A Flavour to the Ghetto
July 24th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Alice Walker in Gaza with Palestinian member of parliament and mother of five, Huda Naim.
Writer Alice Walker was part of the Code Pink delegation to Gaza shortly after the December/ January massacre. She responded to her experience, and connected it to the civil rights struggle in America, in an essay on her blog called ”Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters ‘the horror’ in Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Palestine/Israel.”
Rolling into Gaza I had a feeling of homecoming. There is a flavor to the ghetto. To the Bantustan. To the “rez.” To the “colored section.” In some ways it is surprisingly comforting. Because consciousness is comforting. Everyone you see has an awareness of struggle, of resistance, just as you do. The man driving the donkey cart. The woman selling vegetables. The young person arranging rugs on the sidewalk or flowers in a vase. When I lived in segregated Eatonton, Georgia I used to breathe normally only in my own neighborhood, only in the black section of town. Everywhere else was too dangerous. A friend was beaten and thrown in prison for helping a white girl, in broad daylight, fix her bicycle chain.
But even this sliver of a neighborhood, so rightly named the Gaza Strip, was not safe. It had been bombed for 22 days. I thought of how, in the US perhaps the first use of aerial attacks on US soil, prior to 9/11, was the bombing and shooting from biplanes during the destruction by white mobs of the black neighborhoods in Tulsa, Olklahoma in 1921. The black people who created these neighborhoods were considered, by white racists, too prosperous and therefore “uppity.” Everything they created was destroyed. This was followed by the charge already rampant in white American culture, that black people never tried to “better” themselves.
You can read Walker’s whole piece at Electronic Intifada which first published it.
All roads lead to Palfest
July 23rd, 2009 § Leave a Comment
An edited version of this article was published in The National.
We entered Palestine from Jordan, across the Allenby Bridge and over the trickle which is what’s left of the diverted, overused, and drought-struck river. The Dead Sea glittered in the hollow to our left. Jericho, the world’s oldest city, shimmered through heat haze to our right. The site where Jesus was baptised was a stone’s throw away. Palestine is most definitely part of bilad ash-Sham, in the same cultural zone as Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, but it is also most definitely like nowhere else on the planet. Suddenly the superlatives were coming thick and fast.
Palestine feels as large as a continent – but one that’s been crushed and folded to fit into the narrow strip of fertile land between the river and the sea. The Jordan Valley depression is the lowest point on earth, part of the Rift Valley which stretches from east Africa, and it’s as hot as the Gulf. But only a few miles up from the yellowed, cratered desert into the green hills before Jerusalem, and the weather is very different. As we left our performance in Ramallah a couple of nights later, gusts of fog blew in on an icy wind. If a Palestinian in the West Bank manages to find an unoccupied hilltop – which isn’t at all easy – he can look all the way to the forbidden Mediterranean, and perhaps he’ll pick out the fields of his ancestral village.
The Social Significance of David Rovics
July 22nd, 2009 § 3 Comments
- Portrait by Robert Shetterly
This article originally appeared in ZMag’s August 2009 issue.
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
– Victor Hugo
I meet David Rovics outside his host’s apartment building. I recognize him immediately from the pictures I’ve seen of him. He is tall and slender with closely cropped hair. He is dressed in casual attire with a black t-shirt that says “Gaza on my Mind” on it.
It’s June 2009 and images of the Iranian protesters are being broadcast everywhere – on Facebook, through Twitter, BBC, CNN, Fox News. Rovics can tell that I’m Iranian: “Tell me your take.”
He is not one to wait for his turn to talk. He listens intently and when I’m finished asks another question. After all that Rovics has seen and heard during more than 20 years as a singer-song writer who has performed all over the world, he has yet to act like a self-proclaimed expert on anything.
Rovics was born in New York city to parents who were “progressive and counter-culture in their own way.” His earliest experience of music mixed with politics came in 1979 while attending a Unitarian-run camp in Western Massachusetts in a town that at that time had the oldest nuclear reactor in the United States. At this camp Rovics learned about vegetarianism, sex and the wickedness of nuclear power by anti-nuclear activists who were invited to speak to the children – he was 12 years old. He had up until that point been playing the cello and living a middle class life in a mostly Christian town with non-religious parents who were both classical musicians, but would be marked forever afterwards with an inclination towards political activism:
That was the first time I heard music that had a political orientation to it and I guess I’ve gravitated to that kind of stuff ever since.
Obama’s new style in Latin America
July 21st, 2009 § 10 Comments
Latin American style in Honduras. (Photo: Rights Action)
This past weekend in Buenos Aires, an American acquaintance presented me with page 9 of Saturday’s Buenos Aires Herald, the English-language daily, such that I might join the ranks of those who understood the approach of the US government to the current crisis in Honduras. Page 9 consisted of two Reuters articles, one on top of the other, with the essence of the US approach excerpted in a quote in orange print at the center of the top article: “This is part of Obama’s new style of doing things in Latin America.” How well my acquaintance had read the rest of the article was called into question by his reference to Costa Rican President Óscar Arias as Óscar Asturias.
The top article, entitled “US treads softly as region weighs in,” begins:
Latin America was for decades seen as the United States’ ‘back yard’—a theatre where it imposed its will often at the barrel of a gun.
But since Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was snatched from his home in his pajamas and spirited out of the country by the military on June 28, Washington has played an uncharacteristically low-key role.”
It apparently does not occur to Reuters that there is no need for gun barrels when the US is content for Zelaya to remain in his pajamas and out of the country, or that covert support for right-wing Latin American death squads might also have been described as low-key.
Email exchanges between Ken Loach, Paul Laverty, Rebecca O’Brien and the Melbourne Film Festival organizers
July 20th, 2009 § 5 Comments
Rebecca O'Brien, Paul Laverty, Ken Loach, Kierston Wareing, Juliet Ellis and Leslaw Zurek at the Venice Film Festival 2007
PULSE Exclusive
As you may have heard by now, British film legend Ken Loach has pulled out of the Melbourne Film Festival because the organizers’ refusal to observe the cultural boycott of Israel. Following is an exchange of letters that took place between Loach, long-time co-writer Paul Laverty, co-producer Rebecca O’Brien and Richard Moore, the director of the MFF. Recall that earlier Ken Loach had drawn hysterical responses from the media when he pressured the Edinburgh Film Festival to return the funding they had received from the Israeli embassy.
Letter to the Director of Melbourne Film Festival 2009
13th July 2009
Dear Richard Moore
Sadly, we learn that your festival is sponsored in part by the State of Israel.
As you are no doubt aware, many Palestinians, including artists and academics, have called for a boycott of events supported by Israel. There are many reasons for this; the illegal occupation of Palestinian land, destruction of homes and livelihoods, the massacres in Gaza, all are part of the continuing oppression of the Palestinian people.
The Essential Marcuse
July 20th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Andrew Feenberg discusses his new collection of essays by Herbert Marcuse. The most influential radical philosopher of the 1960s, Marcuse’s writings are noteworthy for their uncompromising opposition to both capitalism and communism.
The Violence of Illusion
July 19th, 2009 § 7 Comments
Amartya Sen on Identity and Violence. In his otherwise thought provoking lecture, Sen appears to assume that identities are only determined, discovered or assumed. He overlooks the fact that sometimes they are imposed. He also appears to overlook the relations of power which accentuate identity, or for that matter the functional, defensive necessity of identity as a means of resisting domination. (thanks Eric)
Nobel laureate Amartya Sen is widely recognized for his ability to join economics and philosophy, reflected in his work through ethics and a sense of common humanity. In this Hitchcock Lecture from UC Berkeley he explores the violence of illusion.
Thomas Friedman paints Iraq
July 19th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
(Photo: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)
In a July 14 column on the New York Times website entitled “Goodbye Iraq, and Good Luck,” Thomas Friedman informs us that he is in Kirkuk “tagging along” with Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They are at a meeting with 11 Iraqi provincial leaders, a sum Friedman explains has been dealt with by “local U.S. officials [who] have provided me a color-coded guide, identifying each Iraqi politician, their political tendencies and religious affiliation.”
The topic of discussion is which part of Kirkuk should be assigned to which color group. The 11 representatives—“seated on one side of the conference table”—present their claims one by one via Arabic interpreter, until a Kurd breaks the succession with a joke in English. Friedman notes that it is his lucky day, and provides a transcript of the joke:
After Saddam was ousted in 2003… there was an elderly citizen who wanted to write a letter to the new government to explain all his sufferings from the Saddam era to get compensation. But he was illiterate. As you may know, outside our government offices we have professional letter-writers for illiterate people. So the man told the letter-writer all of his problems. ‘In the ’50s, they destroyed my house,’ he said. ‘In the ’60s, they killed two of my sons. In the ’70s, they confiscated my properties,’ and so on, right up to today. The letter-writer wrote it all down. When he was done, the man asked the letter-writer to read it back to him before he handed it to the governor. So the letter-writer read it aloud. When he got done, the man hit himself on the head and said, ‘That is so beautifully done. I had no idea all this happened to me.’ ”
Friedman then supplies a translation of the joke, as even Orientals expressing themselves in English require outside decipherment. Friedman’s rendering is as follows: “Everyone here has a history, and it’s mostly painful. We Iraqis love to tell our histories. And the more we do, the better they get. But with you Americans leaving, we need to decide: Do we keep telling our stories, or do we figure out how to settle our differences?”
An observer unfamiliar with Iraqi culture might have interpreted the Kurd’s joke to simply mean that color-coded representatives were embellishing their claims to Kirkuk. The untrained eye might have also failed to detect the reference to the Americans, or wondered why Friedman’s version of the joke was not funny.
Obama’s War
July 18th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Tariq Ali in the London Review of Books on the North-West Frontier.
These women and children have rights, too.
June is never a good month on the plains. It was 46ºC in Fortress Islamabad a fortnight ago. The hundreds of security guards manning roadblocks and barriers were wilting, sweat pouring down their faces as they waved cars and motorbikes through. The evening breeze brought no respite. It, too, was unpleasantly warm, and it was difficult not to sympathise with those who, defying the law, jumped into the Rawal Lake, the city’s main reservoir, in an attempt to cool down. Further south in Lahore it was even hotter, and there were demonstrations when the generator at Mangla that sporadically supplies the city with electricity collapsed completely.
As far as the political temperature goes there is never a good month in Pakistan. This is a country whose fate is no longer in its own hands. I have never known things so bad. The chief problems are the United States and its requirements, the religious extremists, the military high command, and corruption, not just on the part of President Zardari and his main rivals, but spreading well beyond them.
Music, The New York Times and the politics of a Palestinian state
July 14th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
An Israeli leaflet dropped on Lebanon in 2006 depicts Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah as a snake being charmed by the Syrian and Iranian presidents, and the Hamas leader Khaled Meshal. (Zena)
Belén Fernández, The Electronic Intifada, 14 July 2009
On 31 May and 1 June of this year, two articles by culture reporter Daniel J. Wakin appeared on the The New York Times website: “Minuets, Sonatas and Politics in the West Bank,” and “Amid West Bank’s Turmoil, the Pull of Strings.” It is clear before we even begin reading that we are going to be indebted to Wakin for providing us with a romantic filter through which to view an otherwise sobering subject, just as we might be indebted to someone for writing about the athletic pursuits of disabled persons or about clandestine wine tasting groups under the Taliban.
The heroine of the first article is 16-year-old Dalia Moukarker from Beit Jala near Bethlehem, whom Wakin describes as “one of a new generation of Palestinians who have been swept up in a rising tide of interest in Western classical music in the last several years here in the Palestinian territories, but especially the West Bank.” Wakin does not explain why Gaza has been behind the “rising tide,” although it may have something to do with the ban on importing musical instruments.
Three years of flute study have enabled Dalia to “dispatch … the courtly melodies and cascading runs of an 18th-century concerto with surprising self-assurance,” adding to “[t]he sounds of trills and arpeggios, Bach minuets and Beethoven sonatas [that] are rising up amid the economic malaise and restrictions of the Israeli occupation.” The bittersweet landscape is augmented with images of Dalia “sometimes retreating to a bathroom in her crowded apartment [to practice], sometimes skipping meals.” Wakin confirms that, “As with many endeavors in this part of the world, the pursuit of classical music is fraught with tensions and obstacles,” and goes on to explore one example:
