On flood relief t-shirts

Is this going to be the moment that radicalises us?

For weeks I’ve been searching for an image, something to pull the tangle of my thoughts outside of myself and onto a page. Everyday, a new crisis unfolds while old ones linger. Everyday, more people die and those deaths are entirely preventable. It is clear that we need more resources, more planning, more donations, more dialogue with people whose communities and land have been snatched away from them. But also certain (dangerous) ideas have inevitably crept into the discourse that we need to take account of as a community. If we don’t then we are going to lose this critical moment, where people are finally paying attention to what climate activists, feminists, farmers labourers, factory workers, fisherfolk and transpeople have been saying for decades. The radical contours of that collective message blunted by the failure of some to get with the program. In a crisis situation, any help is warranted better than none, but when social work positions itself as beyond critique that’s when alarm bells should start to go off.

In my inbox this week: A flood relief t-shirt, this time sporting the river Indus. LOVE IS RESILIENCE the shirt reads. The river is mapped out across the shirt, splitting into five somewhere along the midriff. Blue lines of water inked over a vintage stamp in contrasting pink. Pakistan, it’s legacy, nourished by the river, kept alive by its flowing currents. But the river has been damaged and polluted beyond repair. The river has suffered the building of dams, been choked by saline water and garbage, its creeks dwindling to nothing. What does it mean, then, to sell shirts with LOVE IS RESILIENCE stamped onto the image of a river that is, at this point, a mere fantasy? Love is not a life raft to throw at the people drowning at the forefront of climate change. If someone whose entire life has been destroyed by flooding turns away from the hand now being extended to them and says fuck Pakistan and fuck this inadequate expression of love, what then?

Painfully aware that I’m spiralling towards melodrama atm, but there is literally a shirt being sold on IG right now with some abstract Indus theme that is priced at about a thousand dollars. This should be enough to make anyone pause in their tracks and wonder what is actually going on here. At that point its not even worth it, we may as well put time and effort into thinking of more effective ways to raise funds that do not feed people’s moral superiorities when they don thousand dollar shirts to walk around London and New York. Rifling through their drawers to find matching accessories, pausing to look at themselves in the mirror before heading out the door. Answering a question about the shirt at the bar or restaurant as people exclaim over its unusual hue, fingers lingering over the silky-soft material. The image of the river as art, a thousand dollar emblem.

Art (the temptation is to call it merch, but sticking to art for a reason) like this cultivates a narrative of village life in Pakistan that is obviously championed by many, as much a regular feature in novels, poetry, eight pm dramas as it is in the news, history and geography syllabi, and public policy. Pure and simple people living in little villages. Tied to the river, which fulfills all their needs. Tied to their lands, which they cultivate with love. Unlike the city, the small town and the village are presented onscreen and in the pages of books as unmarked and unchanged by modernity. The village is too small for the hero (or heroine), their ambitions take them to the city, where they ‘see’ the world for the first time. The city is where they undergo a personal transformation, where they must lose their naïveté in order to survive. In the end, they choose to return to the village, to this uncomplicated place and its uncomplicated people, nurtured by the everyday joys of life; the harvest, a wedding, maybe the installation of electricity or a primary school. They don’t need much, art tells us again and again, these resilient village people.

Can art save us when art shares so much of the blame?

Can art fully acknowledge what has been taken from those who we (educators, artists, writers, fashion designers and the rest) have failed many times over? Instead, flood relief has reified our positions as sellers, scrambling to figure out the most effective way to sell first so we may give later. But there needs to be more, there has to be more than this. The relations of capital cannot help us build a new future! It can only supply a few bandaids. And, anyway, haven’t we sold enough already? We’ve sold our lands, our water, the air we breathe. Now we must also sell t-shirts and candles and workshops, each transaction further cementing these relationships - between seller and buyer, product and consumer. Are we resigned to being trapped in this intermediary position, organising and attending the circuit of bazaars for flood relief. Or is it possible we are just not thinking radically enough and are wasting opportunities for political education and praxis?

So yes, guaranteed this is a time of action, but if only it were that simple. This also needs to be a time of reflection. How did we get here? Is there no way to help people affected by climate change that goes beyond the realm of relations shaped by capital?

Adorno would say no, not if it’s art you are selling.

Style represents a promise in every work of art. That which is expressed is subsumed through style into the dominant forms of generality, into the language of music, painting, or words, in the hope that it will be reconciled thus with the idea of true generality. This promise held out by the work of art that it will create truth by lending new shape to the conventional social forms is as necessary as it is hypocritical. It unconditionally posits the real forms of life as it is by suggesting that fulfilment lies in their aesthetic derivatives. To this extent the claim of art is always ideology too.

However, only in this confrontation with tradition of which style is the record can art express suffering. That factor in a work of art which enables it to transcend reality certainly cannot be detached from style; but it does not consist of the harmony actually realised, of any doubtful unity of form and content, within and without, of individual and society; it is to be found in those features in which discrepancy appears: in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity. Instead of exposing itself to this failure in which the style of the great work of art has always achieved self-negation, the inferior work has always relied on its similarity with others – on a surrogate identity.

In the culture industry this imitation finally becomes absolute. Having ceased to be anything but style, it reveals the latter’s secret: obedience to the social hierarchy.

I mean, this is not the kind of newsletter that massively quotes from theory. And yet, case in point:

Is it so provocative to say this is not the time for art? Only if you believe art is some apolitical thing, to place on your shelf and pick up only when you need to dust underneath.

I want to come back to this question of love that the flood relief t-shirt has proffered. A final reason why the caption represents such a failure of imagination. Love is resilience gives the responsibility of loving the nation as a whole onto those who have suffered the most, valorizing resilience as an act of love. But what about us, the ones who are trying now to belatedly prove our devotion? What it takes to build love, what love should uphold, (subversion as an act of love, refusal as an act of love, community building as an act of love) surely this is what we should be asking each other and ourselves right now. Shouldn’t the love we strive for be one that looks beyond what can be moulded into comprehension, packaged and sold?

Poets who dedicate their lives to invocations of love will tell us that it does not come so easy. What are you willing to risk for love, they ask, knowing that you may never get anything in return?

Put like that, it is an insurmountable task. Maybe we could honour the risk if we remember that love is a muscle. It grows when we build communities that extend beyond our immediate socio-economic class, when we work with and through differences, bolster mutual aid networks, center those working on the ground, speak out against MNCs, refuse the respectability politics that keep us at home or in air conditioned offices, try try try as hard as we can to thwart the system that keeps us all within this hierarchy, within this machine that looks well oiled but quite literally sacrifices the most disenfranchised in order to keep itself running.

Or maybe the risk is too great and the fear of the unknown will hold us back. We’ll do the same things our parents did. Save up to buy plots where there should be none. Build huge houses on them as soon as we are able. Own several cars if we can afford it. Work for companies that are draining the country of its resources. Buy and hang up images of simple village people in our homes. Shake our heads at the television every year when there is another flood. Say our hands are tied because we too are struggling amidst inflation, patriarchy, racism etc etc etc

When tomorrow we drown, we will know it is because we offered no real love, only a cheap imitation.

But still, but still, it’s not too late.

If you can, please donate generously to, or get involved with, organisations and individuals that are committed to community based work such as Madat Balochistan, Leela Ram Kohli, Sindh Disaster Relief Campaign, Mama Baby Fund, Haqooq-e-Khalq, and Women’s Democratic Front .

Madat Balochistan is asking for donations to rebuild homes in Balochistan. Donate here:

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