ESSAY: ART’S RELATIONSHIP WITH POWER
Harris KhaliqueUpdated March 15, 2020
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Composite Illustration by Saad Arifi
Can art be separated from issues of power? How
does creative expression in today’s world differ
from the eras that have come before? What is the
role of the artist in an age of neo-liberal economic
order and a global rise in fascism and the crushing
of dissent? Eos presents a thought-provoking
keynote speech by Harris Khalique, delivered at the
closing ceremony of the 11th Karachi Literature
Festival 2020
It is indeed a matter of profound privilege and great pleasure to deliver this
speech at the closing ceremony of the 11th Karachi Literature Festival.
Particularly, because this city by the sea is my birthplace and although I have
not been living here for long, “to my soul/ the streets anywhere are the streets
of Karachi”.
Let me begin my submissions on art and its relationship with power: what our
previous generations have undergone in the past and what our present generations
experience in contemporary times. I speak on behalf of those creative writers and
artists who are committed to the values of inclusion and pluralism, and believe in
fundamental freedoms of speech and artistic expression. I have little concern here
for collaborators of power among the ambitious rhymesters, calendar artists,
cultural entrepreneurs and propaganda filmmakers.
In the 19th century, and a little before, our ancestors saw the fall of the Mughal
Empire in the Indian subcontinent and the decimation of their succeeding regional
domains, from Bengal to Awadh and from the Deccan to Punjab, at the hands of
the British. They witnessed the lost War of Independence and the absolute
ascendancy of colonial rule. Then, in the first half of the 20th century, their later
generations felt the tremors coming their way from Europe, caused by the birth of
totalitarianism, ironically from the womb of electoral democracy, and the two great
wars.
The spectres of those two ages come together to haunt us today — the spectres of
imperial subjugation and popular fascism. Our age, however, is comparable yet
distinct from those ages. During the 19th century in the Indian subcontinent, the
contours of a different era being born were visible to the wise. In case of Europe
and North America, after surviving totalitarianism and wars, there were thinkers
and planners who could go back to the drawing board. But today, we witness a
world falling apart without any signs of how the future will unfold. Even the best
among us grope in the darkness of the present.
In his recent work Age of Anger (2017), Indian author Pankaj Mishra presents how
the long-held beliefs about the impending success of the institutions of the nation
state and liberal democracy are being so vociferously contested. Besides, the very
concepts of inclusion and secularism are challenged, largely as a consequence of
the disregard for these ideals by their own champion societies and global
institutions.
We see the rise of Donald Trump in the US, Boris Johnson in the UK, Jair
Bolsonaro in Brazil and Narendra Modi in India. When it comes to international
institutions, we live under an undemocratic UN — owing to the arrangement of its
Security Council — and the G-7, being an elite nations’ expedient club that
overshadows the global economy.
There is no standard path of history available anymore within a normative
framework that would describe the future for nations such as ours, who lag behind
in political evolution, social development, scientific achievement and technological
advancement. On the one hand, it seems that the human collective has lost track
but on the other hand, however, this moment in history may also be taken as an
opportunity to stop denying diverse peoples their contexts in the name of
universality.
This can mark a new beginning for according due recognition to contextualised
discourses without overlooking universal human connections. That will bring
enormous responsibility of charting new paths on our indigenous thinking led by
contemporary academics, scholars, historians and social scientists. However, this
onus has to be equally shared by our artists, because it is only art that subverts
power most decisively.
In Pakistan, since ever, shabby treatment was meted out to nonconforming artists
who enriched our writing and fine arts by transcending intellectual and social
barriers. Ones who subscribed to the principles of democratic rule or believed in
the ideal of a classless society — whether writers or political workers — faced all
kinds of repression. They had to make a choice every single moment — between
silence and speech, caution and courage, calm and rage, amnesia and memory.
Although I have no personal recollection of the first two successive military
dictatorships, I do have vivid memories of the last two. The ill-fated and short-
lived civilian interludes between martial rules did much less than needed to remove
restrictions on intellectual freedom and eliminate causes for fear among those who
act, paint, sing or write. In fact, some civilian leaders matched the intolerance and
vindictiveness of the martial rulers.
There is one significant difference between those who lived in the past and we,
who survive in the present. Our predecessors in Pakistan faced a visible opponent
— the oppression by the state carried out through its coercive arms, which were
defined and manifest. Now, we face multiple opponents, besides the coercive arms
of the state. They are insidious yet omnipresent. They are discernible but not
entirely explainable. Because the key challenge of our times is a society which is
both radicalised and fragmented.
Unlike in fascist Germany between 1933 and 1945, there is no unifying force that
is able to coalesce these stark sentiments. There is a polycentric horizontal spread
of the agency of violence. So there are storm troopers of various hues and colours
adhering to different power centres. A society composed of people prone to bigotry
and xenophobia characterises a simple linearity leading to popular fascism. It has a
desire to eliminate those who shake up this linearity.
Since art and creativity pose a grave threat to linearity by their reliance on
discursive categories and disruptive imagination, they make things complex for a
simplistic mind. Therefore, art is censured and confined, if it cannot be completely
eliminated. In his Lectures on Russian Literature (1980), Vladimir Nabokov
comments on how one of the greatest Russian poets, Alexander Pushkin, would
cause irritation to the Russian officialdom, particularly the Tsar himself. Here I
quote from Nabokov where he mentions power’s view of Pushkin’s poetry:
“… instead of being a good servant of the state in the rank and file of the
administration and extolling conventional virtues in his vocational writings (if
write he must), [Pushkin] composed extremely arrogant and extremely
independent and extremely wicked verse in which a dangerous freedom of thought
was evident in the novelty of his versification, in the audacity of his sensual fancy,
and in his propensity for making fun of major and minor tyrants.”
The relationship between art and power in every society has always remained
tricky. It becomes worse when art is confronted with imperial subjugation or
popular fascism. Since in our times we face both, there is a constant tension at
play, a hide-and-seek, a tussle between subservience and subversion. Many, if not
most, of the poets and writers anywhere are distressed because the experience of
living in many places across continents is increasingly more troubling.
But poets, writers and artists in deeply troubled societies like Pakistan are deeply
troubled. There is an internal urge that makes us revolve around the axis of
literature and an external pull that makes us rotate with the sphere of politics. The
choice is not only to be made between silence and speech, caution and courage,
calm and rage, and amnesia and memory. There is also an artistic choice that also
needs to be made between rhapsody or gloom and indifference or compassion. It is
a process of creating a space fringed by two options. There is a continuous
negotiation that takes place between aesthetic sense and social consciousness. For a
poem has to be a poem first and last, without compromising its artistic value.
I understand that the pressure on artists for making these choices battles with the
social class of some, but challenges the inherent artistic preferences of all. To
paraphrase Milan Kundera, we are hedonists trapped in an intensely political
world. But since we are trapped, our expression has to reflect and resonate with the
zeitgeist — the spirit of the age. Our writing and creative expression must contest
the interests of the neo-liberal economic order only serving the elites and the
affluent, and the coercive institutions of the state crushing or silencing dissent.
The dominant classes and institutions have little stake in listening to multiple
voices due to their heightened sense of superiority. They seek managerial quick
fixes to deep-seated social problems. This mindset leads to behaviours and actions
that cause the weakening of participatory democracy and shrinking of the space for
the free mind. Consequently, extremism and violence grow and expand. Once
violence prevails, not only free political discourse is subdued, but critical cultural
dialogue is muffled.
The conversation between art and power is a tedious conversation — frustrating for
art and cumbersome for power. It is impossible for art to escape this conversation
because there is a certain sensibility that gets developed among the best of its
practitioners, who also refuse to leave their countries until forced. The few that
immediately come to my mind from a rather long list are Nazim Hikmet from
Turkey, Pablo Neruda from Chile, Anna Akhmatova from Russia and Mir Gul
Khan Naseer from Pakistan.
Sometimes power is direct, brutal, non-negotiating and uncompromising. In the
late 17th and early 18th-century Delhi, when authority sought submission and
poetry refused, the verse of absurdist Urdu poet Jafar Zatalli, cost him his life.
Three centuries later, the designs of exercising brute force are reconfigured. Now
purges take place and dissidents disappear. A critical intelligence report, a random
petition filed in the court of law, an edict from a religious cleric or the dissection of
one’s character by a TV talk-show host is enough to cause deep personal harm and
severe public humiliation.
The ways of crude oppression are sometimes replaced by or stay in tandem with
the ways of coercive co-option. For instance, in the case of Pakistan, it was during
Gen Pervez Musharraf’s martial rule when an illusion of artistic and intellectual
freedom was created for a coterie of self-satisfied liberals in metropolitan centres
of Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad, that remain far away from Balochistan, parts of
Sindh, Gilgit-Baltistan and the erstwhile Federally Administered Tribal Areas, now
merged into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The primary narrative, hinging upon the
supremacy of institutions inherited from colonial times as well as the dominance of
a certain state policy focusing only on national security through kinetic means,
unfortunately, remains intact.
In today’s Pakistan, we experience quasi-democracy. Whether or not we find
tangible evidence for the so-called hybrid war being waged through cyberspace, we
have evidence — firm and sufficient — that we live under a hybrid political
dispensation. We see a rise in poverty and destitution, inequality and
dispossession. Sometimes it seems that Marie Antoinette has become our queen
who tells us to eat cake if we can’t afford bread. This is an age of chilling fear,
with incarceration or disappearance of those criticising state policies and colonial
sedition laws being used against non-violent political opponents.
These are the consequences of the resurgence of imperial subjugation and popular
fascism. Books are being confiscated, films are being banned, poetry is being
censored and the press is being gagged. The same is the case in some other parts of
the world, and the worst is in Modi’s India. Kashmiris are brutally suppressed and
Muslims across India face a pogrom.
Art anywhere confronts such nakedness of power and the artist never submits. A
major fiction writer of our times, Julian Barnes writes in Flaubert’s Parrot: “the
greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonourably,
foolishly, viciously.” This is how real art views patriotism. Art also understands
the old German saying: “The king makes war and people die.” In any such conflict
perpetuated by power, the side that art picks is the side of life, truth, dignity and
compassion.
The contemporary human condition brings a lot of grief to a creative individual.
Yet that feeling of grief is overcome by an inherent sense of pride. That pride
comes from the ability of a poet or a painter, musician or a fiction writer, to
challenge and ridicule the powers that be — ranging from Western hegemony to
Eastern orthodoxy and all that falls in between — through the sheer subversive
force of art.
Ghalib says:
For the free, grief does not last beyond a moment
Our lightning illuminates the dark room of sorrow
Coronavirus has not suspended politics – it has
revealed the nature of power
David Runciman
In a lockdown, we can see the essence of politics is still what Hobbes
described: some people get to tell others what to do
Fri 27 Mar 2020 06.00 GMT
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Illustration: Ben Jennings/The Guardian
We keep hearing that this is a war. Is it really? What helps to give the
current crisis its wartime feel is the apparent absence of normal political
argument. The prime minister goes on TV to issue a sombre statement to
the nation about the curtailment of our liberties and the leader of the
opposition offers nothing but support. Parliament, insofar as it is able to
operate at all, appears to be merely going through the motions. People are
stuck at home, and their fights are limited to the domestic sphere. There is
talk of a government of national unity. Politics-as-usual has gone missing.
But this is not the suspension of politics. It is the stripping away of one
layer of political life to reveal something more raw underneath. In a
democracy we tend to think of politics as a contest between different parties
for our support. We focus on the who and the what of political life: who is
after our votes, what they are offering us, who stands to benefit. We see
elections as the way to settle these arguments. But the bigger questions in
any democracy are always about the how: how will governments exercise
the extraordinary powers we give them? And how will we respond when
they do?
Though the pandemic is a global phenomenon, its impact is greatly shaped
by decisions taken by individual governments
These are the questions that have always preoccupied political theorists.
But now they are not so theoretical. As the current crisis shows, the primary
fact that underpins political existence is that some people get to tell others
what to do. At the heart of all modern politics is a trade-off between
personal liberty and collective choice. This is the Faustian bargain
identified by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes in the middle of the 17th
century, when the country was being torn apart by a real civil war.
As Hobbes knew, to exercise political rule is to have the power of life and
death over citizens. The only reason we would possibly give anyone that
power is because we believe it is the price we pay for our collective safety.
But it also means that we are entrusting life-and-death decisions to people
we cannot ultimately control.
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The primary risk is that those on the receiving end refuse to do what they
are told. At that point, there are only two choices. Either people are forced
to obey, using the coercive powers the state has at its disposal. Or politics
breaks down altogether, which Hobbes argued was the outcome we should
fear most of all.
In a democracy, we have the luxury of waiting for the next election to
punish political leaders for their mistakes. But that is scant consolation
when matters of basic survival are at stake. Anyway, it’s not much of a
punishment, relatively speaking. They might lose their jobs, though few
politicians wind up destitute. We might lose our lives.
The rawness of these choices is usually obscured by the democratic
imperative to seek consensus. That has not gone away. The government is
doing all it can to dress up its decisions in the language of commonsense
advice. It says it is still trusting individuals to show sound judgment. But as
the experience of other European countries shows, as the crisis deepens the
stark realities become clearer. Just watch the footage of Italian
mayors screaming at their constituents to stay at home. “Vote for me or the
other lot get in” is routine democratic politics. “Do this or else” is raw
democratic politics. At that point it doesn’t look so different from politics of
any other kind.
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This crisis has revealed some other hard truths. National governments
really matter, and it really matters which one you happen to find yourself
under. Though the pandemic is a global phenomenon, and is being
experienced similarly in many different places, the impact of the disease
is greatly shaped by decisions taken by individual governments. Different
views about when to act and how far to go still mean that no two nations are
having the same experience. At the end of it all we may get to see who was
right and what was wrong. But for now, we are at the mercy of our national
leaders. That is something else Hobbes warned about: there is no avoiding
the element of arbitrariness at the heart of all politics. It is the arbitrariness
of individual political judgment.
Under a lockdown, democracies reveal what they have in common with
other political regimes: here too politics is ultimately about power and
order. But we are also getting to see some of the fundamental differences. It
is not that democracies are nicer, kinder, gentler places. They may try to be,
but in the end that doesn’t last. Democracies do, though, find it harder to
make the really tough choices. Pre-emption – the ability to tackle a
problem before it becomes acute – has never been a democratic strength.
We wait until we have no choice and then we adapt. That means
democracies are always going to start off behind the curve of a disease like
this one, though some are better at playing catch-up than others.
Autocratic regimes such as China also find it hard to face up to crises until
they have to – and, unlike democracies, they can suppress the bad news for
longer if it suits them. But when action becomes unavoidable, they can go
further. The Chinese lockdown succeeded in containing the disease
through ruthless pre-emption. Democracies are capable of being equally
ruthless – as they showed when prosecuting the total wars of the 20th
century.
But in a war, the enemy is right in front of you. During this pandemic the
disease reveals where it has got to only in the daily litany of infections and
deaths. Democratic politics becomes a kind of shadow boxing: the state
doesn’t know which bodies are the really dangerous ones.
It's right that parliament shuts – but democracy
can't be suspended
Polly Toynbee
Read more
Some democracies have managed to adapt faster: in South Korea the
disease is being tamed by extensive tracing and widespread surveillance of
possible carriers. But in that case, the regime had recent experience to draw
on in its handling of the Mers outbreak of 2015, which also shaped the
collective memory of its citizens. Israel may also be doing a better job than
many European countries – but it is a society already on a permanent
warlike footing. It is easier to adapt when you have adapted already. It is
much harder when you are making it up as you go along.
In recent years, it has sometimes appeared that global politics is simply a
choice between rival forms of technocracy. In China, it is a government of
engineers backed up by a one-party state. In the west, it is the rule of
economists and central bankers, operating within the constraints of a
democratic system. This creates the impression that the real choices are
technical judgments about how to run vast, complex economic and social
systems.
But in the last few weeks another reality has pushed through. The ultimate
judgments are about how to use coercive power. These aren’t simply
technical questions. Some arbitrariness is unavoidable. And the contest in
the exercise of that power between democratic adaptability and autocratic
ruthlessness will shape all of our futures. We are a long way from the
frightening and violent world that Hobbes sought to escape nearly 400
years ago. But our political world is still one Hobbes would recognise.
