an ill-starred letter

to the readers of the future

Why write at all? A lot of the answers to this question have to do with leaving some kind of record of the times. The Dutch-Indonesian writer Tjalie Robinson said it eloquently: ‘Because we have lived and still exist.’ This is not quite my answer, but it does point to a truth about literature that interests me a great deal: that most of what we write is not directed at the present. A record is by definition something that is kept for posterity: for the people of the future.

Journalism is the writing that strives most to approximate the ‘now’, rushing to post or print before history, and people’s attention, have moved on. I’ve devoted the last four years of my life to this work, but I could never really love it. Probably in part because of this hurry, which precludes thinking for a long time about the thing you’re writing about. I’ve always felt a little trapped by the present, I always find myself trying to write a way out of it. Though not completely free of the pressure of the news cycle, working for Jacobin NL was very different than writing for a newspaper. Because it’s a socialist project, the question of how to approach the future played in the background of everything we did.

Now that I’ve come back to fiction and poetry — Jacobin NL is still going strong under a different editor, as I hope it will for many years — and I can afford to shrug off both adherence to fact and relevence to the news cycle, I can come back to what I like to think of as Big Future. I don’t write so future readers know that I have lived and how, because I don’t think they’d find that particularly interesting, but to bridge the gap between them and us, to get out of the present and into the future. A different future, that is, than the one we seem to be heading for. I want us, above all, to get out of this now.

Now, why write a thing called ‘the ill-starred letter’? There are many people on this medium and elsewhere who write about literature and politics. Most of the time they care slightly more about one of either, and use the other to illustrate or explain. Or they care about the fabric of today’s world and want to deploy a diversity of tactics, including literature and political science, to understand what is going on.

I don’t particularly know what’s going on, but I do know that I don’t like it. I’ll leave the interpretation of the world to others: I would like my writing to be useful in changing it. The discussion about ‘engagement’ in literature is often a bit stale, populated by straw men with delusions that their poetry will change the world and spectres of hermit poets. Among activists I’ve often encountered a certain wariness toward ‘political artists,’ whose politics are so sophisticated that they never seem to involve any actual organising of the working class. I get that.

I’m not proposing that I can write the revolution into existence. An often overlooked way for literature to be political, and maybe the only one that makes sense to me, is as something that is of use to a revolutionary actor. Not primarily to instruct or to propagate, but to furnish the difficult work of politics with imagination. Literature can be utopian where theory shouldn’t, and praxis, understandably, struggles to be. Recipes for the cookshops of the future might be undesirable, but visions of their feasts are highly useful to sustain and inspire an ongoing and often hard struggle.

If this approach is interesting to you, you’re in the right place. I will post my thoughts on literature and politics regularly and discuss some books. But mainly I want to show what I mean by doing: I’ll be posting (serialised) fiction and poems. Expect an ill-starred letter every two weeks.