It all came together so swiftly and perfectly. Writer Frances Stonor Saunders had the idea of asking 12 people living in Britain today what single object each would take into exile. Some were from families which had included refugees in the past; others had been in just such a situation more recently. Following on from the idea of his Saja Lugu book and exhibition - 100 Estonians, volunteers from all walks of life, each photographed twice to celebrate their country's centenary as an (intermittently) independent state - Kaupo Kikkas (pictured up top with Frances and below; all What Would You Take? images by Jamie Smith) spent time with each of the subjects, made 12 portraits and a dozen complementary photographs of their hands holding or carrying their chosen objects.
I saw the pairs of images in the perfect little book produced to accompany the exhibition before I went along for the launch last Tuesday. So I was especially moved by how Kaupo had placed his 24 photographs within the L-shaped 12 Star Gallery of Europe House: first the hands, and then, round the corner, their owners, caught with such naturalness and dignity that it was clear an artist had been at work.
One special charm of opening night was to be able to meet many of the subjects and have plenty to talk about. I never did quite manage to collar Claudia Roden - delightful and approachable as she undoubtedly seemed - to tell her how grateful I was for finally discovering the recipe for muhammarah - walnuts, roasted red peppers and pomegranate molasses plus - in her Book of Jewish Cookery after reeling from it the first time in an Armenian restaurant in Beirut.
But I did get to talk to a delightful Lebanese lady, writer Hanan al-Shaykh, who reminisced about her friendship with another great photographer, Eve Arnold - here I seem to be doing the holdy-forthy to her and Frances -
and briefly to Ryad Alsous, whose story is perhaps the most poignant. Professor of Agriculture at Damascus University, he left behind his beehives and factory, which used to produced ten metric tons of honey a years, all destroyed by Isis, and brought with him to the UK his bee-smoker (pictured below with Thomas Heatherwick's choice of his frugal grandmother's silver-plated spoons.
Ryad now produces honey from native black bees in Huddersfield. 'People say that they are aggressive, but I don't agree, and I'm encouraging others to set up hives with them. When I'm with my bees, I listen for their advice on how to make a home'. His honey was there for sampling - I just missed it, having talked for too long to so many people - and his wife serve up delicious hummus (the secret is to soak the chickpeas in warm water).
We also had music from Nigeria-born Maurice Ijahmo (and I bought one of his CDs). There was an eloquent speech from Frances, and a shorter but very beautiful and sincere one from Kaupo, who says he's never felt such warmth at a launch before. If you want to know the other stories, you'll have to hurry along to the 12-Star Gallery any time during the day this week, or after Christmas and the New Year up to 5 January (check opening times). The booklet with the poignant texts will be there, too, if you hurry. Clearly there's a future for this timely compendium to travel, and to be augmented; but as it is, and where it is, it seems as perfect as it can be.
Hopefully there's a future for the 12 Star too. But whatever happens, the new House of European Art (HEART) will be there in virtual or actual form. Its first project was realised in October with the award of the Hubert Butler Essay Prize.
Butler, the Orwell of Ireland, one of the greatest of all essayists - I've written about him here before - was, Professor Roy Foster (pictured below in the first of two photos by Roger Way) noted in his eloquent introduction at the Irish Embassy, 'unnervingly prescient about questions of religion, national identity and the fractured histories of Central and Eastern Europe, no less than Ireland...Time and again, his questing intelligence probed the question of borders, and what they signified...It seemed to the judges of the first Hubert Butler Essay Prize that the topic of borders within Europe was of pressing relevance, and also carried an appropriately Butlerian resonance. '
Nigel Lewis, the winner out of over 30 entries (picture below on the right with Irish Ambassador Adrian O'Neill, one of the two runners-up, Victoria Mason and grand-daughter of Butler Cordelia Gelly), is ambivalent about competing ideas about Europe, but he is clear that 'the EU, like the EEC before it, has been defusing Europe like an unexploded bomb left over from World War II'. It is our only hope against that bomb being reassembled. Read the whole text online here. It was also printed in a booklet thanks to the generosity of Juliette Seibold.
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18 comments:
David, you write that the winning Butler essay " was ambivalent about the competing ideas about Europe". But surely that is the only interesting question to address? And not only interesting, but urgent
I suggest you read the essay online, and then respond.
I have already read it. It mentions the question of immigration briefly, but does not attack the matter in any detail, nor is the the Euro discussed ( a crucial financial frontier), nor in any depth the reason why several EU countries show a significant degree of anti European sentiment - are these tides to do with Europe as such, or more general? ). On the more positive side, how far have the relationships between countries improved simply because that was likely to happen anyway, in the aftermath of WW2 and the rise of the USSR? These are the questions about " frontiers" which need to be addressed. I should add that in itself this is an elegant essay, but it is nearly all descriptive, not an analysis.
You fall into the trap of criticising what it isn't. The brief was not, after all, to write an essay about the general state of the EU. Within its boundaries, I suggest it is much more successful than you suggest. Clearly, given some excellent competition, the judges thought so.
I am disappointed in the judges. The essay title was about frontiers. The problems now existing for frontiers ( which mainly concern the EU but it is wider) are not discussed in the winning essay - a very elegant piece but what does it achieve? Most of it is descriptive of matters we know already
Bah humbug. Can't agree. Of course I do remember some of the other entries....
A brilliant conception for an exhibit, and I’m sorry I can’t be there to see it. Thank you, too, for reminding me of Lewis’s essay, which I have now read twice more. it was poignant to read of Lewis's visit to Norcia, especially since we visited so recently ourselves. Visiting Norcia was striking, not only for the extent of damage, but also for the robust-appearing recovery underway. I am certain this would not have been possible without the significant financial support of the EU.
It is of desperate importance that we rise, and help others rise, in vision beyond our parochial interests--important though those local interests may seem. Thinking on the "one item" challenge presented by the 12 Star exhibit, it's critical to recognize that most who flee their countries do not wish to do so (I think of Zweig and so many other Jews in WWII, but the same is true for those fleeing Central America for the US, for those fleeing Syria, and so many more). It's essential that we widen our vision not only to offer open embrace of those who make the grave decision that they must flee their countries (Merkel was exactly right to do as she did), but also aid, substantially, the countries from which people flee so that flight is no longer necessary.
Robert Kagan wrote what I thought was an excellent opinion piece not long ago, called "Welcome to the Jungle," that, from a US perspective, contemplated similar terrain as that on which Lewis meditates so thoughtfully. Here's part of what Kagan wrote:
'World order is one of those things people don’t think about until it is gone. That’s what Americans learned in the 1930s, as what had remained of the old European order collapsed and the United States refused to step in either to prop it up or to replace it. That’s when Americans discovered that there are always dangerous people out there, lacking only the power and opportunity to achieve their destiny. They can be suppressed by a reasonably stable international order, whether of a Rome, a united Christendom, a European concert of powers or whatever might pass for “civilization” at a given time and place.
'During such times, they live under the rocks, but they are never gone. When the prevailing order breaks down, when the rocks are overturned, the things living beneath them, the darkest elements of the human spirit, crawl out. That was what happened in the first half of the 20th century. The circumstances in which Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini rose to power — a world in which no nation was willing or able to sustain any kind of international order — gave them ample opportunity to show what they were capable of. Had there been an order in place to blunt those ambitions, we might never have come to know them as tyrants, aggressors and mass killers."
I hope, with you, that there will be a future for the 12 Star and all that it represents.
The wonderful thing about Butler was that he proved equally eloquent on international issues and local ones, seeing no contradiction in cultivating both fields to try and make both the world and one's home town a better place.
Thank you so much for the Kagan quotation. The rocks are upturned again. But the imagery also reminds me of 'stranded monsters gaping lie' in Auden's A Summer Night, my favourite poem, reminding us that resurrection is possible as well as disintegration. Though we now stand on the brink of losing it all.
The question of what one would take has exercised us. And oddly, I can't think of a single thing (if I had a dog, obviously I'd take him or her). No family heirlooms to speak of, nothing that can be detached from the whole - and since music can be resurrected just about anywhere, that's not really an option. A friend said it showed a healthy detachment from material things; I'd like that to be true.
The difficulty with Susan's position on immigration is that there are now many millions of refugees ( including many desperate economic refugees ) and if they were all allowed into Europe the civilisations of Europe would be overwhelmed and destroyed. Susan's point that we should pour assistance into the countries from which the refugees are fleeing is the best and in a sense the only solution, appropriate in the cases of countries simply poor and unstructured. But where there is violence there is little we can until the fighting is stopped, except to assist in stopping the fighting where we can. Mrs Merkel made a terrible error - not in letting in more refugees but in saying so. This encouraged the right wing AfD, raised doubts in the minds of many of her more faithful electorate, and led her colleagues perhaps for the first time to doubt her judgement. In politics the best results ( and the most moral of aims) are often obtained by pointing in one direction and moving in the other
This is not really the place for that broader discussion (again), but while I see the problem I also emphatically reject the bald statement that 'the civilisations of Europe would be overwhelmed and destroyed'. Many more refugees could and should be accepted by the eastern European countries who have little if any experience of them - I saw only a couple of Moroccans, for instance, in Brno. The real problem is how people's perception of refugees - very often founded in ignorance - encourages the rise of the right, which is the chief bad outcome. But Germany has for the most part integrated its refugees.
But I see no celebration from you of what we're celebrating here - emigres and refugees who enrich our culture.
The contribution by refugees has been very positive in so many cases, I agree. And on a practical point Germany has quite a few underpopulated regions/towns as Germans have left the former East Germany. But there are officially 68 million refugees in the world and tens of millions of these are near to Europe. Many are not fleeing from terrible situations but are desperately fleeing from real poverty or from relative poverty. Many want to come to rich countries. Many are culturally different, and it takes a degree of education ( broadly defined) to accept the changes to one's human environment that such refugees impose. Thus, many people feel unsettled if the cultural unity of their small town is broken up. The present developments in Sweden point to other difficulties.
I appreciate that I often go off at a tangent but if a point is raised which is optimistic ( etc etc) I am anxious to make a comment. You can always not publish me!
I'll never not publish you, though I well know what you're saying here. I would, however, rather revert to the smaller picture of the incredible enrichment so many refugees bring to the countries which give them asylum. Which is what the exhibition is all about. Very timely. And I would refer you to Part Three especially of Berlioz's L'enfance du Christ, where the Holy Family is rejected by two households in Egyptian Sais with cries of 'Vile Hebrews, get out!' until an enlightened Ishmaelite welcomes them with food, music-making and sleep.
Macmillan famously explained how things evolve by the phrase " Events, dear boy, events". I use the phrase " Numbers, dear boy, numbers"
A human being is not a number, dear sir. As one of the world's richest countries - for now - we can afford to take in more refugees. If there's still too little focus on the UK's own terrible problems with poverty, that's more to do with the present government's skewed priorities. They can still find £2 billion for a scare campaign.
I have read this discussion with interest, and now may be the right moment for me to make my own comment on it. David Damant sets up a false antithesis between writing that is “elegant”and writing that is useful and relevant and “achieves” something. The first requirement of an essay, I would have thought, is to achieve clarity in a confused situation, not at the expense of truth, but in the service of it. David Nice is correct. Mr. Damant criticises my essay for what it is not and was not intended to be. We were not asked to write about our beliefs or give our opinions, nor can I see what personal opinion or belief would “achieve” in the present situation. We were asked to write about the question of “Europe without Frontiers”, a subject on which I was detached, clear, and – on the subject of external frontiers – decisive. Elegance need not be – and should not be - at the expense of truth, but neither should an essay peddle opinion as truth, however strongly that opinion may be held. I aimed for objectivity, honesty, and clarity. What would Mr. Damant rather have instead?
Nigel Lewis
Honoured that you responded here, Mr. Lewis (and I hope you've received an invitation to the Europe Day Concert in St John's Smith Square on 9 May. Let me know if you haven't and would like one). Over to Mr. Damant, who is bound to have something to say if he sees this.
Yes, David, I would love to come to the Europe Day concert, with my wife if that is possible.
Certainly. Just leave your email address in a response, which I won't print - I'll then pass it on to Jeremy O'Sullivan to send you an official invitation.
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