Brexit: History Has Its Eyes On You

Let me tell you what I wish I’d known

When I was young and dreamed of glory:

You have no control

Who lives, who dies, who tells your story.

– Lin-Manuel Miranda, “History Has Its Eyes On You”, Hamilton

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As the Brexit vote and its consequences reverberate through the internet, I listen to Hamilton’s”History Has Its Eyes On You”, and of all possible things, I find myself remembering the morning of 9/11. I was fifteen years old, and as I stumbled through my parents’ bedroom to their en-suite to get ready for school, despite my habitual bleariness, I was conscious that they were both unnaturally still, frozen in bed as they listened to the radio. I remember my mother saying, unprompted, “Something terrible has happened in the world,” my stomach lurching at the graveness of her tone. I remember how, at school that day, the attacks were all anyone could talk about; how even the most diffident students begged our history teacher for permission to watch George Bush’s address on the TV in our classroom. Above all else, I remember the sense, not of fear, but of irrevocable change beyond my control: the knowledge that something material to all our futures had happened – was in the process of happening still – and yet we were expected to carry on as usual.

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I remember thinking about documentaries we’d watched in history or which I’d seen at home, segments where various adults were asked to give their eyewitness accounts of events that happened in their youth, and imagined being one day called on to do likewise. Where were you when it happened? How did you feel? What did you say? Did you know, then, what stretched out before you? What were the details? I was years away from wanting children, but I still wondered what I might say to my own hypothetical offspring, if some future history teacher asked them to interview a parent about the momentous events which they (meaning I) had lived through. And I thought of the propaganda posters I’d so recently studied for my own modern history class – that classic image of the beslippered pater familias sitting in his armchair, two cherubic children at his feet, and a pained, distant expression on his face as his daughter asked, “Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?”

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Neither one is a comparable situation to the Brexit vote, of course. (I hope.). But that feeling of history having its eyes on me – on all of us – is one of which I’ve felt increasingly conscious ever since the neo-fascist Golden Dawn party gained unprecedented power in Greece in 2015. I find myself thinking again of those high school history lessons, where Edmund Burke’s adage that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it first became a part of my awareness, a tritely profound observation that nonetheless remains relevant, and of all the early warning signs that preceded both world wars. Perhaps it’s just the consequence of having grown to adulthood in the spectre of 9/11, American politics the long shadow cast constantly over my Australian shoulder, but since then, I’ve never lost the awareness that my local world is only an engine part in a bigger and more complex machine.

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I have plenty of scathing things to say about the current state of secondary education in Australia, but it was a modern history unit on the Israel-Palestine conflict that inspired the core of my early university studies: Arabic as a language, the Arab World, Islam and the Middle East, Biblical Studies. Then as now, I understood that, whatever my personal atheism, it was the religious, political and cultural schisms developed over centuries between Judaism, Christianity and Islam that had ultimately shaped the modern world, and in light of that fateful day in September 2001 – in light of the history assignment for which I subsequently won a school award, cutting endless newspaper clippings on conflict in the Middle East to explain how each event went back to what we’d studied about pogroms and Zionism, the UN and oil and the Sykes-Picot Agreement – I wanted to try and understand the foundations of the present.

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I am, by nature, a storyteller. Narrative has patterns, and though we construct them knowingly in fiction, still they echo naturally in life, whose permutations are often far stranger than anything we can dream up. I look at where the world is poised, on the brink of men like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, Malcolm Turnbull and Boris Johnson, and for an instant the very air is textbook paper, a blurring of time and distance and a whisper of darkest timelines. I am a mater familias in an armchair as yet unbuilt, and as my son looks up from whatever device goes on to replace the common iPad, I hear him ask, “Who did YOU vote for in 2016, mummy?” I imagine a homework sheet that asks him to list the date of Jo Cox’s death the same way I once listed Emily Davison’s, and with as much bland dispassion. I wonder if his history module will cover the Orlando massacre, assuming it isn’t deemed too volatile for junior study, the same way I never learned in school that the queer prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, once freed, were immediately rearrested – homosexuality was still considered a crime, you see, even by the Allies.

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I wonder how many teenagers throughout the UK and Europe checked the results of the Brexit vote on their phones today, on laptops, in class, and watched it all with that same spectre of wrenching helplessness that I once did, as their future was altered without their say-so. Overwhelmingly, it was young people who voted Remain, and older folks who voted Leave, and while the result is a tragedy for all of them alike – regardless of how or whether they voted, older Britons have just been screwed out of their pensions as the pound falls to a 31 year low, a span longer than my lifetime – it’s the young whose futures have just been overwritten. Scotland might yet break from the UK, just as other countries might yet break from the EU; Canada is a lone bastion of Western political sanity right now, but everything else is disintegrating. To quote another poet:

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Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity. 

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I don’t know where the world is headed; only that it scares me. We’ve fought through so much to achieve even the fragments of unity and fellowship we now possess, and yet the backlash against it has been so violent, so continuous, as to defy belief. It’s barely been two months since I left the UK, and already it appears unrecognisable, a distorted funhouse reflection trying desperately to possess the body that cast it. Perhaps the only way out is through, but at this point, I can’t imagine that we’re going to get there painlessly.

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I wonder who’ll live, who’ll die. Who’ll tell this story.