YOU LOSE YOUR VOICE IN MARCH, YOU MAY LOSE YOUR JOB IN MAY

Prime Minister Teresa May, the most authoritative person in the British parliament, loses yet another vote on her government’s plan for the arrangements through which the UK will leave the EU by the process known as Brexit. She also loses her voice.

She comes into the great hall of the commoners in Westminster. She speaks to her colleagues, some of whom are political suitors. She is summarily dismissed, in a modern re-telling of Homer’s treatment meted to Penelope by Telemachus, her son, as recounted by historian Mary Beard.

The process starts in the first book with Penelope coming down from her private quarters into the great hall, to find a bard performing to throngs of her suitors; he’s singing about the difficulties the Greek heroes are having in reaching home. She isn’t amused, and in front of everyone she asks him to choose another, happier number. At which point young Telemachus intervenes: ‘Mother,’ he says, ‘go back up into your quarters, and take up your own work, the loom and the distaff … speech will be the business of men, all men, and of me most of all; for mine is the power in this household.’

Teresa May persists in presenting a plan, which has been voted down twice and may yet endure another voting down, before someone cries “enough already.” Is she experiencing what Mary Beard describes as a long-standing practice in Western culture?

…it’s a nice demonstration that right where written evidence for Western culture starts, women’s voices are not being heard in the public sphere; more than that, as Homer has it, an integral part of growing up, as a man, is learning to take control of public utterance and to silence the female of the species. The actual words Telemachus uses are significant too. When he says ‘speech’ is ‘men’s business’, the word is muthos – not in the sense that it has come down to us of ‘myth’. In Homeric Greek it signals authoritative public speech (not the kind of chatting, prattling or gossip that anyone – women included, or especially women – could do).

Or is she simply hoarse, from long hours of working, travelling and negotiating? She quips that her opposite on the EU has also lost his voice.

With the loss of her voice, will the loss of her job soon follow?

Possibly.

Her counterpart on the EU-side is more of an official and so less vulnerable in the short-term. He is also a man and thus less vulnerable in the long-term. A woman with a hoarse voice is weak. A man with a hoarse voice is strenuously and admirably exerting himself.

The voice that rises above the babble and hiss of the House of Commons is sonorous and affected. It is in the ascendancy now and it sounds like it is from the Ascendancy. The Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, barks and scowls in a voice of such pantomimic affectation that he manages to sound like the head boy of a posh school who’s had too much of the headmaster’s sherry.

Mary Beard understands this.

We find repeated stress throughout ancient literature on the authority of the deep male voice. As one ancient scientific treatise explicitly put it, a low-pitched voice indicated manly courage, a high-pitched voice female cowardice. Or as other classical writers insisted, the tone and timbre of women’s speech always threatened to subvert not just the voice of the male orator, but also the social and political stability, the health, of the whole state.

She also situates this authority in the ‘ways and means’ protocols of the House of Commons.

Again, we’re not simply the victims or dupes of our classical inheritance, but classical traditions have provided us with a powerful template for thinking about public speech, and for deciding what counts as good oratory or bad, persuasive or not, and whose speech is to be given space to be heard. And gender is obviously an important part of that mix.

The current British Prime Minister is reportedly sad that she didn’t get to be the first woman in that role, something Margaret Thatcher achieved. She took pains to present a manly demeanour, even going as far as changing her voice.

Those who do manage successfully to get their voice across very often adopt some version of the ‘androgyne’ route, like Maesia in the Forum or ‘Elizabeth’ at Tilbury – consciously aping aspects of male rhetoric. That was what Margaret Thatcher did when she took voice training specifically to lower her voice, to add the tone of authority that her advisers thought her high pitch lacked.

Would voice lessons save Teresa May’s voice and keep her yet longer inthejob she craves? She previously worked as Home Secretary and headed up an onslaught on immigrants under the ‘hostile environment’ banner, an onslaught she has carried over into her current role as the Reluctant Brexiteer. Shewill make the severance happen on her terms and the rest of us can just lump it. That’s a fairly ‘manly’ stance to take. 

For a female MP to be minister of women (or of education or health) is a very different thing from being chancellor of the exchequer (a post which no woman has ever filled). And, across the board, we still see tremendous resistance to female encroachment onto traditional male discursive territory, whether it’s the abuse hurled at Jacqui Oatley for having the nerve to stray from the netball court to become the first woman commentator on Match of the Day, or what can be meted out to women who appear on Question Time, where the range of topics discussed is usually fairly mainstream ‘male political’. 

Mary Beard, in analysing the origins of the horrendous treatment, she, and other women, receive from internet trolling and other on-line abuse, senses that, while gender is significant in the targeting, the scale and the violence of the abuse, other factors contribute, notably the false promises of the democratisation of power the on-line world was supposed to bring us. 

When I’m feeling charitable I think quite a lot comes from people who feel let down by the false promises of democratisation blazoned by, for example, Twitter. It was supposed to put us directly in touch with those in power, and open up a new democratic kind of conversation. It does nothing of the sort: if we tweet the prime minister or the pope, they no more read it than if we send them a letter – and for the most part, the prime minister doesn’t even write the tweets that appear under his name. How could he? (I’m not so sure about the Pope.) Some of the abuse, I suspect, is a squeal of frustration at those false promises, taking aim at a convenient traditional target (‘a gobby woman’). Women are not the only ones who may feel themselves ‘voiceless’.

Recently, Teresa May made a direct appeal to the ‘voiceless/voteless’, in a US-Presidential style address from her own home at 10 Downing Street. Her voice held and she sounded steady and commanding. However, the ploy of opening her next election campaign – and who’s to say that’s not what she was doing? - by blaming her fellow MPs at the same time as she is touting for their support to her Plan A, while not having a Plan B, seems to have back-fired. 

The voiceless/voteless are grumbling and have a Plan C, or at least the inklings of one, with a large demonstration in London last weekend. Getting your voice heard in a floundering parliamentary democracy, such as the UK at present, where the rich and the political elite have thrown the baubles out of the sedan chair and the rest of us may be about to topple the sedan chair, is a vital next step in making sure this horrendous Brexit process, or anything like it, is never repeated. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKje-De5eyw

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n06/mary-beard/the-public-voice-of-women

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-news-live-theresa-may-delay-date-eu-deal-speech-corbyn-a8832811.html

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MICHELLE OBAMA SUPPORTS MOL AN ÓIGE/PRAISE THE YOUNG

Michelle Obama’s bestselling memoir, BECOMING, tells the story of her own life and offers inspirational advice to young people, especially to girls and young women. She, and her husband Barack, have been engaged in supporting the young before, during and, now, after their period of residence in The White House, where American Presidents and their families traditionally live. They are the parents of two daughters.

Among Michelle Obama’s quotable quotes is the line that it’s best for a young person to work out who you want to become rather than what you want to become. This takes us back to the foundation years of child-centred rearing and person-centred psychology codified and pioneered by Carl Rogers in the 1950s. Much of the wisdom and learning in Rogerian approaches to counselling, therapy and human behaviour pre-date modernity and emerged as part of human development across the globe. It is Carl Roger’s work in codifying this wisdom at a peak time of American cultural power that has led to these humanistic ideas entering cultural life in a thorough-going way, in America and further afield, and connected them with campaigns for justice and equality that formed the platform from which the young Michelle and Barack launched their lives into education, upward mobility and powerful public office. 

Were they praised as children? Do they praise their children, as part of their parenting practice? It seems from BECOMINGthat they were and that they do.

So how do you ‘mol an óige/praise the young’? Does the much-used phase ‘good girl/good boy’ work? Does the child know what’s ‘good’? 

When toddlers, at a Christmas drama session, are asked to help tidy up the cotton wool snow balls they have been throwing around, most do so with gusto. Others wander about and some sit and watch. Each time a toddler puts a snow ball in the leader’s bag, they are rewarded with a ‘good girl’ or a ‘good boy’. 

Are the ones who wander about or sit and watch not ‘good’?

When, in Spring-time, the cat brings a dead bird to the back step, do we say ‘bad girl/boy’? Or do we recognise this as animal behaviour and we simply tidy up afterwards? Does the cat expect a reward and, if so, what? 

Is the cat propitiating the gods of food, protection and warmth?

Is saying ‘good girl/good boy’ the kind of phrase that the old Irish folk adage in the title above advises? Would the following formulation be better? ‘Good girl/boy, for helping to clear up the snow balls.’

Is it necessary? Does the child simply get the message from the tone of appreciation and the warmth of the adult’s response? Instead of ‘good girl/boy’, would the same effect be achieved if we said ‘golublub’, with a warm tone of appreciation? 

Separation of the person and the act (or role and behaviour) is at the heart of Rogerian psychology and is one of Roger’s formulations that has entered a wide range of social practices, including toddler-rearing, youth work and social work. The assertion is that while the behaviour may be designated ‘good or ‘bad’, the person just ‘is’. 

At what point – maybe at this point? - does the Rogerian ethic coincide with behaviourist theory and practice, with all the inherent perils in such an approach, using threat, reward and punishment to mould behaviour?

If the toddler drama session took place in an anarcho-bohemian society, in a laissez-faire set-up, would the tidying up be rewarded with warm-toned ‘good girl/boy’ affirmations? Would the leader affirm those who continued tossing snowballs and disregarded tidiness?

For an engaging cross-cultural take on child-rearing, see the comedian Sindhu Vee, below. She notes that parents draw on what they learned from their own parents. They echo the tones andphrases of the previous generation.

I heard echoes from my own parents’ child-rearing practice, when I was rearing my children, including the adage that: if you don’t rear your children, the television will. One influencer among many. Add social media to the mix now. And casino capitalism driving hyper-consumerism. More influencers.

Michelle Obama is an international celebrity. She can be seen and heard on You Tube, web-sites, radio stations, multiple tv channels, numerous print journals and newspapers. And now in a best-selling book. She is a high-powered influencer. As is her husband.

Best wishes to all people rearing children, in all parts of the world, using that amorphous and challenging concept known as ‘love’.

BECOMING; Michelle Obama; memoir, Viking Penguin, London; 2018

Carl Rogers: http://journalpsyche.org/revisiting-carl-rogers-theory-of-personality/

Sindhu Vee; Live at the Apollo; 12 40 to 20 55

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0bw8hbt/live-at-the-apollo-series-14-episode-6

www.DaveDugganWriter/facebook.com

NO HEART, JUST DIM LIGHT IN THE HEART OF DARKNESS

Joseph Conrad’s novella, The Heart of Darkness, is pretty much all ‘tell’, with very little ‘show’. We follow Marlow, a rudderless young man, with a well-connected aunt, who tells his own story to a boat’s company, while becalmed in the Thames estuary. Marlow recounts his search for adventure and purpose, when he joined a commercial company out of Brussels, to captain a steamboat heading inland on the river Congo, in order to further despoil the river’s hinterland of its wealth, notably ivory.

Matters are vague from the outset. It’s not clear as to the specific purpose of the trip. The use of the term ‘pilgrims’ to describe the colonial officials, traders and adventurers, working for and leeching off the Company, among whom Marlow lives and works, is confusing. Are we in search of a holy site? Does Conrad want us to think we are?

And yet the deified figure, Kurtz, the end of this putative pilgrimage, while praised for his wisdom and his eloquence, never substantially manifests either. Is Kurtz modern English literature’s first reclusive celebrity? He’s not the leader of a cult, though suggestions that he is esteemed, feared, even venerated by local people, are hinted at, but never actually shown. The appearance, on two occasions, of a splendidly described local woman – lover? intended? shaman? - is just one instance of dimness. Who is she? What is her relationship with Kurtz? What actions does she take?

“Suddenly she opened her bared arms and threw them up rigid above her head, as though in an uncontrollable desire to touch the sky, at the same time the swift shadow darted out on the earth, swept around on the river, gathering the steamer into a shadowy embrace.” 

There are, as you’d expect with Joseph Conrad, many such glorious sentences, in what was his third language.

“The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling waveof plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence.”

The ‘us’ here is the steamboat’s company and an instance of Marlow’s view of everyone else as an ‘antagonist’, to the journey and the search.

The greed for ivory - read ‘oil’ in today's colonial commercial onslaughts. Soon oil will be overtaken by data as the treasure most craved - is the clearest driver in the story. Marlow’s almost sneering purposelessness is no more than common or garden collusion in a rapacious colonial enterprise. 

Conrad’s story, a novella of 38, 000 words, has a significant impact on 20^thand 21^stcentury writing. Journeys, real and metaphorical, abound in novels since then. Searching ‘within’ forms the plots of many modernist texts. ‘Inner darkness’ is a widely visited locale for such journeys and searches, presenting in fiction, poetry and drama, often without showing, or telling, what is meant by the term, beyond a vague illusion to a spiritual vacuum.

An attempt by Francis Ford Coppola to show the story and the character of Kurtz in his sprawling Viet Nam war film Apocalypse Nowcomes across as heartless and dim. The star actor, Marlon Brando, mumbles his way through scenes that are less than certain and clear. It is as if the film-makers have taken over Conrad’s extensive use of un- and in- adjectives and adverbs, to timorously present the actuality of the characters and their actions.

The use of a colourful character lifted from Conrad’s story, as the boat arrives at Kurtz’s camp, maintains the distancing and the telling, until we arrive at the Brando scenes, which, depending on your view, are either acting and directing masterclasses or gormless ramblings, saved from incoherence by good editing. 

Conrad uses the seanchaí approach, the embodied narrator, in other work, most notably in the adventures of Lord Jim. Is this distancing device intentional or is it a subtle manifestation of Conrad’s unease with his ability to write as well as he wished in his third language?

Joseph Conrad was Polish and learned French as a second language, while growing up. He learned English as an adult, working and reading widely when ‘before the mast’, in his early twenties. He later collaborated with Ford Maddox Ford, as they strove to write fiction in a form they called, in French, “progression d’effet, words for which there is no English equivalent.”Conrad asserted that English words are“instruments for exciting blurred emotions” and that “no English words have clean edges.” 

Some readers and writers consider such attributes a boon, rather than a flaw.

Much has been written about ‘otherness’ and ‘foreignness’ in relation to Conrad’s work. Rudyard Kipling, when reading work by Conrad, felt that he was “reading an excellent translation of a foreign author.” Bertrand Russell, his friend, refers to Conrad’s “highly accented English”. Lady Ottoline Morrell, who had Russell as a lover, said of Conrad 

“He talked English with a strong accent, as if he tasted his words in his mouth before pronouncing them; but he talked extremely well, though he had always the talk and manner of a foreigner.... He was dressed very carefully in a blue double-breasted jacket. He talked... apparently with great freedom about his life – more ease and freedom indeed than an Englishman would have allowed himself. He spoke of the horrors of the Congo, from the moral and physical shock of which he said he had never recovered.”

As a Pole, with nationalist leanings in the face of Russian occupation, he naturally tended towards emerging stances critical of imperialism. Yet with the arrival of post-colonial discourses in critical readings of Conrad’s work, Chinua Achebe was searingly blunt, referring to him as “a thoroughgoing racist”, in particular in his situating of Africa as an “other world”. In an interview, Achebe said:

“Although he's writing good sentences, he's also writing about a people, and their life. And he says about these people that they are rudimentary souls... The Africans are the rudimentaries, and then, on top, are the good whites. Now I don't accept that, as a basis for ... As a basis for anything.”

My latest novel, MAKARONIK,is in Irish, my second language. Writing it, I experienced a form of internalised ‘otherness’, a sense that, though the words and the sentences were my own, they were, to a degree, foreign to me. Is this an inversion of Conrad’s experience? He lived and wrote in a foreign language. I live and write in native languages, my second made foreign by the first and by colonialism, as experienced and lived through by Conrad. 

I hope MAKARONIK has a heart and a clarity, even though it is a work in a second language, a language with “no clean edges” and many glittering facets. Like all languages.

The Heart of Darkness; Joseph Conrad; Penguin English Library; London, 2012; with an essay by Paul O’Prey 

The arrival at Kurtz’s camp, from Apocalypse Now(Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nveZYvyIERA

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READING MOBY-DICK

There is a full chapter in E.M. Forster’s small, but significant, book on novel writing, Aspects of the Novel, on prophecy. Forster mines Herman Melville’s big and significant book, Moby-Dick, for examples of the prophetic in the novels he considers.

He focusses upon the coffin, which the ailing harpooner Queequeg commissions from the ship’s carpenter and which, though he lies in it, never actually bears his remains. Queequeg recovers to play his part in the galloping and horrendous chase scenes that form the climax of the novel. The coffin bobs to the surface and saves the narrator, Ishmael, in a turmoil of devastation and violence, the full and proper outworking of a grand sea-faring yarn of exploitation and madness that ploughs across the Atlantic and ends in the South Pacific’s bloodied waters.

To read Moby-Dick is to surge into the prophetic, but not in the ordinary sense of tellings about the future, but in a story that reaches back into the primordial past of the hunter, now capitalised by economic drives that launch men on vessels of war and rage in search of the largest animals on the planet to kill them mercilessly in order to harvest their oil and spermaceti to burn in lamps and to flavour perfumes. Essentially for money. When we now use the phrase ‘to monetise’ in relation to Apps and social media platforms, we are living out the prophetic tellings of Herman Melville’s great book.

The reader is swept into the power of the book as on a tidal wave, right from the famous opening injunction, “Call me Ishmael”, an Old Testament name that immediately draws the reader into the worlds of patriarchs of the Bible and the Koran and the prophetic songs they offer. From Genesis 16:11-12, we learn

And the angel of the Lord said to her, “Behold, you are pregnant and shall bear a son. You shall call his name Ishmael, because the Lord has listened to your affliction. He shall be a wild donkey of a man, his hand against everyone, and everyone’s hand against him, and he shall dwell over against all his kinsmen.”

The name Ishmael can be translated as ‘God hears’. Thus the book begins with the Reader hearing voices that whisper and roar to create a demonic bedlam of character, story, incident, whaling lore, technical whaling information, philosophy, religion and sea-faring, sweeping the reader along, as much as s/he he wishes. Yes, you can skip chunks and still rush headlong with the thrilling yarn, but why miss the immersion in the prophetic?

And you can wrestle with the presentation of evil in the straight-forward revenge plot, that is the main-mast of the novel. Ahab, the monomaniacal captain of the whaling ship, Pequod, drives himself and all aboard in pursuit of the white whale, the Leviathan, despite the protestations and pleadings of his Chief Officer, Starbuck.

Moby-Dick is a tragedy for all, including the families of the men who drown. None but Ishmael survive, clamped to the bobbing coffin, not a symbol of survival but a prophetic enchantment of the tragedy of life served up with calculated literary irony.

The reader is left with a sense of having experienced a wonder. Questions of morality and action remain. What drives men to do such things? Monomania seems too simple an answer and can only be applied to Ahab. Ishmael says he goes to sea to overcome a deep sense of depression.

Yes, as everyone knows, mediation and water are wedded forever.

But not all the crew of the Pequod, and other whalers, sailed out of Nantucker into the Atlantic and away for three years or more, scouring the whale fisheries across the great oceans, north, south, east and west, because they were depressed. No doubt many were running away. For others it was ‘what they knew’, as their fathers and brothers went whaling before them. Throughout the novel, when Ishmael grows wistful, he muses on the economics of the activity and the huge draw there is, among the wealthier members of the society at home, for the products they seek. 

The reader is left with the question: when it becomes obvious that doom is the only possible outcome of the chase, why don’t some of the crew jump ship? It requires a massive weight of mythology, a burdensome anchor of loyalty and duty and an explosive charge of power to force men to stay, when all around them is violence, danger and dread. Is the hope of a pay-off always good enough in the face of poverty?

The desperation of poor people is also found in a later American novel, As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. And once again it is the prophetic voice of the novelist that resonates throughout. Faulkner obviously read Moby-Dick. He has a coffin bobbing about in tumultuous water too. He has language you’d expect from a religious book or tract. And he has a story of monomania. E.M. Forster might have identified a prophetic writer in action here again.

One ordinary prophesy that Melville makes concerns the survival of whales into the future.

… the moot point is, whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff.

Melville links the extinction of the whale with the extinction of human kind. He is optimistic.

Wherefore, for all these things, we account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality. 

Melville couldn’t have prophesied the massive industrialisation of whaling that has grown up in the 20^thcentury. Or the pollution of the oceans by plastics, noise and effluent.

Expectations for the recovery of whale populations have been based on the assumption that, except for commercial whaling, their place in the oceans is as secure as it was a hundred years ago.

Sadly, this assumption is no longer valid. This is why we believe that commercial whaling in all forms must be stopped.

Moby-Dick is the great novel it’s cracked up to be. The reader surges with the seas and the prophesies. The reader is amazed by the lore and the technical data. The reader fumes at the racism. The reader is transfixed by Melville’s insights into human nature and by the total absence of women from the story. Would Melville write a different novel today? A different classic? 

He might reflect on E.M. Forster’s final thoughts on the novel.

If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people – a very few people, but a few novelists are among them – are trying to do this.

Moby-Dick; book, 1851; Herman Melville; Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition; U.S.A., 2009

As I Lay Dying; book, 1935; William Faulkner; Chatto and Windus; London, 1962

Aspects of the Novel; book,1927; E.M Forster; Edward Arnold Publsihers; London, 1963

https://greenpeace.org.uk/what-we-do/oceans/whaling/

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WHERE IS YEMEN ANYWAY?

Our first step is to search on Google maps. For a better chance of actually locating Yemen, we focus on one place; Saada. We take care to find Saada in Yemen, because a number of places in different countries in the region share that name, just like in Ireland, where you’ll find any number of Ballys.

When we find Saada, we search for the Zaydi Cemetery. It’s between Mufrah at Talh Street and the N1, quite close to the central market, the city’s main mosques and the archaeological site of Bab Narjan. We search for the graves of the children killed in the recent airstrike on a bus. Forty children were among the fifty one dead.

"My son went to the market to run house errands and then the enemy air strike happened and he was hit by shrapnel and died," said Fares al-Razhi, mourning his 14-year-old son.

We are in north Yemen, close to the border with Saudi Arabia. If Yemen is one of the poorest countries in the world, Saudi Arabia is one of the richest. We pore over the Google map images of the border between the two states and wonder how that can be. 

There is a war underway in this part of Yemen. A complex war with militant actors frominside Yemen and also external to the country. The biggest external actor is the Kingdom and army of Saudi Arabia, one of Yemen’s close neighbours. What does that Kingdom and army want?

With logistical support from the US, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have carried out attacks in Yemen since March 2015 in an attempt to reinstate the internationally recognised government of President Abu-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

In 2014, Hadi and his forces were overrun by the Houthis who took over much of the country, including the capital Sanaa.

Since then, the military alliance has carried out more than 16, 000 air raids on Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country, with more than 3, 000 raids pulverising the Houthis stronghold of Saada.

We search the images on Google maps to see signs of ‘success’ for these air raids and bombings. The resolution on the maps breaks down as we zoom in. The maps cannot handle the devastation. They become coy and opaque. Can we hear the Yemeni people themselves?

Hakim Almasmari, the editor-in-chief of the Yemen Post, called it one of the worst days in Yemen in recent memory.

"Today is a tragic, sad day... that has gathered all Yemenis together. There are many people who oppose the Houthis, including residents of [the capital] Sanaa, but a crime like this has given the Houthis more support. You can't have sides when it comes to children." 

The war is three years old now. Young, in world conflict terms. Young, like the children blown to pieces.

"I didn't find any of his remains, not his finger, not his bone, not his skull, nothing. I looked through all the remains in the hospital and I didn't see anything."

We look on. From afar, knowing that great amounts of money are involved in the international trade in the weaponry that produces these tragedies. Jobs too. Do we cringe or quake? Do we feel remorse? Guilt? Who are ‘we’? 

Despite repeated petitions from human rights groups to Western powers over the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia, the US, UK, Canada, France and Spain have all sold weapons to the kingdom in recent years, some of which have been used in the conflict.

The US has been the biggest supplier of military equipment to Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), with more than $90bn of sales recorded between 2010 and 2015.

Are ‘we’ supplying weaponry to the Houthis as well? Probably. If not directly, then covertly, via brokers and dealers. There’s money in it. And probably alongside weaponry, with logistical and political support, from Iran. Wars are complex and multi-agency, often acting in overlaps and parallels. The war in Yemen is one of numerous proxy world conflicts between the Great Powers and their allies. We are well beyond the capacity of thetwo dimensional imagery offered by Google maps.

With grand profits to be made, it is not in the interest of arms’ manufacturers like Raytheon, who dispute the evidence of the use of their products in this war, to see efforts at a cease-fire make progress.

Images sent to Al Jazeera by the Houthis on Monday suggested a Raytheon Mark-82 bomb was used in the raid.

While the photo had yet to be independently verified, fragments of Mark-82 bombs have surfaced repeatedly amid the ongoing war.

Do we say “It’s not personal. It’s just business. If we don’t sell the arms, someone else will”?

Days after the attack, body parts remain unidentified and some families were still searching for the remains of their children. 

Are ‘we’ as two dimensional as Google maps?

The UN special envoy for Yemen, Martin Griffiths, recently announced plans for negotiations between the warring parties.

The peace talks will begin in Geneva on September 6 and focus on building a transitional government and laying down arms.

Can we go beyond the flat maps in the search for a further dimension? More than simply ‘laying down arms’, can we work to end the international arms trade?

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/08/funerals-held-children-killed-school-bus-attack-180812074219112.html

https://www.caat.org.uk/about

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