By Jim Aitken
Michael Rosen loves words. He loves their sense, their sounds, their layers of meaning and the uses they can be put to. He does not like the way politicians use them to hide their deeds, their true intent. He does not like obfuscation in language whether in speech or on the page.
For Beckett ‘words are all we have’ and for Sartre words can be ‘loaded pistols.’ Rosen’s latest collection ‘Words United’ (published by Culture Matters) would seem to accept both these definitions. In his Preface he tells us that our ‘words are not enough to express the horror and depravity of what’s going on’ in our world today.
Yet, like Beckett’s characters who must keep on using words, must keep talking against all the existential odds, Rosen will keep on writing, keep on placing his words in the right order to serve his meaning and intention. He then questions, ‘could words puncture the armour that surrounds our politicians as they engineer war, starvation and mass killing?’ All he can say is that he hopes so and this is where his words become ‘loaded pistols.’
He knows how to fire his words and who to fire them at. But he is also going to have a good time using them, and this collection is witty, amusing and entertaining as well as well as being politically astute. The collection has been written in the last few months with a couple of poems written earlier. It is not all poetry – there are humorous anecdotes, sketches and some performance pieces. The book is written in three overlapping sections: Words, Words, Words; What Words Do We Trust?; and Words United.
Bogus words from Netanyahu
And the subject matter is largely about the genocide going on in Gaza. He casually picks up a comment made by Netanyahu ‘about our ancestral lands.’ These words get Rosen thinking about ‘how things are going in my ancestral lands.’ He thinks about Harrow, where he was born, on to Pinner, Rickmansworth and Muswell Hill ‘where I was brought up.’ He muses that Netanyahu maybe didn’t have these ancestral lands in mind. Then he goes on to Whitechapel and Bethnal Green ‘where my parents were brought up.’ Again, he thinks that Netanyahu probably didn’t have them in mind.
From these places he then goes to Massachusetts where his father was born, on to Poland, Lithuania and the Austro-Hungarian Empire where ancestors did come from only to realise that Netanyahu didn’t mean these places either. He ends the poem:
I mean, I can’t even go to the flat
where I lived as a kid
ring the bell
and say, ’Hi, this is my ‘ancestral land.’
I don’t think I’d get very far with that.
This poem, like others, comes about through the misuse of words. The words are examined carefully and shown to be bogus. Exactly the same technique is used in the poem ‘Defiant Words’ where he takes the Chief Rabbi to task for talking about ‘our heroic soldiers.’ Rosen suggests that the Chief Rabbi and himself ‘already have one army: the British Army.’ He then brings up ‘the fury that’s been flung at those/who have suggested that/the deeds of Israel/are somehow the deeds of all Jews.’
He then indulges in an important digression invoking Norman Tebbitt’s cricket test of loyalty for Britons of Indian, Pakistani and West Indian descent failing that test by supporting their ancestral lands. By implication, the Chief Rabbi is actually showing dual loyalty and would fail Tebbitt’s test. Rosen then reminds those who accept the narrative of our heroic soldiers to remember the soldiers they align themselves with whose ‘origins lie/with those who once blew up a hotel/full of British citizens but are, mysteriously/not described as terrorists.’
He questions, ’Who is this ‘our’? He then says:
It’s Jews.
Isn’t that me?
I’m Jewish, aren’t I?
Rosen then mentions the heroic soldiers he refuses to align himself with:
going about their soldiering heroically
killing and torturing
heroically bulldozing and flattening
now heroically making sure
that 2 million people starve to death.
The term ‘our heroic soldiers’ has been shown what it really means and he defies and refuses to have any part of it. Clearly, you would have to be Jewish to write this since the Chief Rabbi’s words were directed at Jews, and it is worth recalling the politics of Rosen’s parents. They were both members of the YCL, opposing Mosley’s fascists in London’s east end during the 1930s. They were involved in the genuinely heroic Battle of Cable Street in 1936 when Mosley’s fascists, supported by the Daily Mail, attempted to march through the east end where many Jews were living at the time. Many Jews were communists in those days and active in the Labour movement. Other working- class groups like the Irish also opposed Mosley, and there was a clearer sense of class consciousness which seems to have got lost these days. Then it was uniforms and now it is suits. Then the problem for fascists and racists was Jews – today it is Moslems and migrants, net zero and wokery.
Rosen takes issue with those ‘people who don’t like the word “Islamophobic.”’ As he considers alternatives, he frames his response in a subtle way, seeking ‘another word/that describes ‘attacking a mosque’/or attacking people because they ‘’look Muslim’’, thus effectively legitimising the word Islamophobic.
The words ‘Promised Land’ have an unusual twist for Rosen. An anonymous family come to claim their ancestral home someone else lives in. They are told by the residents ‘my people have always lived here.’ The family persist with their claim and have a stack of documents to support their claim to the house. The residents are told, ’Turn to the page marked ‘Promised Land.’ When the residents ask who wrote this, they are told that God did, ’God wrote them, look/Here come His tanks.’
Brave words
This is not merely clever writing, it is brave writing. And bravery is required today to speak out against the unspeakable things that are happening. Rosen has been consistently speaking out for most of his life and it is encouraging that he still espouses socialist values which rise above national, ethnic and religious differences, believing that the human race is the only race in all its wondrous differences.
There are a few amusing poems about his parents. They both worked in education and obviously gave Michael a love for language and words. In ‘My Father’s Words’ Rosen recalls the time when he was doing homework and his father asked what his homework was about. ‘Stuff,’ replies the schoolboy. The father’s persistence breaks the boy down and it turns out Michael had been doing a piece on the Chartists. The father then gives the son some value-added education on the Chartists:
Then my father went over to the books
that my parents had on their shelves
like Marx on Engels
and Engels on Marx
and Marx on Marx
and Engels on Engels
and he pulled down a book called something like:
‘What Michael Needs to Know About the Chartists’
and he dropped it on the table.
This tale has all the hallmarks of similar tales that the comedian Alexei Sayle once gave on stage about his Jewish and communist parents. Naturally, such memories would leave a lasting impression on a child. But for Rosen this memory goes deeper still as his father then told him what Michael’s great-grandfather once said to him. His Zeyde (grandfather) asked his father, ’You know vossiz a union? ’The Zeyde then takes a box of matches and says to Michael’s father:
One match you can break.
Two matches, you can break.
Three matches you can break.
But take the whole box of matches,
you can’t break.
That is vossiz a union.
This lesson, for Rosen, is as relevant today as it was when Rosen first believes this tale was told in 1890, on to when his father heard it ‘around 1930’. We need to be retelling this story all over again –
this tale of class solidarity is incredibly pertinent today.
Another tale from childhood is told when Rosen recalls saying to his parents that he likes Biology, Instantly, they respond, ‘You could become ….. a DOCTOR.’ While his parents were teachers and thought of teaching as worthy, their interior league table of professions rated being a doctor higher. But above that being ‘a Jewish Communist Doctor’ was higher still. Rosen plays with his reader by informing them, ‘And you know what they did next, don’t you.’ They took him to see a Jewish Communist Doctor ‘who could tell me how to become a/Jewish Communist Doctor.’
Playful words
There is a wonderful playfulness in Rosen’s writing and it comes from the stories of his childhood but no doubt more so in his long life of working with children, listening to them, engaging with them and sharing his love of words with them. His style of writing has the simplicity of what could come from a child yet he is dealing with subject matter that is politically mature. Bringing the storytelling technique to political discourse makes the politics more illuminating on the page. It also makes it more accessible to readers of all kinds.
As well as this playfulness, Rosen reveals a concise logic in everything he writes, a process of ratiocination, the kind of exact thinking shown by the metaphysical poets in the careful way they developed their poems. Like them, Rosen knows exactly where he is going in his work and knows how he intends to conclude well in advance of getting there. The love of words creates a playfulness in his work but there is a clear ratiocination at work as well. This wonderful combination of qualities makes his collection very readable.
For example, Rosen can also take a commonplace word like qualms and run with it as he applies it to the genocide in Gaza. In a rather innocuous way he states, ’Tonight I’m thinking about ‘qualms.’ He gives an example that could apply to qualms about ‘expelling someone from school.’ And to fit the mood of having mentioned school he says, ‘Qualms are quivers of disquiet/when you feel queasy.’ Such language is the language of teaching alliteration in the classroom. It can and should be playful and enjoyable. He then remarks, ‘I thought that people would have qualms about Gaza.’
Rosen then tells us that the two main Jewish newspapers don’t seem to have any qualms. He imagines possible Jews having qualms about the genocide but being afraid of voicing them ‘in case they’ll be accused of being self-hating.’ In a playful way he continues, ‘No-one wants to be accused of having/self-hating qualms.’ He then suggests that those who have no qualms and say they believe it is necessary to wage war in Gaza and ‘it’s all the other people’s fault’, Rosen cautions:
do they catch sight of the flattened cities
the terrified, scarred and bleeding people?
The Tik Tok films of laughing soldiers
grabbing the innards of people’s flats, cupboards
and drawers.
Finally, he imagines ‘the qualm is put back in the cupboard’ and a sense of acceptance descending on the group, ’when someone says that it only looks bad/because people who hate us say it’s bad.’ Michael Rosen remains appalled at what Israel is doing.
In the poem ‘Trump has words with Trump’ Michael explores how the hidden, secretive face of capitalism has now turned into the full-frontal horror show under Trump. Before his ascent to power, capitalism and big business seemed to keep the masses at bay. It was generally said in the past ‘there is no ruling class/acting in league with itself/running the show.’ Rosen, however, remained curious about the huge disparities in wealth, and how ‘the wealth could co-exist/with the poverty.’ The arrival of Trump has changed all that:
What’s happened is that
business is government
and
government is business.
For Rosen ‘Trump is/the ruling class/The ruling class/is Trump. Where’s your liberalism now in the free world? he seems to ask. And in a delightful poem called ‘Rags’, a son asks his father, ’Daddy, what’s that pile of rags in the corner? The father replies,’ That, dear, is the cloak of liberalism.’ Contemporary capitalism, or late capitalism as some have it, has no qualms about being nothing more than business management run by a caste of mediocrities and opportunists. This is how all western nations operate today. The centre has moved to the far right and Rosen takes issue with Starmer for his ‘island of strangers’ speech with its nod to Enoch Powell.
In Rosen’s poem of the same name, he addresses Starmer directly and recalls the time he nearly died from Covid. Rosen had a gruesome time trying to recover as he had difficulty breathing. He had to undergo a tracheostomy, had to learn how to start walking again with a stick and then without a stick. All this was made possible by:
people on this ‘island of strangers’
from China, Jamaica, Brazil, Ireland
India, USA, Nigeria and Greece.
These three lines are used twice in the poem to emphasise their international dimension,
as Rosen concludes by saying to Starmer,’ If ever you’re in need as I was/may you have an island of strangers/like I had.’
Inane and biased words
In a delightful flourish of sketches, ‘Great Interviews: Words From The Past And Present’, Rosen wittily yet seriously attempts to capture the inanity of our media. He starts with Israel speaking: ‘The reason we’re not letting food into Gaza has nothing to do with depriving the people of Gaza of food.’ The interviewer, like the ones on the BBC, simply says, ’Thanks,’ followed by, ’And now here’s Fred with the weather news/Later in the show, can double-glazing help you lose weight?
This is the puerile talking shop that capitalism has become. A series of variations on this interview with Israel has Julius Caesar being asked about rebuilding Carthage, ‘On the ruins of the old Carthage where 1000s of Carthaginians were killed? Caesar’s brusque response is to say, ‘Carthage belongs to Rome.’ Caesar is duly thanked by the interviewer who then he finishes off with, ‘And here’s Flavia with today’s cookery tips.’
There are some hilarious ones about the Siege of Leningrad, India in 1858, one jointly with a Starmer and Trump double-act, and a delightful one by God which people of faith should also find amusing.
God is asked if he gave Israel to the Jews. God replies Yes. He is then asked, ’Did you own the land that you gave to the Jews? God replies that he owns everywhere, to which the interviewer asks, ‘Have you given away any other lands? God replies, ‘Yes. Yorkshire.’
‘Words United’ even has its own slogan – ‘Words united, will never be defeated.’ You simply can’t get better than that. There are so many delights in this book and as readers we should all be grateful that Michael Rosen not only recovered from Covid but also that he never became a doctor.
Words United by Michael Rosen, 120 pps., £10 inc. p. and p., is available here. All profits will go to Medical aid for Palestine.
