April 2024

‘Why are you crying, habibi?’ Mansoor Adayfi asked the elephant. He had got into the habit of talking to animals at Guantánamo Bay. Held in solitary confinement for years, he talked to the feral cats who prowled around his cage. ‘I think that’s the glass eye shining,’ I said. We were looking at taxidermy displays in Belgium’s Royal Museum for Central Africa. We had come to Brussels for the opening of an exhibition he’d curated at the European Parliament, of artwork made by Guantánamo detainees. Born in a village in Yemen, Mansoor was nineteen years old when he arrived at Guantánamo. He spent nearly fifteen years there without ever even being charged with a crime. Released in 2016, he was sent to Serbia rather than being allowed to return home. After years of trying, Mansoor had only just succeeded in getting a passport. He was wearing an orange puffa jacket that had been given to him during a recent trip to Ireland: it had ‘Close Guantánamo’ embroidered on the back and ‘GTMO 441’, his prisoner number, on one arm.

‘It is Vendler’s supreme critical virtue,’ Tom Paulin wrote in the LRB in 1998, reviewing Helen Vendler’s book The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ‘that she can write from inside a poem, as if she is in the workshop witnessing its making.’ A professor of English at Harvard for several decades, Vendler, who died yesterday at the age of ninety, also wrote books on Herbert, Keats, Dickinson, Yeats, Stevens and Heaney, among other poets, as well as editing several critical editions and anthologies. James Wood called her ‘the most powerful poetry critic in America since Randall Jarrell’. She wrote a dozen pieces for the LRB. The first, in 1993, was on Elizabeth Bishop: 

‘The Rwanda bill is a legal fiction that makes the law look like an ass,’ Lord Anderson KC said in the final debate on the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill in the House of Lords on Monday, ‘and those who make it, asses.’ Shortly afterwards, the Lords, which had sent amendments back to the Commons again and again and seen them rebuffed each time, passed the bill. The Commons won the game of parliamentary ping-pong, and Rwanda became a ‘safe country’ in the eyes of British law.

It’s the first time the police have been invited onto Columbia’s campus since 1968. Like 1968, 2024 may go down as an inauspicious year for university administrations trying to defend the indefensible.

In Merchant Ivory’s 1981 adaptation of Jean Rhys’s first novel, Quartet (1928), Alan Bates and Maggie Smith play a predatory expatriate couple, H.J. and Lois Heidler. Their vulnerable and volatile young victim, Marya Zelli – Isabelle Adjani won an award at Cannes for her performance – is forced to take refuge with the couple after her husband is arrested and sent to prison.

There is always a tension between a union’s bread-and-butter role to protect its members’ jobs and the wider role that some unions, at some times, have used to improve the world their workers live in. The emphasis on ‘interests at work’ is a rebuke to that wider social role, but it seems increasingly obsolete in the face of the existential threats of nuclear war and ecological breakdown. What about workers’ interests in breathing clean air? Or in affordable rents? Or in protection from floods, droughts and social breakdown? Or in the peace of mind that comes from knowing that the products of their labour have not been used in genocide?

Last Friday afternoon, shortly after the Palestinian writer and researcher Salman Abu Sitta had said that ‘the voice of the victim is silenced, denied, condemned and vilified,’ the German police cut the power to the Palästina-Kongress in Berlin.

The situation is contradictory, even paradoxical: on the one hand, the machinery of justice is moving, however slowly, to prosecute Bolsonaro and members of his entourage, including army generals, for the events of 8 January, as well as the killers of Marielle Franco and those who organised and paid for her murder. Yet on the other, without an organised left proposing alternative public security policies, and convincing people of their viability and desirability, mafias and drug gangs are rapidly expanding their reach.

Gaza’s economy has been stifled since the time of the British Mandate, a process exacerbated by first Egypt’s and then Israel’s occupation. The nail in the coffin was the land, sea and air blockade that Israel imposed in 2007, placing Gaza under siege, severing its economic links with Israel and strong ties to the West Bank, turning it into an isolated enclave where the free movement of labour, material or expertise was impossible.

When armed Ecuadorian police gathered outside the Mexican embassy in Quito last Friday evening, a casual observer might have thought they were there to protect it. Instead, they launched an attack: brandishing assault rifles, police climbed the walls, entered the building by force and kidnapped Ecuador’s former vice-president, Jorge Glas, who had that day been granted political asylum by Mexico. Within ten minutes Glas was being driven away.

The Israeli army’s targeted hit on an aid convoy in Gaza that killed seven World Central Kitchen workers featured on the front page of every UK national newspaper (apart from the Daily Star) on 3 April. It was the first time that Gaza had dominated all the front pages since the weeks immediately following Hamas’s attack on 7 October, and it took the murder of mostly white people to focus the papers’ attention.

We are a small part of a shrinking thing, tail to a dwindling dog, or that thing that, in Yeats, is fastened to the dying animal. The heart; the soul. The dying animal is the English department, perhaps the humanities as a whole.

Between 1880 and 1900, the opera house in Manaus sprouted like a magical pink mushroom out of the rainforest.