EIBF: "The pursuit of happiness”

Monday 16^th August, 2010

A cloudy Monday morning appropriately kicked off in the RBS Tent with a rather grave discussion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Writer and journalist James Fergusson, whose new book is titled Taliban, and Time reporter Jim Frederick, author of Black Hearts which is a documentation of one of the first US platoons deployed in Iraq in 2005, explored the future of these two wars.

Frederick delved into how the US military operations in Iraq were initially chaotic and confused, whilst Fergusson described his book as making “a plea for negotiation with the Taliban.” Both were quick to dissociate the parasitic and opportunistic Al Qaeda from these respective countries, and therefore challenged the very bases upon which these wars are being justified. Frederick claimed that Al Qaeda saw an opportunity in Iraq, and attached itself like “a cancer” to Sunni insurgents, but the Iraqis were quick to realize that their interests and ideologies were vastly different; the same is true of the Taliban, who soon grew to detest the presence of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

There needs to be a dialogue, Fergusson insisted, as there is a gross misunderstanding between both the Western powers and the Taliban. “We need to look at the Taliban through Afghan eyes,” he argues, and explains how, after the Soviet war, Afghanistan was in a complete state of chaos and “outrageously raped and plundered by freelance bandits”. It was, he says, the Taliban that brought relative stability to the country – for many Afghans, the only stability they have ever known.

It was refreshing to hear that discussions over these wars have finally evolved; the implication is that things have now come to a head, and it is now time for talk of withdrawal, negotiation, reconciliation, and peace.

Continuing this theme of The New World Order, was head of the China bureau for the Financial Times, Richard McGregor, who spoke about his new book, The Party. McGregor’s fascinating insight into the mysterious workings of the Chinese political and economic system, produced some surprising answers with regard to the relationship between communism and capitalism in China. Communism in China is best described by the old Soviet joke: “The longest path from capitalism to capitalism,” he quipped.

McGregor elaborated on the extensive reach and control of the Communist Party, but convincingly explained that the country has neither the grassroots opposition, nor the institutional strength to radically reconfigure this political system. Whilst citing that the Chinese did want more transparency and accountability, McGregor refrained from painting the Party as macabre villains, and highlighted the pragmatism and productivity of the government in their difficult task of managing such an colossal nation.

This topic was continued at the later event, entitled Will China Rule the World? which also included McGregor, in addition to the Guardian’s Asia environment correspondent Jonathan Watts, and BBC journalist Allan Little as chair. This discussion placed China within an international context, and debated the Goldman Sachs prediction that China’s economic output will overtake the USA’s by the year 2027.

This discussion of China as a world player brought out many other complexities, and Watts re-coined the debate, “Will China Ruin the World?” Indeed, Watts’ book, When a Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save the World – or Destroy It,  addresses many global concerns. Environmental issues, oil, sustainable rates of economic growth, levels of consumption, and North Asian politics, all loomed large. Thankfully, though, the event ended on a note of optimism, with all agreeing—or certainly hoping—that China’s future holds the development of a new economic model, and the offer of tremendous opportunity and potential for the rest of the world.

The highlight of my day, however, was undoubtedly the iconic novelist Jeanette Winterson. Author of the seminal Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, which won the Whitbread Award for a first novel in 1985 and was later adapted for television by the BBC, Winterson is something of a contemporary literary legend, and the event lived up to even the very highest of expectations.

Festival Director Nick Barley introduced Winterson, on the 25^th anniversary of the publication of her first novel, with much veneration. Addressing a packed theatre of spell-bound aficionados—all bursting with laughter and admiration, empathy and faith—Winterson spoke about the importance of literature for the sustenance of humanity. Of a working-class background, Winterson wholeheartedly and convincingly rejected the notion that art and literature are elitist – “Art is democratic” she insisted.

Riveting and charismatic, she spoke of her life with her Evangelical adoptive parents for whom books other than the Bible were considered evil; her mother who, upon throwing 16 year-old Jeanette out of the house, said “Why be happy when you could be normal?”; and the importance literature came to hold for Winterson. “It’s a strategy for survival” she claimed passionately, dismissing the age of informational nausea and “sound-byte journalism”, and drawing upon the necessity for a language that is “equivalent to the emotions that we feel”. She recalled reading T.S. Eliot’s “Murder in the Cathedral” on the steps of the Accrington Library: “This is one moment / But know that another / shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy.” For Winterson, this line—the violence of the word “pierce” and the corresponding “joy”—became a moment of illumination, a form of solace, and the promise of all the distress and ecstasy that life has to offer.

“The pursuit of happiness,” she reminded her audience, is what life is about, and I left the theatre with Winterson’s words as a kind of prayer ringing in my ears: “All we have is this, this now.”