Women in Dark Times

by Jacqueline Rose

  For Israeli film-maker Yael Bartana, return is a far more concrete and perhaps even more disconcerting affair. Of the three artists, she is perhaps the one who gives to the lost history of Europe its most disturbing face. In a series of three films, a trilogy with the title . . . And Europe Will Be Stunned, she enacts a historic, even if impossible, demand: that the Jews of Poland should return, putting the call in the mouth of a young Polish left activist who clearly believes that the future of his nation, and perhaps the whole world, depends on his anguished plea. Here memory surfaces reluctantly in the mind of the nation, taking us back to the silenced legacy of the Second World War. An old Polish woman has nightmares as she lies sleeping under a threadbare quilt left by a Jewish escapee from that war: ‘Since the night you [the Jews] were gone,’ the young man proclaims to an almost empty stadium, ‘she has had nightmares. Bad dreams.’62 Bartana knows she is flirting with danger. Such memories are unwelcome. But she is also making a proposition, which lies at the core of this book, perhaps the most explicitly of all: that women should see it as one of their tasks to bring to the surface of history, both private and public, what the heart cannot, or believes it cannot, withstand. You cannot move forwards by pretending that the worst of history – yours most intimately, the world’s most brutally – is no longer or was never really there.

  Finally, I come to the painter Thérèse Oulton, whose journey is so striking because of the way she has, in the past decade, turned her work and, with it, the world inside out. She was originally renowned for the almost lush density of her paintwork on the canvas. But if her paintings were beautiful, which they were, they also confronted you with something more viscous. Beauty at the edge of putrefaction, her work seemed to want not just to entice you but also to repel. There was, therefore, something always potentially violent about it, all the more effective for being so ravishingly occluded. Now, in her recent work, it is as if she has accepted her own earlier challenge. In paintings of minute, almost photographic detail, she demands that you lift yourself above the earth and take the lie of the land, which she captures in some of its most brutal modern transformations (soil erosion, factories and nuclear plants). Underneath which, as the mobility of her images still affirms, the world, like the mind, is on the move, sabotaging mankind’s brash omnipotence: ‘matter constantly shifting about, unfit to be the landscape of political control’.63

  The need to dig deeper – and women’s capacity to do so – has been my constant refrain. Oulton, we might say, is taking me at my word. The depths are not only a metaphor. What are we doing, literally, to the ground beneath our feet? Laying waste to forests, uprooting communities. Capitalism, as Luxemburg was one of the first to state, ‘ransacks the whole world’, ‘ever more uncontroll­able’ and ‘with no thought for the morrow’.64 Thus Oulton brings us full circle. There is no sentimentality here. She is not claiming to preserve a world on the verge of being lost. Nor is there any suggestion that as a woman she is, more than anyone else, the custodian of the earth. But Thérèse Oulton is – like Esther Shalev-Gerz and Yael Bartana – asking us, in the textures of our lives, to take responsibility for what we see.

  ‘My ideal,’ wrote Rosa Luxemburg as a teenager, ‘is a social system that allows one to love everybody with a clear conscience.’ ‘Striving after it, defending it, I might perhaps even learn to hate.’65 ‘Love,’ she then wrote to a friend at the age of forty-seven, when she was beset by illness, ‘was (or is?) always more significant than the object who stirs it.’66 Because, she continues, it has the capacity to transform the whole world. Luxemburg’s political and emotional energy can serve as a template for what follows, provided we remember that she does not leave hate out of the picture. ‘I think every human being knows how to hate,’ Monroe said in one of her last interviews in August 1962, ‘because if they don’t know how to hate, they wouldn’t know how to love or any of the in-betweens.’ (Arthur Miller had just dedicated The Misfits to Clark Gable as a man ‘who did not know how to hate’.)67 What all these women offer is a form of understanding, neither pure nor good, but equal to the ravages of the world that confronts them. This book is a celebration, since the future of feminism also depends on how we, as women, choose to talk about each other.

  I

  THE STARS

  1

  Woman on the Verge of Revolution

  Rosa Luxemburg

  Here is the rose, dance here!

  Luxemburg, Social Reform or Revolution

  I had to hold on with both hands to the wires of the cage, and this must certainly have strengthened the resemblance to a wild beast in the zoo.

  Luxemburg, letter from Wronke prison,

  18 February 1917

  A cage went in search of a bird.

  Frank Kafka, Third Octavo Notebook, The City of K.: Franz Kafka and Prague

  Rosa Luxemburg has become a heroine for our times. She herself would not have predicted it, not least of all because she saw unpredictability as lying at the heart of politics. For Luxemburg, we are the makers of a history which exceeds our control, as well it must if we are not to descend into autocracy and terror. Her vision of politics is suffused with something ungraspable, an idea that struck fear into her allies and critics alike. This does not mean that she was without purpose. Her targets were inequality and injustice and she had an unswerving idea of how they had to be redressed. She was a Marxist. This is just one of the reasons for returning to her today when the increasingly blatant ugliness of capitalism has given the language of Marx new resonance. She was – crucially – a woman, whose eloquence and militancy were fired from the heart, and who more than once found herself the target of the most vicious misogyny. And she was Jewish, a foreigner wherever she went, as she slipped back and forth across national borders – from Poland, to Switzerland, to Germany – for much of her life. Rosa Luxemburg was intrepid to a fault. As a young woman of nineteen, already at risk of arrest for her association with underground revolutionary groups in Warsaw, she left Poland hidden under straw in a peasant’s cart. A local Catholic priest agreed to organise her flight when he heard that a Jewish girl wishing to be baptised in order to marry her Christian lover had to flee to avoid the violent opposition of her family.1

  Un-belonging was her strength. It must surely have played its part in helping her to soar mentally beyond the walls of the prisons where she often found herself, as her writings – her letters, pamphlets, journalism, political tracts – so amply testify (she wrote many of her finest letters and essays behind bars). ‘The fire of her heart melted the locks and bolts and her iron will tore down the walls of the dungeon,’ wrote her close friend, the socialist feminist Clara Zetkin, ‘[gathering] the amplitude of the coursing world outside into the narrowness of her gloomy cell.’2 A revolutionary thinker, Luxemburg shows us how constraint, notably the constraint suffered by women, can be the ground for the wildest imaginative reach. ‘As a woman, I have no country,’ Virginia Woolf famously wrote in 1938 in the face of advancing fascism. ‘As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.’3 For both of these women, despite the years that separated them, nationalism was a scourge. ‘The law of England denies us, and let us hope long will continue to deny us,’ Woolf declared, ‘the stigma of nationality.’4 Luxemburg did not live to see the rise of Hitler. But Woolf can be seen as one of her heirs, forging a link which Luxemburg embodied even if she did not explicitly make it herself: between being a woman at odds with the world and the struggle against the fanaticism of nations.

  But if Rosa Luxemburg has become a heroine for our times, it is also because her revolutionary moment, spawned in those first decades of the twentieth century, now echoes with our own. It is hard to imagine today what it would have been like to be thinking about Luxemburg if the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya of 2011 – together with all that has followed – had not taken place. As we watched the peoples of these countries pour on to the streets, sometimes as though from nowhere, their revolutions seemed to
have come halfway to meet her, calling her out of the past. ‘A month before, a week before, three days before,’ wrote Ahdaf Soueif in Cairo, My City, Our Revolution, ‘we could not have told you it was going to happen.’5 ‘It was’, insisted Wael Ghonim, also in Cairo, ‘all spontaneous, voluntary.’6 As if we had gone back in time, even as time seemed to be pressing forward with a forcefulness that many of us had never witnessed before. For Luxemburg, such fragile, determined urgency would be welcome. She knew – she made it the core of her life and her work – that spontaneity was the only way that genuine transformation, in both the private and public world, could be born. Luxemburg is often talked about as if her private world was simply the backdrop to her politics, showing us the humane, real woman behind a will of iron. The gender stereotype is as glaring as it is inappropriate. Luxemburg was perfectly capable, when occasion required it, of being steely in her personal life. More important, as we will see, she lifted her deepest political insights out of the dark night – what she called the ‘bruises’ – of the soul. To cite the first epigraph of this book, ‘Just imagine,’ she writes to Jogiches in 1898, ‘it was precisely those bruises on my soul that at the next moment gave me the courage for a new life’.7

  Today we know that the promise, so vivid on the streets of Cairo and elsewhere in those heady days of 2011, has not been fulfilled. Especially for the women who played such a crucial part in the uprising, and who are now fighting to preserve their precarious freedom. During the second revolution of July 2013 – which turned out to be no revolution but the return of rule by the military – women were surrounded and assaulted by groups of men who seemed to have descended on Tahrir Square with no other purpose. This has been a regular feature of the uprisings. In December 2011, Hend Badawi was violently accosted on the square as she was protesting against the interim military government. She is famous for shouting at Field Marshal Tantawi, de facto ruler and then leader of Egypt’s military council, when he visited her in hospital: ‘We don’t want your visit. We are not the ones who are the thugs.’8 Now spurned by the elders of her family, she continues struggling to complete her education and find her own path in the world. For Badawi, the revolution is as ongoing as it is radically incomplete. But Luxemburg would surely have recognised her description of the upheaval as something that plunged into the deepest core of her life: ‘I had the opportunity to mix my inner revolution with the revolution of my country.’9

  We are, therefore, still in the interregnum. Today, the situation in Egypt could not be more ominous as the military reasserts its brutal control over people and state. Still we cannot be sure which way the world will turn. Counter-revolution also contains its own element of unpredictability (although it hardly seems so at the time). ‘The Middle East is entering a long period of ferment,’ writes Patrick Cockburn, ‘in which counter-revolution may prove as difficult to consolidate as revolution.’10 This makes Luxemburg’s unquenchable faith in justice more relevant than ever before. As Marwan Bishara has put it, those who asked too much of the Arab Spring at its outset were as misguided as those who, at the first hurdle or disappointment, pronounced the revolution dead, as many were quick to do before it had barely begun (his book is subtitled the ‘promise and peril of the Arab revolution’).11 We need to reckon, he argued, with two propositions that do not sit comfortably together in the mind – that things can always get worse, and that the world has changed for ever. In fact it is a peculiarity of revolutionary moments that they force us to revise our sense of time, stretching us between past and future more acutely than usual, as we comb backwards for the seeds, the first signs of the upheaval, and look forwards, in exhilarated and terrified anticipation, to see what is to come. For many observers, mainly those in power, such uncertainty is a way of stalling the movement of revolution, curbing its spirit by calling it to account in advance for a future that it cannot possibly foretell. These are the harbingers of doom, the fear-mongers, who point to a range of possible outcomes – say, anarchy or Islamic control – as a way of discrediting what is happening in the moment; who manipulate the dread of a monstrous future – and the future may always be monstrous – to dull the sounds of freedom.

  Luxemburg was not one of them. Writing to Luise Kautsky on 24 November 1917 from Breslau prison, where she had been imprisoned for opposition to the First World War, she praised her for still holding on to the ‘groping, searching, anxious’ young woman inside her – Kautsky was sixty-three at the time. When she had visited Luxemburg in prison in May, her inner torment, her ‘restless, dissatisfied searching’ had been transparent in her eyes, which were, Luxemburg insists, younger than the rest of her by twenty years: ‘How I love you precisely for that inner uncertainty!’12 For Luxemburg this was as much a political as a personal form of virtue. ‘Far from being a sum of ready-made prescriptions,’ she wrote in her 1918 essay on ‘The Russian Revolution’, also written in Breslau prison, ‘[socialism] is something which lies completely hidden in the mists of the future.’13 There was, for Luxemburg, something radically unknowable at the core of political life. She could herself be tyrannical in her dealings with friend and foe, but – or rather for that very reason perhaps – she hated nothing so much as the attempt to subject the vagaries of public and private life to over-rigorous forms of control. To the immense irritation of her opponents and detractors, she elevated the principle of uncertainty to something of a revolutionary creed. It is, I will be suggesting in this chapter, the connecting thread that runs through her unwavering belief in democracy and freedom, no less than her commitment to socialism. It will also allow us to grasp the unbreakable link between what was most intimately private for her as a woman, and the public male-dominated world of politics. She is the first of the women in this book to lay down the weapon of false knowledge, and then – not bereft but strengthened – to offer that very gesture as her principle and guide. She is the first to cast her lot against omnipotence, to make her own life, both public and private, a measuring rod for injustice.

  She was born in Zamość in Russian-occupied Poland in 1870. Her family moved to Warsaw when she was four – one of her earliest political memories would have been the pogrom of 1881. Secular Jews, they belonged neither in the Jewish community which rejected them, nor with the Poles whose predominant political mood was a fervent anti-Russian nationalism with which Luxemburg would never identify. From an early age, she was exposed to the perils of revolution for women – she was fifteen when Maria Bohuszewicz, head of the Central Committee of Proletariat in Warsaw, and Rosalia Felsenhard, her close collaborator, were imprisoned for sedition (both died on their way to Siberian exile).14 She was always an outsider. She had arrived on the doorstep of the German Social Democratic party as a young Jewish woman radical in 1898. Although she never self-identified as Jewish, being Jewish is something which always identified her. As biographer Elżbieta Ettinger puts it, ‘she represented a nation that Germans considered inferior and a race that offended their sensibilities.’15 None of that was altered – in fact in many ways it was exacerbated – by the fact that she rapidly rose up the echelons of the party to become a star. In the words of Hannah Arendt, she ‘was and remained a Polish Jew in a country she disliked and a party she soon came to despise’.16 The misogyny she unleashed, which we have already seen, would become legendary – Adler’s description of Luxemburg as a ‘poisonous bitch’, Bebel evoking in his reply her ‘wretched female’s squirts of poison’ (their exchange at least has the clarity of their revulsion).

  Not just a woman and a Jew, she was also partly crippled, walking with a pronounced limp (after a misdiagnosed childhood illness). She never talked about it, except possibly in her famous ‘Junius’ pamphlet, smuggled out of prison and anonymously published in 1915, when she accused the war of reducing the labouring population to ‘the aged, the women, the maimed’, words which we might read as painfully invoking a now older image of herself, since by then she was herself all three.17 She never belonged. ‘A severe criminal stands before you, o
ne condemned by the state,’ she announced in August 1914 to the protest meeting outside the Frankfurt court after her trial for inciting public disobedience against the imminent war, ‘a woman whom the prosecution has described as rootless.’18 She took pride in being, in the words of the prosecutor, ‘a creature without a home’.19 She could not – she did not ever want to – hide herself. But the very obliqueness of her position, her status as outsider, also gave her a kind of freedom to think the un-thought, to force the unthinkable into the language of politics. It is my argument in these pages, something I have long believed, that this is one of the supreme and unique tasks of feminism, what it has to contribute to political understanding. I now realise that, perhaps without knowing it, I got the idea from Rosa Luxemburg.