Peace, Love and Humus (Part One)

PEACE, LOVE AND HUMUS: A MIDDLE EASTERN MEMOIR

PART ONE

IN WHICH OUR NARRATOR TALKS OF BORDERS, AND (NOT) BEING MUSLIM

I’ve just returned from the Middle East – well, a couple of days ago, anyway – and from an experience that I can only call life-affirming. It was a pretty unlikely trip, and seemed to bemuse most people that we told about it: we being me and fifteen other writers, who were invited to represent England in a football tournament against our counterparts from Germany and the host nation, Israel .

I’d not been to Israel before. As with all places that you grow up reading and hearing about but never actually get to visit, it seemed an eternity away; when I received my plane tickets I was a little surprised that it only lay at the end of a five-hour flight, and not on the other side of the moon.

I’d always wanted to go there, too. It’s a place that so strongly divides opinions among friends of mine that I would hesitate to invite some of them to the same dinner party (that is, if I finally pulled my finger out and organised a dinner party of my own, instead of swanning off to everyone else’s). It’s a place that needs a nuanced view, but all too rarely gets one, and there’s nothing better than travel for adding some welcome shades of grey to a black-and-white political issue.

Having said that, we were only there for three nights. As mentioned, we numbered sixteen, a mixture of poets and prose writers, of journalists and novelists; when we descended upon the hard-eyed security staff at Heathrow last Saturday night, they must have been as confused as they were concerned. It’s not that they thought we were terrorists, just that they couldn’t place us into a convenient box, and when you’re manning the checkpoints to Israel’s borders, anything out of the ordinary is somewhat startling. (I was partly to blame for that, of which more later.)

FIVE BORDERS

When you’re travelling, most of your countries of destination effectively have three sets of borders; there are the two borders that you cross when your travel documents are approved, and then your luggage is screened, at the airport for your flight out, and then there’s the border that you cross when, having flown to your country of choice, your travel documents are approved again.
Well, Israel is probably the only country in the world that has five borders. Israel’s first border is found at Desk P of Heathrow Terminal 1: Desk P being at the very end of the rows of check-in desks, tucked so far in the corner of the airport that it almost feels like an afterthought, like a backdoor out of the UK. I wondered if this was because security was such a concern that El Al (our airline) had lobbied for a location with only one point of entry and exit. I dismissed this thought as paranoia , until I saw Israel’s first border; a mighty machine called the eXaminer 3DX. The eXaminer 3DX, manufactured by L-3 Communications, is a bomb detection device; actually, it’s not so much a device as a statement of intent. Most such machines are pretty unobtrusive; this one is cavernous. Two adults could almost lie side by side in there.

Anyway, I liked the frankness of the staff. They just didn’t mess about.
“Have you packed your own bag, Sir?”
“Yes.”
“Has anyone given you anything to carry on the plane?”
“No.”
“We ask you this because someone could have put a bomb in your bag.”

There wasn’t a bomb in my bag but I was nervous. I’m always a little resigned to being searched a little more than most people when I fly to countries where black male visitors give off depressingly felonious signals. Like it or not – and I don’t – too many men of my vague ethnicity have been caught in the process of a violent or criminal act for me to waltz through Customs unhindered. By the time I reached Israel’s second border, the airport check-in desk, I was so rattled that I took out all of my documentation – not just my passport and documents but my itinerary whilst in Israel and my printout of all the writers that I was travelling with. The man at the check-in desk just laughed, shook his head and waved me through.

Israel’s third border - Heathrow’s own luggage-screening machine – was a formality after my bags had braved the eXaminer 3DX. In fact, it looked almost puny in comparison. If the eXaminer 3DX was the muscular Christian (or Jew, in this case) of bomb alert units, then Heathrow’s equivalent equipment was a weedy choirboy by comparison. You almost felt yourself scoffing in contempt, as you walked on towards Israel’s fourth border, which was Gate 56.

By now I was sufficiently savvy to have worked out that Gate 56 was the very last of all the gates at Heathrow precisely because it afforded El Al passengers and aircraft maximum protection from a terrorist assault. The plane looked a little lonely out there on the tarmac; looking at it, I knew how the Tube felt when it came to the end of the Central line, way out east in Epping.

So there we were, in Zone 6 of Europe, faced by a final layer of security and a wall of glass that was most probably bulletproof; and I saw something I’d never seen at an airport, which was a white travel companion being detained longer than myself. Craig Taylor, a journalist who has a face so inoffensive that it could have been drawn by Charles Schulz, was held up for questioning because he’d taken a connecting flight, or something, but hadn’t had his passport stamped. At one point, during his fifteen-minute mini-interrogation, it briefly looked as though they might not let him through.

During the flight, I had a good read of the Jewish Chronicle, so as to bring myself up to speed with any news that might better inform or frame my visit to Israel. As I read what was a beautifully presented paper – bright, broad fonts, unlike the narrow clutter of, say, the Independent’s text, which is as cramped as a Hackney backstreet – I was reminded again of how many of our best writers are Jewish. There were pieces from, among others, Simon Kuper and Howard Jacobson; it was a paper with far fewer weak links than many of the broadsheets. Jake Wallis Simons, a novelist who I’d later room with, referred to the very best of Judaism, in Howard Jacobson’s words, as being “intellectual rigour and emotional warmth”; a literary tradition of which I was envious, but which were I Jewish would probably find quite intimidating.

A very large number of our fellow passengers on El Al were Orthodox Jews; so numerous were they that, had I closed my eyes and listened, I could have been on the Number 253 bus through Stamford Hill. I’d have had to listen very closely, though, as they were a reserved bunch, not the type to go hollering up and down the corridors of an aircraft. As a result, they made life pretty easy for the air hostesses. However, their quiet manner possibly led to the only disappointment of the flight, which was that as we landed in Israel there wasn’t the outbreak of polite applause that I’d been told to expect.

It was 5am when we arrived at Ben-Gurion International Airport, but the guards patrolling Israel’s fifth border were wide awake. They could almost have been forgiven a sleepy complacency; Ben Gurion isn’t really an airport, it’s more of an impressively walled medieval city, reminiscent of Byzantium or maybe Jericho. The walk from the airline to the main terminal is about a mile, during which you stroll alongside a soaring façade of warm sandstone, and then back to the cold, modern world of the passport control kiosk.

“ARE YOU SURE YOU’RE NOT A MUSLIM?”

It turns out that I was the sleepily complacent one. Somewhere along the journey I’d begun to assume that, the more checkpoints I was allowed through, the more relaxed security would become. But perhaps that’s just how terrorists would think, because security progressively became, in a friend’s words, “tighter than a duck’s arse”. Having presented my passport, I was asked a rapid series of questions:

“Have you been to Israel before?”
“No.”
“What is your father’s name?”
“Wilson.”
He’d died some twenty-five years ago, so I was curious – and somewhat excited. Maybe I was retracing his steps? My father, a surgeon born in Northern Uganda and trained in Cardiff and Edinburgh, had travelled often before dying in the Civil War back in Uganda. Maybe he’d come here too? “Why, has he been here?” I asked. The official shook her head.
“What is your grandfather’s name?” she asked.
“Julio.”

Her colleague walked over and that’s when I knew it was happening again – that short humiliating walk that I hope I’ll never get fully used to, as you shuffle, head down, back past the line of eveyone else you caught the plane with, knowing that anyone looking up will see you – see me, with my guilty body language. No matter how casual you try to be, you can’t pull off a swagger at this point; nobody struts towards the immigration waiting room at airports. (Come to think of it, you’d probably be a terrorist if you did.)

I walked into the immigration waiting room, and as my eyes met those of its inhabitants, I broke into a smile: everyone else in there was black or brown too. Words weren’t necessary. The attractive couple next to me, it turned out, were young Palestinians who’d travelled to Israel from the USA via Switzerland; they’d been grilled in Zürich for three and a half hours, and merely held at Ben-Gurion for the same length of time. Veterans of tedium, they merely shrugged when I began to complain. “Hey, we’re the prime age [for terrorism]”, said the guy, a student at UCLA. It was his second visit to Israel, but the officials had been no less vigilant on his return. They were allowed to proceed shortly afterwards, leaving me to contend with the same questions from a different woman:

“Have you been to Israel before?”
“No.”
“What is your father’s name?”
“Wilson.”
“What is your grandfather’s name?”
“Julio.”
“So why did your parents call you Musa?”
“I don’t know.” How could I, I wasn’t there, I thought.
“Where is your father from?”
“Northern Uganda, near the Sudanese border.”
“The reason we ask this is that your first name is Muslim. Are you are a Muslim?”
“No.”
Pause.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” I am not, nor have been at any time, a Muslim. “I’ve never even read the Koran.” But some of my best friends are Musl- oh, never mind.
“Then how is your name Musa?”
“Because in Uganda there are many Christians and Muslims, and so you end up with a name from the Koran or the Old Testament no matter what religion you’re from.”

She seemed happy with that, and let me go. Whereupon, having met Paul Laity, who had waited for me immediately on the other side of the gate, I was stopped by a third woman, who had some more questions:
“Have you been to Israel before?”…

Embarrassed that I’d kept my team-mates waiting, and a little thirsty from running that gauntlet, I eventually found my way to a newsagent, where I caught up with David Goldie, a Scottish academic who was already emerging as the group’s outstanding wit. Faced with a foreign attendant whose English was limited, he was searching in vain for the right word to express his meaning. “I wouldn’t worry”, I said, looking back towards security with a sudden bitterness that surprised me. “They don’t know the Hebrew for welcome.”



















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STAY TUNED FOR PEACE, LOVE AND HUMUS, PART TWO!

(IN WHICH OUR NARRATOR ACTUALLY TALKS ABOUT PEOPLE OTHER THAN HIMSELF, AND EVEN ABOUT FOOTBALL.)

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What's Wrong with Africa?

Yes, this post's title was deliberately broad, hysterical and meaningless. (I designed it to capture the shrug of routine helplessness felt at many a Western dinner table, as they read of another inevitable and mercifully distant genocide on the Dark Continent.) "What's Wrong With Africa?", so the shrug goes. In 1994, it was Rwanda. In 2008, it may be Congo. At various other points, it has been Uganda, Angola, Sierra Leone, Eritrea. Give it another few months, it'll be somewhere else.
A few years ago, I thought that the world's media had a tragedy rota, whereby they covered a different war-torn African state every six months; they had to break up their repoting in this way, in order to avoid a monotony of misery from the same place. (Just wait, they'll switch back to Chad soon.)

But I don't mean to point the finger exclusively at the dinner-party set (especially since, now and then, I am part of it). The truth is that I find myself shrugging like that too. It's very easy for me in practice simply to flick past the Congo crisis to the sports pages, and brush off that horror as if it were another world. I tried an exercise in escapism today; reading the front page of the Guardian's website, my eyes were more readily drawn to the Ross/Brand dirty joke debacle than they were to the UN's protests that We Must All Act Now.

Maybe that's cynicism, defeatism, and all the rest of it. In fact, it probably is: but it's also a silent comment on the enormity of loathing that's out there. There are large parts of our civilisation which, having either been set or having set themselves on each other, seem determined to tear each other to pieces. I was reading an article the other day about Congo by the Guardian's Chris McGreal, and its title stood out even among all else that I'd seen of late:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/nov/14/congo.chrismcgreal

"Hundreds of thousands raped in Congo wars"

That's right; hundreds of thousands. See, the thing is about Congo - from a relatively ignorant and detached perspective, given that I've not been there and that I've only read a couple of hundred pages on the subject - is that millions of its citizens are in trauma, and at the moment it's as if this trauma is just feeding on itself. And we're telling their people that we want them to make peace, and they're thinking, "why? I haven't got my revenge yet!"

Because isn't that what many of these tribal conflicts boil down to - the desire to get in the last word, or bullet, or machete? Barack Obama has faced heat from prominent members of the African-American community, because he hasn't spoken the language in vengeance in his campaign. Sure, they want a black man to be President; they would just like him to keep Whitey on his toes a bit more.

The instinct is as understandable, if not defensible, in Georgia as it is in Congo. Your people have been hacked and lynched; why now make peace with your aggressors? Well, Nelson Mandela would argue that it's for the betterment of humanity. I would agree with that lofty ideal, but I would also say that exhaustion probably plays a bigger part in international diplomacy than is often acknowledged. Looking at how several conflicts seem to peter out after several years or decades, it's tempting to think that some tribes simply get tired of all the bloodshed and want to try something different for a change - maybe even harmony. Sadly, however, it doesn't look as if the latest set of Rwandese rebels have had their fill.

The Insecure Artist: There or Nowhere

Hi all,

It's been some time since I blogged last - around two weeks, in fact. I'm still building up my blog stamina at the moment; after the initial flurry of posts, for some reason I ran out of literary puff. Well, it's now returned, so here goes with the new theme: "There or Nowhere".

People often refer to the artist's fragile ego, as if he or she were predisposed to a particularly brittle temperament. That's a romantic and somewhat patronising view of the artist at the fringe of society, somehow unable to engage with the real world; it's a view that's held either publicly or privately by many, including artists themselves; and it's a view that's not without an element of truth.

But there's another reason that artists, for nothing to do with innate psychological factors, are insecure. It's that as an artist, you're either there or nowhere; the margins between success and failure are infinitesimal.

I tasted this recently. My football book, "A Cultured Left Foot", was on a longlist of 13 for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, which is one of the leading sportswriting prizes in the world. However, I didn't make it to the shortlist of 6; and there's the rub. The longlist results in a very good amount of publicity, for which I am thankful; the shortlist opens doors that you wouldn't even know were there. A little like the Mercury Music Prize, it's not so much about whgo wins as who's nominated.

So I've definitely felt some sorrow to have come so far but no further; but it's also a good time to empathise with all of those writers who remain unpublished for many, many years, of which I was once one. Many of those writers are of tremendous talent, and for want of all sorts of factors - an agent or publisher to champion their cause, better economic conditions - they've not had their chance to shine. My failure to make the shortlist reminded me of all those years pining anxiously on the sidelines for recognition; and then I remembered what had got me off the sidelines. Luck, to be sure; but also writing better books, so that there would one day come a point where the quality of what I was producing could not be denied. Now, I'm not there yet; but there's still plenty of time.

On that note, I can share (to end) a great piece of news; I have recently sold my second book, on the subject of "What makes a great football manager?" to Serpent's Tail publishers; so the road to wider recognition continues, so that one day I might even make a living off my writing. So, without further ado, I'm off to get stuck in. Thanks, as always, for reading.

Seduced? (yes, Barack again)

What is it with Messiahs?

I mean, that's what Barack Obama is, right?

First, he's a genuinely brilliant politician, far more gifted than McCain, who has been left floundering in this Senator's wake. He looks like a born statesman. So why isn't that enough for us all? Why does Obama have to redeem those of us who were oppressed, and those of us who, erm, did the oppressing?

I should expand on that theme. It just seems to me that political Messiahs always seem to turn up conveniently when we need them, when we need a leader to believe in -and then they wend up disappointing us.

Don't get me wrong. I am an Obama fan. But I was a Blair fan too, and then Blair went and did Iraq. Ten years older, and several years wiser, I think I know political alchemy when I see it - Obama has gambled wonderfully that the combination of his spectacular talent (come on, the man edited the Harvard Law Review, he's no ethnic charity case) and his exotic persona (he's no apple pie politician) would be irresistibly seductive come election time.

And that's what Obama is: seductive. And that's what I am: seduced. But seduction always makes you a little more wary when you can see the machinery working away under the surface. He wanted to find a way of making McCain, by comparison, look old and fit for the knacker's yard; so he made sure he was filmed shooting effortless three-pointers, knowing that this highlight film was destined for YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daH0ltD20A0

Political genius. But that's what worries me. Barack Obama is a rock star politican, and rock star politicians do one of three things: they (1) let you down, (2) they die young, or (3) they live up to and beyond the hype. I want to believe (goodness knows, America needs it, the world needs it, the climate needs it) that Obama is a true visionary.

I still can't make up my mind. Here are a couple of fine essays in the New Yorker about him:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/05/07/070507fa_fact_macfarquhar?currentPage=1
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2008/07/21/080721taco_talk_hertzberg
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/21/080721fa_fact_lizza (this final essay is the best of all)

So on election day I'll be crossing my fingers for him twice over; once to hope that he wins, and the second time to hope that, well, he's all he promises to be.

Poetry and Climate Change: Tallberg Forum 2008

One of the issues that fills me, alternately, with hope and helplessness is that of climate change; hope that we'll find consensus on how best to ride out the coming storm, helplessness that the problems are of such complexity and scale that it's too tough to see a way through. The poem in this video, "The Creep", which I delivered at the Tallberg Forum in Sweden earlier this year, gives voice to those concerns.

The Tallberg Forum (www.tallbergforum.org) was a place where I met some incredible people; not least Professor Diana Liverman of Oxford University, who is the head of that establishment's Envinronmental Change Institute (www.eci.ox.ac.uk). People like her and her colleagues, such as Dr. Max Boykoff (www.eci.ox.ac.uk/people/boykoffmax.php), give me renewed optimism about the challenges that we face; it's going to be a very interesting next few years on this front, for sure. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the video.

Radiohead, Kid A, bravery, and minds falling open

I've mentioned before that I'm in a band. But there are bands and there are bands - like Radiohead. They're an act as far outside my musical comfort zone as I can imagine, and that's why I love them.

For the last few weeks, I've been listening to their Kid A album on almost continuous repeat. I think it is an absolute masterpiece: not only does it sound incredible, but it's so brave. Where are the choruses? Where are the vocals? Where are the steady and complacent loops, the safety nets that characterise so much commercially successful music?

Instead, there's plaintive wailing ("Kid A"), there's apocalyptic drum and bass ("Idioteque"), there's the hanging dread of "In Limbo"...I came to this album on the recommendation of everyone who'd been blown away by OK Computer, but I was singularly moved by Kid A. I just think, that as a sonic narrative, it is almost untouchable. And I say that as a Wu-Tang fan who previously thought that no-one could ever hold a candle to GZA's Liquid Swords.

Radiohead have shown me one thing above all, for which I am endlessly grateful; that words are only a small part of the very large tapestry that is communication, that to evoke emotion it's sometimes better to chant three or four apparent nothings than reel off a five-minute narrative. What they have achieved with Kid A is a supreme blend of form and feeling. I agree wholly with this ecstatic review from the Pitchfork website, which gives the album a perfect score:
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/21226-radiohead-kid-a

Here's the finest line of many from that review: "Kid A sounds like a clouded brain trying to recall an alien abduction."

Yes, it's really that good. What's more, Radiohead create - simultaneously - the two things that I value above anything else in music, which is urgency and melancholy. Nina Simone's version of Sinnerman? I'm a sucker for it. Burial's "Homeless"? Unstoppable. And I am amazed by their musical journey; they went from conventional rock to electro in the blink of an eye. When I started performing poetry, I would write ten-minute rhyming pieces. Now I'm writing 16-bar raps. Who knows - this time next year, I'll probably be singing.

There's a terrific interview with Thom Yorke here:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=CkzmyarSNzQ. It's great stuff, and well worth the long wait for its download.

What I find worrying - and exhilarating - is that all the music I truly love is the music that remains largely outside the mainstream. (Bjork's Vespertine also stands out in this regard.) Seeing as I might one day like to make a career out of this, that's perhaps a problem. By the way, this is what The Guardian's Alexis Petridis had to say about Kid A:

"There's a fine line between challenging your audience's preconceptions and petulantly blowing raspberries at them, a line that Radiohead seemed perfectly prepared to walk, without the safety net of melody, on last year's Kid A. For an album that was audibly in a dreadful tizzy about the state of the world, OK Computer's long-awaited follow-up managed to sound enormously pleased with itself. Tracks like the free jazz squawk of The National Anthem and the discordant electronica of Motion Picture Soundtrack were self-conciously awkward and bloody-minded, the noise made by a band trying so hard to make a "difficult" album that they felt it beneath them to write any songs."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2001/jun/01/shopping.artsfeatures1

Wow. All I know is that Kid A belongs to that rare bracket of music that makes my mind fall open whenever I listen to it; like Nitin Sawhney's "Tides", Outkast's Aquemini or a Thievery Corporation remix, it helps my ideas flow forth. And it's the guts that they've shown with their art that I one day hope to have in mine.

Israel-Iran: Back to the Drawing Board?

I am no foreign policy expert. My foreign policy outlook, in fact, really extends only to thanking my lucky stars every few weeks that I am a citizen of a wealthy Western European democracy, where we have liberty that other countries have been dreaming of for decades. I used to read journals obsessively for about a year; www.foreignpolicy.com was one, www.foreignaffairs.org was another; I also read the Frontline section at PBS.com, which is superb: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/. But that is merely amateur interest.

As a novice in this area, I therefore feel too naive to articulate a nuanced view on political issues that arouse fire in people. For that reason, I have left so far left the vexed subject of Israel and its neighbours alone: But it looks increasingly as if this subject won't leave us alone.

David Owen, who was the UK Government's Foreign Secretary in the late Seventies, wrote an article in today's Sunday Times. In "Warning signs of an Israeli strike on Iran" (please see link below), he discussed the possibility of Israel striking Iran before the latter had time to develop themselves a nuclear weapon:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article4926251.ece

As I've said, I'm a novice here, so I'll proceed cautiously. Here is the situation as I see it (from the safe and possibly smug vantage point of a warm, soft seat in East London):

(1) The thought of Iran having a nuclear weapon does not fill Israel's military with joy.
(2) There are strong hints that the Iranian government are involved in something fishy with their nuclear programme.
(3) There's no concrete indication that Iran would drop a nuke on Israel if it got one - other than its (apparently mistranslated?) comments about wiping Israel off the face of the map.
(4) However, the whole situation taken together - Ahmedinejad's dismissive comments about the Holocaust, the sight of his nuclear scientists scuttling about like naughty children - has, as implied by David Owen, made many Israelis nervous.

- Right. I think - I hope - those 4 points above were pretty uncontroversial. But here's the thing from Owen's article that made me shake my head in disbelief. Owen says that Israel might strike Iran soon, and that the US - in order to stop it from doing so - advises the following:

"Bush’s legacy would be best served by taking dramatic diplomatic action to prevent a war with Iran. He should publicly warn Israel that the United States will use its air power to prevent it bombing Iran, while announcing that he is sending Rice to Tehran to start negotiating a grand bargain whereby all sanctions would be lifted if Iran forgoes the nuclear weapons option."

Publicly warn Israel that the US will use its air power to stop it bombing Iran? Is this for real? I can't imagine Bush doing this. What if Israel calls America's bluff - if it sends in its warplanes for that pre-emptive strike? I just can't see a US warplane threatening to shoot down - or even shooting down - an Israeli warplane if it refuses to turn back from its bombing run. Really, I just can't.

I am absolutely no foreign policy expert, unlike Mr. Owen, but I feel that he needs to rethink this one. Israel should be forced into an unprecedented and public climbdown - a humiliation - instead of attacking a sworn enemy?...I can't see them, or Bush, buying that argument. Time, I think, to get back to the drawing board.