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John Berger: one of the world’s great lovers |
Berger: love in a time of bad and clumsy laws
From A to X: A Story in Letters.
By John Berger. Published by Verso.
JOHN Berger must surely be one of the world’s great lovers. At 82, he might crack a smile at the idea, but how else can we describe a man whose sheer love of life, love for the dispossessed and the underdog, for art and ideas, has driven him to such extraordinary writing?
He must have fallen in love with a portrait of Christ by one of the Italian Masters when, a few weeks ago, he felt compelled to take out his sketchbook in the middle of the National Gallery and start copying it. (The Gallery, which doesn’t hold with punters who love paintings so much they stop and sketch them, had him frog-marched out). Surely it was his love for the downtrodden that led him to donate half his winnings for the 1972 Booker Prize to the Black Panthers, then running schools and soup kitchens for America’s poorest blacks. And From A to X was clearly born from Berger’s first principle – that love is worth standing up for.
Two lovers, Aida – the A of the title – and Xavier, a political prisoner serving two life-sentences under a brutal regime, cling to love with the kind of defiance only the most downtrodden can muster. Told entirely through their hear-wrenching correspondence, this is not, however, just a story of star-crossed lovers: their love is for the whole wonder of life and humanity, not merely for eachother.
We’re never told whether they are under the heel of a Washington-backed Latin American junta, or are Palestinians under (Washington-backed) Israel. Nor do we know what Xavier did, how deeply Aida, a pharmacist, is involved in the resistance, or whether the prison guards are Israeli or, say, Columbian. Berger blurs all the possibilities so the story can fly far beyond two lovers divided by security walls and razor wire.
What matters is the way their letters capture the sheer magic of everyday life, lovingly described with a master artist’s eye for detail: two women shelling peas; another pair washing their feet together; memories of a landscape seen from a cockpit; a rose creeping up a eucalyptus; mating dogs; a hand holding a pencil. A man Aida describes wandering through the wreckage of his former home, the matter-of-fact spirit of a group of women she joins in a spontaneous human-shield around some injured militiamen.
It’s not important that she doesn’t specify whether the wreckage of the man’s home is in Chile or in Gaza, nor whether the Apache helicopters and tanks the women face-down are Israeli or Columbian – Xavier knows anyway, and for us it doesn’t matter.
The point Berger makes so beautifully by this is that we’re all connected – us, the Palestinians, the Latin Americans, through life’s quotidian moments and its universal struggles: that lines on a map are unimportant.
His brilliant philosophical and political asides which pop up between chapters underline just how we’re all linked across oceans and cultures – the Third World metal welders dying for a dollar-a-day, Hugo Chavez, an Inuit poet, Johnny Cash and the billion people without drinking water while corporate factories suck the land dry.
What to do about this kind of injustice, and what to make of Aida and Xavier? The answers in From A to X are really no different from those Berger put into practice in the National Gallery.
“However good a law is, it is invariably clumsy,” he writes in one of his asides. “This is why its application should be disputed or questioned. And the practice of doing this corrects its clumsiness and serves justice. There are bad laws which legalise injustice. Such laws are not clumsy, for they enforce … exactly what they were intended to enforce. And they have to be resisted, ignored, defied.”
The officials at the National Gallery appear to have very different ideas, and it’s lucky for the Booker Prize worthies that From A to X didn’t quite make it from last-year’s long-list to win again. If he had there’s no telling whose applecart he’d have upended this time.
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