Christopher Scanlon is a research associate with RMIT University's Globalism Institute and a co-editor of Arena magazine.
November 10, 2007
The Canberra Times
 
Overused and abused, stocks in courage have taken a dive over recent years.
 
So cheapened has the word become that one of the first things that springs to mind on hearing it is one of those glossy office posters depicting a lone individual standing atop a rocky peak, along with some trite observation under the word "courage" in capitals. Over- pampered Hollywood actors are routinely described as courageous when they put on a few kilos or a fat suit to play a character whose weight resembles that of a healthy adult.
 
According to one self-help guru, courage is necessary to be rich, the implication being that the poor have chosen their lot.
 
In response to this devaluation, Maria Tumarkin's Courage comes as a form of central bank intervention, injecting a much-needed stimulus into courage's flagging fortunes. There's no grand system or seven-point plan to unleash the courage within. Instead, Tumarkin's book is an extended meditation on courage, carried within stories of struggle both from her past and the biographies of others.
 
Tumarkin takes care to distinguish courage from heroism, with which it is often confused.
 
Unlike heroism, courage has a dark underbelly; it is not necessarily a virtue.
 
Susan Sontag understood the difference well in describing the actions of the terrorists who carried out the Septem-ber 11, 2001, attacks as courageous.
 
"In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue)", wrote Sontag in The New Yorker just a week or so after the attack, "whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards". Whatever one may think of Sontag and many condemned her she was one to choose her words carefully.
 
The "morally neutral" character of courage makes it a far more difficult and perplexing creature than heroism. Part of the challenge of writing about courage, for Tumarkin, was to get past the ideas of heroism that surround and obscure it. Rather than looking to the world- historical examples of courage, Tumarkin prefers to look for it in the mundane, even banal, events of everyday life: a refugee trying to make himself understood in a butchers to buy meat for his family; a father refusing to be seated in a principal's office to which he has been summoned for his daughter's supposed intransigence until his daughter, too, is permitted a seat; a poet who refuses to compromise his vocation to play along with a bureaucratic machinery; a recently arrived migrant battling the pomposity and snobbishness of an elite university.
 
Many are drawn from Tumarkin's own as a child growing up in Russia and her family's experiences, then as a ref-ugee in Europe before arriving as a migrant in Australia. It is in these illustrations and examples that Tumarkin is in her element, finding fresh and unlikely examples of courage in places normally eclipsed by the tendency to associate the courageous with the spectacular. They serve as vivid illustrations of her belief that there "is no spectacle in courage, no glamour, no special effects".
 
"It is a bird of the everyday, small inconspicuous, common," she writes.
 
In places, though, Tumarkin forgets her own wisdom, moving out from the margins of the everyday to the ex-traordinary and uncommon varieties of courage. For example, she guides the reader through the story of Anna Po-litkovskaya, the Russian journalist whose relentless pursuit of Moscow's crimes in Chechnya and the general corruption of Putin's regime saw her assassinated.
 
In discussing courage's opposite, cowardice, Tumarkin similarly opts for the extraordinary.
 
She turns to the stories of Adrian Leftwich, an anti-apartheid activist who betrayed friends and comrades after months in solitary confinement, and Mark Behr, a South African who, as a university student, was recruited as an in-formant for the South African security services in the 1980s.
 
Tumarkin uses these very different stories to good effect, showing how, in the case of Politkovskaya, the pursuit of civic duty can be the path to courage and, in Leftwich and Behr's confessions of cowardice, how what appears to be a courageous act admitting cowardice can become a form of exhibitionism, and thereby continues cowardice.
 
In turning away from the inconspicuous and small, the passion and humour that pervades her discussion of the mundane examples of courage gives way to a drier, more academic treatment of courage. Partly this is a consequence of the examples being drawn from second-hand accounts. They therefore come across as expert commentaries on distant events and people.
 
Mostly, though it is a consequence of Tumarkin not taking her own advice seriously or trusting her gut instincts. The nuance and subtlety of the examples of courage in the autobiographical passages gives way to grand examples where subtlety struggles to make itself known.
 
This makes Courage an uneven read. In parts it feels as if the book was finished in haste and, as Tumarkin writes in the last chapter, it was finished just before the birth of her second child.
 
Alternatively, the unevenness might be just what she intended. As Tumarkin writes in the final pages of Courage, "I do not like neat, easily classifiable books." In this sense, the temper of Tumarkin's book is a fitting meditation on courage, which is neither neat nor easily classifiable either.
 
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