by Jim Aitken
A headline in the Daily Telegraph on the 11th of April this year read, ’Migrants are handed life jackets by the French.’ This implied outrage along with a now customary sneer at France. It was a headline that also summed up the level of inhumanity we have reached; we being the ruling classes in Britain and in the West more generally.
The constant turmoil of capitalism demands scapegoats and right now they are migrants and Muslims. Yet, like everyone else in the world migrants and Muslims remain stubbornly human. The headline was designed to dehumanise the migrants; make them totally unlike ourselves. This outlook justified the slave trade for several hundred years. And it is an outlook that is back in fashion today.
It is also an outlook that needs to take hold of the population at large to justify the relentless drive for more profit at the expense of the masses and the public spending they require. Low wages and cuts to welfare, poor housing and no housing and so much more besides can all be pinned on outside others.
There have been valiant attempts throughout history to challenge this; to seek to change the world of so much hate into so much love. In Fran Lock’s new collection of poems, she takes us back two thousand years; back to source you could say. Like everything else that capitalism touches, religion too has been contaminated and corrupted. Traditional churches have seen their numbers plummet and many now view religion as irrelevant.
Lock tells us in her Foreword that she is not ‘making any claim for the supernatural aspects of Christianity’ but that she does ‘believe in the insurrectionary message carried by Jesus’ words.’ She also maintains that God is not an entity ‘but an action, something we manifest within ourselves every time we stand up for the marginalised or the abused.’
All people who call themselves progressive should have no problem standing with Fran Lock. Her outlook is a socialist one, a communist one in the spirit of that word meaning encompassing and sharing with all. Her outlook is also a feminist one by choosing Mary Magdalene but, ultimately, she chooses the higher form of love, the saving grace that can save us all.
Mary Magdalene, we are told, has come down to us as a conflation of several women called Mary. Gregory the Great turned her into a prostitute who repented her sins for the rest of her life. Clearly, like the Virgin Mary, a good role model for all women to follow; a good form of masculine control, in fact.
But this is not Lock’s Mary Magdalene. Her one is devoted to Jesus and to his message of love over hate. Her Magdalene is also enthralled with justice of the redistributive kind. The riches of the earth should be shared by all. She becomes Jesus’ most ardent apostle where Jesus ‘is not myth, but memory.’ That is an important distinction to be made because the rupture that Jesus created in his world is a memory that needs acting upon in our world today.
Mary recalls her life before the day she met Jesus. She says, ‘our only covenant was suffering / but he called me daughter / that day. The heart was a rinsed wound.’ And what had wounded her was men. Lock suggests that the seven devils she was supposed to be possessed by were in fact seven men who inflicted pain and suffering upon her. This is a radical retelling of the story in the Gospels. She was a victim of the power structures of her day. The real devils are the business leaders, politicians and media magnates who claim:
they are realists, they say.
you say that light gets in through
a crack in their consensus, light gets in
somehow. where hope and rage
can coincide in riot.
We have consensus politics here and elsewhere because all the main parties are capitalist ones. The realism they all speak of is placing profit before people. They all seem to ‘have declared a permanent / victory over the possible. that is / what devils do.’
Mary Magdalene, in Lock’s view, has nothing to be ashamed about. She is ‘scorned. caught on the horns / of debt and sex.’ She will ‘not wear humiliation’s hood.’ The love that is shown to her by another, by Jesus, has taught her that ‘love is justice.’ It also ‘creates / the conditions in which justice / can grow.’ It is also that:
unlooked for thing that aggravates
care. embrace in an age of unwelcome.
an irritant in the eye of ownership.
an open and collective means, not
some dingily privatised end. love
does not end.
This is love radically embraced and felt. People who continue to proclaim the inherent truth and justice of socialist ideas, of communist values do so with love for others at their core. Love is an empty thing indeed if it does not radiate outwards.
Communism – the love that has no boundaries
This is what Fran suggests when she tells us ‘there is a spectre / haunting humankind … there is something stirring … nothing about it / savours the grave. for this is / as strong and stronger than death.’ This is communism, justice, peace, the love that has no boundaries. This cannot be privatised; the sentiments in such words cannot be eradicated. They are too powerful. In the absence of care, we still have the word and what it implies. Such notions of goodness cannot disappear and have been carried down to us these last two thousand years. ‘Our day will come’ is not just a slogan, it is a belief that can become a material force.
Mary berates ‘this tyranny of tyrian shekels’, she berates the ‘pathologies of profit’, seeing in her new sense of love ‘conspicuous sabotage’ and ‘direct action.’ Every protest there has ever been is contained in these terms. They urge us on. They make us confront the version of the Beatitudes that Lock’s Magdalene discovers in Newham, Croydon and Hackney where streets are ‘beleaguered by grief.’ She witnesses ‘towns with eyes like ashtrays for the day’s / stubbed hopes, crawling through mildewed / abandonment.’
All who live in such places – and they are sadly many – are blessed. It does not have to be this way – it never did and does not today. The kingdom of God can be summed up in one word –‘enough.’ No more inequality, no more indefinite detention, managed decline, hostile environment or environmental damage. The rich and powerful have surely had their day in Mary’s words. They should be done ‘pulling the legs from / the poor.’ And it is the many who will save them from themselves eventually – ‘ours will be the hand held out to you, will be / your defeat – and your salvation.’
This is socialism at its magnanimous best. It is not narrow, spiteful or mean, it is generous, open, considerate and kind. However, Mary seems less kind when she thinks of England ‘deep in the seizure / of your ceremonies’ where ‘you shuffle to tuppeny aggro in / carpet slippers, stink on you of tory tweed.’ In these lines we hear the voice of Tory reaction and backwardness; we hear the voice of Reform and Labour too. God could never be ‘an englishman, upright in his martial law’, nor could he be ‘corduroy and carvery beef.’ These are the expressions we associate with the little Englander. They can only grow in size and stature when they realise ‘we are each other … let us in.’
God has to be the opposite of money since ‘capital is gravity / the ugly sum of all we’re tied / to, bound.’ There is a solution to this where God becomes a pair of scissors ‘cutting our strings, setting / us free,’ And setting free the rich as well since they have to ‘outsource’ their ‘conscience to legions / of pin-stripe fetishists’ where their family motto ‘is the plausible denial / of anyone else’s pain.’ This is surely what Sartre had in mind when he spoke of ‘bad faith’ and this is the inauthentic way in which we must all live, since the terms and conditions of our lives are set by the rich. In freeing ourselves, we also set them free.
The ’manacles of money’ and the ‘tentacles of wealth’ reach out to control and restrict us all. The revolutionary response has to be love, the love that comes ’to celebrate, accelerate / not to suffer. yet, when met with nails / and blows – they do not know, they / cannot see – they’re driving our / endurance home.’
Such is the love that Mary has been shown by Jesus; such is its power that she comes to understand ‘that power is / a pocket, both snug / and bottomless.’ This is the love Jesus has preached and the love she feels and understands.
The irritating imperative to do something
Lock told us earlier in her Introduction that she believes in stories and in words. If they ring true then belief should be no problem. Her poem is full of carefully chosen words, carefully arranged. This is incredibly powerful poetry, fierce with love; with a love for justice. She has given us a historical figure in Mary Magdalene who sits well in our age. Were she here today she would be demonstrating against all the injustices of our times. She would be railing against racism and misogyny, against demeaning inequality, against war, against capitalism and all its attendant evils.
The figure, of course, who has inspired Magdalene has been Jesus with his message of love for all regardless of all the differences they may have. As Galatians has it,’ There is neither Jew or Greek, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ The message of Jesus was an insurrectionary one precisely because it was egalitarian. In the temple he turned over the tables of the money men and three days later he was crucified. Yet, the story is handed down; it is memory and lives on as an example.
At the end of the book Fran writes about ‘Our Resurrection’ being something that arrests or interrupts. The dangerous memory of Christ can be this interruption. In this way we –
are the resurrection. the hinge
on which the word hangs,
the axis upon which history
turns.
Lock’s poem can do several things to us. We can admire her skilled use of language, the way she weaves an ancient story for contemporary purposes; we can also rethink Christianity from the point of view of its revolutionary message and potential, and we can start to reach out and demand an end to all this unnecessary pain and suffering. Love is, as Lock has it, ‘the irritating imperative to do something.’ This poem can inspire us to do something, just as Fran Lock has possessed the irritating imperative herself by writing this profound poem and giving it to us to read.
The interruption, the arrested moment that is spoken about is remarkably similar to what Walter Benjamin said. It was Marx who first said that ‘revolutions are the locomotives of history.’ Benjamin, however, took this further by saying ‘Perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train – namely, the human race – to pull the emergency brake.’
This book is an emergency brake – an attempt to pull the brake, and more. This poem wants nothing less than for the train to take us in an entirely different direction; to take us to a fairer, kinder and more loving world. On this journey we will take Fran’s poems and also the tremendously artistic graphic illustrations by Ignacia Ruiz. They heighten the importance of the message and they do so in black and white, signifying the human race as it is.
‘Love is Stronger than Death: Mary Magdalene and the Insurrection of Jesus’ by Fran Lock is available here
