JAN SWAYED ACROSS the deck and rang the dinner bell, just outside the galley door. Those off-duty dribbled in gradually and took their seats around the dinner table, discussing the day’s chores and journey progression. They were just two days from Port Royale now, which meant two days from looting, drinking, fornicating and fighting. The excitement on the ship increased the closer they were to a port, and tonight, aided by extra rum rations, spirits were high and raucous.
Getting over-excited, and forgetting the new regime, one hulking pirate gulped down his beer and belched long and loudly, finishing with a tuneful flourish. His shipmates began to erupt in cheers, until Jan raised a questioning eyebrow. The cheering stopped abruptly. ‘Sorry’, muttered the offender, eyeing the wooden spoon in her hand.
Jan and her galley boy heaved the enormous vegetarian lasagnes from the ship’s ovens to the centre of the wooden table. The pirates, politely, one after another, helped themselves. ‘And whoever doesn’t finish doesn’t get pudding’, she warned to nodded grunts, as the salad bowl was passed around.
Thinking about it, Jan still wasn’t completely sure how she ended up as part of the crew of a 18th Century pirate ship.
Just six weeks earlier, almost to the day, she had been sitting desolate on the Bristol quayside, watching absent-mindedly through her one good eye the ferry boats sail past towards the city with cargoes of tourists. She had fingered the black patch covering her right eye, drained the last of the bottle, and sighed heavily.
Seven days before she had quite unexpectedly woken up with the complete right side of her face just, well, out of order. Her right eye had drooped, and had become frighteningly hard to blink. The right corner of her mouth similarly drooped, as if in formation with the eye, and Jan found it actually beyond use. Talking became a matter of forcing conversation through the left side of her mouth, making it raise slightly whenever she spoke, and giving her speech a curious growl.
Bell’s Palsy, apparently, is when the nerve that controls the muscles in your face become compressed due to some kind of viral infection. Basically, she thought, staring at her reflection, she looked like a stroke victim, but thankfully without having had the stroke.
The hospital had given Jan an eye-patch to wear, and a set of muscle exercises for her mouth. Eventually, they said, her face would recover.
She adapted well, at first. WIthin a few hours she was getting used to talking out the corner of her mouth, but she couldn’t do much about that rolling growl, no matter what she tried. In fact, it was getting more pronounced, if anything.
Mortified at her appearance to her colleagues, in desperation she had taken up her idiot son’s advice about ‘rocking the pirate look’ until she could bear to remove the eye-patch and her face exercises cured the worst of the droop.
Seemed like a good idea.
To head off any suspicions and questions from bewildered colleagues and friends she began a sponsored ‘Act Like a Pirate’ month to disguise her condition. She even started taking donations so as not blow her cover.
Over the next few days, though, things deteriorated.
Her growl became more and more pronounced, and she unthinkingly began prefixing all her replies to colleagues with the guttural, rolling drawl.
On a midweek evening out with department colleagues, she was wrongly ordered a straight rum from the bar. Not wanting to cause a fuss, and despite never having liked rum, being more of a wine girl, she sat quietly and sipped at the dark liquid. Four hours later she staggered in through her front door, swigging straight from a half-empty bottle of Lambs Navy, shouting at imaginary mermaids and singing shanties she had no idea she knew.
She started referring to women she didn’t know as ‘wenches’, a word that definitely wasn’t in her pro-feminist vocabulary before.
She became claustrophobic in the city, hankering for the ocean, to get off dry land and into the open sea, which was weird given that she became sea-sick just by pedalling a swan pedalo on the shallow pond in the local park.
She had also recently started looking into buying a parrot. It just somehow seemed like a good idea.
After a few days of this, while she was sitting desolate on the quayside, wondering what on earth was going on, feeling the black patch covering her right eye, and with an empty rum bottle at her feet, the pirate ship unexpectedly sailed into Bristol harbour. As the crew laid waste to the city, the Captain, seeing one of his own, had her kidnapped and shanghaied aboard. They sailed away that same evening.
And now, six weeks later, under the Jolly Roger flapping in the wind, Jan gazed out across the beautiful blue, swirling ocean. The brilliant low sun cast dark shadows of the ship onto the water as it ploughed through the great seas. In truth, she was quite looking forward to arriving at Port Royale; the Captain had promised her gold and fine jewellery, fit for a queen. Gold and fine jewellery had never before excited her. But now it made perfect sense, and it excited her far beyond most things. Fit for a queen!
Yes, Jan couldn’t wait to get to Port Royale.
She still wore the eye-patch, and she was still talking out of the side of her mouth and growling at people. But the worst of the Bell’s Palsy had long worn off, so this was mostly for effect.
‘OI, JESUS. DO us a miracle, hur hur hur!’ David sighed and smiled, humourlessly, as the local youths in assorted tracksuits giggled to each other and moved on.
Just leaving the house at Christmas was a nightmare for David. For the rest of the year, ‘hippy’ was the insult of choice, but Christmas afforded some of the more eloquent scallies creative freedom. He doubted Jesus was white, British, 6’3 and from Newcastle, but that didn’t stop anyone.
The ‘Jesus’ jibes only ever came at Christmas, as if the time of year was haunting people’s imaginations. David often mused to himself that maybe the aggressive reaction to seeing the son of God in David’s unkempt, long-haired, scruffy appearance was just a reflection of their own atheist guilt in celebrating the birth of Christ.
But, by and large, it was just harmless ribbing, so he never let it bother him too much. See, if they ever found out that his actual birthday was in fact 25th December, that he was one of the poor unfortunates whose birthday was forgotten among the annual maelstrom of forced Christmas merriment, then the piss-taking would grow to a cacophony.
He had always hated Christmas, anyway. It wasn’t the bustling hypocrisy of the season. Or the annual mass delusions and insincere solemn oaths. Or it wasn’t even that every year Christmas turned his birthday into an insignificance. Well, it was all those things, a bit.
No, it was lost chances that made him ache so much. Every year, Christmas arrives, to every one of us, with such majesty, such searing potential for something better, an opportunity to harness an ocean of goodwill and create something magnificent, something human. We have a moment, every year, a blink in time, to do something extraordinary. But just as we have it in our grasp, just as something incredible arrives to every one of us, something wonderful to be nurtured, grown and cherished, we throw it away, every year, with a shrug, discarded into a dustbin of empty wishes. And, you know, it’s not as if Christmas just arrives suddenly, unannounced, like an apple falling on us from a tree, catching us all unaware - we don’t have that excuse. We know it’s coming. Something magical is squandered, every single year. And then we all just carry on as if nothing happened, for the rest of the year, doing everything but thinking about our collective failure, like an embarrassing secret that nobody mentions.
But then, maybe, after all, we just don’t know what to do with that moment.
He belched, loudly, grinning at the echo as it bounced between the close buildings on the quiet, deserted village road, and thought warmly ahead to the annual late-night birthday/Christmas eve pub lock-in with his dear old Dad and friends that he was heading to. He checked his watch. 11.52pm. Just in time. Eight minutes to Christmas Day. More importantly, though, eight minutes to his birthday!
A loud, sudden roar yanked him out of his meandering thoughts. A car skidded out of the sideroad ahead and, without slowing, swerved dangerously towards him, clearly out of control. At just the same time a figure staggered out of the silent shadows across the road from David and lurched towards the kerb, clutching a bottle and shouting something lost to the engine roar. The car careered to the right just as the stranger with the bottle, a woman, a homeless woman, stepped into the road, still shouting but now gesticulating wildly at the sky. David screamed at her to watch out, trying to get her attention, trying to push her back out of the way, pointing at the speeding car as it rushed straight at her…
Thump!
The old woman pirouetted into the air, dead arms flailing at gravity. Her bottle landed before she did, smashing into pieces on the road seconds before she landed a few feet away with a heavy thud and sickening crack. The car roared on, disappearing into the night.
It was over in seconds.
David stood stock still, shock, with unbelieving eyes, staring at the dot on the dark horizon where the car had disappeared. There was no sound from the figure on the road.
Nothing moved. No curtain twitched. No car returned. No passerby rushed to help; nobody passed by. It was a still, soundless night again. If it wasn’t for the dark, lifeless shape on the road ahead of him, he might not have believed the whole episode had happened at all.
David moved over to the body. The old lady was lying on her back, wide-eyed, breathless, ashen-faced, her left leg at a terrible, crooked angle. It was too dark to see whether there was any blood. He was grateful for that much.
He knelt up on his haunches and looked carefully up and down the road, scanning for signs of people or movement. Nothing. So he glanced up at the sky and, with an almost imperceptible nod, placed his hands on the corpse’s chest, over her still heart. A warm smile played on his lips, and then spread across his face and into his glittering eyes. He exhaled a deep, long sigh, drawn from the dawn of collective humanity.
The old woman suddenly snatched at a breath and blinked, brilliant life cascading again through her cold veins. David glanced left and glanced right, checking the road.
There was nobody to see, and nobody saw.
He pulled out his wallet, slipped £60 into the pocket of the old woman’s ragged coat, stood up and headed towards the pub where his friends were waiting. He had a bloody birthday to celebrate. The village clock struck midnight.
ENGINE NO. 4 of the Moscow State Railway Company steamed across the barren open vastness of Siberia in imperial splendour, powering south to the Mongolia-China border. Thousands of miles of isolated tracks lay ahead and behind, stretching through the endless nothing like two long lines of footprints through a vast minefield, picking out the safest and quickest route across the emptiness, for empires to follow.
Nestled in one of the first class carriages, three down from the heaving, sweating engine, Jan and Peter drained their fine cocktails and nodded to the barman for another round. The barman deftly delivered two more to the table - white Russian for him, vodka martini for her. Jan sat back, drink clutched in her hand. She was enjoying herself immensely. Slightly tipsy from her third cocktail of the evening, she was excited about reaching Beijing in a few days time.
The train carriage rocked gently as the great steppes of southern Mongolia sped by the window. The past two weeks had been simply unparalleled, from the trans-Western Europe train odyssey from Bristol to Moscow, to the Trans-Mongolian Express from Moscow to Beijing: Bristol-London-Brussels-Cologne-Warsaw-Moscow; a few days in the Russian capital, a few in Irkutsk and a couple in Ulan Bator, finally to Beijing, and not a good few days and nights on the train itself, steaming across the most beautiful and breathtaking lands Jan had ever seen.
Best. 60th. Birthday. Present. Ever.
Very soon they would be thundering across the border into China. And just two days later they would be arriving in Beijing, the sprawling and congested capital city of the country that had many years ago wrapped its beautiful, maddening, enigmatic cloak around her, and in the warm embrace of which she continued, even after a 17 year absence, to long for. Beijing was to be the conclusion to a most wonderful story, a Catherine Wheel full-stop to a neon-lit paragraph.
Only a few miles from now, just crossing the border would be a return; an East Asian recharge to her Western soul. And even though the unworldly expanses flitting past her window were unlikely to change much, at first, just knowing that she was back on Chinese soil was enough to make flutter the bright butterflies in her stomach.
Then outside went dark, as the train plundered into the cross-border tunnel. The next time they see daylight, Jan thought, happily, they will be on Chinese soil and it will be Chinese daylight, on Chinese time.
She grinned at her husband, who grinned back. They clinked their cocktails together, drinking to Beijing. Oh yes, Jan was having a fine time.
Twenty minutes later, after pouring through the dark, deep tunnel, as the last of the vodka martini drained from her glass and they started eyeing up the barman for another round, they burst out of the gloom into dull sunlight.
Jan peered wide-eyed out of the window for her first view of China after 17 years. The view that greeted her, though, was odd. Streaming past outside in the overcast afternoon ran an endless dirty grassy bank, littered with discarded plastic bags and drinks cans, as ragged bits of newspaper fluttered from straggly bushes and bent trees.
Suddenly, with a stammer that threw her forward against her table, the train started to slow as the brakes screeched on the line. She looked questioningly from the window at Peter, who was nonchalantly packing his book and reading glasses into his bag. Her fellow travellers were similarly packing their belongings away and throwing on coats. The barman rattled down the shutters on the bar and slipped away.
The train slowed to a halt beside the station platform. Looming large in Jan’s window was the dirty yellow and black station sign, with the train company’s omnipotent ‘M’ logo crouching on it like an angry insect. Jan’s mouth fell open. She tore her eyes away from the sign, stared suspiciously at her empty cocktail glass, then around the carriage at her fellow travellers, then back at sign. She peered closer, unbelieving.
‘Birkenhead... North?!’
The train intercom fizzled to life: ‘Thank you for travelling with Merseyrail,’ it Scoused. ‘Change here for trains to Liverpool, West Kirby, Chester and New Brighton. Birkenhead North is our last stop. All change, please. All change.’
Peter slung his bag over his shoulder and headed towards the exit, chatting amiably to the other passengers.
A cavernous, empty silence replaced the low hum of the train engine as, one by one, the carriage lights began to flick off.
(This is a redrafted version of an academic essay, with citations and references removed for ease of reading. Please don't sue me.)
The European Broadcasting Union created the
Eurovision Song Contest in 1956 to strengthen the cultural development of a
European soul.At its most basic,
Eurovision is a contest between European nations to write and perform the best
original pop song every year, judged and scored by each other. However, from
its origin, Eurovision was guided by political strategies, namely the creation
of the EU by six leading Western states, the strengthening of Western
initiatives through an increasing number of participant states and, finally (in
the 1990s), the presence of newly-founded former USSR and Yugoslav states.
European identity can best be identified in a
constructivist framework, where Eurovision serves as a platform from which a
European identity and European values are socially and culturally constructed,
as opposed to describing a European identity that exists as a top-down
political entity. Benedict Anderson, in Imagined Communities, asserts that the
origins of nationalism is socially and culturally constructed, and not
self-evident. In this light, post-Soviet states use Eurovision as a strategy to
construct a national narrative that attempts to identify themselves as, first,
independent, and second, European.
There are three processes at work here, examined below: first,
Eurovision allows a state to present a preferred identity of European values to
itself and its citizens through popular nationalist iconographies; second, the
state then has the opportunity to present and amplify this preferred identity
to the rest of Europe; third, by adopting the European values embraced by
Eurovision, they become a member of an inclusive Europeanness that Eurovision
sponsors.
We will also briefly examine the antagonistic
relationship between Ukraine and Russia, as expressed through 15 years of Eurovision
participation, particularly looking at how Ukraine, more than any other
post-Soviet state, frequently builds its identity formation process in
Eurovision by means of interaction against the ‘other’, the other here being,
of course, Russia.
Constructing identity as a self-referential image
Ruslana. Copyright Wiwibloggs, 2004
Ukraine’s entry into the 2004 ESC was the singer Ruslana with the song “Wild Dances”. The
notes that accompanied the entry began, “In the very heart of Europe, in the
majestic Kingdom of the Carpathian Mountains, there lives an ancient culture
that possesses unique mystic rituals…”. Here is a perfect example of the dual strategy
that post-Soviet states harness in order to construct, for a native audience, a
national post-Soviet identity as an independent European country: first, by
deliberately placing themselves “in the very heart of Europe”, Ukraine are
deploying an identity process that uses Eurovision as a chance to prove that
they imaginatively belong to a larger European community which had for years
placed them on the periphery. Second, states harness nationalist folklorist
musical styles and narratives to create new myths and traditions. Governments
of post-Soviet states harness the notion of continuity that these folklores
provide and the notion of change with those the new myths, without making them
contradictory, and constructed within the social and historical framework.
The process of constructing a tradition must be viewed
as one of ‘essentialisation’, a process that includes in a new identity desirable
iconographies, but omits other, possibly politically inconvenient, narratives.
This essentialising of Eurovision performances by post-Soviet states has become
a frequent event, as witnessed by Ukraine’s entry with Ruslana and the accompanying story of the artist uniting “the
mysteries of the mountains with a new energy and power”.
This new narrative amplifies
a national tradition through folklorism – the memory of societies handed to
each generation through stories, song and dance - and celebrates the new performance
as a normative display of its Europeanness.
‘The
politico-cultural issues addressed inside the short-lived discursive space
emerging around Eurovision are superimposed on existing discourses, but
dissolve within a short period of time, with each intensive round adding a new
layer of sediment to public debates and social imaginaries’ (Christensen and
Christensen).
Indeed, the Eurovision Song Contest is seen by
post-Soviet states as an opportunity to present this new norm – independent
Europeanness - to its own population.
Presenting identity to Europe
Ich Troje. Copyright, Youtube, 2003.
Eurovision also strikingly and most persuasively
allows new states to announce their chosen narrative to the European continent.
Eurovision is seen, simply, as a means for Central and Eastern states to
“return” to Europe after Communism’. Like Ukraine’s “In the very heart of
Europe…”, the 2003 Polish Eurovision entry Ich
Trojeappeared onstage with his
hair dyed the colours of the Polish flag, singing the song “No Borders” (“Keine
Grenzen-Žadnych granic”) that celebrated the 2003 Treaty of Ascension that saw
Poland entering the European Union, serving both to signify to the Polish
people their new independent European identity and to announce itself to its
new European family.
Such is the importance that post-Soviet states
place on the impact of Eurovision, Azerbaijan, Estonia and Moldova made winning
the competition national policy in the early 2000s. A byproduct of the strategic importance placed
on Eurovision has seen former-Soviet states grow in domination in the
competition and, consequently, grow in the regional discourse of Europeanness. Through
Eurovision, being a mass cultural event, the peripheral states earn their
central place in European cultural consciousness by defeating this imagination,
and shifting the balance of power in their favour. Seven of the past 16
Eurovision contests have been won by a country from the former-Soviet Union.
If one of the main goals in the construction of a
new national identity is to create a national culture (the system of common
values and expectations) and define an identification depending on the newly
created, then hosting Eurovision, with an annual global audience of over 400
million presents states with an enormous opportunity.
Ukraine's 2005 Eurovision entry Green Jolly, with Orange Revolution Ukraine President Viktor Yushchenko Copyright ABC, 2005
Eurovision is hosted by the previous year’s
winners, and hosting offers a state the opportunity to represent itself to
Europe through the “master narrative” it attaches to the entire show, through,
for example, a variety of 30-second filmed ‘postcards’ showcasing the host city,
shown to the TV audience before each new song. Eurovision allows states to
project a pro-European identity to the rest of the continent, putting the local
on show for the global. Returning to the Ukraine (not for the first or last
time), hosting the 2005 contest in Kiev after their 2004 victory, the contest
became an almost instantaneous commemoration of the Orange Revolution’, a popular protest that saw the Russian-backed
President Viktor Yanukovich ousted in favour of the democratic party of Viktor
Yushchenko, an event that set a major new landmark in the post-communist
history of eastern Europe, a seismic shift Westward in the geopolitics of the
region. The Ukrainian song entry that year worked in harmony to reinforce an
overarching narrative of Ukraine entering European (post-)modernity. Russia’s response
to anti-Russian protest, attempts at Europeanness, and its attitude to
Eurovision, is examined below.
The European family
The third construction strategy that a post-Soviet state
harnesses through Eurovision is the supposed sponsorship of the pan-European
community, as reflected in its cultural and socio-political values. The
Eurovision Song Contest is an arena for European identity, in which both
national solidarity and participation in European identity is. This view
exposes Eurovision’s usefulness in two definite roles; first, as reflecting a
grand European narrative in which post-Soviet states are eager to participate;
second, supporting the essay’s opening statement that Eurovision is guided by
political strategies, the increase in Eastern European participation has
exposed Eurovision’s political dimensions as a discursive tool in defining
Europenness or striving for Europeanisation. This may also be true for Western
countries, of course, but it is especially true for the transitional countries
in the 1990s and 2000s, where Europe represented (or still represents) a
cultural phantasm par excellence in most public discourses, which was one of
the central catalysts of the post-Soviet nation (re-)building.
We can even go so far as to compare Eurovision to
international sporting events, as both focus issues of national identity and
prestige in an international setting. To recently independent countries,
emerging from the shadow of the USSR, Eurovision, like sporting events, is
viewed as affirmation of statehood; the country has been recognised as a
legitimate state. Eurovision has become not just a mirror but perhaps a driver
of changing conceptions and realities of Europe and Europeanness since the fall
of the Berlin Wall.
Russia and Ukraine
Jamala. Copyright BBC TV, 2016
A common strategy employed by states in identity construction
is to identify an external, politically useful ‘threat’ that a new identity can
by described against. In new post-Soviet republics, nationalist identities are built
as much as a backlash against Russia than on a strong historic pattern of
national identity. Several times this backlash has surfaced in Eurovision over
the past 20 years, almost exclusively between two countries. Ukraine has
repeatedly voiced veiled (and not so veiled) anti-Russian protests through
their Eurovision entries, most noticeably in 2005, 2007, and last year in 2016
(Jamala, 1944, believed to be about
the Stalinist violent expulsion of Crimean Tatars during the Second World War).
For its part, Russia has occasionally attempted to construct its own
post-Soviet European identity through Eurovision, but often their entries
reflect an opposition to Europe and Europeanness, building instead a narrative
towards a romantic construction of a Soviet Union of brotherly love for all its
constituent parts. Russian involvement in the ESC is ideologically coopted by
political elites, and the identity put forward is made of nostalgia for a
glorious Soviet past.
The mixed narratives behind Russia’s Eurovision
entries since the collapse of the USSR reflects a country struggling to locate
a new identity, reminding us that Russia’s identity as a European nation
remains contested both inside and outside Russia. At the 2010 Eurovision in
Moscow, for instance, the Russian entry did not underscore the country’s
integration into Europe, but rather its opposition to it. Russia’s general
attitude to Eurovision can perhaps best be summed up by Russian journalist
Artemii Troitskii. In explaining his country’s defeat in 2009, Troitskii mused
over whether the Russian authorities did not recognise that in Eurovision, ‘the
accent is on the ‘euro’, and that those same euro-values differ decisively from
our Russian values’.
Conclusion
Since its debut in 1956, the Eurovision Song
Contest has represented one of the most consistently silly recurring spectacles
on television. Undoubtedly. However, in amongst the silliness is a process that
reflects the evolution of Europe and Europeanness, and in the 1990s and 2000s a
chance for a host of countries to say hello to Europe as an independent country
for the first time in half a century.
(28m 26. At the height of the Bosnian conflict after the collapse of Yugoslavia, for the first time ever the Eurovision host hands over to the jury of the one-year-old independent nation of Bosnia for their scores...)
A
contest that may seem trivial gives a particular relevant case for studying the
construction of national identity. This argument exposes one of the paradoxes of the
concept of ‘the nation’ described in Anderson’s Imagined Communities: ‘The formal universality of nationality as a
social-cultural concept – in the modern world everyone can, should, will ‘have’
a nationality, as he or she ‘has’ a gender vs the irremediable particularity of
its concrete manifestations, such that, by definition, ‘Greek’ nationality is sui generis’. Under communism, the individual
states did not stand unique or independent. But, through Eurovision, these states
are now expressing, presenting and amplifying their individual nationality as a
social-cultural concept, harnessing the competition as an arena in which
participating nations stage their relationship to an idealised vision of
Europeanness and articulate new models of self-representation. In this light,
it is no wonder at all that post-Soviet states, leaning hopefully towards
Europe, would want to be a part of Eurovision. The Western, more ironic stance towards
the competition (as perfected by the British attitude for over two decades),
with its camp ideology, is opposed to the more strategic attitude of the
Eastern European participants.
Eurovision represents more than a camp festival of
diversity and a glittering celebration of inclusiveness, as if that wasn’t
enough. To some states, emerging from half a century of brutal occupation, it
was and remains a precious nation-building tool in the journey towards a new, brighter
future.
Christensen, M., Christensen, C., 2008. The After-Life of Eurovision
2003: Turkish and European Social Imaginaries and Ephemeral Communicative Space.
Popular Communication (Online), 6(3),
pp. 155 – 172.
