Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance
John Berger Verso, 160pp, £12.99
When he received the Booker prize in 1972, John Berger used his acceptance speech to voice his distaste for literary prizes, which, he argued, treated writers as if horses to be bet on in a race. He also castigated the sponsors for their former commercial interests in South America. He then donated half the cash prize to the Black Panthers. The response of Berger, committed and controversial, to the world around him has often been polemical and partisan.
Hold Everything Dear, his ruminations on aspects of western countries' foreign policy, the economic power of multinationals, the "war on terror", Israel and Palestine, is consistent with his hitherto strident stance. Yet evident on almost every page of these 16 essays - subtitled Dispatches on Survival and Resistance - is his compassion, his sympathy for struggle, his passion for language, his contempt for political lies and his belief in the power of art.
Berger's writing style embraces the polymath disciplines he has pursued for almost 80 years as a writer, storyteller, painter and critic. The collection moves from Ramallah to New Orleans after Katrina and the Tube on 7 July 2005, quoting from Keats, Nick Cave and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish along the way. The essay "Undefeated Despair" mixes his artist's eye and storyteller's voice to describe two neighbouring Israeli settlements in the occupied territories: "Neither looks like a village . . . Both are illegal, both are built on hills, both have lookout towers slender as a mosque's minaret. Their . . . message to the surrounding countryside is: Hands above the head, above the head I told you, and walk slowly backwards."
It is in the detail and the parallels that Berger's flair is apparent. In "War on Terrorism or A Terrorist War?" the attacks on New York in 2001 find common ground with the nuclear bomb dropped by the US on Hiroshima in 1945. Both acts of devastation, he observes, were on a city going about its daily business, both used new and terrible weapons, both came out of a clear blue sky and both were significant in that they marked the beginning and the end of a historical period: the bomb heralded the emergence of the US as a superpower and the al-Qaeda attack showed the US no longer invulnerable on its home ground.
As repulsive to Berger, though, as material acts of violence is the manipulation of language. His precision with words leads him to reproach with disgust the way in which language has been hijacked. The blowing to pieces of civilian families in Iraq at point-blank range is, he notes, called "killing the vehicle"; the description of mines as "anti-personnel" is, he argues, "linguistically murderous", because personnel are the opposite of people and the two words joined to an explosive "become terrorist". He raises a passion that is hard to ignore. "For us to live and die properly," he says, "things have to be named properly. Let us reclaim our words."
Peppered throughout are poetic quotations and analyses of the work of artists from Francis Bacon to Pier Paolo Pasolini that save the invective from ever becoming monotone or hectoring. The combined effect is moving, provocative and urgent.
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