OPEN LETTER TO ALL WHO VOTED TO LEAVE THE EU
It is regrettable, not to say terrifying, that your anger – which may well be justified – has led to a vote which has unleashed the very worst sides of human nature. We are moving rapidly into barbarism. If you don’t accept the sight of hundreds of our citizens sleeping on the streets as barbaric, then you have already descended to the level of inhumanity that points to genocide.
I here outline ten areas within which your vote will have appalling consequences:
- We are all, every one of us, every nation, in precarious balance with every aspect of our lives – legal, financial, social, medical, psychological. You have cut many threads in that delicate web, the consequences of which are unravelling with increasing shock and disquiet as your lives become ever less secure and meaningful.
- Large portions of our land are owned by foreign companies and oil-rich families from beyond Europe.
- Words like freedom need to be examined and understood in their full meaning and in their essential limitation. Used as a slogan, without context, words are sledge-hammers and rapidly become lies or smokescreens. As John Berger says, such a word as freedom can lead us into the very opposite – a cul-de-sac.
- You have trashed the knowledge and insights of seventy years.
- Examining the word immigrant, if you look beyond the corrupt and manipulative slogans, each immigrant has a history of suffering, torture, death of family, forced separation of all or part of family, possibly children shot in front of parents or vice versa, women raped in the presence of husbands, brothers, mothers. Thousands living in camps where the Great British Public wouldn’t house their dogs.
- You, who have homes you wish to secure, cannot look beyond the slogans to the individual human beings who have none and whom you have eliminated, preferring to raise the ramparts, build an impenetrable wall between man and man such as all dictators do. It is a short step from here to allowing absolute power,and the very opposite of seizing power for yourselves.
- You have ‘taken back the power’? Farcical. You have increased your impotence and impotence for every single one of us, beyond belief. The European family may have faults in excess, but these are as nothing to the global forces now unleashed. Within that community lie fundamental principles: equality before the law; The European Court of Human Rights (refer to the numerous examples where British lives have been saved or rights secured by appeal to such a Court); watch now how the Law, our Law, will erode for you, as much as the so-called immigrants.
- Watch how what you claim to stand for, declines – insidiously, invisibly. You, and I, will watch the decline of our ownership of our land and our own lives – already well-advanced – as the results of your vote proceed to unravel ever further.
- However hidden, ignored or rejected by you, a fundamental principle underpins the European Union – a community of nations who stand together and stand for values we turn our backs on at our peril. Will England have allies when war breaks out from beyond Europe? Who will align with us then? The volatile conditions beyond Europe will now affect us ever more forcefully now that we have elected to divorce ourselves from our European neighbours.
- Who, now, is your friend? Who can you trust? What is the status of the millions of non-British individuals and families who were born here, or who have lived here for decades? Non-British people who have married British Nationals? Within our hoped-for, voted-for ‘stronghold’, divisions increase. There is further splintering, fracture until horrifically, as Orwell predicted, and John Donne didn’t write: “(No) Each man is an island, entire of itself”
In that place of total isolation, from where you can appeal to nothing and no-one, anything can get you, whether random or with intent.
Nicki Jackowska
Valldemossa June 26th 2016
Incubus was published by The Menard Press in 1981. It sat comfortably among Menard’s more overtly polemical pamphlets, an honour to be alongside Sir Martin Ryle and Lord Zuckerman, among many other thinkers and writers of exceptional quality in their own field.
I might have said, at one time, I am a ‘mere’ poet, but now in 2016 and thirty-five years later, it is no longer possible to say that. I’ve seen a single poem of mine travel far and long, have a profound influence. From text to collection, to an International Conference in Warsaw, and thence to become the springboard for an entire evening’s expression of Behold’s themes.
Here is my Introductory Note to the original pamphlet:
These poems were written in the face of a possible nuclear holocaust. They approach obliquely and personally, by way of love and potential death. Our urges towards life and love are being warped, our consciousness and language contaminated. Birth, rebirth and creativity have become a kind of defiance.
We are even now victims of a criminal assault on our lives. The poems look back to previous crimes against humanity, and attempt to confront the lies which prevent us looking reality in the eye. They also explore the relationships which are being established between love and this most unnatural of deaths.
I’ve now re-read Incubus several times, and am astonished at its relevance for present catastrophes. Aside from the Introduction’s first paragraph, the rest could have been written in the face of the Nazi Holocaust or any other genocide or humanitarian crisis.
Approaching the too-monstrous issue by devious routes, the writer can infinitely increase the power of words to realise and evoke. Were I to spend a lifetime writing a head-on description of the devastation of Hiroshima – such as is still being recalled and documented on film – I would not move you more than one line I heard recently:
You will only put your child on a boat when it is safer than the land…
Benedict Cumberbatch quoted this at the close of his performance of Hamlet, in an appeal for this millions of refugees and immigrants trying to reach a safe haven, let alone a ‘home’.
Incubus does not evoke a nuclear explosion. The poems move quietly into cracks in our awareness, where the threat lies hidden, simmering, malignant, scarcely conscious. The poems address the affect of that threat, its monumental proportions. That which we cannot consciously accommodate. They also address how we may speak the failure and triumph of language, how we may mate with the devil as well as oppose him.
In these poems I speak with my own voice and the voices of others, use risky juxtapositions, subtle discomforts. I question, dislodge, sing and play. The intimacy of love and death, the sudden presence of an eagle in an English garden, places of safety, temporary refuge, these ironies. From Opening Lines:
You would have thought, said god, that they
had learned enough by now to get beyond
the first line,
and closed the book, bored
by the story and the songs of
death in his nursery…
As I read, three ‘moments’ (in the Hegelian sense) run in parallel: the Holocaust; the Nuclear threat; millions of stateless, homeless refugees running from death,and towards – what? To live somehow, somewhere. Not to mention technology run riot, German efficiency, splitting the atom, digital transformation, the Search Engines that hunt us all.