Climate of Fear

by Wole Soyinka

  Dignity is simply another face of freedom, and thus the obverse of power and domination, that axis of human relationship that is equally sustained by fear—its poles doomed to remain in permanent conflict, yet complement each other. I shall expand on an experience that I described in the first of this series—“A Changing Mask of Fear”—where I commented on the emotional state of my neighbors when we were confronted by a raging fire that threatened to consume our homes, and indeed cast doubts on our very survival if we hesitated a moment too long in its path. I offered a contrast in the feeling of helplessness that one obtains when Nature herself is the force of domination, as opposed to when any human, an equal of others in most ways, takes on the role of dominator or dispenser of life and death, and robs one of the faculty of volition. We need such reminders from time to time to ward off the supercilious cant of those—mostly the purveyors of terror, state or quasi-state, and the vicarious undertakers of human wastage—who wave off human trauma with some profound logic that is presumably embedded in comments such as “After all, one sudden earthquake or flood kills more people than even a year-long civil conflict in Liberia or Chechnya.” Neither death nor suffering is at issue.

  To return, then, to that California experience: I observed no sense of reduction in self-esteem, no conduct that equated with indignity, despite the fact that we were impotent in face of this assailant. This was Nature at work, impersonal, and with an awesome power that annihilated all that lay before it. The power that is exerted by Nature does not humiliate. Indeed, not even the daily precarious habitation in the shadow of a rumbling volcano such as Mount Etna, which in recent decades sent the inhabitants scurrying yet again for safety, nor the earthquakes that devastated parts of Turkey, and lately Iran—none of these remotely attains the reduction of individual self-worth as does the condition of arbitrary control by another. Those citizens of California who live along the San Andreas fault, that is, live with the consciousness of arbitrary seismic eruption, are unfazed by the possibility of death whenever the earth decides to challenge their rights of occupancy. In the Caribbean, the islanders are inured to hurricanes and the accompanying floods. Mud slides occasionally wipe out ancient habitations and bury thousands, later to be dug up in grotesque shapes of mortality—inhabitants of the Philippines recently joined the ranks of these entombed casualties. None of these victims, however, can be said to exist in fear of humiliation or loss of dignity. Illustrations of the kind of power that reduces our self-worth range from the most mundane, even domestic relationships—such as a tenant’s fear of ejection by a landlord in a system that offers neither preventive measures nor legal redress—to a wife or child subjected to constant physical and mental abuse by a husband or parent, an Irish teenager in the grip of terror of a vigilante committee, or a Zimbabwean recruit in the burgeoning terror training camps of a Robert Mugabe, where some are raped as a mandatory rite of induction.

  The nature of power that humbles and humiliates is that which compels the head of a Palestinian family to sit helplessly under Israeli guns, drenched in tears, as he watches his ancestral olive grove, the sole family source of livelihood, fall under the electric saw, tree by tree, to make way for the very wall that will, from then on, reduce his space of volition. Or else wake up suddenly in the middle of the night to find strangers in your bedroom . . . a battering ram has knocked a huge hole in your wall, and a group of armed men are hustling you, your wife, and your children into a holding pen—such experiences must rank as the ultimate erosion of one’s self-esteem. The diet of the average Palestinian in the Middle East today—for this is where we are headed— the table fare of the average citizen is that forced diet of indignity that even children swallow daily and, worse still, watch their parents undergo, encounters that denigrate their very humanity. The reality of this territory of collective indignity can be studied closely by anyone who can make the pilgrimage—one that is attested as unbearable by United Nations agencies on the ground, by humanitarian groups that are constantly involved and find themselves sometimes at risk—to a zone that is at the very heart of today’s climate of fear.

  In April 2002, at the invitation of the Palestinian writer Mahmoud Darwish, I formed part of a delegation of the Paris-based International Parliament of Writers— now known as the International Network of Cities of Asylum—that visited both Israel and Palestine. We were there to convey our solidarity to the imprisoned writers, artists, and intellectuals on both sides—imprisoned, that is, by circumstances that defeated even their customary borderless vision—and to bear direct witness to what we saw, what was said, and what might be expected.

  I shall sum up my apprehension of the Palestinian situation in one word: humiliation. No, it was not because of one of our Palestinian guides who kept on repeating, “We want to live in peace with the Israelis, but let them at least grant us our dignity.” It was not because that word cropped up at least a hundred times—both in street encounters and during the concert of music and poetry that took place in the ancient theater of Ramallah—as the film made of every step of that journey amply testifies. No, it was simply something that I witnessed myself on this voyage of inquiry, and it affected me so intensely that I could hardly wait to share my disquiet with that Israeli leader for whom I have developed enormous respect after several encounters—Shimon Peres. He kindly received us—the organization’s then president, Russell Banks, and me—in his office, straight from his arrival after a visit to China, while we came in directly from a refugee settlement in the Gaza Strip. Our exchanges were candid, and I said to him, “What I saw, what I read on the faces of Palestinians, young and old, was humiliation. I encountered a people who seemed devoid of a hope for peace, yet desperate for a restoration of their human dignity.”

  José Saramago, the Portuguese novelist and Nobel Prize winner, was even more graphic in another encounter, a kind of town meeting that took place in Ramallah. Indifferent to his popular standing in Israel, he used a metaphor from Nazi concentration camps that continues to ring around European literary and intellectual circles even a full year afterward. Saramago’s intent has been much misunderstood, being considered insensitive and hyperbolic by many, including some within our own rank of literary witnesses, but the very fact that this comparison was wrung out of a friend of the Israeli literary constituency contains its own lesson, and is one that cannot be ignored except at peril.

  I witnessed the reality of this humiliation in domestic settings on which the contempt of an occupying force had been visited. I witnessed it at checkpoints. I heard it in the numerous recitations of personal experiences across all classes, in numerous episodes, on the campus of Birzeit University. Most depressing of all, I read it in the eyes of the young, where humiliation had hardened into a resolve not to yield up that very ineffable possession, dignity, the loss of which would finally affirm the nullification of their human status. Most frightening of all, I saw it congealed into a hard, cold, unremitting hatred. Yes, I understood the counterclaims of Shimon Peres, his anger at what he read as the treachery of the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat over that leader’s repudiation of a negotiated agreement with former prime minister Barak at Camp David. And I acknowledged the weight of responsibility that rests on a leader whose primary mission must be to shield his people from attacks that have raised the barometer of terror through the relentless and undiscriminating use of the suicide bomber. Nevertheless, it was clear to me that, on his part, this astute Israeli leader, perhaps the most thoughtful of past Israeli leaders, did not truly grasp, or else deeply underestimated, the factor of humiliation, and the human attachment to that contentious possession—dignity.

  The republic of the disillusioned expands by the day. Recruits into its army have abandoned all hope of justice from within and without, but remain committed to one all-consuming pursuit—dignity. As that goal recedes, they come to lose, like the Irish youth, all faith in a universal concept of human dignity and become indifferent to the moralities and restraints that hold up the sca
ffolding of civilized coexistence. These are the willing recruits to the army of terror: the “harmless neighbor,” the shy but pleasant young man or woman who helps with putting out the garbage and wishes you a good morning. Behind that friendly “Good morning” at a shopping mall, however, may lurk the sardonic smile that is powered by the secret knowledge of a terminal “Good-bye.”

  The quasi-state, we know, sometimes overlaps or interlocks with Community and seeks to take it over. Critical mass occurs at the point at which one can no longer be distinguished from the other, and the overrun Community is seen to appear to bow totally to the control of the quasi-state, if only for a measure of preservation of its own identity. The responsibility that we owe ourselves is to prevent the attainment of that critical mass that then pits one Community against another.

  Let us cast aside all further pretense. The genesis of the present climate of fear will be found right within the smoldering heart of the Middle East, that confluence of multiple civilizations within which are nestled the most influential spiritualities of the world—Judaic, Christian, and Islamic. The dispersal of the climate of fear therefore rests, fundamentally, in a just solution in the Middle East—it has been said often enough, it cannot be disputed, let no one be in any doubt about it. The time for tergiversations is over, it is time for a holistic confrontation of a global dilemma.

  No Community, true, dares succumb to an arrogation of power over the lives of its innocents, and the doctrine of There are no innocents must be strategically and morally repudiated. To do less is to surrender our self-esteem, deny ourselves all dignity, diminish our own humanity, and indeed forgo our fundamental right to existence. Yet even as we build protective ramparts, and pursue the proponents of that impious catechism There are no innocents to the ends of the earth, the mind that aspires to an all-inclusive Community must expand beyond the immediate and address the genesis of the current climate of fear, not as an abstraction, but as a man-engendered reality and, thus, one that remains within the compass of human redress.

  Between my first lecture, “A Changing Mask of Fear,” and this, yet another annunciation of posturing power left such a flaming imprint yet again on the world, this time on the railway tracks of Madrid, that there flashed across my mind a moment in the career of European fascism. That was the infamous event which a General Millán Astray, at the University of Salamanca, spat the shout of “Long live death” in the face of the humanist philosopher Unamuno. That banner of morbidity appears to have been hoisted all over the world. To take it down, the world must act in concert, and with resolve, but must also embrace or intensify a commitment to the principle of justice that ensures that the dispossessed shall enjoy restitution, and the humiliated are restored to dignity.

  Five

  “I Am Right; You Are Dead”

  The French nation lately was involved in a controversy over its decision to ban ostentatious symbols of religious faiths from secondary schools. I was invited to take part in that debate, and readily accepted. It was a chance openly to interrogate my long-held conviction that there should be a period in the development of the young mind when the perception of differences in humanity is reduced to an absolute minimum, even if, obviously, it cannot be eliminated completely. That period, it appears equally obvious, is that of school pupilage, where the space of instruction is cleansed of manifestations of private wealth, tastes, class, and so on. The symbol, as well as practical expression of this oneness, the leveler, is of course the school uniform.

  Objections surfaced in the mind—the indelicate, even provocative timing of the French government— indelicate to the extent of almost sounding like a declaration of hostilities! Then the positive role of religious symbols as spiritual and ethical reminders in the consciousness of youthful minds at all times, a corrective mechanism when one might be on the verge of misconduct. In short, the mind was readying itself for the dialogue mode, anticipating even its extension into protest demonstrations on the streets of Paris and the wharfs of Marseilles. Capitulation by the government was a possibility. I foresaw a protracted dialogue, from objective to acerbic—the basic philosophy of education, instruction traditions from different cultures, inductions into age-groups in traditional societies, reconsiderations in view of the vastly changed nature of the world since Socrates preached his “impieties” in the street “schoolrooms” of Athens. . . .

  For some, alas, such dialogue was superfluous. A hitherto unknown group—vying to overtake rivals as the terminal censors of our time—warned the French government that it was next in line for a Madrid-style reprisal, and should prepare for a season of “sorrow and remorse” for its perceived assault on the Islamic faith. At first I was numbed, then surprised at my reaction. Of course, in the world we now inhabit, it should be only a matter of time before some public target, preferably even a school, is bombed, and the contested Islamic head scarves are torn off to serve as tourniquets for severed limbs—and even as shrouds.

  Here is an even older terminating venture—the ironically named “Right to Life” crusaders in the United States, known plainly as antiabortion militants. One such group—self-styled the “Army of God”—boasts a supportive network for its assassins, one that extends to Europe. Their zeal for the conversion of minds requires that they gun down doctors, police guards, and the occasional patient or passerby. Their effective network provided protection for the one who named himself “Sword of God” while on the run for murder. Another of the same breed of Christian fundamentalists, an ordained priest, was executed in Texas last year, to a chorus of threats by his support group that they would unleash on the American populace reprisals that would make Timothy McVeigh’s crusade of vengeance look like child’s play. Timothy McVeigh, for the uninitiated, was that remarkable individual who was plagued by a unique social conscience that could be stilled only by his blowing up a public building, one that housed both a state security department and an infants’ school. His timing ensured, naturally, that scores of children were blown apart or maimed for life. McVeigh did not profess any religion. Nonetheless, he was a zealot of his own Supreme Purpose, the manifestation of a private irredentism. His chosen grounds of dispute were neither ideological nor theological, but he presents us with a clear psychopathology of the zealot, one who is imbued with a self-righteousness that must be assuaged by a homicidal resolution. It moves all possible discourse away from even the dogmatic monologue of I am right, you are wrong— itself a dead end—to one of I am right; you are dead.

  The sacred—including the infant crèche—appears to diminish by the day, drowned perhaps by the saturation of the world in the rhetoric of sacrosanctity. Here is another lesson from school, an autobiographical note to consider in the collapse of logical (?) expectations from an evolving world:

  The boarding school that I attended in Ibadan, Nigeria, was not without its share of bullies. My class was cursed with a singularly vicious specimen against whom we, the smallest and thus the most vulnerable, adopted a very simple strategy: we formed what, taking our cue from history books, we called the Tripartite Coalition. We summoned the bully into our presence and formally announced to him that, from then on, an attack on any one of the three of us would be considered an attack on all three. We moved together as much as possible, especially when changing classes or on the playing fields. Our strategy held the bully in check for a while, but he soon discovered that all he had to do was bide his time—since we could not always be together—and then pounce on the isolated wanderer. Unfortunately for me, I had a tendency to wander off on my own. Because of this, taken together with the fact that he had decided in his mind— perhaps because I was the smallest—that I was the architect of this defense agreement, he constantly stalked me and tried to teach me a lesson.

  Well, I also had an answer to that. I schooled myself to keep to a certain perimeter whose center was the school chapel. I already had certain agnostic tendencies—which would later develop into outright atheistic convictions— so it was not that I believed
in any kind of divine protection. What mattered was that he did. Well, not protection as such, but—interdiction. He could not bring himself to attack me in a house of worship. So I watched him prowl, taunt, dare, and do everything to invite me out to single combat. All he got in return was an equal dose of insults. Then, when the school bell rang for classes, I took off as fast as my short legs could carry me into the safety of the classroom.

  Even the class bully, a creature of quite indeterminate religious conviction, to the best of my recollection, respected the mandates of sanctuary. Today, there are no more sanctuaries left in the world, not even the holy city of Mecca, whose time-honored serenity was shattered some years ago by a bunch of fanatics. Acting from a most ruthless determination, they destroyed all notion of a peaceful affirmation of faith that eliminated, for a few days of spiritual rapture, all distinctions of race, color, class, wealth, and so on, in what sometimes appeared to be a single concourse of one humanity. Nothing that the world knows today equals the annual hajj to Mecca, neither the combined pilgrimages of other religions, nor those of rival deities, such as the football World Cup. And thus, appropriately for our times, this proved the setting for the most heinous act of religious desecration that the modern world has known. The recent massacre in Iraq that accounted for nearly two hundred worshippers, a massacre that was timed for the holy festival of the Shiite sect of the Islamic faith, naturally shocks and dispirits, but it counts almost as a footnote to the memory of the outrage that was inflicted on the harmonizing potential of that concourse of humanity, one that does have its lessons even for non-Muslims or, indeed, nonbelievers in any deity.