Leaving America

It’s just over a month since I’ve returned from a trip to the States, my first in about four years. There have been occasions where I have crossed the Pond more frequently, but more or less, for the past forty years, I have managed it at least every four or five years.

I don’t think anyone who knows me is ever in doubt as to my origins, but if it is that my own active imagination causes me to forget, the instant my flight touches down on the tarmac I am fully cognisant of my having returned to the land of my birth. Having spent much of these past years between England, Spain and then later Scotland, it is most recently South Africa that for eight years has been my new home. This said, there was an extended period from the mid ‘80s up to ‘91 that I stayed more or less put; living in northern California and raising my family. Alongside the restoration of old houses, something I’ve occupied myself with off and on during most of my adult life, I started writing again, produced an essay, Undercurrents of the Gulf War, and re-discovering, through Hugh Kenner’s magisterial work The Pound Era, Ezra Pound, whom I had first encountered way back in ‘67 sitting on the stoop of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square. That northern California period was for me a watershed and I left America, yet again, returning to Europe.

A second much shorter period of only a few years was spent in Newport Rhode Island, located just over an hour’s drive from where I had grown up outside of Boston, and, so it happens, where it is presumed by some that I have lived most of my life. In Newport there is the old colonial quarter called The Point that consists of carefully restored eighteenth century ‘post and beam’ timber houses that became a favourite area of the town for me to spend time. Then there are the very famous Newport Mansions, built during the closing years of the nineteenth and first years of the twentieth century by some of America’s notorious ‘robber barons’. However short a time it was, Newport marked a significant shift from a wood to a word chisel. With bags packed and a few cases of books shipped, it was off to the Scottish Highlands.

This recent visit to the States all came down to the last day, 20 November, sitting in the JFK Marriott, where I met with a friend from Brooklyn who came out to see me off back to South Africa. He is one of our foremost Islamic scholars versed in The Muwatta of Imam Malik and the Madinan School. He speaks four languages, starting with Mandingo; then French (he grew up in French speaking Guinea); Arabic (his father was a respected faqi in their West African village); then his adopted English. For close to twenty years he has been what is officially called the ‘Muslim Chaplin of Rikers Island’, performing an invaluable if exceedingly demanding service to those men who pass through that infamous prison. In all this he remains a man of ineluctable wit and good humour, generous of spirit and an aficionado of Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, as well as a few of the Greenwich Village poets of the 1960s. We were by all accounts both living in The Village at the same time, as I had spent one sultry summer there, possibly the same year he would have arrived from Africa, but we only met and became friends many years later. He once said we were a couple of guineas, he from Africa me from Boston.

In every hotel room, as well as the lobby, lounges and dining areas, there were TVs tuned in to the Inauguration Spectacle, which was also simultaneously bouncing off satellites to be seen all around the world. Therefore, when my friend Imam Salihu walked through the hotel lobby in his distinguished Mac and black fez, greeting me as we approached one another, there was a ubiquitous circus atmosphere beaming in from the surfeit of television screens. And yet the staged excitement was somehow needing too much effort. But surely change had come? A black man (not withstanding he is the son of a white woman) had been elected President of the United States. He was a senator from the state of Illinois, the same state where Lincoln was a senator before he became the American President who would abolish slavery during the American Civil War. I always thought it most adroit of Mr Lincoln not to have abolished slavery in those states loyal to the Union during the war, as he did in the secessionist states, but rather only after it ended. This innocuous and little known fact about Lincoln aside, America’s new President was proof that the American Dream was still alive. The lease on ‘the world’s leading Democracy’ had been extended.

Recalling Lincoln, I am reminded of an anecdote concerning his famous Gettysburg Address where he ends with “– that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” The story goes that the young and precocious grandson of TP Gore, who had been the first senator of the newly formed state of Oklahoma, asked what his grandfather thought of this emotive final passage to a speech that in my early education during the 1950s was memorised by school children across the country. Senator Gore, who was legally blind, turned towards his young charge, the boy who would soon after take grandpa Gore’s surname as his adopted first name, and said: “Ain’t no such thing. Wouldn’t work anyways.” The myth of Democracy continues to endure in the face of overwhelming evidence that what it purports to be and what indeed it truly is, have been and remain irreconcilable.

The naked facts of the American political class are nowhere more aptly portrayed than in the hard-hitting novels of Theodore Dreiser, who, in 1900, started out as a hard-working investigative journalist in Chicago, then St. Louis and lastly New York. He broke free from the newspaper business soon after the appearance of his novel The Financier. While the novel’s protagonist is a maleficent financier, it is the congenital malfeasances of the lowly political class that allows the movement of wealth to pass into the financier’s hands. The story of Frank Algernon Cowperwood is completed in Dreiser’s The Titan, which was followed by his best-known novel, the classic An American Tragedy.

Dreiser certainly invokes George Orwell, who, born in India and educated at Eton, became ‘the conscience of his generation.’ Yet there is another hugely important American writer, William Faulkner, who held the very soul of his country and was tasked by his own Destiny to write its obituary. His social conscience portrayed the fatal rupture of a nation that enslaved one of its peoples and then actively slaughtered, through a protracted genocide, another. This was the milieu in which the crude and vulgar Snopes family rose in wealth by means of unmitigated greed, envy, bestiality and murder to become politicians, slum-lords and at least one, Flem Snopes, a prominent banker, all in the mythological setting of Yoknapatawpha County, which not only corresponds geographically to the actual Lafayette County in Mississippi, but is the locus of the damaged soul of a nation. This most powerful theme of politics and money stands alongside Faulkner’s daring and devastating study of that worst of all sins, miscegenation, the shameful sexual intercourse between races, that he reveals at the end of Absalom, Absalom to be the only means of survival for America and the inevitable future for the human race.

The truth is that America has never been able to read Faulkner. Of course he is an acknowledged literary giant who took the form of the novel to new and greater heights. He went well beyond Joyce’s Ulysses, mastering not only an innovative style but extraordinary content. He, more than any other writer, advanced the vanguard of twentieth century literary modernism in regards to the novel. It is this towering pedestal that has allowed his social and economic vision to be brushed aside and lost in the closet of academic literary criticism. The immitigable sentence against Faulkner is on account of his great literary stature, and contribution to the world of letters, that his otherwise uncomfortable vision of a doomed nation should be set aside. This egregious anomaly has remained unchallenged. What his modern biographers are so eager to tell us is that he drank too much.

Just before setting off from Cape Town on my Delta flight to New York I had read the brilliant January web-site article by Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi, ‘The End of Democracy’, where he quotes from Visconti’s film masterpiece of Lampedusa’s novel, ‘The Leopard’. The story’s protagonist proves the lie of modern politics: “For things to remain the same, everything must change.” Now that everything in America has changed the status quo can continue. Or will it? The democratically elected political leader must now stand before the people and somehow explain how it is that while for more than 150 years the political class has been bought and paid for by the financial elite – the titans of both commodities and financial services – now that same elite who by shameless and recalcitrant greed has bankrupted the nation, with the knock-on effect crashing markets around the world, must be bailed out – by the people, for the people – so that they and their children’s children shall be able to pursue that ever-elusive American Dream.

The adherents of the world religion of usury capitalism stand and stare aghast at the ruins of their collapsed idolatry, with its underlying sustaining doctrine of liberal democracy powerless to save them. We can see how all the world’s economies are tied together. There is the fate of communist China, which had set itself up as the factory workshop to supply the capitalist consumers of America, which presently looks precariously unstable. And what of the wholesale surrender of the Arabs from the oil-rich Gulf States who have obsequiously bowed to the religion of Mammon, devouring the poisoned fruit fed from the root of riba? The pseudo kings of Arabia, put in place by the British some seventy-five years ago, are seen eagerly helping to bail out the banks of their former masters.

It was so refreshing to be sitting in the hotel lobby with my friend. We had last been together about two years ago when he was in Cape Town for an international gathering hosted by the community I am part of. “Well at least Bush is out. The people need one day to feel there is some hope for better times.” But tomorrow everyone will wake up with that inevitable hang-over as they realise that while the ‘change has come’ everything remains the same. George Bush, led by his obdurate gang boss Don Rumsfeld, rode roughshod over everyone, from the US Congress to the Pentagon. Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, Connie, and all ‘them Snopes’ turned the US Treasury into their personal ATM and no one stopped them. Everyone who worked in the Bush White House was a consummate career opportunist who in the private sector wouldn’t give George a job on account of him not being qualified to do any other reasonable day’s work that folks would pay him for on a Friday pay-week – other than his holding the public office of the President of the United States. For eight years they had a free reign and I don’t think that any of them are filing for bankruptcy.

It was time to go. The hotel limousine was waiting outside to take the guests to the airport. I received a warm farewell from my learned friend and would carry his greetings back to Cape Town. It had been a short but very good visit, though I was now anxious to be on my way, leaving America.