Silence

November 12th, 2007

Views: 639

Posted by ChrisG at 1:18 pm

The effect of keeping silent is that others, who always have a store of ready-to-deploy words to hand, speak instead.

“The sacrifice, the courage, the dedication of our armed forces is what is uppermost in our minds this weekend,” he told Sky News. “As a nation we are remembering more than perhaps 10 years ago, 20 years ago, just how much we owe to people who give their lives – and young lives – for the service of our country.”

But the thing with silence is that the space it creates allows other voices, usually more hesitant, or prevented from speaking by other duties, to be heard as well.

Just as the gun boomed from Hyde Park to launch the two-minute silence, a voice bellowed a tirade at Gordon Brown: the substance was incomprehensible, but the parade ground timbre unmistakable. Afterwards many expressed astonishment that young men terribly injured in Iran and Afghanistan were refused permission to join the Cenotaph parade, on the grounds that they were serving men, not veterans.

The ambivalence of the rituals of Remembrance Sunday is profound. If there is an attractor around which the turbulent discourse that surrounds them every year circles, it is the return to the allegedly simple imperative ‘just remember’. It come from those who wear a poppy every year and feel weary disgust at those who parade their decision not to; from those who represent the protestant wing of the argument and see the wearing of poppies as enforced ostentation, an unnecessary proxy for a simple act of piety; and from those who see the debate over the wearing of poppies as an overpoliticised missing of the point.

But the idea that all is needed is that ‘we remember’ is the crux of the problem, and of the ambivalence. In order for it to be possible to faithfully represent the unity of a nation’s response to war, this unity would first have to exist. It does not and nor can it, for war is not something to be merely memorialised having long since been renounced. It remains a destination of first resort for the political class and for those whose opinions are taken disproportionately seriously by them.

In so far as this is true, then two minutes of silence is not an occasion for reflecting on how we can still, despite all our differences, on one day be drawn together in communion to honour the dead in a way that places those dead entirely beyond the political sphere. They remain with us, they have made us who we are, and we are placed here to try endlessly to understand what it is they have helped make of us. And so we talk, and write. And we see the conflicts, the injustices, that are our inheritance.

My father saw action in the Royal Signals in Italy and in North Africa in WWII. He died in 1982, when I was ten, but long before then I had accepted that I was never going to hear anything particularly concrete about his experiences. The one story he told, of being caught in the open with a mate by a Focke-Wulf and how they got away, was the only concession he ever chose to give to my Commando Picture Library-saturated sense of what war was about. Utimately, those two minutes of silence are an occasion for recalling that silence is often what is made to replace that of which we cannot speak – to which the bad faith that our leaders resort to in order to fill that space is further testimony. What yesterday commemorates is, above all, the duty not to accept the weight of this silence which is imposed on us, and to acknowledge that the only thing to do is to keep talking.