and clichés. During my time doing all this activism, I saw that there are minor and major politics, and that activism is about minor politics. Major politics is about [bigger things like] natural resources, the arms trade and macro economics. And when everything is corrupt, on all sides, it all becomes a game. I wanted to go deeper, to return to literature and defend human rights through literature. Poetry is everywhere, in political speeches, in social media. Poetry is the essence of all that. Writing a tweet in 140 characters, having to summarise your feelings in that space, that’s poetry, and people are always looking for it. Poetry is the only place that I feel human.

This interview with Bejan Matur was facilitated by the organisers of the Ledbury Poetry Festival, where Matur performed from If This Is A Lament in summer 2017. Ledbury is the UK’s biggest poetry festival, running annually for ten days in late June or early July. A preview of the 2018 festival can be found at www.poetry-festival.co.uk

On Europe, insularity and the UK's identity crisis

This is an extended version of an article written for the British Council....before Brexit.

I’m currently away from home. Every morning I log on and read the news headlines, opinion pieces and arts pages in the British papers. From a distance, the UK looks like a tiny little island riven with inequality and lack of opportunity and tormented by suffering, poverty and precarity. On the international or pan-European rankings for social mobility, gender equality, quality of life, political representativeness of the population and a host of other social and political indices it comes up shockingly low.

It is human nature that people who are suffering look for someone to blame, a scapegoat for their pain – preferably a stranger who cannot answer back. The current government, the tabloid media and noisy attention-grabbing outliers like UKIP have taken that urge and focused it, as ever, on whoever is ‘other’, foreign, alien, different. They have managed to conflate unrelated factors to produce a false image of threat and imminent crisis, a phantom danger looming from outside in, making the leap from the 9/11 and 7/7 terror attacks to encouraging Islamophobic ignorance to threatening that Al-Qaeda, ISIS and Daesh are just this moment planning on coming to England to radicalise everyone, along with the millions of refugees who are actually fleeing them and wanting to leech off the state with their nasty greedy foreign ways, along with unscrupulous economic immigrants from beyond and within the EU all coming to steal English jobs and dare to be everything from doctors to waitresses to students to parents, which is why there aren’t enough schools, jobs, homes and hospital beds, because the foreigners have taken them and nasty faraway ‘Brussels’ (the stand-in word for the EU) has said it’s okay, led by mean Ms Merkel who secretly runs the whole show for some evil Germanic reason of her own.

It’s a lie. A toxic, widespread, all-encompassing, all-connecting conspiracy theory that has obscured the facts and poisoned the debate as we approach the referendum like a runaway train heading towards a brick wall. I don’t like getting party political – after all, yuppie New Labour were just as craven in their courting of the rich and famous as any Tory and Jeremy Corbyn is such a male-cronyist bro that he deserves honorary Bullingdon membership. But the present government has a lot to answer for and the present opposition have failed in countering the rhetoric with the facts. Under Cameron’s government, resources have been moved away from education, healthcare, housing and essential social services, kicking those who were already down, robbing at least two generations of a decent future, punishing the poor and disadvantaged, putting the abused at risk and hobbling anyone who isn’t privileged and financially well-supported. It is the same government that has granted asylum to shockingly low numbers of refugees during the biggest humanitarian crisis since the second world war, while allowing the false idea that millions are on their way to the UK to destroy society to flourish. 

It’s as though Britain has faced and failed a challenge to its identity which has played out over recent decades. Following its century-odd of benefitting from its colonial exploitation of 84% of the world, including carving up the Middle East after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, it was painfully made to see the arrogance, greed and racism of its ways. Then came the slowly dawning realisation that England was no longer a great Imperial power and that people everywhere speak English now not because of England but because of America; and that England itself is not important in the political scheme of things despite its cultural prestige which includes Harry Potter, Downton Abbey, Dr Who, Sherlock and the BBC and despite its desperation to pal up with George W Bush and enjoy a random killing spree in Iraq which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and dozens of British soldiers. And despite its past riches including Shakespeare, Milton, King Arthur, the Bloomsbury set, medieval architecture, the plague, The Tudors, Oxbridge, the Elizabethans, The Victorians and all the rest of it. And despite Cool Britannia which Tony Blair so loved. Because the world is a large and varied place, there are more than 7 billion people on Earth, times move on, colonialism wasn’t a great adventure for the colonised and contemporary India, China, Latin America and the protests and demonstrations, civil wars, fragile states, terrorist threats, breakdown in civic life, forced conscription, collapse of law and order and unliveable consequences of climate change in Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, Mali, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Egypt, Yemen and elsewhere just seem more interesting and important at the moment. 

Britain has had to accept that despite its past wealth and power, and despite ongoing cultural prestige, it is no longer a major political player it used to be. Following that, it had a choice. 

One: humbly accept its change in status, recognise that it’s part of a world community and become an involved member of that community, willing to learn and make friendships across nationalities and languages and surface differences, taking a seat at the table in EU summits, contributing wholly and equally as one of a number of participants, being guided by a vision of what is best and fairest for those most in need, gaining in some instances, conceding in others, taking a humanitarian, open, internationalist and collective approach rather than a competitive one. 

Two: throw all the toys out of the pram, keep a vision of white male aristocratic Englishness front and centre (because it was chaps like that who once led Britain to colonial greatness, oh happy days), close the doors against foreigners, close the shutters against dissenting voices, pull up the ladder, pull up the drawbridge, go deep inside and hunker in the aristo-bunker against outsiders, heathens, invaders, meddling foreign dignitaries, homegrown rebels and dirty diseased grasping peasants. Because if you can’t rule the sandpit you don’t want to play.

It made the wrong choice. Now it looks as though Britain will no longer be a European nation but instead an unimportant, unhappy, unhelpful island floating on the north-west edge of the continent. Britain gains nothing from shrinking away from the rest of the world except the likelihood of shrivelling away, eating itself up with inequality and deprivation, starved of the enriching influence of the wider world and the interest and variety it brings, hypnotised by visions from the past. It will develop a worldwide reputation, not of strength and sovereignty, but of xenophobia, jingoism and hostility to those who are in need of sanctuary. It is already gaining that reputation. 

One could argue that Cameron was compelled to hold a referendum into EU membership following pressure from a significant minority of MPs in his own party. Or one could say that the referendum came out of nowhere, cooked up to derail political, activist and media critics of the government’s attitude to refugees and immigrants alike by stirring up the far louder invective of all those Britons who are full of rage, uncertainty and frustration and are looking to pin it on some mythical threat, and the whole thing has now got out of hand. One could add that even if Cameron was challenged on Europe by some of his own ministers, as Prime Minister his role is to handle such challenges within the party and show firm leadership without panicking and throwing the country’s future over to the public on a whim. 

As I said to my mother, “It’s as though David Cameron randomly lobbed a parcel of shit into the middle of his own dinner party and now he’s got to clean it up, only to find that it’s gone everywhere. Now he’s having to get every single one of his high-profile friends from bankers to artists to business leaders to go on the record saying what a disaster it’s going to be if we leave.”

It’s true that the EU is bureaucratic, that some decisions satisfy the biggest power players and (no doubt) various vested interests. That is true of every single major institution and organisation in the world. That’s also what it means to be part of a world community: you don't always get your way, but you do always get to have your say. The oft-repeated complaint that 'Brussels makes all the decisions' is misleading: yes, EU meetings are held in Brussels... and the UK is supposed to play its part, show up and contribute at those meetings as a member of the EU. That's what being in a community means. You have a place at the table and you can say what you need to, in front of everyone else, and they listen to you respectfully and you listen to them respectfully, because you are pulling together with a common purpose which is bigger than your individual desires. Political decisions can be made with a long view, a wide lens and a collective vision; individual states’ leaders are not compelled to make the sudden wild promises or baseless claims that emerge when they’re tied into their own short election cycles and have to campaign amongst an indecisive public for votes. Collective EU membership overrides the pettiness of national process politics. 

This referendum should never have come about and the question of leaving the EU should never have arisen. It signals something dangerous and depressing: England's increasing conservatism, inequality, isolationism, cynicism about multiculturalism and unwillingness to be part of any world community. It's as if, having rightfully been turfed off its colonial victory track and then its warpath, England is now sulking. 

But you can’t stand by and let a great vision die. You have to fight for it, or else those who are the most angry, who can shout the loudest and perform the pernicious psychological trick of tapping into the worst people’s worst fears will win. 

To throw away EU membership is to squander an opportunity to be a part of the wider world of varied languages, co-operation, cultural exchange, mutual opportunity, recognition of common humanity, symbolic sorority and fraternity. Leaving the EU sends a strong message that "we" are better than everyone else and are exempt from the challenges and inspirations of diversity, collaboration and change. Instead of doing to right thing by stepping out, standing alongside our neighbours, acknowledging our responsibilities in a troubled world and making things better by offering sanctuary and humanitarian assistance, we are slamming the door shut, blocking our ears and shouting insults to drown out the cries for help. Leaving the EU will not turn Britain into a strong fortress but into a decrepit prison whose inhabitants will first turn on each other and then waste away.

Choosing political sides in England's porn-fed, combative culture

This is an oddly backdated essay reprinted from the 28 Days project released a month before the 2015 general election, just before the Tories got in for another 5 years with a (slim) majority. You can read the original here.

“If England’s not careful it’s going to wind up on the wrong side of history,” I said.
“Compared to what? Its past? Hasn’t it always been on the wrong side?” was the sardonic reply from a colleague.

We were at a panel discussion about the reality of asylum and immigration in Britain. The audience was full of people who work in the field: service providers, to use that chilling phrase which leaches all the humanity, pain, richness and desperation out of their vital work. I was talking about my latest stint of outreach work, with asylum seekers and refugees, and how the individuals I encountered and the things they had survived were so different from the derogatory and scare-mongering messages put out by politicians and the media. 

My colleagues described how they’d witnessed the development of a ‘Fortress Europe’ mentality: an informal bloc of Western European countries whose policies and public messages are openly hostile not just to asylum seekers and refugees but to immigrants of all kinds, to true multicultural understanding, to a nuanced acceptance of religious or cultural difference. There is a mindset of arrogance and racism which sees the rest of the world as backward, dangerous, uncivilised, tribal, contaminated with violence and propensity towards terrorism and religious (but really, they mean Muslim) fundamentalism. It’s as though Orientalism is back, only even nastier than before and without the swollen-up self-assurance of Imperial, exploitative power. There’s an attitude of uncaring exclusion and desperate self-protection against the perceived barbarity of outsiders, often simultaneous to economic recession and the breakdown of reliable education, employment and stability within these European countries themselves. Even politicians on the mainstream left will not stand up for multiracial multiculturalism, open borders or asylum seekers’ and refugees’ rights. They won’t debunk the myths or take the heat out of the bile and misinformation. Why is that? It’ll take too long to change hearts and minds and anyway there’s no money or votes in it. 

There was a sense on the night of the panel discussion that England in particular is at a critical point. There is less social mobility than ever before, greater insularity and pessimism, a developing xenophobia and isolationism, higher youth unemployment, less equality of opportunity, greater instability in the job market, a housing crisis in the capital, a weakened welfare system. Underlying everything are the terrifying levels of male violence against women and girls: the harassment, the rape, the objectification, the ageism and dismissal, the mockery, the victim-blaming and disbelief and perpetrator excusal by everyone from social peers to the police and judges, the molestation, the grooming and exploitation and abuse, the gendered bullying in schools and the full-blown development of porn-fed, coercive rape culture. There is the commodification, pornification, sale and renting and usage of us by men and the mainstreaming of a society in which it’s okay to rent and use a human woman to gratify you sexually. We fear terrorism, gun crime, natural disasters, wars – but the most common form of violence in the world is male violence against and abuse of women and girls within the home. That’s in addition to the fact that women have to do more cooking, cleaning, childcare, family admin and parental care because men do not do enough; that we are paid less for the same work; that our behaviour, achievements and ambitions are subject to an onslaught of double standards, pejorative stereotypes, sneers and degrading insults; that our employers punish us for being pregnant and having children; that we are kept out of the higher tiers of every profession and discipline from scientific research to academia to the arts to the media to politics. And when we speak up about what we have witnessed and survived, we are threatened and punished, sometimes by the male perpetrators, sometimes by their male cronies, often by male strangers who send us anonymous rape threats. 

I do not believe that people are politically apathetic. Quite the opposite: we are riled, mistrustful, angered and exhausted as we live out the consequences of trying to survive in this hard, patriarchal, capitalist society in which London has become a playground for the international super-rich while the government’s euphemistic ‘austerity’ drives make brutal cuts to social care services, legal aid, charity projects and public sector jobs, all of which have directly impacted the lives of the near-destitute, extremely vulnerable asylum seekers and refugees I work with. 

Given the male abuse and inequality we suffer, women are the major users of these services, as well as the majority of employees in the public sector. So we lose our jobs at one end and at the other we lose protection, we lose assistance when we are survivors of male violence, as victims seeking advocacy, as daughters trying to secure support for older relatives, as mothers struggling to survive when our children’s fathers don’t do any fathering and we can’t find work that will accommodate our family lives or pay enough to cover childcare. Rape crisis services close despite endemic levels of male sexual violence; women’s shelters close despite endemic levels of male domestic violence. 

Meanwhile, mainly male, mainly white politicians sit back as three course dinners are served to them, with good wine. They work hard, they are dedicated, but they will never be hungry, or cold, or poor, or isolated, or understand what it’s like to fall down between the cracks in society. There is a shock as one looks at the leaders of the three main parties, plus the UKIP freak, and sees that they are, but for a few minor nuances, much the same type. The fabled apathy of the populace kicks in not when we talk amongst ourselves but when we consider the possibility of the political elite listening to and acting on our demands and grievances. We do not believe that they will do so; they have lost our trust and our faith. We believe, instead, that politicians work on behalf of themselves and their wealthy, powerful, well-connected friends. 

When did the political system begin slipping away from us like this? Not with Cameron and his men’s club of Eton and Oxbridge cronies. I’d say it happened before then, when Labour betrayed itself to become New Labour, the party of the bourgeois yuppie, the groovy Britpop rightwing-leftwing hybrid that quickly became a war-mongering monster led by a deluded religious zealot. Millions of people protested the Iraq war but it made no difference and that told us everything: people in power don’t listen to people without power. Women are always at the bottom of that heap, of every heap, which is why, scrolling forward a decade-odd, Osborne’s cuts disproportionately affect women – and he didn’t even realise. 

The revolution that must come is a specifically feminist, anti-macho, anticapitalist one which dissolves and sweeps away the current combative and exclusive political system altogether. Will I see that happen in all the election years I’ll witness in the future? I doubt it. But I know which side I’m on.

China Flash: Writer Kerry Brown on the seven elite men who rule a country with Communist roots and capitalist shoots

This is a greatly expanded version of an article which first appeared in Time Out Beijing.

Kerry Brown has been a China hand for two decades now. Formerly head of the Asia Programme at Chatham House in London, he also worked for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London and Beijing and is now Executive Director of the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. He has gained expertise and shared his insights not only in diplomatic politics and academia but also in the literary world, speculating on the future of Shanghai in Shanghai 2020 and collecting voices from across China in Carnival China, an essay collection reflecting the country’s recent social, cultural and ideological transformations.

Brown returns to Beijing this month to discuss a project that may constitute the riskiest move of his career: The New Emperors: Power and the Princelings in China, published this year by I B Taurus. The New Emperors examines the culture of the ruling Communist Party and the personal and professional histories of the seven men elected to the Standing Committee of the current Chinese Politburo in 2012. Brown describes an insular network of wealthy, strategic careerists whose existence is dominated by an all-consuming political culture which absorbs all their ambition but isolates them from the lived reality of the country.

The New Emperors is a fascinating, subtle and timely insight into the most delicate relationships: those between the rulers and the ruled; between politicians’ personal ambition and adherence to the Party; between Communist roots and capitalist shoots; between what is asserted publicly in theory and practiced in secret; between stated ideology and private values; between the mechanics of control and strategies of evasion and subversion; between the major cities and the provinces, local and national; and between the privileged minority and the struggling majority.

Brown reveals a world in which it is possible to rise to the top of a massive communist organisation while remaining firmly within the patriarchal boys’ club and collecting lucrative business stakes, innumerable off-the-books perks, plentiful sexual exploitation opportunities, shady accomplices and a diversity of ideologically, politically, financially, socially, culturally and morally dicey interests along the way. These guys wear their inner and outer hypocrisy as easily as the regulation black hair dye and heavy tailoring which render them deliberately identical in the public eye.

The book hasn’t been translated into Chinese and probably hasn’t been read by the ‘princelings’ and ‘new emperors’ themselves. However, given the targeting of those within China who write critically about politics, I am skeptical when Brown tells me the only risk he has undertaken in his work is ‘an aching hand from typing so much’. When he arrives in Beijing for an event at the Bookworm on Wednesday 15th October, his discussion of The New Emperors will necessarily include issues which the Party deems sociologically sensitive. In advance of that conversation, in which I will be Brown’s interlocutor, he shares his thoughts on China’s past, present and future.

Your first visit to China was as a teacher exactly 20 years ago. How have you seen it change in that time?

The China I lived and worked in 20 years ago was on the cusp of its great economic awakening: here had been reform for over a decade, then the shock of 1989, the withdrawal of many foreigners and the end of the relatively liberal era of politics in the 1980s. The city I was based in for two years, Hohhot in Inner Mongolia, was pretty sleepy and represented the ‘half awake’ atmosphere that prevailed at the time: lots of qualified expectation and hope [which was] still weighted down by the unfortunate events of the last few years. There was one ersatz fast food place in Hohhot, a sort of local rip-off of Kentucky Fried Chicken, then large swathes of the city that were pretty makeshift and ramshackle and looked like they could be blown away in a strong gale.

If you visit Hohhot today the whole place has been rebuilt almost from scratch. Materially, on the surface, China is dramatically different today compared to then. But in the habits and thinking of the people, I think the change has been less dramatic than we think. Networks around you [which enable you] to get by in society were important then and they remain so today. The only difference is that in those days the most powerful person in the city seemed to be in charge of the local station ticket office, because it was so hard to get train tickets. These days, it must be the local Louis Vuitton boss who is the person everyone wants to know, or the director of the Inner Mongolian Apple outlet.

Have you also witnessed a transformation in the way the rest of the world views China?

The world outside could largely ignore China in 1994. I remember speaking to an eminent academic in the UK back then, after I got back from China after two years living there. When I suggested we might need to study China's language and society more and prepare for a future in which it was a more significant global player, he laughed aloud and said, “Well, people have been saying that for two hundred years.” It would be impossible to make this sort of dismissive comment so sweepingly now. But I suspect the same old misgivings and misperceptions of China as some kingdom of otherness still prevails, despite the fact that its people, culture and impact are in our daily lives outside of China much more deeply than they have ever been before.

What do you think underlies the Western stereotype of China as avaricious, inscrutable and alien?

Stereotypes of China have always carried this slightly unsettling element of inscrutability and unknowability. Films and plays in the past, like the notorious Fu Manchu figure from the 1930s, distilled this. It’s odd that these ideas can still linger when you think that in the UK, US and Australia, ethnic Chinese have been part of our communities for well over a century and a half.

Perhaps some people feel a deep need to have these distorted but dramatising images buried in the recesses of their imagination to liven their lives up. But it is a very deliberate and perverse act to maintain in a world where China and its people are in fact so visible, accessible and knowable.

You have engaged with China not only as a writer but also as a diplomat and an academic. What is it that draws and keeps your interest?

I find it to be a world of surprising surprises. It is a place where the things I expect to find startling often feel very familiar - like relating to people, despite the cultural and historic differences. Things which I expect to find familiar are often baffling – [for example] I have never really worked out what many Chinese really think of the outside world.

The New Emperors focuses on the seven men who essentially run China. What is these men's remit?

The seven men in the current Chinese Politburo are best seen, as I interpret them, as in charge of the big vision or strategy for their country. They sit almost like the board of some massive company, signing off the broadest general directives but living in a zone where administrative or specific policy implementation is left to others. They are, in many ways, the guardians of the values and legacy of the Party. We forget that in this context their individual aims and ideas have to be subsumed within this entity to which they owe everything and which they must faithfully serve: the Communist Party. The Party is the strongman in modern China, not Xi Jinping.

What kinds of lives do the members of the Communist Party's upper echelons live?

I suspect [their lives] are dominated by calculation of who they can trust and who they must be wary of. Theirs is a very insecure and often pretty merciless political culture. And once they enter this realm, they can never leave it - not willingly, anyway. In that sense, it is an extraordinary cage they are in.

How did they rise to power?

They rose to power by accruing political capital across different constituencies and networks in the party. Former leaders, particularly figures like Jiang Zemin, [comprised] one of the key groups amongst the [various] constituencies the current leaders had to recruit to get where they are. In the 2012 leadership transition it was clear that in the end, as a kind of circuit breaker, Jiang and other senior retired cadres had a consultative role. This might have been no more than nodding through one candidate or pausing and damning another with faint praise. 

[The seven men] have reached their current position by making many friends and avoiding building up enemies, but also by avoiding binding commitments that marry them to interests that they have to satisfy when they finally reach the summit. In that sense, these current leaders have shown, mostly in provincial careers, the ability to serve but not belong. They carry out the Party's mandate, but they cannot be the servants of anything except it.

How do the current Politburo Standing Committee members benefit from their power and do they share these benefits?

Of course, having a link with someone elevated to the Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China is a great asset and plenty of people overtly - or more often than not covertly or subliminally – try to leverage this in their business or other work. One day we can probably work out the dollar value of having a powerful authentic link to members of the political elite. But the general rule now seems to be that those who have such a link preserve its value by letting others allude to it and broadcast news of it while they keep silent.

You describe the indifference you witnessed among ordinary people in a Beijing hotel when the latest seven were elected. Why do you think they were so apathetic?

I suspect people felt disengaged by the 2012 leadership transition in China because it was something decided in ways that were very remote from their daily lives. This was not a universal franchise election where at least there were campaigners trying to engage with people, get their attention and wrestle their vote out of them. It lacked that link.

The current political system tries to do too much with too little. In the future, power will need to be shared out more widely. At the moment it is concentrated in the hands of too few, and they are unable to really continue making the quality of judgments that people in this society are increasingly demanding.

Walking around Beijing I am always surprised by the visible wealth of many of the young people in certain areas. Where does this wealth come from? 

The Party has created a society where almost anything can now be monetised. Perhaps that is the meaning behind the words of the Plenum last year: the ‘perfection of the market system’. In China, this means today that everything is in the market, from relations between people to education and marriage; there is no area of life that does not involve some sort of financial transaction. The puzzle for many in the manic market of China today is not why there are so many wealthy people, but why poverty still exists. To get rich is now glorious, and normal. I am sure the wealthy elite in cities or elsewhere in China are genuinely puzzled by how it is even possible to be poor in China now.

How do the communist and capitalist aspects of the country coexist?

Communism provides the elite with a common ideological and moral language that they can talk to each other in and concepts which can unite them and which derive from China's recent history [my addition: even if they live in a way which is completely and cravenly counter to the ideology, morality, conceptual framework and nationalistic devotion which they pretend to share]. For everyone else, this is like Latin in the medieval Christian church: something only the priesthood understood but which the rest of society didn't need to understand or know. They just had to take on trust what they thought was being said, and get on with their lives. The parallels between the Catholic church and the Communist Party are quite striking in many ways. Probably a good subject for a future book…

How would you categorise China? A capitalist country with a totalitarian core? A bureaucracy with a communist rationale?

I would categorise China by admitting it resists all categorisation. In some subtle ways it’s a unique system because of its scale, speed and complexity. It is [also] clear that our external categorisation of China carries little weight within the country itself. I was at a discussion on ‘fragmented authoritarianism’ with some Party officials and foreign scholars some months back. When the phrase was finally translated into Chinese, the Chinese officials looked genuinely perplexed. We have still failed to find a term for China or a framework in which those inside and outside the political culture here both agree on what it actually is.

What are the principal misconceptions the West has of China?

I think the West, or principal figures in the West, fail to see that while the Communist Party may well not be particularly loved by many Chinese people, when it appeals to the desire for China to be a rich, strong country it speaks a language that most people in this complex and often highly uneven society find appealing and unifying. We underestimate the desire for many Chinese people to have a strong status for their country - that is as much an emotional as a political desire. Underneath the surface, unity is lacking in China - it is a society where change has been too fast, where mobility has been huge, where people live in a place where they were not originally from and where cohesion is very fragile. This is a society where there are simmering frustrations and the need to create a sense of unity that doesn't just end up being a shrill nationalism is very important. That probably involves the state disappearing even more from people's lives as they seek new and more creative ways to become modern, global citizens.

Do you think that foreign countries criticise China for things that they themselves are guilty of? I’m thinking of nepotism, political corruption, extreme capitalism, too-fast development, commercialism, excessive police/army/state power, opposition to grassroots movements, surveillance culture…

There are a lot of double standards and hypocrisy with some of the international criticisms of China, just as there is a lot of defensiveness or wariness in the response to these criticisms by Chinese officials and elites. As the world's top emerging economy, however, they will just have to put up with attacks like these. It comes with the territory.

• Kerry Brown's site: here
• Publisher I B Taurus' site for The New Emperors: here
• Reviews of The New Emperors in The Telegraph, The Wall Street Journal, The Times Higher Education supplement, The Guardian and The Financial Times.

To read my China Flash series of articles about contemporary China, please click here or explore some of the links below:

• Lean In Beijing on the new sexism, corporate ambition, marital choices and awesome girls in China
• Film-maker Jenny Man Wu on contemporary Chinese women’s wit, pain and ambivalence
• Benedicte Bro-Cassard, Beijing fashion photographer, on luxury, sugar daddies and sugar daughters
• Kong Lingnan, Beijing painter, on natural beauty and human ugliness
• Writer Kerry Brown on the seven elite men who rule a country with Communist roots and capitalist shoots
• Writer Zhang Chao on media misogyny, social changes and the pressures facing young Chinese women
• ABS Crew: Beijing graffiti artists on legal, semi legal and illegal Chinese street art
• My friend writes me a delicate poem to explain the intense Beijing seasons
• Even afternoon tea says something about modern, monetised China
• Porcelain dolls, bad Samaritans and the law

On lies, liberation and Liberty

Today, leading human rights group Liberty celebrates its 80^th birthday. It has invited over a hundred Writers at Liberty to each contribute a piece of new writing reflecting on the aims, values and actions of the organisation. This was mine. Visit the Liberty80 site to learn more.

"Renaissance Florence was an excellent place for collecting documents. Mainly because they didn’t trust each other.”

I am writing this essay while watching a documentary on Machiavelli. A historian’s walking us through the Florentine state archives, showing the presenter a Medici’s Most Wanted persecution list and pointing out that the individuals on it need not have done anything in particular to have attracted suspicion. The presenter visits the police station where Machiavelli was tortured despite there being no evidence of him being involved in the conspiracy he was accused of.

How wonderful that five hundred years on we live in such different times. These days it would be unthinkable that suspicious and secretive governments might follow, seize and physically brutalise innocent civilians based on little more than mere suspicion. What a relief that we now enjoy enlightened and mutually trustful societies in which authorities have integrity; leaders are honest and accountable; judges provide justice with moral consistency and without cultural bias; the heads of the media, police, politics and big business are not all friends with each other; public bodies are representative of the populace they serve; institutions of power have been washed clean of vested interests; and, as humble but proud citizens, we can truly say that what we see is what we get. How comforting to know that the written and spoken word are enjoined in the furtherance of freedom, truth, justice and progressive harmony instead of being deployed in subterfuge, falsified to justify abuse, misappropriated to bend meaning, exaggerated to support a warlike and crusading atmosphere, worked up to derail arguments or simply logged and aggregated to create a secret archive that can be trawled for incriminating details and useful trivia at any time without our knowledge or consent.

Oh. Aha. I see. And I hear the distant, mocking laughter of Machiavelli as he swigs spectral wine and schmoozes his fellow deceased in the afterlife.

To be fair if not approving, the exercise of power and the methods of that exercise have been employed by those at all points on the political scale for centuries. The Vatican, the Elizabethan court, trafficking rings, the CIA, drugs cartels, the current US Senate, the ancient Roman senate, Interpol, Hollywood studios, the music industry and the mafia all behave in exactly the same way. Their actions are justified by research, which is gained by information-gathering, which includes surveillance, spycraft, infiltration, entrapment, the truth obtained by deceitful means. Those who have power, whether it is legitimate or not, elected or not, formal or not, have always justified their deceitfulness by pointing to the ends, the consequences. Look, they say, we have prevented attacks you never knew about; we have stopped individuals before they committed crimes; we can pre-empt the future because of what we know. They argue that when it comes to the subtlety of government, equivocal definitions of what is right or wrong break down. They argue that it is naïve to talk about what is good and what is bad, which are academic concepts that would disintegrate when the strong light of reality hits them.

They would laugh in my face if I tried to assert that certain actions are simply wrong. Perhaps I should couch the argument in language that wrongdoers would understand: some actions result in no tangible gain, no increase in meaningful intelligence, no advance in strategic position and no overall improvement to justify massive costs in terms of logistics, economics, international standing and public trust. Torture is wrong and does not yield reliable or useful information. Detention without justification, without giving detainees any reason, without charge, without trial, without legal representation, without set duration, is wrong and creates trauma, instability and resentment. Following someone and keeping a record of everything they do, say, write or read is wrong and creates paranoia, alienation and hatred of government.

It is not naive to fight for human rights and civil liberties, it is imperative. Otherwise the future will be one of absolute and mutual mistrust in all directions, between and amongst citizens, countries and world communities. It is obscene that anyone who is a grassroots  activist or a cultural advocate in defence of human rights should be monitored, as many of us are, as though we are perpetrators, abusers or lawbreakers. It is contemptible that petty laws should be invented in order to deter us, vilify us or criminalise us. When accused of flouting human rights, powerful organisations behave in a way that demonstrates that they do indeed routinely and systematically flout the human rights of others while aggressively defending their own interests. Having authority does not mean that you can do anything you want, then close ranks when caught.

The authorities will say that life’s complicated and that we should simply go about our daily business being watched and followed and not bother our little heads about it. If we haven’t done anything wrong, like Google something, go on holiday, go on a march or demonstration, speak at a panel event, sign a petition or have a chat with someone, we won’t have anything to worry about.

Everyone knows that governing is complex and involves subtle negotiation between multiple parties with widely differing views. But when it comes to the fundamentals, some principles are inviolable. I would even go one further and say that there is no difference between the rights and freedoms I expect personally and within personal relationships and those I expect politically and within a public, cultural, legal and social context. They are one and the same. Every human being has the right to live free of physical violation, mental torture, domination, abuse, stalking, surveillance and control. Every human being has the right to live free of fear, acting from their own will and physical and mental self-determination, not because they have been threatened, coerced or blackmailed. Every human being’s sense of dignity is intimately connected with their sense of privacy and their positive assumption of freedom of thought, freedom of movement, freedom of association and freedom of expression. These are not political values, subject to change according to who is in power. They are human values.

It is tempting to be blasé and say that the ruled have always been spied on by rulers, that it was ever thus and will always be thus. But it is not true that the present is exactly like the past only with different clothes, or that history is cyclical, or that you can’t stop Them and shouldn’t try to stand up to Them because They always get Their way in the end.

We have arrived at a unique time culturally and technologically. The authorities’ combination of deceit, control, watchfulness, duplicity and cruelty, masked with outward civility and outright lies, is now played out on a global scale, abetted by ever more efficient means of gathering, storing and sorting information. Many international governments’ covert political alliances and commercial deals for information sharing, the transportation and torture of suspected individuals, the sale of armaments, the levying of wars and exploitation of natural resources and emerging markets run counter to their publicly stated interests, values and allegiances.

This goes far beyond language, although I like a good political euphemism as much as anyone. Rendition means torture and extraordinary rendition means a lot of torture. Waterboarding – which sounds like a delightful low-impact sport that one might enjoy on Brighton’s seafront – is a euphemism for drowning someone. A resistance safe-zone is a rebel stronghold. A defence of privacy for privacy’s sake can be an admission of guilt inviting further investigation. The axis of evil is a mythical land where the US sacrificed soldiers for oil. Security means control. Arming in self defence is incitement to attack. A demonstration can be disorder, resistance can be rebellion, organising resistance means planning insurgency. Companies axing thousands of jobs say they are rationalising, harmonising or recalibrating. Swingeing cuts which put families below the poverty line are rebranded as thrifty, vintage-chic austerity measures. In the Big Society you do everything as before only for free and without state assistance. A ‘terrorist’ can be anything from a civil disrupter to a threat to national security and being accused of being one, even without a shred of proof, can justify any mistreatment whatsoever.

As the world becomes smaller, it is becoming more divided. Just when communication becomes more convenient, it is polluted by wariness and suspicion. Just when we have an opportunity to globalise in thought and intention as well as business, we take up a defensive stance and cling to divisive rhetoric, ignorant stereotypes and mistrustful attitudes.

What I seek is not just liberty but liberation.  Liberation from a mindset of mistrust and demonisation, the vilification of otherness and the paternalistic condoning of all surveillance, detention and physical abuse on the grounds of security. Liberation from the fear that someone is always following us or watching us. Liberation from our entrenchment in a cruel, self-justifying system of control which can be brought down on us at any moment, for any reason. And liberation from the aggressive, combative, violating machismo which argues disingenuously that violence is sometimes okay.

The only weapons ordinary citizens have against these trends are our actions and our words, although journalists are in a trickier position than ever. We are either violating the human rights of celebrities and relatives of murder victims or campaigning for truth and justice or accidentally leaving state secrets on the bus and being hauled up in front of political investigations committees or ethics boards or national security tribunals or international courts, depending on how our actions are interpreted and by whom. We are either peddling damaging lies or damaging truths. We are influential and dangerous, mistrusted because our behaviour is risky and independent. When we try to whistleblow we are accused of jeopardising structures that we could never possibly understand. When we try to investigate those structures and hit upon sensitive material we are scapegoated publicly as troublemakers.

Either way, the ferocity of the reaction to journalists’ endeavours indicates something about the impact of the word. UK and US governments are just as frightened of journalists as governments in Iran, Afghanistan, Russia and Mexico are. They fear the word because it’s powerful. Indeed they use that wordpower themselves, negatively, to stir up tactically useful prejudices, plant slanderous lies, maintain myths which work in their favour and gloss their own violence. Those of us on the other side use our position to create space for a truth denied, a suffering voiced, a protest lodged, a testimony revealed, a campaign launched. This is why I am a part of Writers at Liberty.

NOTES:

• Read more about the genesis of the project in this brief write-up in Five Dials magazine.
• If you would like to join Liberty and speak up for civil liberties and in defence of human rights, click here now.
• To find out more about the many events and initiatives surrounding Liberty's 80th anniversary, please click here.
• Some of the other writers involved in Writers at Liberty include Naomi Alderman, Yasmin Alhibai-Brown, Tariq Ali, Anthony Anaxagorou, Hephzibah Anderson, Lisa Appighanesi, Chloe Aridjis, Tash Aw, Damian Barr, Alex Bellos, John Berger, Eleanor Birne, Terence Blacker, Malorie Blackman, Rosie Boycott, William Boyd, Margaret Busby, Antonia Byatt, Georgia Byng, Shami Chakrabarti, Tracy Chevalier, Ian Cobain, Edmund De Waal, Jenny Diski, Anne Donovan, Tishani Doshi, Stella Duffy, Ian Dunt, Joe Dunthorne, Geoff Dyer, Fernanda Eberstadt, Lauren Elkin, Bernadine Evaristo, Michel Faber, Jenni Fagan, William Fiennes, Judith Flanders, Ken Follett, Hadley Freeman, Patrick French, Esther Freud, Janice Galloway, Misha Glenny, Niven Govinden, Lavinia Greenlaw, Jay Griffiths, Niall Griffiths, Mark Haddon, Sarah Hall, Mohsin Hamid, Peter Hobbs, Tom Hodgkinson, Marina Hyde, M. J Hyland, Rhian Jones, Sadie Jones, Jackie Kay, Emily King, Nick Laird, Nikita Lalwani, Darian Leader, Ann Leslie, Kathy Lette, Deborah Levy, Richard Mabey, AlisonMacLeod, Sabrina Mahfouz, Hisham Matar, Lise Mayer, Sophie Mayer, Hollie McNish, Michael Morpurgo, Blake Morrison, Tiffany Murray, Daljit Nagra, Patrick Ness, Lawrence Norfolk, Rachel North, Richard Norton-Taylor, Maggie O’Farrell, Catherine O’Flynn, Ben Okri, Don Paterson, Shyama Perera, Adam Phillips, Hannah Pool, Philip Pullman, Ross Raisin, Alice Rawsthorn, Philip Ridley, James Robertson, Michael Rosen, Hannah Rothschild, Elif Şafak, Taiye Selasi, Kamila Shamsie, Jo Shapcott, Nikesh Shukla,  Ali Smith, Daniel Soar, Ahdaf Soueif, Craig Taylor, Barbara Taylor, Kate Tempest, Colin Thubron, Salley Vickers, Erica Wagner, Helen Walsh, Marina Warner and Sarah Waters.