New Space

This will be my last post on TNGH.

You can get to my new blog here. There is nothing there yet, but a critique of Irish liberalism inspired by Bernadette Devlin McAliskey ought to be finished and posted shortly.

I’m not sure whether this will autopost to my Twitter or not. I quit Twitter two weeks ago for mental health reasons and do not intend to return (nor would I be able to) but I had a “Post To Twitter” thing set up on WordPress that I don’t know how to disable.

Anyway, Gostbustere will be my new blog, and I will try to be more discerning in its upkeep than I have been with TNGH. I have also started a “minor” Tumblr account at http://dziekuje.tumblr.com which you may have some interest in, though its content might be more in line with my former Twitter account than anything posted here.

Thank you to everyone who has read, interacted with and linked to my work here; I appreciate your support very much.

Oisín

To Those I Follow On Twitter

I have been on Twitter since August 2010. I was considering tweeting what I am about to write beneath on this blog, but I need to go into a certain amount of detail so I will sacrifice immediacy and convenience for the sake of saying what I want to say “properly”.

I have learned a lot since I joined Twitter and I have changed a lot as a person. For those positive changes, I feel I must thank the group of intelligent, thoughtful, funny and enlightening accounts (and the people behind them) I have followed. As un-self-aware as it seems to say as much, they have changed my life.

When I joined Twitter, I thought it was funny to joke about rape, mental illness, homosexuality, female inferiority, racial difference: “Otherness”, in general. I have since revised my ideas about humour, privilege and prejudice, and am ashamed of myself for having thought the way I did. I apologise sincerely for my immaturity, my lack of self-awareness, my privileged behaviour and, above all, my self-righteousness. 

I do not want to go into excessive detail, for fear of embellishing or obscuring or detracting from the universality of my situation, and the changes which I have made in my life (which are visible through my Twitter account). If I were to look back at the 9,000+ tweets I have made from the beginning, I would probably feel like going back in time and killing myself, but I would also notice marked changes in the content of my tweets, perhaps getting worse before they eventually, recently, get better.

For those of you with whose accounts I have communicated with, argued with, laughed at, retweeted and been irrevocably changed by, I thank you from the bottom of my real heart. Namaste.

Grief

I leafed through the newspaper again, more quickly this time, in search of the courtroom sketch which had indelibly soaked itself into my memory, a third-hand stain I was now trying to examine at the closest point to its source that I could. I had not been present in court. I had decided against spectating a process which, I felt, would only leave me confused – at least by the machinations of the justice system: the objections and approaching of benches and cross-examinations, if not by the matter at hand – and, at any rate, such was the profile of the case that the national media were obliged to impart the details to the public on a daily basis, myself included. It turned out, however, that putting myself at arm’s length from what seemed the rather unreal process of courtroom justice brought as much unrest as I had hoped it would save me in the first place. And where was that sketch? My fingers were greying with the ashy residue of yesterday’s events.

The sketch, as I remembered it, seemed to manipulate the space and arrangement of the courtroom which I had never seen to hold, in its two inch square frame, the judge, the defendant, the prosecutor and a row of spectators; among whom were a flawed but recognisable representation of the father of the deceased and, holding his hand, her mother: all facing towards the centre of the drawing in such a way as to suggest the existence of perhaps one square metre of floor-space in which the prosecutor, though for the purposes of the sketch without abdomen or legs, might pace and prod the floating bust in the stand, whose gaze seemed to be aimed at nowhere in particular, his head tilted at an angle acute enough that he might be able to look at the spectator, whose attention may now have been diverted to the actual text of the piece: _____ trial ongoing for murder of ____ ____, 19, through the corner of his eyes.

Racism, Football and Morality

Incidents involving Chelsea’s John Terry and Liverpool’s Luis Suarez have caused a stir in English football recently, with the two allegedly (and respectively) referring to QPR’s Anton Ferdinand as a “fucking black cunt”  (or similar) and Manchester United’s Patrice Evra as “negro” or “negrito” (or perhaps something else), depending on which source you read.

As “football fans”, we ought to find this particularly disturbing, for obvious reasons. Media coverage of the incidents has been relatively minimal (perhaps more so with regard to the Suarez-Evra case) both in order to facilitate the Football Association’s investigation (and that of the Metropolitan Police re: Terry-Ferdinand) and as a result of the “established media”‘s general hesitancy to discuss racial issues in less than abstract terms. This tendency towards abstraction here extends to Harry Redknapp’s willingness to criticise Sepp Blatter (the pantomimic head of FIFA) for his own abstract (and typically diverting and ignorant) comments regarding “these kinds of” incidents (and let us note that Redknapp has certainly not been alone in his condemnation of the King of FootballCo.) but a marked absence of indignation directed at those who ought to be central to the debate, namely Terry and Suarez*.

@Magnetic__Man's iPhone enters the fray

Regarding how the Football Association deals with these matters: thorough investigations are required and, for those found guilty, appropriate sanctions must be handed down. In the absence of proven guilt, the Association may not act. Its internal machinations, and their (abstract?) goal of Justice are not to be directly considered here; the legal issue is separate to our concerns.

For football as a sport, a culture, an industry: a thing in general, these incidents raise an important topic for consideration: To what extent does morality have anything to do with football? and how ought it to manifest itself within the game’s existing structures?

Any comment on “what these incidents mean” would be speculative, given the lack of information available about the incidents and their respective contexts, though as with so many other social issues, punitive action taken by “the state” (here represented by domestic football’s governing body) on offenders (should they be found guilty) can be seen as a bandage of sorts placed over an open wound. If “things” have progressed to the point where Terry deemed it acceptable to refer to Ferdinand as a “black cunt” then surely the damage has already been done: his deviancy merely speaks of a wider one in society in which white trumps black and race is a go-to pretext for insult and provocation. If British society tolerates this and so does Football, then significant and far-reaching action must be taken beyond the specific and murky area of the England captain’s behaviour.

The moment it all began?

Furthermore, if Suarez referred to Evra as “negro” or “negrito”, as is being alleged (see links provided earlier), then how are we to react? With a broadly researched and qualified justification, such as Rob Gutmann’s? Is it acceptable to use “cultural differences” as an explanation for the expression of cultural prejudice? If so we, must ask ourselves: whence does cultural prejudice come?

Interestingly, in relation to the use of what seem to be racial epithets to the Western reader, I have a Uruguayan friend who was happy to discuss “on the record”, as it were, the significance of the words Suarez allegedly used. “Negro”, he says, is an extremely common thing to refer to one’s friends as, regardless of and without respect to race. It is used just as “man”, “bro”, etc. are in social situations in Western society. He stressed that there is no “racial significance” to its use, and that it merely suggests familiarity with the person at whom it is directed.

“Negrito” (or “little black man”), however, is something which he said he would never refer to a black person as; it is the diminutive of “negro” but carries with it a condescension and distinct racial element which would be particularly inflammatory. It would be “dangerous” to refer to a black person as such, and obtuse to use it with a white person. At the same time, he said that he would certainly never refer to anybody as “negro” or “negrito” over here (Ireland – not a million miles from England), following up with a wry “obviously . . . “

Bearing this context in mind, we can hypothetically explain Suarez’ choice of word(s), but does it offer anything in terms of justification? In a situation such as this, do we defer to the interpretation of the (alleged) abuser or allow for the victim to assert his own self-determination? Should the idiomatic fogginess of Uruguayan social discourse hold primacy over Evra’s right to respect and equal treatment? In basic terms: who writes the rules, as it were, of inter-racial discourse?

Roberto Carlos is offered a banana at Zenit St. Petersburg (via The Daily Mail)

Racism exists in football as it does in wider society, and Britain’s comfortable “multicultural” editorial position, nestled in the notion that “other countries [read: Italy, Spain, Russia, Poland, etc.] are worse off” with regards to racial prejudice, is now under threat by the apparent reality that overt racial abuse exists between fellow professionals as it does between fans and, occasionally, pundits. Punitive action must surely be taken as a matter of course, but how is “Football” and “Wider Society” to create a situation in which the tensions and prejudices and ignorance that give rise to racial abuse no longer exist? Football must treat the symptoms of this sickness, but it must be viewed in the clearest and harshest manner possible by the general public and especially fans, when a popular reaction by Chelsea and Liverpool** fans has been to side with their clubs’ football-playing employees in spite of allegations, often not denying the charges, but embracing them!

Sport’s phenomenal ability to polarise and divide is unquestionable, but in the context of racial hatred, club allegiances must come second to the provision of justice.

*Though incidents involving Terry and Suarez are distinctly separate, along with their culpability (or lack thereof) in each, one may view them as morally similar (or “inseparable”) for our purposes in this piece.

**Note Lawrenson alleges that Suarez used the word “negrita”, the feminine version of “negrito“, the significance of which is explained first-hand earlier in this post. Without wanting to directly accuse anyone of deliberate and wilful misinformation, to suggest that the word is “harmless” and “accepted” is deliberate and wilful misinformation. To further the editorial slant of this footnote, may I also say that Mark Lawrenson is a massive arsehole.

POSTSCRIPT: Gus Poyet has stuck his oar in. Make of it what you will.

Lawnmowing

The lawnmower jolts and tips slightly to the right on the wet grass and I twist the wheel left then right, the engine still propelling the great orange beast forwards with its front wheels locked and the steering mechanism broken, twisted metal jutting out in a compound fracture where the wheel meets the axle fuck fuck the engine automatically stops when I leave the seat and try to stick the two bits of metal together again, looking for a screw-thread or a bolt but the problem is manifest only in that it is clearly broken but not immediately fixable without a replacement or just a new mower fuck why not just throw this one out or wait and let the wetness of the grass soak into my shoes for a while

Workmen come an hour later to take away the lawnmower to be repaired and I don’t have anything to do while they laugh and kick the wheels left and right to steer it while pushing it up the grass and up the two planks three feet apart up into the trailer and laugh and I help but I don’t know what to say and wash my hands and walk back and it’s silent again and but for the quarter-mowed grass there may never have been a lawnmower and who can say who piloted the thing?

Woman in Dalkey complains of her anthropomorphising flowers, laments the overlapping of two different worlds

“Last week they were blue. By the weekend they were pink and blue, and then on Monday they had turned pink and decided to die.”

Text

The whole of Dublin is ringing wet, dripping in a three-quarter-light as it hangs, pegged and cloudy, from calligraphic jet-stream washing lines and the sealion-head bobbing of the river intermittent through concrete shade

and I feel as though I have fallen in love with you all over again, anew.