Normal. Natural. Necessary.

(No. It's not. Really. It's not.)

Japanese maple in front of a blue garage door. PICTURE: Karin Schimke

Wrong sides and right sides

What is meant by ‘the wrong side of history’? According to the idea embedded in this throw-away line, some of us will find ourselves on it, while others will be lucky enough to find themselves on history’s right side.

According to one writer, we can track signs that we may be on the wrong side of history. For instance:

1. If something seems wrong, we’ve often heard arguments against it, but we’ve preferred not to hear them. (It’s not that a few fanatics decided at the end of the eighteenth century that slavery was wrong: people had been saying it for hundreds of years. Greta Thunberg is seen as a nut job now, but marine biologist Rachel Carson was warning us about the damage we were doing to the ocean sixty years ago already.)

2. We don’t really have a way to defend what is wrong except to say that ‘it’s always been like this’. We call things ‘normal’, ‘natural’ or ‘necessary’.

3. We duck the unpleasant facts. We buy a cheap T-shirt but don’t think about either the sweatshop it comes from, nor how it will rot in landfill when we’re done with it. According to the writer, there are two forms of not knowing: 1. you really, honestly, seriously just did not know or 2. you are strategically ignorant. In the last case, you know enough to know that you don’t want to know more.

4. We demonise moral pioneers. The writer quotes an American journalist who said that ‘Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.’

5. We struggle to explain ourselves to our children. Since small children can often see through to the heart of the matter (‘Am I eating an animal?’; ‘Why do you smoke? It stinks.’), we have to find ways to explain what is inexplicable and inexcusable. And we do.

We should ask ourselves, he argues, what the history will see as our biggest crime.

(The article was written in Dutch. I have summarised aspects of it. If you know Dutch and feel I have interpreted anything incorrectly, please let me know and I will fix it.)

‘The wrong side of history’ presupposes that we get better at how to live together. That once we know something is wrong, we will do the necessary course correction. The end result will be a whole new world a la Disney’s Aladdin.

I was a young adult in the Nineties when it seems like the world was breaking free from its stupidity. Walls were coming down. Prisoners were being released and becoming presidents of hopeful new democracies.

I am starting to doubt the assumption – i.e. that we learn to be better – embedded the concept of history having a right or wrong side.

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Does anything else matter?

The first weekend, I couldn’t get my head around the cruelty of the Hamas attack on civilians.

The second weekend I was in a righteous, disbelieving froth trying to work out what the limits of revenge might be for injured Israel. I thought about the grand power and privilege of the West to do nothing. I thought about Antjie Krog’s poem about the generals and brigadiers and ministers who ‘sit and plait cocks / and fuck up an entire country with the interchangeable faces of politics and violence / everyone is sly / no one gives a fuck’ (this is my very rough translation).

The third weekend I didn’t get out of my pyjamas. I watched and read everything about what was going in Gaza. I thought about the things with which we surround ourselves to make where we live ‘home’. I imagined losing my home and everything in it.

The fourth weekend I allowed myself to not read or watch the news while I was in Warsaw.

The fifth weekend – this past one – I was too busy to watch the news. On the train back from Heidelberg to Berlin yesterday morning, I caught up. Within an hour I had a headache and my mood was severely affected. Last night I got so grumpy about some small domestic thing, I almost burst into tears.

Who cares what I did or felt? Why does it matter?

Nothing matters. Everything is wrong.

Any attempt to comfort myself ends up in a messy internal discussion about why I would think it is okay to comfort myself when others are having their limbs scattered about in the dust of earth, or are dying slowly, crushed, unreachable, under concrete, or from a lack of oxygen in hospital, or from diseases that could be prevented by having access to water and food.

Children who have lost everyone they ever knew have full-body shakes like you see in black and white videos of trench-war veterans with shell shock. Another child carries a cat whose eyes are so rigid from fright it looks like they will shatter into glass powder in the next tremor.

When I expressed shock at the relentlessness of the Israeli retribution, a friend who felt Israel had the right to defend itself how it saw fit, responded that this was ‘the horrid logic of war’ and that Hamas was to blame for the suffering of Palestinians. She felt my criticism of Israel’s unrelenting bombing on the Gaza Strip was antisemitic.

After decades of friendship, we have stopped communicating and I don’t know how we will ever find our way back to one another. Her history is informed by her country’s history. Mine by mine.

When I think about our lost friendship, I grieve more than just it.

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My apologies to Heidelberg

Sam and I spent the weekend in Heidelberg. It was such beautiful weekend with such incredibly special people, that I don’t know how to write about it or them or the meaning of relationships that formed you and that span decades.

And then, this other thing: I can’t seem to think much beyond Gaza Gaza Gaza. I remember once it was Aleppo Aleppo Aleppo.

Whole tracts of time in an undamaged life get sucked into a kind of void with a name.

I wake up with it. I go to sleep with it.

Gaza Gaza Gaza.

And at the same time I feel embarrassed that it might seem as though any of how I feel matters enough to write about it.

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Some things

• Here is Cesária Évora singing ‘Vida Tem Um So Vida’.

• Here is a review of the book Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi, which I read last week. It lived up to the hype I’d created in my mind about it. Read it. You won’t be sorry.

• While I was in Heidelberg, my hostess introduced me to the poetry of Hilda Domin. Here is one translation:

Please

We were deluged 
and washed with the waters of Noah's flood 
we were soaked through 
to the skin of our hearts

Longing for a landscape 
this side of the border of tears 
doesn't work 
longing to hold on to spring blossom 
longing to remain unscathed 
doesn't work

What works is to ask 
please 
that at sunrise the dove 
will bring the olive branch 
that the fruit will be as colourful 
as the blossom 
that even the rose petals on the ground 
can become a shining crown

And that we, out of the flood 
out of the lion's den and the 
fiery furnace 
will be released 
renewing ourselves 
even more wounded and even more healed.

I am sending you love, as always,

K.