Hallyu the Korean Wave Review – Victoria & Albert Museum Exhibition

01.04.2023

https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/hallyu-the-korean-wave

At home, they sit in a neglected and increasingly dusty pile – with my other language learning books picked up mainly from charity shops – or the internet when the owners lost their interest in learning them (14 languages in total and building). Untouched, they are marked out for future study when my life is not just about work and academia, carefully compiled: a set of Korean language books. I picked them up in a free hotel book sharing point in a country where they have many Korean workers (it is not Korea, my friends).

Although I never got onto the Korea loving bandwagon with ‘Gangham Style’ or ‘Squid Games’, and I didn’t watch the film that won the Oscars (‘Parasite’), I have taught several Korean people when I used to volunteer to teach English to refugees and migrants over five years. I watch some K-Pop, although it is just one band called (G)-IDLE as I like watching the young women dance and perform and I enjoy the cinematography of the music videos. So it was with this light acquaintance in need of improvement and because I wanted to see the Friday Late at the V & A that I meandered my way at the end of the night into the ‘Hallyu the Korean Wave’ exhibit.

The exhibit is exciting, eclectic and vibrant and speaks to the young. Inundated with interest, the walls showcase Korean film, music, beauty and fashion. All of the senses are awakened and rejuvenated by an immersion into a colourful Korean cultural life.

When you go in, you are confronted with several screens showing ‘Gangham Style’ and its parodies. Of course, this song is synonymous with K-Pop and is probably one of the only contemporary songs that everyone in cities around the world probably knows. We get to see the audacious pink suit that Psy wore for the music video. But the surprising thing to learn is that the song and the suit mock South Korea’s ‘hyper-consumerism and material pursuit’, using the district of Gangham as an example. The suit is a sneer at what the elites wear in that area and the iconic dance moves are snipes at posers and wannabes that emulate that kind of lifestyle.

If Korean culture is currently chic, then the next section of the exhibit makes us reflect on the historical miracle of how a colonised, war-torn country which was ravaged by the Cold War and also ‘one of the most violent conflicts in modern history’ in the Korean War of 1950 has followed a ‘remarkable trajectory’ to become a ‘leading cultural powerhouse by the early 2000s’. The formula seems to be ‘governmental control, daring strategies and IT innovation’, alongside quick hands and quick minds.

I will write about the parts that excited me the most in what followed on the journey through the massive space that the exhibition enfolded. A long term fan of athletics and gymnastics, I was entranced by the Volunteer guide uniform for the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games. The clothing draws inspiration from the national costume which is called hanbok. The outfit is beautiful, graceful, an accomplishment of functional style inter-weaved with the Olympic spirit and colours. It is the perfect metaphor of endurance, of a people that have kept their traditions while becoming truly international, even though enmity and colonisation attempted to destroy their way of life. Here, as elsewhere in the exhibition, I was reminded of the affinities of Korea’s history with India’s. In fact, there was even a Hindi film poster which showed a pirated (‘adapted’) Korean film, which influenced my finding of affinities with my motherland even more.

It was also a surreal experience to see the wig worn by Choi Min-sik in ‘Oldboy’. This is probably the most memorable Korean film I have watched. When I was immersed in this filmic universe, I just assumed that the wig was the actor’s real hair. In the exhibit, removed from the face, the wig was patently, even insolently artificial. Yet it still teemed with an energy, almost like that of life. The make up and hair director of the film, Song Jong-hee intended to infuse the wig with wildness to convey the ‘feral emotions’ and the effect of the years of incarceration on the protagonist of the film. To me, raised in Hinduism and Sikhism, where hair is sacred and the god Shiva is known for the strength of his hair, the hairstyle raised the resonance of India, religion, power, feelings hard to express or even describe.

A particularly interesting section of the exhibition was the exploration of beauty standards in Korean culture, since the nation is a ‘global trendsetter’ in this area. The historical background until the 1910s (perhaps longer?) is seven hundred years of maintaining beauty as a ‘moral obligation’ as attractiveness symbolises not only social status, but also virtue.

Where did I spend the most time in the exhibition? I sat before a big screen watching a compilation of snippets from K-Pop videos, admiring the crystal sharpness of today’s video cameras, the lightning flashes of Korean dance moves and the stunning physical beauty of the people. It was intoxicating. Yet, as I watched, the critical part of my mind kept on turning over the question of whether what I was watching was something authentic and organic, something different, or just indoctrination and influence from the Western world, a parroting of the Western music video. I am still not sure.

Surely, ‘Hallyu the Korean Wave’ is one of the most memorable exhibitions that I have been to. I was also pleased to see that the exhibition seems to have been put together from Korean descent people, which seems to give it the authenticity that is lacking from Orientalising Western depictions of Asian people such as Indians. I learned a general history of modern Korea, was amused, inspired to learn more, ever more determined to one day make a serious foray into the language. I felt the unity of Asian culture as a man of Indian descent, almost a sense of belonging. Out of the three exhibitions I went to in the V & A that day, the exhibition was my personal favourite. I never felt even a moment of boredom in it and my attention was focused entirely on the exhibits.

https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/hallyu-the-korean-wave

The Refugee Boat – Some Thoughts on an Alternative History of Transport

10.03.2022

If you go to a transport museum, the likelihood is that you will see ultra-expensive vehicles which were at the cutting edge of technology. These cars, buses, trains and trams would have had all the modern conveniences and would have been fairly safe, even if safety standards in the past were laxer. In terms of production, an entire army of workers would have been involved in the construction, probably an ‘international’ team (by which I mean white Europeans).

The history you would find in such museums would be progressive, a story of increasing rationality, efficiency, cost-effectiveness, capitalism, big business. A story the rich tell themselves to celebrate the world that they have created: the globalised, interlinked world of transport convenience. Where, theoretically, there are no physical barriers to community, commuting, connection.

Standing out in stark contrast to this ‘Whig’ version of history is the humble refugee boat.

The refugee boat is fairly inexpensive. It is the mode of transport of the poor, the desperately oppressed seeking a better life in the only way that they can given their losses in the lottery of life and birth. The refugee boat, while not the worst piece of technology ever invented, is still pretty primitive. The standard image is the unpretentious dinghy, clearly unfit for the purpose of a long journey by the sea in dangerous waters. Travel by sea is itself one of the longest, most inconvenient, inefficient and deadly forms of travel, where you are seemingly at the utmost mercy of nature. There are no modern conveniences. Hardly any water to drink, hardly any room for food. No toilet. There is no safety. There is probably more than a 50:50 chance of death. What about the production? The workers that made these products were probably exploited in sweatshops in economically less dominant countries around the globe.

The history of the refugee boat is the unadulterated, unpolished history of transport in our times. History is not always written by the victors. It is also written by the losers. The refugee boat is the testament to the fact that our modes of travel are not objectively the best. They are merely fit for the types of people and the societies that use them. The transport history in museums is the product of capitalism and the reign of the rich. The transport history of the undocumented migrants is the product of those that power has missed out, those that capitalism has downtrodden.

The unvarnished history of the refugee boat – which the media presents as a horrible throwback to primitive times, a history which is now culminating in government interception of such travellers and their lives being thrown away like trash somewhere else, as someone else’s problem – is the real history of travel beyond propaganda, advertisement, embellishment, cultural narcissism. This is the real story of the world that the ultra-rich have created: a world where you can’t even travel from one country to another to try and better your life. A world in which you are tied to the place you were born and the lack of opportunities there. Why can’t anyone tell this history?

‘Green Travel’, London Transport Museum: Poster Parade Review

(Poster Parade lasts for approx. 3 months before it is changed)

1^st Floor, London Transport Museum, Covent Garden

Entry to the London Transport Museum: £21 for an annual pass (£20 students and concessions)

08.02.2023

All the posters listed at the bottom in the Poster Parade can be searched for and viewed here:

https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/collections

I don’t think it is any exaggeration to say that the most important and constant preoccupation of our times is the environment and how we can save the world from the damage that we have done to it. Following the recent, successful, ‘Green Journeys’ exhibition in the Transportorium of the London Transport Museum (LTM), the site is now hosting a ‘Green Travel’ Poster Parade on the first floor. The Museum’s consistent championing of the environmentalist cause has genuinely inspired many youngsters and I remember a visitor telling me how much her daughter missed the ‘Green Journeys’ exhibition when it was gone. She said it had been her daughter’s favourite space in the whole museum because of its educative power.

Public transport has been hailed as one of the solutions that can help to minimise environmental damage to the planet through the economical use of energy and resources. As the title and introduction of the exhibition suggests, there has been much investment in the tube to ‘make London cleaner and greener’. As Londoners know, there has been a historical practice of encouraging commuters to use their cars less, the advertisement of journeys to clean, green spaces of countryside outside of London, as well as a promotion of walking and cycling so as to ease congestion and keep the air breathable. While many of the strategies have borne fruit, such as in the reduction of coal burning and industrial pollution, the public transport infrastructure still has problems to face in reducing pollution and creating a zone with clean air. The saving of the world is still very much a work in process.

The historical range of the images in the Poster Parade is from the early twentieth century in the 1910s to the twenty-first century and the 2010s. The styles and subject matter range from realistic landscapes, to illustrations of space and the planets, edited photographs, games of text and image, visual animalistic metaphors of transport as taxis are literalised as snails, and the conversion of the London landscape into bicycle parts. Quirkiness, comedy, creativity – even horror as the effects of smoke pollution are made evident in the imagined future of a child’s photographed face – all these collide together in the exhibition, whose one sure strength is variety.

The quirkiest image is probably the one of the taxis as snails by Nick Hardcastle, ‘Or take the Tube’. The black cabs of London are famous throughout the world, as is ‘the Knowledge’ that their cab drivers boast after years of learning, but these instantly recognisable facts are given a surprising visual metamorphosis. The familiar is manufactured into the unfamiliar, even the Freudian uncanny. The snail shells add to this impression as Freud called the uncanny the ‘unhomely’ and the shells are their homes. Faintly sickening, the snail taxis glisten with a disgusting mucus which symbolises the dirtiness left by the motor car as its imprint on the world and its journey. The clustered ranks of molluscs, an identical parade, suggest a dreary and unthinking conformism.

I have two favourite images. The first is ‘Good for you green for London’ (2010) by Rachel Lillie. This is the winning illustration in ‘The best of contemporary illustrators’. The illustration depicts London’s journeys through the experience of the cyclists and the message is the promotion of ‘the benefits of cycling for our health and the environment’. The display notice adds that ‘TFL cycling initiatives such as free and tailored cycle skills sessions are teaching safer ways of navigating the city’. The space is imagined as a leaf unfurling through time, with its veins as pathways to famous London landmarks. I liked the image for two reasons. First of all, this seems to be the only illustration by a woman in the collection, if one assumes that the other illustrations and posters are all by men (they may not be, many of them were presented with ‘Artist Unknown’, which was a slightly frustrating experience). Diversity is still a real challenge in illustration, as I know from my own experience as a digital artist, and it is good to support those of us who are examples of diversity and have got a little recognition. Secondly, like the artist, as she says on her website, I am also interested in the depiction and conceptualisation of space, especially London. An interesting connection is drawn in the illustration between the red bus and the cyclists who are shaped in a blood red. The cyclist moves in the same ethical space as the public transport vehicle, as a being that creates a cleaner and greener city. The famous London landmarks are shrouded in the night as black outlines while the cyclists are illuminated by a light that blesses the good. Perhaps the suggestion is that the conventional vision of the city has to change and the things that were once considered important have to yield to the renewed experience of stewardship we face in the age of environmental calamity.

My second favourite poster is ‘Carfree Carefree’ by Abram Games (1967) which is given a renewed life in this contemporary exhibition in this contemporary world. The poster and the title are the same, white letters shaped like a bus against a background of purple, red and orange tiles. Typography is one of my own preoccupations as a digital artist and letters shaped like images act upon my senses with an unrivalled seductive power. The letter bus in the poster hurtles past a small car in the background. The demonstration is of the strength of the bus in relation to the individualised, little car: public transport versus the individual, social and public civic responsibility in the age of environmentalism versus the selfish fixation with the material possession of the car and its solitary amusements. As with the other posters, the interest is in how a public transport corporation converts its competition with private forms of transport into an ethical mission to save the entire planet and the people and life within it. Financial competition does not always have to be selfish after all, it can be of the people and for the people, against the luxury and convenience of the individuals that won’t participate in the group.

The two messages that hit hardest were ‘One full bus equals forty empty cars’ and ‘Each year we cover nearly 1 billion miles in the car on journeys of less than a mile’ (1998). It is always facts that can hit hardest. These facts also contextualise the aim of London transport to get people fitter and get out there walking and cycling. Of course, some have mobility issues, but for the majority of people, it is laziness and the convenience and instant gratification culture that is choking the planet.

My overall impression of the Poster Parade is that it is successful artistically and in terms of its content and importance. And in terms of inspiration for change. The historical sweep is illuminating because it reminds us that people in London have always cared about its clean air and to eliminate the pernicious effects of pollution. Yes, we are facing an environmental disaster. But the good have always fought against this with technology and with the right morals. There is hope and no need for despair. They, the good, will always fight for a better world. Yet, there is no ‘triumphialism’. The Poster Parade acknowledges that there is still much to do and much to fight for. That elusive dream of ‘Green Travel’ is still a work for the making, even though it is the most alluring and important dream of our times.

List of Posters in the Exhibition (all searchable at: https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/collections)

Anonymous, ‘Golder’s Green’ (1911)
Maxwell Ashby Armfield, ‘By Underground to fresh air’ (1915)
Gwynedd M Hudson, ‘Spring Beckons You’ (1929)
Alfred Leete, ‘Nightwatchmen’ (1928)
Anonymous, ‘Clear the Air’ (1938)
Charles Sharland, ‘Light, Power and Speed’ (1910)
Anonymous, ‘London’s Tramways’ (1929)
F Gregory Brown, ‘By Trolleybus to Kingston’ (1933)
Abram Games, ‘Carfree Carefree’ (1967)
Nick Hardcastle, ‘Or take the Tube’ (1987)
Austin Cooper, ‘Bicyclism – the art of wheeling’ (1928)
Transport for London, ‘London – made for cycling’ (2007)
Anonymous, ‘Get ready for Prudential Ride London’ (2015)
Rachel Lillie, ‘Good for you green for London’ (2010)
Easy Tiger Creative, ‘Cycling for Pleasure’ (2016)
Anonymous, ‘Don’t Choke London’ (2001)
Anonymous, ‘London Car Free Day’ (2002)
London Transport, ‘One full bus equals forty empty cars’ (1998)
London Transport, ‘1 billion miles in the car’ (1998)
Anonymous, ‘Cleaner Air for Greater London’ (2007)
Anonymous, ‘Hydrogen powers rockets’ (2014)

Winter Wonderland Poster Parade. London Transport Museum.

Winter Wonderland Poster Parade.

London Transport Museum, 1^st floor.

Entry: 21 pounds for an adult yearly entry. 20 pound student yearly entry.

05.12.2022

You can see all the posters here via a search of terms for your own virtual exhibition (Full Searchable Exhibition Catalogue given at the end of this short outline of my impressions as a viewer):

https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/collections/the-collection?f%5B0%5D=collection_type%3APosters

If I cast about in my mind for my most immediately accessible winter memories, there are images of Christmas and snowballs (with flashes of pain in some cases), hot chocolate in an ice skating park, women in smart, expensive coats on the London streets, lavish adverts on television, frenzied shopping during New Year’s sales, and an annoying range of mediocre songs that are played, unaccountably, every single year.

Many, if not all, of these topics are to be found in the Winter Wonderland Poster Parade on the first floor of the London Transport Museum. Certainly, shopping plays a major role in the collection, including a depiction of the Winter sales. For both critics of capitalism and its supporters, there is something for everyone – anonymous subjects wandering around in a state of anomie in between the stores, a cornucopia of street signs arranged artistically to show a virtual map of the sales in London, depictions of women consumers done in a futuristic style (make of that what you will).

The introduction to the poster parade proclaims that there is a focus on ice skating, country walks, shopping and the exploration of historic landmarks during the winter months. The parade emphasises the practical purpose of the posters which encouraged passengers to take off-peak journeys or appealed to our comfort-loving nature by persuading us that it was warmer to travel by public transport in London.

I have fond memories of ice skating, including watching my female companion surreptitiously distancing herself from me and laughing maniacally as I desperately clutched and groped at an innocent female bystander so I didn’t fall down on my first try. So I particularly enjoyed looking at the portrayals of ice skating. The poster that stood out most to me was ‘Ice Skating’ by Charles Pears, printed in 1928. It shows a beautiful woman engaged in a graceful movement across the ice, her face obscured in shadow, her scarf elegantly billowing against the pure snow behind her. She is entranced in the flow of the figure, lost in her skill to the world and its impurities… Such is the beauty of this season and of ice skating itself, one of the most beautiful of pastimes.

The other poster that I quite liked was ‘Winter’s Discontent Made Glorious’. Against an ominous, sublime, inhumane cloudscape, we see a train in which the windows are filled with scenes from dining, shopping and the theatre, spaces crowded with fashionable people. On one level, the poster reminds us that some of our liveliest and happiest scenes have been in winter. On the other hand, the fact that the train and its illuminated scenes are to plunge into the dark abyss of a tunnel which would extinguish all light seems to refer to the depression that can come upon us in sun-starved winter. It is a conceptually balanced design.

My overall impression of the poster parade is that it contains striking works of art and a good range of different artistic styles. I was interested in how optimistic the collection is about winter. We all know that winter can bring on sadness, and the posters all try to counter this impulse with a positive, upbeat message of hope and happiness. The posters have also inspired me to take a few winter walks, when traditionally, I have avoided long walks out in the cold in the countryside. The posters are intriguing as they show us the emotional appeal of Christmas and winter shopping in the recent past, how they act as a psychological booster during what can be very trying months and also because of the beauty and complexity of the designs and messages that they convey. As such, the poster parade really is what it says it is: a winter wonderland to which all of our senses and feelings are invited.

Exhibition Catalogue

Winter’s Discontent Made Glorious – Anonymous, 1909
Brightest London is Best Reached by Underground – Horace Taylor, 1924
Winter Cavalcade – Margaret Barnard, 1938
Empress Hall – Earls Court – Walter Goetz, 1937
Winter in the Country – Harry Stevens, 1965
Winter Sales – Quickly Reached – Compton Bennett, 1926
Winter Fun – Skating – Anna Hymas, 2016
Winter Sales – Edward McKnight Kauffer, 1924
It is Warmer Below – Frederick Charles Herrick, 1927
Winter Country Walks – Hans Unger, 1958
Hampton Court – Hanna Well, 1963
Ice Skating – Charles Pears, 1928
Winter Walks – Laura Knight, 1957
Keep Warm – travel Underground – Kathleen Stenning, 1925
Out and about in Winter – Molly Moss, 1950
Shop in Town – Leith, 1928
Winter Sales – Artist Unknown, 1920
Winter in London – John Burningham, 1965
Winter – Paul Catherall, 2006
Winter Visitors – Clifford Ellis and Rosemary Ellis, 1937
Brighter London for Winter Sales – Harold Sandys Williamson, 1924

Tom Eckersley Poster Parade

09.11.2022

London Transport Museum, Covent Garden

Price – 21 pounds annual pass regular ticket for the museum (20 for students)

REPRODUCTIONS AVAILABLE AT THE MUSEUM’S ONLINE SHOP.

ALL ECKERSLEY WORKS ACCESSIBLE ONLINE AT:

https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/collections/the-collection?f%5B0%5D=collection_type%3APosters

Although many Londoners don’t realise it, Transport for London has one of the biggest collections of specially commissioned artworks in the entire world. At the London Transport Museum, the thousands of posters in the archive are narrowed down to a select few for the Poster Parade which can be found on the first floor of the museum, behind some of the historic vehicles. It is one of my post Art History Open University degree ambitions to write a monograph on the collection of posters which bear illustrations and advertisements concerned with the world wars, destinations inside and outside of London, architecture and seasonal greetings which nestle amongst safety warnings and ticketing offers.

Most alluringly, the current exhibition boasts the work of Tom Eckersley, a twentieth century poster designer. The introduction to the exhibition summarises his signature style: “bold, bright colours and flat graphic shapes”. Personally, I think Eckersely owes much to Matisse the master, including the use of cut out colours in collages, the simplification and stylisation of figures and the obsession with the brightest hues.

Eckersely worked through the 1930s to the 1990s and managed to design over eighty posters for London Transport. At first, he worked in collaboration with the artist Eric Lombers. The exhibition describes him as ‘transforming commercial art’.

When Eckerseley was working in the 1930s, ‘posters were a hugely effective form of publicity’ the exhibition relates, although the challenge was to compress information so that it could incite further curiosity and relay compressed information in milliseconds: ‘a strong message with a simple design’. To quote the exhibition again, to achieve these ends, Eckerseley employed ‘minimal text’, conveyed messages ‘through pared-down graphic elements and bold blocks of colour’. My personal view, however, is that the posters play quite complicated visual games. I don’t see them as a visual reduction of information. They take quite a bit of decoding to understand the message shown and to understand the flight of imagination that Eckersely took to create the design.

Overall impressions of the Poster Parade? The artworks are visually stunning, richly coloured and immensely memorable. Eckersely really is a master of the poster genre. It is a delight to see the things. However, the short exhibition suffers from repetition, where nearly identical posters are displayed, and there is a certain fragmentariness where a fish poster is shown with the other half (another poster) missing. Having said that, the final word must be that the posters are beautiful, historically significant and therefore interesting because they deal with issues raised by the World War and show how heritage in London has been promoted before.

Finally, from my perspective as a digital artist that often uses flat, bold colours in my compositions, the exhibition is successful in that it shows how beautiful art can be when it uses simple geometic elements to build up its own language and communicate with the viewer. Although Eckersley uses a much more polished style than my own spontaneous ‘calligraphy-art’, the affinities are astounding, as you can see from a poster I designed recently below, and which I will finish this short summary of my impressions with:

A Phoenix Tells the Tale of Her Rebirth: A Patient’s Notes by Madeleine Channer

“A Patient’s Notes” is the soaring voice of the phoenix as it returns from fire and death to regain its former life, power and glory. Like the phoenix, its author burned in cancer and essentially died to give birth to this short, former nurse’s autobiography. The moments that flashed before the nearly departed’s life are here arranged and presented to form a story of healing, hope and enduring legacy. As the title suggests, the book is concerned with illness and its effects on life and its meanings, for all of us who are patients of this suffering world.

Continuing the theme of healing, the sales of this book written in the genre of the Christian medical memoir provide funds to the Diospi Suyana Hospital in Peru. The name of the hospital means to “Trust in God” in the Quechua language. It is because of this noble mission that I have decided to write this book review, rather than the fact that Madeleine Channer is perhaps one of my best and most intimate friends.

Madeleine has dedicated the book to her beloved father, Lesley Francis Cole, who did not manage to escape the tearing talons of cancer that she managed to evade. In terms of structure, the narrative is initiated by the primary scene of the original patient, the father with terminal cancer and his demise. From this tragic, traumatising moment, Madeline then shows how she builds a life dedicated to healing sickness. Finally, triumphantly, Madeleine’s own struggle with cancer is overcome with the help of those around her and the modern advances in medicine. A cruel contrast therefore motivates the work: the luckily present are compared to those unfortunates of history that did not live in the healing world of today. Those unfortunates who had to say goodbye to us for want of the proper care and knowledge. However, the contrast is also an inspiration: the war that Madeline has fought throughout her entire life against disease and cancer on behalf of patients like her father has resulted in victory.

What makes the book relevant to the historical moment and cultural trends is that Madeline had her recovery in lockdown, just as the world recovered from Covid and its effects. We share the relief and sense of wholeness from the broken years of the pandemic, the exulting sense of survival against the odds. Again, the celebration of the healing profession that the book espouses is a sentiment that has overwhelmed the world and England in particular, with its National Health Service. What adds something extra to this concoction is that the author is one of the upstanding citizens from the old generation, someone who has seen and lived through it all. So we hear things through the voice of those that have built the society and the community of care around us.

The constant theme of the book is adversity and its overcoming. Madeleine writes that hers was a precarious childhood where she was subject to emotional destabilisation and a corresponding lack of self esteem. The solution that the young Madeleine found to this state was the power of prayer, with its promise of change and renewal. She saw Christ as a model to aspire to, particularly as Christ the healer and the master of living. Several other heroes who were Christian saviours of the sick are also mentioned as inspirations: Florence Nightingale, Father Damien, Dr. Albert Schweitzer. The book is therefore a good example of what it means to have an enduring role model and how this can change the course of one’s life, as one tries to live up to the demands of becoming the figure that we idolise. The role model provides organisation and structure for living amidst the chaos of being and ultimately leads Madeleine to become a Christian saviour of those suffering in her own right, one of our most valuable members of society. Christ (and her father’s terminal illness) leads Madeleine to nurse Quechua Indian patients above 10,000 feet in the Andes.

Madeleine writes:

“How do we want to be remembered? What do we leave behind us? The kindness and diligent care provided by those involved in the great work of healing will echo for good, beyond time and into eternity”.

It is because Madeleine was one who nursed the sick and poor the we respect and love her all the more, and she will always be in our thoughts and memories. She has caught that good echo of healing with this well written, engaging and stimulating book, which moreover, brings in donations for the sick and poor of this world through its sales. Even if one is not in the faith community, the book is interesting in itself as it sheds light on the trials of one that sought to do good in the world despite all the set backs that life can throw at us. I was very happy to read and review o the book, and not just because Madeleine is my very good, very supportive, very perfect friend. Rather, it is because the book is the voice of the phoenix that has been brought back to her full beauty, after joining in that restless, oceanic sleep which haunts our being and time.

Writing with Fire Review

12.03.2022

Often, we retreat from the very great but empty noise that the Oscars make. However, on this occasion I decided to watch one of the films that was up for the nominations, ‘Writing with Fire’. Famously, if one is from an Indian ethnic background, the documentary is the first Academy Awards nomination which has been directed by an Indian director (Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh). It is also one of the only films, Indian or otherwise, which has ‘untouchable’ women as heroines. Luckily for me, the film is on BBC IPlayer and is available to stream online as part of their ‘Storyville’ series.

‘Writing with Fire’ is about the perils and adventures of three lower caste (‘Dalit’ which translates as ‘oppressed’) women journalists, Meera, Suneeta and Shyamkali. They work for the only entirely woman run newspaper in India, Khabar Lahariya or ‘Waves of News’. In the opening credits, the film makers write that when these Dalit women set up a newspaper in 2002, they ‘started a revolution’. The film follows the newspaper story from 2016 when the publication went digital. The attempt is to show a sea-change. Meera says, “In our region, a journalist meant you are an upper-caste man. A Dalit woman journalist was unthinkable. Over the last 14 years we’ve changed this perception.” Meera asks us to consider what it would be like if Dalit women had power and what they would do with it.

What follows in the film is a traditional and thoroughly conventional hero narrative which has been built up over thousands of years. The difference is that the hero is not a hero, but a heroine, and from the lower castes. What is the traditional hero narrative? The hero comes from humble origins, like the Greek demigods raised secretly by peasants as children. However, such humble origins disguise the greatness, nobility and royalty of the hero, which are revealed later. The hero faces adversity and mortal danger, as in a glorious battle. It is stated in the credits that India is one of the most precarious places in the world to be a journalist, with many murdered. The film shows the response to one murder of a female journalist by the workers of Khabar Lahariya. The hateful trolling of the women journalists is illustrated as well as their vulnerability to the Indian mafia. The hero is threatened by a return to quotidian life, like Hercules compelled to clean the stables. Thus, the women’s husbands attempt to stop them writing for the newspaper to work in the home instead as housewives. Finally, the hero must triumph. Khabar Lahariya is presented as an out and out success, measured by the amount of YouTube views it attracts, which number in the tens of millions.

This hero narrative unfolds amidst a glorification and justification of journalism, the pursuit that the women have dedicated their lives to. Towards the end of the documentary, Meera recites that the journalists are fighting to transform society. That they are holding the powerful to account. That they have made their journalism the voice of democracy. That they didn’t let the fourth pillar fall. And that they continue to hold a mirror to society. Thus, the film seems to be about everything that lip service holds dear: truth, balance, democracy.

Not only this, but the journalists are presented as law-givers. The screen first jumps into motion with Meera asking a woman in person about being raped multiple times in her home by four men. The opening credits mention how many Dalit women are subjected to violence across India and the film shows how Meera and others are trying to challenge the justice system which doesn’t respond to these atrocities. The unnamed rape victim says that the police refuse to lodge her complaint and intimidate her when she attempts to do so. The woman is going to newspaper because they are the only ones that listen to her story. As the husband of the victim says, “We don’t trust anyone else. Khabar Lahariya is our last hope”. Meera confronts the police about the multiple rapes and she proclaims that she is “fighting for justice in a democracy”.

My impression of the film as a whole was that it was a story told well. Certainly, Dalit women deserve to be seen as heroes too. The focus on the stories of the three women journalists gave that personal touch which made the abstract ideals the film supports into something concrete and something that the viewer could really relate to. The cinematography by Sushmit Ghosh and Karan Thapliyal was very beautiful. However, I am more pessimistic about the role of journalism in society. The documentary aims to present the journalist as objective, neutral, impartial, a server of truth, justice and democracy. These are claims that are a stretch of the imagination much too far for me. Again, I am troubled by why the Western media has nominated the film for an Academy Award. Khabar Lahariya is the voice of the poor, oppressed women in India. Naturally, they are pessimistic about power and the government in India. That is, they criticise the society they find themselves in because they hope to transform it and make a better position for themselves. This is fine. This is acceptable. Indeed, I support these women in their mission. However, what is unacceptable, is that the Western media and its public discourse always criticise India when they know nothing about it, in a supreme act of Orientalism and racism. The Academy seems to have selected a film which presents India as a colossal sewer because this is what they think about the country. This is not fine. This is what is unacceptable. And in this, they are trying to use that objectivity associated with journalism to try and present their racist notion of a whole country as the unqualified truth. Final verdict? A good, revolutionary film spoiled by an Oscar nomination and Western practices of racism.

Becoming a Woman: Revenge, Ethics, Law and The Wounded in a Hindi Film

13.10.16

Is it wrong to desire revenge? Some people suggest that it is. My own research into the Victorian period has shown that not only is the desire for revenge seen as irrational, being emotional, and unreasonable, but that it is also feminised. The desire for revenge is a transgressive desire which attacks the very foundations of Western rationality, the rationality and reasonableness of (white, middle-class) men. Perhaps the most famous example of this feminisation is Miss Haversham in Great Expectations which I read as a schoolboy, but it is also in other famous novels like Vanity Fair, where Miss Sharp favours revenge too.

It is with some surprise that I noted that revenge was also feminised in my favourite Hindi film, starring my favourite actor, Sunny Deol. The name of the film is Ghayal, which means, literally, “wounded”, although I believe the correct translation into English should be “The Wounded”, which would make a significant difference to the overall meaning of the film. Ghayal is not just a film, it is an entire philosophy, some of which I will try to make clear in this little piece. I return to the film when I begin to forget who I am and where I come from. The film is a revenge story. The villain kills the hero’s brother. He is framed for the murder and then an accusation that he killed his brother because he was having an affair with his sister-in-law leads her to suicide. The hero triumphs and has his revenge outside of the law. The film is divided into a number of sections, but the obvious structuring is to contrast everything that follows with a first happy period.

Female revenge is present even in the first happy period, which is full of comedy. One day, the heroine of the film travels to see the boxer hero at his training camp. Because he is scared that he might get sent home, he says to her that he doesn’t know her and tells her to go away. The hero is the only person in the world that the heroine loves and who loves her back. She has no family as her mother and father are dead. When the hero tells her to go away and pretends that he doesn’t recognise her, he is refuting his love for her and treating her as a non-person with no identity. He is excluding her and returning hate and apathy for her love. He hurts her badly, he wounds her absolute trust in him and herself, in other and self.

The heroine does go away. But then, the hero has to apologise. He finds her in a restaurant and tries to speak the words of love to her. But now, the heroine’s mind is concentrated on revenge. She tries to provoke the other customers in the restaurant by turning all of the hero’s words against him to insult them, saying that he has called people bald or fat, etc. She wants the hero to be beaten by the mob, she opportunistically manipulates them to give the hurt and the satisfaction that she will feel. The customers are equated with India – this is an explicit comparison that is made. But Mahabharat (Great India, or ancient India) is also invoked when the hero actually touches the heroine.

As soon as the woman is touched, she opportunistically uses the status of victim to further manipulate the mob. She pretends that she is a damsel in distress, she mimics completely passivity and helplessness. She calls out that the hero, who she pretends is a stranger, mirroring his refutation of her identity, has touched her and rhetorically questions the crowd: Is there no man among you (to protect me, to have the courage to protect me, to protect not only me but all women, the women that are your sisters and mothers)? Here is when the Mahabharat comes to the rescue in the form of Bhima. Bhima is perhaps most famous in the epic saga because of his relationship to women, law and revenge. Draupadi, the wife of five men, was dishonoured by Dushasana who vowed to keep her hair unkempt and unmanaged until they were washed with the blood of her oppressor. Bhima was one of her husbands and he vows not only to bring his wife the blood, but also to drink it. Their vows and laws are based on their revenge. The beginning of legality is based on revenge, the revenge of a woman.

The heroine only forgives the hero when he falls from an elephant in trying to win her over. It is only when the hero is hurt that the heroine is able to forgive him. He has now shared her hurt. He has felt what it has been like to have been in pain. He has hurt himself for her. This is love.

The main revenge story is also marked by its relationship to the law and feminisation. First of all, the hero is clearly “the wounded”. I was discussing wounds and their relationship to femininity with one of my supervisors – someone had questioned my tying together of the wound with femininity in a poem by Robert Browning at a postgraduate reading session – and she told me that the wound has indeed been historically been associated with women, which a number of commentators have noted. He has been hurt badly. The hurt is that his loved ones have been taken from him. But the hurt is not just the loss of his brother, who is murdered, but also his sister-in-law who is like his mother that commits suicide. She is murdered just as much as his brother because she is dishonoured and shamed by what the world has been led to believe about her and her brother-in-law. However, the main hurt has been from the law. The law rejects the hero’ hunt for his missing brother and then he is subjected to brutal torture when he is framed for his brother’s murder. It is in the courtroom that the accusation of the incestuous relationship with his sister-in-law is made that leads to her suicide and extinction, her non-identity. The entire legal system fails him. What he should have been able to trust does not help him, it takes away his love, what he loved most. It takes away that which gives him his identity – his family, the brother and sister-in-law that are like his father and his mother.

Thus, the hero’s quest for revenge is a quest for revenge against the law. It is explicitly stated that his campaign of revenge is a campaign against the law since it is a direct challenge to law and the rule of the law. Of course, this law is only there to protect the villain, the rich man who plays Western music on his piano. Yet every time the hero pulls the gun against the villain, he is impotent. The crisis of impotence reaches its head towards the end of the film. Yet, in the most beautiful scene of the film, when the hero’s campaign of revenge is about to fail and he is pounded by a group of policemen and the law which forms a tight circle around him, the heroine sees him as the victim. She remembers what it is like to be the victim. She knows its reality. She knows what it is to be the wounded. And it is woman and the wounded that help the wounded. They see the place of woman in the wounded. She gives him the loaded gun and he is no longer impotent. He shoots and he does not miss. He hands himself over to the police with a smile on his face and a child that he rescued from the villain, the child that was separated from his mother by the villain and snatched from her, separated from the one he loves the most, applauds. The crowd of the people applaud too. The hero walks beside the heroine who gave him back his potency, both towards the law.

On ethics and law. There is a structuring of five. Draupadi had five husbands. There are five in the family: the hero, his brother, his sister-in-law, the heroine and the evil uncle who is a lawyer, the one that makes the suggestion of the incestuous affair. The brother, before he dies, says that five fingers of the hand are not all the same. The hero has four associates in his desire for revenge (five in total), each of which fall, leaving only him. This is because in revenge, the only one concerned and interested and self-serving can carry out their revenge for themselves. The hero kills the evil uncle, the lawyer: the identity of lawyer, liar, must be eliminated. Law itself is a prostitute: it is said to sleep on the bed of those such as the villain, the rich man. It is not the sacred prostitute, it is the one that only serves the rich. Law is there to be hated. It destroys love and unity. It is the insertion of law and the lawyer into the family which leads to the dishonour of woman and her extinction. It is law that stops a woman becoming a woman and which threatens her integrity and existence.

There is a lot to learn from “The Wounded”. Hurt is only appeased by hurt. Because when the oppressor is hurt, it is then and only then that they learn what it means to be hurt. It is only then that they learn the disintegration of self and integrity. It is only then that they learn what it is to be a victim, to be woman. And all of the negative stereotypes associated with an angry and revengeful women are the very things that we need to be: touchy, sensitive. When we want to hurt the law, we have to attack the places that hurt most. We must take everything from the law and give nothing. We must be merciless and relentless. For it is only the execution of revenge that teaches empathy. It is there to eliminate the ego. The oppressor must be humiliated in a contest, in a duel. In the film, the hero kills the villain, but the real defeat of the villain is in knowing that the law which protected his vicious self cannot save him because he has hurt others. Either no-one must be hurt or all must hurt. This is the lesson of empathy. Hurt only desires further hurt. Hurt can only be satisfied by further hurt, by being placed in the exact same place and position that you place another through hurt. Revenge is the teaching of empathy and the production of emphatic persons, learning empathy with woman. This is what is law.

Waiting for Justice

03.06.2018 –

Christianity, Islam and Judaism share similar features as religions. In particular, they are all based on similar ideas of justice. In each religion, an all-powerful god occupies the position of a judge and there is a day of final judgement when good actions are rewarded and there is punishment for bad actions. The idea that the god of these religions is a judge is said to derive from the political and cultural context of the time when the bible was first written, where it was the prerogative of royalty to mete out judgement. Since god was likened to a king, it was natural that he should also be seen as a judge. The idea of a final day of judgement that comes in the afterlife is possibly derived from the ancient Egyptian beliefs where there is a similar concept.

Because their god is a judge, justice is therefore considered to be a foundation for Christianity, Islam and Judaism and notions of divine justice inform and influence ways of living for believers. But what is interesting in each religion is the fact that the believer has to wait an entire lifetime in order to receive their just desserts. Justice can only be achieved upon death in another time and space, not in the earthly realm and earthly time and space. It is apparent that waiting for justice is really what informs the believer’s actions and choices. Why is the wait for justice so important to these religions and their philosophies? Why is it necessary for their conceptualisation of justice?

From an atheist’s point of view, the requirement that justice can only be meted out by a god in the afterlife and one has to wait for it forever is a convenient mystification that disguises that fact that god doesn’t actually exist and can’t intervene in earthly affairs. However, let us consider the wait for justice in the believer’s own terms. How can each believer wait their entire existence for justice?

Science tells us that human beings are driven by reward-seeking behaviour. We do something because we get a reward out of it. The reason why we hunt for food is so that we can enjoy eating it. The reason why we have children is because we enjoy the process of making children and derive pleasure from it. The religions mentioned above, however, all defer the concept of reward. There is no immediate reward (or punishment) for action in this world. There is only a divine reward or punishment, not an earthly one. One reason why a believer has to wait for justice is therefore to destroy the reward-seeking motivations and behaviour of the individual. The believer is prevented from following human impulse and the instinctual drives of the body. They sacrifice such impulses and drives for a belief. Hence, the human body is being repressed in each religion in order to foster and support an imaginary belief. The human body is being sacrificed for a thought. One component of the wait for justice is therefore an illusion. My speculation is that this illusion is pleasure-inducing, since the reward system relies on pleasure (the pleasure of food or sex). The pleasure derived from this illusion that there is an absolute and final justice which transcends earthly considerations and the desires of the body occupies a prime place in the reward-seeking and reward-inducing components of the believer’s mind (I believe one can say that this would exist in the dopamine system in the brain).

What kind of a pleasure is induced by a wait? There are two things that one thinks of here, each with a sexual component. First of all, one thinks of frustration. Frustration can be enjoyed if one is a masochist. The pleasure in frustration relies on a simple idea, that the reality of a fantasy will not match the pleasure contained within the fantasy. If justice is considered important and foundational to each religion, it is because the fantasy of justice is considered to be more pleasure inducing than the reality of earthly justice. The second thing that one thinks about is foreplay. The prolonging of the beginning of the act can induce pleasure as a specific type of frustration and inform action. The wait for justice in each religion can therefore be conceptualised as a type of foreplay.

I think there is one further component of the wait for justice. Divine justice is seen as final, absolute and perfect and true in each religion. One can therefore wait for it patiently and hopefully. On the other hand, earthly justice is messy, limited, imperfect and frequently based on falsity and mistake. The ones that wait for justice can therefore be likened to a single person that keeps on waiting for the perfect mate to come along even though he or she knows that perfection does not exist. Such a person will not go on dates or consider any substitute or alternative.

The ideas of divine justice have been interpreted in radically different ways by different groups in each religion. I remember reading a pamphlet from the Jehovah’s Witnesses which stated that the devil owned the world and there was no such thing as earthly justice. What is interesting and perhaps most important about the wait for justice in each religion is the case of the Protestant. In Western countries, those people that are most likely to support the earthly system of justice and the laws of the land are conservative Christians. These people appear to believe that the divine system of justice has been translated into earthly form in the mundane and banal form of the English judge. There is therefore a big strand in Western thought in which divine conceptions of justice still play a big role in the conception of what justice is.

What are my own thoughts about the wait for justice? I believe that one should never wait for justice. I believe that the wait for justice is a mystification that favours the powerful in society. If one keeps on waiting for this justice, then one no longer takes affairs in one’s own hands to change and transform this unjust world of ours. I do not believe in any perfect, absolute and unlimited form of justice that is out there waiting for humankind. The very concept of justice is an illusion. I do not understand how people in this world of ours can believe in this illusion. There is merely the self-interest of the powerful which governs all things in this world of ours, including our laws and conceptions of law. And this self-interest forces those with little power to lose their voices and their will, to forsake their self-interest. There is no justice. Yet, even though there is not justice, there is still self-interest. I do not believe we should wait for justice. I believe that we should fight for our own self-interest and our own truths. That is what the idea of “justice”, to use the outdated and misleading term, means to me.

Jesus, The Man of Difference and the Revolution

25.12.2021

Today, the world celebrates the birthday of Jesus Christ. When we look back at thousands of years of Christianity, it is easy to reduce all the complexity of that system of thought and the identity of its founder. One almost automatically thinks of how the religion was tied to war, imperialism, racism and the state in modern times. One thinks of the immorality and authoritarianism of organised religion and the Church. The feminist arguments against patriarchal monotheistic religions come to mind too. In this view, Jesus becomes the origin of oppression and conservatism. Because of such ideas, and the relentless march of a scientific reason which denigrates religion, I don’t think I am exaggerating when I say the hostility to religion in general, and to Christianity and Christ in particular, has almost become insurmountable.

However, let us try to be just to Christ. Historically, Jesus was a revolutionary. In many ways, the early version of Christianity was the religion of resistance. Christ went against the Roman state, the biggest superpower in the Western world at the time. This was his achievement, his badge of valour and the reason he holds the place in the minds of men that he has today. Today, this is how I choose to remember him. In many ways, Jesus is the model for the revolutionary consciousness. Against the state, which held the monopoly of power, wealth and men, which monopolised thought and being, Jesus and his small band offered an alternative world. This was a world in which success did not mean territorial expansion, being rich and subjugating other populations. Christ’s world was not an empire. This was an independent and non-materialistic world, a completely different form of organisation which required a completely different identity and character.

Jesus was a model for the revolutionary because he had nothing to offer against a dominant power than an idea. The idea was of a different form of being, living and thinking. Jesus was a world-builder and a builder of the human mind. Throughout the ages, this is how resistance against the superpowers has played out. There is one man or a small group that has that precious, world breaking and making commodity, difference. Jesus was the origin of difference.

Indeed, what marks Jesus and his origin is difference. He was born out of wedlock, the standard model for conception. He went against not only the Roman state, but also the Jewish religion. He aimed to break free of power wherever he found it.

Today, when the state is ever more ascendant and has thoroughly co-opted Christianity for its iniquitous purposes, when the conservatives and blind conformism have taken over society, when a new form of cultural imperialism is at its height, the birthday of Jesus stands as a model for the revolutionary and for the transforming consciousness. Yes, I am not a Christian. Yes, I do not follow the teachings of the Bible. But I judge Christ not as a god, but as a man. The inspiring, pioneering, matchless Man of Difference. And like others, I wait, ever so patiently, to see another coming of this difference into the world.