A ROUGH GUIDE TO LIBERATIONChristian de Sousa

I listen to him; suddenly, for a moment, the human chasm appears.

A flash – and all is told, given silently, to hold.

We plunder tequila and go deep into discussion of the beyond.

What is God? he asks. Where did we go wrong? I ask.

And the tendrils of our many answers weave into the Mediterranean night.

By 3am we are in Adam’s kitchen, drinking local red and

listening to early Bowie on a tinny tape recorder. Surging with emotion,

he leans forward across the table and looks me in the eye.

“You are not a journalist,” he says.

“You are looking for the soul.”

Finsbury Park, the raised station platform empty after closing. My mate sparks

a flame, inhales a lungful of nocturnal oxygen and brings the slender blunt to

life. Pausing during a night of urban exploring, we stand under the sodium

lights and contemplate the vista of Zone 2 North London.

Shipped in undercover from distant, warmer lands, the ganja smoke

infuses us with earthy sweetness and disseminates its pungent aroma into

the night. Like a panacea, it softens the abrasive edges of the city and expands

the moment into a next-level reality.

The herb that Mexicans call marijuana is a catalyst for our waking

dreaming, giving art and music extra, wilder dimensions. It guides us through

the multiplying pathways of our minds and reveals new perspectives on reality

and our position within it.

But the plant of knowledge is an unpredictable ally. It can twist

a conversation into lyricism and theatre but will just as easily kill it dead. It can

awaken and elevate full-body sensation, but can also turn us into disembodied

drones. It can show us how to harvest the golden fruits of our consciousness,

but in the wrong mood it will rouse the looming shadows and afflict us with

a ceaseless paranoia.

As a siren wails in the distance, we receive the medicine

and continue on our way.

Medicine[LONDON]

Night Drive through Babylon

[DETROIT]

Dawn from the sixty-second floor. Gazing out over the twinkling cityscape,

rivers of electronic melody coursing through my mind. Bass pulses under layers

of digital percussion and a synth-line soars into a minor key.

Motor City. The manufacturing heart of America’s twentieth-century

economic triumph and one the original templates for the Western consumer

economy. The engine room of the American Dream: birthplace of the

automobile, the mass-production assembly line and the three-minute Motown

slice of musical soul.

And birthplace also, in the late 1980s, of a sonic revolution. Techno: the

music of the future, the soundtrack animating a thousand dancefloors around

the world. Rhythmic commentary for the millennial era; abstract and repetitive

machine music that brims with raw energy and passion, transporting listeners,

willingly or not, into altered states of consciousness.

Cue Paul and me, two musical pilgrims disguised as journalists, come

to plug into the groundsource of the sound. We’re armed with a commission

from a UK music magazine to cover the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, DEMF,

and recap the origins of the techno story. We hit the blaggers’ jackpot with

a well-worded email to the Detroit City Chamber of Tourism, who are laying out

five-star hospitality for us. We’re riding the media train first class, getting VIP

guided tours of the city and a hotel room in the upper reaches of the landmark

General Motors towers, complete with ice machine and the most panoramic

view I’ve ever seen, never mind woken up to.

By this time my investigations of subculture in London have entered a new

phase. I’ve managed to plug into the music media and have been doing portrait

shoots for magazines. I’m finally earning cash, and I’m also travelling, getting

free records and meeting some of the main characters in the various electronic

scenes. The dynamic energy of all this has tempered my bleak obsession with

the state of the world, and I’ve started photographing in colour. Life seems

to be looking up.

Meanwhile, the immersion in electronic music and graffiti further afield

has confirmed my sense that music-makers and artists in other places are doing

the same thing as the London crews: taking the intensity and challenge of the

contemporary urban experience and using it as the raw material for artistic

expression and transformation. With this in mind, we arrive in Detroit keen to

explore the relationship between the city’s legendary dystopian landscape and

the music that was born here. It feels like Detroit offers a key to understanding

how human beings can respond creatively to adverse circumstance. So, with

some time to spare before the festival begins, we start walking.

Heading first towards the newer architecture by the riverside,

we find an eighties sci-fi vibe that interprets the corporate HQ as futuristic

space station. It’s all tubes and pods and gantries and Star Trek service

towers. We half expect something to suddenly levitate and shoot off to a

different galaxy.

As we reach the core of downtown, we spot the derelict skyscrapers we’ve

heard about. Dating from the now long-gone boom times of the Detroit motor

industry, they have names like Cadillac Tower, and from a distance they seem

to retain all the majesty and kudos of their Art Deco and Modernist origins.

But closer investigation reveals that they are abandoned, with lobbies full

of junk and broken windows punctuating the grids of glass and concrete.

We spend two days exploring the bizarre ghost town that is

metropolitan Detroit, walking, taking it all in and discussing the genealogy of

techno and its musical descendants. We have little contact with anyone apart

from street people, the staff in empty diners and a pair of donut-eating cops.

When the festival begins we head down to the open site under the

towering Renaissance Center, where a number of stages are dotted around the

plaza, pumping out digital music. The festival is free and there’s a broad mix

of punters, from hordes of travelling techno youth to picnicking local families

and a sizeable contingent of old homeless guys getting down to some seriously

funky moves.

Techno, and particularly Detroit techno, inspires fervent loyalty.

We see a guy with a large and still unfinished tattoo on his back depicting

Richie Hawtin’s Plastikman logo, an icon of Detroit’s second wave in the

early nineties. It takes me back – the first techno record I ever owned was

a Plastikman twelve-inch.

Let’s rewind for a minute. The history of Detroit is a classic tale of spiralling

boom-and-bust economics; it is in many ways a microcosm of the evolution

of global capitalism. It was in Detroit in the early twentieth century that Henry

Ford and his Model T assembly line spearheaded the manufacturing revolution

that kick-started the era of mass-produced goods for consumer markets.

The mechanisation and sequential processes of the assembly line allowed

speedier production, lowering costs and making cars accessible to a far

broader segment of the population – including, for the first time, the workers

manning the machines making them. Detroit’s factories produced millions

of cars, but the mechanised assembly-line model was also used for making

everything from aeroplanes and tractors to computers, kitchen appliances and

plastic toys, opening up vast swathes of economic potential.

During the Second World War the city’s entire manufacturing

capacity was converted to the production of planes, tanks and other military

vehicles, keeping Detroit’s economy booming and generating technical

advances that would translate into great leaps forward in post-war car design

and manufacture. Then in the ‘golden age’ of the fifties and sixties, the car

really asserted its dominance of American culture, with the construction

of freeways and the rapid growth of suburbs outside the downtown centres.

This was not entirely a spontaneous evolution; the motor industry lobbied for

the development and was also involved in financing it.

The automobile became the ultimate symbol of freedom, offering

individual choice, comfort, power, status and sex appeal. Promoted with

increasingly sophisticated marketing, the car became a test case for using the

rhetorical promise of freedom to create product desirability. Stoked by this

manufactured desire, the liberation offered by cars generated huge sales, and

repeated them by regularly releasing improved and more desirable models.

All this was gold for Motor City, supporting waves of exponential

growth in prosperity and population. The big automobile corporations built

impressive architectural edifices to house their offices and display their

success. Their management elites developed a taste for the high life. Workers

flooded into Detroit, many from the poor and segregated Deep South, finding

relatively well-paid jobs in factories which significantly raised their material

standard of living.

But then came the crashes. The first was in the thirties, when the

depression brought plummeting sales and production, which in turn led to

unemployment, social unrest and racial tension. But Motor City rode out the

storm and survived. It happened again with the oil shocks of the seventies.

Worldwide economic stagnation, combined with competition from more

fuel-efficient European and Asian cars, seriously disabled the mighty Detroit

car industry. The result was a major economic slump and the return of rising

unemployment. In the middle of all this, in 1943 and 1967, the city exploded into

devastating race riots, catalysing further tension and social dislocation.

By the mid-eighties, Detroit was a metropolis in major decline. The city

and the motor industry at the heart of both its economy and its identity were

reeling from a decade of downturn, strife and the illusory trickle-down rhetoric

of Reaganomics. Wealth distribution was massively uneven. Unemployment,

drug addiction and violent crime were all high, and the wholesale degeneration

had catalysed mass white flight and commercial relocation to the suburbs.

Downtown Detroit was gradually abandoned, leaving countless empty

buildings to decay and become squatted shelters for the homeless and the

crackheads. What was once the fourth-largest city in the United States

effectively became a post-industrial wasteland.

By the time I’ve completed this triangular review of my personal history and the global narrative it’s a few years into the new millennium. The world is reverberating from 9/11, its transformation of the political landscape and the subsequent waves of military mobilisation and repressive legislation. It is against this backdrop that the farcical search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq culminates in a seemingly inevitable and stage-managed invasion.

It seems obvious to anyone reading between the lines that the rhetoric about removing an evil dictator, eliminating terrorist threats and rolling out democracy to the entire planet is a wholesale cover. It’s really all about asserting Anglo-American control over Iraq’s vast oil reserves – along with Afghanistan’s strategic position in resource-rich Eurasia. History has been inverted, with the living descendants of the ancient Babylonians now copping it from the contemporary evil empire.

Saddened and angry at the flagrant injustice of it all, I nevertheless find myself gripped by a morbid fascination with the tension and excitement of the unfolding drama. I watch the annihilation of Baghdad by state-of-the-art American weaponry, the bloodless TV footage worthy of a glossy arms trade PR video. I absorb the massively lopsided statistics

The Road to Hell

[BAGHDAD - JERUSALEM]

on Iraqi versus Allied deaths and then discover shaky, chaotic internet video footage showing dust, mayhem and corpses. I read about the irreversible looting and destruction of the Baghdad library and the archaeological sites of ancient Babylon, both unique records of the origins of civilisation. And I feel a lurking sense of impending apocalypse, aware of the grim irony that even as it rains destruction upon a country full of innocent people, the twenty-first century West is denying and obliterating its own origins.

From the safe distance of my comfortable life in London, I try to think of a way to do something, to engage with the situation beyond passive consumption of the media spectacle and a kind of neutered outrage. One day, a friend in the peace movement introduces me to an Iraqi man called Sammi. Over Arabic coffee on the Edgware Road he tells me he is collecting funds and medical equipment to make an independent ambulance mission to his home town, the northern oil city of Kirkuk. Exiled during the rule of Saddam Hussein, he has been living and working as a taxi driver in Bristol for the last decade. Now, with the help of a London-based NGO called Peace Direct, he plans to go home and set up some sort of post-war citizens’ support centre. He has a large truck and intends to fill it with essential supplies,

then travel by road through mainland Europe, Turkey, Syria and into Kurdish Iraq. He is looking for someone to help with the driving.

I come away from meeting Sammi with a profound sense of respect and an elastic stomach. At last, someone taking the plunge and actually trying and make a positive contribution to the situation. The opportunity is clear: join this crazy one-man humanitarian caravan and align my actions with my beliefs. It’s also an opportunity to finally take on the mantle of being a proper photojournalist – to journey to the frontline, expose the fallacies of the war project and tell a story of hope for humanity. If all this wasn’t enough, it is a ticket to photograph the original Babylon.

The trouble is that by this time the Iraqi ‘peace’ is lurching into a predictable and spiralling bloodbath of insurgency, ethnic strife and sectarian massacre. The violence is worse than it ever was during the official war, and the various militias have taken to kidnapping and executing both foreigners and the Iraqis who deal with them. The highway from the border to Kirkuk has become one of the most dangerous roads in the world.

A friend asks me pointedly what it is I think I can achieve by going to Iraq and risking my

own violent death. I reply that we bear collective responsibility for the suffering and I want to do something to alleviate it and show the reality behind it. But his words hit home. Gradually, a suffocating fear takes root. I have several dreams about being shot and I start worrying about my family. Slowly but surely my self-preservation instinct erodes my desire to lend a hand to the Iraqis, visit the original Babylon and bring home a document from the edge. Reluctantly, I succumb once again to the safety blanket of Western privilege and tell Sammi that I’m not coming with him.

Then a magazine commissions me for a feature on clubbing in Israel. It’s only a couple of hundred miles across the desert from Iraq, but the club scene there is more or less identical to others I have photographed across Europe.

And so my first experience of the Middle East is a road trip along the so-called ‘apartheid highway’. The road from Ben Gurion airport to Jerusalem runs through Palestinian territory in the West Bank but is securely fenced off from the Palestinian lands that surround it, and strictly reserved for vehicles with yellow Israeli licence plates. The taxi driver’s radio is tuned into a station playing eighties pop. As we speed past a bullet-proof watchtower, Chris Rea’s ‘The Road to Hell’ starts playing.

The Temporary

Autonomous Zone

POSTCARDSFROM

BABYLONChristian de Sousa

[BACK COVER]