I wake up
trembling, fumbling for my spectacles. But Bruce is not a nightmare. He is the
reality of my everyday morning, my Weetabix reality that I regurgitate behind
the bus stop when he follows the spitting with metronomic flurries of punches
to my stomach. He is my morning salutation to the sky as I lie on my back
holding my midriff; he is my cross that I carry for being one of only three
non-white boys out of more than six hundred in my school. For daring to pass
the exam, for daring to attend a selective school.
I did not
wonder at that time why Bruce thought this was his country and not mine. Why
colour mattered so much. All I knew was the overwhelming disgust a reviled
feeling of loss, worse than rejection, sub human, subsumed into disgrace. I was
a failure.
I
remember one of the happiest days in those years was realising Bruce was sick,
and not attending school for a few weeks. In fact, my English master asked me
why my books were not so muddy as before. And why I had stopped writing him
poetry. Bamber, my English master would give me after school appraisals for
poetry because I had shown an interest. He never did ask me why I wrote poetry
and if he had I would not have been able to answer him. At that time I could
not say why I wrote poetry after being battered and spat on. How the poetry
would come after the abuse. I would get my English exercise book out and write.
It was not only the books that were dirty. The rabid bite of racism leaves its
inevitable scars but I hope it did not alter my aspiration to humanity.
On that
note I saw an emergency patient today. He said he did not want to be treated by
a non-British doctor, so I nodded, without verbalising that of course I was as
British as he was, and stayed in my seat. Then he said he did not want to be
treated by a non-white doctor. So I got up and left, only to be called ten
minutes later to be informed by the nursing staff that he was in agony. He
would accept me as his doctor because I seemed to be a ‘civilised sort of
fellow’.
I wish I
could say that story about Bruce and the patient are ones I made up because
that is the job of the writer. But they are not stories. They are the truth.
From a long line of stories that I have never told before. I do not believe in
a blame culture or a helpless victim mentality. I believe the focus and ability
to control and so change our lives is anchored within us. Responsibility does
not lie with anyone else. Perhaps what Bruce was demonstrating with his
eloquence of action was the individual product of the Clash of Civilisations.
At the
Battle of Arsuf September 7 1191, during the Third Crusade, when Richard lost
his horse Saladin sent him two as replacements. When King Richard I of England
was sick with fever Saladin sent him fruits and snow. When Saladin died he had
one gold piece and a few pieces of silver. He was buried in the mausoleum
outside the Umayyad Mosque. Seven centuries later, Emperor Wilhelm II of
Germany, donated a marble sarcophagus. This lies empty. To this day Saladin
lies buried in the wooden one. Richard the Lionheart had taken command of his
own army when he was aged sixteen. Before he died he forgave the man who
deliberately shot him with a crossbow.
There
seems to be a determination on both sides of the divide to continue the
Crusades, to ensure that the Clash of Civilisations lives on. In Iraq,
Afghanistan, and it is no accident a war that epitomises barbarity is unfolding
in one of the citadels of historical civilisation, in Damascus, the burial
place of Saladin.
I
remember I was working as a RAF doctor in 2001 when George Bush so infamously
made his comment about the crusade and war on terror.
‘’I am
driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, ‘George go and fight
these terrorists in Afghanistan’. And I did. And then God would tell me ‘George,
go and end the tyranny in Iraq’. And I did. And now, again, I feel God’s
words coming to me, ‘Go get the Palestinians their state and get the
Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East’. And, by God,
I’m gonna do it.” Sharm el-Sheikh, August 2003.
As Osama
bin Ladin said, ‘I’m fighting so I can die a martyr and go to heaven to meet
God. Our fight now is against the Americans.’
Killing
with a sword in battle is hard. It requires courage to conquer your fears and
even more to taste the spittle of your enemy before you plunge the blade
through the pulsing heart of another human. It requires extreme conviction to
look into their eyes as the embers of life are extinguished. But pushing a
button does not. A child can push a button, a drone can bomb thousands of miles
away and kill hundreds with one strike and the child would feel not even the
buzzing sensation he gets with his video game.
At the
extremes the extremists become of one hue. There is no difference discernible
between midnight black and jet black of midnight. The circle must converge.
This
story of the Clash of Civilisations, ‘Us and Them’ has been on-going for
centuries, it has been watered by the politics of hate, fed by the fires of
fear so that is has become the justification for the invasion of Iraq, the war
in Afghanistan and Tony Blair has publically said that Iran should be attacked,
all under the same premise.
Is there
a Clash of Civilisations? Are the Crusades still alive today? Is there an
inevitable ‘Us and Them’?
George
Bush does not represent me and Osama bin Ladin represents me even less. I do
not have to be with you or against you, George. Almost all thinking people of
any creed, who aspire to represent the essence of humanity, do not believe in
the destruction of another race or religion.
I believe
there is another way. In my view there is a third way, a thinking man’s way.
What is the Third Way? Ceasefire and reconciliation.
Civilisation,
in fact, has been a continuum, sometimes one may attain superiority and then
the other may have the ascendency. There can be no zenith without a nadir. Both
grow and depend on each other. There can be no meaningful Europe without the
Moor. There is no meaningful modern life without the civilisation of America.
As Sebastian says in my novel, The Butterfly Hunter, there really is only
one civilisation, the civilisation of humanity.
I write
because there is something to say. Not just a story to tell, which is
inevitable for a writer. But an imperative, a driving force that makes the pen
furious over the page. The description, the language, the nuances, and the
poetry all that is fine and sometimes even beautiful. However, primarily and
ultimately I want my words to change attitudes and feelings and so behaviours.
To change lives.
Race,
culture and religion are simple excuses to perpetuate the insider-outsider mind
set. Perhaps because we evolved living in caves and then villages, we naturally
viewed anyone from outside the cave as different, a threat and therefore to be
never accepted, to be treated with hostility and basically to be killed to
ensure the survival of the cave dwellers. Later when village life became
possible, the village and its laws and systems had to be protected to ensure
its survival. Anyone who threatened this undermined the integrity of the unit
and survival of the individuals.
Civilisation,
for all its great achievements: the beauties of fine art, the brush stroke of
Michelangelo, God’s communion with man, Mozart moving the soul to tears, or
literature of Shakespeare that continues to examine better than any
psychoanalyst the true motivations of people, despite all of this we are in
infantile period of social human development.
The
barbarity of civilisation: there may come a time when to exploit, kill and
invade other countries, or to demean, enslave by proxy or abuse a people and
their resources by military means becomes abhorrent. I do not think that
history will be kind to the perpetrators of the Iraq war, or drone attacks or
the subjugation of the Palestinians. And history will be even more condemnatory
to the suicide bombers of Al Qaida and their mullah masters: the high priests
that have surmounted the highest pagan ziggurats of inhumanity
The
insider-outsider mentality no longer applies because we do not live in caves
and insular villages – if attitudes and behaviour towards racism and
homosexuality can change so drastically then why cannot attitudes towards
religions and nations change? We are still in the foetal stage of development;
in the infantile fearful selfishness of civilisation – economic and
technological evolution has far outstripped social development.
Is there
really a clash of civilisations, if there is, must there be one?
After
being beaten up I hid myself from my friends and started writing. Poetry. I did
not know why. Or understand. It was not cathartic. It was not healing. It was
necessary. I had to write. Maybe Bruce was result of centuries of passed down
hatred as a result of the Clash of Civilisations. Maybe Bruce did not see it
that way. But down the generations his parents imbibed this attitude into him.
These
experiences and the lessons of my life distil into The Butterfly Hunter. That’s
why I write. Because I have to write. The imperative to tell a story that
matters is overwhelming.
I wish in
some ways what follows was a neat coincidence, dreamed up by a writer, to prove
a convenient point in a novel. But this is the truth.
Some
years ago I started running a writing group. It was small but it was good and
it was honest. One day I received an email from a man saying he was a poet
telling me that he had heard about the group and it was his dream to be a
writer. Although it was a closed group, but there was something about his tone
made me think that I should allow the poet in. And so I discussed it at the
next meeting and we agreed to accept him.
The poet
has now been coming to the group meetings for seven years. I no longer write
poetry, not to read in public anyway, but every time I read anything the man
sits up, he leans forward and stares at me, unblinking. This man, the poet
writes only poetry. After every reading of his verse his gaze burns with
antediluvian fire, unevolved, simian. He has a fuel that combusts in his eyes
when he reads.
I never
criticise his poems. They are too raw, passion like pomegranate seeds pour red
and stain my soul.
He knows
why I never say anything.
He knows
that I know.
That is
why he looks straight at me when he reads his poetry.
The poet
is Bruce.
——–
Dr Max
Malik is a medical doctor and an award winning writer, as well as an
established expert on ‘The Clash of Civilistions’ and also a commentator on
international relations between the West and the Muslim World.
Other
articles by Max Malik
Twitter: https://twitter.com/1MaxMalik
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