Autoethnography
So I’ve put up a couple of bits of interview material on Toxic Grafity, interviews with me. Two very different interviews, below is one of them.
That’s interesting because back when I did the paper fanzine it did it in a way that was deliberately impersonalist; impersonalistic in the sense that my name or image hardly ever figured. Partly I think because while the fanzine was largely from me, it wasn’t me and wasn’t about me. It was a reflection on ‘A Reality of Horror!’ Recently, however, there has been something of a trend of old and ex- punks (particularly fanzine writers) presenting themselves and/or what they did then and what they do now in the form of written autobiographies and memoirs or fictionalised as creative writing, or as interviews. That’s really interesting, as we’ve all gone on to do so many different things. What, if any, are the continuities?
I’m interested in autoethnographic writing, by which I mean I kind of writing and method which connects the personal and autobiographic with the cultural, social, and political. In a sense it doesn’t matter if the writing takes a historical-autobiographical approach, or is fictionalised, or combines life narrative with fictionalised creativity. What matters, I think, is that attempt to link the personal with the political, the psychological with the social, a contextualisation of one’s selfhood that enables one to understand one’s self better through a social lens, and society better through a psychological one, embracing criticality but acknowledging vulnerabilities. One can also write like this provocatively, but it is the attempt to collocate the personal and the political, the psychological and the social, that makes such writing autoethnographic.
There is a problem there, however: to what extent does the discrete personality, the authoritative ‘I’ even exist? Is ‘authentic lived experience’ even a thing? Are we not instead a community of different and often dissenting voices embodied in one body, that ‘we are legion’ even at the level of the supposed individual? Might it be possible then, to try to capture that internal diversity by trying to write in a de-centred way? And what of texts written in such a de-centred, contrapuntal way? Might they not merely be ‘messy’ and ‘discordant’? Indeed, so what if they are? Might not that messiness and discord be something to acknowledge and to celebrate? Might it not be psychologically therapeutic and socially and politically liberating to write messy, to problematise our authority and our presence in the text? If both writers and readers are witnesses, what are they witnesses to? How do punk pasts connect now with our political and social agency in our 2020s presents? I have no easy answers to such questions, but I’ll hold those questions in mind as I listen to the interview below, so that maybe that can inform future writing.
My Interview with Ramsey
Anyway, here is the video of the interview I did with filmmaker Ramsey Pietro Nasser, who I got to know online, as one does:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qkaCgIjFhk&ab_channel=RamseyPietroNasser
We did the interview back in January ’23, but nearly all my creative activity was on hold the first half of ’23 while I dealt with an array of pressing health and other issues in the family.
Ramsey is highly skilled and client-focused in him commercial work. Here is his website:
https://ramseypietronasser.com/?fbclid=IwAR3P-Aod8TJxoNa7QmVdXSB5oynVnKFl43sqpios7d6UY2ErTXIAXoy9ZCo
Ramsey Pietro Nasser
Anyway, here is a synopsis of the interview, I’ve written it up quite impressionistically as I listen, giving the reader of how the conversation ranges over two and a half hours. But there is no substitute for listening:
It’s quite wide-ranging, and deals really with completely different aspects of my life and experiences to those related to Toxic Grafity. In that regard, it’s an interesting counterpoint to Tony Fletcher’s interview with me from this April, also featured in Summer ’23 TG.
Ramsey’s based up in Letchworth Garden City. The interview was my first visit to England’s first Garden City (Quaker-founded, even now the pub options aren’t brilliant) since I was there in ’78 on the way to the Knebworth festival of that year. Genesis were headlining, but I was there mainly for Jefferson Starship and Devo.
The Authoritative Voice
The interview kicks off with me talking a bit about my academic work in the UK and the Middle East, how I got into higher education via an access course as a mature student aged 30, my studies in Egypt, how and why I studied Arabic, how Cairo became a second home. Ramsey’s of Palestinian heritage, and he talks a bit about that and his time in Damascus. At this point and for a good while after the interview is very much like a straightforward interview with an ‘authoritative expert’, I’m clearly very well-informed, but where am I in it?
We talk a bit about my PhD – the comparative literatures of the British Occupation of Egypt 1882-1956, how I got to work in the Gulf. Code-switching between different regional and socio-economic Arabic dialects, various aspects of Egyptian and regional history (yes, Mohammad Ali Pasha the first ruler of an independent Egypt was of Albanian origin) – how the British bombardment of Alexandria and subsequent occupation prefigured the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the role of Egypt in the Non-Aligned Movement of the ‘60s.
Then we discuss my time in the Gulf, a working residency 2001-11, a timeframe bracketed between 9/11 and the Arab Spring, reactions of the UAE to my work, what it’s like to teach Comparative Literature out there, the Gulf States as extractive neo-imperial entities, and the compromised nature of state-sponsored higher education development in the region: intellectually enabled and politically engaged as an unforeseen consequence and driver of the Arab Spring. The toxicity of the UK-Gulf States today, the stripping of citizenship.
We talk a bit about teaching literature, colonialism, post-colonialism, and neo-imperialisms in the Middle East. It’s not a dry academic conversation, as it’s based on actual experience teaching this stuff in literature there: teaching Humanities while not being able to discuss politics or society, and the struggle to find creative against-the-grain ways to do so. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Same in teaching Arabic literature, state patriarchy reading obscenities into, say, the mystical Sufi poet Ibn ‘Arabi. How to counter that in class? How did this feed into the student uprisings? Is Britain any different? The political omertà over Brexit and higher education as a woke enemy of the imagined people.
We touch on Imperialism, extraction, and the class struggle in the centre and the peripheries, Egypt in the C19th and migrant labour in the Gulf. Working-class politics and the sectarian glass ceiling in Bahrain, Bahrain and Nasserism and Arab Nationalism, Bahrain as the Arab Spring exception – the only significant uprising in a Western client state, hence the uprising ‘never happened’. Britain and torture in Bahrain: from ‘Butcher of Bahrain’ Ian Henderson to John Yates.
From 1’.30” to the end: ‘Anyone who for whatever reason was pro-regime was invited over for the violence.’
From here in the conversation becomes increasingly reflective and reflexive, intensely so towards the end confessionally so where I try to describe psychosis, breakdown and the shattering of self.
So we carry on discussing my life in Bahrain, the history of militancy since the 1930s, the influence of Occupy! On the 2011 uprising: the occupation of prestige public space and anarchism, the strengths and limitations of non-violent direct action: the suppression of the right to demonstrate in the UK as ‘straight out of the dictatorship playbook’: people power vs the state. What did ‘The People Demand the Fall of the Regime’ mean? The temporary alliance of liberals, socialists, Marxists, Arab nationalists and Islamists – and people who were ‘simply pissed off’, local grievances as a driver of uprising bigger than regional or geopolitics. The regime totters, the Saudi invasion, how I was caught up in it.
On being tear gassed.
The counter-revolution: the murderous suppression of non-violent direct action, martial law and the struggle’s defensive retreat into the villages. Autonomous organisation, mobile technology and subculture. Comparisons with Paris ’68. Contextualising the death toll. Total shutdown of the Internet, ‘phones, shops, road blocks, surveillance, my fleeing Bahrain.
My return to the UK: how I came to understand first-hand what it is to be a refugee. There were crucial differences, mainly my British citizenship and passport. But still that feeling of loss, loss of employment, wealth and money, friends, a social life and social status, loss of a job and a career. I talk about PTSD, PTSD triggers, dreams and nightmares, mental breakdown. Me on depression, self-medication, suicidal intent, disassociation and the breakdown of my discrete subjectivity and the shattering of my personality into many ‘characters’. Psychosis.
Talking therapies, writing therapies, higher study as therapy. Psychological rebuilding. Career rebuild, UCL and Singapore. The Covid pandemic and the shutdown of international travel and its effects on me. Learning about myself and my limitations: some tough life lessons.
What I am trying to do now professionally and creatively. My associative mind. Looking back at my life. On the UK today: Sleeping Turnips, the Reactionary Nostalgia for Empire, Dormant Political Consciousness, and a Misremembered War. My bullshit detector: on seeing the tactics and strategies of dictatorial regimes reproduced in the UK, ‘The UK makes and sells the instruments of repression to ‘our allies’ over there, we are quite capable of using them here in the UK today.
A brief synopsis of my punk stuff.
***
Here’s Ramsey on me:
‘The son of record shop owner, Dr Mike Diboll, was curious about the Arab world, so he studied its language. He spent time in Egypt before he went on to do a PhD in the history of the British Empire in the region. In his career, he went on to head a root and branch reform of the Bahraini education system, only to run in with the secret police. He was present during the so-called ‘Arab Spring,’ where he unfortunately witnessed some of the more violent entanglements between the security forces and the crowds of demonstrators Dr Diboll offers a detailed exposition of his knowledge and experience in the region. I was grateful he came onto the show.
Dr Mike Diboll FHEA, born in London in 1959, is a writer and retired academic with interests in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and Development in compulsory and higher education, with a focus on the Middle East. He was an eye-witness to the 2011 Arab Spring uprising in Bahrain and its murderous suppression by forces loyal to the ruling Al Khalifa regime in Bahrain and the military of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He held senior positions in the Gulf region 2001 to 2011, and was Associate Professor of Languages and Academic Head of Professional Development at the start-up of Bahrain Teachers College. He has worked internationally in the Middle East and Far East including the American University in Cairo, the United Arab Emirates University, and the National Institute of Education at Nanyang Technical University, Singapore. In the UK he has worked at the universities of Sussex, Middlesex, and Goldsmiths College, and at the Centre for Research in Education in Muslim Contexts at the UCL Institute of Education.
Mike Diboll began his undergraduate degree aged 30 via an access course, having previously been involved in the punk and post-punk anarcho-punk scenes 1976 to 1982. He produced the highly influential anarchist punk ‘zine Toxic Grafity 1978 to 1982 before experiences that led him to explore comparative religion and faith and no-faith traditions and trajectories. Mike Diboll is pursuing interests in qualitative research, memoir, ethnography, autoethnography and creative and curative art and writing. He is a mental health survivor, a survivor of substance abuse, and an enthusiastic motorcyclist since 1974. A libertarian socialist he is a contemplative reflective and an unambitious observer of political, social, and cultural life.
Mike is learned, neurodivergent eccentric with interesting insights and a unique story to tell. This is one part of it, one part of a whole.’
I offer no grand narrative on the matters I discuss above. I start off as a knowledgeable, authoritative voice but from halfway through the interview gets more personal. This subjectivity should not be seen as an irritant to an objectivist political or social science approach to this subject matter. Rather, this subjectivity is, I think, to be valued as a kind of data in its own right, rich data. The ‘triple crisis’ of representation, legitimisation, and authority of the 1990s has probably done for the traditional, omniscient knowing expert voice. In many ways that has been a positive move, allowing a more diverse array of voices to have their say, voices which hitherto would be suppressed under wight of the hegemonic ‘expert’ voice. However, in the 2010s and ‘20s this has created and is still creating a fresh crisis every bit as problematic as the old ‘authoritative expert’: the rise of fake news, the idea of a ‘post-truth’ society where all truths are equal just because someone, very often the still hegemonic political-media ecosystem, holds them to be true. A ‘post-truth’ predicated upon a pack of knowing, deliberate, and vested lies is as dangerous, perhaps more dangerous, than the old Master Narrative that told us all what to think.
Against this I posit experience, both in its everyday and its specific Blakean meanings. Post-truth pundits seldom if ever speak from real, lived experience. Generally what they spout is a scripted and rehearsed as any Grand Narrative or Ultimate Truth. Yet a Romanticised notion of experience should be questioned. The discrete, story-telling “I” is not always reliable, indeed cannot always be reliable. Narratives are mediated through language, and experience, or the relating of experience to others is mediated through social and cultural context and construction. Such mediation is inherently unstable, as language, culture, and society exist only in states of flux. Moreover, so is the narrator of experience also existing in a constant state of flux, as the narrating subjective “I” is as fluid and shifting as are language, culture, and society. This the voice of experience, as distinct from the voice of authority, is invariably evocative, emotionally resonant, and embodied in a body, located in a wider social body the ‘body politic’ that experiences pain and trauma, that experiences confrontation, crisis, and conflict through the roaring endocrine torrent: it is in this context and only in this context that the Personal is Political and the Political is Personal. That personal-political voice cannot be value-neutral and rationally-based. In this way subjectivism can be distinguished from solipsism ‘experience’ becomes a site of social-political meaning-making. The self is not an autonomous phenomenon but it is relational and social: the transgressiveness of the located self, its yearning for economic, political, social, ecological justice flows from this. It is quite different to the atomised self of consumer capitalism, or the narcissistic self of solipsism, perhaps the fullest form of narcissism. Against the narcissism of post-truth I pit the radicalism of the engaged self.
TOXIC GRAFITY 