On Violence and On Violence Against Women Read online

  This is the context in which Vox agitates for the repeal of laws passed in 2004 tackling gender-based violence, for the removal of all sex change and abortion procedures from public health services, and for the dissolution of all federally funded feminist organisations. They have also called for the abolition of the Law of Historical Memory, which was designed to ensure that the legacy of Franco is not forgotten, to be replaced by a ministry to protect the rights of the ‘natural family’ as an institution prior to the state, and for the building of a frontier wall to halt illegal immigration ‘encouraged by globalist oligarchies’ – child migrants were presented as a special menace.48 Each one of these is an unabashed incitement to violence – against women, migrants, and historical memory which is being wiped off the page. Each one will appear in what follows, as we slowly move from violence at the apex of the West to the countries (South Africa) and the places (the shores of Europe and the border with Mexico) which have been, and continue to be, where some of the clearest targets of such incitement are to be found.

  A staple of right-wing discourse, hatred of migrants is something which every single one of the leaders so far mentioned shares. In Hungary, Prime Minister Orbán has been accused by the Helsinki Committee, the human rights organisation, of systematically denying food to failed asylum seekers held in detention camps on the border, a human rights violation it described as ‘unprecedented in twenty-first-century Europe’.49 In the past decade, ten thousand child refugees have risked their lives to get into Britain. One of the first moves of the newly elected Conservative Party in January 2020 was to remove the clause protecting child migrants from the EU withdrawal bill.50 Donald Trump routinely refers to migrants at the Mexican border as ‘bad hombres’, ‘thugs’ and ‘animals’ (in the first nine months of 2019, only eleven out of ten thousand asylum applications were granted in the US).51 In December 2019, the advocacy group Human Rights First accused his administration of exposing asylum seekers to ‘life-threatening dangers’ after documenting 636 cases of violence against those who had been returned to Mexico under the new policy ‘Migration Protection Protocols’ or ‘Remain in Mexico’. These numbers included a nine-year-old girl and her mother who had been kidnapped and raped in the border town of Tijuana.52 The ways in which anti-migrant hatred is specifically targeted against women is the subject of the final chapter here.

  Far-right parties do not all hold the levers of power, but they stalk its corridors, releasing their ugly permissions into the mental and social atmosphere. ‘We’re only saying what everyone is thinking’ is the common justification and refrain. They wrap themselves in the mantle of redemption, as if they were saving the world from burning injustice (righteousness raised to the pitch of frenzy is the particular skill of the far right). ‘Hate can exist without any particular individuals,’ comments the narrator of Edouard Louis’s bestselling 2016 History of Violence, which narrates the story of his rape after a casual encounter on the Paris city streets; ‘all it needs is a place where it can come back to life.’53 This too leads to a quandary, one which, in writing this book, I have had to confront at every turn. How to convey the psychic intensities released by the subject of violence without fanning the flames, adding to the spectacle, making the analysis complicit with the crime? ‘Even writing about sexual violence’, writes Anne Enright in the middle of her own article on sexual violence, ‘is a kind of complicity. You must have the fantasy in order to refuse it, because once a thing is named or imagined, it exists – if only as aversion.’54 There is always a risk – one which I have tried to avoid, though I am sure not always successfully – of turning sexual violence into the crime we love to hate.

  If violence is so rousing, it would seem to be in direct proportion to its ability to suspend anything vaguely resembling thought, to release the rush of blood that gives you no time to pause. No introspection, even though – or because – violence plunges so deeply into who we are (the claim that violence is declining in our times, which is presumably intended to make us all feel better about ourselves, drastically misses the point, sidestepping the key moment of recognition that violence requires permanent vigilance in so far as it is a potential for everyone).55 ‘Violence’, observes novelist Graeme Armstrong, who was involved in gang culture from a young age, ‘is very, very quick, and afterwards, you don’t always remember things … You remember what happens to you afterwards, the injuries or whatever, but the violence itself is often just a blur.’56 As if it is only in a state of blindness that violence can bear to conduct itself. The aim of this book is, therefore, to slow the pace, to resist the will to action at any price, to create the space for reflection. It is a paradox of human subjectivity that knowing you are capable of violence – recognising it as your problem, instead of blithely assigning it to someone else (race, class, nation or sex) – reduces the chances of making it happen. The idea of crushing violence – stamping it out or eradicating it from the earth – simply increases the quotient of violence we have to face. We have seen this before at the centre of twentieth-century Europe, in the belief that the First World War would be the war to end all wars, a delusion which allowed that same war and its aftermath to carry on silently laying the groundwork for the next.

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  A key focus of this book is post-apartheid South Africa, because it is the place where all these forms of violence – historic, intimate – coalesce and rearrange themselves, spread throughout the social fabric and intensify. If South Africa feels so urgent in this context, it is because of the acute contradictions of its history: crucible of apartheid, one of the deadliest embodiments of state violence in the twentieth century, and of the steadfast political passions that succeeded in bringing it to an end. During the Rhodes Must Fall student uprising of 2015–17 – which will be the focus of a chapter here – the country was also the site of one of the most eloquent and far-reaching social protest movements against injustice which the past decade has seen. The urgency of that protest could not be more resonant today. In May 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, protesters against the US police murder of George Floyd tore down the statue of slave dealer Edward Colston from the city centre of Bristol and dumped it in the harbour. The link to Rhodes Must Fall was explicit. Weeks later, Oxford University students secured approval from the governors of Oriel College for the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes from the facade of the building, having failed to do so two years before. (It is still unclear whether the university will finally concur with the college governors.)

  Rhodes was a mining magnate, Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896, founder of the Southern African territory of Rhodesia; he believed the Anglo-Saxons were the ‘first’ race, with the God-given right to rule the world. In her study of totalitarianism, Arendt explains how it was Rhodes who propelled the British into the African continent, persuading the British government that ‘expansion and export of the instruments of violence was necessary to protect investments, and that such a policy was a holy duty of every national government.’57 For violence, read subjugation and exploitation of the native people. ‘“Expansion is everything,”’ he once said, but then, she elaborates, he ‘fell into despair, for every night he saw overhead “these stars […] these vast worlds, which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could.”’58 Impotent bigness which, given half a chance, will stop at nothing.

  Today South Africa has one of the worst rates of sexual violence across the world: a woman murdered every three hours, more than a hundred rapes reported every day (Cape Town is known as the ‘rape capital of the world’). ‘It began’, writes journalist and crime writer Margie Orford, ‘with a new flag, a new anthem and a new constitution and it was lost […] to corruption and a plague of gendered violence.’ Violence against women and girls she describes as the ‘collateral damage’ of a society whose ongoing inequality and injustice have snatched away the dream.59 In September 2019, partly fired by the boldness of the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, thousands of women demonstrated on t
he streets of Cape Town against such violence. When Cyril Ramaphosa addressed the protesters, he was handed a memorandum with a list of demands, including the demand that a state of emergency should be declared. The protest had been called in response to the death of Uyinene Mrwetyana, a nineteen-year-old Cape Town student who was raped and murdered by a post office worker who had tricked her into returning to the office after closing time. At the funeral, her mother, dismayed at having been unable to protect her daughter, said that the post office had never figured on her list of places she needed to be wary about (Mrwetyana being a student and the fact it happened at a post office were seen as the unexpected stand-out features of this case). In the same month, police reports had included a woman killed by her husband, who set fire to her body after a marriage-counselling session; a former boxing champion shot dead by her ex-boyfriend, who was a policeman; four young girls hanged by their father/stepfather after he was handed divorce proceedings by their mother. ‘There are many stories like these,’ South African journalist Rosa Lyster wrote in the New Yorker, ‘[but] there is no template for how to proceed after you have reached the conclusion that what is happening is not normal.’ Or isn’t it rather, as she also suggests, that we need to acknowledge just how ‘distorted our definition of “normal” has become’?60 Days before the killing of Reeva Steenkamp by Oscar Pistorius, a seventeen-year-old black girl, Anene Booysen, was gang-raped and disembowelled in Bredasdorp on the Western Cape. She died a few hours after being found by a security guard. Although she told the police before she died that several men had been involved in the attack, only one stood trial (he was given two consecutive life sentences). The case provoked a national outcry – though it is little known outside South Africa, and even inside the country it gained a fraction of the attention accorded to the killing of Steenkamp. ‘It sometimes feels’, Lyster wrote on her Twitter account with reference to the death of Mrwetyana, ‘like you can’t tell people who aren’t South African about what happens to women and girls here because they find it too upsetting, but I hope that people read this story.’61 The day before she died, Steenkamp had been preparing a talk in honour of Booysen to be delivered in a school in Johannesburg in support of the Black Friday campaign for rape awareness.

  In South Africa, the slogan of the campaign against sexual violence is not #MeToo or #TimesUp but, far more chillingly, #AmINext. Like Steenkamp’s act of race solidarity and gender empathy, it cuts through racial boundaries to make violence against women the responsibility and possible destiny – or rather the responsibility because it might be the destiny – of anyone (although Steenkamp can hardly have known that it was about to be her own). While both lay claim to a common experience, #MeToo focuses on the woman making her claim, whereas #AmINext strikes me as stronger because of the way it creates a community of potential targets, alerting the world to a continuum, not only of violence which has already happened but of violence to come. Indiscriminately, the hashtag draws everyone, regardless of race, class or status, into its net. To this extent, #AmINext oddly echoes the ‘veil of ignorance’ posited by legal theorist John Rawls as the sole precondition for justice: only if individuals have no idea of where they are likely to find themselves in the final dispensation will they contemplate for a second the possibility that they might land up amongst the most destitute, and cast their die on the side of a fairer world.62 By being so inclusive, #AmINext stands as a one-line answer to the continuing divisions of the nation.

  South Africa’s first racially democratic elections, in 1994, heralded an unprecedented constitutional and legal transformation, but the forms of racial and economic inequality which that moment was supposed to bring to an end continue to seep through the social fabric of the nation, a cruel rebuke to the belief and hope that everyone would now be living in a just world. Hence the euphoria when the Springboks, South Africa’s national rugby team, won the 2019 Rugby World Cup, a victory which, in the words of veteran anti-apartheid activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu, had restored the faith of ‘a self-doubting nation’ (even though the victory would be powerless in the face of widespread corruption, soaring joblessness, patchy delivery of basic services and power cuts which have pushed the country close to recession).63 Once again, we see an impossible burden of idealisation laid on the heroes of the sporting world, who are raised to the status of gods and burdened with the task of redemption. Likewise, the stellar career of Oscar Pistorius was held up as proof that the fight for social justice had been won. If a disabled man could succeed in the new South Africa, then, whatever the odds stacked against them, so could anyone.

  South Africa presents us with the problem of what happens to a legacy of violence and an ongoing history of injustice that cannot bear fully to acknowledge itself. It brings us up against another version of how violence enters, and is rebuffed by, the human mind. What happens to violence in a world where it is meant to have been transcended? Where does violence lodge itself in the social, physical and mental body of a nation? When the students erupted in protest in March 2015, they were telling the universities, telling the whole world, that the project of equality was not working and the process of ‘decolonisation’ – shedding the debris of a colonised history – had barely begun. Rhodes Must Fall, and then Fees Must Fall, had two core demands: rejection of the emblems of the colonial past – the same demand that erupted in the US and around the world after the killing of George Floyd – and free education for all. It stretched back into the history of colonialism and forward into what was felt by this young generation to be a betrayal of the radical promise of 1994.

  In 2017, I visited Cape Town in an attempt to understand these protests, whose energies I knew were at least partly directed at the cruel colonial legacy of Britain. My sense of responsibility for that legacy as a British subject, even though I come from a Polish-Jewish émigré family, has fuelled a special interest in South Africa that goes back decades. I was the awkward guest of the university which had sparked the protests. They had not subsided; if anything positions were becoming more entrenched. On the plane, I found myself sitting next to a black South African woman who worked in the Land Registry Department and asked her what she thought. I was not expecting a sympathetic reply. The students, she said, were ‘alerting’ the nation. I was struck by ‘alerting’, the idea that the students were warning the nation of a hidden danger yet to come.

  South Africa has taught me that violence never belongs solely in the present tense, that it cannot be severed from the historic legacies of oppression which so often trail behind it. It was the 1913 Natives Land Act, enacted by the British colonial power, which laid the ground for racial segregation and eventually apartheid. It was Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher who made the decision to allow multinational corporations, without let or hindrance, into the global south, a decision which made possible the racialised economic injustices which continue to scar the nation. This would be an example of violence in so-called ‘quiet conditions’, as Rosa Luxemburg put it, an economic order fostering brute forms of social inequality, which formed the steady, unerring backdrop to the more visible atrocities of apartheid.64 In such circumstances, a nation invested in the belief that it has left violence behind, that it has ‘done’ with violence, is all the more likely to find itself confronted with violence once more: in the intimacies of domestic life, in the shadows of the cities, in the anger of the young who were tasked with escaping it, and deep inside the corridors of power.

  If South Africa brings this reality into such sharp focus, it is also because the country staged a unique public confrontation with the legacy of violence in the shape of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up in 1995, an unprecedented experiment in listening, where the victims and perpetrators of apartheid were summoned to tell their stories in a bid to lay the past to rest. For today’s students, the process has failed because it traded racial and economic justice for truth, and decolonisation for democracy. The Commission was, for example, powerless to impose reparations for violence or
to guarantee the more equitable distribution of resources in the new South Africa; whites still dominate the universities in terms of who teaches and the content of what is taught. But there is another way of seeing it, that such a process could only be interminable (the project of justice is endless). There can be no ‘being done’ with violence. Reckoning with violence has to be enacted over and over again. This at least is the wager of the Historical Trauma and Transformation Centre, based at the University of Stellenbosch, founded in 2006 by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, psychologist and participant in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which I visited in 2018 and which forms the subject of one of the final chapters here. In Stellenbosch, the widow of Fort Calata, murdered by the apartheid state, and the grandson of Hendrik Verwoerd, one of the chief architects of apartheid, told their tales (the grandson had spent his adult life struggling against the legacy of his grandfather). It was precisely because the project of reconciliation is now seen to be faltering that their doing so under the same roof felt so urgent.

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  Throughout this book, fictional writing plays a central role. It is for me one of the chief means through which the experience of violence can be told in ways that defy both the discourse of politicians and the defences of thought. As will be clear in what follows, one of the greatest challenges I see in the fight against violence today, notably sexual violence, is to expose it, to call for legal redress, without sacrificing the ungovernable aspects of human sexuality, not least because bringing sexuality to heel would be a pretty accurate descriptor of sexual violence itself. All the writers presented here upend the clichés which imprison, dislodge the stereotypes which bind identities to the floor. Haitian-American writer Roxane Gay, Temsula Ao in Nagaland, Virginia Woolf and Daisy Johnson in England, Eimear McBride and Anna Burns from Belfast, Han Kang from South Korea and Hisham Matar from Libya. Each one moves across myriad forms of violence, from the struggle for secession in post-Independence India as met by the violent barrage of the new state, to military massacres by dictators in South Korea and Libya, to sexual violence in Haiti, Belfast and in the heartlands of middle England, to Britain basking in false innocence on the threshold of the Second World War.