Liberation is not a symbol

Making room for discussion

When I was 22, I wanted to be down and out in London a la Orwell. I had just walked away from my job in a journalism startup and was working on the black in a bar near Brick Lane. I wanted to write a novel, and had visions of me squirreling away my hours in badly lit rooms, looking out onto wet cobblestones. I wanted to be the kind of person who wrote all day in a battered notebook, fleshing out ideas and drafts and observations on the world, living hand-to-mouth so that the edge always felt close enough to peek over. My youth felt like a candle flame in a cellar, flickering over dark shapes of the world which my eyes would become adjusted to as I bravely descended down with the little time I had to explore and confuse and feel my way through. The precarity was part of the thrill, I imagined. The uncertainty of what was to come part of what made the present feel both expansive and threatening—just like darkness.

But I didn’t end up groping around in the dark, just like I didn’t end up writing my book. I took stock of what I could see and began to talk about it. I gave shape to my own thoughts by talking about the shapes I saw. I focused on what was visible to me, and these things, I believed, became known to me. I spoke with other people who agreed with me, other young dissidents in London who were angry with capitalism and angry with education and angry with rising house prices and angry with the British state’s foreign interventions. I learned more shapes from these people and, rather than venturing deeper into that cellar my youth provided, I started to clutter it up with things I believed I knew simply by virtue of being able to speak of them.

I barely wrote. I barely read. Once I’d made sense of what my older peers had spent more time discussing, my speech was dedicated to refining my arguments. I stopped learning. And so, I became convinced that that candle flame of youth was in fact a floodlight illuminating the entire plane of existence because I could speak of the few things I saw with such attention that I could add to them, like seeing shapes in the clouds. I took shapes and made symbols of them, imbuing them with meaning so that I could no longer perceive that things beyond me even existed.

My delusion came apart not because of any sudden wisdom or profundity, but rather because I had an incredibly low tolerance for boredom. After five months, and the nth iteration of the same conversation, what little I knew felt overcrowded. I realised my highest form of action was possession: possessing knowledge, possessing argument, claiming intellectualism as a tangible and valuable quality. Quite suddenly, I was bored with myself. I realised I was about as far from being down and out as if I had remained employed. I wasn’t living on the edge, I wasn’t bursting with possibility nor nervousness, just anger. And all I was doing with that anger was making a whip of words to crack across a bar to rouse those who agreed with me or subdue those who didn’t. Quite simply, I just wasn’t doing anything.

The week after I burst out with that, disrupting the nth iteration of the same lively conversation, I left London. I locked myself in the coldest room of my mother’s house, wearing fingerless gloves and a wooly hat, and wrote that damned novel with a pen, putting all the anger I had towards how the modern world had stolen even the idea of freedom from my generation onto those pages. By the end, I had no clearer idea of who I was or where I would go. But I felt like I could see a little further into the dark by having given form to the few things I knew; definition provides depth and depth provides dimension and dimension provides edges and edges make limits and limits create space. That was the space I needed to start learning again. I had been cluttering my mind with a devotion to meaning which stopped me from taking stock of what was originally in front of me. I had become addicted to the righteousness of anger and the selfish triumph of argument. I had forgotten why we were even talking in the first place. I had forgotten what any of it even meant.

French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote about how symbols replace the original in his book, Simulacra and Simulation, arguing that copies of symbols then go on to replace the symbols until the world is totally divorced from meaning despite being utterly dependent on it. Whilst the text is nothing short of headache-inducing, it certainly feels like he was onto something, especially in an age of free-floating currencies, exponentially increasing commodity prices, and politicians who sport logos which are now utterly divorced from their original symbolism. For me, it explains why so much of being said nowadays feels weightless, superficial. We have forgotten what any of it even meant in the first place.

Is this why even conversation itself is breaking down? Perhaps. This week’s upcoming episode is with Willow Defebaugh, the cofounder of Atmos Magazine. When you listen to it, you will hear much of our conversation is about how we talk to each other, how we find common ground with each other, about how we cut through political identities to reach the real person across the table. These conversations are frequent on Planet: Critical at the moment because it feels like living in a world of symbols which are detached from their original meaning is making it almost impossible to find common ground with one another because we have become detached from why we were even having these conversations in the first place. It feels like politics is increasingly about being a wedded loyalist to a symbol rather than nuanced and critical discussion about what is happening around us. Our realities are free-floating, and so we can’t make any headway. How do we find where to go if we can’t feel where we are?

When I was 22 in London I had a vision for being down and out, and it took me a long time to realise that it was an old version of a world which no longer existed. The cafes in Paris where the existentialists like Baudrillard used to meet up and talk no longer exist. The possibility of paying pennies for room and board so that someone who cares can read and write and think and meet is long past, too. The pockets of these modes of resistance do still exist, but far from the centres of power and industry, and are deemed radical rather than understandable. Symbols of naiveté and extremism are stamped onto those who feel unwilling to attempt to make do with what the modern world deems acceptable. They are excommunicated from the discussion—but, then again, what discussion?

Our lives are increasingly enclosed by industrialised fossil-fuelled capitalism. There are very few places to go, and those which exist are symbolically irrelevant to the mainstream because the ideas of resistance and liberation seem increasingly impossible in a world in which even those who want out still, most often, have to buy their way out. Get enough people, cobble together enough money, buy some land. Even the solutions on offer are so often enclosed in the former bastions of imperialism. Common ground still has to be privatised in order to be considered valid. The terms of engagement have been set. There is no room for discussion here.

I cannot speak for everyone but, certainly for myself, it took a long time—too much time—to learn to have conversations on terms other than my own. This is part of the superstructure of the modern world, ensuring we become wedded to symbols in the pursuit of meaning. But meaning is always collaboratively produced. Terms must always be negotiated with as many parties as possible if we are to truly grasp at that which we can hold dear together. This will mean abandoning the symbols of the past, abandoning the very few meaningful options which have been constructed to keep us held, in place, free-floating, shouting at the sky. It may very well be that what we think about something is the least meaningful thing we can do with it. How we choose to act, together, to confront it, is perhaps the most. The candle is burning down and the shapes are gathering shadows. The reproduction of symbols is the goal, abandoning what matters to obscurity.

Yesterday, a woman told me she liked my watermelon earrings. I thanked her. Then she asked, quietly:
“Do they have any significance?”
“Absolutely,” I said firmly.
“Good! I have some, so does my daughter.”

The watermelon is the symbol for Palestinian liberation. It is not an old matrix we ascribe to, but a new representation which has burst through the age of super-surveillance to allow us to communicate what we stand for to those who know, and pass by unassuming to those who don’t. It is a small piece of common ground upon which we build our humanity. It means nothing more or less than what it is. It is not a strategy nor a manifesto. It is simply an aching need to stand against, to make something definite amongst all the shadows and all the shapes that belong to all of us. It allows us to talk to each other. And it reminds us that symbols in and of themselves are not enough, they are only ever the beginning. We live in a world where symbols have become the end: green triangles despite pollution and red roses despite right wing policies and police uniforms despite murder. Through all of this, the watermelon shines through, reminding us we are as far as we ever were from the end goal of resistance and liberation, and to get there we must keep fighting. Sometimes that fight is a discussion with someone with whom we disagree. Rarely it is the nth iteration of a conversation with those who reflect our ideals, helping us give shape to thoughts which then come to symbolise who we are—not what we’re doing.

It is incumbent upon all of us to let go of what once could have been in order to see where we are now, and act with the intention of confronting what is coming. For some that will be continuing to carve out negative space where the light can flood in. For others it will be throwing everything we have against the tide to slow it down. No matter what, how we talk to each other is fundamental. We are past the privilege of debating across bar taps, of yearning for a wilder time. Our duty to each other should always trump our duty to the symbols of the past. The watermelon is meaningful because it speaks of our collective responsibility. There are children whose candles are being snuffed out before they even get the chance to feel that the world is as expansive as it is threatening. There are children who know only darkness so that others can have floodlights. The watermelon represents their liberation, it represents our own. But liberation is not a symbol. It is acting upon what we know and defining, adding depth, finding the limits. It is making space for what we don’t know. It is talking, not to convince, but to understand. It is acting, not to triumph, but to simply begin.

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