“It’s time to build a kind of village here / amid the concrete and illiterate, grimy fear” - Cathal Coughlan, “On The Parish”
Around the end of 1999, I started a sequence of poems called The Spirit Zone, named after one of the areas of the Greenwich “Millennium” Dome. This was the second one:
Discuss, over spritzers, the shape of the estate,
the shade of things to come. Ésprit de corps
has gothic overtones: the undertaking
proposed could involve one hell of a jolt.
Put your hands together for the body
politic; its multiple piercings, brandings,
lesions; tattoo-removal scars the marks
of erased liaisons. This is your cowed
Leviathan, cool Britannia newly risen
from her various slumbers. The jaded ring
inseparable, in spite of much soaping
and scouring, from the purloined digit,
or finger of accusation. The rigid neck.
The brow in stitches. The stiff upper lip.
That’s enough, maybe, about the Blairite attempted reification of national identity. What about The Imagined Village?
Calling yourself “The Imagined Village” is rather like saying “I know, but anyway…”. There are people - an alarming number, and on the increase - who talk earnestly about fairy magic, run fairy fairs (or faery fayres) and workshops, dress up as fairies, write books, paint pictures, sing songs and tell stories about fairies and so on. Most of them know, I think, that there are no such things as fairies; but anyway…fairies are good, because they encourage a childish sense of wonder in our natural environment, and because writing books, painting pictures, singing songs and telling stories are all enriching human activities. OK, but the question remains: why fairies? And why, specifically, flower-fairy-cum-tinkerbell-type fairies in trim little fairy outfits, flitting about waving little wands and sprinkling magic fairy dust over things? And don’t tell me you just like fairies. Nobody over the age of eleven just likes fairies.
Likewise with “villages”. Saying that you know your village is an imaginary one, that what you’re trying to do is imagine a more inclusive, vibrant, culturally hybrid and fashion-conscious imaginary village, is all well and good, but Neil Palmer’s question remains a good one: why a village, specifically? Given a blank space in the midst of the urban, a region of inarticulacy, a place jets fly over, what is it about that space that suggests a village - imagined or otherwise - to you?
The actual music - the “but anyway” part - sometimes gets a bit cluttered, burdened with superfluity. It includes a lot of things, and mixes them together very expertly, but there’s a flavour of “look how well these culturally disparate elements go together” - frying up last night’s curry as bubble-and-squeak. It’s not quite “Tibetan pornography”, to borrow Badiou’s formula for the apogee of consumerist particularism, but it tends to blend rather than refine, and to layer its “disparate elements” in discrete strata (folk fiddle on top with bhangra drums underneath, say) rather than allow them to really work each other over. Does anybody involved play anything essentially different from what they usually play, or is the point just getting them to play together?
On the matter of “English identity”, what we know (thanks in part to Georgina Boyes) is that identitarian constructions of this kind tend to be imaginary solutions to economic and political problems (cf English Literature). The argument seems to be that we can make of such a construction an imaginary solution to our problems, rather than those of the ruling classes. “But anyway”, a re-imagined Englishness might be a means by which currently latent and inarticulate political currents, disparate aspects of our shared experience of living in this particular polity at this particular time, could be drawn together and given voice. Neil Palmer was rightly concerned with the hegemonic aspects of this: who’s doing the drawing-together, and in the interests of what agenda? The problem is finally in the appeal to a shared experience itself, to the cultural-difference-transcending conviviality of “half-english” friends and neighbours, which fails to register the colossal differences of class and wealth that separate neighbouring districts even within the same small town. Is there an Englishness that transcends these inequalities? Is it anything other than a reactionary, pacifying gesture to try to invent one, while the inequalities themselves remain?