The Vice-Chancellor has criticised the response to the COVID-19 pandemic from the international community. In a post uploaded to the University’s “Coronavirus Research” page, she described the absence of a united global response as “one of the very many disheartening aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic”, noting that neither the G7 nor the G20 were able to fashion a unified response. The WHO, she added, has been the “only international institution in evidence throughout the crisis.”
She went on to note the stark inequality between COVID-19 relief funding for wealthier countries and for developing countries, describing the money allocated towards developing countries as “derisory”. Referring back to previous epidemics, such as the 2002-04 SARS epidemic or the Ebola crisis, she wrote that warnings of the past were largely ignored by global institutions. “That this pandemic occurred at all, of course,” she wrote, “reflects a failure of international institutions and national governments too.” Bill Gates’ 2015 TED talk entitled “The next outbreak? We’re not ready” should also have served as a warning, she observed, in which he outlined the need to match the money spent on pandemic relief to that allocated towards nuclear deterrence.
Moving on from the shortcomings of international institutions such as the G7 and G20, she noted that “far below the haute politique of international relations, there are global institutions in the trenched that are working to find a vaccine, develop effective therapeutics and use technology to design treatments and expedite mass production. They are working together with colleagues from around the world, including the global south. They are, of course, universities.”
Oxford labs, she wrote, are “buzzing” as scientists and technicians engage in Coronavirus related research. Along with Oxford-based study, the University also has teams around the world, such as in Thailand, Vietnam and Kenya, who are collaborating with local researchers to “build local capacity and to understand and to counter respiratory and other diseases.”
She highlighted the research being carried out by teams in Oxford, such as at the Jenner Institute, where a team led by Professor Sarah Gilbert have identified a non-replicating viral vector candidate, for which GMP manufacturing is in progress. It is soon to become an international effort, and is aiming to be effective in humans by late June. Another Oxford researcher, Professor Peter Horby, who led the University’s work in response to both the SARS and Ebola epidemic, has been collaborating with the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and the China Centre for Disease Control throughout the pandemic.
Overseas medics are also mentioned, such as a team in Thailand, led by Professor Nick Day, who are conducting large-scale multinational clinical trials. Oxford academics in Kenya, working at the KEMRI-Wellcome site, are one of only three sites in the country where COVID-19 testing is taking place. Programme capacity had been building for many years in Kenya, as a result of which many are now being run by Kenyan scientists.
She noted that “it is the bringing together of people from different nationalities, different perspectives, different disciplines with a shared commitment to translate the academic research of the university for the betterment of society that is leading the way in the global response to COVID-19.” However, she concluded that, despite the efforts of universities, it is still imperative that global institutions provide a unified approach to stop the spread of the virus. She wrote: “We know that this will not be the last pandemic. We need effective international institutions, supported by governments with the wealth to do so, to ensure that the next time we are prepared.”
Image Credit to Brian Deegan. License: CC BY-SA 2.0.
Crafting a respected legacy is difficult to achieve in the music industry, and relevance is even harder for artists to maintain. The dominance of streaming in modern music consumption favours the catchy single over conceptual albums, though the latter are usually the key to critical acclaim. ‘Cancel culture’ (the internet’s form of group shaming) sets a shelf-life on popularity. The link between youth and pop culture has always made ageing a difficult inevitability for musicians but is acutely present now the constantly evolving realm of social media has become the frontline for advertising. Essentially, the internet’s ability to rapidly build up and tear down musicians gives the old saying ‘It is better to burn out than fade away’ new meaning.
And perhaps it is better to burn out instead of slowly
fading away. Passion for anything is difficult to sustain and made especially
hard when musical success comes with the baggage of media scrutiny. Justin Bieber’s
recent return to the industry after abruptly cancelling his tour dates in 2015
leaves one wondering if his legacy would have been better preserved, albeit by
its infamy, if he had left his fans wanting more. His return came alongside a
new documentary and a tightly run publicity campaign. Yet when Changes
did arrive, it was mostly panned by critics, judged as riding the wave of
R&B’s current popularity with little originality and predictably labelled a
cash-grab. Bieber’s call on TikTok for his fans to create content for his new
Chipotle-sponsored single, ‘Yummy’, was mocked by Gen Z and boomers
collectively on Twitter.
I am not going to try to defend Justin Bieber’s recent album and rather transparent marketing techniques. However, some criticism directed at Changes orbited around the fact that its subject matter – settling into marriage – was not nearly as exciting as that of his previous works like Purpose, which dealt with the crushing effect of fame on his mental health. Though valid, such criticism touches upon a pervasive theme in the creative sphere present before the dawn of the Internet: the myth that the creation of the best art is an unsustainable and painful process that comes at the expense of the creator. As Matty Healy of The 1975 quipped, “It’s so much sexier if artists are in pain, but it can be really, really destructive”.[1] YouTube videos of him crying onstage at the height of his heroin addiction and the epoch of his commercial success are filled with comments discussing his ‘tragic beauty’.
The toxicity of this is self-evident, but the aphorism ‘it is better to burn out than fade away’ is widely accepted, despite the fact it insidiously feeds the same narrative. Burning equates to destruction. Yet the destructive substance abuse burn-out legends like Hendrix, Winehouse, or Cobain struggled with is still framed as a necessary ingredient to their creative work. Kurt Cobain’s drug addiction, tumultuous relationship, and eventual suicide are as important to Nirvana’s legacy as ‘Come as You Are’ ’s opening guitar riff. It is painfully clear that musicians’ publicly displayed personal lives can be as formative to their status as their music. In Cobain’s suicide note he penned the phrase ‘‘It is better to burn out than fade away”, quoting Neil Young’s 1979 song ‘Hey, Hey, My My (Into the Black)’.
Cobain, however, misconstrued Young’s lyrics. He had actually
been trying to reach out to Cobain at the time to encourage him only to play
when he felt like it. There are countless examples of musicians who have
faded away from the spotlight in a dignified manner or maintained a modified
form of fame as ‘nostalgia acts’, like Elton John, The Cure, or Paul McCartney.
Yet, there remains a morbid obsession with posthumous glorification in pop
culture, fuelled by consumers of music more than by the musicians themselves.
This is because the beneficiary of the ‘burn out or fade
away’ doctrine is the audience, never the performer. To burn out is to be a
visual spectacle, and a star’s cataclysmic rise and fall is exciting to watch. But
measuring an artist based on public reception creates countless other ethical
problems in the music industry. What is an artist to do when their image is no
longer palatable to the public? Madonna was originally praised for embracing
her sexuality when young and conventionally attractive. As she has aged, Madonna’s
attempt to continue to utilise her sexuality has been shunned. She is now
framed as an aged, embarrassing has-been. A study by Marketing Professor
Jeetendr Sehdev at the University of Southern California found such efforts
were described as ‘desperate’ and three in five said her image was ‘embarrassing’[2].
If we continue to validate the ‘better to burn out than fade away’ mantra, we
continue to consider relevance the yardstick of success despite its being bound
up with some of the most toxic traits of our society, such as ageism and sexism.
Taylor Swift is only thirty, but acutely aware and anxious of this, stating in
her 2020 documentary “I want to work really hard while society is still
tolerating me being myself”, because “female artists I know of have to remake
themselves, like, 20 times more than male artists”.[3]
I mentioned earlier that musicians can fade out of their
career peaks peacefully. However, this seems easier for men, whose behaviour is
permissible until much later in their lives whilst the same would be framed as outrageous
if continued by the opposite sex. Though most agree Morrissey’s current
political stances are outdated at best and blatantly racist at worst, his
musical legacy with The Smiths remains relatively intact. Mick Jagger is still
widely considered a sex icon, and details of his salacious private life are
praised rather than ridiculed. There are few, if any, females comparable to
these men.
It is incredibly difficult for creative industries to shake
the enduring ‘better to burn out’ myth. Creatives’ use of emotion in art makes
their private lives feel more open to us than in other careers. When this art
is the product of pain, it is even harder to praise it without implicitly
validating the context of its creation. To be a musician you have to consider
audience response, and though relevance is evidently problematic, it is quite obviously
the only route to commercial success. Thus, though it’s clear it is not better for
musicians to burn out, it remains obscure how we can disentangle this belief
from our collective understanding of the creative process and of the music
industry.
NHS staff are on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic – and therefore at the forefront of the public imagination. Whilst the success of initiatives such as Clap for our Carers seems to suggest widespread support and respect for health workers, there have been reports of physical and verbal abuse against NHS staff across the country. These range from racial abuse, to staff being spat on, to doctors being punched whilst treating COVID-19 patients.
The assault of NHS workers is far from a new phenomenon. The most recent annual NHS staff survey revealed that 14.5% of staff had experienced physical violence from patients, their relatives or the public – that means an average of over 200 violent attacks a day. But where does this hostility towards those risking their own health to save lives come from?
Some attacks seem to be motivated by fear; since lockdown measures have been put into place, community nurses have reported being called “disease spreaders” whilst attempting to do their jobs. Receiving treatment for a disease as potentially deadly as COVID-19 would undoubtedly be a harrowing experience, with the stress bringing out the worst in some. But directing this stress at health workers, the very people working to combat the virus, makes little sense. Instead, it suggests a lack of respect for the essential work performed by healthcare workers.
Rather than being viewed as humans executing a difficult and often emotionally harrowing job under pressure, some seem to view NHS workers as simply a cog within the sprawling healthcare system. They become invisible, taken for granted until needed. Anger at the system – for example, misplaced anger that allowing nurses to continue carefully performing their much-needed duties means there are “disease spreaders” in the community (a grossly inaccurate view – the nurses themselves are at the greatest risk of infection) – is directed towards individual workers.
This view does not have to manifest itself through direct violence. The continuous underfunding of the NHS, meaning workers are increasingly underpaid and overworked, also suggests a blindness to the fact that healthcare is provided by people, not automatons. This does not necessarily mean healthcare is viewed as non-essential. In fact, it can sometimes seem that healthcare is viewed as so essential that is taken for granted that someone must provide it, and thus the person who eventually ends up providing it loses their individuality. They are nominally respected for filling the position but offered little renumeration or empathy for the actual effort their job requires.
It is possible that in the aftermath of the pandemic, this could change. However, it is far from guaranteed. When asked if nurses deserved to be paid more in the future, Matt Hancock, the health secretary, replied that “Everybody wants to support our nurses right now and I’m sure there will be a time to debate things like that. At the moment, the thing we’re working on is how to get through this”. Whilst this does seem to express support for the notion of increased pay, there is no concrete commitment even to a review of wages in the future. The work of nurses is seen as so essential that their material needs must be put on hold for the greater good of the nation.
This line of thought seems to lead towards a far more positive perception of NHS workers that still ignores their humanity. Health workers are placed on a pedestal, their work viewed as selfless and invaluable. Yet their requests for better working conditions or better pay are ignored. Support is offered only on the terms of those offering support. This also allows for the deaths of health workers to be glorified as noble and heroic, without acknowledging the fact that many could be prevented if hospitals could afford and obtain the correct protective equipment.
The pandemic has not created these perceptions, it has simply brought them more starkly into focus. However, it also provides the opportunity for them to change. Daily briefings from Downing Street see key members of the cabinet speaking alongside medical experts that many would never have heard of before the pandemic. After one of these briefings launched a drive to recruit volunteers to help the NHS, over 500,000 people signed up within a day.
For vast swathes of the population, health workers are no longer faceless and invisible, nor is their work taken for granted. But we are in extraordinary times. A true shift in the perception of healthcare workers would be accompanied by a significant improvement in pay and working conditions. Professing support while failing to implement or support such measures simply allows the belittling of healthcare work to continue in a new, ‘progressive’ guise.
Despite what social media analytics might
suggest, Tiger King was not the only Netflix Original series released last
month. The English Game, created and directed by Downton Abbey’s Julian
Fellowes and with a conspicuous lack of big cats, was released on the same day
but has been wholly and understandably overshadowed in its pursuit of viral success.
The British period drama, which focuses on the development of football in 19th century Britain, follows a number of characters on both sides of the amateurism vs. professionalism debate which emerged in many sports in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It very roughly follows true events, as it sees Fergus ‘Fergie’ Suter, and his friend and fellow footballer Jimmy Love, move from their Scottish club, Partick, to the Lancashire team Darwen, becoming some of the first professional football players. The pair, alongside their boss, hope to help the mill-based team become the first working class team to win the Football Association Cup, hitherto dominated by gentlemen. These gentlemen are – quelle surprise – not particularly pleased with this challenge and feel threatened by the professionalisation of ‘their’ game, thus moving to ban the participation of players who are paid to play.
The series isn’t bad. It’s certainly
enjoyable, but it promises so much more than it delivers. Its constituent parts
appear to provide a recipe for inevitable success, with its award-winning
director, cast of familiar faces, fascinating social, cultural, and political
historical backdrop and, above all, a central theme focusing on the development
of the greatest game ever played – football. Perhaps, however, this privileged
starting position was the cause of its deficiencies. The English Game
has all the hallmarks of a project designed to capitalise on the reputation of
the director, profiting from his oft-trotted, though admittedly popular, Posh
‘n’ Not theme.
The cast all put in good, solid performances, but they’re hamstrung by average writing, which necessitates their characters erring on the verge of becoming parodies of themselves. Fellows does not delve into the complex lives of the working classes in the small Lancashire town in which the series is largely set, or indeed the lives of the Old Etonians with which they’re unsubtly contrasted, but rather falls back on unimaginative, painting-by-numbers-style period drama clichés. From the outset, we are confronted with the arrogant toffs who are entitled snobs, complete with the charming young son who can never live up to his father’s expectations, and with the hard-working, salt of the earth northern mill workers, variously presented as happy-go-lucky or angry. There is a little more depth of character afforded to Kinaird and Suter, with the former suddenly abandoning his long-term and institutionally-bred arrogance in order to become the champion of the working class football movement and the latter battling between the pull of his heart and pocket. But again, they exist within such a cliched plot that character development can be predicted at every turn, and much of the nuance is lost.
Historically, The English Game is less than impressive. Much of the real history is simplified for the sake of the plot, and the chronology is a little askew in various, unimportant aspects, but almost all of these misdemeanours can be forgiven. This is not a documentary, after all, and the plot isn’t obviously undermined by the ways in which the production fails to represent the historical reality faithfully. Visually, the series is pleasing, and there are satisfying nods to the tactical development of the game, alongside representations of the incredibly physical nature of the 19th century game, which often saw the practice of ‘hacking’ employed as a tactical decision. Again, whilst the treatment of upper-class women is largely reduced to gossiping and following their husbands to and from the dinner table, the series does present Kinaird’s wife, Alma, as an influential character in Arthur’s life, and alludes to the social activism with which many upper-class women were concerned during the period.
Despite the criticism which has been fairly
levelled at the series, the overall viewing experience is good enough. I wasn’t
left overwhelmed at the spectacle I’d seen, desperate to watch it again; nor
was I scrambling to tell my friends to watch it. Despite the sometimes-painful
stereotypes, historical flaws and clichéd subplots, The English Game
does provide 270 minutes of useful ‘bingeable’ Netflix fodder that is
particularly welcome during this period of football-free isolation.
The words spring to mind quickly when thinking of San Francisco in the seventies. Between the tail end of an active hippy movement and a ferociously blossoming gay scene, this is where the suburban sensibilities of the American middle classes were reborn again in the form of LSD tabs and ethereal clouds of pure thought. Sex seemed like the central axis of the world. The sexual revolution defied the traditional limitations set on sexual and romantic freedoms. For the first time, it seemed, homosexuality, masturbation, contraception, pre-marital sex, pornography and more were all in common discussion. Sex was political. Sex was radical. Sex was, above all, diametrically opposed to the dry dreams of domestic stability idealised by the conservative press. The cups of tea left on the counter for a late-rising second half, syncing schedules and platonic morning hugs, one would think, belonged to another plane of reality altogether. Certainly, in this world of acid trips, politicised sex and fearless activism, domesticity would seem a little out of place.
This at least was the message pushed by the media at the time. They hystericised activist groups and the (mostly well-meaning) hippy communes into anti-Christian ‘sex cults’ and ‘hidden drug orgies’ and prophesied the ‘corruption of family values’. But the dichotomy they play on, between domestic stability and sexual or passionate love, is actually an ancient one. The literary canon has been at it for centuries.
Throughout poetic history there is a sustained theme, especially in the body of work by straight male poets. Love is presented as an urge to physically pursue, worship and chase the, generally female and voiceless, love interest. At the same time, in both literature and culture, waning sexual appetite is equated to waning love. There are very few poets who wax lyrical about the subsidence of quick, passionate nights into slow, intimate, but impotent, mornings. The implicit suggestion is that sexual desire and a wish for domestic stability are in some way opposed.
According to the seventies press, then, it ought to be all the more surprising that the poet to break this dichotomy should have risen from the depths of San Francisco’s sex clubs. Thom Gunn openly took his inspiration from popper-driven open-air orgies; party drugs, one-night stands and gay club culture was all fair game. He also took inspiration from his long-term polygamous relationships and the domestic functionality of the housemates he lived with for over thirty years. His poetry centres specifically on the gay experience and seventies SF; he moves intimately from the inner workings of sex clubs to the enlightening – and the darker sides – of recreational drugs. But he also often imbues his poetry with the kind of communitarian, familiar spirit of hippy communes. His flatmates, to him, were family. He valued the kind of dry, domestic love that grows out of long-term relationships. His poem ‘The Hug’ centres specifically on that experience:
It was not sex, but I could feel The whole strength of your body set, Or braced, to mine, And locking me to you As if we were still twenty-two When our grand passion had not yet Become familial. My quick sleep had deleted all Of intervening time and place. I only knew The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.
Joshua Weiner, a close heterosexual friend of Thom’s, describes how “in his life and in his work he [showed] how pleasure and eroticism and domestic stability were, for him, a seamless continuum.” In the essay At the Barriers, Weiner muses on the constraints prescribed especially to straight male poets in love poetry. The antithetical presentation of eroticism and pleasure to domestic stability traps them in the kind of poetic tropes that seem to make it near-to impossible to write the kind of poetry Gunn does. Cue castration anxieties and fears of sterility and empty love. He stresses too the importance of Gunn’s communal living situation too; his constant flatmates provided him much of the domestic stability that the revolving door of lovers could often not, taking turns to cook and clean on a solid rota for thirty-three years. But there is an implicit suggestion that Gunn’s homosexuality frees him somewhat from these constraints. Here, his friend sheepishly underplays Gunn’s revolutionary spirit.
Because looking at queer literary history too more often than not reveals the same tropes as the canonical tendency above. The love interests of Wilde, Mackworth Dolben, Garcia Lorca are, unnamed and ungendered, the objects of a love all the more sexually charged in nature for the difficulty in their fulfilment and the criminality of their attraction to them. Love is expressed – maybe even disguised – through traditionally heterosexual tropes of uneven power dynamics; the pursuer and the pursued, the possessor and the possessed.
Perhaps this parallel happened out of an urge to validate a sexual attraction that was considered a perversion punishable by law. Perhaps it was an act of quiet subversion by using tropes otherwise so unquestioningly applied to heterosexual couplings. Either way, it seems, Weiner was wrong. These static roles ascribed to love poetry were not limited to heterosexual poets.
Which means: Gunn was, even in the radical era he lived in, a true exception. After the seventies, both on the liberal and the conservative side, the ‘acid age’ was dismissed as a drug-hazed misadventure. But San Francisco in the Seventies saw the boundaries of what counted as ‘family’, as ‘love’, as ‘relationships’ radically challenged by ‘alternative’ ways of living. Gunn embodied, and continued to embody the spirit of that era, both in his life and his work.
What I think Gunn really teaches us is this: there is just as much poetic force in the kinds of love that do not conform to traditional tropes of poetry. Be they heterosexual or homosexual, monogamous or polyamorous, sexual or asexual, none of them have to take up those roles. We need to start forging, and appreciating, the roles that lie outside these simplistic dichotomies.
At midday on Friday, February 22nd, 2019, a loud explosion is heard in one of Medellín’s most affluent neighbourhoods. The explosion is so large that it engulfs the neighbourhood, covering the surrounding apartment blocks in a cloud of orange dust. Yet this is not the work of drug cartels or FARC guerrillas, but rather the city mayor and his new initiative, ‘Medellín – Abraza Su Historia’ or, in English, ‘Medellín Embracing Its History’. The building demolished that day was the Monaco building, drug lord Pablo Escobar’s luxury home for much of the 1980s where he planned some of his most violent acts. While the building had been left more or less abandoned after it was seized by the Colombian government in 1990, its gruesome past meant that it quickly becamea popular tourist destination. Frustrated with the dominance of Escobar’s legacy in Medellín, the mayor decided that this ‘symbol of evil’ needed to be entirely obliterated and replaced with a memorial dedicated to the victims, rather than the perpetrators, of the city’s bloody past. Over the last decade, an enormous amount of time and money has been put into reinventing Medellín, Colombia’s second-largest city. Once named the most dangerous city in the world, Medellín has since become known as ‘the most innovative’, winning an international prize under this label in2013for its successes in social development. Yet at the core of this regeneration lies a more fundamental question: will Medellín, or even Colombia as a whole, ever be able to truly overcome its past and create a new legacy for itself while there is still a high demand for cocaine?
Medellín provides a microcosmic example of Colombia’s fight against Escobar’s legacy – that is to say, a fight against its international reputationas a politically corrupt and violent nation, as well as being a major producer of cocaine. All cities are made up of the remnants of their past, both in material and non-material form, and this provides a particular challenge when the recent history is one made up of so much bloodshed and crime.As the Harvard University study ‘Roots of Violence in Colombia – Armed Actors and Beyond’ points out, ‘Colombia’s history is one of the most violent in thehemisphere, with organized killing existing at chronically high levels, punctuated with episodes of high-intensity murderousness, for nearly two centuries’. Medellín became the centre of this ‘endemic violence’ in the latter half of the 20th century.
To understand how Medellín became an urban war zone, we need to understand the city’s past. Following an industrial revolution in the first half of the 20thcentury, Medellín became a hub of economic activity, the population increasing sixfold between 1905 and 1951. The influx of rural migrants led to the development of poor comunas in the hillsides, not dissimilar from Brazil’s favelas. The economic growth that took place across Colombia in the 1970s may have improved life for white-collar workers, but the World Bank suggests that this was highly damaging for poorer communities, with unemployment rapidly increasing in Medellín. During this period, cocaine also reemerged as a fashionable drug in the US and Europe, providing the city’s struggling, marginalisedcommunities with a route out of poverty – drug trafficking. The dominance of the Medellín Cartel grew alongside the richer countries’ appetite for cocaine which consequently led to the city being named ‘the most dangerous in the world’ in a 1988 article by TIME Magazine. The article describeshow what was once known as the ‘city of eternal spring’ had become ‘the city of eternal violence’, policemen pacing suburban streets with automatic rifles and civilians walking around with pistols underneath their shirts. In 1987, 3000 people were murdered in Medellín, a homicide rate five times higher than that of New York the same year. Drug-trafficking had turned the city into a notoriously dangerous place, with around 80% of the cocaine imported to the US coming through the Medellín Cartel. Bombings, assassinations, shootings, torture and sexual assault weredaily occurrencesin some neighbourhoods of Medellín throughout this period, with cartels controlling every aspect of civilian life. Bearing all this evidence in mind, the task of creating a new legacyfor Medellín and for its younger generations seems laughably impossible, but it was after Escobar’s assassination in 1993 and the consequential downfall of the Medellín Cartel that this challenge became the mayor’s policy.
Stanley Stewart summarises the city’s impressive and bizarre reinvention in a 2018 article for The Telegraph: ‘How Medellín went from murder capital to hipster holiday destination’. Stewart, perplexed by the city’s sudden transformation, asked his tour guide what lay at the core of the regeneration’s success, to which the tour guide replied “Transport”. The idea that public transport could put an end to decades of widespread crime and violence seems bizarre, but this is the commonly-held belief of the city’s natives.
In 1995, the Medellín Metro was established in a desperate attempt to reconnect the divided city and avoid the geographical segregation seen in places like New York, Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro. The Metro became an important cultural symbol in the city for marginalised workers, and was soon followed by the Metrocable, a gondola lift system which provided a solution to the steep hills that mark Medellín’s topography. This transport network is more than a means of getting around as it symbolises the transformation of Medellin for the city’s inhabitants and is regarded with something approaching reverence. Announcements on the Metro call on people to behavein the outside world as well as they do in the train carriage, all part of what is known as the cultura metro. When I visited Medellín in 2018, a woman in a tienda in Villa Sierra (once Medellín’s most dangerous comuna) told me that most people’s commutes into the city centre had been halved by an hour thanks to the new gondola system. Medellín’s Metrocable has since become the inspiration for many other cities across the globe which are considering a similar approach to tackle social segregation. By addressing the issues which led to such high levels of poverty and crime, Escobar’s legacy in the city diminished and was replaced with a sentiment of determination.
The mayor and the Colombian government were also aware that Medellín’s public spaces needed to be redeveloped in order to create a safer environment in the city centre. Many squares were hubs of drug trafficking and prostitution, the Plaza Cisneros being the most infamous of them all. In 2005, the mayor of Medellín decided to put 300 towers of light in the square to quite literally dispel any darkness – without any dark corners, it became impossible for the square to become a hub of illegal activity again and it was transformed into a popular attraction for tourists and locals alike, now known as the Plaza de las Luces (Square of Lights). And this is not an exception – examples of the city uprootingits past and putting in place the foundations for a brighter future are abundant. In June 1995, the year that the process of regeneration began, 30 civilians were killed and 200 wounded by the detonation of a 20-pound bomb at a music festival in the Plaza de San Antonio. The bomb had been placed at the base of a sculpture called ‘The Bird’, the work of Medellín’s most famous artist, Fernando Botero. What remained of the artwork was a distressing reminder of the event, a jagged hole tearing through the bird’s metal stomach. Instead of removing the sculpture, Botero decided that it would make more sense to create a new legacy of peace by keeping the damaged bird and placing a new version of the original beside it. Named ‘The Birds of Peace’, the two statues side by side embody the new path that the city is attempting to follow – one which both embraces the past and looks towards creating a better future.
Yet trying to transform a city so drastically in such a short space of time is ambitious, and whether such a feat will be able to sustain itself is a worrying prospect for Medellín. While the city’s art museums and botanical gardens do attract many tourists, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has suggested that Escobar’s legacy has provided a whole new wave of tourism in the city – narcoturismo. That’s to say, tourists going to Medellín to take or traffic drugs and visit brothels, the city supposedly having “the most beautiful women in the world”. The UN study also explores the link between tourism and the sex trafficking of children and adolescents, a pertinent problem in many of Colombia’s touristic hotspots, such as the colourful, colonial city of Cartagena.
Many foreigners go to Medellín to feed their morbid curiosity by visiting sites related to the famous Medellín Cartel, including Escobar’s country estate ‘Hacienda Nápoles’ which is now a theme park and ‘La Manuela’, another of the drug lord’s properties, which overlooks Guatapé’s reservoir which is now used by tourists as a paintballing venue. Guatapé, reportedly one of the most beautiful towns in the country due to its colourful houses and astounding green landscape, has only recently reemerged as a tourist destination after years of chaos under Escobar. Like much of the region, Medellín is home to some of the most beautiful natural landscapes and architecture, yet despite its many charms, it seems that some tourists are more interested in the darker side of its history.
Nonetheless, Medellín is fighting against Escobar’s legacy with an arguably more influential force for change – education. Nelson Mandela famously said that ‘education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world’, and Medellín has invested in this belief with its system of ‘library parks’. A ‘library park’ is a concept native to the city; these multi-purpose educational buildings surrounded by green space open to the public aim to provide education and innovation in the most deprived neighbourhoods of Medellín. The most famous is the ‘Parque Biblioteca España’, created in 2007 in one of the city’s most notorious northern neighbourhoods – Santo Domingo Savio. The building provides the comuna with a library, a cultural centre, a community centre and internet access. The architectural design focuses on providing a sanctuary for the locals; many of the rooms have small vertical windows to allow young people to escape from their environment for a few hours.
Medellín’s regeneration project suggests that the city is creating an exciting new future for itself – one of innovation and determination in spite of such adversity. And this is without mentioning its environmental projects, education schemes, street art and the music genre which has begun to dominate the city’s image on a global scale – reggaetón. There’s even a twenty-minute documentary dedicated to the city’s ‘Rebirth through Reggaeton’. The short film made by Complex News explores Medellín’s newfound role as the epicentre of the genre through interviews with various reggaeton superstars, including the Latin Grammy award-winning artist J Balvin who tells the viewer ‘You’ve just got to go [to Medellín]. I guarantee that you’ll be back. 2000 per cent. If not, I’ll give you your money back.’
However, despite so many successes, Medellín is still struggling with crime and violence. In 2018, the city’s murder rate rose for the first time after years of decline with 626 murders, an increase of almost 10% from the previous year. The national newspaper El Tiempocalled 2018 a bloody year for Medellín, one local government official statingthat such violence hadn’t been seen in the city since 2008. Most of the violence that year occurred in Comuna 7 and Comuna 13 between local gangs who control the majority of the city’s drug trafficking. Cressida Dick and Sadiq Khan are among many public figures who have attacked middle-class liberals for the hypocrisy of their cocaine use which ‘perpetuates a chain of violent activity’, creating misery and environmental degradation at every level in the supply chain. It is not only Escobar’s legacy that Medellín (and much of Colombia) is fighting against but also our national demand for drugs, with Britain estimated to have a cocaine market worth around five billion pounds.
Ultimately,Medellín’s regeneration project has completely transformed the city’s landscape and atmosphere, seemingly ridding the city of much of its dark past. Yet, while this did initially lead to a considerable drop in the crime rate and gave the city a brand new identity to present to the international community, the city is still struggling with the problems left from decades of drug-trafficking and guerrilla warfare. This is to be expected as modern art galleries and chart-topping music cannot wipe away years of violence nor fix the destruction of much of the city’s infrastructure, yet there is also another obstacle that is far too often overlooked – our role, as Britons, in Medellín’s development. Cocaine leaves victims at every level of its production, be it thechildren forced to make the drug, the police officers who face violence and death for trying to fight the cartels, the mules who ingest the drug for transportation or the teenage victims of knife crime in London.And this is to name but a few. Medellín, like all great cities, has many problems but the drug-trafficking and the violence that the cocaine trade brings with it is at the very top of their concerns. In the globalised world in which we live, we are all mutually responsible. Drug-trafficking is not just a Colombian problem, but a global issue. As long as there is a demand for cocaine, Medellín’s drive for a new future will never entirely succeed, and ‘the city of eternal Spring’ will be cursed with many more years of insecurity, crime and violence.
The Oxford Living Wage Campaign, a student organization for worker justice at the University of Oxford as well as its colleges, has released an open letter calling for better protection of workers by the University and constituent colleges during the disruption caused by COVID-19.
On April 9th the Campaign shared its open letter to Vice-Chancellor Louise Richardson, with the intention of gathering signatures from the public. In the letter the Campaign criticizes a lack of action by the main University to protect all segments of its workforce from job insecurity and high-risk work. It argues that workers contracted from third-party employers, zero-hour contract workers, migrant workers, essential workers, and workers with caring responsibilities are excluded from official measures at the moment.
Moreover, the open letter identifies unique issues associated with protecting workers across the collegiate university, as individual Colleges are not currently bound by the University to follow official worker-protection measures. According to information obtained by the Living Wage Campaign, while some colleges have been paying workers for their usual hours despite the disruption caused by the pandemic, others did not take advantage of government furlough schemes and have made “no financial provisions” for casual workers receiving no or little pay.
The open letter organizes the Campaign’s demands into the tripartite slogan: “Tell Us, Pay Us, Protect Us”. In a press release, the Campaign summarizes their three core demands as: “better communication between University/colleges and workers”, “safeguarded pay, benefits and job security, including for those on variable/zero-hour contracts”, and “safe working conditions and immigration support”.
According to the open letter, the decision to publicly petition the University became necessary after aforementioned reports of unsafe working conditions and precarious employment situations at Oxford surfaced. The Oxford Living Wage Campaign has told Cherwell that they have heard from University and college workers who are struggling to afford food and housing as a result of dramatic cuts in hours, as well as workers pressured to show up despite having underlying health conditions which make them more vulnerable to COVID-19. In addition, some cleaners employed at the University have told the Oxford Living Wage Campaign that they are not provided with appropriate Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), making their work unsafe.
Angela Boyle of the Oxford Living Wage Campaign comments that “the university has always relied on an underpaid, under-supported and precarious workforce for its survival, with the burden falling most heavily on migrant workers and women. The current crisis has just thrown this into relief.”
As of April 9th, the open letter has gathered 42 main signatories. These include four Oxford City councillors, Oxford SU Class Act and LGBTQ+ Campaigns, multiple trade unions such as Oxford UCU and UNISON, Co-Chairs of Oxford & District Labour Party and the Young Greens of England and Wales, Oxford Feminist Society, and a group from other universities such as the Justice for Cleaners campaigns at LSE and KCL. In addition to calling for more signatures, the Oxford Living Wage Campaign is also calling for individuals to email the Vice-Chancellor and Chair of the Conference of Colleges to strengthen the petition. The open letter has also been sent to University senior administrators, division heads, Pro-Vice-Chancellors, and all college heads.
Cherwell has reached out to the University for comment.
If there’s a conclusion to be drawn from C. M. Kauffmann’s Eve’s
Apple to The Last Supper: Picturing Food in the Bible, it is surely that
food’s cultural currency is both universal and particular. His opening chapter,
which discusses what he refers to as the ‘Basic Features’ of biblical
comestibles – bread, wine, and fish – points out that the first of these has an
almost ubiquitous anthropological history as a staple. The metaphorical and
literal prevalence of bread in the Bible, therefore, uses its unchallenged
status as a human essential to articulate the fundamental expedience of the
Christian creed. Christ can declare himself “the bread of life” and then
literalise this claim by supplying the cereal necessity. Yet bread has a
broader synecdochal resonance: it alsorepresents the universalising symbolic force of food itself, and
thus justifies the centrality of damning and miraculous acts of eating in multiple
biblical narratives.
It is likely because, and not in spite of, food’s omnipresence
in human life that its various manifestations and methods of consumption tend
to be temporally and geographically localised. As Kauffmann recognises, any foodstuff
to appear in the Bible that isn’t one of the three ‘Basic Features’ is rarely
identified – perhaps its authors realised that the ubiquity of food’s appeal is
contingent upon a generalising, non-specificity of reference. As the book turns
its attention to artistic representations of the Bible’s ‘food moments’, it
becomes clear that illustrators and artists from almost every period of
Christian history were obliged to make decisions regarding what food it was
appropriate to include in their visualisations.
On occasion, an artist’s choice of food appears to have been based upon its obvious symbolic import, with only a weak connection to contemporary customs. The abundance of cherries in Ghirlandaio’s 1480 frescoed depiction of the Last Supper is probably not a comment on their prominence in the 15th-century Florentine diet but a chromatic gesture to the blood of Christ. The resemblance between the colour of cherry juice and the colour of blood is not an association particular to the gastronomical climate Ghirlandaio was painting in. But the rationale underlying pictorial decisions made in relation to food is not always so overt. The identity of Eden’s Forbidden Fruit was notoriously contested, despite the prevailing tradition of interpreting it to be an apple. There are multiple putative explanations as to how and why the apple-identity came to be bestowed upon Eve’s fruit. One account for fruity trends outside of the Western Church relates different portrayals to the agrarian customs of geographies in which they were produced. Apples were the most widely available fruit in north-western Europe when they first started popping up in artistic depictions of Eden; the same is also true of figs in the Byzantine Empire and their prevalence in eastern visualisations of the Genesis story.
As well as reflecting the prominence of food in the Bible itself, Christian art introduced new scenes of food and cooking to certain biblical narratives. These interpolations often reflect the theological concerns and cultural tides of the painter’s contemporary society. A particularly pertinent example of this phenomenon is the popularity of depicting Joseph cooking in the Nativity scene, which arose in the late 14th century. Despite having no basis in the Gospels, Kauffmann suggests that this pictorial innovation reflects a cultural concern with the accessibility of the Bible. In reaction to the early medieval emphasis on Jesus’ divinity, this pre-Renaissance period sought to humanise the son of God; the rehabilitation of Joseph in his paternal role was conducted through domestic scenes such as cooking. This aided the cultivation of an exoteric Christian iconography, which might be understood and appreciated by the lay community.
The domesticity of food, which this final example of pictorial trends in Christianity utilises, is, I believe, the most persistent capacity in which food appears in art (literary, theatrical, and cinematic, as well as visual). While it has other tonal associations – notably, the celebratory (Gatsby’s tea-party for Daisy) and the sexual (Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover) – most commonly art tends to evoke the familiarity of cooking and eating: think of the rich, creamy milk that accompanies Stephen Dedalus, Buck Mulligan, and Haines’ breakfast of eggs, bread, butter, and honey at the start of Ulysses, or of Proust’s ‘Madeleine moment’.
But the quotidian, comforting presence of food also renders the edible trope ripe for subversion. One novel infamous for its strikingly detailed, if not especially appetising, description of its protagonist’s eating habits is Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea. From the custard creams he is offered in his cousin’s flat to his own seemingly impossible concoction of “an egg poached in hot scrambled egg”, Charles Arrowby provides, with excruciating fastidiousness, an account of practically everything he eats across the course the novel, as well as extended passages reflecting on his culinary philosophy. Charles’ investment in what he cooks reflects his theatrical background: the care and thought devoted to the production of a one-person meal which will be gone in a matter of minutes bathetically mirrors the transient art of the stage, which has, somewhat ironically, been his life’s work. Food exposes Charles’ lack of self-awareness: at one point he insists that he is “not a petty purist who refuses to drink wine with curry”, an assertion which sits oddly in a passage full of his prescriptive culinary aphorisms. It reveals his obsessiveness and makes us recognise his isolation: the ritual routineness of his meals stands out in his otherwise unstructured and solitary life. That he considers it worth describing each course of the lunch he eats after the long-lost son of his kidnapped childhood sweetheart turns up is particularly disconcerting. As the plot progresses, Charles’ life increasingly ceases to bear any semblance to normality. Food is no longer a comforting part of the everyday but a false ritual that persists crudely throughout the drama. It works in a sense like the Freudian uncanny, being simultaneously the most normal of Charles’ habits and one of the most horrifying.
While Christian artists included food in the biblical scenes they depicted in order to familiarise them, Murdoch utilises food to emphasise the total abnormality which can characterise human life. Yet this in itself depends upon its cultural salience. Food is both a necessity and a luxury: it can damn you or save you, reinforce the comforting norm or expose a bizarre reality.
The last restaurant reviews for the foreseeable future were published last week, with introductions that were partly nostalgic, partly apologetic. Reading them, you can sense the underlying fear that the reviewers’ work, perhaps never important in the dull, serious sense of the word, has now become entirely redundant. How, the critics seemed to be asking, could they expect us to read such carefree descriptions of an activity now totally inaccessible; whose tone seem inappropriately insouciant; which celebrate businesses that might not survive the current crisis?
At a time like this, reading restaurant views seems an almost masochistic pleasure, rather like picking at a scab. But wasn’t it always? Hearing about the latest, almost invariably London-based, innovative-but-unpretentious, perfectly-pitched, exquisitely-executed opening, I never really considered the reviewed restaurant as an actual place that I might be able to visit one day.
In some senses, eating out itself was also an act of wish-fulfillment. Responsibilities – of cooking for ourselves, managing budget, nutrition and clearing-up – were temporarily suspended as we entered an environment in which our only purpose was to be served. The enjoyment is all vicarious: restaurant reviews fulfill a certain fantasy, of a life of leisure and wealth, in which our worst problem might be getting allocated a table in a less atmospheric corner of the dining room.
What makes the reviews worth reading is not any imagined utility they might have nor the recommendations they might give, but the writing. The reviewers might know a good deal about the food industry, but first and foremost their job is to offer a depiction of their world, not advise about our own. It’s for this reason that Jay Rayner is always so keen to emphasise that he is above all a writer, rather than a food critic.
It’s perhaps an obvious thing to note, but when we read the work of these critics, we’re savouring their prose in addition to the food they depict. This is even more clearly the case when the places reviewed are considered failures: of course I would never plan on eating somewhere with a chilling atmosphere, or a minutely-portioned and dissonantly-flavoured tasting menu, but I revel in the sarcastic, hyperbolic, witty criticisms of journalists whose only job is to become eloquently irate about slightly sub-par food.
I don’t say this to dismiss the onslaught of articles on store cupboard cooking and budget shopping (after all, this is coming from someone who has published an unashamedly gushing panegyric to the lentil in this very newspaper). Certainly, there is a place for practical food writing, and for a food industry less elitist and more in touch with the needs of the majority of the population. But now, more than ever, seems a time we might want to escape from those responsibilities, from the accumulated anxieties of an increasingly restricted daily life, and restaurant reviews can provide just that escapism. Nostalgia can be just as effective a coping mechanism as grim stoicism, so we shouldn’t feel ashamed about scrolling through the archives, shutting out the real world and conjuring up, just for a moment, the old clink of glasses.
My home has always seemed a microcosm of twenty-first century India transplanted into the heart of rural England: the resplendent hues of my mother’s saris blossoming against the staid serenity of the surrounding fields; the staccato rhythms of Hindi intermingled with the measured cadence of English; the spicy fragrance of cinnamon and cloves permeating the evening air…
There is a curious ambiguity to
the immigrant identity – the sense of inhabiting two distinct universes, yet not
truly belonging to either. As
a child, I was acutely aware of the palpable, if largely tacit, gulf that
separated me from my British peers, demarcated by the varying cultural
milestones that punctuated our lives. I, for example, didn’t learn how to
properly cut my food with a knife and fork until I turned nine, having grown up
eating with my hands. Even a decade later, my awkwardness with cutlery remains
a source of considerable anxiety, perhaps because it bears testimony to the
fragility of my selfhood – my identity still precarious, still under construction.
But it is a hybrid ethnicity I have come to embrace. Living in Britain does not automatically decentre my Indian heritage. Recreating the traditions of my ancestors sustains my memory of my homeland, and meal-time ritual is no exception. Eating food with your hands seems increasingly anachronistic in a world dominated by silverware – and I admit, it isn’t always the most aesthetically pleasing mode of consumption. It is, however, a custom – an institution – of profound symbolic significance for the Indian people, not solely on a national level, but also on a personal level.
Hand-to-mouth dining draws deeply on Ayurveda, an ancient health philosophy blending science and spirituality in the treatment of disease. It valorises the hands as the conduits of the five elements – water, air, earth, fire and space – so bringing the fingers into contact with each other and with the food activates these elements, forging a connection with the wider cosmos and imbuing the meal with cosmic energy. This emphasis on mindful eating can provide a crucial antidote to an increasingly complex and fast-paced world. Dispensing with intermediary utensils adds a tactile dimension to the meal, which crystallises the connection between the consumer and the consumed. Texture, aroma, flavour and appearance merge and meld seamlessly, at once intensifying and enlivening the gastronomic experience. Finally, there is, of course, a degree of pragmatism. Roti (the flatbread served with practically every meal) and daal (lentil soup) are, evidently, not amenable to the Western knife and fork.
Let us probe further. What can account for the longevity of a dining tradition amidst successive imperial regimes and centuries of social, political and cultural reconfiguration? Ayurvedic rationale is undoubtedly a legitimising factor, but there persists an undeniably deeper, more visceral resonance. It speaks volumes about an enduring symbiosis between nation and cuisine. Think ‘India’, and, almost instinctively, one envisions bustling sabzi mandis (vegetable markets), steeped in the rampant scents and sounds of culinary sorcery. Food is a lifeblood, the literal and figurative pulse of a personality that is constantly adapting and evolving. It pivots not solely upon the physical substance of the meal but also upon the attendant rites and rituals. The principle of ‘unity in diversity’ typifies the Indian national ethos, finding distinctive expression in the vast array of ingredients, techniques, and equipment deployed in service of the culinary art. Although the final product may vary substantially between regions, the resemblance between our eating practices is quite remarkable; whether we think of the naans and biryani of the northern regions, or the idli and dosa emblematic of the South, the custom of dining sans cutlery is ubiquitous. It is, however, more than a communal experience, composing a mutually intelligible cultural idiom through which interregional division can be temporarily transcended, linguistic and religious divergence attenuated. In short, eating with your hands denotes a national identity that does not exclude or discriminate.
But the journey it inspires is, at the same time, intensely personal. As a second-generation immigrant, ‘diaspora’ and ‘identity crisis’ are, to my mind, virtually synonymous. Mediating a pluri-ethnic heritage can be a tortuous process. It is contoured by the dissonance between culture of residence and culture of origin, the assimilation into the former, the neglect of the latter, and the haunting sense of guilt that this routinely evokes. In this context, replicating the dining practices of my parents, and my grandparents, and millions of Indians across the world is strangely liberating. Engaging in so hallowed a tradition, albeit in a western setting, it feels as though I have somehow established a dialogue between the conflicting claimants to my cultural allegiance. The sensation of internal ‘wholeness’ is soothing.
The connection between dining
etiquette and identity is abstract but nonetheless compelling. As a unifying
force, it articulates a shared narrative of culture, history and national
solidarity of particular importance in an era of escalating regionalist
agitation. But, for the individual, the implications are even more far-reaching.
It reminds us that identity formation isn’t concrete. It is malleable and
mobile and composite, inflected by personal agency and inherited tradition
alike, derived from a myriad of experiences. It is incredible that the
childhood experience of eating with my hands – so reflexive, structured, honed
through daily practice – would enable me to reconcile the ‘Indian’ and
‘British’ elements of my ethnicity, and eternally anchor me to the former as I
progressively submerged myself in the latter.
Perhaps, then, it is time for us to revise the old adage: you are not merely what you eat, but, equally, how you eat.
