GOING BY NEWTON’S THIRD LAW, it is little wonder that the Age of Nations would produce the internationalist socialist movement, and it is even less surprising that the cosmopolitan component of that progressive ideology would attract the spleen of patriots and jingoists everywhere. On 11th July 1917, executives of the Phelps Dodge corporation, which ran the copper mines and border town of Bisbee, Arizona, like a medieval fief, colluded with Harry Wheeler, the local sheriff, to deport over 1,000 miners who had been on a peaceful week-long strike for better working conditions. Many of the strikers belonged to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Bolshevik-inspired paranoia was in the air and, facing a sharp drop in copper prices, Phelps Dodge executives decided to break the strike by any means necessary. Their plan was ruthlessly ambitious: roughly an eighth of Bisbee’s population was to be exiled in a single morning. In order to arrange this mammoth expulsion, the sheriff deputized 2,000 local gunmen from the surrounding areas of Cochise County, gave them white armbands and weapons and unleashed them on the unsuspecting miners. The El Paso and Southwestern Railroad provided a dozen cattle cars for the operation, and, following six hours of mayhem, from early morning to noon, 1,186 men, women and children were loaded onto trains under armed guard and sent to Hermanas, New Mexico, 200 miles to the east.
To suppress all news of the deportation, Bisbee was placed under a communications lockdown: the telegraph office was seized by the sheriff’s thugs, who also erected checkpoints on all roads leading in or out. Although lists of names had been handed out to the posse, many of the deportees didn’t belong to the IWW. Some were innocent bystanders, others were business-owners who sympathized with the miners. Although Harry Wheeler and a dozen of his Phelps Dodge paymasters were later indicted on kidnapping charges by the federal government, the Supreme Court ultimately decided Washington had no right to interfere and referred the matter back to the state of Arizona in the ruling United States v. Wheeler (1920), since kidnapping wasn’t a federal crime at the time. When questioned by Arizona’s Attorney General as to the legality of his actions, Sheriff Wheeler replied that it had nothing to do with the law, but rather with whether the striking miners were “American, or not”. As Wheeler told the Attorney General: “I would repeat the operation any time I find my own people endangered by a mob composed of eighty per cent aliens and enemies of my government.”
None of those involved in the Bisbee deportation of 1917 were ever imprisoned for their actions, and Phelps Dodge’s rule over Bisbee actually tightened. Deportees who returned were denied work, while the unions were effectively shut out of mining operations. Further underscoring the company’s influence, all talk of the deportation was squashed until the 1980s, when most mining operations ceased. Fortunately, however, a poem survives. It was published in the IWW’s One Big Union Monthly in August 1919: “We are waiting, brother, waiting / Tho’ the night be dark and long” the poem begins, before detailing the experience of that terrible day:
We were herded into cars
And it seemed our lungs were bursting
With the odor of the Yards.
Floors were inches deep in refuse
Left there from the Western herds.
Good enough for miners. Damn them.
May they soon be food for birds.
The poem was unsigned; the only indication to the author’s identity was his union card number, 512210.
A mere two years following the deportation, the same violent hysteria led to Emma Goldman’s expatriation to Russia aboard the USS Buford on 21st December, 1919. Like the Bisbee strikers, Goldman had dared to question the validity of the American Dream, and, despite her thirty-four years in the US, her belief that the Dream was nothing more than a pyramid scheme, made it clear that she was still a foreigner. The supposed foreignness of Goldman’s political beliefs therefore came to justify, in the eyes of American conservatives, her denaturalization and exile. Indeed, although American nativists denounced progressives and proponents of social and economic reform as dangerous foreigners out to destroy America’s uniqueness, it was overwhelmingly clear to observers like Goldman that, by so doing, America was becoming as tyrannical as the rest of the world:
I looked at my watch. It was 4:20 A.M. on the day of our Lord, December 21, 1919. On the deck above us I could hear the men tramping up and down in the wintry blast. I felt dizzy, visioning a transport of politicals doomed to Siberia, the étape of former Russian days. Russia of the past rose before me and I saw the revolutionary martyrs being driven into exile. But no, it was New York, it was America, the land of liberty! Through the port-hole I could see the great city receding into the distance, its sky-line of buildings traceable by their rearing heads. It was my beloved city, the metropolis of the New World. It was America, indeed, America repeating the terrible scenes of tsarist Russia! I glanced up — the Statue of Liberty!
The sad fates of Nicola Sacco (1891–1927) and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (1888–1927), two working-class immigrant anarchists who were wrongfully convicted of violent armed robbery due to their unpopular political beliefs, were eulogized by the Filipino-American writer and labour activist Carlos Bulosan (1913–56) in his poem “American History”, which fashions the final scene of both men’s lives into a haunting portrait as Vanzetti, “the dreamy fish-peddler”, and Sacco,” the good shoemaker”, dream of a “future […] that never was”:
in spheres of tragic light, dreaming of the world that never was, as each tragic moment passed in streams of vivid light, to radiate a harmony of thought and action that never came to pass.
Oppression at home usually paled in comparison to oppression abroad, and the stories and novels of the Syro-Libyan Alessandro Spina, né Basili Shafik Khouzam (1927–2013), are fuelled by the intensity of the horrors of the Italian colonial experience in Libya. In 1939, when Spina was twelve, Italy officially annexed Libya, by which time Italian settlers constituted 12 per cent of the population and over a third of the inhabitants of Tripoli and Benghazi, the epicentres of Italian power. Nevertheless, what had been expected to be an easy conquest in 1911 had instead turned into a twenty-year insurgency that was quelled only when the Fascists took power in Rome and Mussolini, in a quest to solve Italy’s emigration problem, dispatched one of his most ruthless generals, the hated Rodolfo Graziani (1882–1955), to bring the quarta sponda to heel and “make room” for colonists. Genocide ensued: a third of Libya’s population was killed; tens of thousands were interned in concentration camps; a 300-kilometre barbed-wire fence was erected on the Egyptian border to block rebels from receiving supplies and reinforcements; and the leader of the resistance, a venerable Koranic teacher named Omar Mukhtar (1858–1931), was hunted down and summarily hanged.
Alessandro Spina’s “The Fort at Régima” is set in the mid-1930s, when an Italian officer, Captain Valentini, is ordered south of Benghazi to take command of a garrison stationed in an old Ottoman fortress that “recalled the castles the knights had built in Greece during the Fourth Crusade”. Valentini is glad to leave Benghazi and its tiresome military parades behind, but as he’s driven to his new posting, his mind is suddenly flooded with the names of famous Crusaders who had “conquered Constantinople, made and unmade emperors, and had carved the vast empire into feuds; they had scrambled hither and thither throughout the lengths of the Empire vainly trying to sustain an order, which, lacking any roots in that country, was ultimately fated to die”. Employing only a few hundred words, Spina slices across seven hundred years, showing the inanity of the concept of conquest as well as the existential vacuum it inevitably leaves in its wake: “As the Captain bounced around in his armoured car, it struck him that repeating the same sequence of events so many centuries later was both cruel and unbearable.”
As the Peruvian journalist José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930) noted, while Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) was known as one of the chief engineers of the Soviet takeover of Russia, he was above all “a man of the cosmopolis” and that, as such, his exile from Russia had been inevitable: “The Russian revolution is in a period of national organization”, Mariátegui noted,
It is not a matter, at the moment, of establishing socialism internationally, but of realizing it in a nation that, while being a territory populated by 130 million inhabitants that overflows onto two continents, does not yet constitute a geographical and historical unit. It is logical that, in this stage, the Russian revolution is represented by men who more deeply sense its national character and problems. Stalin, a pure Slav, is one of these men. He belongs to a phalanx of revolutionaries who always remained rooted in the Russian soil, while Trotsky, Radek and Rakovsky belong to a phalanx that passed the larger part of their lives in exile. They were apprenticed as international revolutionaries in exile, an apprenticeship that has given the Russian revolution its universalist language and its ecumenical vision. For now, alone with its problems, Russia prefers more simply and purely Russian men.
Although the Russian poet Elena Shvarts (1948–2010) is now generally considered among her generation’s most important voices, her translator Sasha Dugdale noted that “she was not adequately recognized in Russia”, and that while she “received more critical attention and admiration elsewhere, like many unofficial Soviet poets, she was denied the opportunity to travel abroad until 1989”. Shvarts’s essay “Why, Let the Stricken Deer Go Weep” is about her mother, Dina, who studied at the Leningrad Theatre Institute during World War II and the infamous Siege of Leningrad, and who was evacuated in 1942 to Pyatigorsk. As the essay begins, the Germans have advanced so rapidly that the soldiers and the town’s administration all flee again, this time south to Tbilisi. “While Shvarts barely sketches the scene,” Dugdale elucidated,
Any Russian reader would understand immediately the contrast between starving Leningrad and the beautiful southern spa town of Pyatigorsk, where the poet Lermontov was killed in a duel, with its mountain air, mineral springs and sanatoriums, which were operating as war hospitals until the German invasion in August 1942. When the Germans invade Pyatigorsk, not everyone leaves. With our gift of hindsight the reluctance to flee may seem suicidal, but if you consider the suffering and fearful confusion that was Soviet Russia at the time, German occupation and staying put may have seemed the lesser of a number of evils. Radlov’s decision to remain, and his tour of Hamlet in Germany, is a curious legend which I first heard quite recently from the theatre critic Alyona Karas. Shvarts maintains that Radlov chose not to evacuate his theatre south to Tbilisi when the Germans approached. I have read elsewhere that the theatre troupe left and Radlov and his wife remained. Other versions of the story describe how Radlov simply did not manage to evacuate his theatre from Pyatigorsk in time. But all seem to agree on the fact that Radlov’s theatre was moved by the Germans to Zaporozhye, where the theatre premiered Hamlet, and then, in September 1943, to Berlin. Part of the theatre subsequently went to France, where it performed Ostrovskii’s Guilty Without Guilt: an example of rarely bettered theatrical irony.”
Not long before the events described in Shvarts’s essay, Mussolini’s Fascists had busied themselves with invading and oppressing Ethiopia, the only African country to survive Europe’s bloodthirsty scramble for its territories in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the words of her translator, Aaron Robertson, Martha Nasibù’s (1931–) sole literary production, Memories of an Ethiopian Princess, was produced by the “daughter of Nasibù Zamanuel, one of the most significant political and military figures of twentieth-century Ethiopia, who served as mayor of Addis Ababa in the 1920s and early 1930s and who commanded the Ethiopian armed forces under the last emperor, Haile Selassie, during the Second Italo–Ethiopian War (1935–37)”. In the excerpt featured in this anthology, Nasibù produces an atmosphere of constant deracination, as we watch the Italian authorities displace these exiled Ethiopian aristocrats from Rhodes to Naples and finally to Tripoli, all in the space of slightly under a year, a narrative where “time is more elliptical than linear; because the exilic element is always changing where the ‘center’ is located … and where the future is a horrific ellipsis with no intention of becoming anything else”.