A Southern Paradox.

I am from the south. Not that South, but a south. And not the "south of the world"that Sepultura sang about. Further south than The South but by fluke of geography and the British Empire, merely an oversized outpost in view of the Southern Cross. Though if that's not south enough, then being born in the year of the horse, the corresponding year of said annum being south (look it up - or check out the diagram below) surely qualifies me to some extent.

So where does all this come from? It is not about authenticity but it also is in part.

Ever since I played the Civil War computer game, North South at my friend's house as a child, I was enamoured of The South. As a child, I always cheered for the baddies. Not necessarily because I believed in their "causes" but because they always had the better colours, better uniforms, better tech and more interesting characters. In North South the south were the baddies but the game let you play as them.


It was not and is not the case that I am a proponent of slavery and other parochial, exploitative and unjust traditions embedded in the society and geography of the time. Rather it is that I am a country boy myself. I grew up surrounded by agriculture, I remember a time when rivers were not just dirty, polluted drains for industry. I remember a time before franchises and pride taken in local production.

It is the deeply felt connection with nature so critical to constructing images of the south that still resonates with me. The smell of warm mud after rain in the summer, cicadas, willow trees and endlessly blooming oleandar, crepe myrtle and local flora, the humidity... just as an agrarian lifestyle was wrenched away from the south at the conclusion of the civil war, so too was the torpid pace of my own historic homelands.

What most people tend to think about the American Civil War is that it was all about slavery. In reality, slavery as a condition of unification and motivation for the Union was a late (yet rational and necessary) addition to the cause. The American Civil war was first and foremost political and economic. It was a war over the right of secession and a war of (futile) resistance against the march of industrialisation as the new economic standard.

Of course, it would be ignorant to say that slavery as a custom and socio-economic system was somehow separate to secession and "way of life". It was not. Nevertheless, it was the last gasp, the rallying of resources on an American scale, the gall to resist that rings true with me.

I have no gilded view of the south in the United States. This little essay is not an attempt to mask or otherwise obscure the real and pernicious, ongoing legacy of deep racism, the psychological and intellectual mauling of people's hearts and minds by peculiar American interpretations of Christianity as well the crippling and far too common blight of poverty on numerous communities.

However, this troubling little writing is about the loss of connection between metropolitan, always connected human lives and nature. It is about generations of children born into a world in which the subjugation of nature is simply given. It is a lament (to follow a previous tearless lament) to an economy that existed before unsustainable, neurotic scales of economy. The civil war was won by the industrialists. The industrialists went on to rule the world.

Yet, a little version of the confederate flag waves within me. Sure, it is dirtied by wrong deeds and injustice, it is bloodied and often wrong headed. But it dares to stand proud and remember a past that for only concepts remains tangibly close.

I got both head and heart, both North and South.

Salt, corrosion and colonial ghosts

At the end of February, I was invited to go on a ten day cruise to Guam and Saipan. To be honest, neither cruises nor Pacific islands are my thing. This has less to do with destinations and means of transportation than it does the concepts of travel and tourism. Nevertheless, at the end of March I found myself on the large ship Asuka II, lazily skidding across the Pacific, enjoying buffet breakfasts and specially prepared, elegant, if not a little unadventurous (special order) vegetarian dinners.

On Sunday we arrived in Guam. If Hawaii is a distant seaside play space for America, then Guam is a more inaka, more bimbo version of Hawaii. Just further away. Let me clear up some terms here, inaka is a great Japanese word which loosely translates as "country/suburban/not cool". It is a great word because it embodies both admiration and fear. Bimbo then means poor or impoverished. However, unlike in English it does not carry the same class connotations. In Japanese, it is quite possible to be poor and also have class. Being poor is recognised as a way of being on a sliding scale, it is relative, proportionate and not forever.

It can be said then that Guam is both inaka and bimbo. The following day found me in Saipan, which was quite similar to its slightly more southern cousin but exhibited a number of interesting differences. First there was an abundance of "poker" clubs, next less general wear and tear on the buildings in the CBD and finally a near ubiquitous signage proclaiming acceptance of food stampsas currency for groceries. What this suggests to this amateur anthropologist is that the divide between rich and poor is more deeply engrained in Saipan than it is in Guam. In other words, where Guam appears more rough and ready and somewhat poor on the surface, it is so universally, whereas in Saipan the division is more strongly regionalism. Pacific readers feel free to correct/inform me if I am too far off the mark. Or just flat out wrong.

Meanwhile although both places are somewhat far from mainland USA, and their basic flavour somewhat spiced with local cultural and ethnic influences, they nevertheless feel like America. What I mean is that in terms of shopping, eating and leisure there is an unmistakable emphasis on excess. Everything is BIG. Portions are big, prices are big, and this is all supposed to provide satisfaction. But why don't I feel satisfied when participating in this environment? Why is there a lack of attention to subtlety, elegance and grace? I find a similar situation in Australia, it is almost as though the energy taken in the original colonial impetus exhausted the desire for refinement. Another way of saying this would be that conquering lands and peoples is enough. That conquest itself is the ultimate feat of culture. But is this so, in this post colonial world being recolonised, redrawn and reconfigured along new emerging economic paradigms and practices located primarily in and around China?

So what will be left once the conquering colonising titans of previous centuries and the makers of today's world have been replaced? What will their cultural legacy be? How will they be remembered once their dominance has subsided? What aspects of their culture will be celebrated, fondly recalled and made objects of nostalgia by the new, dominant elite? Time will tell.

Jah-wah? Deadline

 

I was reading an article, an interview with Jah Wobble in an old issue of the long deceased Deadline magazine. I have many fond memories of Deadline as I stumbled through my late teens. Although it probably means very little to very few these days, back then it was a counter culture connection, a way of joining an insignificant malcontent at the edges of modern Australia with the punky, anarchist spirit of the UK in the 90s. From Tank Girl to Milk and Cheese and reviews of cider I never drank, Deadline was, when available an intermittent bible.

Meanwhile, in the above mentioned interview with Wobble, two points in particular piqued my interest. The first was the reality of a disenfranchised generation whose awareness of their disenchantment was very different to the interviewee’s own. This struck me as profoundly prescient, as latter generations including my own would arrive at very different formations of belonging and identity mediated by a social flattening via technology. Dissatisfaction with status quo certainly still exists but the level of access to certain types of material goods and technological levels has, in my opinion, created a very different perception of the connection, of self identity, society and the state wherein helplessness has been reconfigured as inevitability. Transgression of this new state requires technological transgression/fleeing and in this age of technological dominance in everyday life, performing such a break can be source of great pain and alienation.

Frankly, I believe that the current overreliance on contemporary methods of communication are in themselves a form of alienation. Though their potential in actualising a level of connection between peoples cannot be denied, their function requires excision from the physical/natural world. This is more than just about a rehash of analog versus digital but rather a reimagining identity that gives more weight to its cyberspace articulation than its realworld counterpart. To break with technology now is to break with the forward momentum of modern society. Scary stuff.

The second point of interest in the Wobble interview was on the appearance of culturally different influences in music.  He referred to when Stockhausen went to Japan and returned utilising Japanese influences in his compositions. Or so people said. To which Stockhausen replied, “I am not influenced by Japanese music, I simply found the Japanese in me”. Wobble extends this further with regard to his own context as I do now with my own.

I have written in the past, a number of times about blues, jazz and metal and always tried to understand just what attracts me to it. Thanks to Wobble, I believe I may well have opened a door onto the beginning of such an understanding.

As a child of mixed ethnic heritage, descendents of colonisers and post World War Two European refugees, I grew up in the rural outskirts of Australia and felt an intimate connection to the landscape. Being poor put me in a context where I was alienated from my ethnic roots and connected with a “non-ethnic” white meanstream but mixed up too with an indigenous context. This three pronged ethnic environment engaged European roots, colonial duration in foreign landscapes and the great despair and pride of the displaced and abused indigenous. It is now as I write that I begin to see where my affinity for jazz and the blues comes from.  It has been about finding the pain and joy of the colonial within.