Brexit, and other things lost in translation

It was inevitable on this year’s meanderings through the Pyrénées that Brexit would be le sujet du jour once the locals found out I lived in London (not that I ever admit at first to living in Britain but always start off by stating my Australianness, pre-empting any hostility that seems to have remained between the two countries since about the 12^th century).

'Pourquoi?’

Good question. And my response in Frenglish went something like this:

‘Parce que pleusiers raisons.

Une: le premier ministre David Cameron et son enemmi, Boris Johnson, sont narcissistes.

Deux: le pays est divisée. Dans le Nord, les peuples sont plus pauvres parceque de la deindustralisation, la mondialisation et le chomage. Dans le Sud-est, les peuples sont plus riches et ils n’ont aucun soin pour le Nord. Le Nord levée son doigt dans le ciel vers le Sud-est.

Trois: le democratie fecking ne marche pas.

I’m not sure it was the best explanation. It became even trickier when some Spanish asked ‘pourque?’ as I speak no Spanish and they spoke no English so we drew maps on the serviette in between eating pasta and gateau basque.

Language becomes tangled at the frontier, crossing over and back, ignoring Westphalian borders and imaginary nation-states, exemplifying why Europe as a cultural entity (not the EU as an economic project) is worth fighting for. Walk anti-clockwise around Pic du Midi d’Ossau and at some point bonjour becomes hola and then back to bonjour again. The refuge gardes generally speak at least four languages (French, Spanish, English and German). At communal tables people extend patience and grace to let me practice my atrocious French, and to converse with German French, Swiss French, Southern and Eastern French accents (even other French people had trouble following the latter so he switched to English).

There is a recognisable expression on someone’s face when they don’t understand (furrowed brow; head tilt; eye squint in concentration) and alternative words, sentence structures, hand gestures are used to keep the conversation going. The non-English nor French speaking Spanish men at les Viellettes were determined that we would have a conversation even if it was in pigeon, piecing together whatever language we could to include everyone in the debate. I’m always amazed at how few verbs we actually need to make ourselves understood. 

There are occasionally questions though that I will never have an answer for because I couldn’t think of the words fast enough to ask them before my protagonists had passed, like:

• Why were two young people taking their goats with them on a hike over Col de Riou?
• At my picnic spot above Luz Saint-Sauveur, where did the tall woman go and why were 20 goats following her?
• And how did the nude hikers I passed on the way to Bagnères de Luchon prevent their backpacks rubbing the skin?

The ‘strange’ invokes a necessary interpretation of cultural practice with its inherent risk of getting it wrong. Whether the cheese on the dinner table is for the vegetarian pasta only or for the veal ragout eaters as well is lost in translation. We share. More cheese is brought (there is always room for more cheese at least).

It’s not that anyone is immune to making the odd cultural stereotype. The French refuse to accept that lardons are not vegetables, but laughed at my joke, only made in French, that the lovely German group I was tagging had ‘put their towels down first’ in all the gîtes I had wanted to stay in meaning I was forced to stay elsewhere. And how do you know when you’re in a town with middle class English tourists? There’s no hummus left in the supermarket.

The Germans are loud and chatty over dinner (always getting their beer before finding their beds, while I’m always finding my bed and showering before even thinking of a beer) but share their vegetarian food with me and are in bed and asleep by 9pm. However, they also get up at 6.30am and, resplendent in undies and overhanging beer belly, turn on the main light, deciding everyone else in the room is getting up then as well. The French are not impressed. Viva la difference.

Navigating our differences can be exhausting, alienating, destabilising, using up precious reserves of cognitive and physical energy to manage the dissonance of someone else’s arrangement of consonants, values and comportment. And yes I understand I will make a twat out of myself by getting verbs and pronouns and tenses confused and yes there will be times when I will avoid all contact with another different human being because I just can’t consciously think about what I need to do to be understood anymore. But it will pass, and I will remember the joy of comprehending what someone else is saying, and I will give thanks for a stranger’s patience in trying to understand me. 

Brexiting

I leave London for a few days and look what happens. Just when hell seemed to be going the way of the handcart it apparently can get worse.

It was an odd moment in Glastonbury. On Friday, as news of the Referendum results spread, it was a bit somber; on Saturday everyone seemed to go 'feck it, let's party; on Sunday it was kind of 'oh shite, it really did happen then'; and on Monday we made our ways back home, suffering sleep deprivation, gastro enteritis and trench foot, to process the news that we have no Government to speak of, no Opposition and the rest of Europe in uproar.

Clearly, despite trying to block out the worst of the implications, the Leave vote and its aftermath were on my mind while wading between stages as I found 24 voice messages to myself, a record of ranting and my music selection from this year's festival that went something like this:

We could of course blame the egos of the two men at the centre of all this: Boris Johnson and David Cameron. Whatever happened between them at boarding school or Oxford we are all paying for it now in the UK and across Europe. But that would perhaps be simplifying, personalising things too much. While dancing to Carl Cox's 1990s anthems along with many other predominantly white, male 40 somethings getting nostalgic, we gave Boris brownie points for being a master tactician and a man with the patience for the long game. Clearly, we should have spent less time dancing in the 1990s and more time monitoring Boris's plans for world domination.

However, as I stood at the back of Fat Boy Slim, pile driving myself deeper into the mud to 'Eat, Sleep, Rave, Repeat', my predominant thought was that the 'Righteous Liberals' are not taking any time to reflect on their own portion of blame. The Groaniad screamed 'failure of democracy' in their morning edition (that gets delivered to Glasto and tells you something about the audience there). No, it wasn't a failure of democracy. It was a failure to convince people. And the people that we mostly failed to convince were, ironically perhaps, my people: little England, middle England, however they are derogatorily described these days, that's my family. Even when some of my people picked themselves up and moved their little England to Australia, that Jerusalem, that part forever England, was always there. And so I grew up in the house of little England with all their hopes and fears.

Now there is a reason that I live many miles from my people, and in fact rarely speak to them, but it is too simplistic to just call my people racists and fascists. The older generation, my nan and great aunts and uncles, they knew what fascism meant. They were suspicious of anything that smelt of socialism and change but they were not fascists and I'm pretty sure they wouldn't vote for it. They would vote for what they perceive is order and stability (even if we know in reality that it's not). They would vote for a sense of control over their lives when all around is in flux. And yes, they will at times blame an 'other' for causing that flux. The 'take back control' mantra of the Leave campaign, whether knowingly or not, perfectly captured the zeitgeist of feeling unmoored in a world changing too fast and in directions over which very few of us have any control, with the fig leaves of democracy rapidly dropping off and leaving the mechanisms of power increasingly naked and unashamed.

Now my people are not stupid, they are able to see political rhetoric and attempts at manipulation for what it is. But if there is no alternative framework on offer, one that is convincing, then they will rely on heuristics that lead to the greatest comfort, as do we all (queue the techno pop dissonance of Grimes which I could stand for about ten minutes).

This leads to the failures on our part, people who wanted to remain a part of the institutions of Europe, to convince, which is part of our broader failure to connect ideas with people's real lives, and part of our failure to not provide a vocabulary with which people could express the structural inequalities that are at the heart of this miasma. At Glastonbury, for example, with a fairly well educated, middle class population, not only were there too many people dressed as 'where's Wally' but a myriad of vacuous conversations also had to be screened out. People were genuinely trying to make sense of what's happened, especially young people most affected, but just not having the vocabulary or the critical analysis to be able to do it.

The lead singer of 1975 valiantly tried to articulate that 'today we need compassion, and love ... and stuff' (adding that he's just a pop star which I guess he's allowed to say since he was on a main stage after 7pm). Okay, love, compassion, yes, but '... and stuff'! How about 'social justice and equality, an end to the structural violence of patriarchy, the abolition of peerage in this country and the redistribution of land, support for manufacturing industries in the face of globalisation, the introduction of a living wage, the decommissioning of trident, a reconfiguring of the British psyche to accept that it no longer has an empire and is just a little country on the edge of Europe that once used to punch above its weight. I hope he went to listen to PJ Harvey later: all she had to do was read out John Donne's 'No Man is an Island' to give the crowd something slightly more tangible to grasp onto.

Even 'righteous liberals' seem to be devoid of the vocabulary to capture the complexity and amorphous nature of people's fears and anxieties. 'Fascist' has become the word that is now thrown at anyone who says anything the righteous don't agree with.

We need to talk about what's going on within a framework that's more than just vitriol. The reality is that we need to get out of the classroom more. Our classrooms for the most part are a self-selecting cohort of students who want to learn about the mechanics of social life and power because they've already started asking questions. We spend our days in an echo-chamber of our own making, discussing the ills of neo-liberalism with our mates, railing against the forces of oppression and denigrating my people for failing to see the light.

And London is the biggest echo-chamber of all. The fact that London sees itself as a special state of exception is part of the problem ... and no, London cannot secede. I hate to say 'I told you so' but I was saying weeks ago to the complacent urban who felt it would never happen that in fact it could. London is not the UK. It's not England. My people get very tired of feeling (or imagining) they are being sneered at by the urban urbane who purport to maintain ideal forms of cosmopolitanism and taste (queue Anoushka Shankar, Catfish and the Bottlemen and The Last Shadow Puppets) and who  speak on everyone's behalf. We should not stop trying to understand why people make the decisions they do just because they live outside the M25. Social scientists who should know better are making causal claims out of correlations and reducing complexity in stereotyping and labelling, something that should be anathema to our profession.

I am not one of the millions calling for the referendum to be ignored or reneged upon. As someone who supports citizen initiated referendum (the Swiss model) I would like to see more of them, with a well-informed electorate (and a well-informed, unhysterical media would be nice as well). It would be just one more nail in democracy's demise to say to half the country that their opinion does not count, no matter how much we dislike that opinion. It will not solve any grievance and in fact is more likely to exacerbate it (and is that a sample of 'I predict a riot' I hear). It is part of the problem of politics in this country (and many others) that the referendum seems to be the last remnant of participation where a vote can change something.  Nor can we just have another referendum until we vote the way the EU and the Remain campaign wants (the Irish solution).

At the end of the day, fittingly to New Order, I actually don't think much will change once things settle down. A political-economic elite will remain in power, retaining order in its own image, if with different names and private schools.  While I voted to remain, and I would call myself European rather than British, I am not a fan of all the EU's institutions: it is a neoliberal project, if one that has brought benefits for European collaboration in academia, and some trans-national environmental and work protections. Its desire for free movement has nothing to do with cultural interaction and everything to do with lowering wage bills. So I would support the Paul Mason model and force a general election. With a Labour/Green/SNP mandate, we may actually be able to salvage something progressive out of the current malaise.

Glasto resolved things by engaging us in a rousing chorus of the anarchists' version of God Save the Queen, substitute the words for whatever lyrics you like, led by a woman with tourettes and a man who sang it in Punjabi. It seemed a fitting way to raise a finger to the problems of the world before heading back to actually deal with them. If we have to face down real fascists on the streets so be it, but let's look at our own failings before we divide the country even further.