The Wind Blows Away Our Words by Doris Lessing

Although a book published around 20 years before her final book, I realised halfway through this that The Wind Blows Away Our Words may actually be the latest of Doris Lessing’s writing I have read.

Though I definitely own several books from later in her career than this, and a few of them appear high up in impact-based lists of her prolific oeuvre, this one – which I have in a very nice Picador edition that (uniquely in my personal library, I think?) has the phrase “FIRST PUBLICATION” emblazoned across the top of the cover, as if this were an infamous, newly public, once secret text, rather than the forty or fifty something-th publication of a career novelist…

The Wind Blows Away Our Words is, though, somewhat controversial (or at least on the topic of controversy?) so perhaps the smaller articles this non-fiction book grew from were perhaps infamous in the 1980s?

Maybe?

Did Lessing had a position of pop cultural significance back before the internet?

Was she in late middle age/early old age still considered a dangerous woman with dangerous ideas and connections, as she had been half a century before when a teenage communist in English colonial Southern Africa?

Maybe?

Maybe maybe maybe.

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This 1987 book contains one long form essay and some supplemental materials, including an exquisite introductory piece on the mythological figure of Cassandra (gifted with foresight but cursed to be ignored) and how this existence isn’t anything special at all…

The main piece is about the Russian-Afghanistan war and the exodus of refugees it caused, with Lessing and a few other journalists meeting and interviewing people in refugee camps just over the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Lessing focuses on the causes of the conflict and the groups and people whose ideas and ideals have benefited from this, with a particular focus on how the women of Afghanistan have fared in these far from ideal situations.

Reading this book from the long other side of the series of wars that have occurred in that part of the world, it is easy to see a lot more pain and misery coming down the road… But Lessing, especially in the short opening essay, argues that what was happening then at that time was nothing new, it wasn’t unexpected and it didn’t come out of nowhere…

Knowing what will happen but no one acknowledging it isn’t a rare curse for one person, but it is instead how most people (to greater and lesser extents) live everyday…

For Lessing, writing in the ’80s, the knowledge that was ignored by the wider world was about hunger, about the AIDS crisis, about visible climate change, about rising fascism around the world, about increasing surveillance states and widening rich-poor divides exacerbated by globalisation and the hording of the rich…

The AIDS crisis may have passed since then, but we continue to live in optimistically-nicknamed “late capitalism” and we all see the fucking cracks, the fucking danger, the fucking problems… War makes money. Poverty makes money. Pain is good for business. Business is what rules us and we all fucking allow it to happen.

The danger, the risks, the repercussions and the cracks been visible for a very long time, and we all continue to move on, move along, pretending the problems we have won’t persist or reoccur if we do nothing…

…

Yes.

When the most tragic news stories are met with even a moment of cynical “well of course that happened”, we need to not move on, but realise that we’re in trouble as a world, as people, as beings…

We choose, as a species, as a society, to not solve problems, to not even kick the can down the road but to pretend the can (which in this metaphor is, like a bad can that we shouldn’t have) isn’t even there…

To see it and look away…

To understand it and say nothing. Do nothing.

Because what is it to act?

What is it to work towards solutions for societal problems?

What the fuck are we meant to do, right, when the society we are in and the governmental and economic structures work exactly as they are designed to…

People say things like, “society” are/is “broken”, but they’re fucking not… Just because you don’t like the way something works doesn’t mean it’s broken…

Wealth extraction and distraction and disenfranchisement are the fucking ends, friends, they are not side effects…

Corruption and inequality and hunger and homelessness are not fixable problems that happen by accident, they are inherent and irrevocable elements of the way we all exist.

Everything is going to plan.

It’s an evil plan, sure, it’s a plan that maximises suffering for the masses, but it’s a fucking method that gets results. You don’t have to like it (I don’t) and you don’t have to respect it, but to deny its intentionality and efficacy is – imo – dangerous, too.

–///–

Anyway, what do I fucking know? I’m a fucking mentally ill fucking nobody who continues to spend every day mumbling to myself “I’m wasting my life” yet continues on on on to waste it. Fuckin’ hell. Fucking hell. I’ll go to bed soon so I can get up early to spend 30 minutes on a treadmill. What a fucking waste of life. Fucking hell.

–///–

Aaaaaannnnnnyway, this Doris Lessing book is great.

Thoughtful, evocative, investigative and deeply human. Explores issues of repression and patriarchy and war and violence and cruelty and international politics and it does it with charm, intellect and humanity.

A very powerful book about serious, recent, history, the effects of which we very much still live with, in the world.

Recommended. But I think I say that about every Doris Lessing I read…