Storytelling, Music and Spoken Word for Palestine at UoP
On June 11th at the White Swan Theatre, University of Portsmouth, a showcase of practice-based research – including poetry, fiction, drama and music – reflected on Palestine and associated themes of human rights, identity, culture, loss, dispossession, imperialism and settler colonialism. Featuring AEGIS members, Portsmouth Performers for Palestine was a tribute to the power of art, of storytelling, of creativity to comment on and critique not only one particular and urgent political issue – the genocide happening in Gaza – but politics more generally.
For as long as there has been art there have been debates about how its relationship with politics functions. The Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle held that art should not only represent human affairs but offer a deeper comprehension of them. This was to be achieved through what he called ‘mimesis’: the deployment of expressive language and imagery; imaginative narrative structures that heighten drama, humour and suspense; fictional reconstructions of events rather than literal representations of them and many other techniques that remain familiar to us 2,500 years later because they are pervasive in our cultural forms today. The ultimate purpose of mimesis, as Aristotle wrote himself, was ‘to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.’
Literature has long been shaped by arguments about which forms and styles are best placed to raise political awareness. In a debate in the 1930s that involved dramatist Bertolt Brecht and cultural theorist György Lukács, amongst others, the genre of realism – wherein writers try to educate and stimulate empathy by portraying social and political reality as accurately and concretely as possible – was pitted against more experimental techniques such as montage, inner monologue and estrangement, since these were believed to provoke an audience to question their own assumptions and to think radically and critically about the political status quo.
Throughout history some works of literature have been written with the clear intention to persuade an audience politically – as propaganda if you like, although that word has come to acquire a bad reputation in recent times. Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle was one such text, a tale of Lithuanian immigrant workers in the gruelling meat-packing sector in the United States which broadly fits the social realist genre, although its grotesque and rococo depictions of heavy industry and pollution make parts of it read today like science fiction. Sinclair’s stated aim with The Jungle was to convert the American public to socialism – with the benefit of hindsight we can see that this was not an entirely successful enterprise – and to that end the book concludes with effectively a long speech by a trade union activist about the injustices and inequities of capitalism and what a just and equal alternative society might look like.
A criticism of this strategy might be that nobody likes to be lectured. The contemporary speculative fiction author China Miéville makes the point that a work of art – especially a lengthy one like a 1,000-page novel – is not a very efficient form of agitprop and that more subtlety and invention – as per Aristotle’s view – is required. Miéville has this telling analogy: if you want to convey to someone the repression and paranoia of the McCarthy era you can give them a history book or an academic essay that will furnish them with the facts of that time and advance some theory as to how and why McCarthyism happened. But if you show them Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which is widely interpreted as an allegory for that dark period in American history, they may come away more personally and emotionally affected, as a complex, large-scale political issue is condensed into a human story with drama and conflict. The viewer of the film is freer to make their own associations and draw their own conclusions from this looser representation of reality. They are therefore equipped to think critically and radically, as the modernists above argued for.
Portsmouth Performers for Palestine spanned this spectrum of creative responses to politics. Some of the contributions explicitly grappled with the question of Palestine while others were more figurative and indirect in their approach. A diverse range of voices including Jewish and Muslim academics, students and practitioners from outside the university made for a productive interface between UoP and the wider community. There were meditations on Palestinian political art, the obligations that creatives are under to speak truth to power and the complicity of governments, corporations, universities and others in the genocide.
