It’s my birthday today. I am 34 years old. As is tradition, I’ll be making the same lame observation I do every year. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union on 26th December 1991, it is also 34 years since the end of history.
As the years tick by, each birthday becomes a measure of distance from another world. As an adoptee, it’s a distance made especially poignant. I think about this day 34 years ago as a day when so many things were set in motion, both personally and politically. It makes for a good “individual myth”, as Lacan might say; a readymade complex that
is the product of history, the result of stories lived by others. As Lévi-Strauss explains, myth is not thought by men but rather “thinks through men” and the same holds for the neurotic’s individual myth despite its personal form. The other pre-exists the individualized person and this co-determination of the group and individual expresses itself in the paradoxical formula ‘individual myth.’
What better ‘individual myth’ to acquire as a melancholic millennial communist than a reflection on one’s birth at a moment of closure? December 26th becomes a day of co-determination, where familial dissolutions mix with more global forms to predetermine a melancholic consciousness.
This year, everything is felt more acutely. The 26th day also happens to mark one more month that my partner Hana has spent in prison, after being arrested for alleged involvement in direct action at the end of August. Today we carve another notch into the wall, inscribing the four-month mark.
I have wanted to talk about this experience so desperately, but it is impossible to know what to say. I have a persistent urge to blog every development, and when I tell Hana this, they say “I’ll not contain you.” But I feel uneasy. Nothing I might say feels complete without their voice alongside mine, but they do not want to speak. They worry about the repercussions, as do I. We write to and call each other daily, but to speak beyond our bubble is too vulnerable to bear.
We remain co-determined. They are the one in prison, but my life is also on hold. They are looking at ten months on remand, which is four more than the statutory limit, for a single charge of criminal damage. It is an unprecedented move, made by government and judiciary, that can only be explained by an authoritarian desire to break the UK’s pro-Palestine movement. But on a personal level, the cruelty of a lengthy period of remand is that it makes life impossible to plan ahead for. We have no known release date, and life does not continue without one. We sit on our hands, saying nothing. For someone who has spent the last ~19 years of their life blogging openly through various personal and political crises, it has felt unnatural to keep so schtum.
Everything is put into letters instead. Rather than write publicly, I express myself to a new audience of one. It is surprising that I now feel more comfortable writing letters, which may well be intercepted and scrutinised by the state, than I am comfortable writing online. But I prefer to write letters because I wish to feel the co-determination of this moment more directly: the moment that is being lived not so much by us but through us.
So much is coursing through us, what has been written so far is a torrent. Even at the very start of our ordeal, the writing flowed. I felt like we were building something — some monumental future tome. Four months in, we have written over 250,000 words between us. Unfortunately, whilst documenting the minutiae of this experience is one thing, to read it all is another. There is nothing digestible to extract from this outpouring. There is nothing of great significance to anyone but us within it. And yet, we acknowledge that this labour of love remains significant to all.
Perhaps Hana will extract a short book of poetry from it one day. Poetry would be all because it is obscure, and because it does not require us to show our working. The impact of this writing project is felt within us and we take ourselves out into the world so that both are changed at the intersection of individual and myth. That is where poetry lies, and similarly, it is why writing poetry makes sense in prison.
On September 10th, we were discussing Mahmood Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence, where he writes:
Prison deprives one of the sight of a tree and the sea. Freedom is the imagination capable of recalling them both in prison, making the invisible visible. No, that is what poetry does. Poetry, then, is an act of freedom. It makes what is visible invisible when facing danger.
Processing this experience through the bittersweetness of our presence/absence for each other, Hana wrote to me that same day:
Prison is a density of faults and glitches when you experience it in immediacy … From inside, I find in you [the] secret focal point Darwish refers to – emitting rays and words depriving darkness of the eternity of its attributes.
In that moment, “prison density” emerged as a shorthand for what we feel daily, for what we’re dealing with, combatting it by always vying for a grace that is alien to its gravity. All we can do, when up to our necks in this density, is take each other by the hand and walk onward through it. I think of Derrida in Glas, Derrida the militant, the ‘mile-goer’:
I shall say no more about procession or method. As Hegel would say, they will speak of (for) themselves while marching.
Months pass by. The marching continues. We talk about all that we write and don’t write once again on December 17th. That morning, I receive a letter from Hana penned four days previous in a funk:
What good are these words about those quiet moments alone, sombre, but with solace? What good without you? I don’t want to share this with just anyone… I am sorry I’ve been distant this past week and that I’ve written to you less… There has been so much more empty space, I’ve been afraid to give shape to it in words, that depressive voice in my head asking what good it is for. For loving you of course!
That evening, I wrote a response about noticing but not minding this shift in our procession, which I then read to Hana down the phone:
That feeling of not knowing how to fill a void, shrouded in a cloud, only to realise that time can be filled by loving you — I know it well. Why do you think I have written to you so much? [The writing has] slowed for me too, of course… I was reading back thru our earliest correspondence yesterday… It’s so strange to see that desperation in my written voice; the frantic grasping at philosophy, a crutch in hard times. I think I reach for Deleuze in a crisis like some people reach for the Bible… “Either ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us.” I needed that then. I needed it affirmed… I needed to remind myself and you of those core principles for weathering something — Groundhog Day, pulling difference out of repetition by way of a “selective principle”, making myself worthy of you and of this. In the midst of the panic, I needed to affirm the method. Since then, I feel like I’ve reached less frequently for theory. I’ve not talked about an approach to a crisis, I’ve simply gotten on with approaching you. And I feel you near.
For all that we write to each other, there is always so much left unsaid. History unfurls before us, fueled by fear and hope. It is all the more difficult to register because of that.
Our experience right now is significant — we will be talking about it for the rest of our lives. But it is impossible to comment on how we are coping because we are not coping with it alone. Some days we do not cope at all. There are others in our orbit who cope even less, and who do not have the support networks that we cling onto for dear life. Hana speaks of missing me desperately, but inside, the pain of our separation isn’t relatable to all. Others might think having someone to miss is a privilege.
Counting even our paltry blessings soon becomes uncouth. What use is affirming the beauty found in each other when prison sharpens the edges of all that cannot be shared, on the inside, on the outside, and through the concrete skin that exists between them?
On November 28th, we were discussing Audre Lorde’s ‘A Litany for Survival’, which they had read inside and felt deeply moved by. “We were never meant to survive”, Lorde writes, speaking — at least in my interpretation — to the softness that nourishes existence, set across from solid death.
What survives in the fossil record is that part of each being already tough. We dig up bones, shells, exoskeletons that are already hard in life and hardened further after it. The fossil record of the Anthropocene will be chicken bones and irradiated concrete. The soft parts disappear, whether in an instant or over time.
What enables our survival in the here and now is precisely all of that activity that will not be registered in the fossil record. What enables our survival will not itself survive. It’s how I feel looking at the archive of prison correspondence amassing around me. Our poems, letters, and drawings are inconsequential when viewed from the perspective of a much larger struggle. But aren’t they all the more beautiful for that? Isn’t this archive all the more precious in its fragility? Isn’t it a humble accrual of all that helps us to survive this?
It is precious, and in being so precious, we sometimes find ourselves wishing to share it. But we can’t. We cannot bring ourselves to share the softness of this experience. It is too precious to share, and to do so might even be cruel, since it has the potential to lead others astray from hard reality. There are no words for how inhumane prison is and how difficult life has become. There are no words to describe the efforts made to sustain some beauty within it all regardless. But more than that, there are no words because it is not yet history.
When I told Hana that I was plotting to write some reflection on our co-determination, on the individual myth, on poetry and prison, on the nightmare of British authoritarianism and complicity in genocide, they were eager to add their voice. They wrote me a letter — a celebration of my birthday and the ways in which we are weathering this moment, steadfast in love, humbled in strife — but the next day, they asked me not to share it as planned. It did not matter to me either way. The original version of this post scratched an itch, but most of what is expressed within this moment is just for us.
We’ll write each other poetry for as long as it takes, and we’ll write our history when the nightmare is over. Until then, the two shall not meet. Instead, Hana suggested their contribution should be curatorial. They read the following Mahmood Darwish poem to me. “Copy this down.” Enough said…
Don’t write history as poetry, because the weapon is
the historian. And the historian doesn’t get fever
chills when he names his victims, and doesn’t listen
to the guitar’s rendition. And history is the dailiness
of weapons prescribed upon our bodies. “The
intelligent genius is the mighty one.” And history
has no compassion that we can long for our
beginning, and no intention that we can know what’s ahead
and what’s behind… and it has no rest stops
by the railroad tracks for us to bury the dead, for us to look
toward what time has done to us over there, and what
we’ve done to time. As if we were of it and outside it.
History is not logical or intuitive that we can break
what is left of our myth about happy times,
nor is it a myth that we can accept our dwelling at the doors
of judgement day. It is in us and outside us… and a mad
repetition, from the catapult to the nuclear thunder.
Aimlessly we make it and it makes us… Perhaps
history wasn’t born as we desired, because
the Human Being never existed?
Philosophers and artists passed through there…and the poets wrote down the dailiness of their purple flowers
then passed through there… and the poor believed
in sayings about paradise and waited there…
and gods came to rescue nature from our divinity
and passed through there. And history has no
time for contemplation, history has no mirror
and no bare face. It is unreal reality
or unfanciful fancy, so don’t write it.
Don’t write it, don’t write it as poetry!