Pebble poetry. Photo: Agnes WoolleyThe turmoil surrounding the presidential election in America has shaken the world: fear, terror, uncertainty and despair are some of the feelings generated by this new political turn, or what Cornel West has called a ‘catastrophe’. Significantly, we are reminded that ‘27 years after the Berlin Wall fell, Europe wakes up to a U.S. president-elect promising one of his own’.
Yet, another wall has already been erected in Calais, allegedly to ‘stop refugees trying to board lorries to UK’, while the Calais jungle in France has been shut down and evacuated, leaving many destitute and numerous unaccompanied children in limbo. As we witness the triumph of populism, racism and bigotry translated into a proliferation of frontiers and divisions, Gloria Anzaldúa’s words from nearly three decades ago painfully resonate with our present times, which seem deaf to the harrowing cry of history: ‘the US-Mexican border es una herida abierta (an open wound) where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. […] Tension grips the inhabitants of the borderlands like a virus. Ambivalence and unrest reside there and death is no stranger’. The wall promised by Trump announces a curb on migration which will exponentially exacerbate already adverse and violent international migration politics and practices and, ultimately, disseminate fear.
Nobel laurate Toni Morrison’s reflections in the New Yorker on this new political turn talk precisely of fear: ‘So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenceless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble’. Yet Morrison elsewhere reminds us that while the ‘world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art’. In times of war and conflicts, the arts and humanities have played a vital role in enabling the healing process amongst communities, cultures and societies. As Gayatri Spivak says, the humanities ‘are the healthcare system of cultures’ and our work acquires an even more meaningful role in these times.
