ESSAY: ‟What about fire? or questions I can't answer (or… | NTGent
Openingsparade ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL

ESSAY: ‟What about fire? or questions I can't answer (or can't answer anymore)”

| 23 May 2024
NTGent asked eight essayists to write an impression about one week of the ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL. We start with Zindzi Tillot Owusu: she wrote about week one.

I’m conducting a study of fire, from halfway down. That is to say: I’m already half lost; I’m heading downwards. In this position, I’ve gained a sense of sobriety. At the same time, the tension is driving me crazy. Yes, I’m grateful to be here, grateful that I can still see so much beauty. But also: there are times when I want to hit the ground and explode.
Fire is generated when a flammable material, oxygen and heat (temperature) are present in the right proportions and quantities.
These three elements together form the ‘fire triangle’, as we call it.
Just look around you.
The source of ignition is what mainly determines the likelihood of fire.
If any one element of the fire triangle is missing,
you’ll never be able to light your stove or hearth.

The ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL  begins early. It’s 5:30 a.m. when the audience starts to assemble at De Krook library in Ghent for Prometheus. Ruben Mardulier gets the festival going with a performance portraying the Titan who brought fire to humanity. He is wearing two wooden eagle’s wings, covered with cigarette lighters, and manoeuvres on scaffolding. This is the first of many times I ask myself: what about fire? Prometheus, a Titan with insight into the future, rebels against Zeus and gives people fire in the hope that fire will bring them prosperity, make something wonderful of their future and give them a means to protect themselves against the danger that is always lurking. What he cannot predict is that people will also use fire to burn each other and their world. So: what about fire? What have we done with it?

Especially now, this is a question that evokes ambiguous feelings. On the one hand, I feel that ‘fire’ is currently driving the genocide in Gaza. ‘Fire’ is the murderer and executioner of tens of thousands of Palestinians. On the other hand, ‘fire’ is also driving the resistance, the unimaginable bravery of Palestinian journalists, the almost incomprehensible determination of the Palestinian population, the student protests around the world and all the people who have the strength and courage to organise and unite for human rights in a conflict with the powers that be, in a fight that seems almost impossible to win.

You will be condemned to fire at every moment, whether you like it or not. Even if fire comes with fear and pain and suffering, especially the suffering of wanting and wishing. You are with fire, and you will have to be with fire forever. You will no longer be able to live without fire. And you will die every day and rise from your ashes every day and be condemned to fire all over again. “It’s horrifying”, you’ll say, “horrifying to be a master of fire. Please, let me go back to the way things were.” And I’ll be sorry to say that your sentence will not be reviewed.

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Prometheus is followed by the Parade of Fire and Abundance. There are many more people here now, full of enthusiasm for the parade. We move slowly from De Krook to Ghent’s city theatre NTGent, where the Olympic fire is ignited and the festival officially launched. Seeing so many people working together inspires hope. All the same, I’m left on the square in front of the theatre feeling somewhat desolate. The fire has been lit, which surely marks the start of a lovely festival; there are people everywhere, young people, parents with children and performers in costume. They are laughing, and I want to laugh too but it’s not working. I’m relieved that this shared joy is still there, but I’m worried as well. Will festivals like these still be possible next year? Will cultural establishments and the rest of the cultural sector still use their fire as a form of resistance, will they continue offering opportunities to less obvious projects, artists whose work is not shown as often, those who are bound to become dissident voices in the years to come?

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There was a sense of faded glory. And the sense that it had never been all that glorious. I think I need to think less. Look: everything around me is green, grey, blue, white, red. The red will turn brown. A hot summer’s day, legs covered in ticks, a back raw from sleeping on an inflatable mattress in a tent. I’m happy. A breeze sniffs at me; I hear the mountains singing in my ears, a lullaby, an elegy. There was a thought, but you can no longer know it and so neither can I. There was a thought that was treacherous, there was a me who was treacherous, there was a world of plastic and combustion engines. Even the most beautifully ornamented lie is not true.

It is becoming ever clearer that we are complicit when we tell a lie, but equally when we do not speak the truth. The question I am left with is: are we doing enough? We’re guilty, but can we earn forgiveness? In Exhaust, a modern reimagining of the tragedy Ajax, the audience is invited to play judge and jury. It is a people’s court where the combustion engine is sentenced to death for contributing to the destruction of our world. Although there is a layer of irony, with battle cries like ‘Violence erases violence’, ‘Death to the monster of the Industrial Revolution’ and ‘See the greatest murder of the century before you’, I am left confused about what exactly I am supposed to take from this play.
Plays by the theatre maker Kris Verdonck often add an anthropomorphic layer to the appearance of a machine. This definitely appeals to me: after all, a thing is ultimately just a thing. Machines are subjected to those who use them. They may look terrifying – and the gigantic combustion engine paraded through the city on that day certainly did – but there’s not actually anything they can do about that. We bend them to our will and then curse them for doing our will.

Prometheus was condemned for his crime, the crime of bringing us fire, and now in turn we are condemning that fire to death. But exactly what crime has fire committed? Whatever Kris Verdonck intended, the ritual evokes something close to frustration in me; it’s as if we were condemning the bombs being dropped in Gaza rather than the people who are dropping them. I feel the need to emphasise this: the monster of the Industrial Revolution is not the combustion engine, but the people who have used it for untrammelled, devastating ‘growth’. People and their stubborn ideas are what have brought us face to face with the greatest avoidable catastrophe of the century. Because however much we’d prefer to evade the question – and as easy as it is to believe that the climate crisis, the genocide in Gaza and the reemergence of fascism are all happening somewhere else – we are the ones, we and our children, who will ultimately be sacrificed. And sacrificed to what, precisely? Progress? It has long since stopped being about the progress of humanity as a community. We can’t seriously suggest that it is, can we, in the midst of all this destruction? In that respect, Exhaust does show something important: we can even feel pity for a combustion engine if we dare to see the thing for what it is.

A heaviness has emerged in me, in my thoughts. You’d think I’d know what that heaviness is, what it’s made of, but I have only learned something about emptiness.

One characteristic: this emptiness is heavy. What might I be able to tell you about back then, before the glass broke? My hands are smeared with blood and grief. They can’t lay out a puzzle as clear as glass, neither with the pieces of back then or the pieces of afterwards, which is to say the pieces that aren’t there yet. My tired fingers ask for a forgiveness that cannot be given.

Exhaust leaves me somewhat vague, but the hope that we can convey our empathy and compassion to our fellow humans is real.

Looking at broken glass together forges a bond, but clearing it up always leads to resentment. You might say that broken is ultimately just broken. And that it’s crazy to think fractures can bring people together. Maybe we all expected just that bit too much of it. Of this now, and that back then, and what came afterwards too.

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Clearly our fellow humans aren’t just the people who think the way we do, the ones who live in the same country or on the same continent. The right to a dignified existence must be universal. But can we really feel compassion for people we understand as distant from ourselves? This question is posed in Aischylos’ Persians, and in Tunnelvision: Silenced by Music, a song of protest against the Eurovision Song Contest. This protest – in the form of an installation – decries the purportedly apolitical Eurovision Song Contest for Israel’s participation. The lyric ‘justice is a game for the rich to play’ just about says it all. Just as it is the Persian king Xerxes who leads his people to their certain downfall in Persians, people with excessive wealth and power are apparently those who get to decide what justice is today. Russia was banned from the festival, so why not Israel? The European Broadcasting Union claims to promote solidarity and human rights. Does that imply that the Palestinians are neither worthy of solidarity nor human at all? It is terrifying and inexcusable that a genocide has been livestreamed for months. We all just sit and watch, so many people are protesting, and yet hardly anything has been done. The International Criminal Court has now – at last – issued an arrest warrant for the Israeli premier Netanyahu, but is that enough? What does justice even mean if it takes so long just to issue one arrest warrant against a war criminal?

I don’t exactly know any more when it broke. Only that it broke. After a while, markers of time stop mattering that much. There was a thought; it has fallen to pieces now. Still that emptiness, even though the fallen pieces look like a multitude at first. It’s difficult to see dust particles dancing if the sun doesn’t shine, let alone to realise that they’re beautiful. The clinical, fluorescent light that makes our world visible today doesn’t offer the same details.

Fluorescent light isn’t fire, no. Not all light is light, that much is clear.

And I’m not as light as I used to be either.

The genocide in Palestine is also rocking the foundations of our society. What is justice and who is human? What attitude can we take to our lifestyle and wealth when they imply that weapons are being supplied in our name and with our tax money to a genocidal apartheid state? Can there still be any question of ‘Western values’? And what was so good about those anyway?

I’m conducting a study of life in fire with the water up to my knees. Wherever I go, I am encumbered. The buoyancy of water is irrelevant if you are standing with your head in the here and now and your legs in the past. There’s suddenly nothing more I can say that anyone understands. I’m forming Morse code with my mouth, but I don’t know anyone who can read it.

So I don’t know, sometimes, why I keep trying to explain things that no one wants to know. But it doesn’t matter. Everyone’s time comes, probably. I think: if I were in that position, I wouldn’t want to hear it either. This study of fire will kill me yet, but I want to understand what we are condemned to. I want to understand where I find myself; it’s more than just a burning world, I’m sure. I’d like to ask you if you remember, but I suspect that you’ve forgotten.

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Just as in the panel discussion about Ghent’s heritage and the question of whether we should ‘honour’ it – a debate linked to the tragedy Iphegenia during the festival – many people feel uncomfortable about the institutions in Western society. The credibility of these institutions is crumbling, and I sometimes wonder if they even realise that at all. These sluggish, cumbersome mastodonts that are supposedly ‘apolitical’, that cannot intervene on time in a genocide, that wait in cowardly fear to voice an opinion of the bloodbath in Gaza – what are their status and judgement actually still worth? I was glad that NTGent didn’t shrink from speaking its mind on Palestine, I was glad there were Palestine artists to see, that there was space for protest about the Eurovision Song Contest. But I want to make a friendly plea to raise the bar. Artists and art have resisted as much as possible throughout history, producing so many dissenting and alternative ideas, as well as preserving histories that might otherwise have been completely lost. I learned more about the Aids crisis from artists and art than I ever did at school. Our colonial history, which the panel also touched upon, was something I mainly learned about through art, writers and rebellious teachers. As I see it, it is one of the most important tasks of art to inspire people, to tell stories in the way that only art can, but that inspiration seems to have almost vanished recently. By now, I’ve lost the inclination to honour and glorify institutions. I’m not the only one, but how do we turn that disillusionment into power? And how do we find a way to work together?

Will all this repeat itself forever and ever? Until all the lights go out at last?

And after that, will there be a new start? And then will it really be a new start, or will we just do the same thing all over again? And what’s the difference between the two, in fact? In any case, I won’t be able to conclude what the truth is. Only that I’m afraid of circles and again and again and again. How often circles recur in our lives, as well, and the fear that I might be a circle myself. What if I die and I’m immediately reborn? Amor fati? I don’t know. And I refuse to accept that we live in a circle. That implies that there’s nothing left for me to influence or change or do differently. That I’m watching a really creepy 4D film.

We have to have some influence on things, at least a little bit, don’t we? There was a thought, I’m sure there was, but I’ve lost it. We reflect the people we love. We become echoes of all the love we have received. And all the hate as well, probably.

I notice that I have endless questions but find few answers. Fire is a multitude of things; it’s essential to life and also life-threatening. It’s warm and comforting, cosy togetherness, safety, fondness and love. It’s our driver and our power, but it may be our downfall, it’s threatening ever faster to become our downfall. That’s a lot. Maybe that’s the conclusion: in fact it’s so huge and so much that it’s becoming indescribable, this fire. No, that’s not the conclusion yet.

I’ve been to see four tragedies. Of course they don’t end well, and I realise that this has affected me. There’s a reason why stories that end badly have annoyed me ever since I was a child. Now I’m convinced it’s cowardly to give in to cynicism. I practice gratitude and try to focus on the good things. Someone who was very precious to me once said: “You already know there are bad things, so don’t keep staring at them. Look the other way, and you might still be surprised.”

So I do.

I remember now. You were the one who once told me that Plexiglas isn’t very strong at all. I’d written somewhere, “Not like the La Défense tower, which will stay standing forever.” And you said to me – I don’t remember your exact words – “Without maintenance a tower like that would last no longer than 30 years maximum.” So if the Plexiglas is so eager to be there, that’s where I’ll leave it.

There’s a thought, here and now, about giving up and slipping away,

but I’m already forgetting it.

There is so much left that we can honour, such as the student protests around the world right now, citizens’ initiatives that are about bringing people together and solidarity with the most vulnerable in our society and our world. This world, which sometimes feels like a forest fire, is still home to countless people who want to tame the fire and use it for something positive. We mustn’t forget that. We mustn’t forget that our fire, as humans, is also creativity and meaning, that it is love and goodwill and kindness and compassion. I was able to get a glimpse of that during the festival, as well as in the daily protests at Brussels Central station, the occupations of various universities, the warm, committed people I have in my life.

We mustn’t allow ourselves to be stifled by pessimism and cynicism if there is so much beauty worth protecting.

So what about fire? It’s up to us. As human beings, we are responsible for using our fire as a positive power. For ourselves, but also for the people who will inherit this world from us.

Zindzi Tillot Owusu (°1997) lives in Brussels and studies Writing for Performance at LUCA School of Arts. She is a member of feminist writer's collective Hyster-X and editor at literary bookplatform Kluger Hans. The last couple of years she mainly worked as a poet. Currently she also engages in prose, video art and performance. Her work could be described as melancholy feverdreams with sharp edges. She loves birds, especially pigeons.

Only humans can fantasise There's all that future, still With closed eyes, you can see whomever you’d like Beyond madness, tenderness awaits Until it holds from the inside