Pip: A poet who once read between sets by the Fall and the Buzzcocks is now on a twenty-date arena tour. Britain contains multitudes — or at least, it contains one very well-packaged contradiction.
Mara: That contradiction is exactly what freerein61 is working through here — Clarke's new collection Have It, his tour, and what his elevation to cultural institution says about how Britain remembers its working class. Let's start with the bard himself.
John Cooper Clarke and the Packaging of Decline
Pip: The central tension in this piece is not really about poetry — it is about what happens when a working-class voice becomes a cultural product. Clarke spent decades describing a world official culture preferred to ignore, and now that culture is selling him back to the people he wrote about.
Mara: The post frames it precisely. Clarke is described as "both chronicler and exhibit, both witness to working-class life and participant in its commodification." His success is real, but so is the machinery around it.
Pip: Which means his talent is not in question — the reach is. "Beasley Street" from 1980 put rats with rickets and Friday-night drinking on the page and made it literature. Decades later he rewrote it as "Beasley Boulevard," a sardonic commentary on regeneration and property speculation. The slum gets revitalised; the underlying social reality does not.
Mara: Those two poems are described as a diptych — the industrial city as Thatcher left it, and the neighbourhood as Blair imagined it. "Evidently Chickentown" gets named alongside them as the third pillar: its relentless accumulation of grievances captures, in the post's words, "life in a society where everything is broken but nothing changes."
Pip: And yet some boxes on the current tour run close to fifty pounds a head. The poet of the bedsit is now marketed with the full apparatus of the entertainment industry. Nobody is accusing Clarke of selling out — the post is clear on that — but the apparatus does what apparatus does.
Mara: The formal argument goes deeper than ticket prices. Drawing on Trotsky's Literature and Revolution, the post argues that Clarke's rapid-fire rhyme and list-poem structure are "perfectly suited to depicting a static world" — detail accumulates, the punchline resets everything, and nothing develops. It is, the post argues, the form of political exhaustion.
Pip: A form shaped by a generation that watched the miners lose and never saw the working class rise again. Irony as a refuge — Clarke made brilliance out of resignation, and the culture rewarded him for it once the politics had safely drained away.
Mara: Which brings in Toria Garbutt, who shares the tour's spotlight. Born in Yorkshire's mining towns, her work confronts poverty, addiction, and deindustrialisation's long aftermath — the post describes it as writing "from within the social wreckage" rather than from cultural nostalgia. Her presence is called more than a support slot: a signal that the tradition Clarke helped build is being renewed by artists shaped by a harsher era.
Pip: The world Clarke described in Beasley Street has not gone away — it has deepened. Food banks, bankrupt councils, wages eroded by inflation. The post's closing question is whether Have It engages that accelerating crisis, or whether audiences and industry alike will preserve Clarke in cultural aspic.
Mara: The post leaves that genuinely open. Clarke's limitations are called historical, not personal — a reflection of his generation's moment, not a verdict on the man.
Pip: Whether the new collection answers the moment, or the moment simply outpaces it — that is the question the tour is quietly staging.
Pip: A poet who captured a static world now tours a world that is visibly moving. That gap is doing a lot of work.
Mara: And the tradition he helped build is being picked up by writers for whom the wreckage is not heritage — it is the present. Worth watching what form that produces next time.
John Cooper Clarke has always seemed slightly out of time, a figure who emerged fully formed from the late 1970s, as though spat out by the collapsing industrial North with a pair of drainpipes, a shock of hair and a voice that could turn complaint into incantation. He arrived as Britain’s postwar industrial base began to disintegrate, as the mills and factories that had shaped whole cities closed their doors, and as the working class that sustained them entered a period of historic defeat. Clarke’s style rapid‑fire rhyme, deadpan delivery, the ability to turn squalor into something approaching music felt inseparable from that world. It still does.
Now 77, he’s back on the road. His 20‑date tour of Britain and Ireland, running through October and November, accompanies Have It, his new collection. It follows WHAT (2024), the surprise bestseller that confirmed Clarke’s unlikely status as a national treasure. In 2025, he became the first poet to headline a British arena, taking the stage at Manchester’s Co‑op Live. He received a Northern Music Award. His poems appear on the national curriculum. The man who once read between sets by the Fall and the Buzzcocks, a poet of pubs, bedsits and bus shelters, is now part of the cultural establishment.
This transformation is not merely biographical. It is historical. Clarke’s career spans the period in which the working class that produced him was first defeated, then sentimentalised, and finally repackaged as cultural heritage. His rise tells a story not only about poetry but about Britain itself, about what has been lost, what has been preserved, and what has been embalmed. The industrial North that shaped his voice has been hollowed out, its communities fragmented by deindustrialisation, austerity and decades of political betrayal. Yet its image has been revived as a marketable aesthetic: gritty authenticity, northern humour, the romance of decline.
Clarke stands at the centre of this contradiction. He is both chronicler and exhibit, both witness to working‑class life and participant in its commodification. His success reflects his talent, but it also reflects a culture that has learned to celebrate the working class only after stripping it of political content. To understand Clarke’s late career and the new collection he now tours is to understand the Britain that made him, and the Britain that now sells him back to itself.
The contradictions of success
Clarke’s popularity is real and, in many ways, deserved. Few living writers have captured the physical and moral texture of postwar working‑class life with such precision. “Beasley Street” (1980) remains one of the most vivid portraits of urban dereliction in late‑industrial Britain: a place where “the rats have all got rickets” and “the men get drunk on Friday / And go to church on Sunday.” The poem smells of damp brick, chip‑shop fat, and the hopelessness of a city abandoned by capital.
Decades later, Clarke rewrote it as “Beasley Boulevard,” a sardonic commentary on regeneration, property speculation and the hollow promises of the new urbanism. The slum has been “revitalised,” but the underlying social reality remains unchanged. Taken together, the two poems form a kind of diptych: the industrial city as Thatcher left it, and the “revitalised” neighbourhood as Blair imagined it. Clarke’s work records, with bitter humour, the passage from one form of decline to another.
“Evidently Chickentown,” his breathless catalogue of frustration, still resonates with anyone who has lived on a run‑down estate. Its relentless rhythm, the piling up of grievances until they become absurd, captures something essential about life in a society where everything is broken but nothing changes.
His audiences, many of them working people in their fifties and sixties alongside younger fans drawn in through the Arctic Monkeys or The Sopranos, do not come for nostalgia. They come because Clarke describes their world accurately and treats it as worth describing. In a culture dominated by middle‑class self‑absorption, that is no small thing.
Yet the circumstances of the current tour cannot be ignored. At some venues, boxes cost close to £50 a head. The poet of the bedsit and the bus shelter is now marketed with the full apparatus of the entertainment industry. That apparatus turns rebellion into a brand. Clarke’s “trademark look” becomes a fashion item; his history in the deindustrialised North becomes a heritage attraction. None of this is his fault. It does, however, say something about how far the cultural layers that once called themselves “punk” have come to terms with the existing order.
The politics of form
The deeper issue is one of outlook. Clarke’s comedy targets the grim surface of capitalist society: the decaying high street, the brutal landlord, the pretensions of the newly rich. It rarely asks why that surface exists, or what social force might change it. His characteristic attitude is a wry, sometimes affectionate disgust. The world is absurd and squalid, and the best one can do is name it brilliantly.
That attitude belongs to its period. It was formed in the late 1970s and 1980s, after the defeat of the miners, the betrayals of the Labour and trade‑union bureaucracies, and the collapse of any mass socialist perspective in the working class. Many artists of that generation responded by withdrawing into irony. Clarke, gifted as he is, was no exception.
Trotsky wrote in Literature and Revolution that an artist’s form cannot be separated from the social soil that produced it. Clarke’s form the rapid‑fire rhyming list, the deadpan turn, the punchline that resets everything is extraordinarily effective at depicting a static world. It is less effective at depicting a world in motion.
This is not a moral failing. It is a historical one. Clarke’s technique embodies the period’s political exhaustion that shaped him. The rapid‑fire rhyme reduces the world to surface impressions; the list‑poem structure accumulates detail without development; the punchline ending offers closure without resolution. Everything resets. Nothing changes. It is the perfect form for a society in which the working class has been defeated and the future cancelled.
A world in motion
But the world is now moving fast. It arrives in a Britain of food banks, collapsing public services and wages eroded by years of inflation. The new Labour government continues austerity in name only. Councils go bankrupt while military budgets rise. Across Europe, the far right exploits the anger that the official “left” has abandoned. Young workers in Salford today confront conditions that Clarke’s original Beasley Street would recognise all too well.
The question, then, is whether Clarke’s new collection engages seriously with this situation, or offers more of the beloved routines. The tour publicity promises new material “alongside” fan favourites, a pairing that hints at the risk any veteran performer faces: being preserved in aspic by an audience that expects him to remain unchanged.
The cultural establishment and its limits
Clarke’s elevation to establishment status is not merely a personal triumph. It reflects a broader cultural pattern. Over the past two decades, Britain has developed a taste for working‑class authenticity provided it is safely packaged, politically neutral and available for consumption. The “heritage” version of the industrial North, with its flat caps, brass bands and gritty humour, has become a staple of television, advertising and tourism.
Clarke fits this pattern uneasily. His work is too sharp, too bitter, too accurate to be fully assimilated. But the industry tries anyway. The result is a strange double image: Clarke as both chronicler of decline and symbol of cultural resilience; both outsider and institution; both rebel and brand.
This contradiction is not his doing. It reflects a society that has lost the ability to imagine working‑class life except as nostalgia or entertainment. Clarke’s success testifies to his talent. It also reflects a culture that celebrates the working class only after stripping it of political content.
What remains
John Cooper Clarke’s late career invites a kind of double vision. On the one hand, he remains what he always was: a poet of the streets, a chronicler of the derelict and the absurd, a performer whose voice still carries the rhythms of the industrial North, decades after the factories fell silent. On the other hand, he has become an institution — celebrated, packaged, and circulated through the cultural economy as a symbol of working‑class authenticity. The tension between these two identities is not a personal contradiction but a historical one. It reflects the fate of the class that produced him, and how its memory is now used.
Clarke’s achievement is undeniable. For half a century he has insisted, against the grain of literary fashion, that poetry belongs not in seminar rooms but in pubs, clubs, and the mouths of people who were never meant to read it. He has given form to experiences official culture prefers to ignore: the damp bedsit, the boarded‑up shopfront, the petty humiliations of poverty, and the bleak humour that helps people endure them. In a society that often pathologises or sentimentalises working-class life, Clarke’s refusal to prettify anything becomes a moral stance.
Yet the limits of his work are inseparable from its strengths. Clarke’s form — the rapid‑fire rhyme, the list that piles up grievances until they become comic, the punchline that resets everything — is perfectly suited to depicting a static world. It is less suited to depicting a world in motion. His characteristic attitude, a wry and sometimes affectionate disgust, arose in a period when the working class had suffered historic defeats and no longer saw itself as a force capable of changing society. Irony became a refuge, and Clarke, like many artists of his generation, made brilliance out of resignation.
The world that produced that resignation has changed. Britain today is not merely shabby; it is unstable. Food banks proliferate, councils go bankrupt, wages stagnate, and public services collapse. A Labour government administers austerity with technocratic efficiency while military budgets rise. Across Europe, the far right exploits the anger that the official “left” has abandoned. The conditions Clarke described in “Beasley Street” have not disappeared; they have deepened and spread. But they no longer appear as permanent features of a static landscape. They appear as symptoms of a widening, accelerating crisis.
Whether Clarke’s new collection, Have It, engages with this reality is an open question. The tour promises new material “alongside” fan favourites — a pairing that suggests both continuity and risk. Audiences often want their icons to remain unchanged, and the entertainment industry is adept at preserving artists in cultural aspic. Yet Clarke shares the spotlight with younger poets like Toria Garbutt, one of the most compelling working-class voices to emerge from the post-industrial North in recent years. Born and raised in Yorkshire’s mining towns, her poetry confronts poverty, addiction, domestic violence, and the long aftermath of deindustrialisation with an honesty that avoids both sentimentality and despair. Garbutt’s work carries the cadence of the communities she writes about — sharp, musical, often darkly funny, and rooted in lived experience rather than cultural nostalgia. While Clarke’s generation often turned to irony in response to political defeat, Garbutt writes from within the social wreckage it produced, giving form to realities official culture still prefers to ignore. Her presence on Clarke’s tour is more than a support slot: it signals that the tradition of working-class poetry he helped popularise has not only survived but is being renewed by artists shaped by a different, harsher era.
Clarke’s limitations are not personal but historical. They reflect the exhaustion of a generation that saw the working class defeated and never saw it rise again. The revival of class struggle now visible across Britain and Europe will produce new artists, new forms, and new perspectives. It may also reveal the limits of those who made resignation into an aesthetic. Clarke’s best work captured the world as it was. Artists today must capture the world as it is becoming—and the forces that might change it.
Bibliography
Books and Collections
Clarke, John Cooper. Have It. London: Picador, 2026.
Clarke, John Cooper. WHAT. London: Picador, 2024.
Clarke, John Cooper. Ten Years in an Open-Necked Shirt. London: Arena, 1983.
Trotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution. Translated by Rose Strunsky. London: Red Star Press, 1970.
Poems
Clarke, John Cooper. “Beasley Street.” Snap, Crackle & Bop. CBS Records, 1980.
Clarke, John Cooper. “Beasley Boulevard.” Zipcode. London: Vintage, 2013.
Clarke, John Cooper. “Evidently Chickentown.” Snap, Crackle & Bop. CBS Records, 1980.
Articles and Interviews
Brown, Helen. “John Cooper Clarke: The Bard of Salford Still Has It.” The Telegraph, 2025.
Simpson, Dave. “Punk’s Poet Laureate on Fame, Failure and the North.” The Guardian, 2024.
O’Hagan, Sean. “The Last of the Working‑Class Poets?” The Observer, 2023.
Context and History
Samuel, Raphael. Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture. London: Verso, 1994.
Hobsbawm, Eric. Industry and Empire. London: Penguin, 1999.
Stewart, Paul. Deindustrialisation and the Working Class in Britain. Manchester: MUP, 2018.
Pip: A pop doctor walks out of a pandemic, writes a three-minute list of everything wrong with the world, and somehow ends up being shared by Students for Trump. Welcome to A Trumpet of Sedition.
Mara: freerein61 has been looking closely at Iyah May — the artist, the song, the contradiction — asking what it means when genuine anger gets picked up by exactly the wrong hands.
Pip: Let's start with the song itself, and why its structure might be the whole story.
Karmageddon and the Politics of the Scroll
Mara: The question this post opens with is a structural one: not whether Karmageddon is sincere, but whether sincerity without analysis can do political work — or whether it just becomes available to whoever finds it useful.
Pip: And the post locates the problem early. The song is described as a list — a scroll-song — where, as the post puts it, "Gaza is placed next to celebrity gossip; inflation beside misogynistic violence; pandemic profiteering alongside online outrage."
Mara: That flattening is the argument's spine. Each item gets equal weight, no causality, no connection. The post calls it a reproduction of the social media environment the song is supposedly criticising.
Pip: So the form undermines the content. The scroll isn't examined — it's re-enacted.
Mara: Right, and that's what makes the political co-option legible. Ryan Fournier of Students for Trump shared the video; Newsweek called her "the new darling of the political right"; the Epoch Times and ZeroHedge picked it up. A song naming the Gaza genocide was being circulated by people financing that genocide.
Pip: Which the post insists is not a paradox. It's a symptom.
Mara: Exactly. "Without a large socialist movement to address social collapse, right-wing groups fill the void, co-opting any discontent that can be framed as anti-elite, anti-establishment, or anti-media." The mood is appropriable because the analysis is absent.
Pip: The post also traces her earlier Island Records output — XO Girl, MF ILY — polished pop, politically disengaged. Karmageddon, self-released November 13, 2024, produced by Danny Duke, is a real break.
Mara: And she paid for that break. Her manager pushed her to remove references to Big Pharma and genocide. She refused, parted ways with the label. The post, drawing on coverage from Northern Exposure and a Grokipedia profile, frames that refusal as a small but genuine act of defiance in an industry built to discipline exactly that kind of impulse.
Pip: The Nordic Times piece calls her "fearless social commentary." The post is more precise: it's sincere, and sincerity isn't nothing, but it stops short of the analysis that would give it direction.
Mara: The post draws the Sheeran comparison to sharpen this. When Macklemore was quietly dropped from Sheeran's Loop Tour after expressing Palestinian solidarity, Sheeran retreated into language about "different approaches to advocating for peace" — treating genocide, the post notes, as a matter of tone rather than fact.
Pip: May lost a manager. Sheeran preserved a nine-figure production apparatus. The post is clear that this isn't primarily about personal courage — it's about where each artist sits inside the machinery.
Mara: And the post's cover note on her version of Wish You Were Here makes this concrete. Where Karmageddon is frantic and breathless, that performance is still, almost paralysed — mourning the absence of collective meaning rather than cataloguing its loss. Together the post calls them "a dialectic of contemporary despair: the scroll and the silence."
Pip: Which is a genuinely useful frame. The scroll reproduces fragmentation; the silence laments it. Neither overcomes it.
Mara: The post ends by asking what a critical art that did overcome it might look like — one oriented not toward mood but toward the working-class struggles it argues are the only force capable of addressing the crises May describes. Sincerity is the starting point, not the destination.
Pip: The question underneath all of it: what do you do with real anger when there's no political home for it yet?
Mara: That's the live wire running through everything here — genuine distress, no outlet, and a cultural industry that profits from keeping it that way.
Pip: Next time, we'll see what else on the site is asking where that outlet might come from.
The upcoming acquisition of a significant stake in Liverpool FC by a consortium led by Amit Bhatia, backed by Jeff Bezos and Eduardo Saverin, signals a new phase in turning football into a domain for the global financial elite. Reports suggest the group is nearing a stake exceeding 30 per cent, valuing the club at approximately £4.4 billion ($5.9–6 billion). An announcement is likely soon.
This development is part of a larger trend where all aspects of social life—such as sport, culture, media, and technology—are increasingly controlled and reshaped by a small group of billionaires. Their wealth comes from exploiting workers worldwide. Football, originally a sport for the working class, is now being integrated into the same financial and technological systems that govern logistics, surveillance, AI, and global finance.
A New Phase in the Oligarchic Capture of Football
Liverpool’s potential new investors hail from the most privileged echelons of global capitalism. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, amassed his enormous wealth through the ruthless exploitation of hundreds of thousands of workers, who faced poverty wages, constant surveillance by algorithms, and dangerous productivity targets. His fortune grew significantly during the pandemic, as Amazon employees endured hazardous working conditions. Bezos is not simply a “sports investor”; he exemplifies American financial capitalism at its most predatory. Eduardo Saverin, co-founder of Facebook, renounced his US citizenship to dodge taxes and moved to Singapore. His wealth originates from a social media empire built on surveillance, data extraction, and the promotion of reactionary content through algorithms.
Amit Bhatia, son-in-law of steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, belongs to a global elite whose wealth relies on exploiting workers across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. His abrupt divestment from Queens Park Rangers on the day Liverpool’s bid emerged highlights the financial manoeuvring — regulatory arbitrage and share shuffling — typical of Today’s oligarchy. The inclusion of these figures in Liverpool’s ownership signifies a significant shift. While under Fenway Sports Group (FSG), Liverpool was primarily considered a financial asset. John Henry played a key role in proposing the 2021 European Super League, aiming to replace the competitive league system with a closed cartel that would secure ongoing revenue for the wealthiest clubs. This plan, backed by JPMorgan Chase, was ultimately stopped by widespread fan resistance.
Now the club is being passed from one set of billionaires to another — but this time to individuals whose wealth is measured not in billions but in hundreds of billions.
Football as a Financial Instrument
Liverpool’s valuation at £4.4 billion highlights the sport’s dramatic transformation. Originally founded in 1892 by working-class individuals, the club now has a value that could support the NHS for months. The financialization of football emphasises club worth based on anticipated future revenues, global branding, and digital engagement rather than sporting success. In Marxist terms, football has become part of fictitious capital — claims on future value instead of current output. Clubs are traded like tech stocks, with valuations serving as speculative tools. Their ownership resembles that of a multinational. The Bezos–Saverin–Bhatia consortium is not investing in football as a sport. Instead, they view it as: a content source for Amazon’s media empire, a data collection point for feeding Amazon’s AI systems, a global brand asset integrated into Amazon’s retail and advertising networks, and a financial tool for the portfolios of the world’s wealthiest individuals.
The Conflict‑of‑Interest Question: A Window into the System
A key aspect of the deal is the unresolved question of whether an investor holding a stake in the Premier League broadcaster Amazon Prime Video can also own part of a Premier League club. This is primarily a political issue, not a technical one. The Premier League’s Owners’ and Directors’ Test does not impose significant restrictions on such cross-ownership. In reality, the capitalist system enforces regulations only when they do not conflict with the interests of the ruling class. When billionaires are involved, these rules are often treated as mere “guidelines.”
If the deal goes through unchallenged, it establishes a precedent: broadcasters might own clubs, clubs could control broadcasters, and a few oligarchs could vertically integrate the complete ecosystem. These same individuals would own the product, distribution channels, and ways of consumption. This represents the Americanization of football — not culturally, but in its structure.
Liverpool’s Sporting Transition: Irrelevant to Capital
Liverpool secured the Premier League title in 2025 but is currently going through a transition phase. Manager Arne Slot has left, Mohamed Salah has departed, and Michael Edwards has exited FSG. Despite significant spending, the club finished fifth last season. From the consortium’s perspective, these developments are mainly relevant for their impact on the asset’s valuation. At this level, a football club functions more as an investment vehicle than a sporting entity, serving purposes like capital appreciation, brand leverage, and generating broadcast and commercial income from a global fanbase.
Speculation that Bezos and Saverin might aim for full control is plausible. For wealthy individuals like them, holding a minority stake is not an end goal but a strategic foothold.
The Broader Pattern: The Oligarchy Consolidates Its Power
The shift to Liverpool reflects a wider trend. By 2026, Bezos has invested billions in AI companies, grown Blue Origin’s aerospace activities, and co-led a $12 billion funding round for Prometheus, an industrial AI firm now valued at $41 billion. The same elite pushing humanity toward global conflict — as the WSWS detailed during the 2026 World Cup — is also consolidating control over all aspects of social life.
The 2026 World Cup showcased glaring signs of capitalist excess: generating $15 billion in revenue, with dynamic ticket prices soaring to over $10,000, luxury hospitality packages costing more than an average worker’s yearly income, and the trophy transported in a Louis Vuitton trunk. Football is increasingly being marketed as a luxury item for the wealthy and a global advertising tool for corporations. The Bezos group’s interest in Liverpool aligns with these trends, representing the broader process of expropriating everything the working class has built by a parasitic financial elite.
The Marxist Perspective: Expropriate the Oligarchy
The banners at Anfield during the 2021 Super League revolt — “Created by the poor, stolen by the rich” — summed up the situation well. But the real solution isn’t better regulation, fan representation, or a “50+1” rule. These measures leave the core capitalist ownership model untouched. Football can’t be truly democratised under capitalism because the logic of capital is all-encompassing. Every reform risks new forms of exploitation. The only genuine solution is to expropriate the oligarchs, transform football clubs into democratic entities run by players, workers, and supporters, and replace capitalism with a socialist society where sport, like healthcare, education, and housing, is a public good instead of a means for billionaire profit.
On Shrove Tuesday, February 22, 1631, a group of London apprentices crossed the Thames in a rush toward a fortified estate in Southwark. Their goal was Holland’s Leaguer, London’s most exclusive brothel, operated for nearly thirty years by the fierce Bess Holland. Though the house withstood the attack—its drawbridge remained intact, and the moat proved effective—the event is more than just a colourful tale. It offers a vivid glimpse into early Stuart class society, highlighting moments where the tensions around labour, gender, government authority, and elite hypocrisy were temporarily laid bare.
Viewing Holland’s Leaguer solely as bawdy London folklore overlooks its deeper importance. It functioned as a hub within the growing capitalist economy, where displaced women sold their labour to elite men, and where the monarchy engaged in activities it publicly denounced. Additionally, it was a place where the frustration of exploited youth was diverted from its real cause. On a small scale, the siege of Holland’s Leaguer exemplifies the social tensions that eventually led to civil war a decade later.
The Liberty of the Clink: A State‑Sanctioned Economy of Vice
Holland’s Leaguer was located within the Liberty of the Clink, an area intentionally separated from the City’s jurisdiction. Bankside’s theatres, bear-baiting pits, taverns, and brothels thrived not due to lax enforcement but because the law was purposefully structured to overlook those activities in that zone. The Clink functioned as a device for managing contradictions: it was a district where “vice” could be isolated, taxed, and enjoyed by the elites without threatening the City’s moral image.
This setup wasn’t hypocrisy in a simple sense; it was built into the system. The Crown and the aristocracy needed places where their desires could be fulfilled without threatening the appearance of moral authority. Since theatres and brothels were highly profitable, socially significant, and deeply rooted in elite culture, they couldn’t be abolished. Instead, they were physically separated—moved across the river, out of sight but still accessible.
Holland’s Leaguer itself was a capitalist enterprise avant la lettre. Its exclusivity — fine linen, modern sanitation, controlled access — mirrored the emerging logic of commodification. Sex was not merely sold; it was curated. The clientele included wealthy courtiers, foreign visitors, and, by later report, King James I and his favourite, Buckingham. The same monarchy that periodically ordered the brothel’s closure was among its most valued patrons.
This episode reveals the first contradiction: a ruling class that criminalised people with low incomes for the very desires it enjoyed openly, and that regarded the women working in such houses as disposable labour rather than as individuals entitled to legal protection.
The apprentices who attacked Holland’s Leaguer were not moral crusaders. They were young workers bound by indenture, denied wages, poorly fed, and subject to the arbitrary authority of masters who controlled nearly every hour of their lives. Their conditions were closer to coerced labour than to the free wage work celebrated in English political mythology.
Shrove Tuesday served as a safety valve: a single day when the built-up frustration of youthful repression could be released. Importantly, violence was allowed — often encouraged — provided it was aimed at safe targets. Places like brothels, theatres, and taverns were considered acceptable outlets for anger; in contrast, merchants, guildmasters, and the government were absent. This exemplifies a typical class society dynamic where horizontal violence among exploited groups replaces confrontation with those in power. The apprentices targeted visible victims—sex workers, who also suffered displacement—instead of challenging the property systems causing suffering for both groups.
The apprentices were still in the process of forming a distinct class. Their common living situations, collective grievances, and occasional street violence helped develop a proto-political identity. While not revolutionary yet, they were becoming less willing to accept their assigned roles. A decade later, they would join the crowds that expelled Charles I from London. The 1631 riot wasn’t a revolutionary act, but it served as a rehearsal for one.
Sex Workers and the Gendered Labour Regime of Early‑Modern London
The women of Holland’s Leaguer were unfairly portrayed as morally ‘fallen’ by Puritan pamphlets. In fact, they were victims of a swiftly changing labour market caused by enclosure, falling rural wages, and the loss of traditional rights, which drove many to London. There, women encountered obstacles to joining guilds and often had to settle for jobs like domestic service, laundry, nursing, hawking, or fringe piecework. Sex work was not a moral failing but a survival strategy—an economic necessity to cope with a city that systematically undervalued female labour.
Brothels such as Holland’s Leaguer were not anomalies but integral parts of early-modern capitalism: venues where gendered labour exploitation was focused, commodified, and controlled for elite audiences. The apprentices’ assault on the brothel was therefore not a clash between virtue and vice but between two exploited groups, with their conflict aligning with the interests of the ruling class.
Holland’s Leaguer and the Historiography of Proto‑Proletarian Consciousness
The 1631 destruction of Holland’s Leaguer is more than just a striking event in London’s social past. It is central to a significant historiographical debate about when and how the English working classes started to develop a shared political awareness. Scholars like Christopher Hill, Brian Manning, Barry Reay, and Buchanan Sharp present perspectives that interpret the siege not as a mere rumour but as a key moment in the gradual emergence of a proto-proletariat in early Stuart England.
Hill: Apprentices as a Semi‑Proletarian Class
Hill’s work remains foundational. In The World Turned Upside Down and The Century of Revolution, he argued that apprentices were a transitional class: economically indispensable, politically subordinate, and increasingly aware of the contradiction. Their periodic riots were not random explosions of youthful disorder but expressions of a class whose labour was expanding while its rights remained static.
Hill would see the attack on Holland’s Leaguer as a classic example of this dynamic. Apprentices acted collectively, outside the control of their masters, in a way that revealed both their grievances and their potential political agency. The riot was misdirected — aimed at sex workers rather than merchants or magistrates — but it demonstrated a capacity for mobilisation that would become decisive in the 1640s.
Manning: Popular Agency and the Coming Revolution
Brian Manning sharpened Hill’s insight by insisting on the political agency of “the middling and poorer sort.” For Manning, apprentices were not merely reactive; they were active participants in shaping the revolutionary crisis. Their street actions were early rehearsals for the mass demonstrations that would force Charles I out of London.
Manning’s emphasis on popular mobilisation helps us see Holland’s Leaguer as part of a continuum. The same social layer that attacked the brothel in 1631 would, a decade later, besiege Lambeth Palace, disrupt royal processions, and form the backbone of London’s revolutionary crowds. The riot was not revolutionary, but it belonged to the same repertoire of collective action.
Reay: Gender, Sexuality and Displaced Labour
Barry Reay’s work on sexuality and popular culture adds a crucial dimension. Reay shows that sex work in early‑modern London was not a moral aberration but a structural response to economic displacement. Women entered the trade because enclosure, falling wages and exclusion from guild labour left them few alternatives.
Reay’s analysis reframes Holland’s Leaguer as a site where two exploited groups — apprentices and sex workers — collided. Their antagonism was not natural but manufactured. Both were victims of early‑capitalist transformation; both were denied legal protection; both were indispensable to the functioning of London’s economy. Their conflict served the interests of the ruling class by preventing solidarity between exploited layers.
Sharpe: Ritualised Disorder and Social Control
Buchanan Sharp’s work on Shrove Tuesday riots shows how the authorities tolerated certain forms of disorder as a mechanism of social control. Apprentices were permitted to vent their frustrations so long as they targeted “safe” objects: brothels, theatres, taverns. Sharp’s analysis explains why the attack on Holland’s Leaguer was indulged while attacks on merchants or magistrates were not.
The riot thus reveals a key feature of early‑Stuart governance: the state managed popular anger by directing it sideways—horizontal violence substituted for vertical challenge.
A Microcosm of Class Formation
These historians collectively depict Holland’s Leaguer as a small-scale reflection of early Stuart social dynamics: Hill highlights apprentices as a semi-proletariat; Manning emphasises popular agency and political activism; Reay discusses gendered labour and economic shifts; and Sharpe considers ritualised disorder as a form of social control. The destruction of the brothel was significant; it revealed the tensions within early-modern capitalism—such as labour exploitation, gendered insecurity, elite hypocrisy, and misplaced popular rage. This event is not just part of London’s bawdy folklore but also a precursor to the English Revolution.
The State Intervenes: Coercion as the Final Arbiter
When Charles I ultimately commanded the closure of Holland’s Leaguer in December 1631, he relied on military force rather than moral persuasion. Soldiers, not magistrates, were dispatched to enforce his order. Bess Holland responded with resistance, raising the drawbridge to cause the first soldiers to fall into the moat, and her brothel workers dumped chamber pots over the troops below.
The siege endured for almost a month, serving as a display of state authority amid waning power. The Personal Rule had alienated many social groups, while financial measures eroded the monarchy’s legitimacy. Religious policies also sparked widespread discontent. In this climate, shutting down a brothel became a symbolic act—showing the King’s attempt to assert control in a society that was slipping beyond his reach.
The closure had no effect; Holland just moved. The economic factors behind brothels—poverty, gendered labour markets, and elite demand—stayed the same. The state only suppressed a symptom without addressing the root cause.
From Scandal to Spectacle: Commodifying the Crisis
In just a few weeks, Holland’s Leaguer shifted from a site of conflict to a cultural commodity. Ballads spread widely, and Nicholas Goodman’s pamphlet cast the siege as moral theatre. Shackerley Marmion’s play turned the event into entertainment aimed at the same social groups that had patronised the brothel. This swift shift to commodification is deliberate; it reflects how class society processes scandal: exploitative labour becomes entertainment, state violence turns into farce, and class tensions are repackaged as local colour. The ideological role is evident: spectacle masks underlying social structures. The social issues—gendered exploitation, elite hypocrisy, misplaced popular anger—that created Holland’s Leaguer are hidden behind storytelling and theatricality.
Holland’s Leaguer and the Coming Revolution
Viewing Holland’s Leaguer through a Marxist perspective, it serves as a microcosm of early-Stuart England’s impending crisis. The monarchy relies on coercion instead of consent. The working class becomes less willing to accept its social role. The ruling elite’s hypocrisy weakens its ideological authority. The cultural realm commodifies crises instead of resolving them. The destruction of the brothel exposes a society where class tensions intensify, ideological conflicts deepen, and social controls begin to weaken. The apprentices’ riot, while not revolutionary, hints at the instability that would eventually lead to civil war, regicide, and the temporary fall of the monarchy.
Conclusion: A Case Study in Class Society
Holland’s Leaguer should be remembered not just as a colourful episode in London’s bawdy history but as an example of how early-modern class society organised, controlled, profited from, and ultimately abandoned its poorest and most vulnerable labourers. It shows how public anger was directed at the wrong targets, how gendered labour was commodified for elite amusement, and how the state only intervened when elite interests were at risk. Its contradictions—economic, social, ideological—provide a revealing glimpse into the world that led to the English Revolution. Beneath the chaos of riot and siege, deeper systems of exploitation and resistance were at work, which within a decade would threaten the monarchy’s very foundation.
Marmion, Shackerley. Holland’s Leaguer: A Comedy. London, 1632.
Contemporary ballads on Holland’s Leaguer (British Library, Roxburghe Collection).
City of London Court Records, Shrove Tuesday disturbances (Guildhall Library Manuscripts).
The Liberty of the Clink administrative records (Southwark Local Studies Archive).
Secondary Sources
Christopher Hill
Hill, Christopher. The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714. London: Routledge, 1961.
Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. London: Penguin, 1972.
Hill, Christopher. Society and Puritanism in Pre‑Revolutionary England. London: Secker & Warburg, 1964.
Brian Manning
Manning, Brian. The English People and the English Revolution. London: Bookmarks, 1991.
Manning, Brian. Revolution and Counter‑Revolution in England, 1658–1660. London: Bookmarks, 2003.
Manning, Brian. The Far Left in the English Revolution. London: Bookmarks, 1971.
Barry Reay
Reay, Barry. Popular Cultures in England, 1550–1750. London: Longman, 1998.
Reay, Barry. The Last Rising of the Apprentices: London 1661. Stroud: Sutton, 1999.
Reay, Barry. Sexuality in Early Modern England. London: Routledge, 1998.
Buchanan Sharp
Sharp, Buchanan. In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England, 1586–1660. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
Sharp, Buchanan. “Rituals of Riot: Popular Violence in Early Modern England.” Past & Present 130 (1991): 90–122.
Sharp, Buchanan. The English Riots of 1641. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Early‑Modern London, Sex Work, and Urban Labour
Griffiths, Paul. Lost Londons: Change, Crime and Control in the Capital City, 1550–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Griffiths, Paul. “The Structure of Prostitution in Elizabethan London.” Continuity and Change 8, no. 1 (1993): 39–63.
Ingram, Martin. Carnal Knowledge: Regulating Sex in England, 1470–1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Archer, Ian. The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Shoemaker, Robert. The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth‑Century England. London: Hambledon, 2004.
Stallybrass, Peter. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.
Theatres, Liberties, and the Bankside Economy
Dillon, Janette. Theatre, Court and City, 1595–1610: Drama and Social Space in London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Gurr, Andrew. Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Egan, Gabriel. The Struggle for Shakespeare’s South Bank. London: Shakespeare’s Globe, 2019.
The English Revolution and Popular Politics
Underdown, David. Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Kishlansky, Mark. A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603–1714. London: Penguin, 1996.
Fletcher, Anthony, and Peter Roberts (eds.). Religion, Politics and Society in Sixteenth‑Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Further Reading
Shoemaker, Robert. Gender in English Society, 1650–1850. London: Longman, 1998.
Capp, Bernard. The World of John Taylor the Water-Poet, 1578–1653. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Slack, Paul. Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Longman, 1988.
Wrightson, Keith. Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain. London: Penguin, 2000.
Beier, A.L. Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640. London: Methuen, 1985.
Archival and Digital Resources
British Library, Early English Books Online (EEBO).
London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), Apprentice Registers.
“As a vast, solid phalanx, the generations come on; they have the same features, and their pattern is new in the world. All wear the same expression, but it is this which they do not detect in each other. It is the one life which ponders in the philosophers, which drudges in the labourers, which basks in the poets, which dilates in the love of the women. –
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Notebooks”
“The best things come, as a general thing, from the talents that are members of a group.”
Henry James 1879 biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne
‘Is imagination so fanciful that it can invent a memory and then transform it into something we understand as true?’
Eduardo Halfon
“First of all, art is the cognition of life. Art is not the free play of fantasy, feelings, and moods: art is not the expression of merely the subjective sensations and experiences of the poet; art is not assigned the goal of primarily awakening in the reader good feelings. Like science, art cognises life. Both art and science have the same subject: life, reality. But sciences analyse, art synthesises; science is abstract, art is concrete; science turns to the mind of man, art to his sensual [i.e., sensory] nature. Science cognises life with the help of concepts, art with the aid of images in the form of living, sensual contemplation.”
Aleksandr Voronsky
Eduardo Halfon is part of a new generation of Latin American writers who, to paraphrase Sir Isaac Newton, have seen further than most because they have stood on the shoulders of giants. These giants are well-known. In a recent interview, Halfon was asked about his earliest influences. “Mostly North American writers, and most of them in the short story tradition. Maybe that’s why I constantly go back to that genre. I’m essentially a short story writer. That’s where I feel most comfortable, or least uncomfortable. My technique or approach in constructing a short story is very much based on the North American tradition, much more so than the Latin American one. I feel much closer to Hemingway and Carver and Cheever, for example, than I do to Borges and Cortázar and García Márquez.[1]
Halfon and others are still paying their debt to these greats, but they are also now striking out on a new road. As Halfon succinctly put it, “ My house, then, is built on two pillars. But a writer must begin by destroying one’s house.
Like their earlier counterparts, these writers have to deal with their respective countries’ violent political pasts. In Halfon’s case, the past is the genocidal campaign by the Guatemalan ruling elite against its Mayan and working-class population. Although Halfon clearly is influenced by Guatemala’s great writers such as Miguel Angel Asturias, Augusto Monterroso and modern day writers such Francisco Goldman and David Unger his work is “intensely autobiographical, migratory and steeped in memory” Halfon’s focus on migration, memory and identity can be read as testimony to the real material dislocations produced by imperialism and capitalist restructuring throughout Latin America.
It is worth noting that every single Guatemalan writer or poet of note has been forced into exile due to the distinct possibility of being murdered by their respective dictators. Halfon noted this in an interview in 2015, “For the past century, Guatemalan writers have been writing and dying in exile. Miguel Ángel Asturias, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967, wrote his books about Guatemala while living in exile, in South America and Europe. He died in Paris and is buried at Père Lachaise. The great short-story writer Augusto Monterroso, after being detained by the military forces of dictator Jorge Ubico, was forced to leave the country in 1944. He fled first to Chile, then to Mexico, where he lived the rest of his life, and where he wrote most of his stories, and where he’s now buried. Luis Cardoza y Aragón, arguably Guatemala’s most important poet of the last century, suffered a similar fate —he was also forced into exile in Mexico in the 1930s, where he wrote his poetry and where he, too, died. Guatemala’s greatest playwright, Carlos Solórzano, fled the country in 1939—first to Germany, then to Mexico—and never returned. The writer Mario Payeras, a guerrilla commander in the 1970s, also wrote while exiled in Mexico, where he suddenly and mysteriously died (his remains were buried in a cemetery in the southwest of the country, but have since vanished). One of the most important Guatemalan novels of the last few decades, El Tiempo Principia en Xibalbá (Time Commences in Xibalbá), was written by the indigenous writer Luis de Lión, who in 1984 was kidnapped by military forces, tortured for twenty days, and then disappeared. His murder wasn’t confirmed until fifteen years later, in 1999, when his name and number appeared in the now infamous “Military Diary”, a haunting military document that secretly listed the fate of all the Guatemalans disappeared by the military forces between August 1983 and March 1985. Luis de Lión, born José Luís de León Díaz, is number 135. His novel was published posthumously, that most extreme of exiles.”[2]
Halfon’s recurring motifs of displacement, cross-border families, and fragmented memory are not merely personal or cultural; they are literary expressions of material processes driven by the global capitalist system. Halfon is not a Marxist, but he clearly uses these literary expressions in much the same way that the great American writer Phillip Roth did in his work to uncover the past and prepare for future struggles. How else would you understand Roth’s extraordinary prescient novel The Plot Against America?
Halfon does not explicitly examine the growth of Fascism in Guatemala. Rather, evocations in his stories are an indirect examination of the expansion of informal, precarious labour, the restructuring of national economies through neoliberal “adjustment,” and the integration of millions into transnational labour markets, all of which create the objective conditions for mass migration and social struggles.
According to the International Labour Organisation, more than 2.1 billion of the world’s 3.6 billion workers now labour in the informal economy. Platform and casual work are central mechanisms of modern labour casualisation These processes force families to fragment, livelihoods to be uprooted, and memories to be reconstituted around loss, survival and mobility, the precise themes of Halfon’s fiction. It has been said of Halfon’s collective work that it seems to flow into a single ongoing novel.
Chris Power points out that Halfon’s “ other recurring themes include Guatemalan history, the Holocaust, questions of Jewish identity, and the nature of violence. The books recycle stories, such as Eduardo’s grandfather’s experience of Auschwitz and subsequent emigration to Guatemala; the family’s relocation to the States; and Eduardo’s own career as a writer. When a novel’s narrator and its author share a name and identity, it naturally prompts questions about what is true and what is invented. But Halfon’s primary concern seems not to be with establishing facts, as a memoirist might, but to rappel as deeply as possible into those crevasses where meaning and truth disappear.”[3]
Before discussing other things, it is worth commenting on the translations of Halfon’s books, which merit a book in themselves. Eduardo Halfon’s fiction—works such as The Polish Boxer, Monastery, and The Lost Boy—explore memory, migration, identity and the tangled legacies of war and displacement. It is important to study the translations seriously and treat them not as incidental “products” but as historical-cultural documents.
For instance, Halfon’s The Polish Boxer was worked on by an international group of five translators who worked in concert with each other to deliver a very good manuscript. These translators understand how translations shape how working people around the world encounter cultures and struggles not their own. Translation determines which voices reach mass audiences and under what political framing.
Halfon and his translators stand on the shoulders of the groundbreaking translator Gregory Rabassa. His translations helped define an international readership’s image of Latin American culture and politics. Understanding these processes exposes the cultural market’s role in commodifying exile, migration, and anti‑imperialist themes and creates a basis for challenging who benefits and who is represented.
Gregory Rabassa’s work, most famously his English translations of Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar and Clarice Lispector, offers a model for studying translation as both a literary and political activity. It is important to learn from Rabassa methodically. The reader should combine a close technical study of his translations with an analysis of the publishing, class and cultural forces that shape which books circulate internationally.
As Rabassa once wrote, “The translator, we should know, is a writer too. As a matter of fact, he could be called the ideal writer because all he has to do is write; plot, theme, characters, and all other essentials have already been provided, so he can sit down and write his ass off.”[4]
Eduardo Halfon’s new book is elliptical, memory-driven and obsessed with names, absence and family traces. Still, it is also a powerful entry point for understanding how imperialism and transnational capital shape private lives. Reading Halfon alongside the history of the United Fruit Company (later Chiquita) provides the reader with a powerful understanding of the Guatemalan civil war, fought from 1960 to 1996, which was triggered by the United States at the behest of the United Fruit Company.
The US oligarchy was the largest landowner in the Central American republic. The United Fruit, in collaboration with the US government, sanctioned and organised alongside the Guatemalan ruling elite and its military, systematic kidnappings and murders that were part of the government’s counter-insurgency campaign saw death squads murder hundreds of thousands of political opponents and Mayan people.
The United Fruit Company was not a benign employer but a transnational corporation whose profits depended on control of land, labour, and transport. In Guatemala and across Central America, UFCO backed oligarchic politics, shaped infrastructure for export agriculture, and collaborated with US state power to secure its property and markets. The company’s role in creating the “banana republic” form, where export interests dominated politics and security, helped produce recurrent repression, dispossession and intervention that set the context for the civil war and ongoing violence.
US imperialism’s hand in Guatemala (1954 coup against Árbenz, long-term support for military regimes and counterinsurgency) turned economic disputes over land and labour into matters of geopolitical strategy. The Guatemalan state served as a repressive instrument of the dominant class. In Guatemala, this meant the security forces acting to defend plantation and export interests against labour organising and land reform.
The successor firms to United Fruit have continued the pattern of corporate power shaping violence and act with impunity. Contemporary cases, such as Chiquita’s payments to Colombian paramilitaries and the company’s light legal consequences, illustrate how transnationals use force and collusion to secure profits and suppress labour, often with the tacit protection of governments.
Eduardo Halfon’s fiction, memory-driven, autobiographical and formally inventive, provides a vital entry point into understanding how class, imperialism and genocide shape subjective experience. To study Halfon in relation to the Guatemalan civil war means reading literature as historical testimony: to connect aesthetic form and private memory with the social forces that produced mass murder, displacement and the long-term campaign of state terror.
Understanding Halfon together with the historical record helps expose the continuing rule of the oligarchy, judicial impunity and US influence, factors central to contemporary struggles over land, indigenous rights and militarisation.
Halfon rarely offers direct economic history; instead, his stories register the aftershocks: absences, silences, disrupted families, migrations and the odd conjunctions of identity that result from capitalist domination. Where Halfon evokes a vanished aunt, a rented house, a childhood street, those private traces map onto structures of class power: plantations that displaced communities, export economies that enclosed common land, and states that protected corporate assets rather than popular needs.
To read Halfon politically is to read the gaps as social symptoms: the inability to name perpetrators, the sense of illegible history, the recurring motif of “not knowing” where a relative went or why a place changed. These are not merely aesthetic devices but the subjective remnant of forced migrations, economic coercion and political terror produced by export capitalism and imperialist intervention.
Like most Guatemalan writers, Halfon learned to write as if his life depended on it. For most readers of his books, it must be hard to understand that writers like Halfon are in constant fear of assassination because of what they write and uncover. A prime example of this is Francisco Goldman. His book The Art of Political Murder nearly got him killed.
In an interview with the Guardian, Halfon recounts feeling paranoid about being followed. My understanding of the political situation in Guatemala is that Halfon is not paranoid. Given Guatemala’s track record of killing writers and journalists who get in their way, it is a real threat, not just paranoia.
It is worth quoting in length from Halfon’s Guardian article. Halfon believes that many things in Guatemala are not spoken or written about.
“ Just after I published my first novel in Guatemala, in 2003, I had a beer with the Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya, who was living there at the time. We met at an old bar called El Establo. As soon as he saw me walk in, he raised his bottle of beer, congratulated me, smiled a crazy man’s smile, and then warned me to leave the country as soon as possible.
Guatemalan writers, and Guatemalans in general, have lived for almost a century now in a climate of fear. If anyone dared to speak out, they either disappeared into exile or disappeared literally. This fear is still prevalent, woven deep into the subconscious of the Guatemalan people, who, over time, have been taught to be silent. To not speak out. To not say or write words that might kill you.
The first consequence of this, of course, is overall silence. Certain things in Guatemala are not spoken or written about. The indigenous genocide in the 1980s. The extreme racism. The overwhelming number of women being murdered. The impossibility of land reform and redistribution of wealth. The close ties between the government and the drug cartels. Although these are all subjects that almost define the country itself, they are discussed and commented on only in whispers or from the outside. But a second and perhaps more dangerous consequence of a culture of silence is a type of self-censorship: when speaking or writing, one mustn’t say anything that puts oneself or one’s family in peril. The censoring becomes automatic, unconscious. Because the danger is very real. Although the days of dictators are now gone, the military is still powerful, and political and military murders are all too common.
It was at a bookstore called Sophos. I was browsing some books on the table when an elderly man came over and introduced himself. He was dressed in a coat and tie. He said he had read my novel and talked for a few minutes about his impressions. He then shook my hand again and, still holding on to it, said it had been a pleasure to meet me, that I should take care, be careful. I asked him carefully about what. He just smiled politely and went on his way. I considered it strange, but didn’t give it much thought. Maybe he was just being nice? Maybe I misinterpreted his greeting (usted cuídese, you take care)? Anyway, I had almost forgotten about it until several weeks later, when I received a phone call. The voice on the phone said I didn’t know him, but that he was calling as a friend to warn me about my enemies.”[5]
Suppose you make the effort to read Halfon’s work; it is a joy. His work opens questions about the culture of migration, the commodification of memory, and the role of literature in representing displacement.
“It is unquestionably true that the need for art is not created by economic conditions. But neither is the need for food created by economics. On the contrary, the need for food and warmth creates economics. It is very true that one cannot always go by the principles of Marxism in deciding whether to reject or to accept a work of art. A work of art should, in the first place, be judged by its own law, that is, by the law of art. But the beauty of Marxism is that it alone can explain why and how a given tendency in art has originated in a given period of history; in other words, who it was who made a demand for such an artistic form and not for another, and why.”
Notes
1. The Purest Form of Writing, the Most Intimate Form of Reading-Eduardo Halfon, in conversation with his translators Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn, with Avinoam Patt, massreview.org/sites/default/files/10_60.3Halfom/index.pdf
The UN Historical Clarification Commission, “Guatemala: Memory of Silence”) and forensic anthropology studies on exhumations.
The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed Bishop Gerardi? Francisco Goldman Atlantic Books Paperback – 1 Feb. 2010-
Art as the Cognition of Life: Selected Writings 1911-1936 Paperback – 1 Jan. 1998by Aleksandr Konstantinovich Voronsky (Author), Frederick S. Choate (Translator)
5. Mastermind, by David Unger -AKASHIC BOOKS Paperback – 19 May 2016
About The Author
Eduardo Halfón (born 1971) is a Guatemalan novelist and essayist whose compact, often autobiographical works probe memory, identity, migration, and Jewishness in Latin America and the United States. His books — including titles translated into English such as The Polish Boxer, Monastery, and The Book of Owners — use fragmented narrative, irony and personal testimony to interrogate how individual life is shaped by history, displacement and cultural inheritance. His latest book is Tarantula.
