“To transcend oneself, to leave one’s home, to the point of leaving oneself, is to substitute for the other…This openness of space as an openness of self without a world, without a place, utopia, the not being walled in…is proximity of the other which is possible only as responsibility for the other…” Emmanuel Levinas
My friend Rachel and I were in London for a celebration at Leo Baeck College, marking 25 years of LGBT rabbis being ordained in Britain. During our free time, we visited Postman’s Park, a space of green quiet in the heart of London’s financial district. This is a gated garden with benches and paths winding through beds of purple and vermilion flowers on long green stems mixed with varied foliage; hunter’s green, chartreuse, chalky white. Built into a wall at one end of the park is a monument to human decency.
London is dotted with enormous statues of heroes on horseback, most of them wealthy white men celebrated for acts of martial courage or statecraft; acts that, justifiably or not, cost some other people their lives. Toward the end of the 19th Century, an artist named George Frederic Watts, the son of a piano-maker thought that there should be in London at least one monument to working class people who saved lives at the cost of their own. In 1900, Watts’s vision, now called The Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice, was realized in Postman’s Park.
Into that wall at the back of the park are set ceramic tiles. Each bears a name, a story, and a year:
Godfrey Maule Nicholson Manager of a Stratford distillery and George Elliot Robert Underhill workman. Successively went down a well to rescue comrades and were poisoned by gas. July 12, 1901. Alice Ayres daughter of a bricklayer’s labourer who by intrepid conduct saved 3 children from a burning house at Union Street Borough at the cost of her own young life. April 24 1885. Samuel Lowdell Bargeman. Drowned while rescuing a boy at Blackfriars. Feb 25 1887. He had saved two other lives.
Rachel and I did what Jews do at graves: we left stones, doing our part in laying the dead to rest. Rachel chanted Psalm 23, “HaShem is my shepherd…” We shed tears of awe. Here was a shrine to a special variety of hero who reminds us of a sometimes-forgotten heritage. If human beings can be capable of shocking cruelty and greed, so too do we produce people who, in moments of immediate decision reveal a reflexive care for others, a greatness of soul.
Of course, when Jews mark a celebration, as we had done at Leo Baeck, you know that study will be involved. During the colloquium, I had the honor and pleasure of conducting learning about the work of Emmanuel Levinas, my favorite Jewish thinker.
Levinas taught that the human subject comes into itself in relationship with the other person—not the categorical, sociological Other, but the immediate human neighbor in proximity to oneself, the “one who comes along.” He wrote in the long shadow of the Shoah.
Levinas survived the war, because he was taken prisoner as a French soldier and put into a stalag, not a death camp. But his entire extended family, whom he had left behind in Lithuania when he moved to France as a student, was murdered. (His wife and daughter survived, because they were hidden by brave French Catholics who risked their own lives to do it.) Levinas was fascinated, not with the banality of war and power, but with those people who hoarded and stole bread in the death camps—not to eat but to give to those too sick to obtain it for themselves. He was awed by the human genius for what he called substitution, the ability to find meaning despite one’s own unjust and untimely death in the fact that others would live on.
Levinas would have loved the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice.
It had seemed serendipitous to me that I heard a story about the Memorial on NPR as I prepared for London. Visiting the place was a highlight of the trip for me. I was so happy to find this unique installation and so looking forward to telling everyone all about it. Then I went to the Google for a little extra background on Watts the artist and received a nasty shock.
Turns out that what I had taken to be a work of pointed anti-monumentality was not Watts’s only mode of expression. Watts had, in fact, capped his career with a textbook example of martial monumentalism—a bit of naked beefcake called Physical Energy, intended as a tribute to the imperialist Cecil Rhodes–a figure Watts admired. (He also professed to admire Atilla, Ghengis Khan and Mohammed, so, at least, it wasn’t only white Christian conquerors whom Watts venerated; he seems to have had a warm spot for any masculine hero who imposed his will.) Nevertheless, Watts was the author of a pamphlet written during the Boer War called “Our Race as Pioneers,” a defense of British imperialism. Oh. Oh dear.
This working-class champion who had turned down the opportunity to become a baronet, a British noble, and had called into being a tribute to human solidarity, could see only a glorious march toward progress in white imperialist conquest. Watts, whom a biographer called “The Last Great Victorian,” died in 1904 as the 20th Century began, never knowing that century would be littered with the wreckage that conquerors and colonizers left behind.
From the other side of that wreckage emerged thinkers like Levinas who insist that we learn to live in a world of multiplicity, in which the other person’s difference is a wonder that elicits our receptive response, not a provocation that demands retaliation or erasure through conquest. Levinas taught that the acts of substitution performed by those memorialized in Postman’s Park teach us more about worthy heroism than the deeds of conquerors ever could.
I still believe that Levinas would have loved the memorial. But Physical Energy would probably have earned his scorn. At any rate, it earned mine. What had begun as a simple story of my delight in an affecting work of art was becoming something else. This was turning into a story about the wound at the heart of Western white working-class movements, the corruption of racism and identification with national projects that depend on racist narratives. We see it in the rise of so-called populism in the United States—a kind of faux working-class styling on the part of born elites like Donald Trump and George W. Bush who affect regional accents and the kind of crudity that they were taught to associate with the less privileged. The painful truth is, sometimes that deception works, especially when it offers white working class people a place above the bottom rung of hierarchy, be it imperialist or racist—and when it offers working class men a heroic vision of themselves that comports with traditional (and by traditional I mean reactionary) visions of masculinity.
Too often, trade unionists and other labor groups have been seduced by the story of white national pride, giving their support and their lives to the colonial projects of the men whom they enrich with their sweat and sacrifice. G.F Watts, the son of an artisan who celebrated the personal heroism of working people had also celebrated the conquerors who found ways to waste that capacity for sacrifice on projects of dominion.
All right then. This would be one of those kinds of stories.
And then I read further. And complications multiplied. In his autobiography, Dreams From My Father, President Barack Obama describes a moment of spiritual exaltation, simultaneously a flight and a grounding, that seized him during a Sunday morning at Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s (much misrepresented) Trinity United Church of Christ. The reverend’s sermon centered on a painting by—none other than GF Watts, a painting called “Hope.” The canvas portrays the figure of a blindfolded woman, curled around a battered harp, of which only one string is left, straining to produce a sound. The reverend’s oratory, linking this image of that pale, allegorical figure to the stories of his very real Black congregants who struggled to pay their bills and nourish their relationships with one another, brought the future president to tears.
The intertextuality goes even further. The title of Reverend Wright’s sermon was “The Audacity of Hope,” a phrase which would become the title of one of Obama’s books and would crystalize the message of his historic campaign. Also–the Reverend was not describing a painting that he himself had seen in the original. He was harking back to a sermon he had heard, given by another Black clergyperson who had seen the work and been himself inspired.
So–art created by a working-class born, Romantic, European, imperialist apologist becomes, at various levels of remove, a source of spiritual inspiration for two Black Christian preachers, a future president, and a queer anti-racist rabbi.
All right then again. Maybe cultural appropriation can go in two directions, maybe we can rifle the toolbox of the dominant culture for whatever will move us just a little further toward that world of peace and plenty we fight for, that promised land we remember although we have never been there. Audre Lourde taught us, famously, that, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” On the other hand, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas’ friend and sparring partner suggests that we have no tools, no language, verbal or visual, untainted by the dominant culture. Says Derrida, “I speak only one language, and it is not my own.”
Derrida and Levinas sparred because Levinas believed in the Transcendent, a beyond-being Whom one might as well call God and Whose ongoing revelation we discover in the face and speech of the other person. He agreed with Derrida that all human knowledge is partial, fallible, situated and interested, but he believed that speaking itself is a manifestation of something like the universal—the interhuman. For Derrida, the discursive fields into which we are born, the linguistic maps of the world, the discourses of manners and custom and narrative, and the concrete conditions that situate them, are all there is. We can seize hold of that cultural material and begin to write or speak or govern ourselves into something new, but we do not choose the material we get to work with.
Queer theorist Jose Esteban Munoz in his important book, Disidentifications accepts that, “identity is enacted by minority subjects who must work with/resist the conditions of (im)possibility that dominant culture generates.” We are not immune to the power of those images that shaped our consciousness, even when we disaffiliate from the worldview that produced them. But perhaps we can recast their meaning—in the way that Frederick Douglass recast the American constitution to mandate the inclusion of Black troops in the union army; that same constitution which had legalized slavery. In the same way that our rabbis determined that “eye for an eye” means monetary indemnities, that is to say, restorative justice for people who have been harmed. In other words, we take our inspiration where we find it and we wield it as we can. As did Reverend Wright and President Obama.
If this turned out to be, in part, a story about disillusion, it is not a story of defeat. Reverend Wright really did uplift his congregants with his sermon about received hope, inspiring a successful campaign by the first Black president in US history. Rachel and I really did respond to the Memorial to Human Self-Sacrifice as a living commentary on Levinas, an inspiring teaching. And it’s not a bad thing that I was reminded to scrutinize my sources of inspiration and untangle the threads from which progressive narratives are woven, determining each time what to keep and what to discard.
These days, in the United States and around the world, people are tearing the old monuments down. Physical Energy might go the way of Columbus and Stonewall Jackson. But I do believe that the memorial in Postman’s Park will be allowed to stay, a green space amid commercial concrete and steel, a reminder of what people can do.