Last year, I submitted an abstract for a conference about the future of authoritarianism with the title ‘knowledge production and transparency in a time of secrets’ (Deakin University, Australia). My intention was to reflect on issues that I was writing about in a research project funded by the Australian Research Council (FT200100539). It read: Information is powerful. As academics we know this, and it animates our professional lives. We uncover, collate, verify, and disseminate knowledge. And once we do, it is out of our hands. This presentation is an attempt to think through the afterlives of our work, particularly the clash between the impulse to transparency and the increasing authoritarianism of the spaces where we work. Then the situation changed in some of the places where I work, and I considered withdrawing from the conference altogether—a grief response, in retrospect. The bloodless language in my abstract felt wholly unsuited to the viciousness being forced upon people dear to me. I spiralled over the privilege of my mobility, and the ways that we, as researchers, may help to reproduce the kinds of violence and closure that we thought we were just illuminating. I don’t know what to do with that, but this is where I started.
In the places where we work, the prisons fill.
At first it seemed a trickle,
no one we knew,
then one or two,
—was that his middle name? I think so.
I know it was his father’s name,
but it’s such a common name so maybe not.
I’d need to see a photo to be sure.
And now?
Now we know better.
Now we wait for news.
I ask everyone whom I think might hear it early: tell me,
tell me if they’re being fed,
tell me if she’s getting the medicine her family sends,
tell me if his wife receives his salary, even though he’s
gone.
I don’t know what that knowledge gets me,
but still, I need to know.
I don’t know much about knowing anymore,
only that it’s not tied to freedom, or transparency,
or power,
in the way I used to think.
Now I think that knowledge isn’t power.
I think that power is forgetting,
that it’s through power we forget.
Not through brainwashing, or censorship—
how indiscreet—
No,
just in how we know what not to know in order to get by.
Keep it light,
not rock the boat,
not be so basic as to say
what everyone already knows:
like how, in times like these, the prisons fill.
We know, we know.
We’re doing surveys on it as we speak.
*
So, tell me if they’re losing weight,
or if you hear she made it through the checkpoints before they came for her.
Tell me if they let his mother, now Stage 4, see him
one last time.
Another friend was robbed of that last week
apparently.
I didn’t even know they’d taken him until a photo on my feed,
with condolences for his father,
said shame on them:
he wasn’t even at the funeral; the blackest shame on them.
In the photo he is older, greyer, a little heavier in the cheeks,
but it’s him.
He wears glasses now,
though he didn’t used to.
So, it seems, we still have things in common.
I found another photo, from maybe 20 years ago,
when his hair was black, and he was smiling as we worked
our way through a pack of cigarettes that he’s waving in the air for
some reason.
I think we were playing poker, with cigarettes for chips,
back when the stakes of bluffing
were a few Marlboro Reds that we’d all smoke together anyway.
*
Tell me if I should not contact you again. Oh, you can’t.
Any connection between us,
you inside, me out,
is all it takes, in times like these, to send the boys at
night.
I won’t contact you again.
I hope you know it’s not that I don’t want to.
*
In the places where we work, the prisons fill,
but there’s always room for more.
That’s the thing with prisons,
in the chasms under cities, where
the factories sew more prison jumpsuits.
And the sewing machines buzz,
like the urinous fluorescent lights above them buzz,
and it’s always daytime or, at least,
it’s always hard to sleep.
And they’re not really factories,
most of those were levelled in the war
and won’t come back.
It’s just prisoners sewing jumpsuits for more prisoners
from what must be an endless roll of dark green fabric,
flimsy and synthetic,
to clothe those who plotted something so dastardly that it defies belief,
to clothe those who say to camera that they plotted something so dastardly
they can scarcely believe it themselves—
The Fatherland betrayed like this!
Subverted by its enemies!
who tricked me into sabotage, before I realised it too late!—
in the hope of getting the medicine their families must be sending,
or a reprieve for their children
from the harassment of their teachers,
who are either frightened or complicit,
but what child can tell the difference?
Sometimes there is none,
in times like these.
What is that dastardly thing?—
It was under our noses all along.
Focus on the big picture. Now, focus on the camera.
Look into the camera. Look natural. Try again. Maybe use your hands to look less wooden. Look remorseful. You want the people to believe you.
If you’re smart, you want them to believe you.
And of course you’re smart. You kept yourself hidden in broad daylight all these years, as you spied on the Fatherland, before the people caught you and said you must confess—
One of them is reading his confession,
his jumpsuit sticking to the sweat on his chest.
His eyes move from side to side,
like they’re tearing paper, his voice expressionless.
An insect circles and his eye twitches,
but he stares at the camera and continues to read:
After I converted to Christianity, I joined the CIA,
and went to work spreading malicious lies, and
homosexuality.
His staccato words are his defiance.
His delivery says,
see, I am lying.
The others are more animated,
but who am I to judge
their body language?
I have no idea how my voice would sound,
how I’d carry my shoulders,
what I’d do with my hands,
if I’d fall into a nervous laugh
as I confessed to that, most dastardly, of things.
As I brought down others with me,
with this power that I didn’t want
of whom to name, and who to not.
As I gave their names in exchange for what?
Bread? Hope? A faster death?
I don’t know what exchange is underway as I watch them
boil.
One after another,
boil.
As my connection drops in and out,
because I am far away,
and can only imagine
boiling
from this side of the screen.
*
Meanwhile—and I’m not even aware I do it until it’s done—I
reach into my bag
and check I haven’t dropped my passport somewhere,
maybe earlier, on the way to one of my interviews
where we spoke
of whether there’s still space for hope
for the things we still remember.
I thumb its thick cover
to be sure it’s not my notebook
and exhale:
my easy passage through any airport should the walls close in,
in times like these.
A visa on arrival,
a cold drink on the plane,
maybe a salad,
some headphones to relax.
*
I wear the necklace that she gave me—
how long since she wore one too?
I leave for work—
how long since she saw the sun?
I call my parents—
How long until—and on.
Milan Kundra says the struggle ‘against power
is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’
So, I remember.
I wake up sweating and remember,
but it changes nothing.
I remember that it could all be otherwise,
and it changes nothing.
Because with all of my remembering,
I’ve done the utmost violent thing,
I’ve used the phrase: ‘in times like these’
and known what not to know.
*
When I was asked what I might say today about any of this
—a keynote on The Future of Authoritarianism—
I wasn’t sure.
I mustered a few spindly sentences,
muscle memory, mostly.
I said that knowledge is powerful.
I said that we—us here in this room—we know this.
It animates our lives.
We uncover, we collate,
we verify, disseminate.
Truth to power,
the greater good.
The transparency that should
be the sunlight to disinfect
the stench of polyester prison sweat.
But
what I actually want to say is this:
I search his name, and it comes up next to mine.
I feel sick.
My mouth tastes of metal.
And I realise that this tang
of salty iron is my body’s own rebellion against what should have been so clear.
That our mouths are made of metal,
that they do not decompose,
that we say everything forever.
That our words, captured there in the machine, will never change,
unlike their meaning,
which floats like tissues in the breeze.
*
I left before the war.
Before the snipers shot out the
eyes
of people chanting chants for change.
Before the motorbike assassins came
for the scholars, activists, the kids,
the doctors, journalists, my god, the kids
were so brave.
I left before the war.
Before a nation’s suitcases were stuffed full,
clenched shut,
loaded onto planes,
and scattered like dandelion seeds to places that knew nothing of what they left behind.
Before the airport was blockaded and no more suitcases followed.
I left before the war.
When words still meant, mostly, what we thought they did.
Before big binaries collapsed and fused.
Before friend was foe,
war was peace,
civilian, spy,
grifter, God.
I left before the war.
*
My mind wanders to the gallows,
I can’t help it,
picturing
what that day might look like.
An iron sky, a windswept square, and everywhere
military haircuts
along the balconies,
and in the streets,
unruffled by the wind
now playing with expectant ropes.
My mind wanders and I picture
the people in a chorus line below,
mouthing no, no, no,
to no one:
the borders have been sealed,
the people’s passports vaporised,
a nation now immobile.
‘We know, we just don’t know what to do,’ I say
but no sound comes.
‘You do,’ they mouth back.
‘No,’ I shake my head, ‘too many moving parts.’
‘You do,’ they mouth again.
‘Oh, that,’ I nod, hoping that they actually meant something else,
something we might start on Monday,
or at least get in the diary,
get on the same page.
Their mouths are open wider.
‘Let’s start with smaller steps,’ I try.
They close their eyes in unison.
‘It’s not practical.’ I gesture, open palmed, to show
I wish that it was otherwise.
‘Then what?’ They blink, as if to scream.
‘We need more information.’
‘You know enough already: You know the ones who sell the bombs
are selling the cement.’
*
But back to my search,
and those whom it condemns when the game changes, from poker to hangman
overnight,
and masked boys leap out of trucks and kick in doors,
leaving holes the size of jumpsuits in loved ones’ beds,
condemning children to be called
the traitor’s child.
I searched his name, and it came up next to mine.
In bold text at the top of the screen,
and beneath it, a footnote that
I wrote before the war.
A footnote for transparency, precision,
for gratitude, for recognition,
forever binds him to what they might think of me, or worse,
my stupid book,
whose words have learnt to swim beyond
its pages,
which saw him in one instant,
and suspended him in time.
*
It’s hard for shadows to confess
to having footprints,
feelings,
fuckups.
They’re shadows after all.
Born as shadows,
raised and rewarded for their work as shadows.
For being everywhere and nowhere,
just the facts.
All the while forgetting just the fact
that they’re not shadows once they speak,
and that their work detecting signals sends
the signals they detect.
*
I search his name, and it comes up next to mine
and I don’t know what that means when
in the places where we work, the prisons fill,
the houses burn,
the cities fall.
And the rebels do what rebels do,
of course, the politicians too.
The bureaucrats bureaucratise,
and the researchers compare the size
of this war to that war,
or better yet, to all the wars,
to tell us God knows what
about why we go to war.
But here it is,
what we’ve learnt
about the arithmetic of war:
How much destruction does deterrence take, again?
How much trade for how much peace?
How many of them for how many of us?
Discuss.
What if it is more of them, can it be
less of us?
Discuss.
How many bombs is greater than
the ability of hungry people to
fight back?
Discuss.
Calories in, calories out.
Discuss.
I search his name, and it comes up next to mine.
Discuss.
