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It’s been a fortnight since activists Reverend Dr Sue Parfitt and Judy Bruce dug deep and lit a small fire of hope.
You can watch Parfitt and Bruce take action via PoliticsJOE on Twitter, watch them carefully, loudly, crisply tapping a spike against the far corner of the laminated security glass that covers the British Library’s copy of the Magna Carta. Bruce, wearing a Just Stop Oil shirt, then says to camera “This famous document is about the rule of law and standing up against an abuse of power,” implying that their actions are in line with the foundational document of English rights, in standing up against the British government breaking its own laws by allowing further oil and gas exploration licenses.
Going by the reaction online, the pair cracked open a window onto possibility and collective action – and yet, as always with even the least radical activism in Britain – also a window onto the deranged violence of conservatism. If you’ve heard of the story, it would probably have been through the lens of the activists’ ages, as the deliberate invisibility of all but the wealthiest older people in the UK – generally white men – militates against older people being recognised and included as political actors, as subjects of their own narratives. Sue Parfitt has previously used this myth of the frail elderly white woman as an activist strategy, avoiding jail time for direct actions as part of Insulate Britain (where other protestors were jailed) and Extinction Rebellion. Those are only the most recent of her lifetime of climate action.
Parfitt (born 1942) and Bruce (born 1936) are members of the CND generation, the campaign launched in 1958 with the huge Aldermaston March that became a blueprint for several generations of anti-nuclear, anti-war, and environmental campaigning. Stuart Hall was one of the original members (he and Catherine Hall first met on a march), attending the 1957 meetings that led up to the launch of the campaign, and he noted that it was one of the first racially diverse mass movements in Britain, with an early emphasis on multilateralism and internationalism.
Glimpses are visible in John Akomfrah’s poetic bio-documentary and installation The Stuart Hall Project (2013) – more glimpses than perhaps anywhere else across contemporary British culture. Apart from Sally Potter’s Ginger & Rosa (2012), where Ginger gets arrested outside Aldermaston having attended several CND meetings in the run-up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, it’s hard to think of another film where CND makes a major narrative appearance.
I’ve written about Ginger & Rosa and its foreshadowing of the Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common for Angelaki, and more recently in The South London Cultural Review issue on feminist films. My mind returns again and again to these two 2012-13 films – Ginger & Rosa and The Stuart Hall Project – films made in the wake of the student protests and the lee of Olympic nationalism, returns to a history of collective protest in the UK that was worlded, connected, complex, poetic and transnational. Parfitt and Bruce bring them to mind, and bring to mind too the absence of a fuller history or histories of these activist movements and spaces that involved hundreds of thousands of people. And so activists are mocked, maligned and dismissed partially because their lineage has been written out of the narrative, over and over.
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In fact, Bruce – strategically – repeats one of the narratives that work to hide the more complex history of England. The Magna Carta is often cited as the basis of subjects’ rights in England, a contract between the people and the king that checked royal power. And that’s a story I’d held in my head for forty years before – oddly enough – I happened to visit the Magna Carta’s strange little side chamber in the Treasures gallery at the British Library about a fortnight before Sue and Judy. I was there to look at the religious texts held by the BL (some non-European Christian ones included whose acquisition route is less than clearly stated), but realised I’d never actually seen, or read, the Magna Carta despite going to see Cornelia Parker’s “Magna Carta (An Embroidery)” (2015) several times, meaning I’d read more of the 2015 snapshot of the Wikipedia entry of the MC than the charter itself.
Parker’s artwork fascinated me, not least because I’d organised a Wiki edit-a-thon (on feminist filmmakers) and been a contributor to several others. The idea of freezing an entry at a single moment in time, with all its footnotes and references and hotlinks and images and headers (but not its behind-the-scenes edit notes, the ‘other side’ where the messy stitching, as it were, can be seen) charmed me in that way that something just on the edge of being utterly ridiculous and raising a million objections and being incredibly annoying can just tip into charming because it dwells into its paradox. The incredible hours of stitching, undertaken in collaboration with the prisoners' organisation Fine Cell Work, and their parallel to both the work of constitutional wrangling and Wikipedia editing, the bringing together of craft, profession and digital hobby, of work that crosses and blurs gender roles, the reminder that laws have their own obsolescence written into them, that the law is used against us not to free us even as it is subject to interpretation, to crafting… As well as being very, very big indeed, the artwork was A Lot.
It turns out the Magna Carta is as well. It’s written in tiny, tiny copperplate Latin with almost no gaps between the words. It’s also not one document, any more than a Wikipedia “page” is: there’s four versions (1215, 1216/1217, 1225, 1297) and multiple copies, although only four exemplifications of the 1215 charter survive, including not one but two at the British Library (yes, they have a spare in case one gets damaged, and one didn’t even get damaged). There’s also a legible translation into modern English, and using William Blackstone’s 1759 numbering of clauses, posted on the wall, an object about ten times the size of the parchment, in a strange reversal of the usual relation of museal object or artwork and text panel. And it was here, looking at the translation within the framework of being at the library to research Jewish liturgical texts, that the whole “charter of rights and freedoms” fell apart.
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I will admit I looked at it and quailed inwardly. It’s the very definition of tl;dr. There’s a lahhhht of it. But as I skimmed with my expert bookseller eye, a few things did stand out to me as being very much not what I’d been taught about the charter in school, or read about in liberal and even radical histories. First of all, the deal is entirely between the King (John, in the first instance) and his barons. Why are they making a deal? So the barons will stop annoying the king, and particularly limiting feudal payments. Why o why were feudal payments so high? Two words.
The Crusades.
About a third of the charter is taken up with clauses about repaying loans from Jews; or rather, not repaying them and not having to. While this might seem quite recondite for a national charter (and there’s certainly some academic waffle out there about these clauses relating solely to the independent of the churches in the City of London or something), it only seems that way if the narrative of English history has been shorn of its complexity. Barely a generation before the charter, John’s older brother Richard had buckled his swash and set off for the Crusades (three at least, plus war with France). Wars, especially sailing overseas ones, are very expensive and Richard needed a lot of money, which he borrowed and levied from the baronial class, who in turned borrowed it from Jewish money-lenders (remember here that money-lending was one of the few professions open to Jews, and that Christians were barred from it).
This put both Richard and the barons in a difficult position as a) they didn’t really want to have to pay it back, and b) Richard had caused a pogrom in London by having Jews (from whom he wanted to borrow money) thrown out of his coronation and beaten, which led to a wholesale massacre and arson; then, in order to stabilise the city, he ordered the worst perpetrators charged and issued an edict (in bad faith, out of concern for his rulership and Crusading and Treasury) stating that Jews should be left alone. This contributed directly and indirectly to the massacre of Jews in York in 1190 at Cliffords Tower, committed by barons who – you guessed it – had taken large, large loans to supply the Crusades, and did not want to pay them back.
So the Magna Carta’s middle section is a sort of ex post facto cover-up for a massacre presented in the guise of trying to prevent another one by silencing the vulnerable party. It would be John’s grandson Edward I who expelled the remaining Jewish community of England in 1290.
Whose rights exactly does the Magna Carta secure again?
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It was mildly astonishing to me that the MC mentioned Jews at all, as I would have imagined that this would have been a much bigger feature of teaching about it at my Jewish faith primary school. #Representation. The difficult interconnections not only between Jews and money-lending, but between Jews and the Crusades – between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia as they are entwined, but also as the former is weaponised for a millennium to fuel the latter – were undoubtedly hard to wrap up in a Year 4 lesson. But I can’t think of anything more compelling to think about right now, in relation to fossil fuels and Israel’s ongoing assault on and occupation of Palestine, and that they are connected.
If the Magna Carta is a document of anything, it’s a document of the English monarchy and aristocracy taking the first steps into overseas colonialism (and indeed, of how that began at home: the last quarter of the document is a broken promise to return Welsh lands to Welsh landowners on John’s return from the Crusades). Like CND, the Crusades do not get a ton of coverage in the broad mainstream narrative of English history – at least, not any more. Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves is a surprising exception, in that it at least acts as a reminder that the English Crusaders set off from Nottingham (I accidentally went to the pub that they set off from, which is a tourist attraction that celebrates a colonial war, fun). “We’re here because you were there” begins with the loony tune project of the Crusades, with its hypocritical veil of faith, liberating Jerusalem for Jesus, oh and massive Byzantine and Ottoman wealth, and gaining a crucial point on the Silk Road, eh what!
The Magna Carta is nothing but a pacification of the baronial class so they will keep funding Christofascist colonialism in Palestine and the Levant.
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The Crusaders did not know about crude oil, but their rampaging actions laid the groundwork for what became resource extractivist colonial interference from the 19th century onwards. They did know about millenarianism (they kind of invented it), aka the Christofascist drive to control Jerusalem and Palestine in time for the (Second, if you’re Christian) Coming of the Messiah. But even without fossil fuels, Palestine and Syria were foundational sites for Western proto-capitalist extraction, initially in terms of trade.
As Salma Harland writes in the devastatingly beautiful Spring 2024 Gaza! Gaza! Gaza! issue of Arablit Quarterly, created in collaboration with Gazan litmag Majalla 28, Gaza’s history as a settlement goes back to 3500-3300 BCE, although the first written mention of its name –as Gazatu – found to date is in an Egyptian account of the Battle of Megiddo (which gives the Biblican Armageddon its name). Gaza appears in later Egyptian diplomatic documents as a site of geopolitical significance with an Egyptian ruler reporting directly to the pharaoh. Gaza is a nexus between Egypt (and thus Africa), the Western Mediterranean, the Levant and Asia, a meeting- and trading-point with the vast and historical weight of Egypt on one side, and of Persia on the other, and a dense constellation of peoples, languages, gods, customs, stories, plants, metalwork, textiles, jewels and then alphabets swirling around it. Looking over medieval Arabic poetry saluting Gaza, Harland concludes that the city’s “origin story is that of an important crossroads between cultures and communities, as well as a place of refuge. This was a Gaza that took in those who needed shelter, treating them with generosity and grace” (123).
In coins and stone tablets and inscriptions on buildings, in ceramic shards and celebrated poems, Harland finds and lays out a cosmopolitan history that acts as a reminder that fixed national borders are a recent imposition but that the drive of rulers and their supporting wealthy classes to own, define and exploit territory regardless of its caretaking inhabitants is not.
This multi-layered history of conquests (from the Egyptians through the Crusades to Napoleon) through which Gaza persisted “with generosity and grace” makes Israel’s destruction of its archaeological, architectural, ecological, intellectual and civic heritage all the starker for its deliberateness – which is not an effect of the recent assault, but dates back many years, as Yara Hawari described for the New Arab in 2022, in response to a report by Forensic Architecture. There are accounts of Israeli archaeologists, in their millenarian quest for early Bronze Age Canaanite shards, actually implementing Eddie Izzard’s “Speed Archaeology” parody routine, using mechanical diggers to swiftly and irrevocably destroy layers and layers compressing millennia of Palestinian life.
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Fossil means “that which can be obtained by digging.” In Latin, a ditch is fossa, hence the Fosse Way being the name for the Roman road that ran (and still underlines some modern roads) from Exeter to Lincoln, and which was probably initially dug as a defensive ditch (against the Welsh, aka Brythonic, or Britons). Googling fossa (even with the helpful &udm=14, a web filter that resets Google search back to 2014 or so: no AI, no overtly dominant shopping SEOs, no knowledge panels, no ads), will however lead you to zero ditch information but you will spend a lot of time looking at the very compelling Cryptoprocta [hidden anus] ferox, a wild cat that is the largest mammalian carnivore on Madagascar; fosa is its Malagasy name, possibly from the Iban word for a cat, or the Malay word for a weasel, or some circulating, trading back-and-forth conversation across the ocean about sleek, sinuous, slinking, keenly biting mammals.
Every word is a fossil: or rather, every meaning is a fossil in the older sense of dug up, unearthed, brushed off; while every word is a fossil in the modern sense (from 1723) of a ‘petrified organism’. Sue Parfitt and Judy Bruce are not fossils in the late Victorian informal sense of ‘a person with outdated ideas’, an ageist word often applied to older people as any age band is an even homogenous class of experience, belief and action. But, as Parfitt implies when she says she is called to do this work for life on earth, she is a petrified organisms: aren’t we all?
Petrified means ‘turned to stone’, and through its association with Medusa means ‘so afraid I can’t move’. Parfitt and Bruce moved: they got the emergency hammer to break the glass, in a witty reversal of what you’re supposed to do in case of fire.
Fuel means ‘fire’: from the Old French feuaile (like feu) for wood and other burnable objects, which itself comes in a winding way from focus, which means hearth, homefire. In medieval Latin charters like the MC, focalia shows up in the context of the obligation to furnish or the right to demand supplies of fuel. So the Crusades and combustion are indirectly linked, by hierarchies of power and the fires needed for roasting and heating, but also for smithing and other proto-industries, especially as Northern Europe (particularly England) is increasingly deforested for house- and ship-building; for trade and war, and their imbrication.
This is focusing: the shift from hearth to charter, from charcoal-burners to coal. In those gaps, focus itself gets abstracted from the fire to radiant heat to light to geometry, via the idea that the eyes emit beams of light that meet at the object being seen – the focus. From geometry to optics and acoustics, and abstracted further into focus groups, the realities of fire falling away into bureaucratic verbiage.
When the hammer hits the glass, something comes alive: histories implicit in words and in documents are revealed by the integrity explicit in deeds. It is not the Magna Carta that ‘guarantees our freedom’ (whose freedom?) but the autonomous actions of individuals who act for and as part of the collective.
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We are petrified organisms: accreting pollutions of all kinds, our organs mineralised, in shock, hardened, breaking down. Being petrified can make it hard to take action; being set among petrified narratives, statuary of kings and barons swinging their swords at our heads but claiming they are handing us liberty, can make it harder still.
The narratives and words we need are often hidden from us: broken down, or distorted in Perseus’s mirror shield to frighten us. And yet they are also all around us, in magazines, websites, poems, texts, conversations, newsletters, billions and billions of acts of generosity. Like Margaret Killjoy’s newsletter this week, “A Short and Incomplete Guide for New Activists,” which helped me think about how I come to taking action through my hesitancy by saying:
If you know what your risk models are, you can make better decisions. Maybe you’re fine with a spirited march, but once windows start getting broken, you decide you want to leave so that if you do risk arrest, you don’t risk being framed for property destruction… It’s also important to know your risk levels (which can, of course, shift) because there are, well, predators in the ranks of direct action activists.
I love Killjoy’s brilliant fiction (get in on the crowdfunder for her magical new trans fantasy novel The Sapling Cage), and seeing how she works these propositions out through her characters, particularly in the Danielle Cain duology but also the moving, melancholy anti/war novel A Country of Ghosts, gives me tools to put the compressed guidelines into inner and outer action.
To keep digging. To revel deliciously in the fact that, with just a little playful leeway, we could translate “fossil fuels” as “[to] ditch fuels.” We can see that the name already contains its (dis)solution, its instruction to refocus: to dig into what matters, what centres us. For some of you, like me, that might be supporting Fossil Free Books in their campaign to get both extractivist climate chaos-causing fuels and genocidal states out of the book world through divestment from and by Baillie Gifford.
An act of civil disobedience by two experienced and committed activists was a shone a light for me on the Magna Carta’s hidden history, how its all-but-unmentioned focus on invading Palestine sinks the historical link between crude oil, colonialism and Islamophobia seven hundred years or so deeper. It’s also a reminder that all our rights and freedoms are connected to each other’s: that we cannot continue to be numb to being lied to. We cannot remain petrified – including in the idea that stone is not alive, is not a living subject as well as a document, does not have agency.
As Sarah Dowling writes – moving through the meaning of stone – in her formidable review of Nisga’a author Jordan Abel’s recent novel Empty Spaces, which I am currently reading at the rate of a few pages a day, that I then re-read, for its astonishingnesses:
the Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky argued that the purpose of art is “to make a stone stony.” He meant something like this: we are easily desensitized to everyday things like the little pebbles that litter our paths… Routine, automatic perception flattens out our view of “things, clothes, furniture,” even “your wife, and the fear of war.” But art restores “sensation,” showing us the world in a new way. It forces us to reorient ourselves toward and within what is all around us.
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Empty Spaces reignites the “fear of war,” just as Shklovsky said art should. It restores sensation against stone-faced indifference. Newly attuned to the rocks that lie all around us, awakened to their size, their heft, their solidity, to the way they could cut through the air, Abel acknowledges that his task – as well as ours – is to halt the relentless progress of a plot we’ve seen unfold before. This novel shatters the murderous fantasy of a space that has been emptied just for us.
Time to tap away at ourselves – the words we use, the histories we were told – with a fossil chisel and hammer, breaking ourselves out of stone and brushing away the residue that obscures who we are and what we know. We know the space is not empty although it has been relentlessly emptied. We know the safety glass is an illusion, that it seeks to protect from our small violence a system that enacts huge violence. The safety glass can be a mirror in which we see ourselves, and strike. |