Lives We Might Live

Destination Unknown

2006-08-28T23:17:00.000-04:00

Rancid played 4 nights of sold-out shows at BB Kings on 42nd Street in New York City. Here is a review of Saturday night's show.

Before Rancid came on the crowd was jumpy with anticipation as the house lights in the theatre went out. We were standing in the dark shouting “Rancid! Rancid!” and images began to show on two screens on either side of the stage. The images were old pictures from the ‘60s and ‘70s of police in full riot gear. The images quickly shifted from lines of police looking like a futuristic 1984 military to images of the police beating people. Just as quickly the images shifted to images of the people fighting back against the police: images of people throwing bricks, running, wearing masks, and swinging at the police in Detroit and California.

Suddenly the stage lights came on and Rancid was there! Tim swaggered over the audience slightly elevated above the other members of the band. Before the audience could applaud Rancid jumped into Roots, Radicals, "Where do you go now when you're only 15? When the music execution and the talk of revolution bleeds in me. Give ‘em the boot, the roots the radicals. Give ‘em the boot, you know I’m a radical. Give ‘em the boot, the roots the reggae on my stereo."

The few hundred people around me went fucking crazy: empty beer cups, bottles full of water and people flew in the air, a guy fell on the ground like a sack of bricks to my left, and the pace of my heart sped up and beat along with the music as I struggled to stay on my feet in the pit.

There was much more in the air and up for grabs than in a normal mosh pit. I felt like people were ready to fight for something. Rancid played lots of old songs and the images on the screen conveyed death, destruction, and the photos were interspersed with Rancid logos: lots of skulls and dogs. The set ended with Ruby Soho and as Tim, Lars, and Matt sang "destination unknown" the screens to their left and right flashed with black and white pictures of buildings and entire cities in rubble. The ominous possibility of an unknown future in an environment of destruction and neighborhoods in need of rebuilding was palpable. The fight that led to the devistation is the fight we saw at the beginning of the show: it is a fight between the people and the state and it is happening right now between the Bush Regime and the people in this country. It might not seem like a battle in the streets and for the streets but it is a much more serious than any of the pictures could illustrate. Who will win this battle that we are in is unknown and the future is up for grabs. I felt like myself and the other youth at the show were ready to take it.

The Depth of Rebel Style

2006-06-22T12:17:00.001-04:00

I wrote this in response to an article a friend posted on his blog. The article is by Colin Kennedy Donovan and Qwo-Li Driskill and it is pasted below with a link to their site.

The Depth of Rebel Style by Araby Carlier

Colin Kennedy Donovan and Qwo-Li Driskill’s article is wrong because it assumes culture exists in a narrow vacuum and it advocates a stifling and policing of cultural exchanges when we should be fighting larger battles.

People throw around appropriation way to easily when criticizing all different forms of culture. Music, art, language, slang, religion, and on and on develop with increasing international influence. Our generation and the ones sandwiching us are constantly confronted with new information and cultural norms that were never available to previous generations. Largely, youth around the world have eagerly embraced our ever-expanding ability to learn about each other and communicate (myspace is a major vehicle for this).

In the midst of cultures being slammed together there is assimilation and it is not always a negative thing. Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel) wrote about how cultures are constantly exchanging both horizontally and vertically and they must assimilate and make way for new things. Cultures that do not adapt and assimilate will die out. This predates capitalism. Capitalism and it’s most advanced form, imperialism, are the culprits of forced assimilation and genocide.

Forced assimilation is negative and I’m not making an argument for imposing cultural norms by force or coercion. And it is true that there is and has been a dominating culture in the United States that ruled people’s lives first with missionaries coming across the water to slaughter and plunder native people with the Bible in one hand and the gun in the other and has morphed over centuries to become so deeply ingrained in every aspect of our lives, public and private.

But what do we and countless youth before us do under the shadow and weight of such a bloody history and a tumultuous present? We rebel and create ways of relating to each other that reflect the beauty of cultures in the past to craft how we want to live now and into the future.

Punk rock is such a fantastic example. I have no clue as to who rocked the first mohawk in the punk scene but spiking hair so it stood straight up definitely pre-dates Scorsese’s 1976 movie Taxi Driver. Check out any of Don Lett’s (DJ from the Roxy) movies like Punk: Attitude or Westway to the World for how the punk movement in the UK was heavily influenced and embraced the cultural resistance and outright rebellions of Caribbean immigrants around the UK. White youth were engaging these issues and some of them might have never known if they hadn’t picked up a Clash or a Slits record. Later Blondie, The Clash, Talking Heads collaborated with hip hop artists and “Magnificent 7” was blaring out of windows in the Bronx.

A kid with a mohawk does not represent genocide and theft of cultural practices of native people. A kid with a mohawk represents rebellion and defiance – both good things we need more of on our streets. I would much rather run into a kid with a mohawk at a show than a fucking skinhead – here is an example of a downright reactionary and fucked up personal statement and style that has to go. Not mohawks. While colonizers viewed many practices of native people’s cultures as barbaric and something to be eradicated, youth of all ethnicities are embracing these practices with curiosity, respect, and yes rebellion to the dominant and oppressive status quo I mentioned above. There is a MAJOR difference.

People get caught up in dissecting tattoos, mendhi, piercings, dreadlocks, etc when really what should be tackled is the racism itself. The US government has dumped a ton of bombs on Iraq, killing between 50-100,000 and people in this country can’t say they don’t know that Iraqi’s have been and are tortured by the US military and its cohorts – and they can’t say they don’t know that Iraqi civilians are being systematically murdered in massacres like Haditha. Thousands of Black people were left to DIE last fall in New Orleans, hundreds of people have been killed crossing the border, the entire continent of Africa is being ravaged by HIV/AIDS, the list goes on. I’m not saying this to preach to the choir because you and I and the writers of this article are clearly not in the same choir on this question – but these are the things to fight mad and fight strong. If these things are not eradicated and stopped than there will be no hope of ever eliminating the uneven horizontal cultural exchanges that exist. Our real enemy is the US government that is perpetuating these genocidal moves against people here and around the world.

Let’s start with confronting the oppression and racism where it is going down all around us – where it is life and death, not where it’s hairstyle.

*****************************************************
What are you talking about?
Why should I cut my dreads?
Whats wrong with a Mohawk?

Answers for white people on appropriation, hair and anti-racist struggle.
An Article by Colin Kennedy Donovan and Qwo-Li Driskill

A Few Good Reasons Why White PeopleShould Not Wear Mohawks or Dreadlocks:

Mohawk is the name of a sovereign First Nation in the Iroquois Confederacy. Wearing Mohawks erases Mohawk people and culture.

Dreadlocks are a symbol of Black/African pride and resistance to white supremacist beauty standards and are rooted in Black/African struggles for survival and liberation.

Dreadlocks are rooted in Rastafarianism, a pan-African spiritual/religious movement for healing and decolonization for Africa and African people worldwide. Rastafarianism is a form of resistance to a history of white racism, slavery, colonization and genocide.

The traditions of people of color/non-white people are still under attack across the planet. Appropriating our traditions and ways of dressing/presenting is a further attack on our communities.

Wearing Mohawks or dreadlocks plays into a racist society that believes people of color and our lands, bodies, cultures and spirits are up for grabs.

Mohawks were popularized in Britain and North America because of the film The Taxi Driver.

Appropriating other cultures means you neglect looking at your own ethnic roots and traditions.

By wearing Mohawks and dreadlocks, white people demonstrate they are unaware of anti-racist struggles and deteriorate trust between white and people of color/non-white people.

Being an anti-racist white person is counter-culture. Trying to present a counter-cultural image by appropriating other cultures is not. The hairstyle called Mohawks is rooted in distinct Iroquois and other First Nations/Native traditions that have only recently (1978) been legal in the United States. Non-native people who wear Mohawks appear naÃ¯ve and condescending to this reality. By cutting off their Mohawks and dreadlocks, white people take a concrete step towards an anti-racist journey.

Created by Qwo-Li Driskill and Colin Kennedy Donovan for Planting Seeds Community Awareness Project. www.pscap.org

The struggle against racism is more than just not saying racist comments or knowing that the United States was built by slave labor. It is also a struggle to recognize and understand the ways racism/white supremacy are woven into every aspect of life.One of the ways racism plays out which is often ignored or not seen by white people is through appropriation, the act of taking or making use of without authority or right. Appropriation ignores the lives and struggles of oppressed communities, and instead takes what is seen as interesting, useful or beautiful, disregarding our cultures and lives. In the US and other countries, appropriation is part of long histories of racism and genocide. Colonial governments and peoples appropriated the homelands of First Nations/Native people. Europeans appropriated the bodies and labor of African peoples during slavery. While our bodies, homelands and labor continue to be appropriated, so do our cultural symbols/lifeways. The New Age movement, for example, appropriates (and twists) the spiritual practices of First Nations, Asian, African and other cultures. Among progressive/radical white people, the problem of appropriation continues to damage communities of color. Mohawks and dreadlocks worn by non-Native/non-African people is one form of appropriation that often goes unnoticed and unchallenged and is often misunderstood. Healing the legacy and current reality of racism and colonization means looking closely at the ways we perpetuate these forms of violence. It means, in part, letting go of cultural symbols that are appropriated from people of color/non-white people and instead looking deeply at the complex issues that surround race and racism.

Forever PregnantGuidelines: Treat Nearly All Women as Pre-Pregnant

2006-06-01T15:52:00.000-04:00

click the title to link to the full article sans my raw rage.
By January W. PayneWashington Post Staff WriterTuesday, May 16, 2006
New federal guidelines ask all females capable of conceiving a baby to treat themselves -- and to be treated by the health care system -- as pre-pregnant, regardless of whether they plan to get pregnant anytime soon.
Among other things, this means all women between first menstrual period and menopause should take folic acid supplements, refrain from smoking, maintain a healthy weight and keep chronic conditions such as asthma and diabetes under control.
While most of these recommendations are well known to women who are pregnant or seeking to get pregnant, experts say it's important that women follow this advice throughout their reproductive lives, because about half of pregnancies are unplanned and so much damage can be done to a fetus between conception and the time the pregnancy is confirmed.
what about the damage to girls and women when confronted with an unplanned pregnancy?
The recommendations aim to "increase public awareness of the importance of preconception health" and emphasize the "importance of managing risk factors prior to pregnancy," said Samuel Posner, co-author of the guidelines and associate director for science in the division of reproductive health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which issued the report.
"preconception health" is code for "women and girls are incubators first" and human beings with minds, decisions, dreams, and obstacles second.
The U.S. infant mortality rate is higher than those of most other industrialized nations -- it's three times that of Japan and 2.5 times those of Norway, Finland and Iceland, according to a report released last week by Save the Children, an advocacy group.
infant mortality is higher bc more people live in poverty in the US than in any of those nations, and where our healthcare system is functioning for people it totally sucks.
Preconception care should be delivered by any doctor a patient sees -- from her primary care physician to her gynecologist. It involves developing a "reproductive health plan" that details if and when children are planned, said Janis Biermann, a report co-author and vice president for education and health promotion at the March of Dimes.
oh fuck you march of dimes.
Women should also make sure all vaccinations are up-to-date and avoid contact with lead-based paints and cat feces, Biermann said.
new law - girls and women can't have cats.
The NCHS data also reflect these disparities. Babies born to black mothers, for example, had the highest rate of infant death -- 13.5 per 1,000 live births. Infants born to white women had a death rate of 5.7 per 1,000.
katrina? aids in africa? the entire history of this country? there is a genocidal program against black people in the united states and the bush regime is pushing it to its limits.
"We know that women -- unless you're actively planning [a pregnancy], . . . she doesn't want to talk about it," Biermann said. So clinicians must find a "way to do this and not scare women," by promoting preconception care as part of standard women's health care, she said.
i don't want to talk about it bc i'm NOT FUCKING PREGNANT yet or thinking about being pregnant!
what is more deeply disturbing than anything in this article is that these new federal guidelines are pushing women way way way far into a corner where we are nothing but incubators. these guidelines destroy any notion that we are independent human beings capable of making decisions about our lives and consciously living with those decisions.

Fuck South Dakota

2006-05-20T12:09:00.000-04:00

click the title above to link to the entire rant. here is a prime snippet:

Don’t even try and play this off like it’s just a bunch of prairie extremists who are pushing this radical agenda. It’s just that South Dakota’s legislature is willing to admit what the pro-life movement is really after: forced pregnancy. And they’re not the only dicks who want their chicks barefoot and knocked up – assholes in at least ten other states are preparing turn a procedure that more than a third of American women get at some point during their lives into a fucking felony.

Recycle Beer Bottles

2006-05-16T22:25:00.000-04:00

I haven’t written in a minute and that is about to change. I feel like an absentee parent .. "really kids, it's all gonna change." But seriously, get ready. It’s on now.

I’m reading One with Nineveh: Politics, Consumption, and the Human Future by Paul and Anne Ehrlich. The Ehrlich’s became an academic household name years ago with The Population Bomb, which details how people will eventually overpopulate the planet, reaching roughly 6 billion by 2000, a number unimaginable in the 1960’s when the Ehrlich’s unveiled their work.

Constantly reading fiction has me stuttering in awe when I read a book of facts. I repeat them to anyone who will listen at a given moment with a “can you believe?” tone of wonder. I am amazed by the impact of 16,000 years of human population on the planet.

Ehrlich writes that the “eco-footprint of the average American is roughly four times the human average, and as much as ten times larger than those of the citizens of very poor countries such as Bangladesh and Chad” (69).

As children we learned that individuals must do their share to reduce our own eco-footprint: reduce, reuse, recycle. Did a generation of Americans raised with pro-environmentally altered habits lessen the damage this country has done to the world? No way.

Before I get a slew of email reprimanding me for dissing recycling let’s think about how the rest of the world is increasing their consumption in the pattern of the dominant empire that is the United States. I wouldn’t say the U.S. influences people around the world to adopt lifestyles of consumption, but it inflicts these lifestyles on people.

The necessity and consumption people engage is directly related to the capitalist economies dominated by the U.S. – think of all the America products that are international. And more than the cigarettes and fast food that destroys people’s health, but the patenting of seeds that reduce the nutritional value of food to the shantytowns built alongside factories forcing people to desert their rural homes and lives, oftentimes after a dam or other agribusiness came along first and forced the people out.

The poorest people on the planet are worse off now than some of the earliest human inhabitants on earth.

Jesus Land

2005-11-21T19:10:00.000-05:00

I just read Jesus Land by Julia Scheeres. I'm not going to "reveal the story" but in a nutshell Jesus land is a memoir of a young woman raised by Calvinist fundamentalists in rural Indiana. The memoir is set around Julia and her adopted brother David who is the same age (they idolize Bobby and Cindy Brady) during their last couple years of high school.

Julia and David are not Bobby and Cindy. David was adopted when Julia's parents were basically guilted into adopting a Black child from foster care when they went to the orphanage with the intentions of adopting a white baby. Delighted for their own personal chance to be missionaries in their own home Dr. and Mrs. Scheeres set to civilizing David and Jerome (they eventually adopt Jerome, a slightly older Black child - so David can have "one of his kind"). They bring salvation to these two children in the form of constant mental and physical abuse while their biological white children are spared a bulk of the pain and humiliation.

Part of what drives this memoir is the abuse Julia and especially David experience. But Jesus Land is not a page turner in a gory, tv-movie-of-the-week kind of way. Julia expertly spins her parents fundamentalist values into the memoir portraying them as real-life modern day missionaries who colonize and enslave their adopted Black children so that their souls might be saved. Julia's and David experience is parallel to that of missionaries with the Bible in one hand and a rifle in the other.

What will pull you through this book is (and I won't ruin the ending) but it is, essentially Julia's letter to David. The memoir is definitely written from Julia's distinct perspective but throughout everything what shines through is her committment to David, and trust me Julia and David's relationship is far from perfect, but they are amazing together.

From Harold Pinter, Nobel Prize Winning Playwright

2005-11-02T00:37:00.000-05:00

"The Bush Administration is the most dangerous force that has ever existed. It is more dangerous than Nazi Germany because of the range and depth of its activities and intentions worldwide. I give my full support to the Call to Drive out the Bush Regime."
Harold Pinter 10.31.05

Check it Out! Events!

2005-10-26T14:15:00.000-04:00

Sorry this is New York City-centric.

The New York Times covered a reading of a new play discovered in Kerouac's vaults.

And on November 8 at Cooper Union
STATE OF EMERGENCY readings against torture, arbitrary detention, and extraordinary rendition

with:
Edward Albee
Paul Auster
Sandra Cisneros
Don DeLillo
Dave Eggers
Martín Espada
Philip Gourevitch
Jessica Hagedorn
Heidi Julavits
Nicole Krauss
Rick Moody
Walter Mosley
Grace Paley
Emma Reverter
Salman Rushdie
Martha Southgate
Colson Whitehead

this event is free

It Can't Happen Here ...

2005-10-15T22:41:00.000-04:00

I recently re-read Night by Elie Wiesel.

Wiesel is a well-known writer and a professor at Boston University. He is the author of A Beggar in Jerusalem, The Testament, The Fifth Son, and the sequels to Night: Dawn and The Accident.

Night is technically a novel but is so true to Wiesel's own life it is more autobiography than fiction. Night picks up in the Transylvanian (what is now Central Romania) village of Sighet a few weeks before the Nazis role in with the cooperation of the national government and local officials.

The horrors of Wiesel's time spent in several concentration camps cannot be re-hashed on this blog and for his whole story people must read the book.

Night opens with the introduction of a semi-homeless character, Moshe the Beadle. His displacement amongst the other employed people in Sighet is signified by his lack of a surname. Moshe the Beadle wanders around Sighet taking spreading the latest town news and he receives bits of support from everyone - he is the Mayor of the Block 1940's Romanian style.

The people of Sighet are not living in immediate fear of a Nazis invasion. It is 1944, the war is not going well for Germany, and if you look at a map of Europe and examine where Transylvania is, it is not only Eastern Europe, but it is very far south - near Turkey. People could not imagine the Nazis ever actually invading Romania, let alone occupying Sighet.

But the Nazis do invade Romania and occupy Sighet. The people in the village are suspect of the Nazis at first, but they are not alarmed, and they do not fight back. For a couple weeks the Nazis stay in the village, living with families in their homes - they even stay with and visit Jewish families and leaders. Sighet breathes a collective sigh of relief - the Nazis are not as bad as they have heard. The summation of the people is that the war is going badly for Germany and they will have to leave Sighet soon. In the meantime, the people in Sighet should cooperate so not to disrupt the their polite Nazi guests.

After registering the Jews of Sighet the Nazis deport all of the Jews who were not born in the village. Moshe the Beadle is one of them. All of the native-Sighet Jews reason that these people were not from their village, many of them were wanders (like Moshe the Beadle), and perhaps they will be taken where someplace where they can settle and form their own independent community. The Nazis first go after the people who the larger society has deamed less than desireable - the non-natives, the homeless, those who are outside of the formal establishments of the community.

Days after the first group of Jews are deported from Sighet the remaining Jews, including the influencial leaders, are forced into a few blocks of the city, they are made to live in a ghetto where they cannot leave and no one can enter. As the people are rationalizing their imprisonment in their own village the non-Jews in the surrounding areas do not speak out or organize to help the Jews.

Moshe the Beadle returns badly injured. He tells every Jew remaining in Sighet that he and the others were driven to the edge of the woods. They are ordered to dig a large grave and one by one they are shot and forced into the pit. Moshe survives by pretending he was dead amongst the bodies for days. He crawls out of the grave in the night and hurries back to Sighet to warn the people that they must escape and not cooperate with the few Nazis in the village.

No one believes him.

There are several themes in the book: Wiesel's loss of faith with a god that could allow such terrible things to happen, the will of the individual to survive; but the theme that is most stark is how no one ever believes the situation with the Nazis will get worse. The people are constantly rationalizing occupation, their first exposure to genocide, they are so quick to adopt to fascism with the hopes that their cooperation will get them through.

Even after being crowded into a slow-moving cattle car for days as the people around him are dying, Wiesel and the men he is with arrive at Auschwitz and are sure now they will be allowed to live in this prison until the war is over. There only thought is to stay together as they shuffle through the infamous line where the Nazi Doctor's chose who would live and who would be murdered in the gas chambers.

It is deadly serious how much the people of Sighet denied what was going to happen to them, how much they denied what was actually happening to them in the moment, and how they quickly shifted into survival mode - not once entertaining thoughts of resistance. As Wiesel is being beaten through the process of showering, having his body shaved, and run through Auschwitz to the barracks he is primarily wishing that soon he will be warm and allowed to rest. This is a metaphor for the larger situation. With no resistance, the Nazis were able to roll over everything - while the people thought surely they would stop somewhere - surely the Nazis wouldn't deport the entire village and murder them - this is not how fascism works - it doesn't stop at a certain point because to go further would be wrong.

British Playwright Wins Nobel Prize for Literature

2005-10-13T09:56:00.000-04:00

article by Timothy Williams in The New York Times

Harold Pinter, the British playwright known for enigmatic plays such as "The Birthday Party" and "The Homecoming" and a well-known peace activist, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature today.

Mr. Pinter, 75, has also acted, directed, written poetry and written for film, including the screenplay for "The French Lieutenant's Woman," during his long career. He is a prominent anti-war activist in Britain, writing frequently in British newspapers about his opposition to the United States-led invasion of Iraq.

Mr. Pinter was treated for cancer of the esophagus in 2002 and has announced that he has retired from writing to focus on working for peace.

Mr. Pinter's trademark style is full of tense silences and spare dialogue, and he is among a handful of writers whose name has inspired an adjective: "Pinteresque." His plays, which have been labeled as absurdist, are deeply psychological. His characters speak to each other, but have difficulty truly communicating, and are often unable to finish sentences or express their desires.

In awarding the $1.3 million prize, the Swedish Academy said Mr. Pinter "uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms." The citation added, "Pinter restored theater to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretense crumbles."

Influenced by James Joyce and Samuel Beckett - who became a friend -- Mr. Pinter wrote plays, particularly those during the 1960's, that veer unexpectedly from comedy to examinations of fear and evil. In his early plays, menace lurked just beneath the comedic surface of things - a style that became known as the "comedy of menace."

Mr. Pinter was born in London in 1930 to working class Jewish parents and studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the Central School for Speech and Drama. As a teenager, he twice refused national military service, and was fined. After devoting time to poetry and acting, his first play, "The Room", was performed at at Bristol University in 1957.

His second play, "The Birthday Party", was generally demeaned by critics, with the exception of Harold Hobson, who was among the most influential theater critics in Britain at the time. Despite Mr. Hobson's praise, the play closed after about a week. When Mr. Pinter achieved commercial success with "The Caretaker" in 1960, "The Birthday Party" enjoyed a second, successful run.

The drama takes place in a run-down boarding house near the seaside that has only one resident, a man named Stanley. Later, two men, Goldberg and McCann, arrive at the house and appear intent on possessing Stanley's persona.

In the 1970's, Mr. Pinter became outspoken on political issues, especially about human rights violations. In 1985, he and the American playwright Arthur Miller traveled to Turkey. During remarks at a party at the American embassy, Mr. Pinter said he had spoken to Turks who had been the victims of torture by the Turkish government, including having their genitals electrically shocked. Although the party was held in his honor, he was asked to leave the embassy.

In recent years, Mr. Pinter criticized the NATO bombing of Kosovo and the American-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

For Mr. Pinter's comments on US-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan check out the Artists Network of Refuse & Resist! Pinter's short plays The New World Order and American Football were a part of the Artists Network's 2001 production Imagine Iraq.

Do You Know What It Means to Lose New Orleans? by Anne Rice

2005-10-04T23:30:00.000-04:00

What do people really know about New Orleans?

Do they take away with them an awareness that it has always been not only a great white metropolis but also a great black city, a city where African-Americans have come together again and again to form the strongest African-American culture in the land?

The first literary magazine ever published in Louisiana was the work of black men, French-speaking poets and writers who brought together their work in three issues of a little book called L'Album Littéraire. That was in the 1840's, and by that time the city had a prosperous class of free black artisans, sculptors, businessmen, property owners, skilled laborers in all fields. Thousands of slaves lived on their own in the city, too, making a living at various jobs, and sending home a few dollars to their owners in the country at the end of the month.

This is not to diminish the horror of the slave market in the middle of the famous St. Louis Hotel, or the injustice of the slave labor on plantations from one end of the state to the other. It is merely to say that it was never all "have or have not" in this strange and beautiful city.

.....

Something else was going on in New Orleans. The living was good there. The clock ticked more slowly; people laughed more easily; people kissed; people loved; there was joy.

Which is why so many New Orleanians, black and white, never went north. They didn't want to leave a place where they felt at home in neighborhoods that dated back centuries; they didn't want to leave families whose rounds of weddings, births and funerals had become the fabric of their lives. They didn't want to leave a city where tolerance had always been able to outweigh prejudice, where patience had always been able to outweigh rage. They didn't want to leave a place that was theirs.

.....

I know that New Orleans will win its fight in the end. I was born in the city and lived there for many years. It shaped who and what I am. Never have I experienced a place where people knew more about love, about family, about loyalty and about getting along than the people of New Orleans. It is perhaps their very gentleness that gives them their endurance.

They will rebuild as they have after storms of the past; and they will stay in New Orleans because it is where they have always lived, where their mothers and their fathers lived, where their churches were built by their ancestors, where their family graves carry names that go back 200 years. They will stay in New Orleans where they can enjoy a sweetness of family life that other communities lost long ago.

But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us "Sin City," and turned your backs.

Well, we are a lot more than all that. And though we may seem the most exotic, the most atmospheric and, at times, the most downtrodden part of this land, we are still part of it. We are Americans. We are you.

see the entire piece here

Anne Rice is the author of the forthcoming novel Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt.

Copyright © 2005 The New York Times. All rights reserved.

August Wilson, Playwright, Dies at 60

2005-10-02T19:37:00.000-04:00

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 7:08 p.m. ET

NEW YORK (AP) -- Playwright August Wilson, whose epic 10-play cycle chronicling the black experience in 20th-century America included such landmark dramas as ''Fences'' and ''Ma Rainey's Black Bottom,'' died Sunday of liver cancer, a family spokeswoman said. He was 60.
Wilson died at Swedish Hospital in Seattle, surrounded by his family, said Dena Levitin, Wilson's personal assistant. The playwright had disclosed in late August that his illness was inoperable and he had only a few months to live.

''We've lost a great writer, I think the greatest writer that our generation has seen and I've lost a dear, dear friend and collaborator,'' said Kenny Leon, who directed the Broadway production of ''Gem of the Ocean'' as well as Wilson's most recent play, ''Radio Golf,'' which just concluded a run in Los Angeles.

Leon said Wilson's work, ''encompasses all the strength and power that theater has to offer.'' ''I feel an incredible sense of responsibility on walking how he would want us to walk and delivering his work.''

Wilson's plays were big, often sprawling and poetic, dealing primarily with the effects of slavery on succeeding generations of black Americans: from turn-of-century characters who could remember the Civil War to a prosperous middle class at the end of the century who had forgotten the past.

The playwright's astonishing creation, which took more than 20 years to complete, was remarkable not only for his commitment to a certain structure -- one play for each decade -- but for the quality of the writing. It was a unique achievement in American drama. Not even Eugene O'Neill, who authored the masterpiece ''Long Day's Journey Into Night,'' accomplished such a monumental effort.

During that time, Wilson received the best-play Tony Award for ''Fences,'' plus best-play Tony nominations for six of his other plays, the Pulitzer Prize for both ''Fences'' and ''The Piano Lesson,'' and a record seven New York Drama Critics' Circle prizes.

''The goal was to get them down on paper,'' he told The Associated Press during an April 2005 interview as he was completing ''Radio Golf,'' the last play in the cycle. ''It was fortunate when I looked up and found I had the two bookends to go. I didn't plan it that way. I was able to connect the two plays.''

Wilson was referring to ''Gem of the Ocean,'' chronologically the first play in the cycle, although the ninth to be written. It takes place in 1904 and is set in Pittsburgh's Hill District at 1839 Wylie Ave., a specific address that figures prominently, nearly 100 years later, in the last work, ''Radio Golf,'' which premiered in April at the Yale Repertory Theatre.

Pittsburgh, Wilson's birthplace, is the setting for nine of the 10 plays in the cycle (''Ma Rainey's Black Bottom'' is set in a Chicago recording studio). Although he lived in Seattle, the playwright had a great deal of affection for his hometown, especially ''the Hill,'' a dilapidated area of the city where he spent much of his youth.

Wilson, a bulky, affable man who always had a story to tell, usually returned to Pittsburgh once a year to visit his mother's grave, but he said he couldn't live there: ''Too many ghosts. But I love it. That's what gave birth to me.''

Born Frederick August Kittel on April 27, 1945, he was one of six children of Frederick Kittel, a baker who had emigrated from Germany at the age of 10, and Daisy Wilson. A high school dropout, Wilson enlisted in the Army but left after a year, finding employment as a porter, short-order cook and dishwasher, among other jobs. When his father died in 1965, he changed his name to August Wilson.

Wilson was largely self-educated. The public library was his university and the recordings of such iconic singers and musicians as Bessie Smith and Jelly Roll Morton, and the paintings of such artists as Romare Bearden his inspiration.

He started writing in 1965, when he acquired a used typewriter. His initial works were poems, but in 1968, Wilson co-founded Pittsburgh's Black Horizon Theater. Among those early efforts was a play called ''Jitney,'' which he revised more than two decades later as part of his 10-play cycle.

In 1978, he moved to Minnesota, writing for the Science Museum in St. Paul and later landing a fellowship at the Minneapolis Playwrights Center.

In 1982, his play, ''Ma Rainey's Black Bottom,'' was accepted by the National Playwrights Conference at the O'Neill Theater Center in Connecticut. It was there that Wilson met Lloyd Richards, who also ran the Yale School of Drama. Their relationship proved fruitful, and Richards directed six of Wilson's plays on Broadway.

The first was ''Ma Rainey,'' which opened on Broadway in 1984. Wilson's reputation was cemented in 1987 by the father-son drama ''Fences,'' his biggest commercial success. The play, which featured a Tony-winning performance by James Earl Jones, ran for more than a year.
It was followed in New York by ''Joe Turner's Come and Gone'' (1988), ''The Piano Lesson'' (1990), ''Two Trains Running'' (1992), ''Seven Guitars'' (1996), ''Jitney'' (2000), ''King Hedley II'' (2001) and ''Gem of the Ocean'' (2004).

Wilson's plays gave steady employment to black actors, not only in New York but in regional theaters, where most of his plays tried out before coming to Broadway. Besides Jones, such well-known actors as Laurence Fishburne, Phylicia Rashad, Angela Bassett, Charles S. Dutton, Brian Stokes Mitchell, S. Epatha Merkerson, Roscoe Lee Browne and Leslie Uggams appeared in his plays on Broadway.

''August's work is like reading a rich novel,'' says Anthony Chisholm, a veteran Wilson performer in such plays as ''Gem of the Ocean'' and ''Radio Golf.''

''It conjures up vivid images in the mind, and it makes the actor's job easier because you have something to draw upon to build your character.''

Later this month, a Broadway theater, the Virginia, will be renamed for Wilson, a rare honor also bestowed on such theater greats as Eugene O'Neill, Richard Rodgers, George Gershwin, Helen Hayes and Al Hirschfeld.

Wilson, who was married three times, is survived by his wife, costume designer Constanza Romero; their daughter Azula Carmen, and another daughter, Sakina Ansari, from his first marriage.

No Place For a Poet At A Banquet of Shame by Sharon Olds

2005-09-21T22:59:00.000-04:00

Dear Mrs. Bush,

I am writing to let you know why I am not able to accept your kind invitation to give a presentation at the National Book Festival on September 24, or to attend your dinner at the Library of Congress or the breakfast at the White House.

In one way, it's a very appealing invitation. The idea of speaking at a festival attended by 85,000 people is inspiring! The possibility of finding new readers is exciting for a poet in personal terms, and in terms of the desire that poetry serve its constituents--all of us who need the pleasure, and the inner and outer news, it delivers.

And the concept of a community of readers and writers has long been dear to my heart. As a professor of creative writing in the graduate school of a major university, I have had the chance to be a part of some magnificent outreach writing workshops in which our students have become teachers. Over the years, they have taught in a variety of settings: a women's prison, several New York City public high schools, an oncology ward for children. Our initial program, at a 900-bed state hospital for the severely physically challenged, has been running now for twenty years, creating along the way lasting friendships between young MFA candidates and their students--long-term residents at the hospital who, in their humor, courage and wisdom, become our teachers.

When you have witnessed someone nonspeaking and almost nonmoving spell out, with a toe, on a big plastic alphabet chart, letter by letter, his new poem, you have experienced, close up, the passion and essentialness of writing. When you have held up a small cardboard alphabet card for a writer who is completely nonspeaking and nonmoving (except for the eyes), and pointed first to the A, then the B, then C, then D, until you get to the first letter of the first word of the first line of the poem she has been composing in her head all week, and she lifts her eyes when that letter is touched to say yes, you feel with a fresh immediacy the human drive for creation, self-expression, accuracy, honesty and wit--and the importance of writing, which celebrates the value of each person's unique story and song.

So the prospect of a festival of books seemed wonderful to me. I thought of the opportunity to talk about how to start up an outreach program. I thought of the chance to sell some books, sign some books and meet some of the citizens of Washington, DC. I thought that I could try to find a way, even as your guest, with respect, to speak about my deep feeling that we should not have invaded Iraq, and to declare my belief that the wish to invade another culture and another country--with the resultant loss of life and limb for our brave soldiers, and for the noncombatants in their home terrain--did not come out of our democracy but was instead a decision made "at the top" and forced on the people by distorted language, and by untruths. I hoped to express the fear that we have begun to live in the shadows of tyranny and religious chauvinism--the opposites of the liberty, tolerance and diversity our nation aspires to.

I tried to see my way clear to attend the festival in order to bear witness--as an American who loves her country and its principles and its writing--against this undeclared and devastating war.

But I could not face the idea of breaking bread with you. I knew that if I sat down to eat with you, it would feel to me as if I were condoning what I see to be the wild, highhanded actions of the Bush Administration.

What kept coming to the fore of my mind was that I would be taking food from the hand of the First Lady who represents the Administration that unleashed this war and that wills its continuation, even to the extent of permitting "extraordinary rendition": flying people to other countries where they will be tortured for us.

So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.

Sincerely,
SHARON OLDS

Academics to Debate Springsteen

2005-08-31T10:14:00.000-04:00

this article is from BBC News

The life and works of Bruce Springsteen are to be discussed by academics at a conference devoted to the star.

More than 150 papers are being presented at the symposium at Monmouth University in New Jersey, Springsteen's home state, from 9 September. Discussions include "A Marxist Perspective on Darkness on the Edge of Town" and "The Boss and the Bible".

Organiser Kenneth Womack said the event focused on Springsteen because "he was always shooting for something higher". The English professor cited Springsteen's lyrics on class and community, and his overt patriotism, as among the reasons he was so worthy of academic debate.

More than 500-people are expected to attend the three-day symposium, titled Glory Days, with a concert inspired by Springsteen's music also being staged.

Also on the itinerary is a guided tour of Asbury Park, the inspiration for his first album Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ.

Although the conference is not restricted to academics, Mr Womack is hoping "it is not too fan-nish". "I hope people are thinking carefully about their arguments," he said.

Other titles up for debate include "Springsteen is to New Jersey what Santa Claus is to the North Pole" and "Feminism and Springsteen".

“Our Chances Really Was a Million to One”*

2005-08-18T14:31:00.000-04:00

Paris is internationally recognized as a haven for transplanted artists from around the world. American writers flocked to the Left Bank of the Seine during the first half of the 20th century where they cultivated a vibrant literary community almost unparalleled to any other in the world. The Paris that existed for Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, and Gertrude Stein is a distant memory, but the lasting impression of their work in the city that nurtured them offers inspiration and comfort to a constant tide of new generations of artists.

Paris during the 1920’s was packed with young, struggling writers according to Janet Flanner’s introduction to her collection of essays, Paris Was Yesterday. There was a moment before the major successes of Hemingway and Joyce’s novels where many of the writers living on the Left Bank were exploring both the continent of Europe and their artistic selves through writing. “Richer than most in creative ambition and rather modest in purse,” writes Flanner of the lifestyles of the Lost Generation (vii). The reader imagines a motley crew of young 20-somethings critiquing each other’s stories late into the night over wine and cigarettes in what would become historical locations like Sylvia Beach’s store Shakespeare and Company or the restaurant Les Trianons where Joyce and his family frequently dined. They were all transplanted in a fresh environment and this experience informed their dedication and desire to contribute to society through their writing. Hemingway’s recollections from his early years in Paris embody a tone of romance and exploration when he and his peers were not yet plagued by fame, criticism, and the egos that would eventually pull many of them apart.

The scene Flanner and Hemingway describe is reminiscent in the lyrics to a song written 40 years later. “Bob Dylan’s Dream” opens with a sleeping Dylan dreaming about his early days as a singer and songwriter in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Crowded around a table in what was probably a warm kitchen or café, Dylan was surrounded by a collection of writers, singers, and artists who were “laughin’ and singin’ till the early hours of the morn ... where we longed for nothin’ and were quite satisfied / Talkin’ and a-jokin’ about the world outside.” The idealism of youth and lack of any serious responsibility is captured in the song and is an undoubtedly cherished moment in a person’s life. Hemingway ends A Moveable Feast, his memoir of his years in Paris, with “this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy” (209). Before internationally recognized identities were established and people cashed in on the success of their novels Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, Joyce, and many others were members of a cherished circle. Hemingway and Flanner’s words about the early days in Paris are slightly idealized but are still punctuated with difficulties and interpersonal relationship drama. Overall both writers maintain that their years in Paris were a precious capsule of time that was simpler and they recall their experiences there with great fondness. This is the essence of the Paris artists have traveled to for years.

The writers of the Lost Generation Flanner associated with were financially comfortable to a certain extent even though Hemingway constantly refers to his time in Paris as being years when he was “poor.” Beach was able to open a bookstore and make the investment necessary to publish Joyce’s Ulysses while Hemingway employed a cook, maid, and nanny with some regularity. However, the international economic situation where the dollar carried a high value in post World War I Europe did not last for long. Future influxes of artists to Paris did not experience the same luxuries the Lost Generation were afforded and the leisure time that allowed for Hemingway and company to devote most of their time to writing. Even with the weight of the dollar against the franc many artists worked “day jobs” and struggled to get by in Paris. Langston Hughes and Bricktop arrived in Paris with just a few dollars in their pockets and from the day of their arrival both were devoted to forging a means to survive in the city. As Hughes sought out jobs washing dishes or opening doors for high-end cliental in cafes, Bricktop set her Harlem nightclub experience to forging successful entrepreneurial ventures in entertainment.

Even though Hemingway and Hughes both experienced publication and minor fame before their arrival in Paris Hemingway possessed a social position in the dominant white society of the United States, which allowed him greater financial flexibility. Hughes was widely known by Black intellectuals and writers in the United States and was published in Black-owned and funded newspapers. Hemingway was only employed by a local Midwestern newspaper and not a major publication, but he had access to investments and funding through those connections as well as the financial status of his wife’s family.

More important than the affordability of Paris was the freedom granted to American artists by the distance between them and their home country. James Baldwin and Richard Wright thrived in France. From Another Country Baldwin openly explored his sexuality and analyzed his time in the Civil Rights movement in the United States and gained perspective on the lives of Black people around the world. James Emanuel’s poem “A Negro Author” is a defiant statement of his political view and desire to celebrate Blackness at a time when the word Black was very controversial in the United States. “I wrote something black today. / I wonder what Negroes will say / about it” (Emanuel 142). At the core of the poem is the line “I’d rather be devoutly me” (142) where Emanuel reveals a deep desire of so many artists whether in Paris or the United States – the right to express new ideas and dissent no matter how unpopular.

Some artists, like Emanuel or Baldwin, always consciously interacted with political movements, as they shared the desire to be a part of and cultivate a fresh artistic community like their forerunners in the Lost Generation. Bob Dylan ends his song with “I wish in vain, / That we could sit simply in that room again. / Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat, / I’d give it all gladly if our lives could be like that.” After Hemingway’s falling out with Stein or his open disgust with Fitzgerald’s alcoholism, when Joyce sold Ulysses to a larger publisher and did not give a penny to Beach, or as Baldwin realized that he could not escape the laughter of oppressors, the ideal of Paris and the moments captured in the cafes, homes, and salons kept them there and have lured hundreds of more artists decades after their deaths.

*"Bob Dylan's Dream" by Bob Dylan

Langston Hughes’s The Big Sea and Edith Wharton’s “The New Frenchwoman”

2005-07-16T10:23:00.000-04:00

At the beginning of the 20th century many American artists left the United States and traveled to Paris in search of more artistic, intellectual, and personal freedom. “There were those who were in revolt against the puritan conscience and the denial of artistic freedom in America; the lack of public respect for creative art and artists,” said Claude McKay (photo) in A Long Way From Home (243). McKay’s description is true for the broad array of artists who came from a variety of racial, economic, and gender backgrounds in the U.S. including writers Langston Hughes and Edith Wharton. As Hughes was a struggling, Black poet in New York City’s Harlem he was also determined to get out of the U.S. and see as much of the world as possible in the hopes of enhancing his craft to reflect his understanding of humanity. Wharton was an established novelist and well-known member of the intelligencia at the time of her move to Paris, which signified her boldest act in distancing herself from the rigid, upper class New York City background that demanded female complacency.

Hughes and Wharton sought out and recognized the escape Paris offered them from the Puritanical values of the United States. As a young Black man Hughes quickly grew restless under the constraints imposed on him from the dominant white society in the U.S. Hughes longed to see Africa so he set out working his way toward the continent on ships. After traveling down the West Coast of Africa, and upon hearing the recommendations of many other young Black men, Hughes was determined to get to Paris. As was his financial situation most of his young life, Hughes arrived in Paris broke and with no contacts in the city. In his autobiography, The Big Sea, Hughes is clear about his dire situation once reaching Gare du Nord in Paris, “I had no idea where I would sleep that night, or where to go about finding a cheap hotel. So I began to look around for someone I could talk to. To tell the truth, I began to look for a colored person on the streets of Paris,” (Hughes 145). Hughes went in search of the Black entertainers, artists, and musicians that populated the vibrant nightclub scene in Paris. Many of them, like him, had traveled from the U.S. to Paris with hopes to discard the danger and discrimination of being Black in the U.S. and to pursue groundbreaking careers not open to them in their home country.

A few years before Hughes, Wharton moved permanently to Paris after leaving a philandering husband and the aristocratic East Coast society she had been born into. Wharton saw a more independent social situation available for women in Paris. “It is simply that, like the men of her race, the Frenchwoman is grown up,” Wharton writes (177). Wharton celebrates the lifestyles French women possess in contrast to their American counterparts: economic responsibility and protection under the law, shared leisure time with the family, and socialization with her peers, both men and women. A prominent author and intellectual at the time she moved to France, Wharton delighted in the “French ‘Salon,’ the best school of talk and ideas that the modern world has known ... based on the belief that the most stimulating conversation in the world is that between intelligent men and women” (Wharton 183). The philosophy behind the French Salon is exactly what Wharton needed to cultivate her creative career. The free and “frank” discourse between men and women of her social standing proved relief for Wharton, who was weary of the gender-dividing social norms so prevalent in the U.S. In her novels, as well as her non-fiction Wharton consistently illustrates the ways upper-class American social values tormented people, especially how the potential of women was stifled and how women intellectually and emotionally suffered in such an environment.

Wharton lived at a much higher social position than Hughes because she came from a wealthy family, and because she was white. “The New Frenchwoman” reflects Wharton’s social class through her discussion of more upper-class intellectual pursuits such as Salons, and the way she tackles the lives of the slightly less well off French business-class.
According to Wharton the French business-class are men who work with their minds and receive additional support in their work from their family. While this is no doubt true of the business-class Wharton is familiar with, the working-class French family at the beginning of the twentieth century was drastically different. The man in such a family would be devoted to performing labor-intensive tasks for pay, and his wife and children would not have the luxury to exist on his income alone. Women and older children often took on jobs and intense household responsibilities. No one in the working-class family was afforded the leisure of time Wharton discusses. The fault of her argument is that she does not address the lives of poor French women.

Because Hughes was not fully supported by his writing at the time he lived in Paris, his autobiography more deeply reflects the lifestyles of the working people in Paris. In need of work to pay his way into a city full of creative energy Hughes dove into life with many other young, struggling artists. He found a home with a Russian dancer, and eventually secured a job for himself as a doorman at a club on rue Fontaine. Unaccustomed to the comforts Wharton experienced in her life, Hughes was not hungry for social standing so much as he was interested in constantly finding his inspiration in new people and adventure. The Big Sea includes a chapter on Bricktop’s arrival in Paris to work at the Grand Duc where Hughes was employed. Before she was the celebrated club-owner Bricktop was a young woman from Harlem who landed in Paris to face a club with a low reputation and no cliental. Although Bricktop traveled to Paris with the luxury of having secure employment at the club, she arrived in the city with a similar mindset to that of Hughes – full of curiosity and a desire to live beyond the potential allowed her in the U.S. Bricktop would go from being a relatively unknown performer in Harlem to an internationally well-known personality in Paris.

Hughes and Wharton found refuge from the puritanical American values that restricted both their lives and art when moved to Paris. Hughes as longing for adventure to inspire his understanding of all kinds of people around the world, as well as rejecting the confines he was subjected to as a young Black man in the U.S. Being white and from a wealthy family was not enough allow Wharton to launch her intellectual and creative pursuits in the U.S. unobstructed by oppressive social values targeted at women. McKay details the differences of Black expatriates in Paris from the white artists who also lived there, but together they were in search of a life that “was riper, culture mellower, and artistic things of higher worth than in America” (243).

A Rare Find in Paris

2005-07-16T06:20:00.000-04:00

Help From My Friends

2005-07-12T16:22:00.000-04:00

You all emailed me such sweet and wonderful comments and advice I though I would post some on the blog.

"Bonjour cher Araby,These are routine suggestions: visit public places where you couldlisten in on conversational speech unobtrusively - le Musée du Louvreou le Musée d'Orsay - or sit in a crowded brasserie and eavesdrop, ortake in a few films."

"That's sweet you are in Paris. That's funny that youkeep bustin' out in Spanish because I can reallyimagine myself doing the same thing. Enjoy theamnoninty that comes with being in a foreign countryand simply enjoy the humurous situation that willoccur because you sound like an idiot."

"Congrats on the Paris thing. I’ll hit you up with the obvious. Check the Tour. It’s rollin into your town on July 24. If you’re still there, you should be there. As an avid cyclist, I’m following it daily on tele. But you can see the, mostly ceremonial but still exciting, finish in Paris. Let me know if you brave the crowds so I can live vicariously through you."

"Have a Pernod on me in one of those cafes, araby."

"Yeah if you can't tell I don't know any French. But, I hope you enjoy it anyway..... Miss you lots..... By the way my favorite line in your entire piece is..... (the drum roll please) "Clearly this is not a hot party." That is sooooo James Dean- I'm bad just like you Momma."

"if you can't say some particular thing in french, then say something slightly different even if it's not the perfect meaning you want (rather than try to throw in english or spanish words or some other method).but if you are thinking in french, you will not think of anything which you can't say in french. your thoughts will be simpler, it's true. but it's better than talking gibberish. or making your conversation partner wait 2 minutes for every response to their saying. and of course you will improve with time & practise."

"I was definitely spoiled when I went to France, specifically Paris, as I had a pen pal, and I was also twelve, I think. My pen pal Alex was kind enough to house me for a week and take me around town and show me things around town, the obvious sites such as the Eiffel tower, the place de la Bastille, l’Arc de Triomphe, and the new arch they were making (this was years ago so it should be completely done,) and the Pompidu Arts Centre (SO MANY GODDAMNED MIMES… they were sweet to watch though.)"

Araby in Monet's Garden

2005-07-10T16:24:00.000-04:00

I spent the weekend outside of Paris at Versailles and in Giverny, the home of French Impressionist painter Claude Monet. Rather than depress you with my tales of boredom at Versailles (that's me to the left sitting on steps of Versailles) I’ll give you some thoughts on Monet and his gardens and respond to some thoughtful people in the comments section (so check these as well).

Going to Monet’s garden was a really big deal for me. When I was a little girl my Mother read to me from Linnea in Monet’s Garden by Cristina Bjork and Lena Anderson. I wanted to be Linnea – be in France, be with Monet, and wear that cute black and white outfit she sports. I never imagined I would really arrive in Monet’s famous garden in the tiny town of Giverny, France (population: 550).

I spent some time in the gardens without my glasses on. All of the orange, pinks, greens, and purples smooshed together and created a softer, less stressful environment than the one I have been in for the last week. Monet gradually lost his eyesight in the 30 years he lived in Giverny and of course this drastically altered the way he saw the flowers and water lilies his paintings made so well known. I had always thought of Monet loosing his sight as only awful, but being in his garden didn’t make his blindness seem only tragic. It must have given him a whole new vision of his inspiration, and he didn’t stop painting his series on the water lilies and bridges in the water garden until his death.

After a week of extremely well-manicured gardens all over Paris and at Versailles my friends couldn’t get me out of the overgrown green of Monet’s Japanese-style water garden. Today was the first day when I didn’t feel suddenly tired and overwhelmed by being surrounded by a new culture and language.

Thanks Mom, and Thanks Monet.

see more of my photos from Monet's gardens here

Peep My Photos Here

2005-07-08T15:39:00.000-04:00

2005-07-08T13:35:00.000-04:00

"Damn, This is a Well Lit Party"

2005-07-08T05:29:00.000-04:00

Travel writer Jan Morris wrote: “Black people walk about Paris with such elegance, such panache of cape and flaunt of fur that they might be living models of negritude. The Lebanese, the Vietnamese and the North Africans ... truly do appear to have been gracefully assimilated,” (1989).

I’ve been wrestling with this one. Morris’s statement does not sit well with me. There is this assumption that being Black in France is easier than the United States. Comparing the history and lives of Black people in the U.S. to the lives of Black people in France is not a quantitative study. Black people, Lebanese, North Africans, and Vietnamese are oppressed minorities in France.

One of my first nights in Paris I went to a party of mostly Caribbean and African students. First of all, I race down the steps because I’m so excited to be at a “house” party and I am immediately disappointed because the lights are on full blast (hence the title of this piece), the music is low, and there is not a lot of dancing. Clearly this is not a hot party.

But I’ve brought a couple beers to drink and I’m determined to make it work for the time being. Right away the party gets better because we meet a couple guys who speak some Spanish and English and they are from Haiti and all about Brooklyn because that is where they want to move.

Meanwhile I notice this group of white female students looking increasingly uncomfortable in another party of the room. As I am making the rounds trying to socialize in my broken French I approached them and asked what was up. They told me how shady the party was, how dangerous it was for us to be there. I kind of just stared at them and it took my mind a full minute to comprehend the situation. At first I was thinking this party is so tame and polite, how could it be shady? I was wishing someone would turn up the music and turn out the bright neon lights but it wasn’t going to happen. And then I wondered who is this us that this party is dangerous for?

Then it hit me like a light-bulb going off in my mind. I had a serious “aha!” moment. The girls were scared to be at a party that was 80% Black men. I quickly lost all patience for the situation and told them to calm down and got away from them, confident I wasn’t going to make any new friends in that circle.

To paint a clearer picture of the overall situation – some students have consistently proven to be very culturally inexperienced and at first I (and other students) were patient, but it has become really frustrating. The “insensitive” comments have turned to occasional slurs as a few white people in our student residence have gotten more comfortable with each other and feel like they can say anything.

All this brings back the Jan Morris piece. Assimilation is not the situation in France, and last time I checked assimilation was not cool. I can’t wait to pick up the James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright.

*ps – on a lighter note, the language barrier is hard to break .. but mention the writers or artists of a country (Jacques Roumain and Edwidge Danticat for Haiti, MC Solaar for Senegal/France and all the communication misunderstandings melt away)

2005-07-05T16:59:00.000-04:00

Belleville Park, Paris

On My Way to Paris

2005-06-30T02:04:00.000-04:00

I’m going to Paris tomorrow to study American writers who traveled and lived in Paris. As usual I left my first assignment for class until the last minute: a journal entry on my expectations of the trip.

Most of the authors on my reading list lived in Paris during the 1920’s or 1950’s – at the height of the expatriate experience when many Americans went abroad seeking intellectual, artistic, and personal freedoms. I don’t harbor illusions that the same scene exists in Paris today.

The uniqueness the 1920’s depression-era Paris is long gone. In its place is a more global city, with ties to major US cities, and London to make “almost one city,” as described by writer Mike Ladd. The people occupying Paris and London also live in “the Lower East Side” and “Williamsburg” (both neighborhoods in New York City) and they are of the “hip class” who have the luxury and leisure to travel. But the hip class is never the only inhabitants of a city. “There’s this immense global working class that, if they’re not traveling, they have enough family members in different cities that there is still a profound culture exchange going on – which connects those cities. Not eve cultural exchange: familial exchange. If you came from Lagos, your family’s in Lagos. You moved to London, part of your family’s in London too, you’ve got a brother in Paris and more of your family’s in New York.”

I’ve been thinking about the people have lived or are currently living in Paris a lot – not just the writers or the major historical periods I’ll be studying. When I travel to a new place I am constantly seeking out the opinions and recommendations of the people that live there. Usually I’m down for anything: a poetry slam at the University of Hawai’i, getting the kids in a Transylvanian village to help me find the key-holder to the local church, sitting on the floor of a shack in Louisiana watching old men play the blues, or exchanging popular greetings and pounds with a room full of students from China, Germany, and Spain.

I am constantly surprised. I’ll risk sounding super-naive but when I read about the rising popularity of women novelists in Iran* I am always surprised that something that I don’t notice so much in my own environment (in this case the simple idea of women writing books) happens in another part of the world. My surprise never turns to romanticizing the situation but is quickly and all too simply put in check by a resounding duh Araby, why wouldn’t that exist?

My surprise certainly stems from, at least in part, living in the United States, a country that has dominated the global cultural scene my entire life. But for so many people, as in the Lagos example Mike Ladd gives, there is not a uniform national experience that defines them. I’m curious about the reasons so many American writers traveled to and made their homes in France. It is not for the same reasons millions of Arabs have moved to France in the last few decades. But the writers and artists unknown to me living in Paris now and Baldwin, Hemingway, Orwell, and Stein all felt the weight of America in some way.

I don’t think I have expectations, but more of a constantly nagging curiosity. I’m not ready to resolve this, but I’m sure I’ll discover a multitude of answers super quick once I’m on the ground.

*See the previous post "Popular Novels in Iran"
**photo is a still from La Haine, written and directed by Mathieu Kassovitz

Popular Novels in Iran

2005-06-29T14:15:00.000-04:00

To continue with my slight focus on Iranian literature I'd like to call bring attention to "Women Writing Novels Emerge as Stars in Iran" by Nazila Fathi in today's New York Times. Fathi points out that while women in Iran often deal with "two kinds of censors: the government and their families" they are also very "adept at maneuvering around the forbidden zones drawn by government and society."

The actual subway car in the photo looks so much like the NYC subway. Unfortunately, the works of Fataneh Haj Seyed Javadi, Fariba Vafi, and Zoya Pirzad being enjoyed by the women (it is a women only car) in Tehran are not available in English translation for the commuters on American subways.

Photo by Newsha Tavakolian

Truly Outrageous

2005-06-15T11:46:00.000-04:00

I wanted to bring you something on a fun, light, poppy note before I dive into a piece on The Kite Runner or The Book of Salt.

The Onion is one of the most creative publications around. And the A.V. Club always has awesome pieces with just the artists I want to hear from at the moment, like when they interviewed Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney a couple weeks ago.

I know the real reason I love The Onion is because they do pieces that celebrate nerdiness. Check out Noel Murray's Battle of the Cartoon Bands in the A.V. Club this week.

The only battle where I disagree with Noel's predicted outcome is The Misfits vs. The California Raisins. The Raisins are way cooler than The Misfits, but those girls could mop the floor with those chilled out old men. My friend pointed out that while The Misfits may have written their own tunes, they stole their name from a real-life band, a move that forfits any attempts at future creativity - therefore, The Raisins take the title. Celebrate by listening to some bitchin' Misfits tunes here.

A few highlights:

Jem & The Holograms (Jem & The Holograms, 1985) vs. Barbie & The Rockers (Barbie & The Rockers: Out Of This World, 1987)
When Hasbro had an unexpected hit with its Jem dolls and syndicated TV series, Mattel fired back with a rock-themed TV special starring its perennial bestseller, Barbie, and launched an attendant line of clothes and accessories. Plainly, there's no contest here. Jem & The Holograms represented a sincere attempt at cross-market synergy and tween-focused marketing. Barbie & The Rockers were just a cheap cash-in. (Besides, they also went into space.)
Winner: Jem & The Holograms

The Be Sharps (The Simpsons, 1993) vs. The Flintstone Canaries (The Flintstones, 1964)
What does it mean that the two longest-running prime-time animated series both featured episodes where their lead characters joined barbershop quartets? Probably just that The Simpsons' writers watched a lot of Flintstones growing up. Their episode is genuinely funny though, and even The Be Sharps' big hit—"Baby On Board"—is damnably catchy. Still... Seth McFarlane? Mike Judge? Before you get any ideas, remember Barney Gumble's pronouncement "Barbershop is dead."
Winner: The Be Sharps

The Misfits (Jem & The Holograms, 1985) vs. The California Raisins (TV commercial, 1986)
This face-off seems like a mismatch, because The Misfits write their own music and have a passel of dirty tricks at their disposal, while The California Raisins are a bunch of wrinkled old guys doing Motown covers. Also, the former band was cel-animated, and the latter is made out of clay, so they don't really exist in the same cartoon universe. But oh, if they did! How much of The Misfits' sabotaging nonsense would the Raisins and their super-cool lead singer—voiced by rock and soul veteran Buddy Miles—put up with? Nary a whit.
Winner: The California Raisins

MC Skat Kat ("Opposites Attract" video, 1989) vs. MC Pee Pants (Aqua Teen Hunger Force, 2002)
Why would Corey Clark assume that Paula Abdul could help his career, when she couldn't even give a boost to her rapping animated duet partner MC Skat Kat? It took two years for the freestylin' feline to capitalize on MTV fame and record a full-length album—which, sadly, didn't include a song called "Paulatics." And MC Pee Pants? The demonic spider who disguised himself as an 11-year-old rapper in order to get kids to eat more candy via his hit song "I Want Candy?" No record in stores yet. That automatically makes him (it?) the winner.
Winner: MC Pee Pants

2005-06-06T16:43:00.000-04:00

DJ Mahshar

Sing Loud DJ Mahshar

2005-06-06T16:38:00.000-04:00

Some of you may have heard about Matisyahu, a Hasidic Reggae artist based in Brooklyn. For a number of reasons I am really intrigued by his work so I've been looking at lots of interviews and articles about him.

I came across an interview Leonard Lopate of WNYC NPR did with Matisyahu. When asked about women Hasidic performers Matisyahu told Lopate he does not perform with female singers because his religion does not allow men to hear women singing.

Shirin Neshat’s work came to mind when I heard Lopate’s interview with Matisyahu. Neshat is an Iranian visual artist who often works with film, presenting two works side by side or on opposing walls as she does with Turbulent. On one wall is a film of a male Iranian singer performing to a crowd of men. Across from that is a film of famed Iranian performance artist Sussan Deyhim singing to an empty auditorium.

Isn’t that just like the lives of women? Played out before an empty auditorium? The accomplishments women make both big and small are not as magnified or celebrated in society, while at the same time the avalanche of violence and abuse perpetrated against women barely gets a serious examination on the world stage.

Leonard Lopate had the weakest response ever to Matisyahu’s non-explanation of why he cannot listen to/perform with female vocalists. Lopate’s response was the equivalent of a grunt and shrug. Quickly moving on to the next topic, Lopate didn’t even ask Matisyahu if he felt like he was missing out on half the world population’s ability to creatively communicate. Because by not listening to women’s voices he is not only missing out, but by following a religious practice that bans female song from the stage Matisyahu is an active participant in silencing women’s voices.

While my interest in Matisyahu quickly hit rock bottom I’m thrilled I heard the voice of DJ Mahshar. Born in Tehran, she anonymously rose to popularity when mp3’s of her singing circulated the blogs and websites of Iranian youth around the world. Because her songs were not identified at first, tons of rumors accompanied them, including one that she was in prison awaiting execution. Not an unrealistic rumor considering the harsh punishments religious fundamentalists want to put down against women who step out of line … even for singing.

DJ Mahshar’s father said this to the media critics in Iran who have gone so far to demand she be captured: “She is the voice of Iran’s modern culture, and that is no crime.”

No crime at all.

***I have only been able to find blogs and websites in Farsi with info about DJ Mahshar. Click here and scroll down to find her photo and play some of her songs (I know not all of the links on the site work). I would appreciate the help from anyone who could translate these websites.

Could Of Mice and Men or Catcher in the Rye Really Be Next?

2005-06-02T10:34:00.000-04:00

From Bruce Weber's article "A Town's Struggle in the Culture Wars" from The New York Times June 2, 2005:

"I am in the 11th grade," Miss Hunsicker said. "I had to read this junk."

Less than an hour later, by a unanimous vote of the board (two of its nine members were absent) "The Buffalo Tree" was banned, officially excised from the Muhlenberg High School curriculum. By 8:30 the next morning all classroom copies of the book had been collected and stored in a vault in the principal's office. Thus began a still unresolved battle here over the fate of "The Buffalo Tree," a young adult novel by Adam Rapp that was published eight years ago by HarperCollins and has been on the 11th-grade reading list at Muhlenberg High since 2000. Pitting teachers, students and others who say the context of the novel's language makes it appropriate for the classroom against those parents and board members who say context be damned, it is a dispute illustrative of the so-called culture war, which, in spite of its national implications, is fought in almost exclusively local skirmishes. The board was set to meet the evening of June 1 to reconsider its decision.

"We're absolutely middle-American," said Joseph Yarworth, the schools' superintendent for the last nine years. "And we're having an argument over our values."

According to the American Library Association, which asks school districts and libraries to report efforts to ban books - that is, have them removed from shelves or reading lists - they are on the rise again: 547 books were challenged last year, up from 458 in 2003. These aren't record numbers. In the 1990's the appearance of the Harry Potter books, with their themes of witchcraft and wizardry, caused a raft of objections from evangelical Christians.

Judith Krug, director of the library association's office for intellectual freedom, attributed the most recent spike to the empowerment of conservatives in general and to the re-election of President Bush in particular. The same thing happened 25 years ago, she said. "In 1980, we were dealing with an average of 300 or so challenges a year, and then Reagan was elected," she said. "And challenges went to 900 or 1,000 a year."

2005-05-30T13:54:00.000-04:00

M.I.A.

she'll scream for the nation

2005-05-30T13:45:00.000-04:00

Where do people in the US look to get away for a vacation? Bali, Brazil, Jamaica, Thailand. Nestled beside the beauty that attracts travelers to these and similar regions is intense poverty and suffering.

From Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place:

“That the native does not like the tourist is not hard to explain. For the native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere ... Every native would like to find a way out, every native would like a rest, every native would like a tour. But some natives – most natives in the world – cannot go anywhere. They are too poor. They are too poor to go anywhere. They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go”

Millions of people around the world are too poor to survive in the nations they are born in. Where do the struggling people Kincaid describes look for their escape?

Many look to the United States.

While looking to the US with great hope, many people living in impoverished countries simultaneously recognize the parasitic grip the US holds over them and their homeland. The slight step above the living conditions in their home country that entices people to immigrate to the US is coercive. In the song “Amazon” M.I.A. raps about a kidnapping. Despite resisting and looking backwards to home, the speaker cannot return. “Cutting up the coupon/Saving for a telephone/Can I call home/Please can I go home.”

M.I.A. begins the next stanza by illustrating a setting that could be the rainforest in any of the countries tourists flock to each year. “Painted nails, sunsets on horizons/Palm tree silhouette smells amazing.” Before the listener can fully imagine this picturesque scene, M.I.A. shatters the idealized portrait. Rather than remind the listener of a tourist advertisement, the next line conjures images of contra-type militia violence. “Blindfolds under home made lanterns/Somewhere in the amazon/They’re holding me ransom.”

While the speaker is being held for ransom s/he begins to look more favorably upon the captor. “Bodies started merging/And the lines got grey/Now I’m looking at him thinking/Maybe he’s ok.” Stockholm Syndrome is the term commonly used to describe how a victim will bond with their abuser as a means to endure the violence being inflicted on them.

What a horrific means for someone to be forced to resort to in order to carve out survival.

Check Out Camilo Mejia's "Supporting Dissent is Not Enough"

2005-05-25T12:06:00.000-04:00

An Amazing Writer ...

A few paragraphs from "Supporting Dissent is Not Enough" by Camilo Mejia available at ZMag

America is going through a historical transformation, from disguised to almost openly admitted (and defended) imperialism. In a time when peaceful protesters are being put in cages, or free speech zones, in a time when international law is being ignored or circumvented in order to conduct and justify torture, in a time when schools are being forced to make their students' files available to the war machine, in a time when the fear and pain of the nation are being used to fabricate support for a criminal war of imperial domination, it becomes imperative that members of the armed forces act upon their principles.

An empire cannot survive without an imperial military, a military whose members do not question the orders of their superiors, a military whose members who choose to refuse, do so quietly to save their skins, a military whose members rather die and kill against their moral judgments than question the authority of their command.

It is too easy to just tell service men and women to follow their conscience, whatever that means; this advice puts the burden back on their shoulders and brings no sacrifice to the adviser. But peace does not come easily, so I tell all members of the military that whenever faced with an order, and everything in their mind and soul, and each and every cell in their bodies screams at them to refuse and resist, then by God do so. Jail will mean nothing when 'breaking the law' became their duty to humanity.

Read Camilo's full article here

2005-05-23T10:18:00.000-04:00

Carolin Emcke

2005-05-23T10:17:00.000-04:00

Philip Gourevitch, author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda

2005-05-23T10:16:00.000-04:00

Salman Rushdie at the PEN Festival of International Literature

Re-Mix

2005-05-23T09:59:00.000-04:00

New and improved versions of some of my coverage of the PEN Festival of International Literature appears in this week's Revolution newspaper.

Here is a snippet:

Gourevitch asked the audience to think about the words used to describe genocide: "unimaginable, unspeakable, and unthinkable." These are "the words by which the press gives you permission to forget about and ignore things." Part of the writer's challenge in documenting catastrophe is to collect the pieces of personal narratives from the people struggling to regain their language. The reporter assembles the individuals' stories as well as reaches between the narratives to discover what people are unable to describe. ...

A theme that was revisited over and over at the Festival was the truth carried in works of fiction, and often the imagination applicable to interpreting nonfiction for a global audience. "Facts can be abused, facts can be distorted, facts can be misunderstood...both fiction and non-fiction will be judged by whether they're truthful," said Gourevitch.

The American Literary Translators Association reports only 13 books have been translated from Arabic since 2001. When I saw the number 13 a cold stone landed in my stomach next to the frozen boulder I choked down while watching the U.S. military rain thousands upon thousands of tons of bombs over Iraq in the last decade and a half.

There is truth coming from writers in Iraq, from writers all over the world. Living in the U.S., we have to fight to discover the narratives and dreams of people writing from other parts of the planet so that their experiences are not simply "unimaginable, unspeakable, and unthinkable" because, said Gourevitch, "What are writers here to do except to imagine, speak, and think?"

For the whole thing click here.

translation

2005-05-17T11:02:00.000-04:00

Only 3% of the works of literature published in the United States each year are translated from another language.

I checked out the titles on my bookshelf, and was immediately disappointed. Besides Algerian writer Anouar Benmalek, Kenzaburo Oe from Japan, and Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez all of my books from the second half of the 20th century were composed in English.

Damn, I thought, what am I missing?

Writer Khaled Hosseini was born in Afghanistan and as a young adult his family moved from Kabul to Paris, and finally to California. The success of his first book, The Kite Runner is attributed to curiosity, word-of-mouth, and the support of local book clubs. These factors combined with Hosseini’s tremendous talent as a writer and the immense beauty of his novel have carried The Kite Runner into over 50 languages and 1.4 million copies printed in the United States.

I wonder who would be reading The Kite Runner if Hosseini’s family had remained in Kabul and he had written the book in Farsi or Pashtun. Major publishing houses are not translating and publishing the latest works by young Afghani novelists. Or Iraqi novelists, or Filipino novelists, or Chilean novelists, or Serbian novelists …

PEN celebrated the debut of “Strange Times, My Dear”: The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature with readings from celebrated Iranian writers. The author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi was present and spent time talking with fans after the program. Reading Lolita is Nafisi’s memoir of teaching books banned by the Islamic government of Iran. The curiosity and joy Nafisi and her young female students share in reading great works of literature jumps through generations and over boarders. A group of NYC women approached Nafisi to tell her that their book club read Reading Lolita and the experience inspired them to seek out more titles from authors writing outside of the US. Delighted by their statement Nafisi declared the women should organize their book club and others to stage a sit-in at the public libraries demanding more translated and international titles.

The American Literary Translators Association reports only thirteen books have been translated from Arabic since 2001. When I saw the number thirteen a cold stone landed in my stomach next to the frozen boulder I choked down while watching the US military rain thousands upon thousands of tons of bombs over Iraq in the last decade and a half.

Ya Don't Wanna Miss ... !

2005-05-02T15:37:00.000-04:00

I'm working on new stuff, but in the meantime I want to share this with you:

1. Just released as a book by CUNY Feminist Press: Baghdad Burning Girl Blog from Iraq by Riverbend

In August 2003, the world gained access to a remarkable new voice: a blog written by a 25-year-old Iraqi woman living in Baghdad, whose identity remained concealed for her own protection. Calling herself Riverbend, she offered searing eyewitness accounts of the everyday realities on the ground, punctuated by astute analysis on the politics behind these events.

Riverbend recounts stories of life in an occupied city - of neighbors whose homes are raided by U.S. troops, whose relatives disappear into prisons, and whose children are kidnapped by money-hungry militias. The only Iraqi blogger writing from a woman's perspective, she also describes a once-secular city where women are not afraid to leave their homes without head covering and a male escort.

2. PEN Foreign Exchanges: A conversation between Art Spiegelman and Marjane Satrapi moderated by Francoise Moule
Tuesday May 10, 2005
7pm
The New School, 66 West 12th Street, Wollman Hall, Fifth Floor (across court)

Art Spiegelman has brought us In the Shadow of No Towers, Maus, Maus II, Open Me ... I'm a Dog, and RAW

Marjane Satrapi has brought us Persepolis, Persepolis 2, and EMBROIDERIES

Art Editor at The New Yorker, Francoise Moule has brought us Covering the New Yorker and RAW

Marjane Satrapi on Art Spiegelman: “The first time I really met Art Spiegelman, 57, was two years ago in his studio in Manhattan…I wanted to meet him to apologize, to make it clear that, while some compared my book, Persepolis, to his, I would never do so. He told me not to worry. We spent the afternoon smoking cigarettes. The Great Art Spiegelman smoked three times more than I. He’s a better man than even I had expected.”

2005-04-19T14:42:00.000-04:00

protect at all costs

2005-04-19T14:34:00.000-04:00

“I was not sorry when my brother died.”

The first sentence of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions

Just marinate with this sentence for a minute. You can sit with this sentence for a few minutes because the rest of the book does not follow here.

The tone of this sentence is defiant, a little cold, but only because the speaker is protecting something.

The title of the book is taken from Jean Paul Sartre’s introduction to Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, “The condition of the native is a nervous condition.”

Nervous Conditions follows the female protagonist, Tambu from her home in rural Rhodesia to a boarding school organized by her European-educated Uncle. The first sentence of the book illustrates the tragic circumstances under which Tambu is chosen by her family to be the one child to receive a Western education.

Tambu confronts an onslaught of contradictions in her years shuttled between the boarding school in the care of her extended family and her nuclear family struggling to survive in the countryside. Tambu’s mother is devastatingly ill, her cousin Nyasha openly rebels against her father and privately cultivates bulimia.

After reading this book the conversations between Tambu and Nyasha will never leave you. They echo behind the eyes of every child plucked from a shantytown in Mexico to be backpacked across the US border. They are shouted in the midst lessons taught in classrooms in Soweto. And they wind around the fence posts on reservations in the Dakotas and Jigalong.

Tonight Tsitsi Dangarembga is speaking at Africa and The World: The Writer’s Role. Tishman Auditorium, Vanderbilt Hall, Washington Square South, 7pm.

2005-04-18T12:48:00.000-04:00

Would you mess with her?

Please Welcome Natsuo Kirino

2005-04-18T12:37:00.000-04:00

The most intense crime stories instill suspense and fear because the stories are fantastic and shocking as well as grounded in reality and the fears people confront each day. The characters plagued by fear and viciously attacked by perpetrators and monsters in crime fiction and horror movies are often women. Many stories fictionalize the real attacks women experience daily in the form of rape, abuse, and even murder in order to maximize the horror for entertainment.

Takashi Shimizu’s film The Grudge incorporates gruesome and sudden creepy images to jumpstart the adrenaline in viewers. Several deeper plot factors dominate the female viewer’s fear as she watches the film. From the beginning of the film it is clear that the source of the horror is a domestic situation gone horribly wrong. A haunted house is always the product of once tortured occupants. The source of the haunting is confirmed as the most fearful situation imaginable for women: a violent husband attacks his wife and brutally murders her in front of their son before killing the boy and himself. Finally, the fear instilled in women from watching such a film is not only because such violence MIGHT be inflicted on them at some point. The fear is from knowledge instilled in women from an early age that at some point in her life she WILL confront a man as dangerous as the husband in the movie. In a country where one in three women are abused or sexually assaulted by a husband or boyfriend in their lifetimes – the fictional story in The Grudge is brutally true to thousands of women each year.

Confronting the violence inflicted on women in the real world, and writing against the grain of crime fiction is Japanese author Natsuo Kirino. Describing her work, Kirino said, “I take from people’s conscience and write about the times we live in.” The first of her thirteen novels to be translated to English is Out. Out explores the underside of Japan, dispelling the narrow view commonly held of Japan as being a prosperous, homogenous society with low crime and higher than the international average wealth and comforts.

The female protagonist of Out is Masako, a forty-something year old woman married, living in the suburbs of Tokyo, and working the nightshift at a factory preparing boxed lunches. Other married women and Brazilian immigrants surround Masako at the factory. The women do have strong influence over the family finances and are subject to budgeting by their husbands. Kirino’s characters work from midnight to 5 a.m. even thought they are the wives of men with white-collar jobs, in order to earn money for themselves, or earn money to support their children. Yayoi, Masako’s younger friend, works to support herself as her husband’s gambling drains the family’s finances.

When one of the women becomes so enraged that she murders her husband, Masako assists her in chopping up the body and together they dispose of it as “common garbage,” according to Kirino. Masako enlists the assistance of other women in the factory and they collectively form an underworld organization dealing with bad husbands and the disposal of their dead bodies when murder becomes necessary.

Kirino presented Out at the International Noir panel of PEN World Voices. She sat next to a translator throughout the other authors’ presentations, nodding along, asking questions, and smiling as the translator whispered in her ear. When Kirino’s time on the mic came, her translator scooted back and Kirino approached the mic with a pad of paper. She spoke alone, reading from the pages her prepared presentation in English. Kirino glided through details of her life, introducing herself to a New York City audience and she looked to her new audience a couple times for assistance in pronunciation.

A read presentation does not always come across warmly to the audience, but Kirino’s determination to broadcast her own voice in another language brought all the personality necessary to convince the audience that Out is a must read. When detailing both the praise and condemnation Out has received for confronting uncomfortable social topics in Japan, Kirino grinned mischievously out of the side of her mouth a she spoke. “If people felt liberated by my novel then it served its purpose,” she declared, “I write believing in the power of the imagination to change the world.”

Some Thoughts on “Writing and Catastrophe”

2005-04-16T23:59:00.000-04:00

this is in response to a panel discussion at PEN World Voices

The amount of misery and violence in the world is staggering.

Carolin Emcke, writer for Der Spiegel, brought forward that language, words, documentation has the power to expose and eradicate the violence being perpetrated on countless people each day.

The coverage of a disaster or a crime of the highest degree always arrives on the heels of a recent brutal act and retreats to make way for yet another catastrophe. Thoughts of failure occupy Emcke’s mind.

Failure. Demoralization. It is not simply enough to “fight the good fight.” A screaming conscience is readily available in every brain, but transforming outrage and morality into a tangible reality where the current horrors afflicting the planet disappear is another thing.

In the midst of these puzzling questions a person asked the writers if they found it difficult to enjoy pleasurable aspects of life. In response Elena Poniatowska, the author of Massacre in Mexico, beamed and delightedly exclaimed that she had never considered a question like that because before she could the people were out and running in the streets again and she had to join them. Missing a moment of action in the presence of the masses would dampen Poniatowska’s spirits more than she would ever allow their oppression to sink her determination, or theirs.

“I hate the way the masses of people suffer, but I don’t feel sorry for them. They have the potential to remake the world, and we have to struggle like hell with them to get them to see that and to get them to rise to that. We shouldn’t aim for anything less. Why should we think they are capable of anything less?” from Bob Avakian’s The Revolutionary Potential of the Masses and the Responsibility of the Vanguard

A spark in Poniatowska’s eye as she smiled reflected her confidence in the capability of the masses, and her lifetime of work following the lead of the people in the streets is her evidence.

The failure Emcke shared is not one of shame and defeat that her personal work has not stopped an avalanche of disasters, but that the strength of words are not adequate enough insurance to extinguish suffering. Emcke is correct: the truth in written language burns through the suffering writers document around the world and scar failure, but only combined with a material confidence in the capability of the people will failure fade.

Making New Maps

2005-04-16T00:27:00.000-04:00

I told a friend that Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace was so fascinating because I didn’t know anything about pre-revolutionary Russia. My friend replied that when he begins a work of fiction and it mentions an event he doesn’t know about he usually puts down the novel and grabs a history text. I’m all about the history texts, but putting down the novel I don’t recommend.

When I entered my urban public high school in the heart of the Midwest I was finally offered a non-US history class. It was European history. The histories were complemented by a strict literature syllabus of American and European classics. President Wilson’s New Deal was punctuated by The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness shed some light on King Leopold’s bloody conquest of the Congo.

I read three books in high school that snapped my eyes open to the rest of the world: The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, The Stranger by Albert Camus, and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. These books wound into my life and so did a picture of China, Algeria, and India not photographed for National Geographic. The reality in novels pushed me beyond my borders. In the past year I have taken to consulting maps almost daily. I seek out the countries and cities where my books are taking me. Three of four books usually occupy my thoughts all at once, and as I check out the distance between St. Petersburg and Puerto Rico I wonder if Dostoevsky ever read The Arabian Nights, and I know his contemporary Tolstoy did.

I am writing now from New York City, and many of my friends and the readers of this blog are located on the East and West coasts. We live in cities vibrating with hundreds of languages, and thousands of living narratives from every corner of the planet. New York, Washington DC, Oakland, and San Diego are drastically different from Akron, Des Moines, and Lincoln. While I am certain many coastal natives couldn’t find Akron on a map, I am just as certain that New York City public high school students do not typically graduate having learned a comprehensive history of a country other than the US or the nation their family originated in. While my youthful seclusion from the rest of the world seems so foreign to me now, I don’t think that the lack of global history in my primary education is only endemic of the middle part of the United States.

Across the country history departments are dwindling, and history courses are increasingly not a mandatory part of the curriculum at many liberal arts colleges. A student’s knowledge of the past is rapidly found in works of fiction. Where would students be without novels from around the world? V.S. Naipul and Staceyann Chin taught me of the vast South Asian and Chinese Diaspora throughout Africa and the Caribbean. Julia Alvarez guided me through Dominican Republic. The senselessness of World War I is nightmarishly clear in my mind because of Sebastien Japrisot and Erich Maria Remarque.

Tomorrow is the beginning of PEN World Voices: The New York Festival of International Literature. All week libraries, schools, museums, and bars will be hosting discussions, panels, and interviews with dozens of writers from around the world.

I am on the edge of my seat to hear the voices of Fadhil al-Azzawi, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Azar Nafisi, Salman Rushdie, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. At the same time, I feel so honored to be only a few hours away from an introduction to writers whose names I do not recognize, authors whose home-countries I have never read about outside of the newspaper.

In a piece on Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie said that there is “something that literature needs to recognize all the time: Reality is not realistic. This is something we’re all beginning to recognize. Have you noticed how weird things are lately?” (44). Technology has brought people closer than ever but at the same time the imperial stabs the US has inflicted on the rest of the world have driven us further apart. The view of the planet and its people from within the US as taught to us is not realistic.

Grabbing a history book to emphasize a novel is a fantastic idea. Remember though, that while a novel won’t necessarily present a linear timeline of events, a work of fiction will infuse history with the vibrant humanity it is missing. We always hear how desensitized we are to the violence and brutality surrounding and sometimes intimately in our own lives. Falling in love with the characters so affectionately created for us by the writers I have mentioned and more is one anecdote for curing us.

Rushdie, Salman. “Inverted Realism.” PEN America A Journal for Writers and Readers
6 Metamorphoses. Ed. M. Mark. New York: PEN America Center, 2005. 44-45.

2005-04-04T14:46:00.000-04:00

Dorris Bowdon, Jane Darwell, and Henry Fonda in director John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath 1940.

In Steinbeck's Birthplace, a Fight to Keep the Libraries Open

2005-04-04T14:31:00.000-04:00

by Carolyn Marshall
Published April 4, 2005 in The New York Times

SALINAS, Calif., April 3 - The reputation of this farming community, known as the Salad Bowl of the World, has been burnished by giants of American history like the civil rights leader Cesar Chavez, who organized the area's farmworkers, and John Steinbeck, a native son who borrowed images from the landscape and Depression-era residents in writing "The Grapes of Wrath."

The pride, fear and hope Steinbeck described were in evidence this weekend as residents, celebrities and best-selling authors gathered for a 24-hour emergency read-in to try to avert an unwelcome footnote to Salinas's legacy: the impending closing of the city's three public libraries.

Unless the city can raise $500,000 by June 30, the John Steinbeck, Cesar Chavez and El Gabilan Libraries will be shuttered, victims of the city's $9 million budget shortfall. If the branches are closed, Salinas will become the nation's largest city without a public library.

The read-in, organized by groups including Code Pink and the Salinas Action League, began Saturday afternoon and included a pitched-tent sleepover on the lawn of the Chavez library and readings by authors including Anne Lamott and Maxine Hong Kingston.

The actor Hector Elizondo, known for his work in the television drama "Chicago Hope," told supporters on Saturday that public libraries had been instrumental to his personal development and safety as a boy growing up in Harlem. Mr. Elizondo said that closing a library was "like putting a tourniquet around your mind."

"There were three sanctuaries - first was the subway, second the church and third was the library," he said. "It was a place where you could be creatively subversive, and it changed my life because through books, I started to question."

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, author of "The Dirty Girls Social Club," said her Cuban father learned English at the public library in Albuquerque. "We didn't come from money," she said. "Words were our only capital."

Word of the library closings has spread in recent months. The American Library Association sent a delegation to Salinas in February to meet with local and state officials. The mayor helped to organize Rally Salinas, a fund-raising group, and residents formed Save Salinas Libraries to explore a ballot measure. Last week, residents drafted a petition to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger requesting long-term help in saving the libraries, because the $500,000 would only ensure that each library stays open one day a week through 2005.

The poignancy of library closings occurring in Steinbeck's birthplace has elevated the Salinas problem. But according to the American Library Association, branches across the nation have been forced to reduce hours, eliminate staff and thin inventories. Library services have been cut in Lancaster, Pa.; Onondaga County, N.Y.; and Detroit. The library in Bedford, Tex., closed its doors last Wednesday and will remain closed for at least six months.

Maria Roddy, the manager at the Cesar Chavez Library, said the Salinas libraries have been in trouble for the past three years, a tough situation for a community where 16 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. As in many poorer communities, Ms. Roddy said, the library serves as a public commons for children whose parents work.

Sommer Brooke, 11, a sixth grader who spoke at the read-in, questioned how Salinas could close libraries in one breath and ask schools to raise reading test scores in the next.

"It is like feeding someone but giving them no food," she said, "teaching children to read but cutting off their access."

City officials said the closings were forced in part by the defeat of several tax measures on the ballot in November. But some conceded that two measures failed because they did not specifically discuss how the libraries would have been affected.

Sergio Sanchez, a city councilman who voted to keep the libraries open, said that even if the state decides to help Salinas, the community must remain involved.

"We as citizens have to step up," he said. "There is no one else to help us."

2005-04-01T22:06:00.000-05:00

Jean-Michel Basquiat's "Exu". Exu is the Yoruba God for the crossroads. Called Exu, Eshu, Papa Legba in West Africa, the Caribbean, and New Orleans - Exu is often a rabbitt or older man who plays tricks on people to get them through the crossroads in their lives.

"Touch the Flame"

2005-03-31T14:45:00.000-05:00

Bruce Springsteen on Bono: "He is gifted with an operatic voice and a beautiful falsetto rare among strong rock singers. But most important, his is a voice shot through with self doubt. That's what makes that big sound work. It is this element of Bono's talent, along with his beautiful lyric writing, that gives the often-celestial music of U2 its fragility and its realness. It is the questioning, the constant questioning in Bono's voice, where the band stakes its claim to its humanity and declares its commonality with us."

I never really understood how U2 got the label "political band." Maybe it was the album WAR with the songs "Sunday Bloody Sunday" "New Year's Day" and "Surrender" .. I highly reccommend them all.

While I love the fire in these songs, I would never characterize the overall tone in Bono's lyrics as political - he's a romantic. No doubt. Bono is way romantic: he sees that one-big-fairy-tale-gushy-love and he wants everyone to know about it, believe it exists, and experience it. He's not blindsided and completely idealistic about it, he keeps it real singing about the emotions people struggle through and the not-so-nice things they do to each other. "My hands are tied, my body bruised/She got me with nothing to win/And nothing else to lose./And you give yourself away" (With or Without You). The speaker there is completely stripped and he's offering her his vulnerability. Put that next to the preciousness of being in love in such a fucked up world "I wanna feel sunlight on my face ... I wanna take shelter/From the poison rain/Where the streets have no name ... And when I go there/I go there with you" (Where the Streets Have No Name).

The fragility, the realness, the commonality, and Bruce left out the inspiration in U2's music doesn't come from being a band that sings about Bloody Sunday but it comes from being a band that despite living in a world of Bloody Sunday's sings about love. That's where the "heart first" Springsteen describes comes from. In the middle of all the shit in the world, the speakers in U2 songs are muddling through love - it is hard and traumatic, and I feel horrible for them sometimes, and shudder to think of myself in that place.

I admire the determination to love in such a nasty world. Hearing Bono sing "If I could, through myself, set your spirit free/I'd lead your heart away, see you break, break away/Into the light and to the day" (Bad) after a song with the line "bodies strewn across the dead-end street" (Sunday Bloody Sunday) is incredibly uplifting. U2 songs encourage us to seek love out, when so much else seems to push us away from it. A friend of mine told me that revolutionaries have to dig into all the questions of how to run society, address social question, etc, and that revolutionaries also have to learn how to love differently. The kind of love and the liberation it brings that Bono sings about is revolutionary in this world. It's the kind of love that burns people bad sometimes, but only if they touch it.

Did I just expose myself as being secretly romantic under a thick exterior of sarcasm?

I'd like to thank Bruce Springsteen for providing me with the tools to severly procrastinate on my other projects and devote three hours to thinking about U2 and Bono. Where's the Oscar?

"Through the Door With Fists and Hearts First" Bruce Springsteen on U2 (scroll down to find it)
"Ordinary Lives Became Extraordinary and Heroic" Bono on Bruce Springsteen
U2
Bruce Springsteen

The Resistance of Emasculated Men in Patriarchal Societies

2005-03-22T21:11:00.000-05:00

Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, Edwidge Danticat’s “Children of the Sea,” and Jacques Roumain’s Masters of the Dew condemn the emasculation of men in patriarchal societies. Male characters that dare to resist are inspired and supported by female characters, but are punished with death by an unforgiving society, while those who do not resist loose the respect of the women around them, and shrink into a shadow of their oppressors.

In Praisesong for the Widow by Marshall the pressure of patriarchal society inflicts a devastating toll on the marriage of a young Black couple. Jay and Avey Johnson’s relationship is symbiotic. Life with Avey and their children at home is the only place where Jay can be a whole person. Avey is responsible for the home and maintaining a sanctuary for Jay. The balance they create is filled with inherited rituals, cultural celebration, and passion for each other. The very existence of such a space is resistance to the racism Jay faces when he leaves the apartment. When the balance of their home life is disrupted, the outside societal pressure builds until Jay and Avey’s marriage is infected.

Jay is emasculated where he works at a department store. His job carries risks and he must disguise his real self in order to protect his job, his emotions, and his life. Asserting one’s true opinions, identity, intelligence, or much less could result in Jay being fired or killed because he is Black and living in pre-Civil Rights America. The silence and therefore, acquiescence of the state to the oppression Jay faces also emasculates him. When Jay and Avey witness the police beating a man outside their apartment in Brooklyn, Jay cannot help him (Marshall 56). The police are enforcers of the state and as such they are engaged in a particular act of brutality. Jay’s mind is constantly occupied with the possibility of random acts of violence threatened from ordinary people and the threat of violence inflicted on him from the state.

The only place Jay can embrace his humanity is in the home. Avey and his daughters provide him with the comfort and space to reclaim his whole self that he must abandon each day outside their apartment. Jay fills their home with rituals from his patrilineal heritage that celebrate their lives and resist the oppressing dehumanization they face. He reads poems to his daughters on Sunday mornings and plays the records of black artists. The musicians on many of Jay’s records are rebellious and broke boundaries in society and art. The lyrics in many blues songs are often subtly, sometimes overtly subversive and rebellious, bearing witness to and challenging the injustices Jay faced. He inherited many of his records from his father, who no doubt struggled with the same emasculation Jay confronts each day. Avey gives him time alone in front of the record player until “his body ... would look as if it belonged to him again” (Marshall 94). The few moments he has alone with the records each day are vital to Jay reconnecting to his real self after disguising himself for the public world.

Another important piece of Jay’s patrilineal heritage is his mustache. Grooming his mustache is the other time each day Jay has a few moments alone. The mustache serves as part of Jay’s disguise when he leaves the house. “It subtly drew attention away from the intelligence of his gaze and the assertive, even somewhat arrogant arch to his nostrils, thus protecting him” (Marshall 93). The mustache is a source of pride for Jay and a barrier between him and the dangers he confronts.

Avey’s unexpected pregnancy with their third child makes it necessary for Jay to get a second job and he is unable to regularly participate in the rituals that spiritually sustain them. Their fading domestic celebrations combine with Avey being unable to physically leave the apartment causing her to loose a part of her identity. Not having a public life almost forces Avey into hiding and she retreats from reality by creating a mental prison where she tortures herself with nightmares that Jay is having an affair. The two brooding characters confront each other in an argument so vicious that the oppressive poison Jay and Avey strive to avoid each day is brought into their home and they use it against each other. In the climax of their argument Jay makes a move to leave Avey, “he was like an embattled swimmer caught in the eye of two currents moving powerfully in opposite directions,” (Marshall 111). Jay does not leave the apartment, but their home has been infected and the resistance in Jay dies. He shaves off his mustache and in his drive to provide security for his family he adopts a colder business persona exemplified by taking his full first name Jerome. Jerome never relishes for a moment the rituals he and Avey once shared and Avey constantly carries the burden that she allowed their environment to become tainted causing Jay to disappear. Jerome dies a physical death – a heart attack, which can be attributed to years of stress at the hands of an oppressive patriarchal society.

While Marshall’s characters struggle to preserve their humanity against the oppression of society, Danticat presents a family up against the violent oppression of the Tonton Macoute sanctioned by the Haitian state. The father (Papa) of the female narrator in “Children of the Sea” has lost control in the life of his family on every societal level all as a result of political repression. The soldiers enforce the laws of the state through murder, rape, and intimidation that the father cannot protect his family from. Papa’s loss of control in his community becomes brutally apparent when the Tonton Macoute murder their neighbor Madan Roger and later when the family is forced to flee Port-au-Prince for the relative safety and anonymity of the countryside. Finally, the state’s domination infiltrates the emotional life of the characters and disrupts the familial bonds that exist.

The threat from the state is so severe that the penalty for resisting is certain death. Madan Roger is the only character to publicly challenge the Tonton Macoute’s authority and the soldiers immediately murder her. Papa does not exhibit any signs of resistance. While he does bribe the soldiers to spare the life of his daughter the act of bribery is not resistance. Relinquishing his possessions is a plea from the father to save his family. He is acquiescing to the tyrannical terms of the state. With each humiliating decision Papa is forced to make he is further dehumanized. Manman witnesses her tormented husband, “the soldiers can come and do with us what they want. that makes papa feel weak … he gets angry when he feels weak,” (Danticat 13).

Papa’s anger mounts as the danger escalates. When the Tonton Macoute invade Madan Roger’s home in the night the family hides in the latrine behind their house. At the sound of Madan Roger being viciously beaten to death Manman demands the family come out of hiding to aid their neighbor. Manman is empowered by the same rebellious spirit that provoked Madan Roger to carry her murdered son’s head through the streets of Port-au-Prince. She is seized by a moral obligation and rejects the powerlessness and fear brought by the presence of the soldiers and insists that her husband reassert himself. Papa’s violent outburst misdirected at Manman is a result of the accumulation of crippling blows he has taken to his authority. He reasserts his authority not in the form of resistance but by imitating the brutality of the Tonton Macoute. All masculine characteristics have been stripped of Papa: leadership, authority, and respect. Rather than correctly identifying the culprits that stole his identity Papa replicates the state’s bloody enforcement of leadership and authority commanded through fear. He abandons his morality and love for his neighbor, “papa says, oh yes, you can let them kill somebody just because you are afraid. they are the law. it is their right,” (Danticat 17). Allowing his morality to dictate his actions to defend the life of his neighbor, even risking death in doing so, is the only resistance available to the family hiding in the latrine. When Papa takes Manman by the neck to prevent her from going to the aid of Madan Roger he is strangling not only her voice but her resistance as well. In this action he looses the respect of Manman and their daughter.

The daughter correctly identifies Papa’s fear as the reason her lover was forced to escape from Haiti (Danticat 11). The same paralysis that prevented Papa from helping Madan Roger has intimidated the larger population in the face of the political repression. Papa forces her to join him in not challenging the government when he punishes after discovering she has salvaged tapes of commentary from her boyfriend, a political dissident. He attempts to dehumanize his daughter by slapping her and calling her a whore but he cannot quell her spirit. She is the narrator and throughout all of the turmoil she does not stop recording the family’s struggle. For a woman to write is bold and rebellious. In the epilogue to Krik? Krak! Danticat exposes the violent attitude towards women writers, “Writers don’t leave any mark in the world … Called lying whores, then raped and killed, if they are women,” (Danticat 221). The daughter rejects the fascistic terms of the state and the state of fear and emasculation Papa has been forced to live in. Manman embraces the daughter’s resistance as they sit under the banyan tree and she tells her that women must choose between their father and the man they love, granting permission for the daughter to pursue her love and resistance.

Roumain’s Masters of the Dew is true to the theme that men who resist the suffocation of patriarchal society die. However, Roumain’s protagonist Manuel is not killed by the abuse inflicted by society as Jay is, nor does relinquish his humanity to survive as Papa chooses to. Manuel is martyred to provide the community of Fonds Rouge deliverance from their suffering during a sever drought. His efforts to bring water to the community are guided at his request by two female characters: his lover Annaise and his mother Delira. Manuel imparts his knowledge to them and to others in Fonds Rouge so that they are able to usher in the water and with it, a more righteous society.

Manuel is not individually stripped of his masculinity. At the opening of the novel he has just returned from spending years in Cuba where he had been working in the sugar cane fields. It is presumed that Manuel left Haiti of necessity to find work, not necessarily his ideal choice. Similar to many other migrant workers, he could have easily fallen into a desperate situation in Cuba and died or returned to Haiti broken spiritually. Manuel’s resistance is sparked in the collective resistance of the other workers in Cuba as they organize for huelga. “That’s what a strike is: A NO uttered by a thousand voices speaking as one ... the greatest thing in the world is that all men are brothers, each weights the same on the scales of poverty and injustice,” (Roumain 91). This collective resistance maintained and inspired Manuel to participate in the huelga in Cuba, and to bring this revolutionary ideology to his home.

It is clear Manuel is endowed with the responsibility to procure water for Fonds Rouge. Roumain intentionally neglects to inform the reader of a specific reason for Manuel’s return to Haiti. Manuel possesses revolutionary ideology expressed through the light that constantly shines on his head, the source of knowledge and learning. He comes down the path towards his parent’s house and Delira feels that “great light” begin “to shine in her soul” (Roumain 40) from Manuel’s presence. The enlightenment of huelga Manuel has attained in Cuba will be applied in Fonds Rouge after it has been passed on to others in the community. The people must comprehend the ideology before they can develop a solution to bring water to the village.

Manuel first imparts the philosophy of huelga and coumbite (collectivity) to Annaise. Annaise blossoms as Manuel tells her about the huelga. He instructs her to organize the women in Fonds Rouge to put pressure on and convince the men that water must be brought to the town. Manuel is attracted to Annaise’s physical strength and tells her “from the first day I saw that there’s nothing false about you, that everything in you is as clear and clean as a spring, like the light in your eyes,” (Roumain 86). The same light indicating knowledge and leadership that radiates from Manuel is present in Annaise.

Manuel is a celebrated individual as he alone brings the knowledge of huelga to Fonds Rouge and he unilaterally finds the water to undo the community’s suffering. Annaise is relegated to playing a supporting role in organizing coumbite. She is unleashed by the prospect of saving the community and she is active in guiding the people to procure the water, but Annaise is not a fully realized individual who exists equally alongside Manuel. She is secondary to Manuel both in their motivation of the community and in the domestic life they plan together as their relationship becomes romantic. Annaise’s adherent role and adoration of Manuel supports his role as the savior.

Fonds Rouge is a village of emasculated men trapped in the terms set by the capitalist state. Manuel does not reveal the location of the water to the entire community out of fear that it will be appropriated as a commodity, which would not relieve the peoples’ suffering. Manuel’s revolutionary solution and discovery of water destroys an existing plan to profit from the exploitation of water and leads to his murder. Delira instinctively possesses an understanding of Manuel’s plan, and it is Delira and Annaise who readily provide the last deception by disguising Manuel’s murder as an illness. Manuel’s death provides the reconciliation necessary for the coumbite to bring the water absolving Fonds Rouge of the drought and the feud.

Choosing to resist oppression, whether social or violent, in the face of an unyielding patriarchal society is the only option to preserve one’s humanity. All of the male characters in the works of fiction discussed were presented with choices. They were not simple decisions, many might argue that Papa acted out of necessity to preserve the life of his family, but Danticat does not condone Papa’s actions. She mourns the loss of his morality and whole identity and she presents a heroine in his daughter who embodies resistance as the only acceptable way to live in such an extreme violent setting. Marshall’s tragic unraveling of Jay also robs a family of a confident and vibrant patrilineal heritage and leaves in its place a downtrodden provider. While Papa was not resisting at all, Jay was not projecting his resistance outward on the source of his oppression. Roumain consciously threads revolutionary ideology into the novel in Manuel who projects his resistance outward onto all members of society with the intention of shattering the source of injustice so that this world might never create another shell of a person like Papa or Jerome.

Works Cited
Danticat, Edwidge. Krik? Krak! New York: Random House, Inc., 1996.
Marshall, Paule. Praisong for the Widow. New York: Penguin Books USA, Inc., 1983.
Roumain, Jacques. Masters of the Dew. Trans. Langston Hughes and Mercer Cook. Oxford: Heinemann, 1947.

A Student's Response

2005-03-08T14:53:00.000-05:00

Fanon’s criticism of the Third World’s rush to replicate Europe reminded me of a moment in Ngugi’s novel Devil on the Cross. The main character in the novel witnesses a meeting of gangsters in a cave. The gangsters are all African and they are having a brag-fest to determine which is the most fitting to rule their nation that has just been abandoned by Europeans. The gangsters measure their ability to rule based on their ruthlessness, personal wealth (cars and women are important factors), and ability to best exploit the country (in the spirit of the Europeans that have just left). There is urgency to their debate because they are in a hurry to pick up where the colonizers left off so that they can maintain strong exploitative rule on the people. While Fanon didn’t specifically call out any nations, I’m assuming he was assessing the terrain of post-colonial nations emerging in 1961 as he was writing Wretched of the Earth and he was not inspired by all he saw. It was (and is) correct to criticize newly independent nations and at the time it was bold to do so. Ngugi spent years in prison for his outspokenness – he wrote Devil on the Cross on toilet paper from a Kenyan jail cell. Native people in positions of authority picked up right where colonizers left off, and not because they learned this horrible behavior from Europeans, but because in most situations the colonial strangle on that nation was relocated and given a facelift.

Fanon calls for nations to “create the whole man, whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth.” He demands that Third World nations stop striving to compete with Europe – Europe has built an empire on the backs of all of these millions of people around the world. His words echo the attempt made at creating a new society in Haiti after the first wave of revolution under the leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture. In order to sustain the people of Haiti and build a nation that could economically operate amidst the global powers that dominated the region, all people (Black, mixed-race, even white people) worked in the fields in Haiti. This was something new: not the transfer of power Ngugi illustrates, but in Fanon’s spirit of moving away from the standard Europe has set. “No, we do not want to catch up with anyone. What we want to do is to go forward all the time, night and day, in the company of Man, in the company of all men.”

While Fanon doesn’t dig into how Haiti could not sustain such a model because of a multitude of intervention both military and economic from Europe and the United States, he does embrace the spirit of everyone working together in the field. Fanon insists the humanity of Europeans is at stake as well. This is all well and true: the future of everyone on the planet is intertwined. His call for imagination and invention to be unleashed on how to move forward is inviting and I really want it to be inclusive, but this short chapter does not address how moving forward would include the imaginations and inventions of people who are not close the intelligentsia caliber of Fanon. L’Ouverture possessed political ideology and military training and strategy not readily attainable to the thousands of slaves in the army he led. While Fanon does not illustrate his vision of how this would new society would be created and sustained, I agree with his grievances on the current operating model.

Chapter Six to Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth

"You Do Not Betray Them"

2005-02-24T13:04:00.000-05:00

Two stereotypes of lawyers are everywhere. The first stereotype is of the lawyer who is a greedy bloodsucking beast with higher intelligence. Wearing a slick suit they work late into the night with a multitude of assistants and resources. The late hours and lack of passion and interests in other areas comes easy to this lawyer because s/he is driven to win and make that money. This lawyer is the subject of many jokes and is featured on the nightly news winning class-action suits against telephone companies. The second stereotype is of the lawyer who works with ordinary people all day but lacks respect for most of them. S/he can’t afford a fancy suit because the money in public defense isn’t that good and their interests often lie anywhere but in defending their clients. This lawyer is all over the country. One can often spot her/him behind their current stack of case-files struggling to remember the names of any of their clients let alone when they will be in court.

Given these two stereotypes of “typical” lawyers and considering how lawyers and others in intensely academic professions often operate in isolation from the rest of us the words of attorney Lynne Stewart stunned me.

On being a lawyer Stewart said, “I have one set of rules governing me, and those are the rules of ethics … You represent people, you represent your beliefs, you do your absolute best at what you think is the best for them. You do not betray them.”

“You do not betray them.”

This is a country where millions of people are betrayed at the hands of law enforcement officers, where people are betrayed in courtrooms, where people spend years locked in prisons and detention centers. My own generation has taken a serious hit from this betrayal. If you grew up in the 1980’s think back the transition years of middle school and into high school. How many people started sixth grade with you and didn’t make it to freshman year? When I look into those years I remember names and faces of a whole lot of young Black men that were locked up. Dante was taken away by the police after a fight in science class. The security guards called the police after Jeremy tried to get out a window during a “random” search in class. Each September people would recount stories about how this person got busted at a party, so and so’s brother was dealing and the whole family got broke up over the summer.

“Do not betray them” was not in the vocabulary of any of the teachers or administrators that pushed our friends out of classrooms and into the eager grip of the police, child/family services, and juvenile detention. I did have one outstanding teacher who would announce at the beginning of class that the police were in the school and he would open a drawer and offer his protection in storing anything that might “get us in trouble.” He did it confidentially, he didn’t look at what we put in the drawer, or ask any questions. This teacher’s actions partially exemplify “do not betray them.”

Lynne Stewart is a distinguished attorney who has constantly represented clients that many would categorize as “unpopular.” Her clients included members of the Black Liberation Army and men accused of shooting at or killing police officers. Another lawyer at the Day of Outrage in support of Stewart reported that Stewart always took the hard cases. But Stewart didn’t choose her cases because they were a unique challenge or they would define and distinguish her career. Aimara Lin from the Not In Our Name project described many attorneys as people who love the law but that Stewart is a lawyer because she loves the people. In an individual way Stewart’s measured, professional defense of Larry Davis and the many others like him she represented was the only ounce of non-betrayal they were going to get.

Thinking outside the individual act: how my teacher looked out for his students, how Stewart offered her clients a fighting chance at some justice – there is something larger at work here. “Do not betray them” demands that we struggle to ensure that all human beings live to their fullest potential. And it is deeper than simply helping individuals carve out a place for themselves to comfortably survive in society. Stewart’s morals for working with her clients illustrate how she knows that they are capable of and that they have already accomplished great things in their lives. “Do not betray them” looks forward to a point in history where every person is actively pulling society forward, and the people and the state encourage that in each other rather than stomp people out in their youth.

What happens to Black men whose hopes are snuffed out in their youth? “A Wall of Fire Rising” is a short story by Edwidge Danticat. Guy and Lili live in a shantytown in Haiti with their young son Little Guy. They live in the “shadow of that sugar mill” (Danticat, 66) where Guy is lucky if he can get work cleaning the latrines every few months.

As Guy relates his humiliation at only being able to find work cleaning toilets, Little Guy eagerly rehearses lines for the lead in his school play. Little Guy is honored to play the part of Boukman – the leader of the slave rebellion against the French colonizers in 1791. Boukman was killed not long after the rebellion began and his head was displayed in Le Cap. Playing the role of Boukman unleashes a proud and rebellious spirit in Little Guy.

The excitement instilled from a legacy of rebellion is quickly manifesting in Guy. It is transforming from Little Guy’s youthful dreams for what the future to a calm adult eagerness to finish this life and fly away home (see “The People Could Fly”). Guys hopes are unrealistic: he wants to steal the hot air balloon that belongs to the son of the sugar mill owner and fly away to a new land. Guy is afraid of the impact his faltering presence will have on his hopeful son, “You know that question I asked you before,” Guy says to Lili, “how a man is remembered after he’s gone? I know the answer now. I know because I remember my father, who was a very poor struggling man all his life. I remember him as a man that I would never want to be” (Danticat, 75).

Can you guess what happens to Guy? I won’t tell you because you have to read the story! I was tripping over Stewart saying “you do not betray them” and “A Wall of Fire Rising” took it to another level. More than simply defending people because it is their “right as an American”, Stewart clearly views her clients not only as potential contributors to every aspect of society (and not in a condescending “they can be reformed” way) but as whole human beings that contribute to our world now. She would see my former classmates not as criminals or potential criminals but as Dante and Jeremy - Little Guys with unlimited energy and ideals inspired by a concretely world-changing history. Stewart knows that the transformation Little Guys undergo everyday to become Guy is devastating and intolerable.

And while people cannot literally fly to new heights, much like Guy, they dream about it all the time. “Can’t you see yourself up there? Up in the clouds somewhere like some kind of bird?” he asks Lili (Danticat, 68). Stewart sees us in a different future where the betrayal that millions have felt the brunt is a simply a lesson about the past and the moment people rebelled and shook it off is the source of excitement and inspiration.

While Stewart potentially faces 20 years in jail she still cherishes her desire to fly and she won’t be silent about it – she eagerly shares it and sitting next to other left attorneys she stand out like a jewel catching light. She is so precious in this way. Guy saw things around him that made him want to fly: the air, the birds, Little Guy (Danticat, 68) and he would not be caged. We must not allow Stewart to go to jail.

Lynne Stewart
Check Out Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!
The Slave Army of Toussaint L’Ouverture

The People Could Fly*

2005-02-10T11:54:00.000-05:00

Generations have heard stories about Africans who flew to freedom. The people looked to the sky and their feet lifted up off the ground and they flew away.

A slave ship containing countless Ibo people from what is now Nigeria arrived in the Gulla Islands off the coast of South Carolina/Georgia. The people were brought onto the deck and they witnessed the suffering of the people before them on the shore – Africans on auction blocks. Their eyes bore into the future and they saw the pain of generations to come in America. They saw all of this and together they flew home to Africa.

Paule Marshall gives us a slightly different version of this tale. In her novel Praisesong for the Widow the Ibo walk back across the Atlantic Ocean to Africa. As a Great Aunt recounts this to Avey, who is a child, Avey asks how come the people didn’t drown. Her Great Aunt Cuney doesn’t miss a beat with her response. “Did it say Jesus drowned when he went walking on the water in that Sunday School book your momma always sends with you? … I din’ think so. You got any more questions?” (40).

There is another version of the story. The Ibo were brought out on the deck of the ship and they witness the horror of the lives that await them. They immediately know that not only their generation will suffer in slavery – they know that their children will never know the lives they were stolen from in Africa. So the Ibo pick up their feet together to leave the boat. And because people can’t fly, and because people can’t walk on water, they drown together in chains.

*The People Could Fly is the title of a Children’s Book of African and African American Folk Tales by Virginia Hamilton

It's Time Children Took Matters Into Their Own Hands!

2005-02-06T19:50:00.000-05:00

for my Dad who never hesitated to read me any book out loud from Dahl to O’Henry and
for my Mom, who got me subscribed to Cricket, hates it when adults call young people ‘kids’ and who always told me to run from or fight anyone who tried anything funny.

Roald Dahl is the master of innocent sinister. Dahl easily scared the crap out of me when I was a kid – witches really were everywhere disguised as innocent older ladies, parents as mean as Matilda’s existed – but at the same time I found myself consumed by maniacal laughter when his stories were read to me. George poisoning his evil Grandma was great! And then when it didn’t work and she grew and grew and then shrunk! Or the Trunchbull swinging that annoying shy girl by her pigtails - Hilarious! Dahl’s writing was mysterious enough to be clearly fiction no matter what scary binds the characters found themselves in.

To terrify kids with something so obviously fantasy and somehow give them permission to laugh at it – even when the scary acts really are terrible – is brilliant. My Mom got me Lemony Snicket’s “Book the First” in his A Series of Unfortunate Events because she knows I was a sick child. I highly recommend reading children/young adult novels – especially this one.

The Bad Beginning maintains Snicket’s promise on the first page that “in this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle” and the lives of the Baudelaire children are “rife with misfortune, misery, and despair” (1). Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire are not tormented by bullies or fantastical monsters. Their troubles are real. First the Baudelaire parents are burned up in a fire and the three orphans are basically thrown into a nightmare of a foster-care/adoption system.

A few elements prevent the story from being the most depressing ever. First, Snicket maintains a clearly fictional setting for the Baudelaire’s traumas. The city and country where the events occur are not revealed, the children have unique names and are portrayed in Victorian outfits by illustrator Brett Helquist (of Cricket magazine fame!) so the story is clearly not contemporary and cannot be clearly imagined to be happening next door. The Baudelaire nemesis is “Count Olaf” – children do not typically encounter Counts, and The Count on Sesame Street is creepy so it fits that image.

What is extremely clever is how Snicket not only creates a void between the world of the Baudelaires and that of his readers but he also distances himself from the novels. He is an investigator on the trail of the fate of the poor Baudelaire orphans. Snicket is doing a good deed by recording their story and it is left unsaid, but so that such horrible things will not happen to children in the future. Each novel ends with a note to Harper Collins publishers on how Snicket is hot on the trail of the Baudelaires and will be catching up to them soon.

Snicket is also a recluse – the J.D. Salinger of children’s books. It is not clear where he lives – if Lemony is indeed a he, and where he is from and how he came into writing such a tale. His official bio reads: “Lemony Snicket was born in a small town where the inhabitants were suspicious and prone to riot. He now lives in the city. During his spare time he gathers evidence and is considered something of an expert by leading authorities.” A longer bio at his website includes “Lemony Snicket was born before you were, and is likely to die before you as well.”

The world we live in has vast amounts of tragedy in it and unfortunately we encounter lots of nasty characters who might try to do us harm. My criticism of Snicket, and I think it is a strength of the tale as well, is that the story stresses that the Baudelaires have only each other. The children are constantly dismissed when they reach out to adults for assistance, even as their lives are at stake. They are gradually learning (it seems it will become a theme in the series) to not trust others, and the others are always adults. For me, as a young adult it is heartbreaking to realize that children should not reach for help from strange adults, and they must quickly develop the ingenuity to save their own skins in case you might not be their to help them (as the Baudelaire’s parents died), or even more tragically, if you ignore them yourself.

While I would like to see fiction foster a world that is always ready to greet children with warm rooms and adults who are excited to learn from them I know that is not representative of the world we live in. So while I wish The Bad Beginning gave us one competent adult who didn’t dismiss the children, that is not the case, especially in the welfare system, which is where the Baudelaires find themselves.

One appreciates how Snicket’s tales illustrate the sanctuary children have when they defend each other, and actually risk their own lives to help the group. What is also fantastic is the Baudelaires do not act on a whim – Violet (hurray its a girl character) is very interested in science and engineering and she logically invents contraptions that get them out of jams while Klaus’s photographic memory retains random pieces of knowledge to help get the plans off the ground.

The Baudelaires camaraderie is refreshing and in a way it exists already in the rebelliousness of youth – how we refuse to get each other in trouble – we’ll all take detention rather than rat someone out, the substitute teacher is the common enemy. But wouldn’t it be fantastic if it didn’t disappear into our adulthood? Then Snicket wouldn’t have to tell us the nightmarish tale of the Baudelaires. Because the first adult to hear their story would have put a stop to the anguish they were facing and brought them into fantastic home to nurture Violet’s inventions, Klaus’s reading, and baby Sunny’s biting.

For More Delights:

Roald Dahl
Lemony Snicket
Brett Helquist
Cricket

2005-02-05T13:05:00.000-05:00

Illustration by Marjane Satrapi

Girl's Imagination on "Dialectic Materialism"

2005-02-05T11:46:00.000-05:00

I grew up without Iran on my international radar. Palestine was definitely on my mind, Iraq – without a doubt, East and West Germany – of course, the USSR – duh! But Iran was not in the thick mix of places that I could point out on a map or provide a two-sentence synopsis of propaganda about.

This probably seems really hard to believe. To have lived in the United States in the last 20 years and not be familiar with Iran?

I was born within months of Reagan’s inauguration. The years I’ve spent on this planet do not intersect with the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran or Ayatollah Khomeini’s return from exile. The Iran-Iraq war was over by time I entered school and had begun to cultivate a long-term memory.

I remember the first conscious thought I ever gave to Iran. I was in middle school around 1995 and the girl next to me in music class recognized my name as Arabic. I asked her if her name was Arabic too and she said no, she was Persian.

I was totally confused. Somewhere in the back of my mind rested a fact from Ancient History class about Persia being a civilization older than Alexander the Great and the Greeks. I didn’t have the story straight – but the fact that this girl was Persian, and from a culture older than the Ancient Greeks – I was impressed.

My formal introduction to Iran comes from having read Persepolis, a graphic memoir by Marjane Satrapi. Persepolis details Satrapi’s childhood in the years leading up to the Islamic Revolution. At the opening of the memoir Satrapi is ten years old and is struggling to maintain a place in her life for typically youthful pleasures as her imagination becomes more dominated with political issues. While internationally sharp events that centered on Iran in those years matter, little girls were growing up in Iran like girls are growing up all the time in every corner of the planet.

Satrapi’s childhood development is not drastically different than anyone else’s who grew up economically comfortable with a loving family. She exhibits vivid imagination, rebelling against her parents and teachers at school, has crushes on boys, and discovers rock music.

The subjects and figures that haunt Satrapi’s imagination are where the reader notices she is living under strikingly different circumstances. The two intellectual figures that occupy her thoughts the most are God and Karl Marx. In her mind the two figures wrestle for ideological supremacy. Satrapi’s illustrations give us a grandfatherly version of God resembling Marx. The two bearded are hilariously identical, Satrapi even points out that the only distinguishing feature was Marx’s curly hair.

Now, I’m certain that most children do not daydream of Marx wrestling with God – nor do so many young children strive to grasp the principles of Marxism. Satrapi was. Her parents provide her with a comic book on Dialectical Materialism and she re-illustrates a frame of Marx striking Descartes with a stone after Descartes tells Marx the stone only exists in their minds.

Needless to say Satrapi’s parents were radicals who fostered a deep sense of curiosity and independence in their daughter. She is deeply inspired and concerned for their safety as her parents protest together in the streets of Tehran and host parties with Communist leaders in the student movements. In the battle for ideology God wins out each time Satrapi overhears of the the Shah’s army killing protesters, or when her friends tell her their fathers are away on a trip – something the children tragically discover means the men were executed. When tragedy strikes her own family Satrapi has her final vision of God. She banishes him from her dreams screaming he does not exist. “Get out of my life!” she shouts at God.

Satrapi’s deeply inquisitive childhood complements the history of Iran, a small chapter of that history is a second narrative in Persepolis. The book was named for a noted city-center in Persia, the city of Persepolis was founded around 500 BC. Many texts were discovered at Persepolis documenting hundreds of years of Persian history before the city’s founding as well as many volumes of Persian poetry.

It is not right to gloss over 1,000 years of history but Iran remained distinctly Persian throughout numerous Arab invasions and the expansion of the Ottoman Empire in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries – I have even heard that Persian influence was evident in languages as far west as Austria a few hundred years later. Because of such preservation of Persian language and identity a strong nationalist history survived in unique poetry and history texts – like some of the most ancient that resided at Persepolis.

Persepolis radiates this legacy. Satrapi’s remembrances both offer the reader with a history lesson missing in my American generation as well as a firecracker of a girl’s take on events. The memoir radiates literary tradition distinct to the region, not only in Satrapi’s writing but also in her stark black and white illustrations that portray our heroine even more warm and endearing than you could imagine a photo to be.

I could riff on so many layers from this book – from Satrapi and her mother’s protesting the veil in unique ways, to how her parents struggled rock music posters into Iran from Turkey. But what outshines each memorable anecdote is how the spirit of young Satrapi remains intact and only rises up in more fury and determination each time she faces another horror. Marjane rings of the students who marched on Tehran in the greater and greater thousands each day as they were brutally attacked by the military and fundamentalists. She reminds us of girls all over the world who refuse to accept the future being laid out for them.

Word Gymnastics Do Not Equal Funny

2004-12-08T16:47:00.000-05:00

Funny is my number one favorite thing, with silly coming in a close second. How do I differentiate? Aaron McGruder is funny, burps are silly – both are amazing and loved. The Onion is funny; a dog sliding across the floor on his nails is silly. Jokes are funny, farts are silly – are you with me? Brain + thought = funny, spontaneity + immaturity = silly.

Yesterday I spent 30 minutes trying to select the best funny. It was between PG Woodhouse and John Kennedy Toole – and Toole won. I’ll tell you why he won – it will shed a bright light on my shallowness. I picked the Toole because Woodhouse has tons of books and I couldn’t decide, and Toole is from New Orleans and N’awlins conotates sultry images for me.

We’re on to A Confederacy of Dunces today. Finished that sad business Jude the Obscure yesterday and I definitely needed to go with the polar opposite with my next selection. I am a girl of extremes.

However…

I’m not laughing yet. The novel that is considered one of the funniest ever written has not caused me to crack a smile. Although, some of the words in it are silly – the way they role off the tongue when you pronounce them silently to yourself as you read – I do this to new words great combinations. “Thank God my moustace filters out some of the stench. My olfactories are already beginning to send out distress signals” (Toole, 9). I was trippin’ over that for a minute, but not laughing.

While the lack of funny might disappoint some readers, I am frantically insecure that I don’t get Toole, that he must be too smart for me. His prose is over my head. The result is that I’m feverishly reading it, like the dialogue and adventures of Ignatius and his overbearing mother will suddenly gel together into side-splittingly hilarious sense to me.

Crying in Public Again

2004-12-07T15:54:00.000-05:00

Just a little warning: if you are not into spoilers do not read this post.

The book is so devastating I have to write about what happens. Of course I am talking about Jude the Obscure. Anyone who knows anything about it has heard “it’s the most depressing book ever.” Or that it is also the most attacked of Thomas Hardy’s works.

Jude and Sue break societal norms by choosing to live together, carry on a sexual relationship and have children … all after they have abandoned their first failed marriages.

All this is not very shocking, but consider it during the 1800’s in church-dominated England. Jude and Sue are at the bottom of the economic heap too, there is no aristocracy shading their affair as a simple scandal – it is the deepest sin imaginable.

But Jude and Sue are so heroic. They choose to be together knowing that doing so will terminate all friendships with other people, cause them to loose work and live in poverty – but they will have each other finally and completely which is what they have denied themselves of for over half the book (I was on the edge of my seat waiting for them to make out!).

An example of how deep their love is combined with the harsh eye of the church: Sue does not consent to having sex with Jude for months even though they live together as assumed “husband and wife” because she is certain it is the morally wrong thing to do – she has already had a husband (her first marriage).

So Jude and Sue FINALLY hook up. And I am ecstatic. But their lives plummet! Neighbors and religious leaders are hating. Jude gets fired from jobs (his trade is cutting stone for churches .. of course the church is gonna fire him), the kids are hungry, Sue is no longer so defiant.

Then the book takes its infamously horrifying turn. Sue and Jude’s children commit suicide. And they are children; two of them are under 10. The strain of their existence and their parents’ relationship is too much for them to bear.

What broke my heart more than the children killing themselves is Sue’s transformation. Besides being devastated by the loss of her kids she places the blame for her children’s death on herself for breaking with the Bible’s moral code. “Our life has been a vain attempt at self-delight. But self-abnegation is the higher road. We should mortify the flesh – the terrible flesh – the curse of Adam … We ought to be continually sacrificing ourselves on the altar of duty” (Hardy, 363).

Sue, who so boldly and rationally left her (significantly older) husband to be with Jude who she loves – and was on the cusp of living happily with him without shame of herself - is sucked back into living within the strict code of the church which would gladly have her blaming herself for the suicide of her three kids.

What a sick, sick society and while I can’t imagine living in such a place, it was so recent and seems so close on the horizon.

Christminster, USA

2004-12-05T15:40:00.000-05:00

Sex before marriage ... the bitter end to a shotgun marriage ... a woman’s reputation ruined for spending the night with a young man ... a young woman forced into a marriage to salvage her social and financial future ... bastard children ...

When I line up these plot twists that double as timeless social questions ... they look like the outline to a sermon by Jerry Falwell on what has caused the deterioration of American life. These are just some of the issues raised in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.

I began reading Jude in the week up to the presidential election. Having never read any Hardy I had no idea what I was in for, but I had heard that he is the most depressing novelist ever.

Awesome. I have nightmares about the bleak future that Bush & Co. proudly display each day. And I’m reading about the medieval oppression of Sue Bridehead written over 100 years ago – and its as if I’m looking into my own future.

Sue is young and single. She is going to school to be a teacher and the instructors believe she shows great promise. There is a glitch in Sue’s plan. She is doing all this at the end of the 19th century. Church morality rules every aspect of her life. The name of the town she resides in is Christminster. So when Sue starts kicking it with her cousin married cousin Jude all the time she catches hell for it.

Put cousin love out of your head for a minute. I know it sounds tough to get around, but when you read Jude, you will forget and it will not make you queasy. The book is oriented around Jude’s life and his love for Sue, but it is her oppression that rages through the novel and breaks my heart and Jude’s.

I don’t want to rehash all the crap Sue and Jude are dragged through (and I haven’t finished yet). The two pursue their life together and each hardship and attack they face is like penance for their sins as defined by church-heavy society. Hardy doesn’t uphold the couple’s punishment; he creates sympathy for them. I am cheering for Sue and Jude because of Sue’s denial of church morality.

How a woman like Sue was grown in Christminster, I don’t think I understand. I wonder how women like her will be cultivated in increasingly evangelical United States.

"Origination is Instinct not Intellect"

2004-12-02T23:46:00.000-05:00

Mao Tsetung wrote that all literature and art is guided by class society, meaning that whether an artist is conscious of it or not their work will take a class stand. Mao further argued that artists should be asked for whom they are producing their works (Avakian, 211-14). I toyed with the idea of doing my research on the responsibility of artists, from the point-of-view of the characters they write about to the audience the art is directed at. In the process of investigating the feelings of pressure and responsibility that artists feel towards their audience and to broader humanity I came across the above-mentioned article about Mao. I focused on the works of, and interviews with, poet Suheir Hammad and actor/writer Danny Hoch. Hammad and Hoch consciously strive to create works that serve the interest of the proletariat and both artists write and fight to perform for the people.

During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution Chiang Ching addressed artists:

“There are well over 600 million workers, peasants and soldiers in our country, whereas there is only a handful of ... bourgeois elements. Shall we serve this handful, or the 600 million? The grain we eat is grown by the peasants, the clothes we wear and the houses we live in are all made by the workers ... and yet we do not portray them on stage. May I ask which class stand you artists take?”

(Chiang, www.rwor.org). Artists are part of the intelligencia in our society. They are members of the elite 10% of the population that are able to engage in academia and work with their minds rather than labor with their hands. The other 90% of the population is practically locked out of this realm. Almost all of the works studied in this class were written for and about the lives of the 90% of the population that labors with their hands, the people that are economically and ethnically oppressed. The respect for the proletariat in these works and the warm reception to such works by people around the world illustrates a further point promoted during the GPCR: the masses of people are more than capable of appreciating, engaging, and creating great works of art.

In an interview that playwright/poet Reg E. Gaines conducted with poet Suheir Hammad, Hammad described a constant artistic struggle to represent the people of the world, particularly her ancestors and Palestinians with dignity. She is firmly rooted in creating poetry that serves them. Hammad’s poem “What I Will” is a strong example of a work that represents the interest of the proletariat. The poem illustrates the outrage and pain that millions of people felt in the lead up to the United States war on Iraq in the spring of 2003. “I will / not lend my soul nor / my bones to your war / drum. I will / not dance to your / beating. I know that beat / it is lifeless. I know / intimately that skin / you are hitting. It / was alive once / and hunted stolen / stretched” (Hammad). “What I Will” also celebrates the resistance and self-determination of those millions of people. Hammad centers the poem around herself as an individual. She highlights her responsibility and in turn the poem is a rallying cry for others to do the same. “I / will craft my own / drum. Gather my beloved / near and our chanting / will be dancing ... I will dance / and resist and dance and / persist and dance” (Hammad).

To further illustrate the interest and the audience that Hammad’s work engages one should examine the opposite. Toby Keith’s song “Courtesy of the Red, White, & Blue” directly serves the interest of the bourgeoisie. Keith’s lyrics are a parade of destruction and vengeance directed at all non-Americans, specifically Arabs and Muslims, as it was written to encourage the feverish patriotism and xenophobia post September 11, 2001. Keith’s song is a cultural pillar of American imperialism. “And the eagle will fly / Man, it’s gonna be hell / When you hear Mother Freedom / Start ringin’ her bell / And it feels like the whole wide world is raining down on you” (Keith). Hammad’s poem was written for and directed to people around the planet opposing the war, including the people of Iraq. Keith’s song was written for the politicians who are vying for every inch of soil and profit on the globe and to rally the soldiers who will carry out the conquest. “Justice will be served / And the battle will rage / This big dog will fight / When you rattle his cage” (Keith).

Besides the class that a piece of art serves, we must address the question of for whom the art was created. In an interview from several years ago actor/writer Danny Hoch tells performance poet Steven Sapp about his intended audience. Hoch describes a typical theater audience of white people over 50 years old and then he describes the youth from all different ethnic backgrounds and nationalities that he writes for. Hoch’s performances consist of numerous monologues from many different characters, predominantly urban youth but also from the point-of-view of a prison guard. Hoch insists that his work is for the youth and laborers. While he is thrilled white middle-aged people frequent his plays, he writes them for the proletariat. Hoch said about his determination to accurately capture the lives of his characters: “When I was studying in high school, in college I started to ask myself where are my voices, where are my people? I wanted to see my neighborhood and my people center stage. I wanted to see these stories center stage, but more importantly I wanted to see these languages center stage” (Hoch, Artists Network). Hoch’s performance venue is not only theaters (with the typical theater audience) but also jails and schools around the country. He has constantly sought out venues and opportunities to perform before the people who inspire his work.

Hammad and Hoch dedicate their artistic works to representing the proletariat and they fight to have their performances and words heard by the same people they are creating for. By doing this they are breaking down currently existing divides and stereotypes that the proletariat are incapable of creating and unwilling to appreciate literature and art. Hammad described the international response to her poem “First Writing Since” when she received over 500 letters from around the world from people who discovered poetry and were inspired to live a peaceful life through her work. The poem was never officially copywrited and was published all over the internet and translated into dozens of languages. Hoch insists he is constantly impressed with how deeply youth and prisoners connect with his work – how quickly they understand it and make interpretations that he hasn’t even connected himself yet. Singer/writer Joe Strummer said, “origination is instinct not intellect” (Westway). Strummer’s observation refers back to the statements from Mao and Chiang: it does not take only the elite and educated few to create and comprehend art. The hungry embrace of the artists and works discussed in this paper are further proof that the proletariat around the world is eagerly awaiting the moment when not only a few artists will engage them.

Bibliography:

Avakian, Bob. Mao Tsetung’s Immortal Contributions. RCP Publications: Chicago, Illinois; 1979.

“Chiang Ching: A Revolutionary Life.” The Revolutionary Worker #610 (1991).

Hammad, Suheir. “First Writing Since” 2001. “What I Will” 2002. http://www.artistsnetwork.org/

Inside the Culture of Resistance: Suheir Hammad with Reg E. Gaines. Produced by the Artists Network of Refuse & Resist! 2004.

Inside the Culture of Resistance: Danny Hoch with Steven Sapp. Produced by the Artists Network of Refuse & Resist!

Keith, Toby. “Courtesy of the Red, White, & Blue.” Unleashed. Tokeco Tunes BMI, 2002.
Westway to the World. Dir. Don Letts. Sony Music Entertainment, 2001.