Return Of The Repressed Poem by gershon hepner

Witnessing return of the repressed
is hard for those who do not like fanatics
but think repressive thoughts can be suppressed
in London launderettes or stored in attics.
Threatening the id with interference
are bigots who believe they have the right
to limit it not only for adherents
of their own faith but everyone in sight.
Islamic counter-sexual revolution,
promoted far more radically than when
the Puritans promoted the illusion
of shiny cities on a hill for men
who hunted witches while they read the Bible,
is now the program which if we don’t fight
will make the western word resemble tribal
Arabia, while its uncouth Wahhabite
fanatics turn the clock back on the west.
If supporters of the freedom of the id
don’t fight against their doctrines, the repressed
will be the cat that eats the only kid.

Rachel Donadio writes about Hanif Kureishi, who recently received a CBE from the Queen, in the NYT Sunday Magazine, August 10 (“My Beautiful London”) , and has written a new novel, “Something to Tell You”:
One of the most revealing insights into Britain’s recent social history comes early in “My Son the Fanatic, ” Hanif Kureishi’s tender and darkly prescient 1997 film. It’s morning in an unnamed city in northern England, and Parvez, a secular Pakistani immigrant taxi driver brilliantly portrayed by Om Puri, watches Farid, his increasingly devout college-age son, sell his electric guitar. “Where is that going? ” Parvez asks Farid as the buyer drives off. “You used to love making a terrible noise with these instruments! ” Farid, played by Akbar Kurtha, looks at his father with irritation. “You always said there were more important things than ‘Stairway to Heaven, ’ ” he says impatiently in his thick northern English accent. “You couldn’t have been more right.”… In our conversation, Kureishi described the novel as “a critique of the notion of limitless pleasure, ” a re-examination of the sexual revolution. “Is this what we thought we would be in the ’60s when were dancing around with flowers in our hair wanting a more erotic and a more sexual life? ” he said as he drank his peppermint tea. “If the society doesn’t install the values anymore, ” he went on to say, “your happiness and your pleasure is entirely up to you; you have to work and earn it and install your own moral values.” This, he pointed out, accounts for a common “complaint of the West against radical Islam: ‘Why do they have to keep asking God? Why can’t they, as it were, make up their own minds? ’ Well, it’s much harder to install your own moral values than to have them imposed by other people or by the system.” Things were “miserable” when he was growing up in the ’60s before the sexual revolution, Kureishi said, but now, he added, “we’ve moved from repression to unrepression” — which comes with its own strictures.

8/11/08