Tolan-Szkilnik’s book Maghreb Noir sits the luminaries of the North African revolutions under the leafy shade of Algiers coffee-houses. There’s a conference down the road—all the leaders are there—but they prefer to smoke. To make love, also, on uneven mattresses with the fan going too loud and the air too hot at the upstairs flat painted in an exhausted yellow. It’s stupid to call the places “coffee-houses”, really. They’re cafés, smoke-choked terraces with metal chairs straggled against cool stone walls. It’s only worth making the distinction because coffee-houses were the places where European revolutionaries met; pale, sickly, excitable. The luminaries of Algiers are puck-black (seldom) or pinched-pale (often) and recline heavily into a din of tongues, smiling under the floating, throating strains of saxophone.
The world is being bereaved of its good Circles. In the 1960s, you could overthrow the state from a radio room and still get home in time for the threesome. Formerly, members of a Circle fought together, were beaten by cops together, slept together, painted together, and together wrote great works that licked at the feet of nations. Today, a Circle is mostly a group of people plagiarising each other’s blog posts on Substack and having unendurably sterile dinner parties in the Bay Area. Academic Circles are worse, not least due to the demographic shift underway in humanities departments. Where once crotchety old men were too creaky and decrepit to get an invitation to the raves, but could at least choke out a decent manifesto, so now socially-awkward young scribes problematise any struggle from any site less proper than a gallery. There is a certain millennial fascism in the prudishness and priggery of those who will soon control the academy.
The standard explanations for this decline usually involve some variation on what my mate Bunny calls the cheap rent theory of everything. Namely, that radical, sexy artistic scenes of the past were able to rise due to cohabitation in an undesirable quarter of a world city. Nowadays, everybody has two jobs and lives in a shoebox. My dear intelligent friend Amelia blames this above all. It’s also true that fame today is more local and distributed; in the early modern age, all of ‘world culture’ came from basically three European cities. If you happened to be part of a Circle in such a city, congratulations! You were in a Circle of global significance. Finally, there’s the boomer suite of arguments: phone bad, pub gone, nobody wants to think anymore, et cetera. So much for the materialist answer.
However, there is an idealist case to be made: that the problem is the globby subsumption of all intellectual activity under the membrane of critique. It is our worst inheritance from the Frankfurt refugees of the thirties. All positive creation involves an inheritance; the new can only exist with regard, literal regard, to the old. Critique, a process apparently concerned with constant refinement, can in fact only whittle and shave until no solid core is left. It is only reductive, blurry, muddling—certainly not progressive. The Maghreb generation of poets and artists were progressive in the sense that they were prefigurative: they articulated a positive, decolonial future draped with colourful music and woolen rugs, rousing the masses with poems and pottery. There was to be no future with less tradition. No next without before.
This is the right order of things. Young intellectuals should busy themselves by running around the world, wildly swinging tradition like a hammer. All symbols necessarily refer to the past. O you young things: hang a literacy in the past like a jade about your neck. Overcome that second phase of Fanon’s native intellectual: the confused, Europeanised fetishiser of his own culture. Refer to it, and all else, by its own terms—even if you’re a middle-class kid who’s only been hit in the face once. And, most importantly, lest your proteins unravel and your sinews shiver themselves apart: do the same for other people’s stuff, too.
There’s a metaphysical reason for this. You please the cosmos when you wish your Muslim friends Ramadan mubarak, your Orthodox friends Christos anesti! I’m calling it the manaakitanga theory of everything. In brief: the past and present are two streams of potentiality flowing out of a primordial, superlative, self-negating negation. Being co-constituted, they spiral outwards with reciprocity as their motor: the past owes the present and the present owes the past. We of the present owe the past memorialisation, redemption, the fulfilling of its dreams. It owes us its stories and creations—and its ruins.
The mutual obligation extends across space and time to a universal idea of humanity. Budding from the branching tendrils of each stream of creation, each human culture expresses different alleles of a universal human gene; different isotopes of the same element. As a foreigner in New Zealand, your obligation to serve universal human truth absolutely rests upon your successful execution of the hongi. No pressure.
Loads of us knew this in the sixties. It’s a shame, because knowing it didn’t stop the generation in question from utterly ruining the world after two summers of rioting, going to Woodstock, and having unpleasantly irrigated and bedreadlocked sex with each other in rural patches of reeds and bullrush. Still, for a minute they had the right idea. In May 1968, high on Boas and Mauss and Debord, the hotly-marching students wanted nothing more than permanent potlatch; escalating, reciprocal, munificent destruction of the commodity. What they needed to grasp, however, and what would have saved them from filling the resulting, post-orgastic hollowness with a boat, an affair, and a rental property, is recognising that the process is creative as well as destructive. By all means, take your utu on the world of material evil. But build your relationships to different times, to different places, to different peoples, to different ideas; let every escalation in largesse deepen your love for others, and reify your dedication to ultimate human truth.
The Maghreb Generation, as T-S calls them, articulated a Pan-African future in relational terms. Their militancy and revolutionary violence were essential companions to their art. Although adopting wholly their notion of créolité (creolity) risks creating an identity so blurred as to become meaningless as a political or cultural tool, it was still a positive, uncompromising, lived exercise in building a future from a past. The lessons it teaches us include the beauty of Circles, the inadequacy of critique, and the necessity of learning the mutual obligations between past and present.
Postscript: Two Observations
- All STEM people have printed memes at their desks. I do not know why this is.
- Some Inuit nations have recently adopted a right to be cold, a phrase originally attributed to Sheila Watt-Cloutier, as a policy position in negotiations with Canada and the United States on matters of climate change.