<nettime> By the rivers of Babylon

[David Garcia via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Frederick Douglas by the Rivers of Babylon

Over the summer I’ve been reading David W Blight’s great biography; 
Frederick Douglas, Prophet of Freedom, a giant book about the giant life 
of the Frederick Douglas who was born a slave and escaped at around the 
age of twenty to become the political, intellectual wonder of the 
nineteenth century. I am ashamed to say I knew vanishingly little of 
Douglas until reading him in the Covid years. I imagine that many 
nettimers will know far more about his astonishing life writing and 
political achievements. Although we have grown rightly suspicious of 
‘great man’ stories, its very hard to read Douglas’ story without a 
sense of awe and gratitude.

The only reason I risk re-stating these truisms is because of reading 
Blight’s biography against the unbearable back-drop of the Israeli war 
crimes in Gaza. I was struck by the possible relevance of the ways in 
which Douglas drew inspiration for his patriotic rage against slavery in 
the language of the Old Testament prophets (who like Douglas were also 
persecuted by their own people) and wonder whether anyone in modern 
Israel/Palestine could find use or inspiration in Douglas’s ability to 
embody the Old Testament Jeremiadic tradition to serve a different 
progressive cause? And give them the courage to denounce their own 
people. Here are the extracts from the book that set me thinking:

‘ He (Douglas) was a man of the 19th century a thoroughgoing inheritor 
of Enlightenment ideas, but for justification and for the story in which 
to embed the experience of American slaves he reached for the Old 
Testament Hebrew prophets of the sixth to the eighth centuries BC. 
Isiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel were his companions, a confounding but 
inspiring source of intellectual and emotional control.  Their great and 
terrible stories provided Douglas the deepest well of metaphor and 
meaning for his increasingly ferocious critique of his own country. 
Their Jerusalem, their Temple, their Israelites transported in the 
Babylonian Captivity. Their oracles to the nation of the woe to be 
inflicted upon them by a vengeful God for their crimes, were his 
American “republic,” his “bleeding children of sorrow,” his warnings of 
desolations soon to visit his own guilty land.

Their story was ancient and modern; it gave the weight of the ages to 
his cause. Their awesome narratives of destruction and apocalyptical 
renewal, exile and return, provided the scriptural basis for his mission 
to convince the Americans they must undergo the same. […] Douglas not 
only used the Hebrew prophets; he joined them.

Douglas’s use of the Jeremiadic tradition… and Jeremiah followed God’s 
call to “go and cry in the ears of Jerusalem,” so Douglas proclaimed 
anti-slavery oracles to vast public audiences in pro-slavery America. 
And as the Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel wrote, “Prophets must have 
been shattered by some cataclysmic experience in order to be able to 
shatter others” By this standard, Douglas qualified.’ David W Blight, 
Frederick Douglas, Prophet of Freedom.

The potential here is that of inverting biblical language exploited by 
Netanyahu’s regime. Could a new Jeremiah in Israel emerge to rage 
against their own people’s actions, actions that shame the memory of the 
victims of the Shoah. Like both Jeremiah and Douglas himself they will 
be hated by their own people who will block their ears when told that 
they have forfeited the right to draw legitimacy for their crimes from 
the Holocaust’s bottomless well of grief. This well has been poisoned.

David Garcia
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