PJH's 'Shaker Aamer' Revisited

Hope Six has prompted me to reassess some of PJ Harvey’s earlier work and more particularly those parts of it I’ve ignored up till now, including her 2013 song ‘Shaker Aamer’, dedicated to the last British detainee in Guantánamo Bay, who finally came home last year. When its release was first announced my heart sank a little bit: what would this song be like, deliberately and self-consciously (and, you might well argue, pretentiously) commenting on a particular and very real situation rather than the imagined emotions and personae which form the accustomed landscape of Ms Harvey’s musical endeavours. It reminded me uncomfortably of that painfully right-on band of the ‘80s, The The, whose lead singer would periodically issue portentous declarations to the press about the state of the nation as though anyone cared what he thought. Ms Harvey, in contrast, gave out no statement about ‘Shaker Aamer’ apart from a very taciturn press release whose traces you can detect in the identical wording used to describe the song on various websites dating from the time. Back then, I listened to about ten seconds of it, and heard a bald account of the horrors of Shaker Aamer’s detention, set to unremarkable music: I was disappointed but unsurprised, and mentally put it aside after that.

Coming back to the song, and giving it a bit more time to settle in the ear, I hear something completely different. It isn’t a masterwork by any means, yet, nevertheless, its insistent, repetitive rhythms fit the purpose rather well. But what raises it to the level of something remarkable is the phrase, occurring several times and emphasised by periods in the music, ‘Shaker Aamer – your friend’. This is a very strange, and bold, description to slip into a protest song. It attempts to generate not a sense of outrage, or pity, but actually to claim a personal relationship between the wretchedly incarcerated man and the listener. He is our friend. He isn’t a threat (as the US government claimed), a fundamentalist, a terrorist: he is a friend, someone who means us no harm. Nobody else, surely, would dare to be so humanistic, so personal.

But my thoughts went further. This line – ‘your friend, Shaker Aamer’ – is what you would put at the end of a letter. This song is intended as a letter written on behalf of someone who can’t write one. It’s not only that, of course, because if it was, the sign-off line would be precisely that, rather than appearing three times through the lyric; but it makes it clear that the song’s function is not just to comment on the prisoner but to give him a voice.

But we aren’t finished yet: there is another, final layer. As a result of re-listening to ‘Shaker Aamer’, I looked up the details of his case (as far as Dr Wikipedia reports them), and noticed that his lawyer, during the time of his incarceration, was one Clive Stafford-Smith of campaign group Reprieve. I know that name, I thought. And Mr Stafford-Smith was the man who, the year before Shaker Aamer was eventually released, Ms Harvey got to do a report on Dorchester County Hospital as part of her act of assault and battery on the Today Programme in early 2014. So, therefore, she had an ongoing relationship with one of the few people in a position to know what Shaker Aamer himself thought of his own situation. Knowing that, it becomes impossible to see anything other than the detainee’s own words in what Ms Harvey sings. This isn’t only her imagination at work: it’s someone else’s actual speech, presaging what she’d do on Hope Six. If Shaker Aamer is our friend, it’s because he wants to be, because he’s used those words.

How wrong I’d been. This isn’t just a socially-conscious musician sitting in her studio taking it upon herself to call our attention to a dreadful injustice and commenting on it from a position of safety. This isn’t even a socially-conscious musician sitting in her studio and imagining what it might be like to be the victim of that injustice. It’s a musician giving that victim a voice in the most direct way imaginable. And then not even telling anyone that that’s what she’s done.