Be a disrupter of the peace!

Dear Readers,

One of the problems with creating seriously in the second half of life is that we come to it with some understanding of what is important in life. Some of what we know to be important is frivolity and froth, art that entertains and relaxes and brings much needed joy and beauty into our lives. That’s not where the problem lies.

The problem comes when we understand that justice and legal processes are important, equality is important, human rights, truth and kindness are important. If we do our job well, if we are brave and resolute and able to access our own hearts, often that truth will gently but firmly come out in our work. That truth will then discomfort people. It will challenge assumptions and prod at complacencies. It will raise questions and plant nagging doubts. It will disturb the peace. And so it should.

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

In an interview with Dorothy Allison in a book Southern Women by the editors of Garden and Gun, she was asked: You wrote once that Bastard Out of Carolina “disturbed the peace.” Is that part of the purpose of literature and music?

Her response was,

Yes. That never changes. And let’s be clear about what the peace is. The peace is a kind of silence about the very issues that writers exist to call attention to. It’s so easy to disturb the peace. All you really have to do is tell the truth, and it will disturb and upset people.^[1]

Likewise James Baldwin is credited with having said,

“A writer is by definition a disturber of the peace. He has to be. He has to make you ask yourself, make you realize that you are always asking yourself, questions that you don’t know how to face.”^[2]

Disturbing the peace in this context is not the same as the criminal offence of breaching the peace. It is not about swearing, shouting, threatening, causing alarm and distress. Rather it is about rooting a reader out of comfort. It is about a quiet invitation to realise that the world is not quite as it was when you last looked. It is a nudge to look at the facts we place just out of peripheral vision, unwilling to face them. It is a vibration under a suddenly not so solid foundation, a revealing of a vista that the reader preferred hidden by a gauzy blind.

Disturbing the peace requires of the reader a reaction. That could be a private closing of the laptop or book, and a putting away out of mind the inconvenient words. It could be a silent stalking out of a gallery, nose held high. Or, it could be a discussion, a recalibration, a willing widening of perspective.

Or could be a spewing of bile.

Which is where the problem arises.

The Hevel centre actually have a prize called the Disturbing of the Peace award. Its website states that the prize “recognises authors of distinguished works of fiction, literary nonfiction, biography, memoir, drama, or poetry who are courageous in dissent and have suffered unjust persecution because of their outspoken defence of democracy and human rights. The award helps provide awardees with the shield of international attention while enriching public understanding of the power of the written word to preserve and promote humanity’s highest ideals.^[3]

If I say that the first ever life-time Disturbing the Peace award winner was Salman Rushdie, that gives some idea of the level of disturbance their awards winners have created and the level of ill will they have received in return.

Not all disturbance is on that word-stage level, however. It could be that your mother is offended by the truthful poem about your childhood, the neighbour is challenged by the mural on your garage door or – as for me this week – Substack words you considered mild and balanced have been perceived as dangerous, seditious and worthy of forming the basis of a personal attack.

Being an artist who disturbs the peace in this truth telling way almost inevitably means we are also going to experience the disturbance of our own peace. If you create waves, your own boat is going to bob up and down a bit too. We may not (please God) attract physical life-threatening knife attacks. Most creators will at some point in their lives, however, if working authentically, honestly, experience sharp words that slash at our self-esteem, aimed at maiming self-confidence and killing our ideas. They hurt. A lot. They make us cry and shake and want to retreat from the dangerous world.

There are many reasons why we should resist that urge to give up. Why we should summons a fighting stance. But in the moment, they often seem too lofty, too demanding. All that talk about telling truth to power, standing for justice, leaving the world better than we left it. All that seems too much energy altogether when we are curled into a self-protective ball, all alone. When enough seems more than enough.

James Baldwin gives us one very good reason to persevere though when he elsewhere said:

“The effort it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too — the terms with which they are connected to other people. This has happened to every one of us, I’m sure. You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered it happened a hundred years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that they are alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important. Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to them from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it’s true for everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace. They have to disturb the peace.^[4]

We do not have to stand alone for our truths. We do not have to be that brave man standing in-front of the tank in Tiananmen Square. We can be part of a hand-holding human chain that circles the world. More, when we feel like we cannot stand up ourselves to make grand declarations, we can simply write about our experience in that curled-up ball and that will tell a struggling stranger that they are not alone. We don’t have to stand. All we have to do is extend a hand a few inches out from that self-protective ball and say: it feels like crap. That alone can liberate the stranger to get out of their ball.

Today I was struggling with the unfathomable determination of a small number of people to beat me down. Then I found, by accident, a most wonderful poem called Discomfort by Andrew Minhinnick on Spillwords. (Please do read the full poem - if copyright did not exist I would quote the whole gorgeous thing!) I do not know the precise circumstances which caused him to write it but his opening stanza was the most eloquent way possible to describe the feelings I was having

They are bile…..
they are illness fill
unhappiness is their sweat
from them
tones are only pinched
and invective always spittled

they’re blind to discussion
…..anger leaking
through squint eyes
and the ejaculated words start
their ceaseless tirade
where conducted hands are waved daggers….

One might think that all these words would do is to poke at the pain, but a later stanza declares that

the only ease to the stricken
their release
to see someone else
bent, taught, snapping
sodden phlegm vomiting
someone else rent
with unhappiness
pain, confusion
this anger…

and suddenly the strength of the bile is inverted from weapon to weakness by those two small words ‘someone else’. Instantly, the attackers became the internally attacked by their own anguish. It is no longer a question of withstanding one-sided attack but of having been enabled, by connection to a stranger’s like experience, to stand back and observe the pain within the attacker.

This ultimately is empathy in action. Empathy is not only for the recipients; it is for the benefit of the givers also. Empathy does not excuse or deny reality. It does however, enable us to discover the ways in which we are connected to other people. That connection is not always through the commonalities of faith, culture or language. We can be connected by the experiences we do not want to look at; by loss, fear, denial. As humans we are also linked by the capacity to be both victims and perpetrators and the tendency to see only the former.

Connection is not always froth and frivolity, the dancing of a hip-holding conga around a party pool. Connection can be brutal and demanding, causing us to look deep into the bile of shared human experience. It can be about equality of pain, the truth of our shared vulnerability, the bond of mutual fear. Connection is not always shoulder to shoulder. It can be the lightest of fingertip brushes.

Human connection, however will always work - even if slowly, tentatively counter-intuitively – to oust the pain of loneliness, of fear and isolation. So that is why we should create in the moments of fiercest pain. Not from revenge or a desire to prove a point but to connect.

It reminds me of the process of loving kindness mediation. First you send that love to a person to whom you don’t know well but have no ill feeling towards even if they are really unknown to you – the woman who drives your bus today, the new subscriber to your Substack, the mailman. Only then do you send that loving kindness to the person who is challenging you, provoking you, making you miserable. Finally , because it is the hardest things to do of all, you give that loving kindness to yourself.

Similarly as we create in moments of the utmost turmoil and distress we can start with providing words for others in the same situation, strangers who have the same pain and needs as us. Which is every human being (save perhaps genuine sociopaths). As we practice that, we gradually gain the capacity to extend that offer of connection to those who torment us. It doesn’t have to be direct words but somehow, somewhere in our art, even if it’s hidden to the naked eye, we can implant an offering: I see your fear. I see your discombobulation with the way the world is. I understand that I disturbed your peace. And now you are returning that to me. We have that connection, if no other.

Finally you can return to yourself. You can come home and by creating connect again to your own soul. You can shed the lie that you are no good, that you are unacceptable or unlovable, that you are untrustworthy, ignorant and ill-informed, you can connect to your inner core and know that if you disrupted with kindness and truth and good intention, you did a good thing. You did what an artist is supposed to do.

Shalom,

Helen

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^[1] https://lithub.com/dorothy-allison-on-the-necessity-of-making-readers-uncomfortable/

^[2] https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/writer-definition-disturber-peace-james-baldwin

^[3] https://havelcenter.org/2024/07/09/2024-disturbing-the-peace-award-to-a-courageous-writer-at-risk/

^[4] https://advicetowriters.com/advice/artists-are-here-to-disturb-the-peace