I was privileged to attend a screening on Friday of Leave to Remain, followed by a Q&A session with producers and stars of the film. This is a moving and important film about the experience of unaccompanied children seeking asylum in the UK and of the challenges and moral dilemmas they face. The focus of the film is primarily on the issue of story-telling: how stories come to be created and remembered, and the consequences of their being or not being believed. For many unaccompanied asylum-seeking children their stories are literally all they bring from their native land. They frequently have no family, no possessions, no papers and no cultural context, so the stories of their childhood, the traumas they have faced and their journey to the UK are their only currency and all they have to define themselves. Yet this is a currency that is treated with contempt and suspicion by the officials with whom they have to deal.
In the film Lunar House, the UK Border Agency headquarters in Croydon, is a looming grey monolith packed with menace, and hardly surprisingly. Within its walls truthful answers to fundamental questions like 'How old are you?' or 'Where do you come from?' are simply ignored. When one of the central characters says in dari that he comes from Nuristan the interpreter adds for the benefit of the interviewer, "But he may well be from Pakistan." When he says he is 15 the interviewer begins an intrusively personal yet cruelly casual series of questions about pubic hair and wisdom teeth. At one point the interviewer asks his colleague how tall he thinks the boy is and writes down the answer. He neither asks the boy nor actually measures him.
Some stories are believed of course, but it is clear in the film that truthfullness is not the key factor in such belief. When the English teacher/care-worker of the children lies in court about one of them no one so much as questions his account. When, at the beginning of the film, one of the central characters gives a moving but fictitious account of his experiences in Afghanistan his audience of middle class do-gooders is moved to tears. And for the other central character, lost and alone in an alien land, it is the rediscovery of his own stories that brings him back to life. In the Q&A after the film the (non-professional) actor who plays this character told of how the motivation for a central scene in which he catches and rides on a sheep came from a story his older brother used to tell him from before the family arrived in the UK.
In this post though I want to focus on another issue that this film explores- one that has fascinated me since I first came across unaccompanied refugee children early on in my teaching career. This is the question of how unaccompanied refugee children come to develop their own language of social interaction in a new land.
Some time ago I heard a radio programme (which I cannot now track down) about the development of a particular creole language in the Caribbean in the 17th or 18th century. Children of slaves were taken from their parents at a very early age and effectively imprisoned in large "convent schools." The explicit purpose was to remove them from the (presumably pernicious) social context of language, ethnicity and culture into which they had been born, so "saving" them from eternal damnation. Yet they were given no new context. No effort was made to teach them language and they were left pretty much to their own devices socially, being treated simply as mute and compliant servants. What these children did was to develop a creole of their own, stringing together whatever words and snippets they overheard into an entire language. This became their only language, as they had no memory of the language of their parents, and over a surprisingly short period of time it developed into a properly sophisticated language of its own, with the complexity of a tongue developed over hundreds of generations.
And this is precisely what happens to unaccompanied refugee children, only it is not the literal language they have to create from new (we are marginally more enlightened now, and at least help them learn English) but the language of social interaction and inter-personal relationships. Like the Caribbean slave children they have been utterly ripped away from their native cultural and family context and placed in a new 'family' alongside other adolescents with whom they have little in common. In the group of teenagers in the film there are individuals from every war-torn region on the globe. Outsiders may see such groups as principally "asylum seekers" but what similarities really are there between Afghanistan and Angola? The teacher of the group clearly feels relieved for Abdul that there is at least one other afghani boy in the group, but Abdul is hazari and Omar pashtun. They may both speak dari but they have little else in common.
What is more their new context is one in which the accepted rules of social interaction no longer apply. Truth has no currency in this new world: tell the truth and you will be automatically disbelieved; tell a big lie and you may well get away with it. Adults in this new world are almost invariably hostile and threatening. The officials in Lunar House and the lawyers in Omar's immigration status review hearing are rude, contemptuous and uncaring and there is only one adult in the film- the teacher- who treats the children with anything like respect.
Superficially these children may appear to be living the same sort of life as those whose immigration status is not in question but appearances can be deceptive. In one scene they all dress up in fancy dress (or those who have more than one set of clothes do) to go out to watch the Diwali fireworks. Aside from Abdul's initial terror at the sounds of the explosions they have a nice night out- another group of teenagers loudly enjoying themselves without any adult escort. Yet the mood changes rapidly and dramatically when they see police outside the overground station. This is not because they have been up to no good- they have no drugs or weapons, have not been drinking and have caused no trouble- but because they have brown skins and no valid papers. And sure enough one is arrested, handcuffed and taken away, presumably to Yarl's Wood or one of the other charmingly named immigration removal centres.
So what do these teenagers do, ripped from their cultural context and placed together to make a new life between themselves? They do what the Caribbean slave children did: they begin to develop their own language. They work out modes of interaction and ways of communicating friendship, mutual supportiveness and compassion. So on the issue of truth and lies they seem to accept that some lies (like the specific area you came from) are entirely socially acceptable because they are simply weapons in the battle with the immigration service, whilst others are forbidden because they corrode some fundamental sense of who one is.
Some of their invented language of social interaction is a little bizarre: when Zizidi is devastated because her leave to remain has been refused Abdul seeks to comfort her by stealing an entire lamb carcass and attempting to roast it in a small domestic oven. Much is hidden from the outside world and the film reminds us that we will never truly understand the languages these children have had to work out for themselves. When Abdul first arrives he speaks no English and Omar translates for the benefit of the teacher. However we the audience (unlike the teacher) have the benefit of subtitles and know that actually Omar is not translating accurately at all. There is a strange battle going on here of which the teacher (well meaning as he is) guesses nothing.
I have had experience myself of this impenetrability: when you think you understand the social language by which unaccompanied refugee children live their lives but suddenly realise that you understand nothing at all. There was in my school a boy who had escaped one of the conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa. He had been well supported and integrated into the school and now seemed happy, well adjusted, sociable and popular. And then one day he severely wounded his best friend with a Stanley knife. He was only messing around and had no intention of hurting anyone but what struck me was his reaction afterwards. He immediately said sorry to his friend, but was then apparently completely baffled that despite this people were shocked by what he had done. I had to exclude him permanently and in the hearing, when asked if he wanted to speak, he simply said, "But I said sorry. I thought that would make it alright."
In the last line of the film Abdul says (in dari) "I didn't know it would be so difficult." For me it is not just the pressures and perils of living on the edge that makes life difficult for these children. It is the fact that, alone and unsupported, they have to develop an entirely new language of social interaction to make sense of their new lives.
Showing posts with label Immigration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Immigration. Show all posts
Sunday, 27 July 2014
Tuesday, 7 January 2014
the British and immigration
Warning: the following post may contain sweeping generalisations about the characteristics of entire populations based on very little evidence. If such national stereotyping offends you please look away now. If what you prefer is racial stereotyping, please click here.
So, it seems that 78% of the British public surveyed think that immigration to the UK should be reduced, even though 30% believe that immigration has a good or very good effect on the UK economy. In fact 34% of those who rated the economic impact of immigration as very good still want it to reduce, according to the survey.
The easy way to interpret these findings is that the British are inherently racist and are allowing this instinctive racial prejudice to be whipped up by the right-wing tabloid press. So, like Nigel Farage (who in a recent interview named Enoch Powell as his political hero) they would prefer to suffer economically so long as it meant keeping the foreigners out.
This is certainly a tempting argument, if you look at some of the front pages British tabloids have run in recent years. Look here for instance. And no, they aren't made up.
Yet there is a part of this argument that actually doesn't ring true to me. In everyday life, here in London where issues of race are all around us, I cannot remember the last time I witnessed any sort of behaviour that I would regard as racist. I am convinced that people are much less racist in their attitudes now than they were in the past and that British people are less prone to be racist than are say the French or the Italians.
As head teacher of a large London comprehensive I had to deal with many hundreds of argumentative teenagers of various racial, religious and ethnic origins yet never found racism in interpersonal relations to be a particularly significant issue (nowhere near as significant as homophobia for instance). Yes there was the occasional racist insult but the kids, almost without exception, saw these as unacceptable. Indeed, race seems to have virtually disappeared as an issue for these kids: a prominent member of the unpleasantly violent Dem Africans gang was white British and another Turkish. This is a very different situation to that which pertained even 20 years ago, when racist insults were much commoner in schools and gangs tended to be mono-ethnic and indeed defined by race. Interracial marriages are now so commonplace as to attract no attention whatever where not so long ago they were treated with deep suspicion and even anger.
In Italy by contrast my daughter recently witnessed racist abuse of African street sellers by uniformed police of a sort that would be unthinkable in the UK and in France the comedy l'Italien exposed a degree of anti-Arab racism that is seen there more or less as normal. Yet France and Italy are both signatories to the Schengen accord and in neither is there the same sense as in Britain of paranoia about immigrants swamping the country.
Indeed on closer examination it really does seem to me that British anxieties are much more to do with national populations than with race. The image most people seem to hold is of our island nation desperate to resist invasion and keep the alien hordes the other side of the channel like armies outwith the castle's moat. Indeed the use of this metaphor in the phrase "pulling up the drawbridge" points up precisely the difference between attitudes to race and attitudes to immigration: those pulling up the drawbridge are previous immigrants into Britain and their descendants (which covers all of us I suppose) who are keener than "native" Brits to resist further immigration. In fact in the study cited here a higher proportion of British Asians than White British believe that immigration should be stopped permanently.
So why is this? Why is a population which is, by comparison with previous eras and other countries, fairly tolerant and accepting of other races so intolerant and fearful of immigrants and immigration?
Partly of course this is the fault of the lies peddled by the tabloids and implicitly endorsed by government ministers. The UK population now seem to take it for granted that immigrants milk Britain for benefits and take all the council houses, despite this study for instance showing that immigrants are 59 per cent less likely than natives to receive state benefits or tax credits and 57 per cent less likely to live in social housing. Now, I wonder where they could have got such an idea from...
But that isn't all of it, I don't think. There has to be a kernel of distrust of the outsider somewhere for the tabloids, UKIP and the Tories to play on. So where does that distrust originate?
Well, I will posit two explanations:
1) It's because Brits are so terrified of ABROAD that anything that originates from there is to be distrusted.
Brits do seem to be almost uniquely frightened once outside the boundaries of their own country- more so than any other population with the possible exception of the Chinese. As a people, we have the linguistic ineptitude of all English-speaking peoples without the gung-ho adventurousness of the Aussies or the arrogant sense of entitlement of the Yanks. Wherever we go we huddle together in safe English speaking enclaves or scuttle about in abject terror that we may be called upon to communicate with someone who DOESN'T SPEAK ENGLISH! Some of us, it is true, appear totally at home in Provence or the Algarve, but on closer examination it is clear that we are so only because these places are now as Anglicised as the Costa del Sol.
It seems that the Brits are unique in creating such tropes as the pool-bed-hogging German early-riser and we clearly see foreign holidays as brave sojourns into enemy territory. Other Europeans seem much less phased: they are used to having to operate in a number of languages and can drive from one country to another without ceremony (they don't even have to pack their suitcases full of PG tips and packets of hobnobs). The Americans by contrast seem to see other countries as so utterly alien that they are merely quaint and hence no threat, and Aussies wonder what all the fuss is about, since wherever they go there never seem to be as many highly venomous animals as there are at home.
And I am convinced that this fear of abroad carries over to attitudes to immigration. Apart from anything else, the numbers generally quoted on the subject are for NET migration (numbers of immigrants minus numbers leaving the country) and there is a strictly limited number of places that the British (or the English at least- the Scots and Irish are more adventurous) are prepared to go.
2) It's because Brits distrust the motives of those with the power to control migration
The perception of who immigrants are and why they want to come here seems to have changed radically over recent years, in a very interesting way. It used to be that "immigrant" was equated with "asylum seeker" and conjured up images EITHER of terrified refugees from appalling conflicts overseas OR of hook-handed hate-preachers pretending to be terrified refugees... (depending on your political viewpoint and/or readership of the Daily Mail). Now, it seems, that is not what people think of first when immigration is discussed. Instead, people now see impoverished Eastern Europeans coming over here EITHER to do a fantastically professional but incredibly cheap cash-in-hand job of refitting your kitchen OR to lounge about in council houses claiming benefits (again, depending on political orientation/Daily Mail readership/experience of having cheap cash-in-hand job done on the kitchen).
And in a sense this is not surprising. It turns out that, with the freeing up of employment restrictions on Romanians and Bulgarians entering the UK major companies and institutions here have been falling over each other to recruit Romanian and Bulgarian workers. Suddenly they have discovered a new and even cheaper way to outsource work, without even leaving the UK- just get foreign workers in to do the work for next to nothing right here! You don't even need to pay the minimum wage if you go through an agency. Win, win!
And this is hardly the first time this has happened. It seems pretty clear that New Labour's attitudes to Polish immigration were prompted more by the desire to boost the economy than some sort of impulse towards internationalism. Which of course it did, much to the advantage of the captains of industry and the money men who duly profited enormously, while average wages failed to keep up with inflation.
So whilst it is shameful for Britain to turn its back on the refugees from Syria for instance some of the British attitudes to immigration are neither as racist nor as illiberal as they might appear. Immigration has served the rich of the UK very, very well indeed. Immigrants provide a net boost to economic output and increased economic output, more than ever before, benefits the rich. It is perhaps hardly surprising that the less well-off resent the way the movement of people has been used by the rich to keep their wages down.
It is even almost understandable that they direct that resentment towards the least culpable parties to this process: the immigrants themselves.
So, it seems that 78% of the British public surveyed think that immigration to the UK should be reduced, even though 30% believe that immigration has a good or very good effect on the UK economy. In fact 34% of those who rated the economic impact of immigration as very good still want it to reduce, according to the survey.
The easy way to interpret these findings is that the British are inherently racist and are allowing this instinctive racial prejudice to be whipped up by the right-wing tabloid press. So, like Nigel Farage (who in a recent interview named Enoch Powell as his political hero) they would prefer to suffer economically so long as it meant keeping the foreigners out.
This is certainly a tempting argument, if you look at some of the front pages British tabloids have run in recent years. Look here for instance. And no, they aren't made up.
Yet there is a part of this argument that actually doesn't ring true to me. In everyday life, here in London where issues of race are all around us, I cannot remember the last time I witnessed any sort of behaviour that I would regard as racist. I am convinced that people are much less racist in their attitudes now than they were in the past and that British people are less prone to be racist than are say the French or the Italians.
As head teacher of a large London comprehensive I had to deal with many hundreds of argumentative teenagers of various racial, religious and ethnic origins yet never found racism in interpersonal relations to be a particularly significant issue (nowhere near as significant as homophobia for instance). Yes there was the occasional racist insult but the kids, almost without exception, saw these as unacceptable. Indeed, race seems to have virtually disappeared as an issue for these kids: a prominent member of the unpleasantly violent Dem Africans gang was white British and another Turkish. This is a very different situation to that which pertained even 20 years ago, when racist insults were much commoner in schools and gangs tended to be mono-ethnic and indeed defined by race. Interracial marriages are now so commonplace as to attract no attention whatever where not so long ago they were treated with deep suspicion and even anger.
In Italy by contrast my daughter recently witnessed racist abuse of African street sellers by uniformed police of a sort that would be unthinkable in the UK and in France the comedy l'Italien exposed a degree of anti-Arab racism that is seen there more or less as normal. Yet France and Italy are both signatories to the Schengen accord and in neither is there the same sense as in Britain of paranoia about immigrants swamping the country.
Indeed on closer examination it really does seem to me that British anxieties are much more to do with national populations than with race. The image most people seem to hold is of our island nation desperate to resist invasion and keep the alien hordes the other side of the channel like armies outwith the castle's moat. Indeed the use of this metaphor in the phrase "pulling up the drawbridge" points up precisely the difference between attitudes to race and attitudes to immigration: those pulling up the drawbridge are previous immigrants into Britain and their descendants (which covers all of us I suppose) who are keener than "native" Brits to resist further immigration. In fact in the study cited here a higher proportion of British Asians than White British believe that immigration should be stopped permanently.
So why is this? Why is a population which is, by comparison with previous eras and other countries, fairly tolerant and accepting of other races so intolerant and fearful of immigrants and immigration?
Partly of course this is the fault of the lies peddled by the tabloids and implicitly endorsed by government ministers. The UK population now seem to take it for granted that immigrants milk Britain for benefits and take all the council houses, despite this study for instance showing that immigrants are 59 per cent less likely than natives to receive state benefits or tax credits and 57 per cent less likely to live in social housing. Now, I wonder where they could have got such an idea from...
But that isn't all of it, I don't think. There has to be a kernel of distrust of the outsider somewhere for the tabloids, UKIP and the Tories to play on. So where does that distrust originate?
Well, I will posit two explanations:
1) It's because Brits are so terrified of ABROAD that anything that originates from there is to be distrusted.
Brits do seem to be almost uniquely frightened once outside the boundaries of their own country- more so than any other population with the possible exception of the Chinese. As a people, we have the linguistic ineptitude of all English-speaking peoples without the gung-ho adventurousness of the Aussies or the arrogant sense of entitlement of the Yanks. Wherever we go we huddle together in safe English speaking enclaves or scuttle about in abject terror that we may be called upon to communicate with someone who DOESN'T SPEAK ENGLISH! Some of us, it is true, appear totally at home in Provence or the Algarve, but on closer examination it is clear that we are so only because these places are now as Anglicised as the Costa del Sol.
It seems that the Brits are unique in creating such tropes as the pool-bed-hogging German early-riser and we clearly see foreign holidays as brave sojourns into enemy territory. Other Europeans seem much less phased: they are used to having to operate in a number of languages and can drive from one country to another without ceremony (they don't even have to pack their suitcases full of PG tips and packets of hobnobs). The Americans by contrast seem to see other countries as so utterly alien that they are merely quaint and hence no threat, and Aussies wonder what all the fuss is about, since wherever they go there never seem to be as many highly venomous animals as there are at home.
And I am convinced that this fear of abroad carries over to attitudes to immigration. Apart from anything else, the numbers generally quoted on the subject are for NET migration (numbers of immigrants minus numbers leaving the country) and there is a strictly limited number of places that the British (or the English at least- the Scots and Irish are more adventurous) are prepared to go.
2) It's because Brits distrust the motives of those with the power to control migration
The perception of who immigrants are and why they want to come here seems to have changed radically over recent years, in a very interesting way. It used to be that "immigrant" was equated with "asylum seeker" and conjured up images EITHER of terrified refugees from appalling conflicts overseas OR of hook-handed hate-preachers pretending to be terrified refugees... (depending on your political viewpoint and/or readership of the Daily Mail). Now, it seems, that is not what people think of first when immigration is discussed. Instead, people now see impoverished Eastern Europeans coming over here EITHER to do a fantastically professional but incredibly cheap cash-in-hand job of refitting your kitchen OR to lounge about in council houses claiming benefits (again, depending on political orientation/Daily Mail readership/experience of having cheap cash-in-hand job done on the kitchen).
And in a sense this is not surprising. It turns out that, with the freeing up of employment restrictions on Romanians and Bulgarians entering the UK major companies and institutions here have been falling over each other to recruit Romanian and Bulgarian workers. Suddenly they have discovered a new and even cheaper way to outsource work, without even leaving the UK- just get foreign workers in to do the work for next to nothing right here! You don't even need to pay the minimum wage if you go through an agency. Win, win!
And this is hardly the first time this has happened. It seems pretty clear that New Labour's attitudes to Polish immigration were prompted more by the desire to boost the economy than some sort of impulse towards internationalism. Which of course it did, much to the advantage of the captains of industry and the money men who duly profited enormously, while average wages failed to keep up with inflation.
So whilst it is shameful for Britain to turn its back on the refugees from Syria for instance some of the British attitudes to immigration are neither as racist nor as illiberal as they might appear. Immigration has served the rich of the UK very, very well indeed. Immigrants provide a net boost to economic output and increased economic output, more than ever before, benefits the rich. It is perhaps hardly surprising that the less well-off resent the way the movement of people has been used by the rich to keep their wages down.
It is even almost understandable that they direct that resentment towards the least culpable parties to this process: the immigrants themselves.
Monday, 2 January 2012
Serendipity in imagery- or how symbols can acquire new resonances
As I have argued in a a previous post the human brain seems particularly inclined to think in terms of imagery- to recognise the grounds of comparison in terms of connotations and allusions between an idea, concept, feeling or thing and the image, or 'vehicle', with which it is presented. Symbols are the purest expression of this tendency, where artists create a vehicle that is rich in connotations and invite the reader to think about grounds of connection with some feeling or some object or person in the real world. Of course over time the field of connotations on which an individual reader calls can change substantially, meaning that symbols can acquire resonances that were unforseen by their orginal creator.
Blake's the Sick Rose is a well known example of such symbolism, and no doubt readers over the years have felt in it uncanny resonances with particular relationships or emotions they have experienced. What Blake would have been unlikely to be able to foresee was how apposite some readers felt it to be as a symbol for AIDs. Tennyson's the Eagle can be read as a simple descriptive poem or as a symbol of autocratic, despotic power. Again it is unlikely that the poet could have foreseen the grounds of connection with Adolf Hitler, sitting alone in his Adlerhorst, plotting to unleash the thunderbolts of his Blitzkrieg on a war-torn Europe.
In both of these poems the new grounds that modern readers see, though unsuspected at the time by the poets, chime well with the presumed original intentions of the authors. What fascinates me is where symbols an author creates take on entirely new resonances that their creators would find surprising, even perverse. If a reader sees in a symbol uncanny resonances with concepts or situations that are divorced entirely from their original context, is there any problem with them doing so? I will present two examples and let you judge.
George Orwell's Animal Farm is an acute and moving satire on the way the idealism of the Russian Revolution descended into the brutal repression of Stalinism. A turning point in the plot is when the windmill that the animals have created with enormous, backbreaking effort has been destroyed in a storm. In the story this is clearly a symbol for the failed industrial policies of the Soviet Five Year Plans, and Napoleon's identification of Snowball as the culprit a reference to Stalin's scapegoating of Trotsky and others.
However for me in autumn 2001 this symbol acquired terrible new resonance. On the 11th September a great tower in the real world came crashing down. As in the novel "a cry of despair broke from every animal's throat. A terrible sight had met their eyes. The windmill was in ruins." What was particularly chilling was the way that almost immediately afterwards the actions of George Bush and the neocons, ably assisted by Tony Blair, so exactly paralleled Napoleon's actions in the novel:
"Napoleon paced to and fro in silence, occasionally snuffing at the ground. His tail had grown rigid and twitched sharply from side to side, a sign in him of intense mental activity. Suddenly he halted as though his mind were made up.
'Comrades,' he said quietly, 'do you know who is responsible for this? Do you know the enemy who has come in the night and overthrown our windmill? SNOWBALL!' he suddenly roared in a voice of thunder. 'Snowball has done this thing! In sheer malignity, thinking to set back our plans and avenge himself for his ignominious expulsion, this traitor has crept here under cover of night and destroyed our work of nearly a year. Comrades, here and now I pronounce the death sentence upon Snowball. 'Animal Hero, Second Class,' and half a bushel of apples to any animal who brings him to justice. A full bushel to anyone who captures him alive!'"
Substitute Saddam Hussein for Snowball and there you have it.
The second example is perhaps even further from the author's intention but I find it fascinating. Dickens' Great Expectations is a perennial favourite, recently reimagined as a BBC drama. This adaptation had some excellent features, though it misrepresented the original in some aspects. A key point in the televised version is that Pip might have brought Magwitch the file because he was frightened, but the bringing of the pie was an act of pure goodness that Magwitch never forgot and chose later to reward. Pleasing as this notion might be it is not there in the text. Pip brings the pie because Magwitch tells him "'You get me a file.' He tilted me again. 'And you get me wittles.' He tilted me again. 'You bring 'em both to me.' He tilted me again. 'Or I'll have your heart and liver out.'"
It is in the character of Magwitch and his treatment by Pip that on my last reading of the novel I began to see a symbol that surprised me with its serendipitous relevance. In the original Magwitch is clearly symbolic of the brutalising effects of Victorian England's penal system and Pip's contempt and disgust for him symbolic of the way polite society sought to sweep any awareness of that world under the carpet. Yet I began to see their relationship as a fascinating symbol of the relationship between the rich West and the colonies of the Third World.
Before you immediately stop reading, just think about this summary of the plot, considering Pip as symbolic of the rich West (us) and Magwitch of the Third World:
Pip (the rich West) comes across Magwitch (the Third World) in a dark and baffling whirlwind of fear and excitement. He provides Magwitch with some leftover food and a file (beads, charity and weapons). Later, in the company of men with guns, he comes across Magwitch in a deadly struggle with another convict (another Third World country). The men make no attempt to understand the nature or causes of the struggle but intervene with force to bring about a sort of peace.
Over the years, Pip benefits massively from wealth that originates from Magwitch (the exploited peoples of the Third World). He fails to recognise the origins of his new-found prosperity but sees it as no more than his due, because of his connection to Miss Havisham (the raddled remnants of a grand aristocratic past). In due course, Magwitch, who has "lived rough that you should live smooth; I worked hard that you should be above work." decides he wants to visit Pip (the rich West) to whose benefit he has been breaking his back for years. Here the mood changes and Pip responds with alarm and disgust to the appearance of his benefactor. Pip finds himself "shrinking from him with the strongest repugnance" and experiences "a half-formed terror that it might not be safe to be shut up there with him in the dead of the wild solitary night" (the fear and prejudice directed towards the ex-colonial immigrants by people in the West).
There is great pressure to have Magwitch (the immigrants from the old colonies) removed from polite society. There is then a final scene in which the inexplicable conflict between Magwitch and Compeyson flares up again, in a murky, muddy landscape where nothing can be clearly seen (take your pick- the Iran-Iraq war, the Middle East conflicts, any one of a number of brutal sub-Saharan wars).
To make matters worse, a vast amount of money simply disappears into the dark waters of the Thames (the banking crisis).
This reinterpretation of the text is not intended to be taken entirely seriously. If it was I would be far more guilty than any BBC screenplay writer of distorting the original. However it does demonstrate for me the strange protean power of symbols in literature- that we can see in a text connections and symbolic resonances with events, feelings and situations that the author would never have imagined.
Blake's the Sick Rose is a well known example of such symbolism, and no doubt readers over the years have felt in it uncanny resonances with particular relationships or emotions they have experienced. What Blake would have been unlikely to be able to foresee was how apposite some readers felt it to be as a symbol for AIDs. Tennyson's the Eagle can be read as a simple descriptive poem or as a symbol of autocratic, despotic power. Again it is unlikely that the poet could have foreseen the grounds of connection with Adolf Hitler, sitting alone in his Adlerhorst, plotting to unleash the thunderbolts of his Blitzkrieg on a war-torn Europe.
In both of these poems the new grounds that modern readers see, though unsuspected at the time by the poets, chime well with the presumed original intentions of the authors. What fascinates me is where symbols an author creates take on entirely new resonances that their creators would find surprising, even perverse. If a reader sees in a symbol uncanny resonances with concepts or situations that are divorced entirely from their original context, is there any problem with them doing so? I will present two examples and let you judge.
George Orwell's Animal Farm is an acute and moving satire on the way the idealism of the Russian Revolution descended into the brutal repression of Stalinism. A turning point in the plot is when the windmill that the animals have created with enormous, backbreaking effort has been destroyed in a storm. In the story this is clearly a symbol for the failed industrial policies of the Soviet Five Year Plans, and Napoleon's identification of Snowball as the culprit a reference to Stalin's scapegoating of Trotsky and others.
However for me in autumn 2001 this symbol acquired terrible new resonance. On the 11th September a great tower in the real world came crashing down. As in the novel "a cry of despair broke from every animal's throat. A terrible sight had met their eyes. The windmill was in ruins." What was particularly chilling was the way that almost immediately afterwards the actions of George Bush and the neocons, ably assisted by Tony Blair, so exactly paralleled Napoleon's actions in the novel:
"Napoleon paced to and fro in silence, occasionally snuffing at the ground. His tail had grown rigid and twitched sharply from side to side, a sign in him of intense mental activity. Suddenly he halted as though his mind were made up.
'Comrades,' he said quietly, 'do you know who is responsible for this? Do you know the enemy who has come in the night and overthrown our windmill? SNOWBALL!' he suddenly roared in a voice of thunder. 'Snowball has done this thing! In sheer malignity, thinking to set back our plans and avenge himself for his ignominious expulsion, this traitor has crept here under cover of night and destroyed our work of nearly a year. Comrades, here and now I pronounce the death sentence upon Snowball. 'Animal Hero, Second Class,' and half a bushel of apples to any animal who brings him to justice. A full bushel to anyone who captures him alive!'"
Substitute Saddam Hussein for Snowball and there you have it.
The second example is perhaps even further from the author's intention but I find it fascinating. Dickens' Great Expectations is a perennial favourite, recently reimagined as a BBC drama. This adaptation had some excellent features, though it misrepresented the original in some aspects. A key point in the televised version is that Pip might have brought Magwitch the file because he was frightened, but the bringing of the pie was an act of pure goodness that Magwitch never forgot and chose later to reward. Pleasing as this notion might be it is not there in the text. Pip brings the pie because Magwitch tells him "'You get me a file.' He tilted me again. 'And you get me wittles.' He tilted me again. 'You bring 'em both to me.' He tilted me again. 'Or I'll have your heart and liver out.'"
It is in the character of Magwitch and his treatment by Pip that on my last reading of the novel I began to see a symbol that surprised me with its serendipitous relevance. In the original Magwitch is clearly symbolic of the brutalising effects of Victorian England's penal system and Pip's contempt and disgust for him symbolic of the way polite society sought to sweep any awareness of that world under the carpet. Yet I began to see their relationship as a fascinating symbol of the relationship between the rich West and the colonies of the Third World.
Before you immediately stop reading, just think about this summary of the plot, considering Pip as symbolic of the rich West (us) and Magwitch of the Third World:
Pip (the rich West) comes across Magwitch (the Third World) in a dark and baffling whirlwind of fear and excitement. He provides Magwitch with some leftover food and a file (beads, charity and weapons). Later, in the company of men with guns, he comes across Magwitch in a deadly struggle with another convict (another Third World country). The men make no attempt to understand the nature or causes of the struggle but intervene with force to bring about a sort of peace.
Over the years, Pip benefits massively from wealth that originates from Magwitch (the exploited peoples of the Third World). He fails to recognise the origins of his new-found prosperity but sees it as no more than his due, because of his connection to Miss Havisham (the raddled remnants of a grand aristocratic past). In due course, Magwitch, who has "lived rough that you should live smooth; I worked hard that you should be above work." decides he wants to visit Pip (the rich West) to whose benefit he has been breaking his back for years. Here the mood changes and Pip responds with alarm and disgust to the appearance of his benefactor. Pip finds himself "shrinking from him with the strongest repugnance" and experiences "a half-formed terror that it might not be safe to be shut up there with him in the dead of the wild solitary night" (the fear and prejudice directed towards the ex-colonial immigrants by people in the West).
There is great pressure to have Magwitch (the immigrants from the old colonies) removed from polite society. There is then a final scene in which the inexplicable conflict between Magwitch and Compeyson flares up again, in a murky, muddy landscape where nothing can be clearly seen (take your pick- the Iran-Iraq war, the Middle East conflicts, any one of a number of brutal sub-Saharan wars).
To make matters worse, a vast amount of money simply disappears into the dark waters of the Thames (the banking crisis).
This reinterpretation of the text is not intended to be taken entirely seriously. If it was I would be far more guilty than any BBC screenplay writer of distorting the original. However it does demonstrate for me the strange protean power of symbols in literature- that we can see in a text connections and symbolic resonances with events, feelings and situations that the author would never have imagined.
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