At least notice where you are
Howard Jacobson is a bit harsh but he’s right.
[I]t is irresponsible, so many years after Don Quixote messed up everything he touched, and when there is no shortage of international report, to be quite so determinedly unaware of where you are and what you’re doing and what the consequences might be. And that irresponsibility is compounded when you come home having narrowly escaped a lashing or worse, tell everyone what a great time you had and how lovely the people are, and express the hope that what happened to you won’t put anybody else off going.
I had the same thought, and I don’t suppose I’m the only one. No, thanks, I don’t think I will rush off for an adventure holiday in Sudan just now.
As for her refusal to be judgemental about it: at best it is a worthless show of magnanimity if she hasn’t a clue what the furore was about or how it relates to the treatment of other women or dissenters in that country, at worst it smacks of Stockholm Syndrome – that masochistic compulsion (especially incident to lovers of the simplicities of the Third World) to fall in love with your captors and torturers. It behoves you if you insist on travelling – against my advice that you stay resolutely at home – at least to notice where you are. And to bring back a better report from what…must be an ideological hell to live in, than how nice everybody was to you…With her release it’s business as before: half the world can go on thinking it has a right to imprison and execute whenever it considers its feelings hurt. So tell me what, now the dust has settled, is cultural “understanding”. Accepting the inhumanity of whatever society one finds oneself in? Acknowledging the primacy of local sensibilities, however closed-minded, however uneducated and raw, however severe the penalties for outraging them?…No Danish cartoon affair, this. Even the most vehemently touchy parties could agree it was an innocent mistake. No harm done because no hurt intended. But where does that leave us if we believe we should be able to give a teddy bear any name we like?
Just so; hence the interest of the fact that Bunglawala was obliging enough to say explicitly that if it is intentional then…he has no sympathy for the criminal. That’s where that leaves us.
If only the whole world was as exquisitely literate as Howard Jacobson! If only we were all as acute in our perception of ethical minutia as he is (especially after spending 8 days in a Sudanese jail)! If only we were, like him, paid to pass judgement in print on event and people of which we actually know very little. If only we were all able like him to quote the Bard at the drop of a hat!
Then we would all be right, all the time and would have nothing else to do but nod smugly at one another…
Another example of this judgementality (sorry, couldn’t resist!) is this article by Nick Cohen, happily conflating Brian Haw, a man who by all accounts “is not all there”, with the very people, like G. Galloway (do I need to say more?), who are using his endurance and exploiting his courage (and probably his mental illness).
Don’t get me wrong! Jacobson is right in what he says. He should just be more mindful and discriminating about whom he says it.
Well, yeah… You did say “a bit harsh”…
I am going to bed now…
Heh.
Yeah, I did say a bit harsh, and Jacobson himself did hedge what he said a lot (in effect also said a bit harsh) and did say GG is basically admirable etc. But like him, I balked at the not wanting to put anyone off going to Sudan part.
“It is foolhardiness, pure and simple, to be as blithe as Gillian Gibbons about zooming off and having a bit of an adventure wherever the fancy takes you and there happens to be a vacancy for an English infant teacher?
I heard through the rumour mill that Gillian Gibbons (prior to her ‘zooming off’ to The Sudan) had allegedly separated from her partner. If this were the case, would it not therefore in that respect have been somewhat natural for her to want to have sought escapade, somewhere far away. Like me, she is no ‘spring chicken’. I too would have vanished off to the other end of the earth to drown my sorrows – if I had found myself in her shoes; I too would have looked for exciting activities – to block out the pain of the separation. I, like her, (I think) would have wanted to re-invent my self. Urgently! Regrettably, she did not think it out appropriately. Then again, she was (in all probability) – in advance of her Sudan Adventure – far too traumatized, even to chew over her local movements – let, alone, mull over her foreign ones. “It is foolhardy in general to be unaware that a foreign country is a foreign country: that they do things differently there.” She is perhaps at the best of times a very impulsive person and because of what she was at the time going through she was not thinking straight at the time about the dangers of the country and its religious/political mechanisms! “In addition, it is foolhardy in particular not to know that Islamic countries are in ferment now – Sudan more than most – and that, as an English person not least, you run the risk of getting yourself into trouble whatever you say.” Maybe she thought that because she was doing a job with children that she would be safe. Perhaps she thought that she was too insignificant a person for them to bother. She was most likely a woman who had lost everything she had invested her life’s worth in and did not care about the consequences. She perhaps threw herself into her work with the schoolchildren because she was brokenhearted and grief-stricken about her past life. She was a woman with sorrows. “Myself, I have difficulty understanding why, just for the fun of it, any Westerner would venture into that part of the world right now.” Well, a woman with sorrows would venture anywhere to seek solace. Unfortunately, though solace never greeted her the day she held a teddy bear and allowed the little Sudanese children to call him Mo! (BTW, that is also my nickname!)
Yeah, but in a way what Jacobson is calling for here, is an end to all aid, charity work or even visit by Westerners in Sudan.
I was reading Gibbons’ account of the event in yesterday’s Observer and I think it’s worth reading. A lot of people are going abroad with aid organisations, each with their own motivation. It’s a bit fast to dismiss it as an holiday adventure. Gibbons spent 5 months in Sudan prior to her arrest. She taught in a mixed muslim/christian school, she made friends there, she was by her own account quite happy. She certainly seems distressed at having to leave the place, just because a fired secretary used her (2 months after the event?) to take revenge on the school and then the Sudanese authorities decided to use her to put pressure on the UK.
And now, Jacobson uses her to make a point.
And to be frank, I don’t think he hedges his point that much, apart from saying that he is in two minds about her and then being so fucking ironic it borders on sexism (he is basically portraying her as a silly old woman, comparing her “blundering”, her “foolhardiness” and “breeziness” to Lawrence Oates macho imperturbability).
Jacobson himself acknowledge at the end that Gibbons’ blunder had no real importance and that she was caught into a web not of her own making. He is right but that doesn’t stop him from piling on the ridicule.
Well, I, like her, hope that it won’t put anybody else off going, be it to Sudan or Afghanistan, or anywhere where such people are needed. It’s not because I don’t have the courage or the hefty dose of idealism for such works(though no doubt HJ would call it naivety) that I feel it necessary to dismiss her, and others like her, as modern-day Don Quixotes.
Oh and OB, please tell me when I am reaching my Maximum Monthly Commenting Allowance. Soon people will start wondering who is this OB who keeps writing on Arnaud’s blog…
Well, you could be right, Arnaud. I may have read Jacobson’s piece through a distorting lens of one kind or another.
Have just finished Gibbons’s Observer story. She suggests that her ignorance of the law was no excuse. I cynically ask: was there a law to be broken? Or was the “law” she “broke” invented ex post facto?