We're Doomed. Now What?

by Roy Scranton

  Much of the war was fought in Ukraine. Today, while hawks in Washington, D.C. and the New York Times say that it’s Russian president Vladimir Putin who is aggressively pushing into Ukraine, Putin and most Russians see it differently. They see an expansionist NATO, led by the United States, the avowed enemy of Russia for most of the twentieth century, propping up and supporting an anti-Russian regime in Kiev. They see the US allying with Ukrainian fascists, the European Union working to separate Ukraine from Russia’s economic and political influence, and American politicians calling for military buildup all along Russia’s borders. They see this in a context of fourteen years of unilateral American military aggression in the Middle East, a global American campaign of torture and assassination, political instability throughout Central Asia, and a melting Arctic that promises to ignite a resource war over massive oil fields suspected to lie beneath the ice.

  I heard the roar of the crowd wash over me on Tverskaya as strategic bombers flew overhead like death-metal condors. I heard the cheers drowned out by giant ICBM launchers rumbling past. These people were proud of their military strength, proud of their nuclear force, proud of their nation, their leader, and their history.

  Later that day, after the military parade was over, I met a Russian poet and video artist named Kirill Adibekov beneath the statue The Worker and the Kolkhoz Woman, an eighty-foot-high stainless-steel monument to the Soviet proletariat built for the 1937 Paris World’s Fair. The two figures in the monument, a muscular, hammer-wielding man and a powerfully built woman with a sickle, stand shoulder to shoulder, arms upraised, towering over a traffic intersection, blazing brilliant silver in the sun, striding confidently into a utopian future. Kirill sat beneath them, a thin artist with long, dark hair and a gentle smile. We walked from the statue through VDNKh, the Exhibition of Achievements of the People’s Economy, a massive Soviet-era expo and park in the north of Moscow celebrating the economic achievements of the far republics of the Soviet Union: Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Leningrad, Karelia, and the others. He pushed his bike along while we awkwardly weaved through the thick Victory Day crowds. Occasionally we would stop so I could photograph some oddity, like the riding field or the girl on high-tech suspension stilts. We paused for a while at a café beside a lake, which Kirill told me reminded him of the Crimea; we had beer and khachapuri, a Georgian hot cheese bread.

  Along the way we talked about state censorship, politics, poetry, the Saint George’s ribbon, Russia’s current economic recession, and many other things. Kirill was glum about the political and economic prospects his country offered but happy in his work as an artist, connected to a lively art world that, though the artists within it couldn’t really come out in direct opposition to Putin’s regime, did offer an independent and vaguely countercultural attitude that didn’t seem all that different from the apolitical anti-authoritarianism of metropolitan hipsters and much contemporary American literature. He was saddened by how readily his fellow Russians seemed to accept the nationalist propaganda being broadcast on Russian television and websites, but he was philosophical about it. “You have to remember,” he said, “Russia was a slave state until the 1860s. I think sometimes that we’re still working our way out of that moment a hundred and fifty years ago.”

  Toward the end of our talk, Kirill pointed out the entrance to VDNKh, an enormous arch, and told me that in the 1950s there had been a giant statue of Stalin between it and the first pavilion. The statue of Stalin had been to scale with the arch, Kirill said, to show that he was a leader on a vast scale, and to turn the entrance to VDNKh into a theater of his power. “So much of Moscow is theater,” he said, “the giant spaces, the great monuments—it’s all a set for a play.”

  His comment about theater provoked a moment of realization: “That helps me make sense of this Gertrude Stein quote I’ve been puzzling over—I’m not sure where it’s from—where she says that Americans and Russians are alike because they are both abstract and cruel,” I said.1 “I understand what she means about America being abstract, but I’ve been trying to puzzle out how that relates to Russia. All these giant figures, they don’t seem abstract at all, at least not in the sense of abstract painting. But they are abstract, in a figural sense, like an allegory, or theater. They are the giant abstraction of a characteristic, of a character, the idea of a person rather than a person itself.”

  “What’s more,” I went on, “what you said about Russia only ending slavery in the 1860s suggests another similarity with America, which reflects back into this problem of abstraction and theatricality, because America was also a slave state until the 1860s. The difference between Russia and America, though, is in the relation between the masters and the slaves. In America, the relationship was seen through race, a concept predicated on the idea of biological, physical difference, fundamentally blood. Skin color and phenotype were too variable to reliably mark racial identity, so it always came back to the idea of white blood and Negro blood. You can’t see blood, though, and it’s all red anyway. This epistemological instability at the heart of the American political order was a profound problem for the ruling class. How do you know who is ‘really’ white and ‘really’ black? We might imagine that ruling-class anxiety about this problem is part of what gave rise to American literary and cultural fixations on ‘realism,’ since the most terrifying and troubling question gnawing at the soul of the white ruling class is precisely the question of how you know what is real.”

  I looked out across the motley Muscovites dressed for a holiday swirling around the massive architecture, almost all of them wearing their black-and-orange ribbons. “In Russia, on the other hand, the masters and the slaves are the same, from the same country, probably looking much the same, sharing a religion and a culture going back centuries. In Russia, there is no ontological fact separating the rulers and the ruled, but rather the ruling class must rely for its power on the performance of its role as the ruling class. This explains the performative anxiety of all this massive sculpture, but it also suggests a way of looking at the dramatic quality at work in Russian literature and culture, from Tolstoy to Nabokov. It also helps explain Putin, it seems to me, and the current impasse in American-Russian relations, in that Obama’s staff seem to take Putin for a player of realpolitik; they read him by asking themselves what he ‘really’ wants or ‘really’ plans to do, whereas Putin is in a position where he feels he has to perform tough leadership, perform the reconstitution of Russia as a world power, perform the thuggery and daring that has helped him gain power and earned the respect of his people and the fear of the world.”

  “That’s very interesting,” Kirill said. “You know, of course, that the first actors in Russia were all serfs, right? They put on plays for the aristocracy.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Like minstrelsy in the US. Blackface dramatizes and discharges ruling-class anxiety about the epistemological uncertainty at the heart of the political order. If race is just a performance, then there’s nothing holding up the dominance of white privilege. So race must be performed, under the gaze of a white audience, in order to ritually enact the very hierarchy the idea of its being a performance calls into question. Like in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled. The ruling class has to play with the question of race in order to reassure itself that, at the end of the day, it retains the power to define reality.”

  3. Gospel

  More bodies. History is full of them. Some days it seems that’s all history is: piles of bodies, a gruesome wreckage of bones growing ever larger. Some have names. A few are remembered. Most are lost.

  In 1781, the captain of a British slaving ship, gone off course on its way to Jamaica and rapidly running out of fresh water, ordered between 130 and 150 of the slaves it was carrying dumped overboard. I say dumped, but I must mean forced. Pushed. The crew must have had swords or guns and must have forced the slaves to jump into the ocean a few at a time. Maybe one at a time. Obviously, you couldn’t bring all hundred-some slaves
on deck at once and force them into suicide. They would mutiny. No, it must have happened one by one.

  The sailors go below into the stinking hold and unchain a slave, drag him up into the first fresh air he’s smelled in weeks. Imagine the taste of the salt air and the smell of the sea, the blinding fury of the Caribbean sun after days upon days of darkness and unwashed bodies and bilge, tight and close and hot. The sails crack overhead in the shifting wind while waves crash and split against the hull. You hear the angry calls of gulls. The rocking movement you’ve been blindly subjected to, the nauseating underwater dip and wobble, is transformed now into the brisk glide of the keel along the water. For a moment you savor the taste and feel of free air.

  Then the sailors force you to the gunwale and, just as it dawns on you what’s happening, push you over. You probably don’t even have time to beg, though you might give a shout before you hit the water. Your hands tied, your body weakened by countless hours of immobility and days of bad food, you still can’t give up so you kick, kick desperately—you’ve probably never swum in the ocean before, certainly never in water so deep, bottomless, abyssal—and you call out, shouting to the men who threw you over, but they have turned away and gone below for the next. You realize that what you thought were the calls of gulls were actually the cries of other slaves: you can see three, maybe four, a line of shouting heads bobbing in the ship’s wake. Four, then three. Then two. When their legs give out, the ocean takes them. As the ship sails away, you see another dark-skinned body jerked to the gunwale and shoved unceremoniously over. You kick as long as you can, though you cannot imagine being rescued. You pray. You kick. You inhale salt water and feel the sun bake your eyes.

  Aboard the Zong, known as the Zorg before a mishap painting turned the Dutch word for “care” into noise, the sailors keep working stoically, slave by slave. The job probably took all afternoon. Surely some struggled more than others, some not at all. We must be certain it was easier with the ones who didn’t, because they were easier to hate: disgust mingled with contempt kills the sympathy you might feel for those who fight, as you’re certain you would if you were in their situation. The sailors on the Zong were hard men—only rough and desperate men would risk the uprisings, disease, and other dangers of working on a slave ship—and they would have respected and sympathized with the fighters. Sailing men knew firsthand the taste of the lash. Most would have been impressed—kidnapped into service—at one time or another, and some were probably former slaves themselves. They would have identified with the resisters.

  The Zong had set sail from Ghana with some 442 slaves on board, about twice as many as a ship its size would normally carry. The ship had been a Dutch slaver, captured by a British gunship during the fourth Anglo-Dutch war and sold to a syndicate based in Liverpool, and it was being steered by a former ship’s surgeon, one Luke Collingwood, in what was his first voyage as captain. But Collingwood fell ill during the voyage and command seems to have broken down. After making it across the Atlantic, the crew mistook Jamaica—their destination—for Hispaniola, and sailed three hundred miles out of the way. It was at this point that someone, possibly Collingwood, ordered a number of slaves dumped overboard, ostensibly because the ship was low on water. We know about this massacre because when the Zong finally made port, its owners filed an insurance claim seeking recompense for the value of the lost property, and the insurers refused to pay on the grounds that the loss was the fault of the captain.

  The Zong was only one ship among many, one insurance case among many, though it has become historically important and was, at the time, a landmark ruling in the fight to abolish slavery in the United Kingdom. Historians estimate that anywhere from 9 to 12 million Africans were transported across the Middle Passage to the Americas between 1500 and 1900, and probably around 2 million of those died at sea. These raw numbers of bodies, however, like the 26 million Russian dead in World War II or the 6 million dead in the Shoah, are merely so much information. You can read them again and again every day and feel nothing, learn nothing. About 1.3 million people die in car accidents every year all over the globe, which means that in the past twenty-five years, since 1980, global deaths from automobile accidents must have passed 30 million. So what?

  The question here is how we remember bodies and events. How we keep the dead alive, in stories, in art, in history. How we make meaning from death. The story of the Zong, like the story of the slave uprising on the Amistad or the one on the Tyral, which inspired Herman Melville’s story “Benito Cereno,” offers a compact, bounded narrative that we might recount easily enough, and which might serve as an allegory or synecdoche for the four-century-long horror of the transatlantic slave trade, or even as a story standing in for slavery as a whole. The treatment of the slaves onboard the Zong, dragged across the sea or dumped overboard as deemed necessary, illustrates the cruelty of treating humans as things. The court case deciding whether or not the ship’s insurers were required to pay the owners’ insurance claim illustrates the inhumanity and callousness of a legal system based in the abstraction of property. Indeed, the case suggests the absurdity and inhumanity of law as such. Where is the place for feeling in this abstruse, arcane language? Where are the voices of the Africans? Where are the spaces for compassion, or even for sympathy and respect? The names of the slaves on the Zong were not recorded and are not known. How could a legal system that doesn’t even recognize the names of the dead be in any way just or fair?

  Yet all the same, even taking the case as it is, retelling the story involves telling it, which means making aesthetic and narrative choices. The lack of water could be emphasized, and the story could be told as an illustration of the hard ethical choices people are forced to make in difficult situations. If your ship is running out of fresh water, people are already dying, and you don’t have enough water to get your crew back to port, what do you do? How do you decide between letting your crew die, along with all three hundred-odd remaining slaves, and murdering one hundred fifty slaves to save the rest? Is it an economic calculation or a humanitarian one? The Zong could be told as a story about the necessary moral calculus of scarce resources in a dehumanizing economic system: it could be a story about capitalism. Or it could be a story about a foolish new captain and the pressures of command. It could be a story about the slave who was so terrified by the screams of the drowning men and women that he asked the sailors to starve them to death rather than throw them overboard. It could be a story about some of the slaves who jumped in suicidal defiance rather than let themselves be thrown. It could be a story about one of the sailors. It could be a story about one of the survivors. It could be a tragedy. It could be a gospel.

  The documents that preserve the record of the event are material texts, already formed according to certain narratives (such as the British legal system, narratives of property, et cetera), but they are archaic and abstract and hence, for most of our contemporaries, alien, foreign, hard to understand and relate to. Making sense of Gregson v. Gilbert demands close reading, knowledge of historical context, some fluency with legal jargon, some fluency with eighteenth-century British speech, and a sympathetic imagination. Still, any college-educated American could probably read the report and have a basic understanding of the case, and most Americans with a high school degree or GED could probably work through it with a little help. It’s not a radically difficult document. But while the key narrative event—the throwing overboard of 150 slaves—stands out clearly and memorably, the train of events is vague, there are no distinct characters, the story does not flow, and the text does not sing. For some readers, that very vagueness provokes the imagination to fill in the gaps. Most, though, will be left wandering in a cloud of ignorance. The narrative doesn’t “perform.” The “through-line” is not clear.

  Canadian lawyer and poet M. NourbeSe Philip took up Gregson v. Gilbert as the material for her book of conceptual poetry Zong!, which is, as Philip insists repeatedly in her explanatory essay at th
e end of her book, not a telling of the story, because the story cannot be told. Rather than tell the story, Philip takes the words of Gregson v. Gilbert apart and recombines them, sometimes whole, often broken, into gestures, phrases, Yoruba words, African names, page after page of scattered language. She compares her work to that of the Language poets, such as Charles Bernstein and Rae Armantrout, arguing that her poem questions “the assumed transparency of language and, therefore, employs similar strategies to reveal the hidden agendas of language.” As she explains, “The not-telling of this particular story is in the fragmentation and mutilation of the text, forcing the eye to track across the page in an attempt to wrest meaning from words gone astray.” Consider these lines, taken at random:

  tunis for the bonesthe ruins of my

  story their s & y ours

  our story it hides

  the secret thatin the rift between

  cain & abel there

  rome founds herself on murder &

  on death comestrum the lute some

  more for my late

  soul sumsum sum sum i am

  sum i am i am sum sum