Fittingly, Mectoub made its American debut at Seattle’s Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, which in an art scene that is particularly homogenous, stands out as a trailblazer. It exhibits artists hailing from at least thirteen countries and five continents many of whom are of African, Asian, and Middle Eastern descent, and/or deal with themes in their works connected to these regions. The gallery has established a practice that rejects aesthetic and conceptual narratives steeped in the European art historical tradition, in favor of discourse and praxis that support and promote diversity of experience and identity.

Mohamed, Nablus (2014), courtesy of the Mariane Ibrahim Gallery

Coten’s Mectoub is the result of a discourse between photographer and subject, with Coten seeking to understand and document (mectoub means it was written, also destiny) identities other than what is considered ‘the standard’ (typically determined through a European lens). Coten’s decision to photograph Arab men bucks the global trend that focuses almost exclusively on the liberation of Arab and Muslim women who are framed as victims of an excessively oppressive Islamic patriarchy. Arab men are limited to caricatures of corrupt dictator, Muslim cleric or jihadist. Contrary to historical interactions between Westerners and Arabs, the men in Mectoub do not exercise their agency reactively. What we observe is a conversation. Coten asks “Who are you?” and these men respond assertively and unabashedly.

However tempting it may be to apply a Saidian analysis, the only, remotely Orientalist characteristic found in Mectoub is Coten’s French nationality. Mectoub is not the 19th century oft-salacious depictions of harems, bathhouses, and slave auctions. None of the men are dressed as devout, orthodox Muslims; thus a disassociation from Islam and the terrorist trope. Several are pictured bare chested, or with their shirts open in seductive, sexual poses. These postures could be interpreted as a nod to the odalisque genre of painting within Orientalist art however, the difference is that most of the men are looking directly at the camera and none of them are nude. When viewing the images, your eyes meet theirs straight away. The odalisque tradition portrayed fetishized female subjects: inanimate objects to be devoured by men. Coten depicts Arab men who are comfortable in their own skins, and who assert alternate gender and sexual identities over which the viewer, nor Coten herself, has no control.

Nubi, Cairo, courtesy of the Mariane Ibrahim Gallery

To suggest these poses were elicited by Coten is too simplistic an assessment. It supports the antiquated concept of the colonial subject incapable of thinking for himself. Further, it implies homogeneity amongst a population of people with immense diversity. There are four main dialects spoken across the region, and while Islam is the dominant religion there are sectarian differences, as well as notable communities of Christians, Jews, Druze, and others.

Mectoub illustrates Arab men as proactive agents in the creation of their lives, their futures, and of their own representation. It effectively destroys the singular narrative that Arab identity is confined to patriarchal oppressive Islam and terrorism.  In a space where the agency of these men is intentionally brought to the fore, these men illustrate self-determination that we must consider has always been there, hidden behind prevailing monolithic narratives of the region. There is a power shift at work here. When the western viewer is no longer the sole agent and consumer of the identity of a people it once subjugated, imaginably there is discomfort, dissonance and a rejection.

Nabil, Algiers, Algeria, courtesy of the Mariane Ibrahim Gallery

The post Scarlett Coten, Mectoub: In the Shadow of the Arab Spring appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

“…the upshot is that while we now feel we know nearly everything that African states societies, economies, are not, we still know absolutely nothing about what they actually are…” (Mbembe 2001:9)

Introduction

This collection of photographs, taken during recent visits to my native Sierra Leone, are part of a continuing effort to help others see a bit more of the everyday in Africa through my subjective eyes –behind the objective lens of a camera, of course.

The images are not intended to (UN)change anyone’s perceptions of the beautiful, diverse, and vibrant continent of over fifty(50) separate, independent countries that constitute AFRICA.

Such (r)evolutions are best left to western media and (ma)paternalistic observers who continue to distill their (in)versions of Africa.

We, Africans, do not often get the opportunity (or take the time?) to interpret the sights or sounds of our countries, as we see fit, in order to resist the uniform exaggerations of an exotic, faraway place ravaged by poverty, starvation, disease and conflict.

As Mbembe asserts, “… there is language that every comment by an African about Africa must endlessly eradicate, validate, or ignore, often to his/her cost, the ordeal whose erratic fulfillment many Africans have spent their lives trying to prevent…” (Mbembe 2001:5).

Everything takes place within the context or contours of the preceding or existing discourse.

Hopefully, these glimpses do not nullify that greater purpose…

********

All photographs courtesy of Fodei Batty

Ships docked at the Queen Elizabeth II Quay in Freetown, Sierra Leone — Freetown, Sierra Leone, July 2015

Any Postcolony without a port to exploit its resources is not worthy of its misery

Although the Queen Elizabeth II quay is said to have one of the world’s deepest natural harbors, the presence of such a fine seaport has only expedited the exploitation of Sierra Leone’s natural resources by various multinational mining companies who use its fine services to ship commodities out of the country.

An Australian’s best friend: Diamonds from Sierra Leone — Bo, southern Sierra Leone

You, too, want a piece of me? An Australia diamond merchant seeks his fortune in the Postcolony.

Winners of Chinese Language Scholarships at the University of Sierra Leone — Mount Aureol, Sierra Leone, July 2015

From North-South to South-South domination? These students at the University of Sierra Leone were the “lucky few” who won scholarships to study the Chinese language at universities across China. They will be excellent speakers of the Chinese language, for the future.

Chinese car dealership in Freetown, Sierra Leone — Lumley, Freetown Sierra Leone, July 2015

The Great Wall goes South: Chinese car dealership in Freetown

Chinese merchants in Freetown, Sierra Leone — Freetown, Sierra Leone, July 2015

The Chinese are busy in Africa. Here a Chinese expatriate family hangs out in front of their store in Freetown as their employees also lounge rather idly nearby

On Umbrellas… — Lumley Market, Freetown Sierra Leone, July 2015

…and on Jerry cans: President Obama is the Midas Touch in Sierra Leone — Construction site, Freetown Sierra Leone, July 2015

Sierra Leone is a place in search of heroes and inspirational figures. Most Sierra Leoneans tend to look elsewhere because examples of good leadership within the country are rare. Hence, President Obama’s popularity across the country. Everything emblazoned with his name is an instant bestseller. The photograph of an umbrella carrying President Obama’s name next to a woman carrying her wares on her head and his name on a jerrycan are all evidence of the president’s popularity.

From Virginia to Sierra Leone: With Love? — Freetown, Sierra Leone, July 2015

A huge market for used cars; you cannot miss America’s finest anywhere you go on the streets of Freetown

Gifts to the Postcolony: Trojan Horses? — Freetown, Sierra Leone, July 2015

A popular sign across the developing world, all USAID-funded projects carry the questionable phrase “from the American People.” This one was stamped on a wall commemorating American support for a project preventing bush fires in the Postcolony.

Warscapes and Mercedes Benzes in Kenema, Sierra Leone — Kenema, eastern Sierra Leone, July 2015

Even though the war ended thirteen years ago, the landscape across Sierra Leone is still littered with the bitter memories of war –warscapes

Headscratcher: Office of Nuclear Safety, in Sierra Leone? — Freetown, Sierra Leone, July 2015

The postcolony is rife with contradictions. The sign on this building made for one head scratching moment. Nuclear energy in a state that has not found a way to provide sufficient thermal or hydroelectric energy to its people a century after the invention of electricity?

The sign on this nearly decrepit building in the heart of Freetown says it all: BE SMART! — Freetown, Sierra Leone, July 2015

Philadelphia Medical Clinic in Sierra Leone: another sign that says it all — Freetown, Sierra Leone, July 2015

Road Crossing Sign on the street of Freetown — Lumley, Freetown Sierra Leone, July 2015

This sign struck me as quite ironic because the constant flow of traffic does not allow children to cross the road safely on this busy street in the west of Freetown.

Total Domination in/of the Postcolony — Freetown, Sierra Leone, July 2015

A Total gas station. Next to residential dwellings…

The lifestyles of the rich and shameless contrast sharply with others: a mansion in Freetown — Freetown, Sierra Leone, July 2012

Hardly do structures such as this make it into the pages of western media. There is, in fact, a direct correlation between the construction of mansions such as this one and the misery of the people. The more mansions rise, the more the misery of the people increases.

Not a mud hut in sight! Juba Hills, Freetown, Sierra Leone — Freetown, Sierra Leone, July 2012

You see what you want to see in the postcolony. There are mud huts, diseases and poverty galore but there is also what you see above. In some cases, those who live here are responsible for the conditions of those who live where capitalist western media would like to divert your attention.

More mansions blend into lush foliage around the hills of Freetown — Freetown, Sierra Leone, July 2012

And then there is this one, also in Freetown, Sierra Leone: Not your average mud hut? — Freetown, Sierra Leone. April 2007.

A street scene in Freetown, Sierra Leone — Freetown, Sierra Leone. April 2007.

There is also the everyday.

Ingenuity — Freetown, Sierra Leone, July 2012.

Ingenuity is evident everywhere on the streets of Freetown. This is the postcolony, after all.

In a mud hut in eastern Sierra Leone – November 2006.

Perception is not reality. I could choose to show you the above…

Beautiful sunset along Lumley Beach, Freetown Sierra Leone — Freetown, Sierra Leone, circa 2007

…this beautiful sunset

*****

So, you see? My photographs have just played tricks on you by showing you the AFRICA that I want to show you! Perception is not reality…

The post (Alter)Native Lens: Seeing my Sierra Leone like a Postcolony appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Ya motivados por dicho estudio, nos interesamos mucho más por el léxico de la política puertorriqueña, en especial, las innovaciones léxicas en cada cuatrienio electoral. Iniciamos, entonces, la recopilación de artículos periodísticos relacionados con dicho tema y en 1984 nos sorprendió la creatividad lingüística en esas elecciones. Para citar un ejemplo simple pensemos en el fenómeno del melonismo o más específicamente el voto melón: Se dice del elector afiliado al Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño (PIP), pero que vota por el Partido Popular Democrático (PPD) para detener la ofensiva anexionista. Se le compara con esta fruta, porque es verde por afuera (color que identifica al PIP) asimismo rojo por dentro (color con el cual se reconoce el PPD).

Otro ejemplo emblemático es  cangrimán. Voz con la cual fueron conocidos un grupo de congresistas estadounidenses que visitaron el País en 1910. Los isleños los llamaron “cangrimanes” por confusión con el inglés “congressman”. En la propaganda política de las elecciones 2004, vuelve a utilizarse el término (Véase el discurso  Ante el engaño y represión, dignidad  y perseverancia, Rubén Berríos).

Aclaramos, antes de pasar al análisis léxico-político, que algunas voces se apartan del tema seleccionado en el título del ensayo: represión, persecución y estrategia de lucha. Las hemos incluido ya que nos parece pertinente por la alta frecuencia de uso y por la trascendencia adquirida en la realidad puertorriqueña.

Sin más preámbulos, recordemos que “tutte le parole possono  diventare termini politici , se sono usate in una situazione politica ” (Maurizio Dardano1981:150).

abstencionismo. Práctica de abstención en el proceso electoral. En algunos partidos y agrupaciones de izquierda, el a. es una forma de protesta al status quo. Puede utilizarse en relación a otras actividades políticas no eleccionarias.

activista comunitario. Oscar López Rivera, el a. c. que el 29 de mayo de 2015, cumplió 34 años de prisión en cárceles estadounidenses;  por el único delito de luchar por la independencia de su País. Oscar, después de su experiencia militar en Vietnam, se convirtió en un luchador muy activo en las comunidades puertorriqueñas  de la metrópolis. En 1981, fue acusado por ser miembro de una organización militar clandestina  independentista. Condenado por ello a 55 años por conspiración terrorista , aún permanece en  prisión.  En estos momentos, es el prisionero político más antiguo del hemisferio occidental. Pero, diversos sectores del pueblo puertorriqueño han emprendido una campaña nacional e internacional por su excarcelación: Se pide el indulto al Presidente Obama.

albizuismo. Ideología y estrategia política-revolucionaria seguida por  Pedro Albizu Campos  y los afiliados al Partido Nacionalista Puertorriqueño en el periodo de 1930 a 1950.

amordazar. (De mordaza). Silenciar o reprimir con violencia actuaciones políticas o sociales en que se usen los símbolos de la Patria. Impedir hablar o expresarse libremente a todas las voces independentistas o nacionalistas del País.

anexionismo criollo. Asimilación e integración (como estado 51) a la federación norteamericana que postulan los simpatizantes del Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP).  El a. c. propone, además, la preservación de nuestro idioma, cultura e identidad puertorriqueña, los cuales no están sujetos a negociación. En las elecciones de 2004 y 2008, el adjetivo “criollo” fue perdiendo vigencia.

asimilismo colonial. Tendencia política que pretende destruir o sustituir la identidad cultural puertorriqueña por la estadounidense.

antimilitarismo. Oposición a la presencia y al programa militar obligatorio del  ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Course) en las instituciones universitarias del País. Como consecuencia de esta lucha decenas de estudiantes fueron expulsados y suspendidos de sus estudios. Hoy día el ROTC se establece fuera del campus universitario y se ofrece como curso electivo o voluntario.

asistencialismo. Se dice de la dependencia económica impuesta a las masas populares y otros en esta economía colonial  (v. también mentalidad cuponera).

boricua mutante. Dicho de una persona que sufre mutación de identidad. Que por su vehemente y absoluta lealtad al sistema y a la nación norteamericana se aleja de sus raíces; por tanto su sello de identidad tiene muy pocas huellas de puertorriqueñidad  (Juan Mari Brás), (v. también pitiyanqui).

cacería de brujas. Locución que se acuñó para describir la persecución y represión de todo aquél que resultara sospechoso de preferir la independencia. Como consecuencia de dicha cacería, “los candidatos para puestos políticos  se removían a tenor con las reglamentaciones federales. Liberales prominentes, entre los que se contaba Jorge Font Saldaña… , fueron obligados a  abandonar sus cargos por  haber establecido un pequeño grupo con el nombre de Renovación” (Thomas Mathews 1975:266).

cadete de la República. Perteneciente o militante del nacionalismo albizuista. Vestían de negro y recibían un entrenamiento militar.

carpeta. Nominativo con el cual se conoció la práctica del gobierno y la policía de Puerto Rico de crear expedientes a todo aquel ciudadano que por su afiliación o creencias políticas de izquierda se consideraba subversivo. El Tribunal Supremo de la Isla declaró ilegal e inconstitucional tal práctica, pero “la decisión del Tribunal no alcanzó a las agencias investigativas de los EE. UU. en Puerto Rico. En consecuencia, los actos ilegales del FBI y sus colaboradores continúan  impunes” (Luis Nieves Falcón 2009:197).

Cerro Maravilla. El asesinato de los jóvenes Arnaldo Darío Rosado y Carlos Soto Arriví en el C.M. el 25 de julio de 1978, “fue un acto provocado y ejecutado por la policía de Puerto Rico, sin que mediara justa causa y con la intención específica de quitarles la vida. El crimen de Cerro Maravilla fue planificado por miembros de la policía, quienes tomaron la decisión de dar muerte a los jóvenes por la única razón de que éstos fueron vinculados a actividades relacionadas con el movimiento independentista en la Isla” (Nieves Falcón 2009: 158-159).

Claridad. Esta publicación – un pequeño boletín –  aparece en la realidad política de la Isla en 1959. Empieza en forma muy artesanal, esto es, hecho en un mimeógrafo. Se inicia por acuerdo del Comité Organizador del Movimiento Pro- Independencia, y sus fundadores fueron dos grandes de la lucha independentista: César Andreu Iglesias y Juan Mari Brás.

En su primer aniversario, y no obstante las dificultades iniciales, se convirtió en la voz del independentismo tanto en Puerto Rico como en Estados Unidos. Por miles razones, no pudo seguir publicándose diariamente, y en los años setenta se convirtió en semanario.  Recuérdese los intentos que se hicieron para eliminarlo. Pero, Claridad sobrevivió y actualmente es valorizado como “El Periódico de la Nación Puertorriqueña” (v. Paralitici 2004:190;  Mari Brás 2006:135-138).

colonialismo puertorriqueñista. Estrategia de dominación impuesta al colonizado. Consiste ésta en reconocerle su identidad latina, así como idioma, bandera y otros símbolos patrios (Véase el ensayo crítico Posmodernos, neomelones y neoconservadores: respuesta a Carlos Pabón, Ramón Grosfoguel).

colonialismo “light”. Se dice de los sectores del Partido Popular Democrático que en pro de la derrota del Partido Nuevo Progresista piden a todos los independentistas el voto melón. Este sector desea mantener el status quo colonial  (Estado Libre Asociado) o la Libre Asociación Soberana permanentemente, pero exigirán a la metrópolis más autonomía.

confusión permanente. Frase acuñada por Rubén Berríos para describir el sistema colonial del País: dos banderas, dos himnos. Sin embargo, el pueblo escogió curiosamente otros dos himnos: Preciosa  de Rafael Hernández  y  Verde Luz  de Antonio Cabán (El Topo).  Esto es evidente en las actividades deportivas y músico-culturales.

diáspora boricua. Se dice de los tres y medio  o  cuatro millones de  residentes de origen puertorriqueño establecidos en Estados Unidos. También son conocidos como los nuyoricans o niuyoricans;  indiferentemente del estado donde residan.

espanglish. La lengua creada por la diáspora boricua como identidad y signo de resistencia.

espionaje doméstico. Dicho del control que ejercen las agencias federales en la Isla: FBI, CIA  y sus colaboradores.

estadidad jíbara. Sintagma nominal creado por el ex gobernador de  Puerto Rico Luis A. Ferré  en las elecciones de 1976. En las elecciones de 2004 y 2008, el  adjetivo “jíbara” pierde  vigencia (v. también anexionismo criollo).

Frente Puertorriqueñista. Coalición  constituida por sectores independentistas y autonomistas para detener la amenaza del anexionismo: evidente ésta en el triunfo electoral del PNP en 1968 y 1976.

Gran Jurado.  La institución del G. J. tiene su origen en Gran Bretaña. Trasladada  a  Estados Unidos, y después de la independencia , se incluyó dentro de la Quinta Enmienda de la Constitución. “En Puerto Rico …, se  ha utilizado principalmente contra el independentismo desde la década del treinta, cuando Juan Antonio Corretjer fue encarcelado por un año por negarse a entregar documentos del Partido Nacionalista  en 1936” ( Paralitici 2004: 362).

Grito de Lares. La conmemoración  del  Grito de Lares - 23 de septiembre del 1868 contra el imperio español – fue y sigue siendo una ingeniosa táctica que ayudó  a crear continuidad en la lucha por la independencia. Fue el Partido Nacionalista y Albizu Campos quienes iniciaron esta conmemoración.

hoyo. Práctica punitiva en la cárcel federal por parte de la Marina de Guerra  de EE. UU. en Vieques. Consistía en “aislar al preso en una cárcel pequeña y solitaria para castigar aún más los desobedientes  civiles” (Nieves Falcón 2009:203).

indulto incondicional.  Acción mediante la cual se libera a un prisionero antes de cumplir su condena, sin que esta liberación esté sujeta a reglas específicas. El i. inc. fue otorgado, en septiembre 1979, a cinco miembros del  Partido Nacionalista Puertorriqueño: Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Andrés Figueroa, Irving Flores Rodríguez  y Oscar Collazo. Los nacionalistas habían cumplido una larga condena a raíz del ataque, por ellos perpetrado, al Congreso de los Estados Unidos y la Casa Blair en los años cincuenta.

jaibería. Se dice de “la estrategia existencial  para sobrevivir  en una situación de dependencia y marginación” (Juan M. García Passalacqua 1993: 58).

jaula de perro. Práctica punitiva de la Marina de Guerra de Estados Unidos en Vieques. Los desobedientes civiles “fueron encerrados, por largas horas, en jaulas malolientes, con espacios reducidos, sin techos, divididos o separados por verjas de alambre eslabonado” (Nieves Falcón 2009: 202).

Ley de cabotaje. Ordenanza mediante la cual Puerto Rico está obligado a utilizar (para su comercio) barcos de matrícula y construcción estadounidense, los más caros del Mundo.

Ley de Comercio Interestatal. Obstáculo colonial al desarrollo económico nacional, por virtud  de  ésta los centros comerciales se pueden establecer en cualquier lugar. Esta realidad colonial ha provocado la quiebra y desaparición del pequeño y mediano comerciante nativo, ya establecido en zona. Ejemplo fehaciente actual es la lucha de las farmacias de la comunidad  para poder sobrevivir.

Ley Jones (Acta). Política de dominación emprendida por el gobierno norteamericano en 1917: imposición del inglés como idioma único en el sistema educativo, imposición de la ciudadanía y del servicio militar obligatorio.

Ley de la Mordaza. El 21 de mayo de 1948, la Legislatura de Puerto Rico aprobó la ley de la Mordaza, cuyo propósito principal fue silenciar las voces independentistas y nacionalistas. Al amparo de esta legislación se persiguió toda expresión independentista y de afirmación nacional; se encarceló a cientos de puertorriqueños.

Ley 600. Autorización otorgada  a Puerto Rico – por el Congreso de los Estados Unidos – para redactar su propia constitución. Ésta debía estar dentro del ámbito de las leyes de los Estados Unidos.

Ley Servicio Militar Obligatorio. El 18 de mayo de 1917, el Congreso de los EE. UU. impone (a los jóvenes puertorriqueños de 18 años) la ley de S. M.O., mediante la cual fueron obligados a servir en el ejército de los Estados Unidos so pena de encarcelamiento. Esta ley fue abolida después de la guerra de Vietnam.

Ley 7. Ley especial sobre emergencia fiscal en Puerto Rico del 9 de marzo de 2009. Fueron despedidos 30,000 empleados públicos bajo la gobernación del Partido Nuevo Progresista.

macheteros (los). Nombre oficial Ejército Popular Boricua- Macheteros (EPBM). Organización militar clandestina creada en los años ochenta. Su área de acción  fue tanto contra el sistema político y militar estadounidense en Puerto Rico como en cualquier territorio de Estado Unidos. Se ignora el destino de esta organización después del asesinato de su líder Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, por el operativo del FBI y la policía de Puerto Rico en 2005.

Marcha de la Dignidad. Marcha de protesta de los populares (los afiliados al PPD) e independentistas para repudiar la intervención de la Corte Federal en el proceso electoral de la Isla en 2004.

Masacre de Ponce. Nombre con el que  se conoció la masacre de un grupo de nacionalistas desarmados, los cuales celebraban una manifestación política el 21 de marzo de 1937. Como consecuencia murieron 25 personas y más de 150 resultaron heridas.

melonismo. (De melón). Tendencia en el proceso electoral de 1984 seguida por los independentistas y socialistas  a favor del PPD. Consistía ésta en prestar sus respectivos votos a dicho partido para así detener la avanzada de la estadidad. Estos electores ideológicamente continuaban comprometidos con la independencia.

mentalidad cuponera. Se dice de la dependencia económica impuesta a las masas populares en este sistema colonial, la cual ha traído enajenación e impotencia para luchar y mejorar su nivel económico y social.

Monoestrellada. La bandera nacional de Puerto Rico. Fue creada en 1895 por un grupo de independentistas exiliados en la ciudad de New York. Invertido los colores es idéntica a la bandera cubana. Es el símbolo más amado  y el que nos representa en nuestra soberanía deportiva.

Movimiento Pro- Independencia (MPI). Organización  no- partidista, y una de las fuerzas políticas independentistas más influyentes  en el País a finales de los años cincuenta. Evoluciona con el tiempo y se convierte en el Nuevo Movimiento Independentista Puertorriqueño.

Movimiento Independentista Puertorriqueño (Nuevo). Surge como una nueva gran casa independentista. Pero, “la dispersión fue tal que ese mismo año se convoca a otro encuentro amplio del independentismo  con miras a aglutinarlo”. Se crea, entonces, el Congreso Nacional  Hostosiano (CNH). Es la reunión de todos los sectores del independentismo, con excepción del PIP (Jorge Farinacci 2004).

Movimiento Independentista Nacional Hostosiano (MINH). Nueva fusión de los proyectos políticos anteriores (MPI, NMIP,CNH). Actualmente es un organismo amplio policlasista, no partidista  y más unido al Partido Popular Democrático (Véase el ensayo Se organiza el Reformismo melonista, Jorge Farinacci).

neonacionalismo criollo. Nueva ideología puerorriqueñista que apoya la alianza de los independentistas  y socialistas con el PPD. Como se ha dicho , el n. c. es en su vertiente política melonista (v. Grosfoguel 2003:37).

pitiyanqui o pitiyanki. (Del fr. petit y del inglés yanki). Persona que admira e imita todo lo norteamericano. Partidario fanático de la estadidad. Esta voz fue creada por el poeta puertorriqueño Luis Lloréns Torres (1878- 1944).

pivazo. Voto emitido por un sector del  independentismo en las elecciones del 2004. En las papeletas del p., aparecían dos cruces: una debajo de la insignia del PIP y otra al lado del nombre del candidato a la gobernación del PPD.

Proyecto Tydings. Proyecto de independencia para  Puerto Rico propuesto por M. Tydings al Congreso de Estados Unidos. Se consideraba como un castigo a los puertorriqueños, por el auge alcanzado por los independentistas y nacionalistas en la década del treinta (v. Mathews 1975: 254- 258).

puertorriqueñizar. Dar forma puertorriqueña a un vocablo o expresión de otro idioma, especialmente del inglés norteamericano . Introducir elementos puertorriqueños en los arreglos musicales afrocaribeños.

purga. Acción con la cual se conoció la destitución de maestros y profesores puertorriqueños opositores al programa de americanización en el sistema educativo del País en los años treinta. El despido que ocasionó mayor protesta fue el de Inés Mendoza, profesora de español y luego esposa del primer gobernador elegido por el pueblo: Luis Muñoz Marín.

Revuelta Nacionalista. Se inicia probablemente en octubre de 1950, ya que “el directivo militar del Partido Nacionalista, parece que había dado orden de empezarla en ocho pueblos del País. Se inicia formalmente en la residencia de Blanca Canales, en el Barrio de Coabey, donde se decide tomar el cuartel de la policía de Jayuya, y junto a otros nacionalistas ocupan el pueblo y declaran la República de Puerto Rico. Pero, al otro día 31 de octubre de 1950, Jayuya es bombardeada …”  (Nieves Falcón 2009: 120-121).

sedicioso (terrorista). Dicho del liderato nacionalista “encarcelado por s. y desterrado a cumplir largas condenas en cárceles norteamericanas “(Nieves Farcón 2009: 69).

Vieques. Isla-municipio puertorriqueña  que – después de 60 años de bombardeos – logró sacar de su territorio  la Marina de Guerra de los Estados Unidos. Con la participación de los pescadores viequenses, de diversos sectores de la sociedad puertorriqueña, la diáspora boricua y otros ciudadanos extranjeros se logró (a través de la desobediencia civil) impedir los ejercicios bélicos. No obstante los actos punitivos a los que fueron sometidos los desobedientes civiles, la Marina de Guerra tuvo que abandonar el territorio viequense en mayo de 2003. Pero dejó graves daños, por ello se le exige la rehabilitación  ecológica de las tierras y playas.

voto melón. Elector independentista que presta el voto.  Llámese también voto derrotista, voto flotante, o voto periférico.

zona restringida. Se prohíbe la entrada, so pena de encarcelamiento en la zona de prácticas bélicas de la Marina de Guerra norteamericana.

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Or, si l’on passe de l’origine du mot au concept, on voit que l’acte d’expression en tant qu’urgence d’extériorisation et d’explicitation, convoquant à la fois socialité et individualité, corporéité et normativité, ne peut être aujourd’hui recompris qu’à partir de la pensée de Merleau-Ponty ou d’une phénoménologie sémiotique, dont le défi « est bien de respecter le caractère à la fois public et incarné de l’expression » (V. Rosenthal, Y.-M.Visetti).

Le bref texte poétique ici proposé, À la naissance du sens aborde la problématique de l’expression, et de sa liberté, pour ainsi dire à l’état naissant, sous l’impulsion et la ‘pression’ du souffle et de la voix. Car l’entente seule du tremblement d’air de l’autre, dans ma proximité à son souffle et, inversement, de ma voix au dehors, dans l’écoute de l’autre, atteste enfin ma voix. C’est de cet échange de voix qui s’entendent et se répondent, de cette expérience d’une réversibilité sensible, qu’émerge tout sens. En termes merleau-pontiens « le sens est pris dans la parole et la parole dans l’existence extérieure du sens. »

De ce double mouvement, mouvement chiasmatique, entre le dedans et le dehors, le moi et l’autre, s’ouvre alors un nouvel horizon éminemment éthique, si par éthique – comme le souligne magnifiquement Patrick Leconte – « il faut entendre d’abord et essentiellement [...] cette modalité de l’exister, selon laquelle le soi accède à soi dans la proximité de l’autre ».

                             À  la naissance du sens

• De ta chair sonore
• au dedans
• doux vibre silencieux
• ton souffle charnel
• et fugitif couve et bat
• de tes poumons à ta gorge
• Sous ton plexus solaire
• sous tes rondes papilles
• mûre s’ouvre comme une pêche
• aux rougeurs d’été ta voix
• à ma caresse vocale
• Fautive à l’entente de mon souffle
• qui m’échappe
• de ton souffle
• qui s’élance
• je m’abreuve alors
• de nos voix
• au dehors
• et je bois et m’émerveille
• à l’estuaire du son
• à la naissance du sens

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Men in the Sun follows three Palestinian refugees: Abu Qais, Assad, and Marawan as they attempt to illegally cross the Iraq-Kuwait border in order to seek employment in the Gulf state; their trauma of existential exile is further exasperated by a harrowing smuggling journey they must undertake in the belly of a water container. Throughout the novella, the characters wrestle over the cost of the journey as well as their own safety and indignation with the profiteering smuggler, but eventually succumb to their struggles. The passive deaths of the men against the backdrop of their ongoing struggle to reach Kuwait amid the suffocating heat of the tank closes the novella with poignant irony.

Kanafani, however, was not allegorizing an aesthetic ideal, but rather a cutthroat and dangerous reality. The distinction between these two ideas mirrors the difference between the traditional allegory and what is known as the modern allegory. Benjamin speaks to this in the German context of drama tragedies. In the Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin makes a relevant distinction between classical German idealism and Romantic thought on one hand, and the modern allegory on the other.[1] He projects his own ideas of what an allegory should constitute in German Baroque literature by making the following comparison: “By its very essence classicism was not permitted to behold the lack of freedom, the imperfection, the collapse of the physical, beautiful nature. But beneath its extravagant pomp, this is precisely what Baroque allegory proclaims….”[2] Benjamin additionally argues that the Baroque movement is corrective of the art of the classical and Romantic traditions which have a “false appearance of totality,” especially when merged with the theological, and which distort the true form and function of the allegory.[3] Benjamin defines an allegory as a form of expression akin to those of speech and writing, which carries certain attributes such as ambiguity, multiplicity of meanings, disunity, and a shock experience![4]

Traces of Benjamin’s allegory can additionally be found in his chapter “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.”[5] In this chapter, Benjamin distinguishes some features of his own conception of allegory, prominent amongst which is his preoccupation with the notion of experience. The concern for Benjamin is ultimately when shock enters and permeates experience. An example of a modern experience of shock can be as standard as walking through a crowd. This can inspire “fear, revulsion, and horror,” as demonstrated in both Poe’s and Baudelaire’s poetry.[6] The first line of the latter’s sonnet A une passante reads: “The deafening street was screaming all around me.”[7] Bauldaire’s poetry is dominated by a defensive response to that unique shock experience, which the poet, in one of his poems, must combat spiritually and physically. Another reflexive defense, as argued by Freud who Benjamin also cites, would be a person’s own consciousness wherein shocks are parried and protected against materializing into a negative experience or even the recollection of a previous one. Muhsin al-Musawi writes that the novella represents “the writer’s defense mechanism against uprootedness and cruel annihilation.”[8]

Most saliently to the Palestinian narrative, Benjamin does not argue for the suppression of an experience but instead seems to be emphasizing the changing nature of that experience, particularly within modernity. Moreover, the nature of experience changes in light of the form of the experience that is partaken. Forms of mechanical reproduction, for instance, carry no place for experiences because they partake in the deterioration of the ‘aura’ of those experiences.[9] According to Benjamin, its aura diminishes when a work of art becomes reproducible such as in the technology of the camera as well as in modern ‘crowd’ experiences which are “closer to mechanization,” according to Benjamin.[10] Hence, one might argue that Benjamin’s notion of experience, though preeminently an experience in its own right, is also invested with intense emotions or psychological ideas such as shock, trauma, and mechanization which might deform or distort the experience in light of Benjamin’s conception of the modern allegory, which purports such characterizations.

Within Kanafani’s novella, geography and memory become elemental to the experience of trauma and struggle. In the opening scene, Abu Qais lies on the ground near Shatt El-Arab, the estuary of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. He recalls a classroom lesson in which the location of Shatt El-Arab was taught, and moves on to measuring the distance between where he is at present and where he is going: “On the other side of this Shatt, just the other side, were all the things he was deprived of. Over there was Kuwait.”[11] Hence, memory impels geography to become more prominent, but also further traumatizes the present experience. In an analysis of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal, Benjamin argues that a “memoire involontaire” (experienced in the register of forgetting) is capable of robbing a person of the “ability to experience,” and causing the “present state of collapse of the experience that he once shared.”[12] This is precisely the case with Abu Qais, whose synesthetic experience of the “scent of the earth,” which constitutes the memoire involontaire, gives way to the realization that he is dispossessed from his homeland of Palestine, the bearer of these scents that he is immersed in recollecting in the present. In another scene, Assad is cautious about choosing a proper guide for the trip; he recalls the first time he had to undergo an ill-fated smuggling passage from Jordan to Iraq, during which he was duped by his guide into walking around the H4 pipeline stretching from Kirkuk to the Mediterranean. The journey resulted in him barely evading death and in his subsequent obervation, “If they had taken me to the desert prison, Al-Jafr, at H4, I wonder if life would be kinder than it is now.”[13] Therefore, a recollection, whether positive or negative, opens up to a traumatic and destructive present moment which removes the ‘essence’ of experience and which emphasizes an immense geographic distance and journey to be undertaken.

Edward Said in particular has written on this situating of the characters in the ‘present.’ In his analysis of Men in the Sun, Said writes that the conflict in the book turns about the “contest in the present; impelled by exile and dislocation, the Palestinian must carve a path for himself in existence.”[14] Though this statement might look futuristically upon the role of the Palestinian, it also shows how the future is dependent upon the present situation, which is in constant contestation with its own stability and struggle against dissolution. Hence, the present (or rather the present situation) becomes continuous in light of the volatility of the Palestinian political reality and the political action or lack thereof of the Palestinians who occupy its core. For instance, the attention to time in the novella is attached to the dangerous position the characters find themselves in. They must pass two checkpoints in the heart of the smuggler’s container, Abu Khaizuran; the time spent at each checkpoint is meticulously calculated and appraised, so that each minute is counted either towards the characters’ survival or demise. When the characters emerge safely the first time, they discuss the period of their submergence in the air-tight container with much anxiety. Abu Qais says, “It was six minutes. I was counting the whole time. From one to sixty, a minute…I counted six times….”[15] Passing the time it takes to go past two checkpoints while holed up in a tank, the characters’ overbearing experience of time extends to and is in fact determinant of their death. By the time Abu Khaizuran reaches the second checkpoint and is delayed, the characters, who have taken refuge in the container, are dead. The subliminal political message that Abu Khaizuran puts forth is: “Why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank?”[16] Therefore, the time to act becomes important, the opportunity for which is missed in the novella, causing Palestinian resistance to revert back to its ‘present stage’ where the present continues to represent instability, the possibility of demise, and even apathy. The world which Kanafani writes about is one of Palestinian political disenchantment; Arab leaders have either turned their backs on Palestine or enabled policies repressive of Palestinians within their own countries. By 1970, Palestinians suffered from isolation in Lebanon, were driven out of Jordan beginning with the events of Black September, and were marginalized under two post-coup administrations in Iraq and Syria. This goes to show how allegory cannot presently be grounded in a conception of the Palestinian situation as stable, especially when connotations of temporality and nature of struggle might change with the ability to resist the occupation and dispossession.

The personal story of Abu Khaizuran might represent a symbol of that resistance; it is offered as a counterpoint to the despondent story of the three characters, who refused to knock or bang on the sides of the tank, in which they were smuggled across the Iraq-Kuwait border, in order to save their own lives. This futility is further illustrated when Abu Khaizuran later becomes impotent during the 1948 war. His impotence is allegorical of the loss of nation and his own country’s political failure.  He laments his losses, but also tries to re-assert his masculinity by desiring to get married. Abu Khaizuran is then seen as attempting or desiring to regain what has been lost of his body and virility as well as his nation whereby, one can argue, a wishful restoration of masculinity is equated with a desire for nationhood and its fruition.  Though he proclaims that the motives for helping the characters cross over are greed and a plain desire to settle down, he also tells them that he had acted as their savior and “rescued them from the claws of the fat man,” who has led many to their graves through his negligent smuggling practices. He more importantly dismantles the indestructible façade of the fat man by recounting how he has stopped being unconquerable to many who take the trip, and wish to return and “throttle him.”[17] His valedictory message—knocking, inspiring resistance and action—emphasizes the more hopeful and salient message he tries to convey against the tragedy of the novella.

By that, one can largely argue that the world or situation of national identity that the author allegorizes is prone to change, even positively. There are, however, conflicting debates on how a national allegory should function and to what it should pertain. Frederic Jameson turns the “other” of the allegory into the frozen category of nationalism and national identity when he argues in a seminal essay that “all third-world texts are necessarily…allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories…”[18] Jameson continues to argue that such texts project a political dimension, and should primarily be read politically in light of the continuing experience of colonialism and struggle for independence that dominate “Third World” cultures. Incapable of reflecting private subjectivity in their works —or anything of the private domain which is inseparable from politics in third-world milieus — third-world authors cannot recount “the individual experience,” and therefore construct national allegories in relation to “the whole laborious telling of the experience of the collective itself.”[19] Hence, the collective identity is posited as public, national, and political altogether, an idea contended in the famous rebuttal offered by the critic Aijaz Ahmad.

Ahmad, first and foremost, contends that Jameson’s argument is both reductionist and positivist since nationalism is not necessarily the only political experience of all third-world countries whereby “there is nothing else to narrate” and that national allegories are not the most exclusive nor the only forms of literary device and expression used. Ahmad also objects to the totalizing of historically, economically and nationally different experiences into binary oppositions such as first/third world, and nationalism/postmodernism, to name a few.[20] With regards to the collectivity of the national experience, Ahmad uses Jameson’s private/public argument to argue that a personal experience can be a collective along the lines of other forms of collectivity such as race, gender, religion, class…etc., other than the nation, thus eliding the use of national allegory altogether.

My main concern is not whether the private or collective is allegorized, but rather whether the reader of the allegory discerns its “breaks and heterogeneities,” the gaps and discontinuity, and “the multiple polysemia…rather than homogenous representation,” all of which are attributes that Jameson considers when deciphering his national allegory.[21] Jameson, however, searches for these attributes on a textual level and does not discern their extra-textual validity. On that note, Amy Zalman, who authored a journal article on two of Kanafani’s novels, suggests a compelling reversal: she writes that the ‘extra-literary ground’ is that which is in flux while “the more stable narrative exists inside the novel.”[22] This debate invokes Benjamin’s argument showing how an allegory can function in a new way to explain the discordant realities both inside and outside the worlds of the novella. Benjamin does so by naturalizing the ambiguity of an allegory, which, according to him, is a basic characteristic that must be present (within the allegory). Ambiguity in allegory works against the law of economy, and therefore “is always the opposite of clarity and unity of meaning.”[23] One can argue that the ambiguous situation of characters that essentially become functions of the remittance system and immigration reality finds some common ground with (the outside) reality in the other/counterpart of the allegory, causing both worlds of the allegory to become more bridgeable. This holds true in Benjamin’s attribution of the notion of ‘truth’ in allegories. For him, allegory could not exist “if truth were accessible: as a mode of expression it arises in perpetual response to the human condition of being exiled from… truth.”[24] Similarly to ambiguity, “exile from truth” extends across the border between the novel and the outside world whereby the daily realities of the refugees and characters, as well as the political fruition of their homeland or Palestine as state, grow more eccentrically adverse and far-fetched, and also intersect. For example, the notion of the past homeland and the collective memory of the lost 1948 war are points that remain as fragments of memory or traces and reminders of an unattainable truth both inside and outside the novella.  Consequently, perhaps what Benjamin’s notion of allegory supports is a rethinking of the allegory based on new, non-fixed experiences that aid in opening up space for change and resistance (such as Abu Khaizuran), as well as bridging both sides of the allegory by its inherent emphasis on attributes such as ambiguity and disjunction.

Literary critics and scholars have been all too aware of the text’s polyphonic art of ambiguities, fragments, breaks and absences. Kanafani’s work has been received variously as a piece of resistance literature, a work of representation, and as a post-colonial text. Saree Makdisi, for instance, argues that the novella implicitly rejects national boundaries, a point that echoes Ahmad’s proposition. Boundaries also include: “the conceptual and political systems that go with them, above all that of the independent nation-state.”[25] Abu Khaizaran’s haunting question: “Why didn’t they knock on the sides of the tank?” suggests a call for “purposeful resistance that brings life to death,” as argued by Mausawai in the Postcolonial Arabic Novel: Debating Ambivalence. He continues: “The purgatory denounces a reality, but it also draws attention to its complications.”[26] The complications are precisely the ambiguities of Palestinian existence, one that lives despite and beyond its own death. An allegory, such as the one that Benjamin proposes, must take into account the peculiar, ambiguous, and shocking character of the Palestinian situation. In other words, the (political) situation to which a reader might attach or affix an allegorical relationship is an unstable and fluid one. Benjamin’s pertinent criticism of the allegory adopts in its framework this dissonance between the two worlds of the allegory, namely by attaching new meanings and attributes to them as well as attempting to bridge them. Trauma and shock are pertinent to any experience being allegorized. The tension between national and non-national or modern allegory presented in this essay strikes at the core of a contemporary debate on Arabic literature between Jameson and Ahmad. Indeed, the modern allegory should redefine itself to fit and be able to represent a reality that cannot possibly be defined.

The post “Men in the Sun” and the Modern Allegory appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Towering over the Senegalese capital of Dakar, the recently completed African Renaissance Monument casts a long shadow that stretches out across the surrounding suburb of Ouakom. Ahead of these three colossal bronze figures – a man, a woman and a child – is the Atlantic Ocean. Behind, an otherwise barren landscape is scattered with tell tale signs of development: here a cluster of cranes, there the foundations of a hotel rising up from the beach scrub. The skyline of Dakar is changing.

The brainchild of former Senegalese president Abodulaye Wade, the 49-metre high African Renaissance Monument (Le Monument de laRenaissance Africaine) was billed as an effort to challenge “centuries of ignorance, intolerance and racism” about Africa (Ba, 2009). To this end the monument represents a confluence of two distinct agendas. On the one hand, it embodies a moment of enormous optimism. As the name suggests, the statue signifies a rebirth of sorts; the right to a future just over the horizon signalled by the bronze child’s outstretched hand. In aiming to “match the Statue of Liberty or Paris’ Eiffel tower” (Ibid), however, the ARM also stakes out a claim in a global arena of national monumentalisation. This statue does not merely celebrate; it competes. The latter goal is complicated by a number of factors: a lack of transparency around the cost of the project, labour secured from a North Korean investment cartel, and an “un-Islamic”, even Stalinist aesthetic belie its scope and ambition. Collectively these concerns have engendered extensive debate in the global press. While Wade’s supporters argue that the statue brings life to Africa’s “common destiny” (Walker, 2010), celebrated Cameroonian curator Simon Njami has called the monument (in O’Toole, 2012) the “‘most outrageously stupid thing in the world”.

African Renaissance Monument – Photo by Author

In terms of sheer schizophrenic impact, the ARM is perhaps an apt metaphor for another giant looming large in the Dakarois cultural imaginary. The Dakar Biennale or Dak’art, the oldest mega show of its kind on the African continent, is likewise the meeting place of two ideological commitments that can make for uneasy bedfellows. As the descendent of poet, politician and philosopher Léopold Sédar Senghor’s “First World Festival of Negro Arts”, the biennale is closely bound up in the rhetoric of a contemporized pan-Africanism[1]. In its most recent incarnations the event has also strategically aspired to internationalism. To extend my metaphor, Dak’art turns its gaze to the West with its feet still anchored in African soil and as the African Renaissance Monument suggests, this can at times be an awkward, even inherently unstable, cultural and political location. In the text that follows I briefly chart some moments of friction that emerge as a consequence of these two ideological metanarratives overlapping in Dak’Art 2014, and evaluate to what extent the biennale has succeeded in reconciling a pan-African regionalism with its alignment to a global art world.

Rather than polarise these discourses and risk rendering them mutually exclusive, I hope to examine their points of intersection (and cross-pollination) in order to ask after Rasheed Araeen, “Can Africa assert its independence or develop its own direction and vision…without critically confronting the dominant structures of art around the world today?” (Araeen 2003: 100).

The theme of this year’s Dak’art, “Producing the Common”, makes for an interesting point of departure. In the show’s comprehensive accompanying catalogue, curators Elise Atangana, Abdelkader Damani and Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi establish their approach as “a conscious act of engaging what is collectively shared” that “take[s] into account what effects everyone, the Whole-World” (2014: 21). The phrase whole-world (Tout-Monde) is drawn from the writings of Martiniquan poet Edouard Glissant to describe a field of social relations: a world configured as an archipelago of “islands, isthmuses, peninsulas, lands thrusting out, mixing and connecting…” (cited in Dash, 2011). It is a radically egalitarian sentiment that also leaves room for cultural specificity, sharing some significant ground with the work of another theorist invoked at length in Dak’art press materials, Michael Hardt. Hardt’s conception of the common, from which “Producing the Common” takes its cue, operates as a politically and socially charged territory:

[The common] is not the realm of sameness or indifference. It is the scene of encounter of social and political differences, at times characterized by agreement and at others antagonism, at times composing political bodies and at others decomposing them (2009).

As a guiding principal of the biennale, “Producing the Common” thus locates Dak’art 2014 not only at the tense intersection of politics and aesthetics, but also at a meeting point between the global black consciousness movement brought to bear by Glissant[2], and the Western political philosophy of thinkers like Hardt. In the space of Dak’art’s catalogue, such bodies of thought seemingly sit comfortably side by side.

Read in conjunction, however, the references to Hardt and Glissant that punctuate Dak’art’s press resources also couch the show in a resoundingly academic rhetoric. I cannot resist recalling the experience of sitting at a conference at the primary Dak’art venue of the Village de la Biennale, translation headset in hand, and listening to the women behind me parody the academic language of a catalogue essay. They threw words back and forth teasingly, taking turns to find a pleasing turn of phrase: “interdependence”, “arbitrating”, and “communitarian solidarity”.

In framing the exhibition in a particular lexicon – the language of the academic, the university, the elite – it is worth asking for whom the triumvirate of curators aim to produce this “common” The 62 odd artists on the main exhibition? The Senegalese public? An international art market? Glissant’s whole world? In an earlier essay, ‘Curating Africa, Curating the Contemporary’, Nzewi offers the model of the counter-public by way of explanation. His is a public called into being by a curatorial approach that establishes Dak’art unambiguously as a “counter-exhibition”. He advances that it is the “discourse [of Dak’art] which imagines and produces a pan-African ‘exhibitionary’ world” at odds with a dominant biennale typology (2012: 6-7).

Dak’art curators (left to right): Abdelkader Damani, Elise Atangana, Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi

“Counter-publics”, as the notion is expanded in the work of American social theorist Michael Warner, are a kind of bounded audience at odds with a prevailing social paradigm. It is worth noting Warner’s first criterion by which the parameters of a public are defined. “Publics,” he writes, “are a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself” (2002: 49). They exist only as the end for which information is manufactured, or in the case of Dak’art, for whom exhibitions are organized. Such publics come into beingby virtue of being addressed (2002: 49-51). There is a degree, then, to which Dak’art forges its own countercultural arena of reception, generating a unique brand of pan-African internationalism that it simultaneously defines and delimits. Bearing that in mind, I am inclined to argue that there is, still, room to expend critical energy inventing (or perhaps reinventing) a register that reflects the needs of a contemporary African public. Following Nzewi, if Dak’art’s objective is to “imagine and produce” a pan-African exhibitionary model, particularly one that falls under the rubric of egalitarianism, surely inclusivity would be a worthy cause célèbre?

In a way I am doing an injustice to Dak’art 2014 by reading the exhibition through its theoretical framework. The active “producing” contained within “producing the common” was more evident in the main exhibition space of the Village de la Biennale. There, diaspora artists and African residents shared a level playing field unbounded by either theoretical partitions or artificial national borders. The tone was set by Angolan artist Kiluanji Kia Henda’s installation “As god wants and devil likes it” (O.R.G.A.S.M. Congress) (2011-2014) in the central courtyard, which modifies the European Union logo to include the African continent at its centre. Henda’s accompanying series of photographs, equal parts staged and manipulated documentary footage, featured prominent European leaders in Afros and cornrows. The resulting scenes were playful, but also represented a critique of Africa’s place in a global political arena. In re-signifying his subjects, Henda figures the possibility of re-scribing not just a bitter colonial past but also a political present and, indeed, a future. His codified politicians are both caricatures of Africanness and placeholders of a sort. And indeed, the vision of an Africa at the heart of a European emblem – an Africa that acts as a centrifugal force around which Europe must operate – is a potent symbol for the agenda that undercuts Dak’Art.

Although opening a day late (and who gets to say, really, that exhibitions should function according to a preordained schedule) Dak’art’s main venue was polished and sharply curated. Standing amongst the cosmopolitan crowd of collectors, curators and artists, I was reminded of the biennale’s many siblings the world over: perhaps Documenta, Manifesta or the Venice Biennale. Filipovic et al observe that the nomination ‘biennale’ frequently refers less to a specific periodicity – simply a bi-annual art event – and more to a model of exhibition practice that is “often grandiose in scale, sometimes dispersed across several locations in a city, [and] at times locally embedded through site-specific commissions while being global in ambition” (2010: 14). A biennale conceived as such is not a name only, but rather a series of aesthetic and critical standards capable of legitimating certain curatorial models, certain artists, and certain spaces.

O.R.G.A.S.M., by Kiluanji Kia Henda. Photo by author.

Let me be clear. Conforming to the standards of an international biennale typology is not a fault, nor am I levelling a critique of that aspiration here. Calling for something as reductive as “local flavour” would be too much like demanding that selected work exhibit an “African essence”. Ironically, the biennale selection committee upheld that same principle of “essence” as a necessary precondition for entry until Dak’art’s 2004 iteration (Fillitz, 2011). It is through such ill-defined criteria, taken on board unequivocally, that the mechanisms of colonialism are institutionalized and sustained. And make no mistake, such mechanisms are still at work. As Araeen asks of the present generation of African artists, “If the social, economic and political conditions of Africa are still struggling against the global hegemony of the West, how can its art be free from this hegemony?” (2010: 100).

That said I would like to point out that Dak’art 2014’s detailed (if madcap) press page links to an article from Italy’s Domus magazine that opens with the line “For the first time in its history, Dak’art has begun to resemble a real biennale” (Pensa, 2014, my emphasis). Written by the director of Wikipedia’s collaborative WikiAfrica initiative, the review is exhaustive and full of flair and critical dexterity. The authoritative judgement implied in that first statement, however, is compounded by the addition of the line “From what they say [the curators] seem well aware that a biennial – even in Africa – can certainly not represent a continent” (Ibid, my emphasis). Needless to say the author is not alone in this sentiment (over the years, such conversations have plagued Dak’art) but she does explicitly foreground something important. Adhering to the standards of international biennales reifies those same standards and ascribes universality to them, allowing for a category like “real biennale” to operate with relative impunity. And who polices the boundaries of that definition, after all? Who decides what constitutes a sufficiently ‘real’ exhibition?

It is in Dak’Art’s fringe programme, known colloquially as the ‘Off’, that the “realness” of a biennale is further complicated. The ‘Off’ is not confined within an orderly exhibition model. Over the course of Dak’art’s month long run, more than 250 artists exhibit work in the city and surrounds. Artwork materialises in disused warehouses and car dealerships, along bridges and in courtyards. I would suggest that the ‘Off’ allows for Nzewi’s imagined counter-public to be more truly activated. The mode of address in the streets of Dakar is less clearly defined, the art-public relation more protean and nebulous. Thus, “the common” is untethered from the curatorial dialogues engineered between works and expanded to encompass a more complex social sphere of engagement. An artwork that appears in the street – that most public of public spaces, and ideally available to all – necessitates, even demands, a different tone and register of engagement.

This is not always without complication. In the case of “Precarious Imaging: Visibility and Media Surrounding African Queerness”, such engagements were far from polite. Curated by Koyo Kouoh and Ato Malinda at the Raw Material Company venue in suburban Dakar, the show sought to profile explorations of queer African experience. Among others, the show featured South African artist Zanele Muholi’s Faces and Phases portrait series of black lesbian women, and Kenyan artist Jim Chuchu’s Pagan, exploring contemporary African homophobia as a colonial hangover. Within a day of opening, religious fundamentalists had attacked the gallery space, broken windows and destroyed light fittings on its front facade. According to Senegalese newspaper Le Monde, Mamè Mactar Guèye, vice-president of Senegalese Islamic organization Jamra, spearheaded the attack. In a subsequent television interview, Guèye explained, “This event is supposed to promote our culture, but proves to be propaganda for unions which are against nature. Undeniably, this edition of Dak’Art has been detrimental to our morality and to our laws” (Forbes, 2014). The show closed early due to pressure from the Senegalese state.

To me, this incident represents a clash between the immediate conditions of locality and globality; between the enactment of a local political logic and an aspirational internationalist agenda. In a predominantly Islamic country where perceived acts of homosexuality remain illegal, an exhibition of queer visual culture imagines and produces publics outside the bounds of the immediate political present. That is not to say those publics do not already exist- the opening event was duly attended by a diverse group of local and international artists and activists, some of them very outspoken figures in the Dakar community. The press release by Secretary General of Dak’art Babacar Mbaye Diop’s, however, suggests that these counter-publics exist beyond the purview of Dak’art. He formally disassociated the biennale from the troubled (and troubling) ‘Off’ show, bluntly stating that Dak’art was “not responsible for collateral exhibitions” (Forbes, 2014). As a crucial insight into the biennale’s objectives, this event manifests the frictions that exist when local particularities encounter internationalism and both commitments are equally compromised.

Critic Clementine Deliss, describing the first iteration of Dak’Art in 1992, acknowledges what she deems a “misguided faith in the so-called international art circuit” that has “deterred the organizers from developing a pan-African approach” (1993: 136). Notably, her review is titled “When internationalism falls apart”. Deliss finds fault with both the biennale’s pan-Africanist and internationalist ambitions. For her, writing in the early 90’s, the event had a long way to go. As Fillitz (2011) has suggested, though, it is all too easy to force upon Dak’art the goal of dismantling the dominant aesthetic discourses of a Euro-American art world without taking into account its ambivalent cultural location or, indeed, the needs of exhibiting artists.

Much like the African Renaissance Monument, Dak’art is caught between looking outward and inland. Situated at the meeting point of distinct national and international cultural agendas, the event is necessarily conflicted at times. It is important to keep in mind, however, that the intersection of pan-Africanism and internationalism – that metaphorical crossroads – is also a vantage point. From that unique point of view, new worlds are visible.

The post Dak’art 2014: At a crossroads appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

1. Les palimpsestes verbo-culturels de Mai 68 : une analyse lexi-culturelle des médias

Dans cet article, le mot-clé « événement » est presque un synonyme du mot « parole », d’où mon attention à la lexiculture, qui représente l’une des méthodologies de recherche les plus actuelles permettant d’analyser la culture d’une communauté, justement, par son système sémiotique, c’est?à?dire le langage. Galisson définit les expressions que nous prenons en considération ici comme des « palimpsestes verbaux » obtenus par la « délexicalisation » de l’énoncé de base et sa substitution par un « sur?énoncé », devenant ainsi des révélateurs culturels, donc des « palimpsestes verbo-culturel » (P.V.C.). Seul celui qui vit dans la même « sémiosis sociale » peut les reconnaître, d’où l’existence d’une « identité collective » qui « possède le mystérieux pouvoir d’agréger, de solidariser, d’aider à vivre ensemble des individus qui se reconnaissent en elle (implicitement, ou explicitement)[1] ». Dans la société française, Mai 68 semble ne pas être tombé dans l’oubli[2] et de nombreux interlocuteurs partagent encore sa mémoire… discursive. Cette section propose une analyse lexicale de huit de ces P.V.C.

• « Sous LE PAVÉ… (la page) »

Il s’agit titre d’un site Web d’une coopérative dont le but est l’éducation populaire, enjeu d’éducation au politique et au social. Elle enseigne à « prendre conscience de l’importance de se révolter » et de « s’entendre sur les mots[3] ». Le P.V.C. dérive du sous-énoncé « sous les pavés, la plage », par une délexicalisation avec filiation phonique et avec modification par suppression phonémique (plage à page). On remarque une transformation du nom, du pluriel au singulier, et du caractère graphique conférant de l’importance au terme « pavé », ainsi qu’une substitution d’un nom commun à un autre (plage à page); les points de suspension et les parenthèses sont ajoutés. Bien plus, il faut remarquer la polysémie du terme « pavé » (défini de façon dépréciative comme un gros livre), à partir de laquelle un jeu de mot s’établit. Le « pavé » fait appel à la « page », créant une synecdoque et véhiculant le message principal de l’association : l’éducation populaire pour créer les bases de la compréhension du monde capitaliste afin de le démanteler, en donnant importance aux « pages de la vie » de chaque citoyen.

• « Sous les pavés, Libé… mais sous la pluie, rien de nouveau »

La source médiatique de ce P.V.C. est un article du 18 avril 2008, « France Inter célèbre Mai 68… à sa manière »[4]. Il s’agit de sous?titres à deux paragraphes de l’article. Les sous-énoncés en question sont « sous les pavés, la plage » et « rien de nouveau sous le soleil ».Ce palimpseste est fort intéressant, car on peut l’interpréter de deux façons. Si on le considère comme une expression unique, alors il s’agit d’un palimpseste-amalgame qui mélange les deux sous-énoncés ci-dessus, tandis que si on les considère comme deux palimpsestes séparés, les remarques à faire sont multiples. Le premier est une modification de l’originel par une délexicalisation sans filiation phonique et avec déstructuration syntaxique : le nom commun est remplacé par un nom propre (plage à Libé), abréviation de Libération. Le deuxième est toujours une delexicalisation, sans filiation phonique et sans déstructuration syntaxique, mais avec une inversion des syntagmes par rapport à l’expression originelle, créant ainsi un parallèle avec le palimpseste précédent. Or, puisque la lexiculture nous permet de jouer avec les mots, pourquoi ne pas voir dans le célèbre « nihil novi sub sole », en français « rien de nouveau sous le soleil », une source d’inspiration qui arrive à Bernard Cousin pour créer son slogan, « sous les pavés, la plage » ?

• « Sous les pavés, des bulles »

La source médiatique de ce P.V.C. est une émission télévisée sur Mai 68, diffusée sur Public Senat le 2 mai 2008. Le sous-énoncé est encore une fois « sous les pavés, la plage », transformé par une délexicalisation sans filiation phonique et sans déstructuration syntaxique, vu que le nom « plage » est remplacé par un autre nom de la même catégorie, « bulles ». La seule différence est dans le nombre et dans le partitif qui suggèrent l’idée d’une quantité considérable et indéfinie, en opposition à l’idée de la « plage », déterminée et définie. Au-delà des déterminatifs employés, les deux énoncés jouent sur leur signification connotative : le sous-énoncé définit le caractère imaginaire et lyrique de Mai 68, alors que le P.V.C. renvoie, par une relation métonymique, à la création des bandes dessinées auxquelles l’émission télévisée a consacré un Spécial Mai 68. Les bulles représentent donc les BD ressorties de l’action à la fois révolutionnaire et poétique déroulée sur la rue, dont le pavé est le symbole. Il faut donc remarquer un même rapport symétrique des énoncés aux niveaux non seulement linguistique et grammatical, mais aussi au niveau de la signification, ce qui exige un travail d’abstraction et d’imagination, rappelant toujours l’atmosphère de Mai 68.

Dans cette catégorie il y a d’autres P.V.C., comme « sous les pavés la terre », « sous les pavés, le design », « sous les pavés, la grève » ou « sous les pavés, l’underground ».

• « Pour consommer sans entraves »

Ce P.V.C. se retrouve dans un article intitulé « Que reste-t-il de 68 ? » dans Le nouvel Observateur. Il contient un entretien avec Daniel Cohn?Bendit et Luc Ferry, écrit le 17 janvier 2008 et inséré dans un dossier spécial sur Mai 68.Le sous-énoncé est« pour jouir sans entraves », qui subit une délexicalisation sans filiation phonique et sans déstructuration syntaxique. Le verbe « jouir » est remplacé par un mot de la même catégorie grammaticale, c’est?à-dire le verbe « consommer ». Et c’est à partir de ce verbe que l’on peut saisir la critique que Luc Ferry lance envers les événements de Mai 68, qui ont été pour lui « la première grande libération de la société de consommation de masse ». Le P.V.C. s’insère en effet dans un cotexte qui révèle un ton plus que critique sur le concept de « consommation », créant des champs sémantiques opposés, celui de la « destruction » et celui de la « révolution ». Du dernier font partie les mots « mouvement », « valeurs », « libération » et « lutte », alors que du premier font partie les termes « casser », « destruction » et « déconstruction ». De plus, il faut noter que le sème « libération » pourrait appartenir aux deux champs sémantiques, mais sa collocation dans la structure de la phrase confirme la critique de l’énonciateur, Luc Ferry, associant au terme « libération » une idée négative. De fait, si Mai 68 a toujours été défini comme un mouvement de libération des valeurs culturelles et morales, pour Ferry il s’agit d’une « libération de la société de consommation de masse » ou encore d’« une révolution de futurs consommateurs qui changeront de portable tous les six mois ». La phrase en question est ainsi structurée :

Mai 68 a été un mouvement non pas de lutte contre la société de consommation, mais la première grande libération de la société de consommation de masse.

À travers la rhétorique de la négativité et la particule adversative, Luc Ferry oppose deux idées contrastantes : ce que Mai 68 aurait dû être, c’est?à?dire une « lutte contre » la consommation de masse, et ce qui au lieu se serait réellement passé, c’est?à?dire une « libération » de la consommation de masse.

Ce n’est donc pas un hasard si l’émetteur change le verbe « jouir » avec le verbe « consommer », conférant au slogan un ton de moquerie et de critique.

• « La culture c’est la chienlit »

Il s’agit d’un slogan tiré d’une photo d’un blog personnel qui se réfère à une manifestation de protestation de la part des Verts contre une émission de télé?réalité dans le troisième arrondissement de Paris, « Star’ac »[5]. Le sous-énoncé « la chienlit, c’est lui » est transformé par une délexicalisation sans filiation phonique et sans déstructuration syntaxique dans la première partie de l’énoncé. Ainsi, le nom commun « chienlit » est remplacé par un nom de la même catégorie, « culture », tandis que, dans la deuxième partie, on assiste à une déstructuration syntaxique par laquelle le pronom « lui » est remplacé par un nom commun « chienlit ». Entre le sous-énoncé et le P.V.C., un chiasme se crée, changeant d’ordre les termes de l’expression : dans la source, c’est le terme « chienlit » qui est mis en évidence en incarnant la figure de Charles de Gaulle, à l’époque critiquée par les soixante-huitards, tandis que dans le P.V.C. le terme en évidence est la « culture » considérée après comme « chienlit ». Ce rapprochement est une évidente dénonciation de ce type d’émission, (de télé?réalité), proposée comme « culturelle » mais qui en réalité est l’exaspération de la société de consommation contemporaine. Bien évidemment, le procédé, tout à fait ironique, utilisé par les énonciateurs est basé sur l’antiphrase : ils affirment le faux pour sous?entendre leur critique féroce d’un type de « culture », jugée déviante, et contre ses partisan. Ce sont ces derniers qui auraient transformé la culture en une mascarade, une véritable « chienlit ».

Dans cette catégorie, il faut rappeler aussi l’expression « La chienlit, c’est Sarkozy ».

• « L’imagination prend la Bastille »

C’est le titre d’un reportage sur la marche pour une sixième République[6]. Le sous-énoncé « l’imagination prend le pouvoir » est reformulé par une délexicalisation sans filiation phonique et avec déstructuration syntaxique d’un nom commun à un nom propre, indiquant une institution publique. La Bastille est interprétée par l’historiographie comme un symbole historique de liberté et de révolution. Au moment de la Révolution française, elle symbolisait le pouvoir despotique du Roi, qui l’employait comme prison. Le 14 juillet 1789, le peuple français l’occupe et la détruit, d’où la célébration de ce jour comme fête nationale. Malgré sa destruction, le mythe de la Bastille existe aujourd’hui encore, constituant donc une mémoire à la fois historique et discursive, et très forte puisqu’on parle de révolution. Dans ce reportage, en fait, on prépare une marche symbolique vers la « Bastille », donc vers la liberté, et les instruments les plus utilisés sont les slogans, réhabilitant le style de Mai 68, tels que « Nous, on peut », « J’ai des mots à faire défiler », ou le titre de l’émission.

• « Obama, nous sommes tous des Oussama »

La source médiatique de ce P.V.C. est un article de Libération datant du 14 septembre 2012, écrit à la suite d’une tentative d’assaut de l’ambassade américaine à Tunis par des salafistes protestant contre le film américain « L’innocence des Musulmans »[7]. Ce palimpseste donne le titre à l’article, mais c’est aussi un slogan crié par un manifestant lors de l’assaut.

Le célèbre sous-énoncé en question est « nous sommes tous des juifs allemands » qui subit une délexicalisation sans filiation phonique et avec déstructuration syntaxique, de fait la modification voit le passage d’un adjectif (dans ce cas deux, « juifs » et « allemands ») à un nom propre, « Oussama ». De plus, il y a des transformations ultérieures dans l’énoncé : les énonciateurs ajoutent à leur slogan le nom propre, Obama, président de l’Amérique qui rime avec Oussama, prénom de Ben Laden, en créant une rime interne et donnant une structure circulaire à l’énoncé.Le cri de solidarité que les soixante-huitards avaient crié à Daniel Cohn?Bendit se transforme en un cri de révolte et de défense de leur religion de la part des Musulmans salafistes[8]. Ce slogan évoque toujours une idée d’union et de solidarité qui peut s’élargir bien évidemment au journaliste qui l’a d’ailleurs choisi comme titre de son article. Outre la provocation faite réellement par les Musulmans contre les Américains, je pourrais y voir aussi la solidarité de certains Français, en premier le journaliste et le journal Libération, s’exprimant contre l’islamophobie.

Suivant cet exemple, je peux citer aussi « Nous sommes tous des Arabes[9] », « Nous sommes tous la France[10] » et « Nous sommes tous Américains[11] ».

• « Nous sommes là pour boire »

Il s’agit d’un slogan pour la campagne publicitaire du vin de la région Languedoc-Roussillon, l’une des plus grandes productrices de vins au monde, par la vaste extension de son vignoble totalisant une surface de 40 000 hectares.Le sous-énoncé « Nous sommes le pouvoir » est modifié par une délexicalisation avec filiation phonique et avec modification par fragmentation morphemique basée sur une assonance entre le mot « boire » et le syntagme « là pour boire ».Au niveau linguistique, l’énoncé évoque une masse, désignée par le déictique subjectif « nous », prête à l’action, à l’acte de boire : le ton du P.V.C. transmet une idée d’exigence qui, hors de parallélisme, peut vouloir faire l’éloge de la qualité du vin très demandée et mettre en évidence la grandeur, en termes d’extension physique aussi, de la production de vin, tout cela souligné par ce jeu phonique basé sur l’assonance entre le verbe « boire » et le terme « pouvoir ».

Sans être en mesure de donner une quantité considérable d’exemples, mais du moins satisfaisante pour le but établi, je peux constater que les expressions liées à Mai 68 sont nombreuses : en particulier, me fait réfléchir la provenance de ces P.V.C. soit dans des sites Web reconnus et officiels, soit dans des journaux plus périphériques ou bien des blogs personnels, ce qui confirme l’actualité de l’événement, malgré les décennies passées. Il a pénétré dans la culture des Français, puisqu’il fait partie d’une étape sociale et historique fondamentale pour l’Hexagone. Évidemment, Mai 68 est non seulement descendu dans la rue, mais il y est resté! Bien plus, selon le deuxième axe de ma réflexion, qui essaie de saisir le lien entre culture et médias, ces derniers sont vus comme porteurs de réalité sociale et donc de bagage culturel et historique de chaque peuple. Les P.V.C. en sont un exemple significatif.

2. Mai 68 et sa mémoire discursive dans les médias : les mots-événements

À propos du lien entre culture et médias, Sophie Moirand, soulignant l’importance du concept de « culture partagée », a postulé l’existence d’une « mémoire des mots » « voyageant aucours du temps, d’une communauté à une autre et d’une époque à une autre » selon l’orientation dialogique de Bakhtine, et que « tout membre d’une collectivité parlante ne trouve pas des mots neutres libres des appréciations ou des orientations d’autrui, amis des mots habités par des voix autres[12] ». Dans un autre travail, la chercheuse insiste sur le fait que les mots définissent l’événement et l’inscrivent dans un imaginaire commun grâce à la fonction des médias :

Ce ne sont pas les interlocuteurs qui interagissent directement dans la presse, mais les textes, les énoncés, les mots eux-mêmes, les titres, les photos, les dessins de presse, avec les discours qu’ils transportent, ceux qu’ils anticipent et ceux qu’ils rencontrent sur l’aire de la page… Les discours des médias sont essentiellement des discours « médiateurs » d’autres discours[13].

Elle nous montre la force énonciative des textes médiatiques et leur interdisciplinarité, car on peut étudier les textes d’un point de vue non seulement linguistique, mais culturel et sociologique. Charaudeau a postulé l’existence d’un modèle socio-communicationnel du discours où existe un « contrat médiatique[14] » basé sur « l’information » et la « captation » liant le texte au lecteur : le texte médiatique doit informer et en même temps capturer l’attention de son lecteur par l’emploi d’un langage, dirions-nous, « séduisant » qui fasse appel à un imaginaire, culturel et linguistique, collectif. L’approche de la chercheuse Moirand, soutenue par les thèses du professeur Charaudeau, se prête donc bien à l’analyse du langage de Mai 68 qui a envahi le domaine médiatique et qui révèle la complexité non seulement du discours médiatique même, mais des mécanismes socio-culturels qui en dérivent. L’événement Mai 68 est repris dans la presse d’aujourd’hui imposant sa majesté historique à travers un fonctionnement intertextuel, confirmant encore une fois le pouvoir de la parole sauvage, agissante et révolutionnaire qui encore au XXI^e siècle ne cesse de faire irruption dans la vie sociale de l’Hexagone.

Dans cette partie, j’analyserai un corpus de cinq articles de presse, évidemment groupés autour du moment discursif de Mai 68 dont l’air se fait sentir au long des textes à travers les mots-événements. Ils datent de 2007 à 2012 et ils concernent des sujets d’actualité variés.

2.2 Analyse du corpus

Le premier article, écrit en 2007 et paru dans Le monde diplomatique,explique le scénario du documentaire « LIP, l’imagination au pouvoir » sur un mouvement ouvrier en avril 1973. Bien évidemment, le contenu se prête à la réhabilitation, presque spontanée, dirions-nous, des mots?événements de Mai 68 : de fait, l’annonce des licenciements de l’usine LIP déclenche la révolte où les acteurs principaux sont les ouvriers, les syndicats et les patrons, et qui mieux que ceux-ci peuvent réhabiliter la mémoire de Mai ? Au cours du texte, l’auteur semble utiliser des mots qui attestent son savoir sur Mai 68, comme « grève », « camarades », « ouvriers », et de certaines expressions aussi, notamment « tout est possible » rappelant l’atmosphère de rêverie et de lutte soixante?huitarde. Au premier paragraphe, on lit :

le syndicaliste ouvrier Charles Piaget se montre hostile à la grève. Il préfère que ses camarades freinent le rythme des machines et celui des mains ; mais« ils avaient tellement les cadences dans la peau que c’était pas possible de ralentir ». Ils arrêtèrent de travailler dix minutes par heure.

L’image du rythme des « machines » et des « cadences » incessantes n’est?elle pas un écho direct aux revendications des ouvriers de l’époque ? Les mots deviennent donc symbole d’intertextualité d’un slogan soixante?huitard « BRISONS LES VIEUX ENGRENAGES » : il rappelle l’image des engrenages qui roulent sans cesse et écrasent l’homme. Les « usines », au centre de la contestation de Mai, reviennent au cours du texte à côté d’un autre slogan, « tu n’as pas besoin de lui », se référant au « patron » qui, avec « l’ouvrier » et les « camarades », définissent les acteurs concernés dans ce type d’événement. Ce qui est intéressant, selon mon interprétation, c’est la présence d’une phrase que l’auteur a voulu mettre exprès pour stimuler la mémoire du lecteur envers Mai 68, c’est?à?dire « y compris sur les plages ». L’extrait se poursuit ainsi :

Que faire de toutes ces montres ? On décide de les vendre et de remettre en route l’usine pour en produire de nouvelles, cette fois sans patron (« tu n’as pas besoin de lui »). La vente est un énorme succès, y compris sur les plages.

Il est évident que les montres de l’usine LIP à Besançon ne sont effectivement pas vendues sur les plages, (même si personne ne pourrait l’empêcher !); par contre, leur image m’a spontanément renvoyée au célèbre slogan « sous les pavés, la plage » et à la rêverie et à la puissance que les soixante-huitards confiaient au pavé, leur symbole de révolte, ce qui donne une identité culturelle au texte.

L’idée de rêverie mène à un autre article qui tisse un réseau de mots?événements sur Mai 68. Déjà le titre, « Sur les pavés, le pochoir », considéré lui-même comme un P.V.C.[15], plonge le lecteur dans cette « sous-culture » : la proposition « sur », renvoyant à la superficie du pavé, confirme l’idée de matérialité et de créativité, puisque l’article suggère des techniques pour dessiner sur les murs et décorer la rue. D’où l’emploi du terme « pochoir », l’instrument privilégié par l’illustratrice Keri Smith et auteure du guide Réveillez la rue! Idées, astuces et outils pour embellir le quotidien. Si, dans l’énoncé?source, le pavé est lié à la plage par une dimension presque onirique, dans le P.V.C. sa signification réside pour la plupart dans sa dimension dénotative : le pavé est au service d’un instrument concret, le « pochoir », qui déclenche de toute façon l’imagination et encourage les gens à pratiquer l’art de la rue. Le titre du livre renvoie donc à Mai 68 et à l’endroit le plus « massacré », c’est?à?dire la rue. D’autres désignations, comme par exemple « graffiti », « murs », « imagination » et « beauté ». Évidemment, ce dernier me rappelle le célèbre slogan, « la beauté est dans la rue ». Cette forme verbale s’unifie à d’autres au cours du texte, comme par exemple « créer de la beauté », « disséminer de petits mots poétiques » et enfin le titre même du livre « réveillez la rue », ce qui désigne le moment discursif de Mai 68 et en particulier son aspect à la fois lyrique et réactionnaire.

Cet aspect est repris dans un autre article tiré de Libération et publié le 20 mars 2010, « La jeunesse kurde prend le maquis[16] », où reviennent les mêmes acteurs des articles précédents, comme par exemple « camarades » et « jeunes », ainsi que d’autres mots?événements qui désignent Mai 68, à savoir « actions », « cocktails Molotov » ou « guérilla ». Dans ce cas aussi, il s’agit d’un P.V.C. dont le sujet est repris dans l’image de « jeunes camarades » qui rejoignent la guérilla kurde pour prendre le maquis. Il est intéressant de remarquer que non seulement le journaliste réhabilite l’imaginaire de Mai 68, notamment dans le titre de l’article, mais les témoignages des jeunes manifestants confirment l’idée que derrière chaque action révolutionnaire le souvenir de Mai 68 est bien fort, d’ailleurs les mots le confirment. En guise d’illustration, voici des extraits de l’article en question :

« Mon fils a 14 ans. De temps en temps, il participait avec ses camarades de classe aux manifestations dans le centre?ville. Il ne parlait pas beaucoup avec nous. Un soir, il n’est pas rentré à la maison. On était inquiets. Je suis allé voir ses camarades et on m’a informé qu’il était parti avec un groupe d’une trentaine d’autres jeunes »,raconte un fonctionnaire de Diyarbakir, la capitale du sud?est de la Turquie.

L’une des entrées du mot « camarade » dans le dictionnaire implique aussi l’idée d’un groupe solide et compact de gens[17]; on lit dans le texte que ces jeunes se nomment « Jeunesse » et qu’« ils détestent les journalistes et affirment « s’exprimer dans des actions avec cocktails Molotov et non dans les salles de conférence de presse ». Ce témoignage sous?entend aussi l’idéologie de Mai 68 qui oppose les actions de rue aux « salles de conférence » typiquement bourgeoises et ce n’est pas un hasard si le journaliste nous explique que l’origine de ces jeunes est justement bourgeoise, sous l’exemple des soixante-huitards.Dans un autre article, « Comment les conflits sociaux minent l’Afrique du Sud », publié dans Challenge le 31 août 2012, et traitant des conflits sociaux dans l’Afrique du Sud, apparaissent les mêmes mots?événements, comme « camarades » et « pavé » à côté d’autres nouveaux termes, par exemple « gréviste », « réformes » et « revendications », et d’expressions métaphoriques, notamment « nombre de salariés battent le pavé en dansant et en chantant leurs revendications ». Les acteurs de l’événement, « salariés », et les termes « pavé » et « revendications », avec les actions verbales « danser » et « chanter », sont une référence évidente à l’atmosphère de Mai. Bien plus, l’article se conclut par un témoignage d’un manifestant qui ressemble au ton des slogans soixante-huitards, on lit « Ils nous ignorent », où l’opposition des pronoms « ils » et « nous » est une constante que l’on trouve souvent sur les murs parisiens à l’époque et derrière laquelle se cache une opposition sociale entre la bourgeoisie, définie par le déictique objectif « ils », et le prolétariat qui se fortifie dans l’action collective et intime du « nous ». L’imaginaire de Mai revient dans deux autres articles, « Grève générale en Grèce contre la rigueur », tiré de Challenge et publié le 11 mai 2011, et « Grèce : manifestations et débrayages contre le nouveau train de rigueur », publié dans l’Express le 12 septembre 2011 concernant la crise et les protestations en Grèce. Ici, les mêmes mots?événements apparaissent, notamment « cocktail Molotov », « pavé », « grève » et « manifestation ». En particulier, l’expression « battre le pavé » est présente dans le sous?titre du premier, « Des milliers de manifestants ont commencé à battre le pavé » et dans le deuxième, « les médecins, dont les salaires sont menacés de nouvelles réductions, et les enseignants dénonçant la grande misère de l’éducation publique, ont aussi battu le pavé mercredi pour dénoncer le nouveau tour de vis ». Le pavé, emblème de la révolte, revient comme outil principal dans toutes les manifestations et il est associé à l’image de la rue. Dans le deuxième article, l’expression verbale « descendre dans la rue » apparait dans le contexte de lutte sociale et de sauvegarde des droits personnels. Bien plus, l’article relate les « banderoles » qui ont dominé la manifestation de la Grèce, à savoir « Ils nous poussent vers l’extrême pauvreté » où l’opposition connotative des déictiques objectifs et subjectifs revient, ou encore « Santé gratuite pour tous » et « Non au bradage de la patrie », rappelant le style sec et direct de la parole « sauvage ». Ainsi, la structure énonciative semble?t?elle être reprise dans ce mouvement discursif réhabilitant la mémoire de Mai 68, ce qui permet de pousser l’analyse de la chercheuse Moirand à un niveau supérieur, car ce ne sont pas seulement les mots qui deviennent événements, mais les tournures discursives mêmes qui acquièrent le mouvement de l’énonciation soixante-huitarde.

En conclusion, je peux bien affirmer l’existence d’une mémoire collective et d’une culture partagée réveillant le souvenir de Mai 68 : tous les médias ont recours à cet imaginaire bien vivant chez les Français qui ne cesse jamais de surprendre et surtout d’exprimer la « rage » et l’action des manifestants, car tous les mots?événements dans les articles pris en considération confèrent à leur contenu une touche révolutionnaire et rêveuse à la fois, typique de Mai 68. Ce qui frappe, c’est la diversité des articles contenant ce souvenir. Le pouvoir des mots et leur force ne s’obscurcit jamais : non seulement les murs avaient parlé en Mai 68, mais même aujourd’hui ils font parler les textes créant un véritable dialogue dans les médias qui suit le chemin naturel de la mémoire et de la culture.

The post Mai 68 au service de l’interdiscursivité médiatique : entre mémoire révolutionnaire et mémoire discursive. Deux approches interdisciplinaires : lexiculture et mots événements appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

The female voices in Shafak’s novel merge in a curious manner. One family lives in the United States, Armenian refugees who emphasize the importance of their traditions. The Turkish family that remains in Istanbul, however, has changed and modernized. The two young girls in the novel, Armanoush (Armenian-American) and Asya (Turkish), are unlikely, disparate step-sisters, who begin to bridge the gap between Turkish and Armenian traditions. The families are faced with challenges despite the similarity of their cultures, in terms of food, music and religious traditions. The two girls are unknowingly linked by a weak father, Mustafa, himself a product of persecution and upheaval. At his death, Mustafa transforms from a physical being into a silent, physical space that allows for conversation, healing and understanding. Without words to define his transformation, Mustafa the man disappears and instead becomes the framework of a mythological text.

Myth is a sacred type of speech that allows people to recognize and name the unspeakable. Roland Barthes believes that all obvious cultural objects have the power to attain mythical properties. Barthes says,

Every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural or not, which forbids talking about things. A tree is a tree. Yes, of course. But a tree as expressed by Minou Drouet is no longer quite a tree, it is a tree which is decorated, adapted to a certain type of consumption, laden with literary self-indulgence, revolt, images, in short with a type of social usage which is added to pure matter. (109)

The body of a man has the ability to transform from a physical presence into a culturally significant text, filled with symbol and rhetoric larger than the individual. In coming to understand the events in Mustafa’s life that led to his eventual demise, the reader becomes a key participant in the evolution of myth. Barthes states that: “[M]yth is a type of speech chosen by history: it cannot possibly evolve from the ‘nature’ of things” (109). Therefore, in order to understand Mustafa’s mythological significance, the reader too must know his history.

Shafak takes great pains to explain a character’s societal and cultural significance. She uses categories as names, creating nick-names laden with socially constructed, obvious and essentialized identities. This unique approach must be differentiated from simply explaining a society or culture. Here, characters represent a specific aspect of a society and their actions, expressions, words and descriptions allow the reader to comprehend the nuances from particular stereotypes within the culture. By creating characters with disparate identities, she creates forms and through these forms, she enables speech. Shafak is, of course, designing a mythological society that parallels the actual. She leaves intelligent, obvious and accessible signs in this created culture. When Armanoush, self-named ‘Madame My-Exiled-Soul’ in her online chat room, decides to seek her roots, she claims, “I need to find my identity…. This is a journey into my family’s past, as well as into my future. The Janissary’s Paradox will haunt me unless I do something to discover my past” (117). Shafak deftly moves Armanoush from one place to the next through conversations with people categorized by their stereotype, creating layers of intersections and accessible, informative bridges simultaneously. The reader must note the importance of this technique, or overlook the meaning of Zeliha’s introduction, Armanoush’s journey to discover her Turkish family or Mustafa’s eventual death. This proves that the characters’ identities have been formed, in part, by cultural norms. They are mapped by things greater than themselves.

Due to the accepted norms placed upon women by religion and culture, the reader is doubly shocked at Zeliha’s rebellious nature, which forms a complex grid of intersections. The novel begins with Zeliha’s attempted abortion. Everything within this first chapter startles the senses. Unlike traditional Turkish women, Zeliha Kazanci speaks brusquely and rebelliously, but also places importance on traditional cultural practices such as the delicacy of teacups and the ritual of prayer. She embodies anger, rage, frustration and strength all of which affirm her voice, body and occupation as the text that deciphers the entire mythology. Zeliha’s narrative and experience is solidly placed within a marginalized world, outside of Islamic norms and made possible only through the use of character types. As Kimberlé Crenshaw notes, “[W]e will dare to speak against internal exclusions and marginalizations, that we might call attention to how the identity of ‘the group’ has been centered on the intersectional identities of a few” (“Mapping the Margins” 1299). In other words, Shafak’s novel utilizes culturally prescribed stereotypes in order to highlight disparities of identity. The Kazanci family forms the body of this myth and, therefore, in a male-dominated society, Zeliha is able to own a tattoo parlor, wear miniskirts and speak her mind, bridging both ancient custom and radical modernism.

From this introduction, the novel moves quickly while many characters are described, some developed, and some left as shadowy substances that represent nothing more than their assigned role. In this deluge of characters, Shafak purposefully chooses to begin and end the novel with the strength, resilience and rebelliousness of Zeliha. In order to understand The Bastard of Istanbul, one must understand Zeliha’s full-bodied mythological representation which contrasts with Mustafa’s bare form. Mustafa, Gulsum’s only son and Zeliha’s older brother, is introduced as a “king in his house” and “precious from the day he was born” (31). As a child, Mustafa was arrogant, rude, greedy and unlikeable to everyone but his family. Due to the fact that most of the men in the Kazanci family die unexpected deaths before reaching the age of fifty, these women decide to send Mustafa away for school as a form of protection. Mustafa’s existence within the Kazanci household allows him only silence as he is smothered by women.  The women, then, conspire to keep Mustafa alive and out of reach of the family curse by sending him to the United States. Until the very end of the novel, he resides in Arizona and does not return to Istanbul. Other than a quick history of Mustafa, the novel barely discusses him, proving that he is minimized by his own weaknesses and overshadowed by strong women.

As a voiceless, adolescent male, deified by a group of women, Mustafa, therefore, remains a shadowy figure throughout the novel. The reader learns about him through the voices and eyes of his sisters and future wife, Rose. In fact, Mustafa first speaks more than two thirds of the way through the novel, and then only about weather in Istanbul. He hints at regrets, but does not articulate them. Instead, the narrator notes, “[I]f truth be told, more than Arizona or any other place, it was the future that he [Mustafa] had chosen to settle in and call his home – a home with its backdoor closed to the past” (285). Without a past, Mustafa is an unactualized shell. Yet, the reader should recognize the cultural importance of the only male in a Turkish family. Typically, families would rely on the male to complete all business transactions in addition to offering a certain unspoken respectability. Instead, Shafak points out the way that female voices in a Turkish society can create intimacy and richness. And she allows the story to unfold through the Kazanci women. Shafak utilizes the language of the novel as both a background into social institutions and representative of social values. Roland Barthes explains the way that one accesses idea through form. Bridging both ideology and semiology, Mustafa is idea-in-form, he functions purely as a cultural stereotype representative of historical ideologies (Barthes 112). Deified, fragmented, bereft of emotion, Mustafa’s voice arrives in only two sections of the novel: Zeliha’s rape and Mustafa’s own death.

Shafak creates other human bodies in order to assume a space which will represent an idea-in-form, linked by universal, culturally significant history. In this way she builds a mythological, but culturally significant family. Generally speaking, The Bastard of Istanbul is a novel of women. The first chapter alone introduces the reader to Zeliha and the four other remarkably different women in the Kazaci household.  In addition to living without a male in the house, the Kazanci sisters assume extravagant qualities including clairvoyance and hypochondria. The mother, Gulsum, ironically avoids sentimental attachments, presenting as a severe and nearly silent figure throughout the novel. Mary Douglas writes, “To which particular bodily margins its beliefs attribute power depends on what situation the body is mirroring” (121). The family within their societal role, then, becomes the culturally significant text expressing sexual taboo and ritual.

The novel opens with the lines, “Whatever falls from the sky above, thou shall not curse it. That includes the rain” (1). Water serves as a linguistic device at critical times in the story, meant to draw attention to the implicit cultural identifiers. In this case, the character of Zeliha, on her way to obtain an abortion curses the rain, in direct contrast to etiquette and expected cultural norms. Then, as she receives anasthesia, Zeliha imagines cobblestones falling from the sky. The text reads, “[I]t was raining cobblestones from the blue skies. When a cobblestone fell from the sky, a cobblestone lessened from the pavement below. Above the sky and under the ground, there was the same thing: VO-ID” (19). Zeliha screams and the doctor abandons the abortion. First, real rain descends into the text, and then links into the cobblestones of Zeliha’s dream. Zeliha, sister of a ‘prince’, beautiful, youthful, falls in the same sense as the cobblestone, through a void. As she prepares to cross the physical boundary of abortion, Zeliha’s body becomes a text heavily laden with images. Mary Douglas notes, “Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins” (121). Therefore, as Zeliha’s body awaits an abortion on the surgical table, she absorbs and reflects societal symbolism. For her, the chanting of the Friday prayer, typically a holy day, resulted in an internal awakening that allows her to abandon the abortion and accept the life of a single mother in a society that values the male.

The major events in this novel all incorporate rain. The element of rain, then, becomes the link that allows an object to transcend daily discourse and enter into myth. The rain from this scene links modern day Istanbul and Zeliha’s story directly to Noah’s ark as told by Auntie Banu, which will further enlighten the way in which bodies can be read as culturally significant texts. The familiar story of Noah’s ark is changed slightly in this retelling. Auntie Banu’s story focuses on the way that all members of Noah’s ark must share food. The ingredients physically combine to create community and sustainability through the image of a single pot of ashure. It is important that Shafak uses such a common myth and equally as important that she edits it to pinpoint a singular cultural event involving food. This shared history allows the story’s transcendence into a mythopoetic form. Instead of the biblical story of the flood, the myth transforms into one through which readers will experience struggle, survival and salvation in terms of these two families. Barthes writes, “Unlike the form, the concept is in no way abstract: it is filled with situation. Through the concept, it is a whole new history which is implanted in the myth” (119). In this case, Noah’s ark models an entire narrative that involves flood, famine, hardship and salvation. Rain signifies growth, change, and transfer and links the three major events of this novel: Zeliha’s rape, Zeliha’s abortion and Mustafa’s death.

The Kazanci family represents a marginalized portion of Turkish culture and history, evidenced by the oddities of Mustafa’s burial. The women in this novel deal with the dead body in a very unique manner, mixing both fairy tale and tradition and finally dipping into myth. The family chooses not to bury the body immediately, which is rare in Turkish society.  Instead, Mustafa’s body is washed, prepared for burial and transported back to the Kazanci household for a viewing, despite numerous religious objections.

 The body was cleansed with a bar of daphne soap, as fragrant and pure as the pastures in paradise are said to be. It was scrubbed, swabbed, rinsed, and then left to dry naked on the flat stone in the mosque-yard before being wrapped in a three-piece cotton shroud, placed in a coffin, and despite the adamant counsel of the elderly to bury it on the same day, loaded in a hearse to be driven directly back to the Kazanci domicile. (338)

The Kazanci women blend and bend the rules of Islam depending on their emotional needs. They determine that the body should remain visible to family and friends, but more importantly, to the reader. It is significant that the novel ends with Mustafa’s body resting within the Kazanci household, unburied, shrouded, in much the same role as his entire life: surrounded by women, silent, lifeless and yet, significant. The women circle around Mustafa’s shroud, creating a new space and a new ritual.

The irregular treatment of Mustafa’s shrouded body allows the story to assume mythological properties. As the body is prepared for burial, the narrator notes, “[I]t started to drizzle; sparse, reluctant drops, as if the rain too wanted to play a role in all of this but just hadn’t taken sides yet” (338).  Once again, the presence of rain alerts the reader of the story’s framework, and of the underlying mythology. Noah’s flood has begun to trickle into a modern era, blending old with new, at play with chronological time. Not only does water fall from the sky, but soccer fans flood the streets. These fans interrupt the funeral procession, a fact that becomes relevant when discussing the intersection of myth and fairy tale. Mary Douglas claims, “Just as it is true that everything symbolises the body, so it is equally true (and all the more so for that reason) that the body symbolises everything else” (122). The reader literally follows the frame of the story through the watery streets of Istanbul, flooded with the modern noise, people and cars. Disgusted with the soccer fans, the driver of the hearse asks Armanoush and Asya, “Aren’t they Muslim or what?” (345). Attempting to show his disgust at the lack of respect for religious customs he sees in the soccer fans, this comment actually solidifies the transformation of fairy tale into myth. Shafak is asking the reader to answer this question. Are the people in this novel Muslim? Are they modern? Are they traditional? And where is the line between the two drawn?

The story of Zeliha’s rape follows closely on the heels of Banu’s retelling of Noah’s ark and ashure. The story begins, “But the day Auntie Zeliha was raped was not a rainy day” (307).  The absence of rain highlights the physical divide, the rupture of time and of nature. As Armanoush, the youngest of the Armenians, and a second generation Armenian-American, begins to comprehend the differences that exist between the two cultures, she notes, “For the Armenians, time was a cycle in which the past incarnated in the present and the present birthed the future. For the Turks, time was a multihyphenated line, where the past ended at some definite point and the present started anew from scratch, and there was nothing but rupture in between” (164-5). Void, anger, avoidance and isolation fill the current ‘rupture’. In a similar way, Zeliha and Mustafa begin their lives within this void. Brought up as witnesses to and products of the estrangement of their cultures, the rape only confirms the existence of a hyphenated line. The absence of rain during the violent event obviates the discord between time and nature.

In this novel, there are two events that interrupt the natural flow of life:  Zeliha’s rape and the Armenian genocide. Shafak explores the events of the Armenian genocide through the story of Hovhannes Stamboulian, an Armenian author and intellectual. The reader sees only his march to prison, an unfinished children’s story upon his desk. Guards demand that he leave his desk mid-story while writing a myth that relies heavily upon culturally significant objects, such as the pomegranate. This is the beginning of the genocide, the rupture of time and nature. After his death, most of Hovhannes’ sons and daughters move to the United States to begin again, removed from the painful location of persecution.  Hovhannes’ daughter, Shushan, marries into the Kazanci family, which is Turkish, and remains in Istanbul for a short time. She ultimately abandons her Turkish family to rejoin the Armenian family in the United States. Shushan begins a new life and from there is mother to a wholly Armenian family inside America. The family that she has abandoned, purportedly Turkish, assumes a family curse. Something of the unnatural and evil sentiments reflective of the fear involved in the persecution remains hidden among the Kazanci men, and it is said that they are fated to die before their fiftieth birthday. Ignorant of this, Shushan left the Kazanci family for America, and married again, becoming a mother to an Armenian-American family in addition to the Turkish family she left behind. Armanoush, the youngest of the Armenian-Americans, notes the “mordant gap between the children of those who had managed to stay and the children of those who had to leave” (254). The silent past affects both Turks and Armenians, but without addressing the issues, the gap between two cultures widens. In much the same way, the two families’ histories unexpectedly intertwine and this is to Shafak’s purpose of creating space to discuss cultural taboo.

Mustafa cannot entirely bear the blame for his impulsive, irrational, angry conduct. Raised by women who pampered him, raised to be a prince, raised to be the man who breaks the family curse, Mustafa has little chance of finding his own voice in life. Instead, in an act of pure rage, Mustafa rapes and unknowingly impregnates Zeliha’s body which then assumes the weight of repression and the fallen woman. Zeliha’s body physically becomes larger with motherhood in direct opposition to Mustafa’s emaciated body and literal absence. Asya’s arrival as a bastard is important because she will be the key piece which forces dialogue in the end. As Barthes claims, “[I]ts [the myth's] point of departure is constituted by the arrival of meaning” (123). The presence of both Zeliha and her daughter, Asya, at Mustafa’s death allows them to hold a discussion about past events. Mustafa’s death creates space for the rejection of taboos, such as incest and rape, and replacement of myth with the conceptual neologism of future inclusivity. His death removes Zeliha from mythology and places her solidly back into a future of unruptured time, a future in which she has overcome the cultural difficulties placed upon women in Turkish society.

Throughout the novel, Shafak plays with time and place. She moves seamlessly between past and present, the United States and Istanbul. She carefully highlights the weakness and lifelessness of the present day, Americanized Mustafa so that, when looking back at the time continuum of historical events, one understands the origination of the puppet strings he wears. Mustafa is a creation of his heritage, nothing more, nothing less. Due to family pressures, family heritage and political upheaval, he could not have been other than what he was. He could not have acted differently. The weight and complexity of the intersections of his particular identity did not allow for tools that would enable atonement. Instead, he seeks silence, distance and avoidance. Because he is male, Mustafa achieves this separation without question. Most importantly, Mustafa’s silence and virtual departure from his family create a different kind of form from Zeliha’s. Like his ancestor, Hovhannes Stamboulian, Mustafa’s absence generates the space where story unravels.

Mustafa’s destined path began generations before his birth, with the imprisonment and death of the Armenian intellectual, Hovhannes Stamboulian. As guards lead him to prison, Hovhannes recalls a passage from Rousseau’s Social Contract: “Man is born free but everywhere is in chains. In reality, the difference is that the savage lives within himself while social man lives outside himself and can only live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the feeling of his own existence only from the judgement of others concerning him” (235). And generations later, Mustafa arrives to prove Rousseau’s point and link himself to Hovhannes’ story. Mustafa is the product of secrets, of pain and of tragedy.   His attempt at a life of silence obviates the need for healing. Mustafa’s form allows the two families access to their painful, personal history. Likewise, Mustafa’s death opens the door for a discussion of taboo, rape, incest and genocide. The narrator explains: “In time he had learned to appreciate the desert, its infinity soothing his fear of looking back, its tranquility easing his fear of death. At times like this he remembered, as if his body reminisced on its own, the fate awaiting all the men in his family. At times like this he felt close to committing suicide. Finding death before death found him” (269). Mustafa’s weakness prevents him from confronting his own past, which he escapes as long as he can. However, upon his return to Istanbul, he finally accepts that he is not a prince and no longer wishing to live a lie, he succumbs to his fated destiny. Aware that Auntie Banu had poisoned his ashure, he eats anyway.

Using Auntie Banu’s voice, Shafak incorporates traditional fairy tales into the story. The popular fairy tale style introduction “Once there was; once there wasn’t” frames the novel, a verbal signifier that allows for a different sort of reality. The story of two families, then, transcends its reality by accessing the framework of fairy tale. Mary Douglas writes, “There can be thoughts which have never been put into words. Once words have been framed the thought is changed and limited by the very words selected. So the speech has created something, a thought which might not have been the same” (64). In this case, the introduction of “Once there was; once there wasn’t” offers a comfortable prop in the form of accessible, obvious forms, much in the same way that Shafak labels characters in a way that reflects their personalities.

Both Asya and Armanoush interact with social groups named for their attributes. Armanoush belongs to an online chat room where everyone has given themselves labels, such as hers: Madame My-Exiled-Soul. Likewise, Asya often visits a cafe in Istanbul where her friends are labeled, but not named. For example, she dates the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist. Framed by their titles, the characters in this novel outline basic cultural stereotypes.

These cultural identifiers function in much the same way as theater props. Only necessary in staged environments, props serve as a means to an end. In this novel, Shafak utilizes the djinni, magical and mischievous deities, as a sort of prop. Fairy tales involve magic and enchantments, so in a culture where djinni are perceived to be real, the fairy tale drifts into myth. As is often the case, this family is full of secrets, rigidity and rebellion. Auntie Banu relies upon djinni to tell her of historical events. These voices build a bridge over the ever-widening gap created by war, incest and rape.  The two victims, Zeliha and Mustafa, have only one verbal exchange throughout the novel, during the rape scene. Banu, the eldest sister, relates the story of Zeliha’s rape at the hands of her older brother, Mustafa, to the reader through the invention of djinni.

In order to access the images of a specific mythology, the reader needs to identify with the symbols. Layers of complexity exist within each image and as it sheds the specific unique identity, it gains a concrete, culturally accessible value. Barthes explains the way that the signified comes to be known through the signifier within a system of mythology. Barthes’ metalanguage, or mythology, arrives when one utilizes a group of forms as a place of global sign. The original bodies lose their individuality and instead come to represent a larger notion. Only when the reader understands the historical links between characters can each character of The Bastard of Istanbul represent the larger ideology of myth as described by Barthes. In this created society, forms of oppression interrelate to create a system of oppression, reflecting multiple layers of discrimination in much the same way as contemporary societies. As Auntie Banu continues to investigate the past and relay it to the reader with the help of the djinni, she obviates layers of discrimination. Kimberlé Crenshaw writes, “[T]he failure to embrace the complexities of compoundedness is not simply a matter of political will, but is also due to the influence of a way of thinking about discrimination which structures politics so that struggles are categorized as singular issues. Moreover, this structure imports a descriptive and normative view of society that reinforces the status quo” (“Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race”48). Therefore, Auntie Banu’s narration in addition to the elements of mythology and cultural stereotypes all enable the transcendence of Mustafa’s death from the death of an individual into a redemptive, healing space, one that overcomes taboo and secret. Again, Barthes explains, “When it [meaning] becomes form, the meaning leaves its contingency behind; it empties itself, it becomes impoverished, history evaporates, only the letter remains” (117). Mustafa is now a mere form, a key word, set out to assist the reader decipher the remaining signs of the text. Mustafa’s absence speaks more powerfully than his presence.

Mustafa as the form, or the signifier, cannot be the sum total of the story. A form must be utilized in order to speak about structure. Therefore, he becomes an actual, physical space over which Zeliha feels able to tell Asya the truth about her father. Asya, being the ‘bastard’, was unprepared to hear that Mustafa, her uncle, was also her father. Zeliha notes that this discussion must take place at his death, that the time for discussion is fleeting. She says to Asya, “’I finally realized, I owed you an explanation. And if I don’t make it now, there will be no other time” (353). She means, of course, that the family curse, the political history, the rape and the family history all the way back to Hovhannes Stamboulian can be laid to rest. As Barthes noted earlier, the unnatural occurrences in this story and within history, have led the characters to precisely this spot. They transcend their spatio-temporal plane, enabling their bodies to represent larger issues in the cultural context. Mustafa is the prop that results in a cultural neologism. And the ‘bastard’ is no longer a bastard.

Ruth Benedict explains the complexity of an individual within society. She states, “In reality, society and the individual are not antagonists. His culture provides the raw material of which the individual makes his life” (251-2). Culture has indeed shaped these characters and is inseparable from them. The farther one moves from the initial event or rupture, the more it writes a narrative, transforms into myth. Barthes claims, “[W]e are no longer dealing here with a theoretical mode of representation: we are dealing with this particular image, which is given for this particular signification” (110). Mustafa’s physical purpose in the novel would be lost without the family history, and more specifically, without Zeliha’s presence at his death. Shafak assigns and specifies very concrete images to each of her characters for the purpose of obviating their cultural significance.

Mustafa’s existence in The Bastard of Istanbul can certainly be seen as marginal. Mary Douglas claims that structures are most vulnerable at their margins (121). And the Kazanci women are, without a doubt, marginalized characters in both actual, mainstream culture and within the auspices of the novel. The fact that the reader gains access to culturally significant rituals and events through the eyes, voices, actions and habits of the Kazanci women, speaks to this marginalized structure. Douglas explains:

Any culture is a series of related structures, which comprise social forms, values, cosmology, the whole of knowledge and through which all experience is mediated. Certain cultural themes are expressed by rites of bodily manipulation… The rituals enact the form of social relations and in giving these relations visible expression they enable people to know their own society. The rituals work upon the body politic through the symbolic medium of the physical body. (128)

In other words, the Kazanci women represent the margins of society and they mythologize Mustafa’s body through a blend of ritual and superstition. More importantly, societal margins often represent important but often unheard voices within society. As Douglas claims, “What is being carved in flesh is an image of society” (116). Zeliha realizes this when she designates Mustafa’s burial as the space in which to discuss the cultural taboo of at least incest, if not rape.

The marginalized, then, participate in Mustafa’s funeral in multiple ways. First, and most obvious, are the Kazanci women: mothers, daughters, wives and sisters of the fallen ‘prince’. Yet soccer fans and pedestrians participate as well, obviating the idea that this novel discusses not only familial rites, but societal ones. The narrator describes the scene of soccer fans: “Thus they all flowed along the avenue in a flood of red and yellow, amid chaos and clamor” (344). It is important to note that the people flowed, much like water. They flowed because they will be the redemptive elements of the novel, while also creating a present day mythology. Red and yellow soccer fans surround the green hearse, which carries Mustafa in a white shroud. Color symbolizes both an adherence to Islamic traditions as well as diversity and a celebration of life. These colors swirl into a pot of ashure, given at Noah’s ark, a mix of everything. Margins are everywhere present in this scene, as if replacement characters and scenarios for Noah’s ark. Instead of an ark, Shafak designs a Turkish household that grows to include an Armenian-American family member. Crenshaw notes that, “The struggle over which differences matter and which do not is neither an abstract nor an insignificant debate among women…they raise critical issues of power” (“Mapping the Margins” 1265). These families and voices become the elements that transcend their cultural identifiers, that transcend present and past in order to perform a creation myth.

The element of water moves through the text in a significant way. Rain was absent on the day of Zeliha’s rape. However, its absence may be just as significant as the presence of rain in other scenes. Events that disrupt nature must exist in order for change and growth to occur. Decades later, as the green hearse carries Mustafa towards the family house, pedestrians sing, “Let earth, sky, water listen to our voice/ Let the whole world shake with our heavy steps” (344). These pedestrians reflect the function of marginalized voices in much the same way as the Kazanci women represent modern day culture in Turkey. And they sing their importance.

What follows the end of a myth? The reader is led to believe that, as is often the case in fairy tales, there is a happily ever after to this story. Shafak’s novel begins as fairy tale, which involves magic and enchantments such as the djinni. She then melds the story into myth, in order to elucidate the way in which a society may renew itself. Though marginalized, the Kazanci family finds a way to create a vibrant future. Auntie Banu uses djinni often and retells common folklore consistent with fairy tales. In this case, genocide, rape and incest significantly rupture chronological time, which also allows the story of the bastard to enter the realm of mythology. The Kazanci family seeks and creates a new way of life through inclusion and acceptance.

Myth is laden with meaning only if the object itself loses individuality and gains universality. In other words, a physical presence must disappear allowing myth to appropriate image, laden with new meaning.  Barthes claims, “In semiology, the third term is nothing but the association of the first two” (121), meaning that The Bastard of Istanbul conveys meaning through both cultural mythology and culturally relevant signifiers. Mustafa’s body allows for a space over which Zeliha can discuss the taboo subjects of incest and rape. Mustafa’s death is a product of the unnatural rupture of time, healed only by the full disclosure to Asya about the identity of her true father.

While this novel incorporates many elements of rupture, disease and division, it also allows for healing, discussion and community. Through marginalized voices, repurposed cultural stories, and tragedy, Shafak enables discussion and proposes a reparation of time through myth. The reader feels that Zeliha’s future holds much promise as she stands apart from the shrouded Mustafa, clutching two fragile tea cups purchased at the beginning of the novel, moments before her attempted abortion. Both the teacups and the baby survived two decades of struggle. And finally, rain closes the novel, once again highlighting the fact that myth underlines this novel. Rain enables each character a function on the chronological timeline towards a modern people. The novel ends hopefully, a hodge-podge family full of once marginalized voices, now the ‘first peoples’ of a modern era.

The post Mythology, Taboo and Cultural Identity in Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Black Gay Genius, an anthology edited by Steven Fullwood and Charles Stevens, opens with a meditation, a series of haunting questions that linger and will, perhaps, never be answered. In the Introduction, the editors ask us to tarry alongside them; they invite us to wrestle with how to negotiate the legacy of Joseph Beam’s In the Life[1] and envisage its continued influence.

“How do we honor [Joseph Beam] and that generation of black gay men? How to handle his legacy, so heavy with ambiguity?”

[...]

“How do we excavate the site that Joe occupied and conquered so brilliantly, we who inherit his courage and his loneliness? How do we create a project in conversation in an incompleteness?”

And it is the struggle to create a communion within and against an incompleteness—which can never be completely resolved—that drives this beautiful anthology. Each essay included in Black Gay Genius grapples with the implications of “un-burying our dead, our memories and our futures.” Each contributor “invite[s] us to look back, look ahead and, most critically, reveal where we might be now.” It is an invitation to engage in what Christina Sharpe would call “wake work.” Sharpe writes,

“Wakes allow those among the living to mourn the passing of the dead through ritual; they are the watching of relatives and friends beside the body of the deceased from death to burial and the accompanying drinking, feasting, and other observances; a watching practiced as a religious observance. But wakes are also ‘the track left on the water’s surface by a ship; the disturbance caused by a body swimming, or one that is moved, in water; the air currents behind a body in flight; a region of disturbed flow; in the line of sight of (an observed object); and (something) in the line of recoil of (a gun)’; finally, wake also means being awake and, most importantly, consciousness.”

The contributors to Black Gay Genius have taken up the commitment to perform “wake work”—to situate themselves in the wake of the In the Life, the ground breaking anthology of literary works by Black gay men—with a passion. Joseph Beam’s life was stolen. He was working on Brother to Brother, a second anthology of Black gay men’s writings, when he died unexpectedly of AIDS-related complications on December 27, 1988—just three days before his 34th birthday.

Black Gay Genius is a hymn to Joseph Beam, and his work. However, it is not a hagiography, the editors assure us. Instead, the book traces how Joseph Beam’s legacy speaks to our present reality. In the process, “Joe isn’t elevated to sainthood, he is humanized and unpacked. Memory stripped of sentimentality and faced head-on without blinking.”

Such an unflinching endeavour to ‘‘wake the dead with discursive interventions’’ is not easy. The wake work of recovering “those black gay men whose lives were ripped from us, violently” leaves us “suspended in place [...], our fingers deep in the grime of the rubble.” The rituals of raising the dead, our memories, and futures suggest, “we might need to perpetually bury our dead over and over again so that we can truly appreciate those individuals who came before us.”

Joseph Beam, Audre Lorde, Essex Hemphill, his “spirit family,” emerge through and within the revelatory essays, stories, interviews, and poems. Beam’s presence saturates the book, but the ‘real’ Joseph Beam never materializes. “The ‘real’ Joseph Beam is,” as Robert F. Reid-Pharr remarks, “available to us only as metaphor.” The image of Joseph Beam that surfaces in Black Gay Genius “represents nothing more than an attempt to frame and delimit what Beam was good at.” Reid-Pharr urges us to “resist the impetus to read Hemphill, Beam, or any of the other black lesbian and gay creative intellectuals whom we take them to represent, as simply forebears of an ever-nascent black gay/lesbian/queer cultural enterprise.”

Instead, Robert F. Reid-Pharr suggests a continued engagement with “the discursive artifacts that Hemphill and Beam left behind,” and invites us to approach their works “as living and engaged documents.” While admitting that we “cannot predict with any certainty the uses to which these works will be put in the future.” I read Reid-Pharr’s words as an adjuration to curate the dead, the voices that speak and dream in terrifying spaces of silence. To attend to the dead is a queer act.

The meditations in Black Gay Genius call for a critical wakefulness to the cuts, ruptures, silences, and wounds that shape how we connect ourselves to not only a Black gay past, but also our Black gay present, and future. However, Black folk’s relation to ‘contemporary’ time and its dissipation—or, perhaps, accumulation would be more fitting—is a sticky matter. The historical conditions of Black life have deeply affected how Black folk experience the ‘passage’ of time. The afterlife of slavery “has so welded past and present that it is virtually impossible and certainly meaningless to speak of it as occurring, as it were, in time.”

Black (gay) folk live “in expectation of something that has not yet been realized, is delaying being realized, is constantly unaccomplished and elusive.” In his essay In The Life and Death, Kenyon Farrow presents a queered/blackened way of “measuring time,” that illuminates the temporal strictures and structures of an anti-black world. Farrow opens his essay by noting that he “mark[s] the passage of time by death.” He learned to ‘keep time’, he tells us, by “the casket-count that marches to the beat of time passing.” A rhythm that has become an indelible feature of Black life: approximately every 28 hours a black person is killed by police officers.

Thinking In the Life—and death—alongside the ongoing, steady assault on Black life is to inhabit “a place where life and death are so entangled that it is no longer possible to distinguish them.” ‘Black time’ emerges as “the ‘moment’ of no time at all on the map of no place at all.” Farrow’s question of “how to best make Black gay premature death legible to Black people as a part of the structural violence that we’re all dealing with,” when Black gay men exist not only outside of ‘White time’, but ‘straight time’ as well makes it the more pressing. Black gay lives often disappear under the banner of ‘Black community’—a proxy for ‘Black family’.

For our survival, we need to “be politically and emotionally engaged around the totality of Black suffering (violence, unemployment, the inability for Black men to love each other, etc.).” When we say Black Lives Matter, we need to go “beyond the narrow nationalism that can be prevalent within Black communities, which merely call on Black people to love Black, live Black and buy Black, keeping straight Black men in the front of the movement while our sisters, queer and trans and disabled folk take up roles in the background or not at all.”

Black gay men and women in the Netherlands are dealing, perhaps unsurprisingly, with similar issues of erasure of our particular kind of suffering, “due to the “heterosexist erotics of family,” that often shape popular Black political attitudes. Where do Black gay men and women, who destabilize a politics of respectability and civility, fit in the (sanitized) archives of Black memory? It seems that irrespective of our geographical location and temporal frame Black gay lives are engulfed by silence, and subject to erasure.

The gestures that Joseph Beam’s writings have made “to end the deafening silence about our lives” are themselves precarious, passing. To speak our truth is not enough in a world where most ears are not attuned to the distinctive features of Black suffering, which is often heard as what Saidiya Hartman and Stephen Best call “black noise.” Black political aspirations and demands are “inaudible or illegible within the prevailing formulas of political rationality.” And yet, Black gay women and men must continue to write, sing, dance, dream, and organize—despite the fact that much of what we have to say is ignored within and without Black communities; it goes literally unheard—even when it is screamed into ears, and onto pages.

David Green suggests in his essay Erotic and the Crisis of Black Love: At Home with Joseph Beam, Melvin Dixon, and In The Life a queering of Black home in order to make Black gay lives legible. Green writes that “we must all live ‘in the life’, if we truly wish to survive this and future life.” While musing on Green’s entreaty, I drifted back to Kenyon Farrow’s words and Christina Sharpe’s theorization of wake work: in the life and in the wake. To live ‘in the life’ in the wake is to inhabit an antinomy between life and death. How, then, do we in this space of impossibility, of incommensurability—where “the time of slavery” appears to lag, lengthen out, stand still—begin to imagine a “future life” in the afterlife of slavery?

The question of “future life” cannot be divorced from the urgency of attending to the centrality of death, and “doing time,” in Black (gay) life—so much of the “future life” work we do is centred on attending to the dead, the “prison slave,” and the “prison slave-in-waiting.” In a certain way, I imagine, heterosexual, cisgender Black folk are already living ‘in the life’. Black life is already queered. It is lived against the odds. Jared Sexton uncovers the queerness of Black life when he notes, “that black life is not social, or rather that black life is lived in social death.” [emphasis in original] Being Black/queer is “a fatal way of being alive.” When our future is already precarious, and constrained by an anti-black time frame (every 28 hours) our persistence is an act of resistance. We need to say over and over and over again that it is possible to imagine different futures. We need to “believe in and create the world that we actually deserve.”

In Queer Relative: Joseph Beam, Audre Lorde, and the Diasporic Poetics of Survival in the 1980s, Alexis Pauline Gumbs breathes more life into this queerness that “disrupts the reproduction of a social narrative that says that Black life is worthless.” We must conjure alternative visions of freedom and survival from the violence and terror that haunts Black (gay) life across the Diasporas. In the wake, daring to dream and surviving is a queer thing to do. And yet, we must avoid the temptation of over-romanticizing the power of dreams, “as if having a dream were all we needed to transform ourselves and our futures.”

“Black dreams,” Joseph Beam warns us, “are dashed as assuredly as Black dreamers are killed.” And yet, Joseph Beam dared not only himself, but also us as well to dream “dreams borne of personal conviction and desire.” In the foreword to On Black Men David Marriott takes on Joseph Beams’ plea to dream the unthinkable in order to “contest the dream work of racist culture in its verisimilitude, address and imagine another kind of experience, another kind of living present and future.” [emphasis in original]

In the Life called a tradition of Black gay writing into existence, and left in its wake seeds of new possibilities; “the [ethical] commitment to dream ourselves differently,” to find and nurture “healthy (meaning non-patriarchal, non-objectifying) holistic love between Black women and Black men.” Alexis Pauline Gumbs shows us that Audre Lorde and Joseph Beam have provided a cognitive map. We must respond to the call of those who came before us, those who are no longer with us.

In Making Ourselves from Scratch Joseph Beam asks us, “what is it that we leave them beyond this shadow-play?” The most valuable thing we can leave behind is evidence that you do not have to make yourself from scratch. Black Gay Genius shows the evolving influence of Joseph Beam’s dictum.  It not only offers, but also inspires a sustained engagement with Joseph and his work. To use a turn of phrase like “a timely contribution” to describe Black Gay Genius seems jarring when “Black life is filled with untimely deaths.” This deeply moving anthology reminds us that our journey doesn’t end with death—one way or the other we remain in the life.

The post Black Gay Genius (Book Review) appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

**********

Title
“The Strategic Success of ISIS Propaganda”

Date & Location
October 24, 2014 – University of Madison, Wisconsin (CEH)

Abstract
To borrow the words of Judith Butler, “if we are interested in arresting cycles of violence to produce less violent outcomes, it is no doubt important to ask what, politically, might be made of grief besides a cry for war.” For reasons that will readily become apparent, the present lecture derives not simply from my professional area of expertise, but also from an uncomfortably personal connection. Of course, the spheres of personal experience, political convictions, and academic work are never as separate as one might like to believe, imagine, or pretend. On rare occasions, however, these closely related arenas intersect more fully—one might even say violently. “Strategic Success of ISIS Propaganda,” was, in fact, prompted by precisely such a brutal collision—provoking painful self-examination, at levels personal and cultural.

This analysis of ISIS propaganda is limited to a singular genre of production that I title: “The Beheading Series.” This infamous video set, comprised of four installments, depicts the decapitations of Western journalists and aid workers, including—at the time of writing—James Foley, Steven Sotloff, David Haines, and Alan Henning. These political snuff films have prompted a heightened level of global hysteria, media hyperbole, and inflammation of viral fear that comes closest in intensity to the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001. But on that day, an atrocity was committed on American soil, and claimed thousands of casualties. Here, however, pixelated screens mediate and distort the atrocity, in terms of both space and time (“over there” seems yet “over here”); the death toll of U.S. citizens numbers merely two. What makes ISIS propaganda more horrifying than its terroristic predecessors? Stated differently, how does it succeed—and why? Further, the necessary questions are not simply “what” is different, nor “why,” but also—how? And—for whom?

I argue that the “Beheading Series” is not a recruitment attempt. Rather, this set of films is best understood as an advertisement campaign for apocalyptic war (or, “reverse recruitment”)—an extremely effective use of viral marketing techniques, that draws from horror films, video-game-style “immersive media,” and models of public diplomacy’s “soft power” arsenal—i.e., the “branded nation.” “The Beheading Series” belongs to a particular genre of propaganda, produced for a specific body of consumer-spectators, coded “the West.” Successful PR, after all, requires “knowing the audience.” And ISIS knows quote-unquote “us” very, very well. I demonstrate that the group’s media sophistication includes the deliberate exploitation of Islamophobia (with which Western cultures currently wrestle), and thrives within the (now) invisible distinctions between the spheres of entertainment, politics, and news.

Finally, against this lecture’s thematic backdrop, I also argue for the cultivation of visual literacy as an increasingly urgent tool for critical political analysis. This essential skill enables recognition of an influential connection rarely—if ever—voiced in public forums, such as the global mass media. I refer here to the intertwined relationship between the intense power of emotional affect, and the nebulous sphere of “geopolitics,” a connection that is particularly pronounced in our collective transnational context—i.e., consumer capitalism’s globalized marketplace. By purchasing ISIS advertising as if an “impulse buy,” the political arena and news media—however unwittingly—serve as (to borrow a term from security studies) “collective force multipliers.” The ad campaign, literally, goes viral—and most ominously, entirely by design.

The post The Strategic Success of ISIS Propaganda (video lecture) appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

On my last trip to NYC, I was overwhelmed with Homeland season four’s new advertisement campaign plastered on almost every public bus in the city. The American political thriller has received overwhelming support, with six Emmys and five Golden Globes. President Barack Obama has even claimed it his favourite show on television.[1] Focusing on CIA agents and their fight against terrorism, the show has received widespread criticism over its (mis)representations of Muslims and Islam, all while maintaining a universalized view of Muslim spaces. Laila Al-Arian has called it “TV’s most Islamophobic show.”[2] Despite this criticism, the show’s newest campaign demonstrates no sign of progress in its representations of Muslims and, specifically, Muslim women.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Producers of the American political thriller revealed that the new season’s plot takes place in Islamabad, Pakistan and Kabul, Afghanistan. Season four’s poster features lead actress Claire Danes (as Carrie Mathison) wearing a red headscarf surrounded by a group of burqa-clad women. Although the poster does not reference a specific location in which the image takes place, by the style of dress of the women in the poster we are to assume that these are Afghan women. In one of the show’s video teasers titled “Target Confirmation”, the same red veil is shown on Carrie as she undergoes a ground mission in Pakistan. As Carrie walks onto the road, the teaser shows a brief close up shot of a Pakistani woman gazing at Carrie. As the teaser goes on, Carrie sees male terrorist suspects and gives the order to destroy them. Upon giving this order she–in slow motion–unwraps the red veil off her head and throws it aside carelessly. The camera then shows a slow motion shot of the red scarf as it makes its way to the ground.[3] The teaser ends with a shot of the CIA led missile explosion and the falling red veil is placed in the center of the frame.

It is important to first acknowledge the varying geographies present in the poster. Considering that the Afghan burqa is traditionally blue in colour and taking into account Carrie’s red veil in Pakistan, the poster blurs distinctions of Muslim spaces by combining varying illustrations of Muslim women’s cultural dress into one image. Homeland’s deep interest and fondness of Muslim women’s attire is consistent all throughout the show’s ad campaign and costume design. It even made it all the way to the episode titles, with season four episode three named after the traditional South Asian dress “Shalwar Kameez” even though the episode’s plot is irrelevant to the attire it references. In its universalized pooling of different cultural and Islamic dress, the show dispenses of any factual articulation of the different meanings behind different forms of covering. Homeland’s point here is not necessarily to depict the specific location of the storyline, rather to visually demonstrate that the show is about Muslims­–and the CIA’s patriotic fight against them.

The poster and the teaser both limit Muslim women’s participation to outer physical appearance. Using images of passive veiled Muslim female bodies to suggest eastern backwardness and western emancipation efforts for eastern freedom is a common trend in popular representations of Muslim women. By removing all forms of active dialogue with the represented Muslim women, Homeland references historic and cultural orientalist stigmas of Muslim women’s ‘passive oppression’ in the face of backward eastern societies. Similar orientalist images have been circulating for decades. For example, circa 1900-1930, European photographers based in North Africa and the Middle East established studios to market and produce commercial postcards displaying images –mostly staged female nudes/veiled/erotic dancers–of the Orient[4]. In his critique of French postcards depicting face-veiled Algerian women, Malek Alloula highlights the colonial de-humanizing implications of these images on the subjects in question. In the case of postcards depicting a group of Moorish women in full veil attire, Alloula argues that the veil is seen by the colonial photographer as a generalized mask; where whenever the photographer captures a veiled woman, “he cannot help but include in his visual field several instances of her […] For it is always a group of veiled women that the photographer affixes upon his plate” [5]. The striking similarities of the aesthetic grouping of face veiled women in both the postcards and Homeland’s poster pose the question: What purpose do these images serve?

Moorish Women Taking a Walk. Postcard from The Colonial Harem, by Malek Alloula. Image Credit: ReOrienting the Veil, University of North Carolina

In the case of the French postcards, images of veiled Algerian women caught the imagination of western audiences by allowing them to look into the ‘exotic’ life of women in the French colonial east; this imagination thereby allowed for the justification of French colonial presence. Taking into account Homeland’s plot in Afghanistan and Pakistan, season 4’s campaign brings forward colonial fantasies of imagined eastern–Afghan and Pakistani–Muslim women through the praxis of U.S foreign policy. As the traveling colonial postcards repetitively reproduced stereotypes from one western home to the other, Homeland’s traveling poster buses and orientalist moving images also work to recycle and fixate the stereotype of far-away Muslim women as non-resistive passive victims stuck in religion-based fanaticism and turmoil.

For the case of contemporary post- 9/11 North American society, Homeland functions alongside larger political frameworks working to ideologically justify U.S imperialism. Anthropologist Lila Abu Lughod suggests that since 2001, defending the rights of Muslim women was offered as a rationale for military intervention in Afghanistan; thus, images and stories of oppressed Muslim women have been widely circulated in North America and Europe (a timing that is not coincidental). For Abu Lughod, stereotyping Muslim women “distracts us from the thornier problem that our own politics and actions in the world help create the (sometimes harsh) conditions in which distant others live”[6]. As seen in Homeland’s campaign, emphasis on region-cultural depiction works to “artificially divide the world into separate spheres–-recreating an imaginative geography of West versus East, us versus Muslims, cultures in which First Ladies give speeches versus others where women shuffle around silently in burqas.”[7] In the case of the show, it is Carrie playing the role of the first lady.

The campaign’s poster draws on the implications of ‘third world’ vs. ‘first world’ difference through its use of colour and juxtaposition. Presented in deep black, the burqa-clad women are all standing facing forward while Claire Danes looks back and gazes resistively straight at the audience in her bright red scarf and peeking blonde hair. By separating Carrie from her imagined Muslim female counterparts, the poster presents a strong contrast that isolates and labels one party as privileged and the other as voiceless, oppressed and in need of outside intervention. Similarly, the teaser also reinforces such distinctions of privilege through the dramatic visual portrayal of Carrie’s act of unveiling. Homeland’s insertion of the non-Muslim character Carrie Mathison in conflated Muslim spaces illustrates a striking colonial framework that subjugates Muslim women’s imaged bodies for the glorification of Carrie’s western efforts of feminist-based resistance.

What does it mean to have a whole teaser illustrating a non-Muslim American woman unveiling in Pakistan? In removing and disposing of the scarf while veiled Muslim women are present in the scene, Carrie attempts to play out an act of agency against a backdrop of women who are presumed to lack freedom and autonomy. Carrie removes the veil as an affirmation of power, for she has just ordered the killing of a group of threatening male terrorists. Her feeling of empowerment in destroying dangerous men plays out in her decision to unveil. In its insinuations of power dynamics, the scene draws a direct relationship between veiling and ideas of weakness. Similar to the colonial gaze of the French’s postcards, Jasmin Zine borrows the term “imperialist feminist gaze” to suggest the recurring colonial motives played out under the banner of feminism[8]. Zine highlights the collision between feminism and Orientalism, where the two allow for the othering of Muslim women through the lens of the feminist gaze[9]. The imperialist feminist structure creates a binary that inherently juxtaposes ‘oppressed’ third world Muslim women against ‘liberated’ women of the west. Placed alongside Carrie’s unveiling, the close up shot of the Pakistani woman early in the scene visually affirms the imperial feminist binary. The teaser is extremely problematic in its depictions and not only undermines but also blatantly questions veiled Muslim women’s agency in every way.

What is most interesting about the show, however, is that it does not at all focus on specific Muslim women issues or their lives. Homeland’s Western women, like Carrie, are given a highly acknowledged individuality.

Photo 1 of Marvel comic still taken from page 4 of 27 from Ms. Marvel 001 digital comic book

In contrast, Eastern Muslim women are simply used to reiterate and support Carrie’s occidental livelihood. The show’s poster campaign and storyline are almost irrelevant to each other in their subject matter. The difference between the two acts as proof of the bleak reality of face-value imperialist feminism for what is really a national propagandist pop cultural creation. For audiences in North America, the ongoing failed depictions of Muslim characters[10] in popular texts only further instigates Islamophobic threats and pushes for the exclusion of North American Muslims from their societies[11].

In order for any form of representational progress–in popular fiction–to occur, we have to reject the idea of imperialist feminism by creating roles that negate existing stereotypes and that actively work to resist and refute them. Marvel comics recently released a new comic series featuring the first-ever lead female American Muslim superhero. The new Ms. Marvel stars a 16-year-old Pakistani-American superhero named Kamala Khan and is on its sixth printing with over 30,000 print copies sold, placing it among the top-selling comics in the market[12]. Created by Sana Amanat, Ms. Marvel provides a positive example in the popular representations of Muslim women. The superhero presents a non-universalized young woman’s negotiations of daily life as a Muslim in America, all while battling super villains. This comic book production not only acts in favour of diversity, but also allows audiences to identify with strong characters with similar relatable experiences and backgrounds.

Image Credit: Photo 2 of Ms. Marvel’s portrait taken from Marvel’s web image gallery and marvel.wikia.com

While positive representations, such as Kamala, demonstrate a hopeful move to Muslim audiences, the imperialist-led struggle does not end there. Indeed, the media dangerously enforces and creates marginalizing stigmas, but the real-life danger inflicted on those marginalized–both external and internal–remains harshly present in the everyday. As mentioned earlier, Homeland’s point to focus on non-American human targets and places re-directs people’s attention away from the local American governing villains–who, as Abu-Lughod reminds us, actively work to inflict violence on distant others for imperial gains. For a true re-scripting of the imperialist colonial structure, I urge us to self-reflect on how each of our everyday lives contributes to or resists this imperialist framework. I call for the pursuit of productive decolonial action by locals in Western communities against their local Western powers. Active participatory resistance takes many forms, and creating a lead Muslim female superhero is certainly one of them.

The post Framing Muslim Women: The Problem with Homeland’s Season 4 Campaign appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Haiti was postcolonial before postcolonial was cool. As the result of the first successful slave revolt in the Americas, Haiti declared its independence in 1804 and formed the first anti-slavery postcolonial nation. Early Haitian literature has, however, often been disregarded—perhaps due to the nation’s early and unique postcolonial status. In this piece, I’d like to offer an example of the powerful commentary on postcolonialism that studying early Haitian literature provides.

The first Haitians worked to form their nation in an environment of extreme hostility. American states, for example, passed laws to prevent slaves from coming from the Caribbean because they feared the spread of revolt. The French tried to re-colonize the nation for decades.[1] When the French finally recognized Haiti in 1825, it was only after the new nation agreed to pay an “indemnity” that plunged Haiti into debt and economic hardship. From 1825 to 1947, Haiti paid France a sum that some have estimated to be over 20 billion dollars in today’s money.[2]

This hostile environment certainly influenced the development of intellectual life in early Haiti. It was difficult for Haitians to gain respect as authors and thinkers among their former colonizers. Much of what they wrote was in defense and praise of their national independence, which understandably was a status that Haitians viewed as indispensible in a highly colonial world dependent on slave labor.

A long history of prejudice, including accusations of imitation and inferiority, has plagued the reception of early Haitian writing. Thankfully, a growing cohort of scholars is turning its attention to this literary treasure-trove.[3] This post is about one short Haitian play that is a vital and understudied part of this corpus.

In 1841, the newspaper Le Cancanier published a short play titled Mr. Granier and his Assistant Study the Question of Abolition in Basse-Terre. The newspaper was published by T. Bouchereau, giving it a political bent opposed to the president at the time, Jean-Pierre Boyer. The latter negotiated France’s recognition of Haiti, which means that he was also responsible for an agreement that initiated Haiti’s massive debt. Mr. Granier and his Assistant offers a humorous take on the ability of any (formerly) enslaved person to engage in debate with the pro-slavery colonialists, which can be read as a criticism of Boyer, but also a broader statement asserting the futility of any intellectual or political engagement with the French at all.

Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haitian independence on January 1, 1804 after defeating Napoleon’s army at the Battle of Vertières in November of 1803. Napoleon’s troops were also sent to Guadeloupe, where the formerly enslaved (slavery had been abolished in all French colonies in 1794) also battled against re-enslavement. The resistance forces in Guadeloupe were, unfortunately, defeated. Guadeloupe stood in contrast to Haiti: the island remained (and remains) under French control, which failed to abolish slavery there until 1848.

Mr. Granier and his Assistant takes place in Basse-Terre, capital of an island that serves as Haiti’s opposite, a place where French control and slavery still exist. Mr. Granier is a Frenchman who travels there with his assistant, Capo, a silent character who does nothing but “take notes” related to his colleague’s observations. Granier’s goal is, supposedly, to study the possibility of emancipation. He meets with a young enslaved boy named Yanko. The entire play recounts their rather one-sided conversation.

The conversation begins by showing Granier’s obtuse ignorance of his own prejudice. He states that he has “no prejudice of caste” and that this is why he will allow Yanko to stand and fan him with a palm leaf while they talk. He asks Yanko, “Are you happy?” Yanko responds, “Well, no, good white sir.” Granier is annoyed to hear this response and complains, “Oh, this race is never happy.” Yanko meekly contends that it is because he is beaten. He suggests that slaves might work more if they were beaten less. Granier, shocked, accuses Yanko of having “insurrectional ideas.” He uses the names of Haitian revolutionary leaders as insults. Yanko’s responses could not be more deferent. He states that he wouldn’t dare dream of freedom as if it were a real possibility and would only bow down at the feet of the person who broke his chains. Nonetheless, every response that Yanko offers further confirms Granier’s belief that slavery is necessary. The play ends with Granier telling Capo to write: “After scrupulous study and the most conscientious investigations, we are convinced that slavery is the natural state of the black beast…” Granier’s last words are: “Anti-abolitionism pays!”

The complete futility of Yanko’s conversation with the Frenchman was feasibly hilarious to Haitian readers. It highlights the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation in which France’s slaves found themselves. No matter how pleasant or deferent they were, the (formerly) enslaved’s experiences were never heard and only used to further confirm the opinion of the colonizer. Mr. Granier and his Assistant honors Haiti’s postcolonial status by demonstrating the impossibility of escape for those still enslaved in Guadeloupe. In a less overt way than many other early Haitian texts, this play argues for the vital role that national independence played in Haitians’ ability to find respect for their own intellectual ideas and experiences as humans.

This play offers a perspective on postcolonialism that was perhaps unique to the nineteenth century and Haiti in particular: don’t bother trying to articulate the “post” part of postcolonial to the colonizer. Haitians were speaking a language incomprehensible to those in power; neither waging a war of independence nor acquiescing to colonial hierarchies could result in respect for their humanity. Postcolonialism, this play suggests, would have to be forged through national independence and, perhaps most effectively, a kind of national independence not recognized by the former colonizer.

Note: Dr. Curtis has translated Mr. Granier and his Assistant from the French into English. The play will be read at Wellesley College’s Newhouse Center for the Humanities on December 8, 2014.

 

The post Early Postcolonialism in Haiti: On Being between a Rock and a Hard Place appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

At present, the exhibitions The Unicorn Incorporated (Curtis R. Barnes) and Your Feast Has Ended (Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes, Nicholas Galanin, and Nep Sidhu) have been on display at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, WA for nearly three months. The Unicorn Incorporated is the first solo exhibition and retrospective of the work of Curtis R. Barnes. As described by the Frye, “For over five decades, Barnes has worked as an artist, illustrator, muralist, and community advocate. In his sculpture, painting, and drawing, he employs imagery derived from his vast experience, mystical erudition, and heritage.”[1] Your Feast Has Ended is a joint exhibition featuring the work of the artists Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes, Nicholas Galanin and Nep Sidhu, who explore themes of death, ancestor veneration, environmental exploitation, legacies of colonialism, and fetishization through multimedia works including but not limited to sculpture, video installation, pelts, and adornment.

These exhibitions have been the subject of much discussion and bewilderment, the force behind figurative kicks in the ass and literal calls to action in Seattle’s artistic community this summer. The works contained within these exhibitions bring to bear a number of “–isms,” “–archies,” and other troubling aspects of our society that the politically correct would prefer to remain in the background: non-mainstream spirituality, racism, patriarchy, homicide, body fetishism, and social control to name a few. Further, the makers of these works are representative of nationalities and ethnicities that typically are not visible in the art world.

Two years of intense conversation and collaboration between Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Director of the Frye Art Museum, and Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes resulted in The Unicorn Incorporated and Your Feast Has Ended, as well as a bevy of multidisciplinary, accessible, community oriented programs constructed specifically to support and expand their reach. It must be acknowledged that these installations couldn’t have happened anywhere but the Frye. Its historical policy of “always free” looms large in an artistic and cultural landscape where museums and other cultural institutions are increasing admission prices to compensate for shrinking funding sources, rising operational costs and the general effects of global economic malaise. Undeniable too is Birnie Danzker’s leadership. Her beliefs that curation never really achieves denouement, and that exhibitions are not singular events where artists simply turn over their work and agency to the museum, has allowed a significant degree of multidisciplinary thinking and practice to be incorporated into traditional modes of art curation and art education.[2]

Why do these exhibitions matter?

Discourse, of the generative kind, is salient and necessary. Given their bellicose, in your face nature, these exhibitions have certainly revived seemingly forgotten conversations around issues such as gentrification and police violence.  Yet the factor that has implicitly, and for some, subversively, caused the most discomfort is that we are witnessing versions of manhood, represented by men descending from African, Native American, and Indian lineages whose presence has historically been, and continues to be, contested. That these are four men who do not fit the stereotypical tropes created and systematically distributed worldwide about African, Native American, and Indian men means that their art can’t be made to fit such a narrowly defined narrative either[3]. In order to think about their art, we must accept that the existing, dominant paradigms based in large part on European aesthetic standards (or minimally a European filter on the aesthetics of African, Asian and Native American cultures) fail miserably. We have no control over creating or manipulating the value of these works. We must consider that the themes and ideas proffered by these exhibitions may not be for us, even if they are about us. These ideas may very well signal the resurgence of a way of being that, though hidden for reasons of protection and self-preservation, has always existed and has always been about creation, connectivity, being self-determined, and sustaining a community of beings who are free and self-sufficient.

The Unicorn Incorporated: Curtis R. Barnes

Look Them, by Curtis Barnes. Photo courtesy of the Frye Art Museum.

The Unicorn Incorporated is the first solo exhibition of Curtis R. Barnes, a life long artist and Seattle resident. Barnes’ formal and informal education included cherished time with his grandmother in his home in the Central District, Seattle’s historically African-American neighborhood, where he states, “she taught me how to read, count, and write in cursive, and she introduced me to Aesop’s fables, a variety of folk tales, mythology, and other make-believe worlds.”[4] During his elementary school years, at the recommendation of one of his teachers, his mother enrolled him in art classes at the Frye, which were like “a new world of magic.”[5] Subsequent art education included art courses at the University of Washington, eventual degrees in painting and sculpture from Cornish School of Allied Arts as well as a degree in wood technology.

Curtis R. Barnes’ portfolio traverses significant spans of time, mediums and experiences.  The works selected for The Unicorn Incorporated are but a snap shot. His work for the Afro-American Journal gives a clear view of the violence and oppression visited upon African-American people in Seattle, and is representative of Barnes’ ongoing work to raise consciousness for those willing to be present and receive the message. Barnes’ editorial cartoons for the Afro-American Journal problematize the carefree, liberal, progressive view associated with the city of Seattle: the work titled “White Seattle Is Doomed” (1971) depicts the entrance to the city as barred by crisscross wood panels. His conté drawings explore and celebrate the female form, while his Mask series, in pen and ink, confronts the viewer with the reality that everyone has something to hide. His intrigue of the unseen is further explored with the African Unicorn in his “Television in the Sky” series bringing to bear the importance of mythology at the familial, community, and societal levels. These works are a profound commentary on connectivity to other planes and realms, where the ancestors and other spiritual entities reside, and states very plainly that although fragmented at times, the connectivity has always been and will always be there; we must know it and respect it.

Barnes’ wood sculptures constitute only three pieces in the exhibition but are among the most poignant. In particular there is “Look Them” (1975), a nearly 4 foot tall sculpture with four figures all intertwined, supporting each other. This work immediately calls to mind similar aesthetics found among Bantu peoples of West Central Africa who created sculpture for use in ceremonies to venerate their ancestors.  The concept of the blood’s memory[6] explains “the visible manifestations and ongoing praxis of displaced peoples in their respective Diasporas. In this case, it very adeptly explains the historical and ongoing praxis of African culture and tradition found in every place outside of the African continent where people of African descent reside.”[7] Barnes’ commentary that, “Wood is important to me because it is alive and has veins”[8] invites analysis of the artist’s insistence upon the physical manipulation of living things.  The impact that such manipulation has may only play out long after the manipulator has ceased to exist in human form, as well as the ability of the artist, or any maker for that matter, to tap into that blood’s memory and sit consciously with his/her ancestors and create in the way his ancestors did without loss of time, space, or relevance.[9] This kind of artistic practice is a continuation of Curtis R. Barnes’ early time spent with his grandmother and the manifestation of his respect for and ability to master other worldly modes of doing and being.

Your Feast Has Ended: Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes, Nicholas Galanin, and Nep Sidhu

The official title of this joint exhibition is O Ye Parasites, Your Feast Has Ended and if you are bothered by the title, then this exhibition is for you. A synchronistic selection of work representing a diverse range of media, the pieces in this exhibition are like long time comrades whose relationships to each other, irrespective of the different narratives they tell, are timeless and unfaltering.  Where The Unicorn Incorporated is retrospective and introspective, and according to Curtis R. Barnes, self-explanatory, Your Feast Has Ended is a call to action beckoning both those who have been fed upon and issuing a warning to the “parasites” that their food supply has dried up. This exhibition is a collusion of acts that follows the realization of the need for change, to remove the blinders, to reconnect to the Host.[10]

Consistent throughout this exhibition is a tribute to ancient and contemporary spiritual traditions, or the Host. These artists, through an intentional and sustained connection with the Host, have created objects whose primary form is art but whose function is a spiritual vessel. These vessels have been consecrated in accordance with each artist’s pact and agreement with the Host; similarly perhaps, to what their ancestors did when they walked the earth. In doing this work, these men are no longer solely artists, but also shamans, and their artistic practice is now also ceremony.

Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes

Wait! Wait! Don’t Shoot!, by Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes. Photo courtesy of the Frye Art Museum.

Magic and spell, weaved betwixt and amongst sobering stories of death, dismemberment, resurgence, and salvation are tantamount in Alley-Barnes’ work in this exhibition. The pelts cum trophies are the most intriguing of the artist’s work in Your Feast Has Ended, as they merge the artist’s fascination with our society’s obsession with fetish and signal his ability, like that of a shaman, to repurpose materials for divine use. Though what you see before you is indeed a confluence of vintage materials and garments, each pelt represents a different narrative, infused with incantation, which transforms it into something ‘other.’

Alley-Barnes’ work, “Wait! Wait! Don’t Shoot! (An Incantation for Jazz and Trayvon)”, is simultaneously a death rite for Trayvon Martin, as well as a spell designed to speak directly to the living spirit of Jazz, to whom this piece is also dedicated. The notion of speaking to an individual’s spirit is ancient spiritual practice and is often a solution used when a child or adolescent is engaged in damaging behavior that could cause great harm if not death to the child. Through leveraging the right combination of words in the form of prayer at a predetermined time towards the spirit of the individual, the spirit is convinced to stay and re-orient itself towards healthy behaviors. Doing so, in effect, saves the person.

Calves of Saint Sa-Rah Lu-Pit-Ta, by Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes. Photo courtesy of the Frye Art Museum.

This work is especially poignant in light of the artist’s own experience with police brutality and the recent string of murders of young Black men committed by police officers. The message here is straight, no chaser: do not think for one moment that we do not still have ceremony to lay our dead to rest and that we won’t use the same to teach, protect and exalt our people who are still here.

Alley-Barnes describes his form of sculpture as refuse alchemy . He sources used materials, that he then recycles and formulates into sculpture. These sculptures are visual representations of the ancient and extinct Matuzdi people, and the vehicle through which Alley-Barnes’ shares with us his personal reflections on dismemberment. His work “Calves of Saint Sah-Rah Loo-Pee Tah” is a commentary on the literal and figurative destruction of the bodies of women of African descent, dating back to Sarah Baartman and also referencing present day occurrences, namely the media’s obsession with actress Lupita Nyong’o’s phenotypic traits, which reduce her to her parts divorced from their sum.

Alley-Barnes returns to the feminine, specifically the divine feminine, in his short film “Sacred” where he asserts the necessary role of women in reestablishing physical and terrestrial balance. Water soothes, and like a woman, can give birth and nurture life. At the beginning of the film we witness scenes that are replete with abundance and beauty: the sound of water drops pierce our ears, a bulging, quivering drop of water sitting on a leaf, and a beautiful woman fully submersed in water. By the end of the film we are acutely aware of water as a scarce commodity in high demand that must be controlled at all costs, even to the point of exhaustion. We are also left to ponder the extent to which divine intervention, calling on women with their inherent connection to the Host, can assist in righting the ills we have carelessly visited on ourselves, and environment.

Nicholas Galanin

This Country Is A Lie And Well, by Nicholas Galanin. Photo courtesy of the Frye Art Museum.

Standing at the entrance to the exhibition, your eyes follow the light and suddenly you are under attack from Galanin’s porcelain arrows sitting quietly above. It’s a surprise attack but the choice is yours: turn and leave, or move forward. Your decision-making is interrupted by words broadcasted on a pirated radio station, created by Galanin and his brother Jerrod, in a traditional Tlingit wood storage box built to hold ceremonial items. Tlingit language springs forth from it and our ears ring loudly in our attempts to understand a tongue that was nearly obliterated. The lesson here: language exists because we are a communal people and we must continually engage in dialogue to build community. When language is taken from a people, as was done to Native Americans, communities are forever changed and entire cultures destroyed.

Inert, by Nicholas Galanin. Photo courtesy of the Frye Art Museum.

Galanin’s point of departure is the land itself. Whether it is the battles between Native peoples and colonialists, the materials he uses to construct his works (wood, silver, copper, etc.) the blood of Native men and women spilled on this soil or the animals that once roamed Tlingit territory in present day Alaska – land is preeminent and predominates; without it we would have nothing.  Galanin intends to shock and awe. The point is to feel something affectively. It may be empathy for the wolf in “Inert” whose hind legs and back are flattened and unable to move, a symbol of the cultural stasis of Native American cultures. Or it may be visceral disgust upon viewing the rape whistle transformed into earrings. Should a rape whistle be an earring? Perhaps not, but Native American women continue to grapple with the legacy of rape. It is a part of the American historical record. Native American art has been reduced to what the market place deems as valuable: trinkets and mementos stripped of historical weight. Don’t we all have a dream catcher?

Galanin broadens the commentary on destruction by issuing a specific indictment of reckless de-ritualized animal sacrifice through the mass killing of its native animal species in “This Country Is A Lie and Well” and “Inert”. Taking it a step further, he decries police violence as an extension of the systematic colonial oppression visited upon Native American people in the Northwestern United States, with “How about those Mariners?” a video installation of a Tlingit warrior carrying a carving knife much like the one John T. Williams (to whom the work is dedicated) was legally carrying when he was murdered by a Seattle Police Officer in 2010. Galanin’s work intentionally broaches uncomfortable historical events that were visited upon Native peoples and speaks loudly against continuing marginalization of Native American peoples and their art forms.

Nep Sidhu

Paradise Sportif, Nep Sidhu. Photo courtesy of the Frye Art Museum.

When language and architecture are merged the result is a third space, and Sidhu dedicates his grandest pieces of the exhibition to spatial exploration. Heavily theorized, particularly within the field of postcolonial studies, Edward Soja defines the third space as, “as an-Other way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human life, a distinct mode of critical spatial awareness that is appropriate to the new scope and significance being brought about in the rebalanced trialectics of spatiality–historicality–sociality.”[11] Each of Sidhu’s panels in the Confirmation series is both the portal to the third space and the third space itself. Looking into the center of each work creates a dizzying optical effect such that you feel you can enter it and go beyond to another place.[12] And that is precisely the point. Sidhu combines his experience with the death of his mother written out in Kufic script (which he studied for nine months with an Imam to learn), with the experiences of his fellow Constellationeers[13] Ishmael Butler and Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes (Butler’s lyrics about his mother and Alley-Barnes’ observations on Seattle’s cursed history), mounts them on brass and sheet veneer marble to become the Confirmation series, and has shared them with us in a newly sanctified space: the Frye Art Museum.

Confirmation B, by Nep Sidhu. Photo courtesy of the Frye Art Museum.

With “Re (Confirmation) A” this work creates a portal through which Sidhu and Butler can continue to communicate with their deceased mothers – a hopefully soothing realization that though the body ceases to be the spirit is always there in this third space.[14] “Confirmation B” takes it a step further: the combination of language and architecture is not solely a portal, but a vehicle for the necessary incantation that is the precursor to ancestor veneration. The script in “Confirmation B” contains Sidhu’s mother’s last words to him as she made her transition. The message here is that we need simply to activate language and earth in the appropriate iteration, and conversations with our ancestors will recommence. The third spaces of “Re (Confirmation) A and “Confirmation B” represent the realm of the ancestors and more specifically that realm where our mothers are ever present. The third panel of the Confirmation series, “Curse Words”, is a visual representation of an excerpt of a written work of the same name written by Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes. This fragment tells the story of the blood-drenched contradictions of the beautiful territory now called Seattle, providing a commentary on the transgressions visited upon the land and its original inhabitants. The mind piercing red reminds us how much blood soaks this land, and forces us to reckon with our stake in it.

If the Confirmation series illuminates our path towards the third space, Sidhu’s Paradise Sportif clothing line exemplifies how we must comport ourselves once we get there: protect and exalt.   Intending to uplift our present day shamans so that they can work efficaciously, the garments are necessarily beautiful, but what they do and what they mean is more relevant. In Sidhu’s own words,

“When understanding the power of our past messengers and healers, the garments that they wore played significance in their function as much as their understanding of nature, rhythm, dance and medicine. When dealing with negative or destructive spirits during a ceremony, the healing of an illness could inspire revenge in the spirit that caused it. The spirit could not effectively attack a shaman wearing a powerful costume, nor could it recognize the shaman when he or she was out of costume. In both cases, the shaman was protected in the spiritual realm. The garments worn functioned in much the same way as playing the same music during meditation to induce a meditative state. By always wearing the same costume during trance states, the costume itself became an instrument for facilitating access to that state.”[15]

Sidhu has intentionally steered clear of turning Paradise Sportif into a commercial line. To date this collection has only been seen at the Frye, on Sidhu’s web site, and donned by the members of the Black Constellation collective, of which he is a part. It is apparent that Sidhu seeks out people and places that embody and radiate the light that he carefully infuses into every piece.

And now?

On September 14 and September 21, Your Feast Has Ended and The Unicorn Incorporated complete their respective runs at the Frye Museum. While it is significant that these exhibitions started in Seattle, which so desperately needed to be shocked out of its complacency, these exhibitions speak both to and far beyond this city, and thus they must travel. Sidhu’s work must be seen in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Dakar, Marrakech and his hometown of Toronto. Alley-Barnes’ work must visit Chicago, New Orleans, Detroit, Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and Baltimore. Galanin’s should reach as broadly as possible throughout the Americas to countries like Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia and Peru where the indigenous imprint remains indelible. The challenges of planning and executing such global exhibitions aside, there must be a concerted effort to make these exhibitions accessible to those who are open to the large-scale metamorphosis invoked by this body of work. Our responsibility as viewers of this work and culture patrons is to lend our minds and voices towards its actual and conceptual longevity. The artists have done their job. Now it is time to do ours.

The post Transcendence, Transformation and Continuum: Summer 2014 at Seattle’s Frye Art Museum appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Arctic Summer stands apart from fiction that either speaks back to empire or belongs to its ideology, in a third space all of its own. It offers the colonial written by the postcolonial: a writer imagines the writing process of something already written. Forster’s novel is dedicated to Syed Ross Masood, the Indian Muslim who was his lifelong friend, and with whom Forster fell painfully in love. Galgut is a frequent visitor to India and his own book is dedicated, in language that mimics and echoes Forster’s, to his friend Riyaz Ahmed Mir. Is Galgut’s Arctic Summer homage, appropriation, or simply an evocation of a writing life? Is it a biography or a travelogue? Reading it one experiences a certain kind of vertigo, as when cave paintings are illuminated by flashes of electric light, and the ghosts of centuries past seem to speak.

Arctic Summer is a novel that looks both ways – to its past and future – even while it postdates and pre-empts some formative tropes of postcolonial thinking. Mimicry forms a chain of echoes through it. The title is taken from the eponymous novel that Forster began in 1911 but never finished, and one of Galgut’s themes is writer’s block. Galgut’s style is very much the spare, heart-piercing voice of The Good Doctor (2003). All the repressed anguish of In A Strange Room (2010) is intact but the focus in Arctic Summer is reminiscent of Forster’s Maurice: the inner life of one central character dealing with his sexuality. Though it was not published until after Forster’s death, Maurice was written in 1913, during the eleven-year gestation period of A Passage To India, and this writing forms a rare moment of exhilaration for the fictional Morgan inside Galgut’s novel. Here, the writing of Maurice, which occurred when homosexuality was still criminalised and considered shameful in England, becomes Morgan’s working out of his own sexuality – the darkness he must confront. For it is only by doing this, Galgut imagines, that Forster gained the confidence and the courage to leave blank what actually happened to the young, impressionable, evocatively named Adela Quested, “an English girl, fresh from England”[1] in the Marabar caves, masterfully allowing the reader’s terror to rise alongside the outrage of the English at her “assault” by the native Dr Aziz, and creating a suspense that could only be constructed by an author who understood that the greater fascination and horror lies in the acts we privately imagine.

This choice effects a striking reversal into an act of subversive mimicry, one that Forster only approaches in his previous novels. The white English author inhabits the position of the “other”. Instead of following Adela, Forster remains with Dr Aziz as he ducks out of the cave in confusion over the social faux pas Adela makes in asking him, a highly educated and cultured Muslim, if he has more than one wife. Forster remains with Aziz, full of worry for Adela and fear for himself when he thinks she is lost. His relief upon seeing her below glosses over any residual anxiety he might have felt when he finds her binoculars at the entrance to a cave. Forster nearly lulls the reader into Aziz’s confident sense of security when he writes, with such a sense of finality, “The expedition was over.”[2] In the 2005 Penguin edition of the novel, the eye travels from the bottom of the page to the top of its facing partner. This tiny pause does not prepare readers for what comes next: the shock that hits Aziz and breaks any fragile concord that he has attempted to spin between himself (as host, yet subordinate to his British ‘guests’). “…[A]s they sat up in the gloom and prepared to enter ordinary life, suddenly the long drawn out strangeness of the morning snapped. Mr Haq, the Inspector of Police, flung open the door of their carriage and said in shrill tones: “Dr Aziz, it is my highly painful duty to arrest you.”[3] “Ordinary life” is no more – the reversal is complete – and the reader is fully on the side of the wronged party – Dr Aziz, the ‘other’, who cannot be guilty. Forster breaks the coda described by Ania Loomba, “Perhaps the most binding imperative of colonial life was to stick to one’s own,”[4] and tricks his readers into recognising the morality in doing the same.

Forster’s great theme in Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and A Room with A View (1908) was the English abroad: their sense of superiority, their manners and habits, their prejudices and, in Lilia, Philip and Lucy Honeychurch, the yearnings for something more. ‘Others’ – the Italian Gino and liberally raised George, upset English sensibilities so thoroughly that they provide a vision for how life could be lived, if, as Margaret Schlegel observes in Howards End (1910) we could “only connect”[5]. In A Passage To India, begun two years after Howards End, Forster attempts a supreme feat of connection – placing himself alongside Aziz’s point of view, leaving Adela in the dark. Here, Galgut effects the same, casting himself into the mind and body of a writer haunted by his own banned desires, living in a time when to be a “minorite”[6] as he termed it, was as socially vilified as the idea of the dark native thinking he could accost a young white woman.

But mimicry is deeper and subtler than a fiction writer’s effective evocation of the ‘other’. In Arctic Summer Galgut is dealing with a real person and his writing process. Writing in the close third person, Galgut shadows, echoes and mimics Forster in creating an English voice in tune with the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. The difficulty of such an act of ventriloquism was perhaps made easier by the apparent similarities between the two authors. Both are fascinated by male relationships and the intimate distance they exist within: Philip and Gino in Where Angels Fear to Tread and Dr Aziz and Fielding in A Passage to India. In A Strange Room gives us a fictional Damon, written by the real Damon in remembered fragments, through travels with various equally solitary companions: Ranier and Jerome. The search for love – and not only of the romantic kind  – is at the core of Galgut’s questing third novel, and in Arctic Summer he casts himself into that intimate, distanced communication with a Forster both real and imagined. Galgut drew on his own experiences of growing up in apartheid South Africa to imagine the internal life that Forster kept so private. As BBC Radio 3 presenter Rana Mitter noted in an interview, the younger Galgut was “a white liberal gay man benefiting from a system of racial privilege,” just as Forster was in colonial India. Galgut said, “You can’t grow up in apartheid South Africa without being aware of matters of race, matters of power and how they connect, and of course that leads directly to Forster’s experience.”[7] Galgut understands what it is to live through a time of great division in a position of unasked for superiority and yet, still, be regarded as ‘other’ in terms of mainstream ideas of sexuality. He holds that no one thought apartheid would ever end, and that this enabled him to write from Forster’s perspective about colonialism while it was still very much in force. Of apartheid he said, “It was an astonishing shock when it ended. It was inconceivable… Being in the middle of a system shapes the way you think about it retrospectively.”[8] Of course as he goes on to say, the desire for Indian independence was already in the air when Forster made his first visit there. By the time he went again in 1921, the Independence movement had found its figurehead in Gandhi. Though Gandhi only has a fleeting mention in Arctic Summer and does not figure in the inexplicit chronology of A Passage to India, Forster was aware, according to Galgut, of horrific injustices perpetrated by the British in India including the Jallianwalabag Massacre at Amritsar in 1919. Here is Galgut, imagining Morgan’s encounter with Indian nationalism following those events:

For the past six months, Morgan had been among Indians who were attached, sentimentally and politically to the British crown, and it was startling to suddenly hear the opposite. How hated they were, the English! How unwanted, how mistrusted! And how very far from understanding what they had done.[9]

There is a direct connection between this moment, imagined from Forster’s diaries and letters by Galgut, and Aziz at the end of A Passage to India:

Aziz in an awful rage danced this way and that, not knowing what to do, and cried: “Down with the English anyhow. That’s certain. Clear out, you fellows, double quick, I say. We may hate one another, but we will hate you the most. If I don’t make you go, Ahmed will, Karim will, if it’s fifty or five hundred years we shall get rid of you, yes, we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea, and then” – he rode against him furiously – “and then” he concluded half kissing him, “you and I shall be friends.”[10]

This connection shows just how much Galgut was aided by Forster himself, and how A Passage to India, with its effective reversals, can be called a postcolonial novel.

Half of the joy of Galgut’s novel is the seamless weaving in of his deep research into Forster’s own diaries and letters, which fed Galgut’s ventriloquism and provided a rich source for imagining how his extraordinary Indian novel was formed. In Arctic Summer, Morgan meets the Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy, and Galgut imagines Cavafy saying, “I myself have always been poised between history and poetry”.[11] That seems a fitting description of Galgut’s style and the hybrid nature of this novel – a merging of biography, broader historical detail and the writer’s imagination. In fact ‘hybrid,’ that key postcolonial term, is one that the novel does not shy away from: Galgut’s fictional Morgan even uses it to articulate why he is drawn to Alexandria.

[W]hat stirred him most deeply was that it was a mixture: an inbred miscegenation, a bastardy of influences and traditions and races. He had learned to mistrust purity, rather, because the real thing didn’t exist. Everybody by now was a blend; history was a confusion; people were hybrids.[12]

And later, thinking of himself as a mixture of sympathies – English born and bred, changed by his visit to India, having consummated his desire and fallen in love, Galgut writes of Morgan, “His own hybrid self missed Mohammed terribly.”[13] Subtly inflected is a mission statement against the 19th century meaning of ‘hybrid’, connected to miscegenation, but also captured is Forster’s own sense of ambivalence,

He himself, as usual, was subtly conflicted. […] he couldn’t help believing that on a certain level, this great dream [of Empire] was dying because of petty rudeness in railway carriages.[14]

This internal sense of conflict Forster feels between his various identities – what one should feel as a proud Englishman, and what one should feel as a human: empathy towards one’s fellow being – is the real subject matter of Arctic Summer. Structures of power – racial, sexual and gendered, that prohibit real connection – are Forster’s, and they become Galgut’s. If anything this novel is a consummate last word in the exercise of speaking back. That it comes via a South African voice, when South Africa (with its formative impact on Gandhi) forms a vital echo to the Indian-British relationship only makes Arctic Summer a more nuanced novel.

But perhaps the most daring feat of imagination in Arctic Summer comes when Galgut writes Morgan’s visit to the real ‘Marabar caves’ at Barabar. To venture into the caves with a Morgan who has yet to write Aziz or Adela, to bring to light that moment so carefully protected by Forster’s later maturity and worshipped in literary studies, is a risk. Yet with his careful evocation of Morgan’s voice, his concentration on the ambivalent feelings of love and shame that Morgan feels towards his friend Masood, the cave becomes a place where yearning fights with horror, race, desire, the humiliation of rejection by the beloved who is also the ‘other’, and finally, the need to give voice to these emotions is born from the rock, from the darkness:

It would be good to have a few minutes sequestered in the rock. Looking out from the first arched room through the entranceway, he had a sense of the sunlight world beyond as a remote dream, which he was looking at through a window. Then he retreated into the second chamber. Instantly, he felt sunken profoundly into the world, or into himself. He spoke his own name aloud. The cave repeated it endlessly. He said Masood’s name too, and then the word “love” – all of it rumbled back at him. […]

In the darkness […] he experienced what he had done with a fresh wave of shame. Aie-aie-aie! It was terrible, terrible, to have been wanted so badly, to have been pushed so firmly away.[15]

Here are the pre-emptive echoes of Adela’s yearning: her fear of exposure and her own half articulated desire. The scene works because Galgut sets it before Adela is even imagined and long before she is named. The echo Morgan hears is the absolute opposite of the dull, almost narcissistic “boum”[16] Mrs Moore is disappointed to experience when she sounds a noise in the caves on the fateful, fictionalised Marabar visit.

This sensitivity to the workings of successful appropriation means that Arctic Summer avoids sounding such a dull “boum”[17] of echo. The sweep of history that takes place in the eleven-year period against which Forster grappled with A Passage to India provides an epic backdrop for Galgut. He includes Forster’s first trip to India, the writing of Maurice, the start of the First World War and a posting with the Red Cross to Egypt where Forster finally fell in love and consummated his desire with Mohammed, a poor young man. Galgut imagines Forster in moments of doubt, thinking Mohammed “was flattered, of course, to be courted by an Englishman, and eager for the financial help too.”[18] These events provide startling moments and moving insight, even if they are imagined into the minds of two writers whose novels feel so much for the delicate threads of human relationships.

It is difficult to remember that Galgut’s Morgan is a hybrid of biography and fiction. Forster said himself that he only writes about “The person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I would like to be.”[19] Galgut has followed this lead bringing to life a Morgan that perhaps Forster would have ‘liked to be’  – compassionate, ambivalent, self-doubting, and yet determined and adventurous, with insight far beyond his times.

In A Passage To India, Forster wrote: “Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence.”[20] Galgut’s sparse writing is elegiac without being sentimental, and urgent without resorting to polemic. The position it occupies in contemporary postcolonial fiction is a unique one, an act of compassionate mimicry for the troubled inner life of a man whose interest in the humanity of others was the true forerunner for this book, and for the difficulties of the writing life itself.

The post The Art of Compassionate Mimicry: Arctic Summer by Damon Galgut (Book Review) appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

******

Introduction 

In one of his poems, the well-known Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai expresses his hope for an era of peace and love between the Palestinians and the Israelis on the land of Palestine:

• An Arab shepherd searches for a lamb on Mount Zion,
• And on the hill across I search for my little son,
• An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father
• In their temporary failure.
• Our voices meet above
• the Sultan’s pool in the middle of the valley.
• We both want the son and the lamb
• to never enter the process
• of the terrible machine of ‘Chad Gadya’.
• Later we found them in the bushes,
• and our voices returned to us crying and laughing inside.
• The search for a lamb and for a son
• was always the beginning of a new religion
• in these hills. (Cited in Coffin 1982: 341).

According to the preceding lines, the Israeli poet’s dreams were not fulfilled due to dubious political policies imposed by colonial hegemonic powers. Historically, the British colonial strategy of divide and rule prior to WWII era intensified the conflict in Palestine, widening the gap between the Arabs and the Jews. Due to British colonial policy, the Jews and the Palestinians were not able to come to an agreement about their attitude toward the British occupation. They were not able to drive the British colonizers out of Palestine, and consequently were obliged to confront the possibility of either dividing the country or living in a multi-national state of double nationality.

Apparently, there were important currents and trends within the Middle East on the eve of the Second World War that had a great impact on the geo-political history of the entire region in general and on the situation in Palestine in particular. Just as the First World War was a dramatic historical event that stimulated competing visions about the political future of the Middle East, the Second World War had equally momentous consequences. First, the demands of the war provoked the intrusion of the European powers into the region as they sought to mobilize the political, social and economic resources required to secure their respective strategic positions. Although in the short term this policy appeared to redouble the assertion of European-control, in the longer term it signaled the end of European imperial power. In the aftermath of the war, the exhausted states of Europe, particularly England and France, lacked both the means and the will to maintain the kind of hegemony over the Middle East that had once seemed vital to the security of their interests (Tripp 1991: 88).

In a related context, the great Israeli novelist, Amos Oz argues:  ”The encounter between the Arab residents and the Jewish settlers does not resemble an epic or a Western, but is perhaps close to a Greek tragedy. That is to say, it is a clash between justice and justice, and like ancient tragedies, there is no hope for happy reconciliation on the basis of some magic formula,” (cited in Coffin 1982: 319).  In an interview with Amos Oz, he attempts to come to terms with the essence of the Arab-Israeli dispute. He argues that the Arab-Israeli conflict is greatly influenced by prior confrontations between the Arabs and the European invaders during the colonial era, as well as by the traumatic Jewish experiences and the genocide of European Jews during the Holocaust.  Amos Oz points out: I feel that it is fundamentally a struggle not over territories or over symbols and the emotions they raise. I think that both sides of the conflict overlook the actual enemy. Now for the Palestinian Arab, “Jews are considered a mere extension of the arrogant, white European oppressor. Both parties regard their enemy as an extension of their traumatic experience. Both Israelis and Arabs are fighting against the shadows of their own past” (cited in Coffin 1982: 332). Moreover, the Palestinians are currently struggling against a hegemonic occupying force in a relentless attempt to establish their own nation state.

Irrespective of occasional periods witnessing a growing sense of frustration and pessimism, both Israeli and Arabic literature, prior to 1948, expressed a great yearning for coexistence between the Jews and the Palestinians. Under the impact of western Orientalism, early Israeli fiction portrayed Arab characters in an exotic fashion.  Nevertheless, sentimental Arab images are to be found in the socialist/realist Israeli literature of the late forties and the fifties. In both Arabic and Israeli literature, mutual hostile representation of each other dominates the works written between 1948 and 1973. But the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel in the mid seventies marks the beginning of a new era of increased understanding and tolerance between the two sides of the conflict, which is reflected in literary production.

There is no doubt, however, that the existence of militant organizations and regimes that advocate violence on both sides, in addition to the rise of political Islam and the Jihad movements in Palestine-under the sweeping impact of the Islamic Revolution in Iran since the eighties-have complicated the situation in the Middle East. Regardless of violence and bloodshed, there are positive solutions underway in the political arena and many promising developments in the field of civil society on both sides that would bring about a better future of more understanding and tolerance between the two peoples.

 The Myth of Arab Anti-Semitism

In the Arab world, the aphorism “the Jews are our cousins” used to be a recurring motif in Arabic folklore and everyday language prior to the rise of the nationalist movement after the 1967 war and the emergence of political Islam in the 1980’s.  The above-cited aphorism is still used in Arabic discourse, although it gains punning and ironic connotations shaped by the radical developments and political complexities in the ongoing Middle East conflict.  The notion of the so-called blood ties between the Arabs and the Jews is deeply integral to Arab popular culture and local religious traditions, particularly in locations where Jewish communities resided such as Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Yemen, Iraq and Palestine.  According to Islamic tradition and popular culture narratives, both Arabs and Jews descended from the same Semitic roots, therefore they are originally cousins and relatives. Regardless of these anthropological narratives, which may contradict their counterparts in Western theology, the Jews, like other Middle Eastern minorities such as the Christians, the Kurds and the Druze, were able to live in a state of coexistence with the mainstream Arab-Muslim population.

Like all minorities and non-conformist groups in the region, the Jews have been marginalized, ghettoized and deprived of certain basic rights as Arab citizens. However, they were not physically annihilated or exterminated due to their religious doctrine. After the massive immigration of western Jews to Palestine during the Nazi Holocaust and the emergence of Zionism as an independence movement, an armed struggle erupted in Palestine between the Arabs and the Jews. The conflict between the two sides culminated in the 1948 war which paved the way for the establishment of the state of Israel and the exodus of Palestinian refugees. The dramatic consequences of the Palestinian tragedy in 1948, the erroneous equation between Zionism as a neo-colonial movement and Judaism as a sacred scripture, a pervasive lack of knowledge on the part of the Arabs of the Nazi Holocaust, and a Jewish history of genocide and victimization intensified Arab hostilities toward the Jews. The Arab antagonism towards the Jews, in Palestine or elsewhere, has never taken the form of anti Semitism in the European sense.  In other words, the Palestinians dealt with the immigrant European Jews as western colonial invaders the same way the Algerians did with the French or the Egyptians with the British during the era of colonization.

Nevertheless, in several fictional and nonfictional texts, Western writers claim that both Arabs and Palestinians are hostile to the Jewish people, which is a distortion of a complex history. In English literature, the negative Jewish image epitomized by Shylock, Barabas (The Jew of Malta) and others, has had an expansive effect on Arabic literature, particularly after the 1948 war. However, there does exist Arab fiction that reveals a counterattack on the Shylock image. While the artistic superiority of the bad over the good Jew is dominant in English literature, the positive image of the Jew in several Arab novels fits the shifting imaginative interests of a changing generation. The fictional Jew, the wandering Jew, and other images that display a stereotypical rigidity are altered by several liberal Arab writers. Incorporating Eastern and Western myths and recalling archetypal figures from the Bible and Islamic history, these writers attempt to be objective in their treatment of the Jew as a historical victim.

In the same context, Trevor Le Gassik points out that in Arab culture, Judaism is approached “as a divinely-inspired religion as the Quran teaches”  (Le Gassik 1982: 250). According to Le Gassick “even armed resistance groups” in Palestine distinguish between Judaism as a religion and Zionism as a political and colonial movement aiming to dismiss the Palestinians out of their homeland. The wide differences between the attitude of the Palestinians toward the Jewish people and towards the Zionists is “a fundamental motif in the ideology of the Palestinian Liberation Organization as many of their publications show,” (Le Gassick 1982: 250). It would appear that many Western authors equate Zionism with Judaism the same way they equate Islam with terrorism, in order to fulfill dubious ideological or political ends. Moreover, even though critics claim that Theodore Herzl, the father of Zionism, was a dedicated Jew, Herzl problematizes this claim in The Diaries, confessing that “he does not believe in the Jewish religion,”  (Herzl 1960:54).

Moreover, in his discussion of the image of the Jew in Arabic literature, Trevor Le Gassick argues that “Arabic political writings frequently express negative comments on the greed and duplicity of Zionists but reiterate that “there should not be any quarrel with Judaism or its adherents. In general, they emphasize their respect for Judaism as a divinely inspired religion” according to Islamic traditions and insist on the idea that “Zionism is an aberration supported by fanatics in the service of Western imperialism,” (Le Gassick 1982: 250). There is no doubt that the deliberate distinction between Zionism and Judaism in Arabic political discourse is reflected in Arabic literature about the Arab-Israeli conflict. This difference becomes a fundamental motif in the ideology of Arab writers dealing with the Palestinian question. Thus many of the fictional works incorporating Jews and Zionists are extensions of political polemics.  Most of these works aim to express the anger of the writers and incite the Arab masses against the Zionists in Israel. However, “few words in Arabic of recent years involve a major character who is Jewish and the portrayal is rarely sympathetic,” (Le Gassick 1982:  251). In this connection it is significant to argue that for centuries Arab culture has lacked any information about the historical suffering of the Jews, particularly the Holocaust. This cultural gap, in addition to other elements, contributed to what Le Gassick calls “the rare sympathy” (Le Gassick 1982: 252) toward the Jews in Arabic literature.

Apart from Le Gassick’s perspective, it is evident that the image of the Jew in Arabic literature is shaped by a variety of national and international elements including internal social and political transformations and external pressures and interventions. Some of these images are directly inspired by negative stereotypes assimilated from western literature, particularly the works of Shakespeare in which Shylock, the famous Jewish character in The Merchant of Venice, is demonized. Likewise Christopher Marlowe, in The Jew of Malta, introduced a biased image of the Jew through the character of Barabas. In Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens unfortunately appears to dehumanize the Jews by emphasizing the inhumanity of Fagin. In The Cantos, Ezra Pound associates usury with Jewish bankers. Moreover, many of T.S. Eliot’s well-known poems reveal a sense of anti-Semitism.

It is noteworthy to point out that after the defeat of the Arab armies in the 1948 war, negative images of the Jews adapted from western literary sources were transformed and recycled in Arabic literature to serve political and ideological aims integral to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In other words, western stereotypes of the Jews reflecting European anti-Semitic discourses have been extensively duplicated by Arab writers in the aftermath of the 1948 war to underscore Israeli aggression and violence against the Palestinian people. Several Arab versions of Shylock, Barabas, Fagin and others are aesthetically articulated by conservative writers to reinforce the image of the Jew as a fearful and hypocritical colonizer and a sadist who wants to slaughter all the Palestinians and drive them out of their land.

On this basis, it is apparent that many Arab writers, supported by tyrannical/local regimes that stood to benefit, depicted the entire Jewish community in Israel as Haganah militia fighters determined to annihilate the Palestinian people. This simplistic image of the Jew has also been deployed by other Arab writers who introduced a balanced vision of the Middle East conflict. Deploying positive portraits of the Jew and foregrounding the human dimensions of the Jewish character as a defender of the oppressed and the humiliated as well as a victim of a history of persecution and genocide, these writers aim to bridge the gap between the two conflicting parties in Palestine.

For example in Samih al-Qasim’s novel al-Sura al-Akhira fi al-Album/The Last Picture in the Album, the protagonist is a sympathetic Jewish girl who becomes acquainted with the suffering of the Palestinian people after her visit to an Arab village.  The girl, who lives in Tel Aviv, changes her attitude toward the Palestinian situation due to her journey to the Arab community. Consequently, she becomes convinced of the right of the Palestinians to have an independent state of their own (cited in Zalum 1982: 46). In confrontations with her father, a militant Zionist who keeps an album including the pictures of the Palestinians he murders, the Jewish girl asks him to put her picture in the same album as a sign of sympathy with the Palestinian victims.

Another example is al-Qasim’s novel Orange Fruits in which Miriam, a German girl of Jewish origin, identifies with the Palestinians. She even refused to cooperate with the Zionist Agency in Germany.  When members of the Jewish Agency attempted to urge Miriam to immigrate to Palestine she told them: “I will not cooperate with you.  You are criminals.  You want to use us to implement your hateful Zionist agenda.  Palestine is not my homeland.  My homeland is Germany and I will stay here. I will not help you to use our misery as a means of achieving your aims” (cited in Abu-Matar 1980: 410).  Apparently, the Palestinian novelist Samih al-Qasim aims to draw a distinction between the Jews and the Zionists, acknowledging the Holocaust as “our misery,” a painful catastrophe experienced by the Jewish people. The analogy to the Shoah as “our misery” reveals the sympathy of the Palestinian novelist toward the Jewish victims of Nazism and emphasizes the shared Semitic origin of both sides of the conflict.

Moreover, the Palestinian writer Hanna Ibrahim depicts a sympathetic Jewish character in his novel al-Mutasalelun/The Infiltrators. The novel’s events portray the encounter between Sara, a Jewish girl, and a Palestinian family consisting of an old man, his daughter and her baby who came to the doorsteps of Sara’s house inside a Jewish Kibbutz.  At the beginning of the confrontation, Sara carried her gun and went toward the door where she heard strange voices and mild knocks.  She screamed in Hebrew “who is there?” and a female voice replied in Arabic “for God’s sake, open the door.” Hearing the cries of a baby, Sara became confident that the strangers were not Palestinian rebels because the rebels did not carry babies. When Sara opened the door, she found an old man in a state of fatigue, coughing and groaning. His daughter Hind was also exhausted due to the cold weather outside, as the cries of her baby broke the silence of the night.  Immediately Sara threw her gun away and brought clothes for the woman and her baby while attempting to help the cold man who fainted and fell on the floor out of hunger and exhaustion.

Afterwards, the old man told Sara that they should leave her house “because our presence will cause trouble for you” (cited in Abu-Matar 1980: 110), but Sara refused to let them go at night in the raining weather. They left Sara’s house at daybreak, but she discovered later that the Palestinian family had been killed by the Israeli soldiers in the Kibbutz. In conversation with an ex-Israeli soldier Sara became aware that Hind and her father were killed in an olive tree field near the house. The soldier happily told Sara that two Palestinian rebels were killed while attempting to infiltrate into the Jewish community. Sara became very angry and she insisted on reaching the spot where the assassination took place. Inside the olive field, she found a crowd of people and only two dead bodies lying in the mud. She asked the crowd about the little baby and they asked her in return whether she saw them before.

In her embarrassment, Sara told them, she became confident that the dead mother carried a baby after watching “the milk coming out of her breasts,” (cited in Abu-Matar 1980: 112). Sara feels sympathetic toward the Palestinian family particularly when she remembers that Hind’s husband, detained in an Israeli prison, will not be able to see his baby anymore. In addition to Sara, Hannah Ibrahim introduces Shlomo, another sympathetic Jewish character who takes care of the cows in the Kibbutz. Shlomo decides to help Said, a Palestinian villager, to bury the dead bodies of his two brothers, killed by Israeli soldiers seemingly without reason. While the two brothers were carrying furniture from their own house, the soldiers killed them assuming that they were thieves. Shlomo decided to dig the grave insisting on helping Said to bury his brothers despite the Sabbath. Explicitly, the novel reveals the honorable side of the Jewish characters because “Shlomo, the Jew, preferred to offer help to a Palestinian Muslim even if he disobeyed God,” (cited in Abu-Matar 1980: 113).

The Humanization of the Jew in Palestinian Literature 

The humanization of the Jewish subject through literature is a process that originated in the eighteenth century, accelerated in the nineteenth century and continues on in the present time. Western writers must cope with the two great antipodes of the fictional Jewish stereotype, the Jew as a saint and the Jew as a devil, with frequent emphasis on the latter image. The fear and the basic impulse of animus surrounding evil Jewish characters such as Shylock, Fagin and others ultimately lead back to the fabled role of the Jew in the Christian narrative of crucifixion. This nucleus served as lodestone that unfortunately associated the Jew with ritual murder, necromancy, greed, duplicity and lust. In the Arab world, the historical and political ramifications of the Arab-Israeli conflict over Palestine not only created long-term hostility between the Arabs and the Jews; it revived old Jewish tropes and also undermined the possibility of initialing a mutual dialogue between both sides.

One of the main elements of tension that increasingly plague Arab writers who engage the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in their literary works is their recurrent foci on hostilities between Palestinian militants and hawkish Zionists or stone-throwing Palestinians and gun-wielding Israelis. Further, in several Arabic narratives, the Jew is viewed not only as a senseless murderer of children but also as a downright sadist. The invisibility of moderate Jewish characters in contemporary Arabic literature contributes to the anti-Israeli discourse prevalent in Arabic writing and valorizes the Arabic fanatic perspective toward the Hebrew state. In the absence of Jewish counter narrative, in Arabic literature on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Palestinian militancy becomes a suitable alternative to the rhetoric about the suffering of the Palestinian people whereas the Jews emerge as the violent aggressors in the Middle East.

In traditional Arabic literature where the issues of nationalism and Arabism are one of the central foci of contemporary literary discourse, the question of representing the Jew, the cultural other, remains problematic and critical to any serious attempt to engage the Arab-Israeli issue from an objective perspective. In most of the Arabic literature written prior to the 1948 war, resulting into the foundation of Israel, the Oriental Jews were positively represented, even romanticized, as part and parcel of the social structure of their countries in the Arab world. The post 1948 war literature witnessed an unfortunate rebirth of a web of cultural stereotypes where the Jews are either systematically expunged from the textual narrative or, when acknowledged, are associated with a status of ontological otherness, evil and inferiority. Through the narrow lens of an Islamic fundamentalist perspective pervading traditional Arabic literature on the Palestinian question in the aftermath of 1948 war, the Jew emerged as an inimitable and inexorable counterforce to an ideologically pure Palestine. In Returning to Haifa, Kanafani indicates that the categorization of all the Israeli Jews as hard-core Zionists is completely out of touch with the exigencies of contemporary geopolitical realities.  Explicitly, the argument and events in the novel consider the principle behind Jewish hatred as corrupt and self-serving.

Ghassan Kanafani’s[1] famous novel Returning to Haifa (1969) marks a turning point in Arabic literature after the 1948 war and the establishment of the state of Israel, because the author deploys positive images of the Jews, thus challenging orthodox Arabic narratives. Unlike writers who either romanticize or demonize the Jew, Kanafani underlines human issues of common interest between the two sides of the conflict-the Israelis and the Palestinians-foreshadowing the political agenda of the novel. In Returning to Haifa, Kanafani introduces the Arab-Israeli conflict not only by incorporating Palestinian suffering and displacement, as in traditional Arabic literature, but also through an engagement with the Jewish history of Diaspora and genocide. The Jewish motif in the novel has precipitated the emergence of a new pattern of Jewish characters in Arabic literature associated with the nature of the cultural ‘other’. For decades, the awareness of such a motif resulting from an encounter between the Palestinians and the Jews emerged as an outburst of literary consciousness characterizing major Palestinian literature on the conflict.

Returning to Haifa is “the story of a Palestinian couple’s return to the flat from which they were forced to flee twenty years before,” (Campbell 2001:53). The main events of Kanafani’s novel cover the period that extends from the beginning of the armed clashes between fighting factions in Palestine prior to the establishment of the state of Israel until the post 1967 war era. After the 1967 war and with permission from Israel, Said S. and his wife, Safiyya, returned to their house in the Halisa area in Haifa looking for their son, Khaldun, left behind during the occupation of the city in the 1948 war. When they entered the house, they were warmly received by a kind woman, Miriam Iphrat, who did not identify them in the beginning: “She was short and rather plump and was dressed in a blue dress with white polka dots.” As Said began to translate into English, the lines of her face came together questioning. She stepped aside, allowing Said and Safiyya to enter, then led them into the living room (Kanafani 2000: 162).

Miriam lost her family in the Nazi Holocaust and immigrated to Israel. During the carnage perpetrated against the Jews in Europe, she escaped and hid in a neighbor’s house. When she came to Palestine, she settled in the house of Said, which was given to her by the Jewish Agency. She found Said’s abandoned baby son Khaldun/Dov in the empty house and brought him up as her own child. Obviously Miriam felt sympathetic toward the plight of the Palestinian people. This emigrant woman, a Holocaust survivor, witnessed a massacre in which Palestinians, not Jews, were slaughtered. She saw two Haganah (an Israeli militia) soldiers throwing the dead body of a Palestinian boy in a truck. The incident reminded her of the murder of her brother at the hands of German soldiers during the Holocaust. To her, the Haganah violence against the Palestinian refugees is reminiscent of the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany and in Poland under German occupation, from where she has come.

In a flashback, Said S., the Palestinian refugee and main character in the novel recalls the bitter memories of the 1948 war when he was forced on 21 April to leave Haifa “on a British boat” and “to be cast off an hour later on the empty shore of Accra,” (Kanafani 2000: 166).  On April 29, 1948, Miriam and her husband, Iphrat Koshen, accompanied by a Haganah member entered “what from them on became their house, rented from the Bureau of Absentee property in Haifa,” (Kanafani 2000: 166). Escaping from the Nazi Holocaust Iphrat Koshen’s family “reached Haifa via Milan in the month of March under the auspices of the Jewish Agency” (Kanafani 2000: 166). The woman told her visitors that she came from Poland in 1948 to settle in their house, which she rents from the Israeli authorities. In the beginning Miriam’s family had to live in a small room at Hadar, the Jewish quarter in Haifa.

After the initial confrontation between Said S. together with his wife Safiyya and Iphrat’s family, it seems that the Jewish woman had anticipated the visit of the Palestinian family: “I have been expecting you for a long time”, says the woman. “The truth is, ever since the war ended many people have come here, looking at the houses and going into them. Every day I said surely you would come,” (Kanafani  2000: 163). When Said and Safiyya returned to Haifa, their former house was only inhabited by Miriam and Dov after the death of Iphrat.  During the visit of the Palestinian couple to their house and in a conversation with Miriam, she told them that Khaldun/Dov had become an officer in the Israeli army, and is due to come back home within few hours .  Waiting for the return of Khaldun/Dov, Said told his wife the story of a Palestinian friend, Faris  al-Labda – when Faris came back to his flat in Haifa he found it occupied by another Palestinian family who convinced him to join the Palestinian resistance forces. The novel moves toward its climax after the arrival of Dov, and the final chapters witness the confrontation between Dov and his Palestinian/biological parents.

Castigating Said and Saffiya for abandoning him, Dov denounces his Palestinian origins, affirming his identity as a Jew and an officer in the Israeli army: “I didn’t know that Miriam and Iphrat weren’t my parents until about three or four years ago. From the time I was small I was a Jew. I went to Jewish school, I studied Hebrew, I go to Temple, I eat kosher food. When they told me I wasn’t their own child, it didn’t change anything. Even when they told me – later on – that my original parents were Arabs, it didn’t change anything. No, nothing changed, that’s certain. After all, in the final analysis, man is a cause,” (Kanafani, 2000:181). The young man continues his address to Said, his biological father: “You should not have left Haifa. If that wasn’t possible, then no matter what it took, you should not have left an infant in its crib. And if that was also impossible, then you should never have stopped trying to return. You say that too was impossible? Twenty years have passed, sir! Twenty years! What did you do during that time to reclaim your son? If I were you I would’ve borne arms for that. Is there any stronger motive? You’re all weak! Weak! You’re bound by heavy chains of back­wardness and paralysis! Don’t tell me you spent twenty years crying! Tears won’t bring back the missing or the lost. Tears won’t work miracles! All the tears in the world won’t carry a small boat holding two parents searching for their lost child. So you spent twenty years crying. That’s what you tell me now? Is this your dull, worn-out weapon?” (Kanafani 2000:185). Expressing his gratitude to his Jewish foster parents, Dov remains in Haifa as an Israeli citizen. As Said and Safiyya drive back to Ramallah, Said thinks seriously of allowing his elder son, Khalid, to join the Palestinian fighters. In the beginning of the novel, Said prevented Khalid from joining the resistance movement in Palestine, but his meeting with Dov changes his attitude regardless of his fear of a potential confrontation between Khalid and Dov on the battlefield.

Moreover, Said and Safiyya started to see the Palestinian-Israeli question from a new perspective not only because of Dov’s response, but also as a result of the encounter with Miriam. As a Holocaust survivor, Miriam expresses sympathy toward a Palestinian boy treated brutally by some Israeli soldiers in Haifa. Drawing an analogy between the Palestinian boy and her brother who was killed by the Nazis in a concentration camp in German occupied Poland, Mariam is able to change the hostile attitude of the Palestinian couple toward the Jews as a whole.  The new awareness on the part of the Palestinian couple of the painful Holocaust experience opened their eyes to new realities that should be taken into consideration in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

In Returning to Haifa, Kanafani takes the readers back to Iphrat Koshen’s experience as a Holocaust survivor in Europe: “He’d read Thieves in the Night by Arthur Koestler while in Milan, a man who came from England to oversee the emigration operation had lent it to him. This man had lived for a while on the very hill in Galilee that Koestler used as the background for his novel (Kanafani 2000: 166). The allusion to Arthur Koestler’s novel is significant because it recalls a highly romanticized account of a group of Jews who flee the Nazi Holocaust and came to Palestine to build a little settlement in the late thirties. The characters in the novel aim to challenge the surrounding hostilities in order to establish a promising community constructing “houses and inhabit them, and they shall plant vineyards and eat the fruits of them,” (Koestler 1967: 357). The novel, like American frontier literature, depicts an image of an isolated country conquered by young pioneers who stayed in the Jewish ghetto, in Haifa, in “a building choked with people.” Kanafani describes the life of Iphrat Koshen’s family in the “Emigres’ Lodge” where emigrants spend the night, eating dinner together and “waiting for eventual transfer to some other place” (Kanafani 2000: 166). Like the characters in Koestler’s novel prior to their adventure, Iphrat Koshen was not fully aware of the nature of Palestine.

Attempting to counter misconceptions and stereotypes that impede the cultural dialogue between the Arabs and the Jews in Palestine, Kanafani, in Returning to Haifa, does not acquiesce to literary traditions which view the Jew simply as a militant Zionist.  Instated, he deploys a reconciliatory discourse creating positive Jewish characters such as Miriam and Iphrat, two Holocaust survivors, in an attempt to carve out a morally viable narrative of the Arab-Israeli conflict. By locating Miriam, Iphrat-and their adopted child, Dov-at the center of his novel, Kanafani aims to dismantle local traditional conceptions about the Jews as Zionist invaders similar to other European colonialists. Further, the Holocaust motif is unequivocally and passionately introduced in an Arabic novel about the Palestinian tragedy in order to foreground parallel human calamities and suffering.  Convinced that the Arabs were not able to distinguish between the white settlers in South Africa and the Jews who escaped from European anti-Semitism and the Nazi Holocaust, Kanafani reveals a desire to build a new future, a desire that reveals an identification with the other victim who had also experienced humiliation. The idealized portrayal of the Jewish characters in the novel and the representation of the Jew as an individual and a human being signify a sympathetic understanding that would hopefully develop into further understanding and tolerance between the two partners in the conflict in Palestine.

In a related context, Returning to Haifa is a testimony that undermines claims about anti-Semitism in Arabic literature regarding the Palestinian-Israeli issue. Zionist scholars like Neville Mandel and others argue that the Palestinian hostility toward the Israelis is not the result of anti-Semitic sentiments, but due to the former considering the latter as colonizers settling Palestinian territories. Regardless of recent and frequent attempts to engage the race issue in the Palestinian  question, there is no anti-Semitism in Palestinian literature and culture, in the western sense simply because the roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict  are primarily due to political  and geographical differences about borders. The hostile attitude toward the Israelis in Palestinian literature stems historically from the false conception that all the citizens of the Hebrew state, without exception, are militant Zionists who insist on transferring the Palestinians off their land. This claim was introduced into school curriculums and was propagated by right-wing media in the Arab world after the 1948 war and the establishment of Israel. Since the Palestinian-Israeli dispute lies in politics rather than race, the Palestinians approach the Israelis in the same way the Algerians approached the French colonizers during the era of imperialism.

As a Marxist oriented scholar, Kanafani, in Returning to Haifa, creates thoughtful voices openly skeptical of traditional Arab views toward the Israeli survivors of the Holocaust. In Arabic literature, it is easy to fall back on the negative stereotypes of the Jew, originally assimilated from western culture and built on models like Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and Fagin in Oliver Twist and other European fictional works. In an attempt to purge Arabic literature on the Palestinian/Israeli issue from the realm of political propaganda  advocated by totalitarian Arab regimes that views the Jews in Israel as sadistic Zionists and brutal invaders, Kanafani introduces a balanced vision of the conflict incorporating the Holocaust motif as a sub-plot serving his aesthetic intentions.  Refusing to look at the genesis of the conflict with a myopic eye, blinded by feverish militancy and religious attachment to institutions like al-Aqsa Mosque, Kanafani engages the perspective of the cultural other, dismantling virulent stereotypes of the Jews assimilated in Arabic literature from Western sources.  Unlike writers who disseminate Jewish stereotypes to achieve an ideological agenda, Kanafani weaves the Holocaust motif into the Palestinian issue, narrowing the gap between two histories of pain and exile.

Regardless of the fact that Kanafani’s fiction is ultimately harnessed to the Palestinian national cause promoting native culture and identity, Returning to Haifa explores new horizons confronting Jewish stereotypes in Arabic literature. The novel simultaneously introduces two narratives reflecting the viewpoints of the partners in the Arab-Israeli conflict. For the first time in Arabic literature following the humiliating defeats in the 1948 and the 1967 wars between the Arabs and Israel, the Holocaust experience is aesthetically articulated from a sympathetic perspective that honors the memory of the Shoah. Though it is difficult to study Kanafani’s fiction in isolation from the discourse of Palestinian nationalism, Palestine is depicted in Returning to Haifa as the native land of both Palestinians and Jews.  In this context, the novel is not only a challenge to the Arab official master narrative but also a deconstructive critique of the Arab version of the conflict.

Conclusion

Though Kanafani’s fiction is frequently dominated by what critics call “the discourse of resistance,” Returning to Haifa breaks new ground in Arabic literature dealing with the armed conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis. In the novel, Kanafani unabashedly introduces Jewish images which undermine previous stereotypes about the Jews as antagonists to everything Arabic or Islamic. Returning to Haifa was written during a period in Arabic literature that prioritized a work’s social function as well as literary merit. Sabri Hafez argues that the novel’s socio-economic and political aspects interweave somewhat with the national cause and contribute to its development,” (cited in Harlow 1996: 163). This sense of commitment, in Harlow’s view gives way to a deeper sense of alienation as the 1960’s wore on and it became apparent that grand socialist experiments like Nasser’s or grand political dreams like the idea of Palestinian reunification were going to fall short of their goals. In the dark days after the 1967 war, many Palestinians felt that the defeat of the Arab armies (the United Arab Forces) by the Israelis had also defeated “the very ideals of Pan-Arabism for deliverance and a victorious return to their homeland had largely been based,” (Harlow1996: 72).  This defeat of ideals led to a period of self-criticism, wherein one function of the literature of commitment was to posit which changes of ideals might result in a better future. Returning to Haifa embodies this principle by depicting two similar version of what ensues when Palestinians who have held onto these defeated ideals are forced to face the reality of their defeat.

Discussing the impact of the 1948 War of independence on the relationship between the Palestinians and the Jews, Edna Amir Coffin argues that the war intensified feelings of guilt on the part of the Jewish community in Israel: “the military victory put the Jewish community in the new position of perceiving itself not only as intended victims but also as potential victimizers defending itself but also expelling civilian populations from villages and homesteads” (Coffin 1982: 326). The reference to the dispersal of the Palestinian refugees as a result of the 1948 war triggers an interrogative move toward a re-reading of the Arab Israeli conflict in Israel.  In parallel lines with Coffin’s argument, the incorporation of the Holocaust theme in Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa opens new horizons about the possibility of a revision of Arabic literature on the Palestinian-Israeli question that takes into consideration the painful histories of the two partners in conflict.

The post Mapping the Image of the Jew in Postmodern Arabic Fiction appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Although there are numerous cultural connections linking Cuba and Brazil through the Black Atlantic, surprisingly little has been written about the similarities in performance between the two countries beyond simply acknowledging similar ethnic makeup.[1] In most parts of the world, the capoeira diaspora has been expanded since the 1980s by Brazilian mestres travelling abroad and opening new capoeira schools. In the Cuban context, however, no capoeira mestre ever arrived with the sole purpose of opening a capoeira academy. When capoeira arrived in Cuba in the 1990s, through Brazilian telenovelas and through student-capoeiristas studying at universities in Havana, Cuban practitioners connected capoeira to their own lived experiences and sense of Cuban identity. Learning to embody and relocalize Brazilian capoeira has created an incentive for a reencounter with their Afro Cuban traditions. As the last societies to abolish slavery in the Americas, Cuba and Brazil (1886 and 1888, respectively) have both engaged in historic cultural discourse around the integration of a large African Diaspora into the concept of a national identity.

El contrapunto histórico entre africanos, cubanos, y brasileños tuvo lugar, a nivel simbólico, en los relatos contados a ambos lados del Atlántico, que así conforman una cuenca épica. Esos lugares comunes del imaginario afro-románico sobrevivieron gracias a los continuos intercambios entre América y África. (Leo 142)

The capoeira practiced in Cuba today is not only a recent phenomenon of globalization, but is an ongoing reconfiguration of the circular movement of ideas, people, and practices that emerged in the New World and has continued into the present. National consciousness is an imagined expression of “people” in its collective form. In both Cuba and Brazil this imagining played itself out in the realm of performance. The myths and icons of nationality in Cuba and Brazil, often embodied through the mulato or creole figure, personified the social inversions, hybrid cultures, and the violence of colonialism.

Contextualizing Capoeira

In the words of Floyd Merrel, to define what capoeira is, it is necessary to define it by saying what it is not (2003, 279). It is not just a Brazilian martial art, although its characteristics are very martial and its history is in self-defense. It is not a musical tradition, although all the movements follow a distinctive rhythm and capoeiristas (capoeira players) must learn to be equally skilled on the berimbau, atabaque, pandeiro, agogô, and reco-reco. It is not a dance, although many moves are so fluid and graceful that you would think that the players were dancing. And it is not a ritual, although the roda of capoeira (the place where capoeira is performed) follows the traditional characteristics of ritual in that there are predetermined and symbolic actions that reoccur in a particular environment and sacred space.  Capoeira is all of these things and none of these things. And this enigma has been what has drawn practitioners and helped preserve this art form for hundreds of years.

Although capoeira is a Brazilian art form, it has origins in different dances and martial traditions of Africa. The Angolan martial arts n’golo, basula, and gabetula may have been influences in the creation of capoeira. It may also have picked up elements of West African culture such as the use of the agogô instrument and references to Yoruba orixás (sacred deities of nature in the African religion). (McGowan 118) Mathias Assunção explains that history is paramount in contemporary capoeira through the invocation of its historical roots and its performative reenactments of the resistance techniques used by the first practitioners of capoeira who were living under oppressive institutions. “The belief in the remote origins of the art, coupled with the conviction that an unaltered ‘essence’ of capoeira has been transmitted from that foundational moment down to the present, confers greater authority to contemporary practice, and is therefore shared by many practitioners” (McGowan 5).

Some of the first documentation of capoeira is among enslaved Africans and Creoles in colonial Brazil as early as the 18^th century. Despite periodic clampdowns by the police, the martial art continued to spread to the free underclasses in Brazilian cities throughout the nineteenth centuries (Assunção 1). While many of these legends come from the rural setting of capoeira during plantation life, much of capoeira’s development actually took place in the urban centers where there was obviously a tension between public authority figures and lower class Blacks (Chvaicer 546).  The fact that the performance of a historical past is at the very core of the game of capoeira means that its past has serious implications for its current practice in global settings worldwide. In the case of Cuba, practitioners are able to draw parallels with their own Cuban performative traditions of resistance, feeling a connection to capoeira’s history through a circum-Caribbean dialogue.

Capoeira in Cuba

The few foreigners who have come to Cuba and have made their mark on the capoeira community have not stayed in Cuba to create a new diaspora, rather they have been part of transnational flows, coming and going for brief periods of time over the years. Capoeira in Cuba has developed through sporadic encounters with these foreigners (who are mostly not Brazilian nor capoeira mestres) who come to the island for short periods of study or tourism and, in periods of their absence, Cubans continue training by improvising movements learned through studying the CDs, DVDs, books, or flash drives of capoeira music and videos left behind by these visitors. As Cubans inevitably learn about capoeira’s historical myths through playing capoeira and through media that has been left for them, Cuban players begin to find similarities with their own Cuban experiences of resistance to oppressive systems from their remembered historical past and from their present conditions.

Derrida argues and Stuart Hall elaborates that identity formation can be captured by the term, différance. According to Derrida, this term can refer to both French verbs “to differ” and “to defer.” Not only does identity describe a difference, but also characteristics of identity are often “deferred” or “postponed” as we focus on the more sounding likenesses. This creates bonds of commonality.[2]  The capoeirista historically has embodied this idea of différance. During times of slavery, traditions of different tribes and African nations were melded and incorporated into a system of resistance made solely for the context of the New World. As players and the game developed, this différance was reoriented to unite people of different social classes, ethnicities, countries, and languages. Today Cuban capoeiristas defer what may be seen as differences in Cuban and Brazilian cultures and instead focus on their imagined likenesses.  Capoeira evokes the struggles of resistance of Afro Brazilians throughout history and holds the healing powers to confront injustices committed against a group so often overlooked and forgotten. The processes of transculturation and globalization then make it so that the transformative powers of capoeira performance are not confined to a solely Brazilian experience; Cuban capoeiristas are able to connect its history to their own present and historical struggles, both real and imagined.

Transnationalism is defined as “the flow of people, ideas, goods and capital across national territories in a way that undermines nationality and nationalism as discrete categories of identification, economic organization, and political constitution” (Braziel and Mannur 8). Transnationalism is often talked about in parallel with diaspora; however, diaspora refers specifically to the flow of people. The arrival of capoeira in Cuba is transnational but it is not diasporic since there has not been a relocation of Brazilian mestres or Brazilian capoeira academies to Cuba. Cuban capoeiristas, thus, are processing their capoeira training through their own lived experiences in Cuba. The processing of capoeira through a Cuban lens, however, is an example of an African diasporic connection. In Cuba, as in Brazil, the ritualized violence of social inversion is an important allegory of national culture. According to Jossianna Arroyo, both Cuban and Brazilian national culture is found in spaces where creole masculinity is performed.

…es un discurso sobre la necesidad de hacer un performance de la supervivencia del más fuerte y del más apto. La masculinidad se funda, entonces, a partir de la articulación de la ansiedad de subvertir espacios sociales y negociar las divisiones raciales y de género, y de obtener la libertad.” (Arroyo 177)

Arroyo points out that the performative and violent concept of masculinity in the Americas is represented through the often criminalized and carnavalized creole performer.

Creating a linkage between the similar images of embodied culture in Cuban and Brazilian tradition has meant that the Cuban capoeira group, Caiman Capoeira, has made a conscious decision to define its practice as a cultural expression rather than as sport, even though capoeira in Cuba was first registered as an official sport and as a martial art under the Federación Cubana de Artes Marciales, which is a subdivision of Instituto Cubano de Deporte (INDER). After the revolution in 1959, the right of the population to practice sports took a central place in the imaginary of Cuba and INDER was created to regulate all sport activity within the country. In 2008, La Escuela Superior de Educación Física, “Comandante Manuel Fajardo,” which was created in 1961 as the school to train and graduate professionals in physical education, began to teach capoeira as part of its curriculum. It now organizes community projects in Havana and in the neighboring provinces of Pinar del Rio, Matanzas, and Ciego de Ávila.

However, even though there is a central governmental institution (INDER) given the duty of promoting capoeira in Cuba, focusing on capoeira as culture rather than sport allows Caiman Capoeira to access funds and visibility as a cultural group through the Cuban Ministry of Culture and through the Brazilian Consulate in Cuba (both of which provide more access to prominent cultural [and touristic] performance spaces than would be available solely through INDER). Capoeira as culture is parlayed into a resource for accessing and debating rights and capital among capoeiristas on an island where culture is a powerful economic resource.

Ultimately, the way and the extent to which a cultural identity is performed in the minds of a public and a governing body have dramatic effects on policy, capital flows, and the extent to which a people’s way of life is to be performed.  This point is articulated in George Yudice’s The Expediency of Culture when Yúdice argues that what is considered cultural, as well as the very concept of multiculturalism, has become a resource in the sense that they are endowed with near-quantifiable values, and that the value imposed on the cultural by an audience has a direct effect on how culture is performed (1). Yúdice’s linkage of cultural practice with political and economic access foretells Cuban capoeiristas interest in performing Brazilian capoeira as an expression of a cultural linkage between Cuba and Brazil. While capoeira’s arrival in Cuba may not be a diasporic experience, the imaging of this linkage of Brazilian capoeira to Cuban soil is elaborated through the diasporic experience of the Black Atlantic where performative acts of resistance are part of cultural survival tactics of those affected by the slave trade. They are, thus, expressions that can be both Cuban and Brazilian simultaneously and increase practitioners’ cultural clout within the Cuban performance space.

When enslaved Africans arrived in the New World, their direct connection to their countries of origin was cut off. When the transatlantic slave trade ended in 1850, memory and oral tradition became paramount in communicating these individuals’ sense of their past and their history. Furthermore, they adapted to their new social environment, adapting people from other ranks of society and incorporating other worldviews into those of their own.  The process of transculturation, the malleability of culture to fit the local context, is ever-present in the capoeira game.[3] Cuban capoeirista Daniel says, “We respect the Brazilian culture and we mix it with what we are able to get here in Cuba” (Daniel June 30, 2012). In practice, this means players construct berimbaus out of local bamboo wood, sew their own abadá (uniforms), or cut and dye their own chords at capoeira batizados[4] that they organize without the direction of a Brazilian mestre. Such an attitude embodies these fundamental ideas of transculturation employed in the New World.

Even though no Brazilian mestre has ever come to Cuba to teach classes formally for any extended length of time and although Cubans face limitations in access to the Internet, a tool usually utilized by capoeiristas abroad to exchange information about the sport, the capoeira community in Cuba is training regularly, expanding their presence on the island and developing a style of play that is unique to Cuba. We often think of Cuba mostly as an exporter of cultural traditions, since the Afro Cuban musical traditions based around the beat of the clave are at the basis of so many Latin musical rhythms. Also, because of the isolationist position of the Cuban society exacerbated by the US embargo, we often think of Cuban culture as developing independently from the same global influences on popular culture that are common throughout the world. But while the processes of this consumption may happen under different parameters, Cubans are constantly consuming popular culture from abroad and making it their own.  There is no such thing as a fixed or static national cultural identity, especially when this culture comes in contact with imaginings of an outside eye.  What does arise is a connectedness between cultures, identification with a set of imagined cultural norms, and a self-understanding that is negotiated within the overlapping of the convergences. In discussing these convergences, one member of Caiman capoeira said the following:

I see many comparisons between Brazilian culture and Cuban culture because of the African influences. It is a mixture that comes directly from Africa. It makes me think about how cultures so far away from one another could have so much in common. They are different, but the essence is the same. The ideas about trying to get energy out of the earth, for example, are the same. (Haisa July 1, 2012)

Uprooting and transplanting a cultural form is followed by compromise, sharing, and ultimately a transformation into a new cultural whole based on the conglomeration of various cultural traditions within a new territorial space. Fernando Ortiz explains this process through transculturation, a complex process of cultural transmission and diffusion. Fernando Ortiz’s classic work Cuban Counterpoint emphasized individual agency in selecting parts of dominant discourse and reworking this discourse into something new (1947: 102-103). Meanings are always adapted to fit the local context. While Fernando Ortiz’s work is cited as a fundamental text for understanding Cuban culture, it is important to note that his social and intellectual links with Europe and other parts of the Americas meant that his definitions of Cuban culture were in a transnational dialogue. There are many comparisons between the theoretical arguments of Ortiz who aimed to systematize the geographic origins of Africans in Cuba with the work of ethnographer Raymundo Nina Rodrigues in Brazil, for example. “Assim, o conhecimento etnográfico dos africanos vindos escravos para o Brasil, o qual não me consta tenha sido tentado antes de meus estudos, projeta larga e intensa luz sobre todos estes fatores, conferindo a cada qual uma fisionomia histórica justa e racional” (Rodrigues 70). The works of Raymundo Nina Rodrigues in Brazil and Fernando Ortiz in Cuba theorize “un sujeto masculino ‘de color,’ delincuente, excesivo y atávico” who is an important figure in defining nation in the respective countries (Arroyo 19). These founding ethnographers, who were so important in recording cultural performances seen as being “Brazilian” or “Cuban” respectively, communicated that the tastes, sounds, smells, and dances produced by the African Diaspora were paramount to creating and defining national identity. This was especially the case in terms of performances in which the black (and especially the mulatto) body used creativity to escape, at least during the space of the performance, his marginal position (Leo 29-47).

The modern discourse surrounding the globalization of capoeira emphasizes that changes in capoeira over time and place should not be viewed as a lack of authenticity but as an active, inevitable, and pervasive social tool by which culture becomes expedient, recreating the idea of bodily performance as a tactic to escape a marginal position. Following this logic, capoeiristas in Cuba, whose “communitas”[5] was once defined solely by their Cuban cultural expressions, have entered into a global context and are redefining definitions of culture and authenticity. This speaks to changes in gender and racial norms among practitioners globally, in which females and white practitioners can also embody the allegorical figure of cunning and resistance that had previously been associated with masculine creole identity. And it also explains how Cuban capoeiristas imagine their connection to capoeira and to Brazil not through a lived connection to a mestre, but through using creative malleability as a survival tactic, an expression consistent with their own social contexts.

As a physical manifestation of how Cuban and capoeira identity combine, Cuban capoeirista Daniel decided to get a capoeira tattoo on his forearm to mark the importance of capoeira in his life. But, he emphasized that the tattoo needed to highlight the Brazilian cultural tradition that he loved (capoeira) as well as the centrality his own Cuban identity and, inevitably, the Cubanness of the capoeira that he practiced. He designed a tattoo of a berimbau, the central musical instrument in capoeira, made not from the traditional beriba wood customary of berimbaus in Brazil, but from bamboo, the wood that Cuban capoeiristas have available to fashion their own berimbaus. The design of the tattoo has a Cuban flag wrapped around his berimbau, symbolically highlighting the importance of the local in the practice of Brazilian capoeira. (Daniel June 7, 2012)

Francisco, another Cuban capoeirista, explained that learning about the history of capoeira deepened his own connection to his Afro Cuban heritage. He described that he received the book Fundamentos da Malícia from a visiting student from Mexico and, after he understood the concept of malícia in capoeira, it motivated a deeper spiritual connection to similar concepts and practices in Cuba. As an example of how malícia becomes interpreted within the Cuban context, I remember the first time I met Francisco (who is now one of the instructors of capoeira at the Escuela Superior de Educación Físcia). We were playing capoeira in front of the arts and crafts market, Mercado de San José, in Habana Vieja. This market is very similar in concept to Mercado Modelo in Salvador, Bahia, and the capoeiristas in Havana often go there on the weekends to perform rodas, the circular space where the capoeira game is performed, for tourists and locals alike. Before we played, Francisco made a special signage with his fingers on the ground at the foot of the berimbau that he would later tell me was for his muerto (the spirit of a deceased, enslaved Cuban) that protects him during the roda. For Francisco, Cuban cultural traditions that were born of a similar Afro Atlantic experience are what drew him to develop such a strong passion for capoeira. His Cuban muertos, he said, protect him during the roda and guide his movements. He confessed he also secretly hides his resguardo, his protective charm from the Cuban Palo Monte religion, before entering any roda. (Francisco June 9, 2013)

What Francisco’s story represents is that Cuban capoeiristas can hold a cosmic view that approximates to both the historical setting of capoeira in Brazil and to their own lived Cuban experiences. While most practitioners would agree that capoeira as it is practiced today is a secular event and that any connection with spiritual practices, such as Candomblé or Catholicism, are indirect, rodas often begin with an invocation that explicitly gives praise to God (Deus) and many songs refer to saints and deities, both Christian and African (Lewis 14).  Brazil, and Salvador in particular, was (and is) home to many different religious traditions that intertwined in practice. Capoeira, according to Mathias Röhrig Assunção, was an important part of this uneasy coexistence during its formative years (116). Francisco’s understanding of the malícia in capoeira, the secularized understanding of how cunning has a greater spiritual significance, is often difficult to discern and describe to foreign capoeira players, the most common transnational manifestations of capoeira being in Europe and the United States. Globalization has made it common to see an American, French, German, or Italian make the sign of the cross before entering into the roda or even to touch the ground to make reference to the African ancestry of capoeira, even though it is likely that this is not part of the student’s own personal history. These foreign practitioners are following the codes of the ritual as they were taught, passed on via oral tradition from mestre to student, and then appropriated, creating a new spiritual significance to the capoeira ritual within the global context. For Cuban students, however, these codes and rules were not taught by a mestre but are often a manifestation of their own lived understanding of the relationship between the secular and the sacred understood through similar slippages in Afro Cuban manifestations of culture such as abakuá or rumba, for example. In fact, these elements of deep play in the Cuban capoeira game are becoming less visible in capoeira even in Brazil due to inevitable globalization and commodification as capoeira and culture itself becomes farther removed from this defining historical past. However, the ritualized understanding of malícia continues to be the key element of any capoeira game. In Cuba the ginga flows from Cuban experiences of performances of cunning and social inversions.

Embodying Malícia with Cubaneo

An Italian capoeirista who was living in Havana for six months in 2012 had the following to say about Capoeira in Cuba:

For what I have seen of capoeira in Cuba, people have a lot of feeling. I have seen capoeira in Brazil, in France, in Italy, and in Sweden. Sometimes people have a lot of financial possibilities to buy a berimbau, but they don’t even play it well. They don’t have the “sandunga” (swing), as they say in Cuba. And here the fact that Cubans have music in their blood means that it comes easier to them. They sing and they sing in rhythm. They play and they play with rhythm. If the music isn’t good the energy isn’t born. But here with very little they make marvelous things happen. We need to help them a little, right?  Send them things. Because they have the talent, the swing, and the malícia… (Vilma June 23, 2012)

According to Floyd Merrel, “Malícia is a little bit of ‘malice’, but with a sly, clever, ingratiating roguish gesture. It involves awareness of what’s going on under the surface appearance. Malícia is cunningly putting something on someone before she does it to you…The slaves developed malícia into a carefully honed instrument by means of which to generate subversive acts against their masters. Malícia became their way of coping with life, a way of life, the heart and soul of which is found in capoeira.” (Merrel 2005: 280)

Just like the upside-down aú and bananeira movements, capoeira is a microcosm where elements of power, prestige, politics, and existence are turned on their heads. Only the most cunning will survive. Literally and figuratively, the capoeirista has made these capoeira movements his weapon. The capoeirista is playful, but also very careful. Your opponent may smile in your face as he pulls your feet out from underneath you. In doing so, the capoeirista embodies this subversive behavior learned as street smarts for those born into colonial systems of servitude. Roberto Da Matta comments that “malícia” and “jeitinho” (finding a way to make something happen when there are no resources available) are characteristics of the Brazilian national psyche (204).

These traits of the national psyche are also true in Cuba and are, thus, naturally incorporated into the Cuban capoeira game. Although making resources out of nothing is not in and of itself revolutionary and, in fact, is characterized by making changes to better individual social situations without changing the status quo, it is representative of the politics of the everyday. It turns the average individual into a heroic figure resisting dominant oppression with creativity and skill. Representing the common man as an heroic figure is at the basis of Che Guevara’s conception of the “new man” put forth in “Socialism and Man in Cuba” (1965) through which Guevara called for the average man to use his creativity and spontaneity to battle the repressive systems of capitalist embargoes. Today, post-Special period, the “new” new man in Cuba questions this very institutional discourse; the common man looks at the unfulfilled promises of what was supposed to be a bright future, and uses the same social cunning to question the official Cuban discourse, citing the frustration of accessing the limited resources available to them in an outdated Socialist system.

Capoeiristas in Cuba talk about connecting to capoeira because it is an escape from “la lucha diaria,” literally the daily struggle for survival. Capoeira songs and movements are filled with irony and double meanings, incorporating the concept of malícia that is often so hard for foreign students to grasp because it cannot be taught, but must arise from its own social context of marginalization. For Cuban capoeiristas, a similar cultural language of metaphors and riddles are employed daily to deal with the difficulties of living through moments of scarcity caused by the political climate and/or the effects of the US embargo, using humor, metaphor, and performance to assert presence and identity.  Thus, the same concepts of malícia are at the heart of the Cuban psyche, only under a different name. For Cuban capoeiristas who have not had direct contact with Brazilian mestres or Brazilian cultural contexts, the idea of malícia, with its connections to spiritual powers as well as its ability to make something out of nothing, is interpreted through a Cuban understanding of cunning and street smarts known as cubaneo. In the Cuban context, inventing ways of survival or getting around the system when there does not seem to be any visible solution has become an important cultural marker of Cuban identity.

According to Pérez-Firmat,

Rather than naming un estado civil, [la cubanía] cubaneo names un estado de ánimo, a mood, a temperament, what used to be called a ‘national character’…Its frame of reference is not un país—a political entity—but un pueblo—a social and cultural entity… Cubaneo, finds expression in all of those habits of thought and speech and behavior that we know as typically criollos—the informality, the humor, the exuberance, the docility…” (Firmat-Pérez 4)

Cubaneo is a term to refer to a loose repertoire of gestures, customs, and vocabulary that mark Cuban national character. Works such as Jorge Mañach’s Indagación del Choteo (1928), Calixto Massó’s El carácter cubano (1941), and José Muzaurieta’s Manual del Perfecto Sinvergüenza (1922) are the best-known studies exploring the ways that Cubans invent a vocabulary of informality and humor towards living and survival. Unlike cubanidad or cubanía, which are born out of legal documents and governmental decrees of nationality, cubaneo denotes membership in a cultural community (Ibid). This cultural community and way of using methods of informality, gestures, and street smarts as survival tactics denote a similar understanding to the Brazilian malícia. Playing capoeira in Cuba then becomes an act of ritualizing cubaneo.

Capoeira and Baile de Maní

As such, capoeira is not a foreign practice to Cubans who have grown up with similar corporal gestations in which movement, music, and sacred energies are in dialogue. In explaining how learning about the history of capoeira has revealed similarities between Cuba and Brazil Minhoca said, “Santería and Candomblé. Here [in capoeira class] we learn about both of the religions and the drum rhythms for both” (Minhoca June 30, 2013).

In Los Bailes y el Teatro de los Negros en el Folklore de Cuba Fernando Ortiz writes,

…la danza [afrocubana] es originariamente un fenómeno dialogal, de magia o religión; por los efectos psíquicos de la danza y por la relación de su dinámica con los conceptos de la trascendencia de la acción sacromágica” (Ortiz 1951: 75).

Similarities in the institutional structures of colonialism in the Americas shaped the cultural sphere. Cuba became the largest producer of sugar after the Haitian Revolution of 1804. And in Brazil, sugarcane production was the largest earning crop in the slave plantations of Northeastern Brazil, especially in the states of Bahia and Pernambuco. Plantation systems as well as urban spaces in slave-holding societies in which slaves and poor, marginalized freedmen would congregate for social and financial reasons became places of creativity and performed resistance. Benítez-Rojo describes how the Caribbean (and I would argue that Northeastern Brazil can be included in this description) share a cultural history related to the structures of the sugar cane plantations. “The powerful machine of the sugar plantations attempted systematically to shape, to suit to its own convenience, the political, economic, social and cultural spheres of the country that nourishes it until that country is changed into a sugar island” (72). The Casa Grande became the basic structuring model for society and was a space for the generation of new cultural practices (Mwewa 153). The plantation system and slavery created the need for cultural acts of resistance in order to keep African (and indigenous) cultural traditions alive. These cultural performances that had their roots in systems of oppression created on plantations made their way to the cities through rural to urban migration.

Whereas in Brazil, capoeira was one of the products of the plantation system, making its way to urban centers when free Africans and Creoles moved into marginalized communities known as zungus, Cuban solares were parallel collective urban housing spaces for the poorest of the poor that also harbored cultural forms of resistance. Rumba, for example, is said to have “flourished in urban and rural settings where Cuban workers of all colors and occupations [gathered to share] their Creole heritage in music and dance…where free blacks gathered to communicate their feelings or comment on their struggles and enslaved Africans were permitted to congregate after work”  (Daniel 17). Musical synchronization between the drumbeat and the dancer is seen in the “rumba brava” or the “rumba de solar” just as it is in capoeira, for example.

Not only have Cuban capoeiristas brought up the connections between the cultural settings of rumba and capoeira and the importance of these practices in the performance of national identity, but playing capoeira has caused a new interest in a Cuban martial art that seems to have faded out of modern-day practice in Cuba: baile de maní. Maní, also known as Bambosá, was an African-derived acrobatic combat game that is rumored to have been widespread in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Cuba, especially in the central areas of the island such as in Matanzas, Villa Clara, Cienfuegos, Sancti Spíritus, and on the outskirts of Havana. These were all areas known for their sugar cane plantations. Fernando Ortiz documented one of the few detailed descriptions of maní in the 1930s in the neighborhood of “Los positos” in Marianao. This, interestingly, is also one of the last written documentations of baile de maní. Ortiz defined it as “consisting fundamentally in boxing, during which the player who is dancing tries to knock down one of the various participants, who remain on the defensive, and form a circle around him” (Ortiz 1951: 161).

El juego de maní consiste fundamentalmente en un pugilato, durante el cual un jugador que está bailando trata de abatir con un fuerte golpe a puño cerrado a uno de los varios participantes que están a la defensiva, formando un corro a su alrededor…Los maniseros iban descalzos, desnudos de la cintura para arriba y con calzones cortos o subidos a la rodilla; sin armas, insignias ni otro adorno que algún pañuelo de colores colgando de un ancho cinturón de cuero que les protegía el vientre. (IBID)

Mathias Assunção highlights its comparisons to the game of capoeira.

Despite its likely West African origins, maní offers a number of important parallels with capoeira, both in its formal aspects (played in a circle, with similar instruments, strikes embedded in a basic rhythmic movement) and its cultural meaning (multiple social functions, corresponding to the various modalities of the game, the role of ‘witchcraft’, and the importance of deception” (Assunção 63).

The origins of maní, like capoeira, are steeped in myth. It is possible that the name comes from Mani-kongo (King of the Congo Empire), which, according to Fernando Ortiz (1951: 160-161), is what the powerful freed blacks from the Congo region would call themselves.[6] Ortiz proposes that both rumba and maní are attributed to the Ganga, located in what are today the Sierra Leone and Liberia regions of West Africa. There are similarities between the two terms baile de maní and gangá maní, which is a term used to describe the dances of the manis, a group of people who migrated to Sierra Leone in the mid-sixteenth century (Ortiz 1951:164). Argeliers León supports this idea that baile de maní may be of bantú origin from the Congo region in his ethnographic study of Cuban folkloric traditions in “Del Canto y el Tiempo” (León 67-68).

Just as in capoeira, maní responded through lyrics to the game being played. The instrumentation of maní was usually two or three drums and an agogô.  Mathias Assunção makes the interesting observation that, although the berimbau is considered to be the iconographic instrument of capoeira, the first documentation of capoeira does not include the berimbau (7-8). The instrumentation of maní is actually very similar to capoeira as documented in the well-known engraving “Jogar Capöera-danse de la guerre” (1835) by Johann Moritz Rugendas, which is one of the earliest recorded visual representations of capoeira.[7]

There was also much exchange between players and musicians in both folkloric practices. For example, the leader of the musical line in maní was the cajero drummer. The cajero was supposed to mark a hard hit during the game with a hard hit of the drum. If the cajero missed the hit or was behind, he was taken off the instrument and put into the ring to be taken down. Similarly, different rhythms on the berimbau in capoeira mark a different style of game to be played. Whereas in capoeira, the circle of players surround a game of two capoeristas who battle in the middle, in the maní game, all men forming the circle could throw a hit. In both cases, however, the act of playing became an allegory of the physical violence one must avoid outside of the ring and a ritual for survival of the fittest.

Like capoeira, el baile de maní did not have a set choreography. Players would perform acrobatic punches and kicks to the rhythm of the music within a circle of other maniseros. In both practices players were noted for the surprise attacks that they performed on their opponents and the games were based in techniques of defense rather than attack. Yet, there are violent accounts of both maní and capoeira to the death.[8]

The spiritual worlds of maniseros and capoeiristas also hold parallels. The maniseros often used wrist bands or hid makutos in their belts, powerful charms prepared to help protect them and aid in their opponent’s defeat. In a parallel context, patuás, believed to ‘close the body’ and protect the owner from bad spells, were very popular historically among capoeiristas in Brazil (Assunção 118). Finally, although both were solitary fights, players often formed collectives. In Cuba, for example, one sugar cane plantation could challenge another plantation in maní games (Ortiz 1951:165). Capoeira is famously associated with maltas, Afro Brazilian gangs that would protect one another and battle rival gangs as well as the local authority.

The embodied performance of these cultural affinities parlays into powerful redefinitions of both Cuban and Brazilian culture. Maní was a Cuban folkloric practice that had all but disappeared since Ortiz’s last known documentation of it published in 1951. Today, however, capoeiristas in Havana are rediscovering it in their personal narratives explaining the Cuban connection to Brazilian capoeira. Since Cuban capoeiristas do not have mestres that are shaping their styles of play, they look towards and incorporate Cuban folkloric practices into the swing of their play. It is not uncommon to see movements from rumba or abakuá, for example, in a capoeira roda in Cuba. Players have also mentioned that they are incorporating the steps of baile de maní as part of their cubanization of capoeira. But, maní is not a contemporary practice in Cuba. This means capoeristas are reinterpreting what they imagine baile de maní must once have been like and applying that idea to their capoeira games. The interpretive powers of a Cuba-Brazil hybrid capoeira experience are actually resulting in a revival, or, at least, a rethinking of a Cuban cultural tradition that had been almost all but forgotten.

The capoeirista and the Íreme

Capoeira culture is also being incorporated into performances of Cuban cultural traditions. The way in which I first became involved with the capoeira community in Cuba is a particularly interesting example to illustrate this point. On November 27, 2011, I went to a march in honor of five Abakuá members who were killed in 1871 trying to defend eight medical students executed by the Spanish firing squad for allegedly desecrating a Spaniard’s grave; this was in the time of Spanish colonial rule when tensions between Spanish-born peninsulares and Cuban-born criollos were high. The yearly procession in honor of the 19^th-century medical students departs from the University of Havana and goes across town to La Punta del Prado where there is a statue in honor of these martyred medical students.  However, what is rarely mentioned in the commemorating event is that, along with these eight medical students, five black men also died that day trying to defend the students’ rights. These men were Abakuá members, a male initiatory secret society, who take oaths of lifelong loyalty to one another.

Abakuá Society[9] was founded in 1836 in La Regla and members, descendants of the Calabari cabildo, historically took a rebellious stance against Spanish colonial rule and slavery. As a mutual-aid secret society, Abakuá culture and lore has been transmitted orally and, though Abakuá lore has become ever-present in Cuban popular culture to represent the rebellious and anti-colonial aspects of Cuban culture, much of its meaning remains uninterpreted by outsiders. (Miller 161)

On the day of remembrance of the execution of the 19^th-century medical students in 2011, I did not actually go to the main procession leaving from the University of Havana, but to an alternative event, organized by the Abakuá Association of Cuba, that met in front of Editora Abril in Havana Vieja. I had heard of this event through the rumba circles where I had been studying dance, many of whose drummers and dancers were, themselves, Abakuá members. One of my dance partners was scheduled to play the part of one of the íremes for the march. The íreme, often referred to as the diablito ñañigo, is one of the principal figures in the Abakuá ceremony, representing an ancestral spirit from the other world that dances in typical Abakuá fashion for the duration of the ceremony.

When intellectuals and Abakuá members Orlando Gutierrez and Ramón Torres Zayas began their speeches, instead of beginning the event accompanied by the coro de clave of the abakuá or the beat of the Ékue drum (the ritual drum through which Tánse, the divine fish whose capture supposedly led to the creation of the abakuá society in Africa, and through which the voice of God is said to reverberate), the ceremony opened with the berimbau of capoeira. That was the first day that I met Cuban capoeira instructors Libre and Cobrinha, instructors for the group Caiman Capoeira. Libre played berimbau and sang capoeira songs to lead the event as Cobrinha answered the refrains and called for the crowd to join in.

The Brazilian berimbau opened a public event honoring the Cuban tradition of abakuá and its heroes, which is very significant given the strong markers of specifically Cuban creole culture that commemorate this particular day. Abakuá rhythms are in the basis of most Cuban music, including the rumba guaguancó rhythm, which is the symbol of Cuban national pride. So why was it that if there were Cuban drummers present, the organizers chose the berimbau to introduce the event as well as to be the musical accompaniment during the poetry reading? Purposefully or not, the berimbau, as a symbol of capoeira and, thus, an Afro Brazilian performance of cultural resistance against a dominant colonial system, brought a sense of universality to the specifically Cuban abakuá ceremony that day. The abakuá martyrs became martyrs of a whole cultural process that went far beyond the confines of Havana and linked the creole experience in Cuba to the rest of the Diaspora, sharing an historical experience in slavery and creative resistance across the black Atlantic.

After the berimbau, speeches, and poetry readings, the procession began down Prado Avenue led by two iremes. When the íremes finally arrived at the statue in honor of the medical students, the crowd watched as these íremes danced across the monument and the capoeiristas in the group began to organize a small roda off to the side. I watched in awe as I saw the movements of the íremes and the movements of the capoeristas blend into one.

Cuban capoeiristas overcome obstacles and pool their resources to reproduce capoeira a lo cubano. Players are transforming culture into a form of social capital within their own cultural context. Capoeira in Cuba embodies an experience of social inversion and performative resistance that was developed over centuries of Afro Atlantic exchanges. Though it is a Brazilian expression of national identity, capoeira blurs lines of nationality when localized into the Cuban context, creating a performative dialogue between observable Cuba-Brazil cultural affinities—of both past and present.

All photos are copyrighted to Annie Gibson, the author of this article.

The post Rediscovering lo cubano Through Capoeira in Cuba appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Francisco Zamora Loboch[1], o “Paco” para los que lo conocen, es uno de los escritores más conocidos de Guinea Ecuatorial. Nacido en 1948 en la isla guineana de Annobón, su vida ha sido profundamente marcada por el paso de su patria por el dominio colonial español, la independencia, la dictadura, y la diáspora. Aunque llegó a España para emprender estudios universitarios en 1968, la toma del poder por Francisco Macías Nguema obligó a miles de sus compatriotas a exiliarse, así convirtiendo en permanente la estancia de Zamora en España. En 1979, el sobrino de Macías, Teodoro Obiang, se convirtió en presidente, lo cual confirmó aún más la imposibilidad de que Zamora volviera. Desde entonces, Zamora se ha establecido como periodista en Madrid. Ha trabajado para varias publicaciones a lo largo de los años, especialmente como especialista del deporte para el diario As. Sus obras literarias, las cuales comprenden ensayo (Cómo ser negro y no morir en Aravaca, 1994), poesía (Memoria de laberintos, 1999; Desde el Viyil y otras crónicas, 2008); y novela (Conspiración en el green, 2009; El caimán de Kaduna, 2012), enfrentan temas urgentemente importantes como el papel del nacionalismo en una tierra marcada por la tensión étnica, la pobreza, y el terrorismo estatal; la experiencia del exilio en el antiguo poder colonial; la pertenencia de una nación africana en la comunidad hispanohablante global; y el papel del humor a la hora de promover el cambio social.

El 28 de mayo, 2013, Paco se sentó conmigo en su despacho en Madrid para hablar de su vida y de su literatura.

*****

Martin Repinecz:                ¿Puedes hablar un poco de cómo llegaste a España y de cómo llegaste a ser escritor?

Francisco Zamora Loboch:               Bueno, pues escritor ya lo era desde niño. Tengo un poema que lo describe. En Annobón, no había mucha gente que supiera leer por aquella época. Cuando el barco correo llegaba, los hombres y mujeres mayores siempre acudían a los chicos, a los jóvenes, que sabían escribir, para escribir las cartas. Entonces a partir de allí empecé a escribir, que estaba bien porque estaba muy bien remunerado. Quiero decirte que, cuanto mejor escribías las cartas, más ñames tenías, más plátanos tenías, incluso pescado tenías, etcétera. O sea, de allí empecé a escribir, o bueno, más que a escribir, a saber la importancia de lo que es la escritura.

Bueno, y en cuanto a llegar a este país, cuando era joven como tú, al parecer era tan listo y tan inteligente como tú–¡la gente se creía que era yo listo e inteligente como tú!

FZL:               Y me dieron una beca, por lo cual llegué aquí para estudiar ciencias económicas. Pero al poco tiempo me di cuenta de que lo que realmente me atraía era el periodismo. Y me pasé a periodismo.

MR:                ¿Y eso era en los años ’60, no?

FZL:               Más bien ‘70. No me eches tantos años; no seas capullo.

MR:                ¿Y cuándo empezaste a escribir creativamente?

FZL:               Creativamente también ya en Guinea empecé a escribir poesía, cuando tendría 17, 18 años. E incluso antes, porque de niño aprendí muy pronto a leer; creo que a los tres años ya sabía leer, o a los cuatro.

MR:                ¿Tu padre también era poeta?

FZL:               Mi padre era poeta y maestro de escuela. Entonces, pues, para mí descubrir la lectura de los tebeos, o los cómics, como se llaman ahora, fue un mundo muy gratificante. Pero también era problemático porque ahora mis hermanas mayores me recuerdan lo mucho que me reía de ellas porque ellas no sabían leer. A los seis, siete años, todavía yo decía, “pero esto, ¡¿cómo puede ser?!,” y tal. Entonces obviamente empezaba a meterme en problemas, pero de risa; yo siempre me he reído mucho de los ignorantes.

FZL:               Pero como los ignorantes siempre tienen más fuerza, siempre te acaban hundiendo de un golpe, o de una hostia, o de una cosa así. Entonces, bueno, sí, en Guinea empecé a escribir, y al llegar aquí, sufrí, como es natural, una transformación de todo lo que había escrito, que era sobre palmeras, e historias y movidas. Y al llegar aquí, gracias a Dios, me encontré en la escuela de periodismo, en las aulas y tal, a gente muy crítica con respecto a la política, la historia, etcétera. Tuve mucha suerte en ese sentido porque el ser crítico, y el decirte “¿qué es eso de las palmeras, y de los cocoteros?”, y tal, te obliga a ponerte al día. Y a la vez que escribes en los periódicos, te vas dando cuenta de que el regionalismo no tiene ninguna razón de ser si no tiene su proyección en un árbol común de cultura. No se puede andar por ahí toda la vida hablando de ancestros, de grutas, de palmeras, de cocoteros; no, no, no. Hay que integrar todo esto, como diría un cierto músico brasileño, dentro de una cultura común.

MR:                Y cuando eras pequeño en Annobón, ¿qué textos estaban disponibles para ti? ¿Mencionaste los tebeos, no?

FZL:               ¡Cómics! Capitán Trueno; Jabato; Mortadelo y Filemón; lo que había de aquella época. No leí ningún libro interesante, si es lo que tú quieres saber.

¿Si ya leía a Dickens? No. En absoluto, mi cultura se limitaba a los cómics: al mundo de Capitán Trueno, al mundo del Jabato, al mundo de Mortadelo y Filemón, del Guerrero del Antifaz, como cualquier niño español.

MR:                ¿Y del Western también, no?

FZL:               Ah sí, por supuesto; mi padre tenía muy buenas novelas del Oeste, pero no me las dejaba leer. Pero buscaba y conseguía. Y además, coincide que ha salido una historia hermosa en estos años con los autores del Western. No sé si habrás leído de cómo los autores represaliados por el franquismo se refugiaron en las novelitas del Oeste y de misterio y de crímenes para sobrevivir, y firmaban con pseudónimos como Clark Karrados, como Silver Kane. El único que firmaba como él era Marcial Lafuente Estefanía. Ese momento me coge completamente. Por entusiasmado, no por presumir  de grandes lecturas. Ahora, cuando ingresé en el Instituto de Enseñanza Media en Santa Isabel, en Malabo, o en Clarence, que tiene los tres nombres…[2]

MR:                O sea, perdón, ¿tú te fuiste de Annobón en cierto momento?

FZL:               Sí, claro; mi padre era maestro y cuando le destinaron a Santa Isabel, ya me fui para allá. Y entonces, dos o tres años después, ingresé en el Instituto de Enseñanza Media. Cuando estuve en el Instituto de Enseñanza Media, ya empezaron a autorizar a los chicos negros que podían entrar, porque antes era una institución sólo destinada a los chicos blancos. Entonces a partir del año ‘58, cuando se declara que Guinea Ecuatorial es una provincia, igual que Albacete, entonces ya podíamos entrar a los institutos. Entonces allí es cuando me encontré con profesores competentes que me enseñaron quién era Juan Ramón Jiménez, quién era Cervantes, quién era esto y aquello, etcétera. Y es cuando entré en contacto con la literatura de gran tamaño, y empecé a leer en serio, sobre todo a Juan Ramón, me lo leí bastante; Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer; en fin, todo lo que se leía en aquella época. Y me acuerdo perfectamente cuando leí Platero y yo, que me quedé impresionado de cómo se podía escribir tan bien. Y por supuesto, los poemas de Juan Ramón Jiménez, aunque luego no haya influido mucho en mí, pero esto te llena de cultura, ¿no?

MR:                Sí, definitivamente. Incluso cuando tu escribías cartas en Annobón, ¿escribías en castellano?

FZL:               En castellano, en castellano. Si no, ¿qué misión tenía? De Annobón, sólo se puede

ir a Santa Isabel, o a Fernando Pó, o a Bioko, o a Malabo.[3] Ese era el itinerario vital del annobonés. El annobonés iba para trabajar en Malabo y volver para construir su casa, etc. Entonces, no teníamos otro panorama, y seguimos sin tenerlo. O sea, el ideal del annobonés es poner los pies en la tierra de los bubis,[4] acumular dinero o elementos de material para construir una casa de piedra, o una casa de cemento, etc.

MR:                ¿Puedes hablar un poco más de la identidad de Annobón? ¿Cómo la gente en esa isla siente su identidad annobonesa con respecto a la identidad equatoguineana?

FZL:               Los annoboneses se sienten annoboneses; mucho, mucho, mucho. Hombre, yo creo que nos sentimos guineanos por los bubis. La relación entre Annobón y la isla de Bioko, o la isla de Fernando Pó, como se llame, siempre ha existido. Porque como te he dicho, era nuestro vínculo para saber lo que pasaba en el mundo, para poder comprar, para poder usar una cosa que se llama dinero, para tener relaciones con la cultura blanca. Entonces, claro, a partir de allí, cuando se junta con el continente, no hay ningún problema. Al fin y al cabo, vas a estar en África. Hagas lo que hagas. Esta es una cosa que desconocen los africanos, que es que al fin y al cabo, va a ser África.

MR:                ¿Pero ustedes se identifican más bien con los bubis que con los fang?[5]

FZL:               Sí, claro que sí. El trato entre Annobón y los fang es de hace cuarenta, cincuenta años. En cambio el trato de los annoboneses con los bubis ha sido secular. No íbamos al continente, íbamos a la isla en busca de oportunidades. Allí están los bubis. Pero es un crisol, la capital, que forman bubis, españoles, y otros. Lo que significa ser una capital. Pequeña, pero una capital al fin y al cabo.

MR:                ¿Y cómo era para ti la experiencia de vivir en Santa Isabel [present-day Malabo]?

FZL:               ¡Por supuesto! allí conocí a los amigos de toda la vida, a los que serían mis amigos, que eran todos unos maleantes. Mi padre llevaba además un reformatorio de menores. Con lo cual, imagínate, un chico de mi edad, ¡la cantidad de desalmados, delincuentes, golfos! Toda mi vida he estado entre golfos, golfillos, ladrones, mangantes! ¡Eran mis amigos!

FZL:               Y además de los que incorporé en el instituto, también hice muchos amigos en una experiencia semi-fascista, que era la OJE, la Organización Juvenil Española, cuando llegué a España en el 62-63. Pero esa OJE era una obra de Franco, y decían que le llamaba Franco la obra más mimada, o una cosa así. Servía para que los chicos guineanos de 14, 15, 16 años, pudieran venir a la península, a España, a integrarse con los otros chicos españoles. Con lo cual, claro, ¡tu universo cambió en dos o tres viajes! Era tremendo, porque de la discriminación racial de Guinea, de la supremacía del blanco sobre el negro, llegas aquí y dices, “¿Qué cojones? ¿Y esto? ¡Yo soy igual que estos tíos!” Los tíos esos te tomaban el pelo, tú les tomabas a ellos, te integrabas en un día, en dos días, en fin. Entonces, la OJE jugó un papel muy grande a pesar de ser una organización fascista de la juventud de Guinea Ecuatorial de aquella época porque le permitió salir del ambiente colonial y disfrutar del ambiente español. El enriquecimiento de esta experiencia semifascista, parafascista, etcétera–¿te puedes imaginar, con el uniforme azul y caqui?—nos sirvió a nosotros para despertar de un mundo colonial aletargado. Además, a toda una generación: no era yo, eran cientos de críos los que veníamos en verano aquí a los campamentos de la OJE. Con lo cual, pues, aunque Macías[6] acabó con toda esta gente, algunos se han salvado.

MR:                Entonces, cuando viniste a España para empezar la universidad, ¿pensabas volver a Guinea?

FZL:               Sí, por supuesto; no tenía ningún interés por quedarme; todo el romanticismo que yo podía tener para este país ya se había agotado a los 18 años. A los 18 años ya me lo conocía todo.

MR:                Y con la OJE, ¿tú venías a Madrid?

FZL:               Ah, no; es que eran experiencias increíbles para un chico nacido en Guinea. Con 15 años, te dejaban en Cádiz en el barco. Te dejaban el dinero suficiente y un mapa, y te decían dónde debéis estar en tal día. Con lo cual, teníamos que buscarnos la vida, o caminando, o en autostop, o como fuera para llegar a estos sitios, claro. Imagínate la experiencia que coges en los años ’60 y pico por aquí. Yo me acuerdo una vez que llegamos a Galicia porque el campamento era en Galicia en un lugar que se llama Sada, en una playa famosísima. Llegamos allí los seis guineanitos con nuestros macutos y tal, y el jefe dijo, “Bueno, hoy vamos a hacer una paella.” Teníamos allí el arroz, pedimos una paellera, y empezamos a hacer allí el arroz, y se acercaron unas señoras. “¿Qué hacéis?,” dicen. “Vamos a hacer una paella.” “¿De dónde venís?” “De Guinea.” “¿Desde cuándo hacéis paellas?” Le decimos, “no, es que…” y dicen, “mirad, hijos: sois muy jóvenes; estáis muy bien, muy guapos. Iros a bañaros. Tranquilamente disfrutad de Galicia. Cuando vengáis, no os preocupéis, que nosotros os preparamos la paella.” ¡Wooooow! Y cuando volvimos, aquella era una paellerona, una fiesta.

MR:                Entonces, ¿dijiste que viniste a estudiar economía pero luego cambiaste a periodismo, no?

FZL:               Sí, en la Complutense.

MR:             ¿Y estabas en la universidad cuando Guinea se independizó?

FZL:               No, yo estaba allí [en Guinea], en la plaza de España, pero no sé cómo se llama ahora.[7] Yo estaba aquel día.[8]

MR:                Ah, ¡te acuerdas del día! ¿Qué pasó exactamente?

FZL:               Bueno, después de aquello, a los dos meses o así, ya me vine a España. Y luego llegó lo de Macías: lo de los asesinatos, y la brutalidad, y todo eso, pero todo eso lo pasé aquí. Luegó se organizó alguna cosa para regresar, pero fracasó; todos los intentos que hicimos fracasaron. También éramos muy ingenuos; no creíamos que el dinero era importante.

MR:            O sea, en los primeros años, ¿estabas involucrado en movimientos políticos?

FZL:               Sí, siempre lo he estado.

MR:                Vamos a hablar por un momento de tu carrera de periodista. Puedes hablar un poco de como llegaste a ser periodista del deporte en particular?

FZL:               Ah, sí, porque en una ocasión estuve hablando con uno de mis maestros, y yo estaba obsesionado con Guinea. Entonces me dijo que no me obsesionara demasiado con esto, y que me dedicara a hacer periodismo. Primero, porque tenía que subsistir, y segundo, porque no me tenía que etiquetar demasiado. Entonces, siempre he ido alternando una cosa con otra. Pero sobre todo, para mí, donde he escrito lo mejor es el mundo del deporte porque de pequeño he sido muy buen deportista. Eso sí que es verdad, sí. He hecho velocidad, baloncesto, vallas, por supuesto jugar al futbol.

MR:                Tu última novela, El caimán de Kaduna, es sobre el fútbol. ¿Supongo que tu experiencia reportando sobre el fútbol te ha ayudado mucho a escribirla?

FZL:              Sí. El diario As me ha enviado prácticamente a todos los campeonatos de fútbol de África. En el mundial de Alemania,[9] se clasificaron cuatro o cinco equipos africanos, así que yo tuve que recorrer todos esos países africanos contando cómo se veía el mundial allí. En la Afrocopa de Ghana,[10] estuve. En la de Egipto,[11] estuve. En la de Angola,[12] estuve. Y luego estuve en Suráfrica ahora para el mundial.[13]

MR:                Y cuando estuviste en todos esos países, ¿conseguiste establecer contacto con otros escritores africanos?

FZL:               No, estaba trabajando como un loco. Porque es que tienes que rellenar todos los

días dos páginas de periódico. No tienes tiempo para nada. No da tiempo más que comer malamente. Pero es el mejor momento para visitar esos países. Ves la explosión nacional, la depresión nacional, ves gente que no tiene nada que ver con el fútbol criticar el fútbol. Además, la organización no suele ser muy sofisticada. Aquí si enseñas la credencial, te mandan a otro sitio, y de allí tienes que ir a otro. Pero allí no. Yo prefiero ese caos. Está más entretenido.

MR:                Entonces, volviendo a la literatura, ¿los primeros textos literarios que publicaste eran poesías, no, que salieron en la antología de Donato?[14]

FZL:               Precisamente, en la antología de Donato, no. Entre los intentos de buscar fondos para luchar contra Macías, sacamos unos libros que llamamos literatura guineana, o una cosa así que no me acuerdo. allí empezaron a salir los primeros escritos.. .Ahora creo que se han cumplido unos 25 años desde aquellos primeros escritos que sacamos Donato, yo y esta gente.

MR:                ¿Y qué te parece, en general, el proyecto de crear una literatura guineana? ¿Te parece importante etiquetarla de esa manera?

FZL:               Sí, me parece importante etiquetarla de esa manera porque de esta forma, la gente que leemos en español nos daremos cuenta de que ahora mismo, el español tiene tres patas, si no cuatro. Una pata  que es la española normal: Madrid; Sevilla; la península. Otra pata es Sudamérica;  y la otra es África. Entonces es importante para nosotros que se distinga como tal. Tú, como buen americano, sabes que hasta que una cosa no le dan nombre, no toma visibilidad. Y no puedes hacer un movimiento. Es bueno, no es malo.

MR:                ¿Te parece que los escritores guineanos están obteniendo más visibilidad?

FZL:               Las universidades les están dando visibilidad.

MR:                ¿En España también?

FZL:               No, en España no. Los americanos. Cada vez que me llama un estudioso americano, soy incapaz de decirle que no, porque sé que están haciendo un esfuerzo valioso, y gente como Justo Bolekia, Ávila Laurel, Donato Ndongo Bidyogo, [15] saben la dependencia y el agradecimiento que les debemos a los americanos. A los estudiantes americanos. Porque se han tomado muy en serio lo que se está produciendo con sus tesis y sus estudios. No hay universidad americana donde no se sepa algo de lo que se produce en Guinea Ecuatorial. Y eso es gracias a ellos, no a España. En España, nos ningunean. No han tomado dimensión exacta de que un pequeño país llamado Guinea es la embajada del español en África. Y si la tienen, les da igual. Pero coño, un continente que habla mil millones de idiomas, ¿que tenga un promontorio dedicado al español? ¡Aunque sea escribir con el culo! Que es verdad que a veces digo, joder, esta novela está escrita con el culo, o este poema no tiene nada de interesante, pero ¡es en español!

FZL:               Y España, y el Instituto Cervantes y las instituciones deberían tomar un poco más de conciencia de lo que está ocurriendo. Porque es que no sabes además la cantidad de gente que escribe en Guinea, un montón.

MR:                ¿Como es la situación para los escritores en Guinea Ecuatorial?

FZL:               No sé, porque no vivo allí. Pero supongo que debe ser frustrante porque no tienen lectores. El gobierno guineano no hace mucho por ellos. Como decía Ávila Laurel, “escribir en Guinea es como ser esquiador en el Sahara.”

MR:            Sí, eso imaginaba.

FZL:               Sí.

MR:                ¿Puedes contarme un poco sobre tus próximos proyectos literarios?

FZL:               Estoy preparando un libro de poemas. Quiero entitularlo “Azul español.” “Azul español” es sobre la lengua, la religión, y la relación poética entre mi España y mi Guinea. Por un lado, el azul representa el uniforme de los falangistas, del régimen. El himno falangista decía “cubre tu pecho del azul español.” Pero luego también hay un poema de Juan Ramón Jiménez que dice, “todas las tardes el cielo será azul y placido.”[16] Este “azul y placido” me encanta. Y me parece una cosa muy sugerente. He empezado a escribirlo pero no tengo mucha prisa.

MR:                Muy interesante. Como  última pregunta, ¿has pensado alguna vez volver a Guinea Ecuatorial?

FZL:               ¡Sí, claro! Tengo que enseñar a los chavales a jugar bien al fútbol, que creo que lo están haciendo mal. Y también les puedo enseñar a jugar a vóleibol, y también les puedo enseñar a jugar a baloncesto. Y si no quieren los guineanos, lo puedo hacer en Annobón. No pasa nada.

MR:                Pues muchas gracias, Paco.

FZL:               Nada, hombre. ¡Son dos o tres cañas que me vas a pagar ahora, cabrón!

The post Laberintos de memorias: Una conversación con Francisco Zamora Loboch appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

One of the many things I appreciated while reading the book is the clear highlighting of the role that the Rwandan and Ugandan governments played, particularly the personal involvement of the two dictators, Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni, in the war in DRC. Their motives, their modus operandi, the people they used, the ideologies they espoused, as well as the support they continue to receive from their American allies, is well documented via interviews, reports, articles and a previous book on the DRC. In fact, the involvement of these two countries is so deep that the chapter on the war in DRC begins with a compelling account of living conditions in pre-genocide Rwanda, moves on to the genocide itself, and the retribution of revengeful Rwandan soldiers deep in the forest of DRC, massacring Rwandan Hutu refugees, as well as DRC citizens.

The role of mineral riches is also very well presented. At first, the mineral trafficking was indeed a financial means of sustaining the costly hunt for the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) and other international armed groups, but quickly, smuggling riches out of the DRC became an end in itself. This burgeoning economic activity encouraged the mushrooming of faction after faction in corners where State authority could not be enforced.

Mining activities were conducted either through artisanal mining (rebels) or through direct contracts with the government (such as Angola buying a diamond exploitation monopoly for the derisory price of $20 million). Once opened, this door could not be closed and at various levels national and international political leaders and warlords used resources from DRC to fill their own pockets as well as fuel the war.

As the author moves toward interpreting the situation, the passivity of the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC) (later MONUSCO) is particularly worth reading about. While their mission to protect civilians and enforce peace was clear in their mandate, they stood by, “observing” as hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians were massacred in Ituri, South Kivu, and North Kivu. This, and the tacit blessings of the US, UK and other actors of the so-called international community, was captured quite well and in great detail by the author.

In an extraordinary tour de force, the author packs 550 years of Congolese history into the first forty pages. However, this account of the DRC’s history should have focused more deeply on those elements that have led to the current crisis instead of the personalities of the key players. It is notable that the DRC’s history is not the only reason for state failure and ongoing unrest in certain regions.

While the book is rich in information, dates and places that are very familiar to those living or working in the DRC might confuse a reader who is unfamiliar with past and present events in the DRC, and may erroneously reinforce the false perception that the DRC crisis is a conflict so complex that it cannot be resolved or understood. The book would have benefited from more maps and illustrations for the non specialized reader. It does not appear, for example, that different regions of the country experienced war at different times. The Eastern city of Bukavu for example has been at peace since 2004 while its northern sister, Goma, was under M23 siege in 2012. The CNDP/M23 episodes affected the southern part of North Kivu, leaving provinces like Katanga, Bas Congo, Kasai or Bandundu very far from that conflict.

As with many books written about the DRC, the presence of Congolese heroes who have worked tirelessly in the field to influence the national and international agenda seems missing. The book seems primarily about the roles played by international actors in the Congo, and less about the Congolese people themselves. They are presented either as either passive victims or naïve pawns used by foreign powers to conduct their criminal agendas on DRC soil. The unity of all Congolese parties during the struggle for independence has been minimized. The peaceful and non-violent demonstrations that brought down the Parti-Etat, organized by the Catholic Church, and the relevant political opposition have not been emphasized. When the author covers the Intercongolese Dialogue in Sun City, he fails to demonstrate the role played by civil society. Even when he mentions the denunciation of Rwanda and Uganda by international bodies, the author does not acknowledge the roles of Congolese whistle blowers, lobbyists and activists both inside and outside the country in shaping the Congolese political landscape, forcing the UN and European countries to name Rwanda and Uganda as instigators, and to take measures against them.

At times the Congolese actors are painted in black or white terms, and the social and political contexts under which they took certain decisions are not readily evident, despite the contextual relevance at the time. As an example, on page 95, in 2002 Joseph Kabila is already presented negatively when many Congolese still believe that it is the failed checks and balances in the DRC institutions, inherited from previous regimes and not addressed by the Sun City dialogue that changed him from a peacemaker into the authoritarian leader he now is. The overemphasis of the leaders’ ethnic origins was unnecessary in cases where tribal affiliation played a minimal role. It is easy to simplify situation of the DRC by grouping actors based on tribes, and it could even be misleading in some instances to think in terms of tribes when other interests were at stake.

Despite this, however, the work is a must-read for all who seek to understand the different factions and involvements in the DRC, and how the fate of the DRC is linked, in general, to the stability of the region, or lack thereof. Rather than being more broadly about development, diplomacy or economics, Deibert is principally focused on the engagement of national and international actors in the DRC security landscape and the ensuing complicity in mass murder that armed forces have perpetrated on the DRC soil. After encountering all the difficult facts presented in the book, the reader faces an important question: “Now what?” Now that we know about what happened, what comes next? Now that we have learnt about the despair, what hope do we have for the DRC?

The post Book Review: The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Between Hope and Despair (Michael Deibert, 2013) appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

The well-known artist’s warmth, kindness, and humility caught me by surprise. I was younger by nearly six decades, but he patiently listened all the same as I introduced myself, and briefly explain that I was in South Africa to work in the arts. A glimmer of a smile appeared on the face of the elder artist as he offered some words about the art scene in his Cape Town. When he finished, he nodded and turned toward a waiting friend. He then paused and turned back, saying: “Here, take my card and we’ll talk some other time. I’d like you to come visit and see my artwork.” Turning the card over in my hands. For a moment my young self was surprised to find only a street address and telephone number; my reflex was to look for an email address to which I could write. When I looked up again, Clarke’s spry frame was heading into the theatre. We just met, and Clarke’s warmth went beyond a simple welcome as he invited me to share his vision of South Africa.

Before continuing, I should note the stimulus for my meditations here is Clarke’s passing in April of 2014. Born in 1929 in Simon’s Town, The Group Areas Act moved him to Ocean View in 1973, and he lived and worked there until his passing. Clarke is best known for his paintings and prints of the daily life of Cape communities, but for decades he also quietly produced collages, handcrafted concertina books and poetry.

Clarke’s biography is astounding. The artist was relocated in the forced removals from Simon’s Town to Ocean View. He began his artistic career as part of community arts programs, and his sense of community and he maintained his commitment to public arts programs and social engagement, for many decades. Whereas most other now well-known artists of colour fled South African oppression, Clarke remained in the country. For instance, Gerard Sekoto thrived in France while Clarke survived in Cape Town. Clarke has engaged notions of ‘space’ for many years. The artist’s commitment to live and produce from his home base is a decision that is both personal and political.[1] It was from South Africa that Clarke developed and nurtured global community. These networks are both physical and conceptual, and the artistic engagement motivated active dialogue with artists internationally, among artists of colour in particular.

Since Clarke’s transition, several thoughtful eulogies have appeared. Emile Maurice marks the artist’s status as ‘elder statesman’ while Mario Pissaro is more direct in his description: “Peter Clarke was, indeed is, a giant.”[2]These authors (and others) offer broadly panoramic surveys of the different modalities in Clarke’s life and artwork, and Pissaro is especially attentive to the criteria and modes of interpretation that are employed to historicize Clarke’s activities. Indeed, it is difficult to overstate Clarke’s impact on histories of South African visual art.

Clarke’s work has appeared in several major exhibitions that solidify the artist’s relevance on both popular and critical levels. Clarke had been exhibiting work since the 1950s, and in 2011, Patricia Hobbs and Elizabeth Rankin produced a major retrospective exhibition and book on Clarke’s work. The venue of the South African National Gallery and its production by Standard Bank Johannesburg makes the project a definitive comment on Clarke’s oeuvre. In 2013, Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town held an exhibition and produced a catalogue of Clarke’s work, and in the same year Riason Naidoo and Tessa Jackson curated the first major exhibition of Clarke’s artwork in the United Kingdom at INIVA.[3]

In this brief reflection I shall be adopting a less panoramic viewpoint, and setting aside some important insights relayed by others, for example, Clarke’s mood that day in 1956 when he decided to be a full-time artist, or the specific ways in which the German Expressionist art movement influenced the artist’s style. Instead, I shall be focusing upon more theoretical issues in Clarke’s history and reception.

I would like to introduce Clarke’s unique position as an artist, including his impact on the development of critical discourse over decades. The artist’s long life afforded him reciprocal vantage points, shaping a historically informed awareness of the present day. Within the scope of this brief essay, I can do little more than gesture at the wider context that I believe to be necessary in formulating Clarke’s impact. I should say my tactic is to give some weight to what this impact might mean as a demonstration of visual culture in South Africa, of looking and being looked at, of spectacle and spectatorship, and the staging of the quotidian. I also make no apology for discussing the essential drama of black life, and what any of this has to do with the quintessential modernity of Clarke’s practice. I hope this viewpoint will provide an alternative way of framing the biographical picture that others have, quite rightly in my view, judged to be important.

Peter Clarke

My attempt to reflect on the vibrantly beautiful pictures of Clarke’s oeuvre immediately refracts in the glare of South African historical fact. The advent of Apartheid in 1948 merely ‘hardened’ a model for white minority rule in Africa that derived from nineteenth century British colonial policies—including the removal of African families from their farms; segregating spaces in cities; restrictions on mobility, sexual freedom, and economic rights of non-white South Africans, including the Pass Laws Act of 1952, which formalized the mandatory reference book identity document.[4] The catalogue for Clarke’s 2013 exhibition “Just Paper and Glue” points to this history; the second page pictures Clarke’s identity document issued in 1989, complete with photograph and biographical details. As a collage element, the inclusion of this fragment points to the legacy of the legal, psychological and social effects of the colonial era. What is more, it underscores the longstanding impact of these effects on daily life and interactions between people, going so far as to shape the space of imagination.

Space is materially and conceptually paramount in Clarke’s artwork, and the artist addresses the concept through a variety of media. Early pictures included views of his surroundings in Simon’s Town and the ocean shoreline. Clarke’s catalogue of landscape paintings provides literal examples of the artist’s concern with space. Clarke notes: “One idea, one project I’d like to see take shape is: I’ve always been interested in space, you know, space, space, space, and also in what happens in space, a space like this…”[5] The consistent genius in Clarke’s “space of imagination” may be its ability to depict and metaphorize at once. Gavin Younge picks this up with an incisive observation about Clarke’s “Haunted Landscape” (1976), describing it as a picture that represents a ‘landscape of the mind.’[6]

In an artwork made in gouache and collage titled “Afrika which way” (1978), the landscape view is interrupted and blocked by a white wall covered in graffiti. The space is divided in thirds, against dark grey clouds, in the upper left and right, a blue sky at dusk mingles with magentas, purples and blues. Hovering in the upper right of the scene, above the dividing wall, a setting vermillion circle is collaged over the clouds and placed above the wall. This picture is overtly political—the graffiti references Africa’s liberation leaders including Amílcar Cabral, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta and Julius Nyerere – and attacks the Cold War that was tearing southern Africa apart. Clarke comments:

Among the various laws that were put into place by the apartheid government was the Group Areas Act, whereby they would remove black people out of town in order to create separation between one group and another. So that people in Simon’s Town, people who had been there for a very very long time, people who’s parents had been born there, grandparents and so on and so on, they were given this order that they would have to move out, and they were in fact moved out of town… And so I became interested in this thing about graffiti, protest, space.[7]

A black dog trots along the fence as if to exit the scene, and in the vibrant, warm hued foreground, a young black man holds a birdcage from which two white doves fly. In this landscape, text and collage are in the mid-ground—at the center—of the image.

The iconography of these details matter to the (un-isolatable) formal properties of Clarke’s artwork, yet here my move is to establish some procedures to trace a relationship between Clarke’s longstanding admixtures of picture and text, visual practice and community outreach, and a courtship with conventional visual forms of European modernism as it consistently appears with local and necessarily black African (and Diasporic!) subject matter. This brief essay will only preview the wider context necessary in formulating such an issue. Here I give some weight to specific, if diverse points, but place the main emphasis on understanding the overall logic that links Clarke’s oeuvre to vital moments, concepts, meanings, and historical legacies.

From the fifteenth century the region posed an environmental conundrum to Europeans. From the early, dismissive assessments of the Portuguese to the Dutch colonizers of the region from 1652 to 1799, to the British controllers from the nineteenth century, the form and concept of the landscape was a problematic inheritance, as much so as the indigenous populations found therein. The Cape came to be populated by a mixture of indigenous inhabitants and colonists that spoke European languages but—because of unique cultural exchanges and makeshift colonial lifestyles—refused to act out the modes of life expected of them as ‘Europeans’. After 1880, the region was propelled into industrialization and by the geopolitics of imperialism transformed into an autonomous, modern society.

Closely related to the geopolitics of industrialization was the emergence of aesthetics, an attempt to develop a consequential science of appearances and imagination. The practice mediated the emergence of the modern representation, and initiated a shift in art away from the poetic tradition of classical mimesis toward “abstraction” and “non-representation.”[8] This is the bare minimum we need to note that to think about ‘landscape’ and ‘environment’ is to be concerned with describing “something there,” which is one among many questions of representation, the same methods that mediate the construction of imagined communities, nations, and personal identities. Geographic territory defines national identity through two distinct ways of understanding: internally, how the national community is imaginatively linked to the land; and externally, how the community is delimited in relation or in contrast to other groups in proximity.[9] Put another way, there is a direct link between space, land, territory, community and identity.

During the twentieth century, the preoccupation with finding some kind of psychic accommodation with the land became a defining feature of white South African nationhood. Apartheid’s ‘hardened’ model for white minority rule in Africa extended nineteenth century British colonial policies that included the removal of African families from their farms; segregating spaces in cities; restrictions on mobility, sexual freedom, and economic rights of non-white South Africans—black people—of various skin colours. Fred Moten insists the history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist such debilitating restraints on the imagination, and Clarke’s visions provide specific examples.[10] Clarke’s artwork offers ways of seeing how race and power have been legitimized and naturalized by everyday practices and experiences. Here, the basic point is that ideas about space and place are embedded in and produced by modern and transnational networks of knowledge and discourse, and Clarke’s wisdom allows us to see this movement.

In returning to “Afrika Which Way,” herein is a demonstration of visualizing landscape to invoke space, but also to use of text and collage as forms that execute disruptions of the established order. Clarke states this plainly:

I’m interested in recycling of materials, trash, leftovers, etcetera. I like to think in terms of the world being cleaned up and so I am doing my little bit for the process by making use of stuff that should be dumped, or is dumped and then retrieved, and so on. So I’ve made lots of use of collage… so its making use of waste materials in other words… what else?[11]

Collage in the usual meaning involves the pasting on of scraps that originated beyond the studio, in the store or on the street. The French noun coller means literally to glue or to stick. Collage method impacted the formation and elaboration of the art historical style known as Cubism. There was composite imagery before the twentieth century, but the appearance of collage in European modern art was substantially new.[12] Collage is linked to notions of indecency, paradox and perplexity—as “impurity by any other name,” and this technique of pasted paper had a special and profound part to play in the expression of the Modern sensibility in Europe and beyond—a sensibility tuned to matter and “capital” in the modern city.

Returning to historical fact: early papiers collés heralded in the Spanish artist Picasso’s involvement with “African art.” Picasso’s surrealist and cubist works are described as representations of representation. They are, like language, structured by means of arbitrary signs ‘circulating’ within a system of opposites. In collage, even when the imported object is still whole (a newspaper clipping, for instance), it has to join another surface where it does not strictly belong. Things happen in this transfer. A new relationship is enacted between the ‘low’ culture of newspapers and magazines, and the ‘high’ culture of professional art. This relationship is ‘inappropriate’. The collage method, then, delivers visual and conceptual encounter. Indeed, something happened in the explosive encounter between the European artist and the Trocadéro museum in Paris where non-Western artifacts were displayed and stored.

The collage method pulls the viewer in different temporal, conceptual and material directions when looking at the picture. This matters to Clarke’s artworks because this perspicacious feature articulates a vibrant modernity—of the discarded, unwanted, or overlooked as much as that which is kept, cherished or convenient. Collage in the fine arts allows viewers to see that it is somewhere in the gulf between the bright optimism of the official world and its degraded material residue, that many of the exemplary, central experiences of modernity exist. The fissures that open from a foreclosed universality, a refusal of humanity, a heroic but bounded expression, is black creative production.

Clarke’s use of collage and text begin to extract a new horizon of possibilities from within the moral and epistemic contours of a “postcolonial” present. Clarke inserted himself into the evolving discourse of modern African art during the 1960s.[13] Whereas Picasso used collage to escape narrative imagery, Clarke fills his scenes with text and signifying marks, situating them in space.[14]  Such a process that orients and situates our selves in space while coming to know the surrounding environment seems indispensible to the recognition of the self as a self.

Modernity’s fragments, some suggest, are its history, its residue, what is left over when consumption has ended for the day, when trading and exchange have ceased and the people have gone home. The production of blackness is a feature of the extended movement of modernity’s specific upheaval. It is a strain that pressures the assumption that personhood (personal biography) is the equivalent of subjectivity.[15] Put another way: since the colonial era, black South Africans have been portrayed as commodities who spoke—as laborers who were commodities before, as it were, and the abstraction of labor power from their bodies continues to pass this material heritage on, across conceptual divides that separate slavery and “freedom” in time and space.[16] These ideas may be placed in metaphorical relation to an artwork Clarke describes:

I have a feeling that in a space like this, If there is an air current coming in from that window or another source, and then another, and there is a current coming in from somewhere else, like over there, what we can’t see is what is happening with these particular streams of air. I have a feeling that if colour could be introduced into these streams, different colours, it would be visible, we would be able to see what was happening in these different streams, we would be able to see movement.[17]

Clarke’s work offers an opportunity to see movement in our aesthetic-political present. On the one hand, it asks what is demanded of a practice of postcolonial, postapartheid creativity. On the other, it asks what postcolonial creativity’s demand on this present ought to be.

Assuming, as I do, that the answers to these queries are not transparently self-evident and not adequately covered by the dominant vocabularies of the art historical, cultural and political realms we currently inhabit, Clarke’s artworks are one way of beginning to formulate responses to such questions.[18] Clarke’s oeuvre prompts us to see movement, to ask how, and with what conceptual resources, do we begin to extract a new yield, a new horizon of possibilities, from within the moral and epistemic contours of our present moment, and beyond.

The post Peter Clarke: Meditations on Space, Place and Movement appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Writing in 1961, on the eve of both Algeria’s independence and his death, what will become his seminal work, Les damnés de la terre, Frantz Fanon characterizes the colonial world as two zones or compartments opposed to each other in their very nature. He describes that the one zone, is “strongly built…all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly-lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt”. He continues in the same temperament with the added bonus of naming the inhabitants: “The settler’s town is a well-fed town, an easy-going town; its belly is always full of good things. The settlers town is a town of white people, of foreigners.” While on the side zone; that of the negro or native “is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there…they die there; it matters little not where, nor how. It is…without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other…the native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of light…a crouching village…of niggers and dirty arabs.”

Consistent with Fanon, French-Algerian existentialist, Albert Camus writes in 1953: “Poverty increases insofar as freedom retreats throughout the world and vice versa…The oppressed want to be liberated not only from their hunger but also from their masters.” Fanon’s sheer description of the geopolitical disparities – one of affluent existence and another of desolation, outlines not only colonial structural differences as such, but how the very orchestrations, determine experiential and existential realities. Fanon also notes that these cartographic domiciles produce inequalities, differing subjectivities and are self-cancelatory. The settler looks, from the hills of his well-lit town, with scorn and pomposity at the degenerate plight of the colonized native. The state of the desecrated existence of the colonized gives and sustains the colonizer’s humanity. Which is to say the symbolic weight of the colonizing being is constructed by and through the defilement of the colonized subject. The very well being of the master is the causal connection to both lack of freedom and the hunger that characterizes the colonized subject.

So there is something intrinsically relational between place and being. The common dictum that we are made by our dwellings becomes relatively plausible. The colonial machine produces subjects according to spaces. The designated colonial spatial positions, literary or figuratively, are built with their inhabitants in mind. Frank Wilderson III bolsters this point when he says: “Here the Absence of cartographic Presence resonates in the libidinal economy in the way Black “homeland” (in this case, the Ciskei) replicates the constituent deficiencies of Black “body” or “subject.” The Black “homeland” is a fated place where fated Black bodies are domiciled. It is the nowhere of no one. But it is more—or less—for “homeland” cartography suffers from a double inscription. The “homeland” is an Absence of national Presence drawn on the Absence of continental Presence; a Black “nation” on a Black “continent”; nowhere to the power of two.”

French philosopher Alain Badiou explains that when Marx argues that the proletariat has no being; he means it has no political presence. In the world Fanon diagnosed to have been characterized by “compartments” the logic is the same: “you are rich because are white, and you are white because you are rich.” This differential becomes the ‘dividing line’ as Seyki Otu would call it that separates between political and apolitical subjects. The color of one’s body determines the space and experience one aught to have – one’s access to life itself. This unrepresentability of others doesn’t mean, as Badiou also argues, that these others don’t exist – they do, however paradoxical their form of existence might be. This form of appearance, with all its formal presence as living bodies, “if we consider the world’s rules of appearance, the proletariat does not exist.” If the political subject aught to live in a place of decent living, spacious, secured and brightly lit streets, as a la settlers’ place, the apolitical subject, deserves can be found in nightmarish zones of depressive poverty, unsanitary streets and squalor like townships, shacks and favelas. Thus in this case the relation between place and people, land and native, colony and colonized or ghetto and blacks, is tautological. That is when one sees a black person automatically one sees a tableau vivant of township life.

Wasn’t this the intended mission of the 1913 native land act, to reduce blacks to nonexistent entities by dispossessing them off their land, labour and being? Today we live through the cracks of a legacy of colonial dispossessions. Even though there are no instruction boards designating separate amenities and laws that insist on the humiliation of the blacks, the lingering face of suffering remains unabashedly racialised. Thus the places in which blacks stay in the post 1994 situation remain to bare the already anciently prescribed “zone of nonbeing.” Though there are relative changes in the successive generations of black dwellings, from homeland to city, and the various types of settlements in city life, what has changed is neither the racialised colonial settlement nor its still degrading conditions. However, what has changed is the proximity of these spaces, getting closer and closer to places of employment – white spaces. More than the convenience for the working population to be closer to work, these proximities instead of showing an imaginative rupture from colonialism, force us to still re-read Fanon’s wager. This is because the “line” Fanon spoke about becomes over-emphasized and the two realities, wedged. Or rather the so-called inclusion of the black subject into the democratic plane, shows its fallacious mendacity. The black rather becomes in this arrangement included as excluded. Its inclusion doesn’t rupture with the structural exclusion of the colonial enterprise, but seeks to blur it or render it obsolete and natural.

There are many such spaces where the opulent towns stare in their cold gazes the “yelping noise” of black poverty. This pattern can be argued to repeat itself in the standard official ideological move of ‘reconciliation without justice’ between the oppressed and oppressor. Whereas before bodies were separated not only from entering the same spaces and entrances, but also were barred from meeting physically. In the age of multiracial South Africa the exteriorities of legal sectarianism has vanished but the core problematic which reproduces racially structured inequalities has remained intact. This game of corporeal meeting was at the heart of the 2010 soccer world cup state propaganda. The juxtapositioning of apartheid separation and post 1994 ‘rainbowness’ were used as psychological strategies to create a false consciousness of an imaginary leap into a different moment. That is, it cemented the assumptive idea that a rupture with our colonial past was made. This revelation is merely a superficial gesture of concealment of the rapacious structurally necessary inequalities.

Curators like Okwui Enwezor in the early years after 1994 were quick to pronounce how art could show the lingering binaries – of excluded/included, black/white etc., however one aught to ask whether art actually did this? Or whether the art world was any separate from this ‘compartmentalized’ world? Sport and other cultural activities were and still are hopefully propagated as conduits that will close the dichotomy while the very dichotomizing machine persists in its usual project. The antinomies of post apartheid South Africa still need us to raise the old uncomfortable questions of ‘the system’, the settlers/natives, the land, exploitation, white supremacy and so forth. It is burdensome to talk of freedom while bondage is still the burning reality amongst the oppressed. It remains problematic to talk of the rainbow nation or the biblical phrase of ‘love thy neighbor’ if the architectures of adjacent neighborhood is overdetermined by the persistence of undying legacy of inequality and systemic differentiality. In fact the recent explosions and mass protests, including the scandalous pota pota (shit spilling) riots in Cape Town CBD are indicative of the persevering nature of anti-black racism as a structuring logic. They become not only clues of an either vanishing or nonexistent liberated country, but also rather the safe existence of colonial legacy as a spectral force in a different form. They urge us to ask questions about dignity and security. They ask us to mark some distance from the misleading romanticization of the ghetto and glory that comes with suffering. Most importantly they must encourage us to say “no!” Or as Fanon would say: “There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born.”

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“I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I’ve known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

- Langston Hughes

*****

Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, tenth-century Arab writer and envoy of Abbasid caliph Muqtadir, explains that The Book of Ahmad Ibn Fadlan 921-922 “tells of all he saw in the lands of the Turks, the Khazars, the Rus, the Saqaliba, the Bashghirds and others, their various customs, news of their kings and their current status”[1] (3). More ethnographic than official, Fadlan’s travelogue poses intriguing departures for both medievalists and postcolonialists seeking to deconstruct European discourses of Otherness and narratives of both subject individuation and modern development. Ibn Fadlan’s travelogue gives evidence of a non-European medieval sensibility already attuned to constructions of exoticism and Orientalism, of cultural translation and acculturation, and of tourism and migration. Oft referenced for its early insights into Viking culture and burial practices, Fadlan’s text remains largely a historical artifact outside the scope of Anglophone literary studies.[2] That Fadlan has been hitherto overlooked in literary circles is unsurprising; medieval literature in the West has traditionally assumed a European center and a European gaze. That Richard Frye’s 2005 Ibn Fadlan’s Journey to Russia is marketed as the first ‘complete’ English translation of Fadlan’s text demonstrates glaring omissions in the medieval archive.

As postcolonial studies has gone great lengths to challenge and revise European subjectivities, literary and historical archives, and modernities, medievalists have begun to find postcolonial models useful for understanding the movement and subjectivities of the Middle Ages. Akin to the ‘transnational turn’ in postcolonial studies, the ‘postcolonial turn’ of medieval studies is in concert with anxieties around periodical, disciplinary, and national borders. This turn, which I understand to be a reconstituting of relationships between the Middle Ages and modernity and the pre-colonial and the postcolonial, coincides with the mobility of global capitalism, complex negotiations of national identities, and the transnational nature of language and literature. Inasmuch as Edward Said and Fredric Jameson have forced scholars to redefine ‘modernity’ in concert with the postcolonial and neocolonial worlds, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s 2000 edited work, The Postcolonial Middle Ages, and Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altshul’s 2009 edited collection, Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of ‘the Middle Ages’ Outside Europe, compel scholars to reconsider the “middle.” Cohen, Davis, and Altshul, along with their constituents, debunk the false characterizations of the “medieval” as a fixed Euro-Christian identity and the Middle Ages as “hard-edged alterity,” a dark, innocuous, staging ground in the trajectory towards modernity (Cohen 4).

If postcolonial studies has had success in shifting medieval positionalities, the current transnational moment should prompt us to expand the temporal limits of the postcolonial archive. The tremendous momentum of globalization and traveling cultures initiated by international trade, migration, re-mapping of national boundaries, and technology gives evidence for the porosity of national, cultural, and temporal borders. While postcolonial studies may traditionally be interested in a certain ‘national’ historical moment, neither the colony nor the nation-state can be utterly abstracted from its pre-colonial past. Medieval texts like Ibn Fadlan’s give evidence of early confrontations between East and West and developing representations of transnational trade, movement, and identity negotiations. Not unlike postcolonial and transnational texts, Fadlans’ text reflects anxieties about difference, the risks of migration, and the development of identity against an exoticized Other, a process so endemic to the modern and global world.

Though this project claims nothing as comprehensive as the aforementioned collections, it does seek to intercede in a direction of medieval literature that troubles the boundary between temporalities, territories, identities, and histories in hopes that we might open up new temporal alliances and fresh territory for postcolonial studies.[3] Inspired by Stephen Clingman’s 2009 The Grammar of Identity, James Clifford’s 1997 Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, and Mary Louise Pratt’s 1992 Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, I consider how river crossings specifically orient Ibn Fadlan’s 10th century travel narrative’s intimate negotiations with Otherness. His narrative not only poses an alternative locus and direction for the medieval gaze but also exemplifies the “middle’s” continued structural and thematic investments in issues of border mediation often deemed so characteristic of our postcolonial, transnational, and global positionalities.[4] I argue that through the river motif, Ibn Fadlan’s text enacts a series of complex boundary crossings as a means of geographically and textually mediating what Cohen calls the “intimate alterity”of the Other.[5] As neither utterly monstrous nor essentially familiar, the ‘difference’ Ibn Fadlan encounters poses problems of physical and textual translation made most manifest through Fadlan’s river crossings. In Clingman’s terms, the river, as the site of navigation, is also the site of transformation and, relatedly, transmission (22). Because “intimate alterity” collapses the distance between monstrous and man, the river becomes a space of both intersection and production. In other words, even as the river separates Ibn Fadlan from the foreign Other he encounters (the Bashgirds, the Bulghars, and the Rus), it configures a “contact zone”which produces anxiety even while allowing for proximity.[6]

Ibn Fadlan’s text is, of course, part of a larger collection of eastern and western medieval travel narratives that grapple with the ‘wholly Other’ in terms of representation, identity, and locatedness. We see similar productions of spectatorship in the writings of other medieval travelers: Abu Hamid, Geoffrey of Villehardouin, Marco Polo, and Ibn Battuta. However, Ibn Fadlan’s narrative contributes to the medieval conception of the Other in particular ways, as it is more concerned with the mediation of Otherness than with the identity formation of the subject. For Fadlan, the river marks the physical and epistemic distance between himself and the foreigners he meets. There is a boundary there, but one that can be crossed, however treacherous. His focus on these geographic crossings makes plain that the text is no bildungsroman. Providing scant detail about his internal world, Fadlan stubbornly resists the narrative of one-directional subject formation. Neither is his an even or direct journey from the known to the unfamiliar. The text, rather, charts a halting narration—one that ebbs and flows in its movement towards contact with an unknown Other in an unknown land.

“I’ve Known Rivers”

Thus far I have attempted to position Fadlan as part of a larger conversation that examines the Middle Ages as unbounded, a “contact zone” revealing the ‘always-already’ inextricability of temporalities made disparate. In such a context, Fadlan’s rivers function as the contact zone for the “intimate alterity” of the medieval and point to its trans-historical, trans-literary present. As readers, we cannot extricate the Jayhun, the Yaghindi, and the Jayik rivers of Fadlan’s text from the Homer’s Acheron, Conrad’s Congo, or Hughes’ mighty Mississippi. Though alternately poised as territorial, periodical, or cultural boundaries, rivers reach both ways: backwards to the Greeks and forwards to Europe and the Americas. Almost uni-directional, the river as both geographical feature and literary symbol resists beginning and end. Poised in the midst of a large body of literary crossings spanning millennia and oceans, Ibn Fadlan floats uneasily in the contact zone, always-already in between and in motion.

It is the river’s very ‘middleness’ that makes it an apt representation of both the text’s placement within a longer historical/literary trajectory and Fadlan’s anxiety about coming in proximity with the Other. Simultaneously demonstrating that literary history (medieval, modern, postcolonial) is always in flux, the river reveals that identity is equally mobile and mediated. In only fifty-three pages of manuscript, the text records twenty-three river crossings: the Jayhun, the Yaghindi, the Jam, the Jakhsh, the Udhil, the Ardin, the Warsh, the Akhti, the Wabna, the Jayikh, the Jakha, the Arkhaz, the Bajagh, the Samur, the Kinal, the Sukh, the Knunjulu, the Uran, the Uram, the Baynakh, the Watigh, the Niyasnah, and the Jawshir. While Fadlan does not rehearse every crossing in detail,he provides three longer narrations at the crossing of the Jayhun, the Yaghindi, and the Jayikh rivers that emphasize the difference between ‘here and there’/ Self and Other, the complexities of narrating the place of contact, and the anxieties of being in proximity. Fadlan, like Homer, Conrad, and Hughes before and after, suggests that the crossing is at times both otherworldly and otherwordly—dangling somewhere in the periphery of both place and language. For, in the middle of the current, the traveler is caught between the riverbanks, curiously fixed within the margins of territory and location.

While Fadlan’s first fording, of the Jayhun, reveals much about constructions of Otherness, the text elides the actual moment of contact. Profoundly emphasizing both the dislocation of the subject and deferral of narration, Fadlan’s difficulty in crossing mimics his difficulty in accessing the unknown. Refusing to annunciate the actual event, the text stages a physical and psychosocial transference that either occurs outside the boundaries of the text or never actually occurs. Oddly silent about both the nature of the inhabitants and the experience of crossing, Fadlan’s copious details regarding his mission’s three-month delay, the severity of the winter freeze, and the extensive preparations necessary to cross the river illuminate the ineffable and perhaps illegible point of contact. The reader literally has access only to what occurs on the edges and thus learns more about the nature of the boundary than the actual crossing of it. That Fadlan cannot or does not translate the corporeal ‘slap of oars on water’ but does narrate the intensity of the climate, signifies that transmission and mediation are often displaced. It is not that mediation or contact exists outside of language but that Fadlan’s physical proximity to the Other produces a textual anxiety which renders the moment of contact unnarratable.

Textual deferral or absence connotes an epistemic displacement realized through the geographic materiality of the river and its limitations. The cold codifies the hard-edged alterity of the Other while illuminating Fadlan’s persistent anxiety of and desire for mediation. He explains that the ice was “seventeen spans thick” and was “solid and did not crack,” creating “cold and hardships” that forced them to stay in Jurjaniya by the banks of the Jayhun river for over three months (Fadlan 8). Noting that even his beard froze, he characterizes Jurjaniya as “a land which made us think a gate to the cold of hell had opened before us” (Fadlan 8). The ice presents a physical boundary that animates the psychic distance between self and Other, marking both difference and proximity. His emphasis on the river’s depth and the ‘solidity’ of the ice accentuates the perceived distance between Fadlan and the Jurjaniya and the limitations inherent in crossing over. No arbitrary association, Fadlan’s chronicling of the cold is more than a symbolic manifestation of ethnic difference. In his 1992 publication, “Barbarians in Arab Eyes,” Aziz Al-Azmeh ably articulates that medieval constructions of racial ‘othering’ in the Arab mind do not imitate Anglo-European models but, rather, follow what he calls an ethnology “governed by a natural-scientific ecological determinism” (6). Azmeh intones:

Briefly stated, medieval Arabic culture followed the Greek conception of the inhabited world as consisting of seven latitudinal zones that began slightly north of the equator and ended in the realms of perpetual darkness in the north. Beyond the zones (aqalzm, from the Greek klimata) human habitation was not possible, and within their boundaries the nature of the changing environment prescribed different temperaments to the inhabitants. The four primary qualities of dryness, humidity, heat and cold, attached to the four elements, entered into four combinations that yielded the basic somatic humours of blood (hot and humid), phlegm (cold and humid), bile (hot and dry) and atrabile or black bile (cold and dry). Embryonic growth was the result of the “cooking” together of these four humours. (6)

Discursively coded in the medieval mind in terms of geography and biology, Fadlan’s careful chronicling of coldness and its effects on the body codifies the Otherness that he cannot articulate and reiterates that he is not like them. The river, the cold, and the ice, are both sites of deferral and agents of textual production.

Fadlan’s anxiety about the Other is as much about desire as it is fear. If we think of the river as producing Otherness, it is through that very production that Fadlan can make contact. Both boundary and conduit, the river enables mediation even as it forecloses understanding. Returning to his description of the Jayhun river valley as “a land which made us think a gate to the cold of hell had opened before us,” Fadlan signals that his anxiety is mitigated by wonder (8). For ‘to wonder’ is to fear and to desire. James Montgomery rightly notes that Fadlan’s interests are largely anthropological; thus his is not an overtly supernatural or fantastic tale like others from the period (6).[7] That Fadlan uncharacteristically invokes the marvelous or “heavenly” here, even through metaphor, seems indicative that the text is attempting both to cross into a different space of desire and to insinuate that strangeness is not wholly foreign. While it is unclear whether or not the “gate” references a specific location in the Islamic afterlife, Fadlan attempts to make what is foreign, familiar. The wondrousness suggests an unknown and, thereby, ‘marvelous’ locale which contextualizes his desire, however unconsummated, for making contact.

The river, however, allows for contact even as it imposes limits. Thus, while the text may eschew all physical and epistemic mediation between Self and Other, it does reveal a space of contact engendered through empathy. While the intemperateness of the boundary suggests the rigidity of difference, it enables Fadlan to come in proximity with the other. Thus, if the river designates on the one hand a material and natural limit imposed upon the travelers, it alternately marks the empathic possibility, however difficult, in crossing epistemic boundaries.  Because he can occupy a shared space with others, Fadlan can experientially intuit what it might mean to be that Other.  Consequently, the language of the text indicates that the narrator is coming in closer contact with his subject (moving from exterior to interior, from outside observer to inside participant) even while the climate itself prevents him from truly crossing over. Just by being in proximity, he is able to empathize with the Other. Noting both the social isolation induced by the extreme weather and the corresponding generosity that individuals show towards even their inferiors in the face of such “rough and violent wind,” Fadlan imagines Otherness without facilitating a direct, personal encounter (8). Understanding “how the intense cold made itself felt in this country” through shared experiences (“my cheek froze to the pillow” and “my beard [….] was a block of ice”), Fadlan laboriously approaches the place of contact (9).

The textual shifts that occur within this description reflect Fadlan’s empathic capacity and the text’s epistemology of negotiating individual and cultural difference. Understanding the boundary to include both the space of contact (the river, the ice) and the territory around it (the river bank, the Jurjaniya), the text shows traces of subtle linguistic/narratological movement. Through a series of narrative cues, the passage indicates a developing intimacy between narrator and Other. Regarding the generosity of friends, the narrator reports: “In this country, when a man wishes to make a nice gesture to a friend and show his generosity, he says: ‘Come to my house where we can talk, for there is a good fire there’,” (Fadlan 8). The narrator relates this anecdote without affect; the voice is flat and objective; an outsider’s perspective. Both the “man” and the “friend” are unnamed: abstract generalities rather than specific individuals. The narrator’s positionality changes, however, as the passage progresses: “I was told, in fact, that two men set out with twelve camels to load wood in the forest, but they forgot to take flint and tinder with them” (Fadlan 8-9). The speech tag “I was told” reframes the narration as conversation, indicating greater intimacy between narrator and subject. While the ‘telling’ has initiated some kind of personal exchange between individuals absent in the former example, Fadlan is still merely the receiver. Remaining in the passive voice, the text reiterates that Fadlan has not initiated transmission. By the end of the passage, however, the narrator is no mere interviewer; rather, as witness to the story he claims: “In truth, I saw [my emphasis] the earth split and great crevasses form from the intense cold. I saw a great tree split in two from the same cause” (Fadlan 9). As Fadlan’s experience of the cold facilitates greater understanding, the textual movement from unmediated reporting, to passive voice, to first-person narration and active voice reveals a renegotiation of his relationship to and familiarity with the Jurjaniya inhabitants. Though he may yet be an outsider, the narrator textually and experientially closes the distance between Self and Other.

If the text follows a current leading from outsider to insider, from Self to Other, the concluding preparations for the Jayhun river crossing reveals Fadlan’s sincerest attempt thus far in imagining the experience of the Other. Fadlan closes this account with a lengthy description of his company’s meticulous preparations to protect their bodies from the weather. He methodically records:

When we saw the reality with our own eyes, however, we realized that it was twice as bad as we had been told. Each of us was wearing a tunic and over that a caftan, on top of that a cloak of sheepskin and over that again a felt outer garment, with a head covering that left only two eyes visible. Each of us wore a plain pair of trousers and another padded pair, socks, horse-hide boots and over those boots, other boots, so that when any of us mounted a camel, he could hardly move because of all the clothes he was wearing. (Fadlan 9-10)

Fadlan’s rigorous cataloging surely brings to mind multiple literary genres: Greek epics, medieval romance, and nineteenth century African-American literature chart an indirect trajectory in which clothing functions alternately as badge and as disguise. For both armament and disguise have the potential to erase difference through performance. As Achilles’ shield may substitute somewhat for his weakness, Fadlan’s “caftan,” “sheepskin,” double-layered “trousers,” and “horse-hide boots” may compensate for Fadlan’s foreignness. By donning their dress, Fadlan embodies Otherness.

The physical and narratological boundaries imposed upon the text delineate the site of difference between the Self and the Other, even as they illuminate the thorny and sometimes perilous process of mediation. Thus, though the previous moments give textual evidence that the traveler may close the distance between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ the text suggests that the mediation of that distance is never secure. While Fadlan does narrate the following two crossings explicitly, the passages reiterate the dangers characteristic of the boundary. At the rivers Yaghindi and Jayikh, which separate the territories of the Ghuzz, the Bajanak, and the Bashghirds, Fadlan’s company faces significant loss. At the Yaghindi he reports:

They took poles made from a wood called khadank [sic] and used them as oars. They continued to row like this, while the water carried them and they spun around, until we had crossed. As to the horses and the camels, they called them with loud cries and they swam across the river. It was essential to get one of the companies of men-at-arms over the river first, before any of the caravan crossed, so that they could form an advance guard to protect the others in case the Bashghirds fell on our people while they were crossing. (22)

The text intimates that the crossing is more legible here than at the Jayhun: both river and creature have agency. Yet, the crossing is ever beleaguered by the threat of contact. Again the river constructs a boundary that is replete with anxiety about and desire for the place of contact. At the crossing of the Jayikh, only one page later, Fadlan chronicles, “I saw a leather boat overturned in midstream and those who were in it drowned. Many of our men were carried away and a certain number of horses and camels were drowned. It cost us great efforts to get across that river,” (23). As in the crossing of the Jayhun, Fadlan use of the speech tag, “I saw,” indicates the nearness of the narrator to the subject. Participant rather than mere audience, it is Fadlan’s very nearness that heightens the danger in the crossing. We might expect, in other words, that the closer one comes to the zone of contact, the greater the risk to the Self.

The Final Passage

What, then, is the nature of contact, we might ask? Risk. In Fadlan’s every movement across, the “alterity” of the Other becomes more intimate. The traveler ultimately risks becoming an inhabitant. James Clifford concludes the first chapter of Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (1997) by reframing how we think of the “travelling anthropologist,” describing his practices as following:

My point, again, is not simply to invert the strategies of cultural location, the making of ‘natives,’ which I criticized at the outset. I’m not saying there are no locales or homes, that everyone is—or should be—traveling, or cosmopolitan, or deterritorialized. This is not nomadology. Rather, what is at stake is a comparative cultural studies approach to specific histories, tactics, everyday practices of dwelling and traveling: traveling-in-dwelling, dwelling-in-traveling. (36)

Clifford’s insistence that cultural studies develop a new model for study corroborates transnational studies’ instincts that neither “home” nor the “village” nor the “native” nor the “traveler” occupies a static location. Rather, movement across physical, social, and textual boundaries keeps identities in a perpetual state of mediation and formation. Thus, Fadlan is always-already in transit. But I believe we can extend Clifford’s injunction; redefining “home” and “native” requires that we also redefine “specific” literacies as well as “histories” (36). Thus, if texts like Fadlan’s might work to deconstruct the rigidity of literary history, they must also serve to blur the lines between the darkness of the Middle Ages and modernity.

I began this project under the auspices that the Middle Ages has achieved a new cogency (or at least an alternate identification). Postcolonial practices and assumptions have opened up the medieval world as one that is intimately connected to both modernity and the postcolonial. But, as Ibn Fadlan experiences, contact and understanding do not occur along a linear trajectory; as I think Cohen would corroborate, the Middle Ages is producing the postcolonial to the same degree as the postcolonial may refigure the “middle.”

Shortly before the text concludes, Fadlan records the elaborate funeral rites of a Rus (Viking) noble man. Fadlan’s focus, curiously, seems to be the slave girl who volunteers/is chosen to accompany her master to the afterlife. As aforementioned in this piece, critics and historians relish the account for its insight into early Viking culture, burial practices and beliefs, class distinctions, and gender roles but have perhaps occluded its equally useful interstices for understanding the text’s historical/periodical positionality. Fadlan’s fascination with the ritual is reasonable—the funeral seems oddly more of a human sacrifice than a celebration of the dead. Though there are many generative readings to be made regarding the agency of the slave girl, in terms of this project I am more interested in the final crossing that the text seems to prefigure. If the text ultimately performs the complex negotiations implicit to the contact zone, the mediations between Self (Fadlan) and Other (slave girl/the Rus) and the multifarious dangers, anxieties, and desires encountered along the boundary, the funeral stages the ultimate act of ‘crossing over’. The preparations of the body, the collection of food (fruit, basil, bread, meat, and onions), the sacrifice of animals (a dog, two horses, two cows, a cock, and a hen), the copulation between slave girl and masters, and the drinking of nabidh, all mimic Fadlan’s gathering of boats and arming against the cold. For, death, the text suggests, is the ultimate Other, the ‘familiar foreignness,’ and ‘intimate alterity’ undergirding each point of contact.

Yet, there are larger forces at play here, beyond the subjective experience of the Self. Part of Fadlan’s captivation with the funeral is in the spectators’ anticipation of the beyond. Shortly before the slave girl’s death, the crowd repeatedly hoists her up to look over what “looked like the frame of a door,” (Fadlan 52). Fadlan records the interpreter’s translation of the girl’s statements: “‘The first time they lifted her up, she said: [“There I see my father and my mother.”] The second time, she said: “There [I see] all my dead relatives [sitting].” And the third time she said: “There [I see my master sitting in] Paradise and [Paradise is green and beautiful.] There are men with him and [young people, and he is calling me.] Take [me to him….]”’” (52). While Fadlan faithfully and without commentary transmits the girl’s statements, we are unsure of what Fadlan sees. Similarly poised as Benjamin’s “angel of history” looking back while being propelled forward, both slave girl and writer envision a future history that always-already exists. If we consider the text as looking into a future literary trajectory, we see that that future “paradise” contains the new and the old, the middle and the modern and the post.

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The open-ended question – with the last digit intentionally left out – fills the final screen of Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s most recent film, Le Président (2013).  The question refers to the political tenure of the president of Cameroon, where the film has been banned at all locations, including at L’Institut Français Cameroun (IFC, The French Institute). The IFC plays an important role in providing a venue for film screenings in Cameroon, particularly since the closing of Yaoundé’s movie theatre, Abbia, in 2009. Around the time of the release of Le Président, another Cameroonian filmmaker, Richard Fouofie Djimili, was abducted and tortured for eleven days, allegedly in response to material in his film, 139… The Last Predators (2013, watch the trailer here). Djimili’s fictional film focuses on a 139-year dictatorship in an unnamed African country. According to Times Live, shortly before the filmmaker’s abduction, a friend of Djimili’s received a text message that read, “Tell your friend Richard Fouofie he is digging his own grave. His film is part of a destabilization plot that has already been unmasked. If he wants to play the patriot, he will be decapitated. Victory is near.” Reporters Without Borders has documented other cases of harassment, censoring and imprisoning of Cameroonian artists and journalists. On 6 November 2012, President Paul Biya celebrated 30 years in power and Bekolo has quipped that when Biya was minister in 1962, “Barack Obama was one year old.”  It is in this political context that Bekolo’s film explores a fictional African president’s last days in power.

Bekolo is troubled by and committed to transforming what he has called the “image problem in Africa”: The misrepresentation of African cultures and peoples in international media and film, which continue to present the subcontinent as solely poverty-stricken, HIV/AIDS-ridden, war-riddled, corrupt and failing. Bekolo works to alter this image by addressing the roots of dominant stereotypes. These ‘image problems,’ he argued in a video interview with David Murphy at the Africa In Motion film festival in Scotland in 2012, are founded in ‘reality problems.’ Seen in this light, Le Président is Bekolo’s intervention in the Cameroonian ‘reality problem.’ The film is an invitation to reinvent the present by revisiting the past. It challenges viewers to conceive of a new reality for the country upon the demise of the current president, Paul Biya (1933-), who has been the president since 1982.

In an interview for SlateAfrique, Bekolo explains, “It is the first time that a movie removes a President. Cinema always arrives afterwards, to tell us [about] the Arab Spring for example. Where was cinema before? Cinema must be forward thinking, open new doors and make the revolutions. I do not want to tell people what happened. I want to inspire those who will make it happen.” In this sense, the film is an anticipatory conversation of a coming political moment, one that poses the question: What will come about in the power vacuum of Biya’s eventual absence?

The film is set a few days before the presidential elections, the next of which is scheduled to take place in Cameroon in 2018. When the president mysteriously disappears, TV reporters speculate his absence and political prisoners discuss possibilities for the future. Through a series of intimate conversations including the fictional president’s internal monologues, dreamscapes and quiet life moments, Bekolo explores a president’s awareness of the approaching end of an era. This unadulterated access to the president’s intimate spaces challenges facile representations of the African dictator, namely those representations popularized in western films of a uniformly dangerous, irrational, womanizing, war criminal. So often in western films African presidents are reduced to tropes and are only seen through the gaze of the white hero. The Last King of Scotland, Blood Diamond and Machine Gun Preacher exemplify this tendency. Bekolo’s Le Président is instead an artistic exploration of the inner life of an ageing patriarch, a man who dreams of a rendezvous with his deceased spouse, and speculates upon the violent means of his eventual demise. “Has my chauffeur been hired to assassinate me?” He contemplates as he grapples with the destructive political policies that he has implemented.

What struck me the most about the film, in fact, was Bekolo’s humanizing of the ‘African dictator.’  Cameroon’s president rarely speaks publicly and is seldom seen, other than in the seemingly infinite campaign posters, billboards and fliers on prominent display across the country. With thirty-one years in power, it is little surprise that Jo Wood’ou, the Canal-D reporter in Bekolo’s film (a local news channel that follows the events in the film, based on Cameroon’s TV station, Canal2) comments, “no man votes for the president.” Wood’ou’s comment both naturalizes the president’s lifetime in power and simultaneously hints at the state’s repression of the democratization movement in the 1990s and the history of election rigging. As Wood’ou traces his life stages, he sardonically notes that Cameroon has had the same president throughout each stage.

It is the president’s deceased spouse, Jeanne (most likely inspired by the life of Jeanne-Irène Biya, Paul Biya’s first spouse who died in July 1992), who offers the most genuine and scathing criticism of the president’s lifetime of power. It is before her that he is most shamed. He admits to her, “I don’t know anymore… I got lost along the way.” Indeed, women play central roles in Bekolo’s films, including the protagonist known as ‘Queen of the Hood’ in Quartier Mozart (1992) and the two vampire sex workers, Chouchou and Majolie, of Les Saignantes (2005). In each instance, it is the woman who reveals or fights against the tendency of masculine power to corrupt. Likewise, in Le Président, Jo Wood’ou turns to the women who operate the country’s communications via call boxes (umbrellaed, street-side stands where customers can pay for cigarettes, candies and telephone calls by the minute) for knowledge of the president’s whereabouts after his disappearance. The women who manage the call boxes, Wood’ou declares, are the ‘pulse’ of the country.

Lost before Jeanne, the president contemplates, “I feel like I am advancing towards an ocean or a desert… and I don’t recognize anything.” He gets out of his luxury car in the middle of the dense rainforest and begins to walk. The president returns to his village and seems awed by his surroundings. We see him eating les bâtons de manioc (boiled cassava, rolled into lengths and steamed in banana leaves) beneath an open-air roadside stand. Later, Jeanne laughs at the thought of him eating sandwiches, a food associated with foreignness, particularly the French former colonial power.  Food becomes a symbol for the distance that he has imposed between himself and his village, his people and his country land.

The film begins and ends with footage of benskiners (motorcycle taxi-men, also spelled bend-skin and bendskin) on the crowded roads of Douala, Cameroon’s industrial capital. The striking figure of the young benskiner at the conclusion of the film weaves in and out of traffic with careless ease, stretching, looking backwards and taking his hands off the throttle. This benskiner is striking in his orange-framed sunglasses, signifying the spread of a globalised hip-hop culture where the young people are known colloquially in Cameroon as les yo(s).

The benskiner is a complex symbol of resistance to state power, and adaptation to a lack of road infrastructure and resilience in an economy that would otherwise exclude him. He is a youthful, masculine figure who challenges authority.  Indeed, in Cameroon, the unification of benskiners has created a significant political force in urban and semi-rural areas. This political force has been one reason behind the banning of motorcycles in wealthy and administrative quarters such as Bastos in Yaoundé. The government has repeatedly tried to crack down on benskiners in Douala with sanctions and imposed tax payments but benskiners are notorious for their disrespect of such sanctions and are quick to mobilize collectively. By allocating such a prominent space for the benskiner in the film, Bekolo draws upon this powerful resistance force as an illustration of the fracturing of authoritarian power on-the-ground.

Yet, while the figure of the benskiner features so prominently, he is simultaneously silenced in his anonymity throughout the film. This silencing lends itself to alternate (and less empowering) interpretations of the Bekolo’s focus on the benskiner. Is he meant to illustrate the fatality of young people (particularly young men) in Cameroon, as he speeds in and out of vehicles with no apparent care for his own life? Is the beginning scene, which captures the traffic of a main thoroughfare, meant to show the chaos or misdirection of life and politics in the post-colony? I cannot help but wonder what the benskiner would have said in response to the film’s final question, “When will it end? 1982-201?” had he been asked.

A glimpse of the concerns of the youth comes through during the interaction between a well-known Cameroonian rap, hip-hop artist, Valsero (a.k.a. Le Général) and the film’s president. In the conversation, Valsero addresses the perpetual joblessness of Cameroon’s so-called ‘lost generation’ – those born in the 1980s onwards, as the country’s economy, politics and educational system suffered from the IMF and World Bank-imposed structural adjustment programs. The resulting economic stagnation and withdrawal of the Cameroonian state produced the context in which benskiners flourish. Valsero’s well-known songs Lettre au Président and Ce Pays Tue Les Jeunes voice the frustrations with corrupt political powers and an aging political body that marginalizes the youth, many of the same issues that are central to their conversation in the film. “I am young and I am strong and I am not dead,” Valsero sings at one moment in the film, pointing upward toward the future, toward the ancestors and toward a moment that might harbinger a recognition of the youth’s powerful potential; this in a country where forty per cent of the population is under fourteen years old (U.N Statistics Division, Country Profile for Cameroon 2011). Yet the (re)turn to Valsero – a man in his mid-thirties – as a voice for the youth is itself a powerful reflection of the state of politics in Cameroon, where even alternative voices (I am thinking for example of the long-time opposition leader Ni John Fru Ndi) are hesitant to cede power to younger generations.

Bekolo’s portrayal of the president is forgiving, complex, comprehensive and hopeful. The film provides an important counter narrative to the forecasts of potential political conflict and even genocide for Cameroon’s near future. It is the film’s honesty and lack of condemnation that makes its banning so unfortunate, illustrating the disparities between Cameroon’s real life political climate and the imagined space of the film. We have a sense that the president of the film, so reflective near the end of his political life, might have been grateful for the humanizing depiction offered by Bekolo in Le Président.

Note:  Le Président is banned in Cameroon but can be streamed from BuniTV. Watch the trailer here. 

The post Review of Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s “Le Président” appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

O conceito de viagem, de acordo com Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (1996), se transformou em uma referência a movimentos populacionais, bem como em uma metaforização de processos de questionamento identitários essencializados.   Nesse sentido, Kaplan parte do pressuposto de que a subjetividade moderna sempre valorizou a mobilidade e de que, se a viagem foi tão central para a constituição desta subjetividade, uma análise do deslocamento deveria se tornar uma prioridade para o discurso crítico da contemporaneidade (32). Tomando como pressuposto esta necessidade crítica, este trabalho tem como objetivo discutir as implicações do deslocamento transnacional no contexto da literatura brasileira contemporânea. Mais especificamente, a base para esta discussão está estruturada em dois romances: Viagem ao México (1995), de Silviano Santiago (1936 – ) e Berkeley em Bellagio (2002), de João Gilberto Noll (1946 – ).

Apesar de suas diferenças específicas, esses dois romances constituem a metáfora do deslocamento como um gesto de confrontamento de formações autoritárias, de identidade cultural e de sistema político. Em Silviano Santiago, o deslocamento aparece como um mecanismo de produção de conhecimento histórico sobre a formação cultural latino-americana. Nesse sentido, Viagem ao México funciona como revelador dos modos de resistência, assimilação e transformação do eu e do outro[1]. Esta recuperação histórica da formação discursiva latino-americana na escrita de Silviano Santiago constitui, portanto, uma representação do debate pós-colonial no contexto da América Latina, trazendo à tona uma dimensão teórica que pode ser considerada metanarrativa, a partir da nomenclatura de Linda Hutcheon (1988). Viagem ao México realiza uma discussão sutil e astuciosa das tensões em torno do projeto civilizatório Ocidental diante do desafio do encontro entre o euporeu e o latino-americano, bem dos próprios latino-americanos entre si.

No caso de João Gilberto Noll, a metáfora do deslocamento funciona como a representação de uma viagem aos processos subjetivos que constituem seus personagens, mas sem a dimensão histórica construída por Silviano Santiago em Viagem ao México. A viagem rumo ao espaço do outro torna-se o desencadeador de um processo de auto-análise, a partir do reconhecimento da diferença que constitui toda identidade.  A viagem em João Gilberto Noll é feita para conhecer o outro, que está fora do sujeito, mas que, em certo sentido, está nele próprio (Kristeva, 1991; Young, 2001: 425) [2].

Apesar dos traços distintivos presentes nesses dois romances, um elemento unifica essas duas performances representativas do deslocamento: dramatiza-se nestes romances o percurso de constituição dos sujeitos na/pela linguagem. É fundamental assinalar que tais gestos representativos revelam também uma reflexão sobre o próprio ato de narrar a viagem e o encontro com o “novo” e com a diferença. Esses dois romances brasileiros contemporâneos constituem suas especificidades, enquanto discurso literário, conscientes das implicações do eu na construção do outro e em busca de formações culturais menos autoritárias.[3]

I. Diálogos críticos com os modos de produção do outro

Viagem ao México (1995) é um dos romances menos conhecidos e estudados do escritor mineiro Silviano Santiago. O romance narra a viagem do poeta, ator, e dramaturgo francês Antonin Artaud (1896 – 1948), de Paris ao México, em busca de inspiração para o seu projeto de renovação do teatro francês. Nas primeiras páginas do livro, o leitor se depara com um sujeito da enunciação descrevendo um personagem envolto em um estado de decepção frente a sua realidade imediata. A França pós-primeira guerra mundial transparece nessas linhas iniciais do livro por meio de uma crítica da produção intelectual e artística do momento – especialmente o cinema e o teatro. Aponta-se também neste início meta-narrativo do romance para o debate sobre a função da arte na sociedade: arte como forma de propaganda ideológica versus arte como um processo de desautomatização da linguagem, nos termos em que a arte de vanguarda do início do século XX se pronunciava.

A ênfase sobre as implicações do deslocamento e a revelação da curiosidade em relação à cultura do outro é uma constante dentro da narrativa. A primeira referência ao título do livro acontece quando o narrador faz alusão ao desejo de Antonin Artaud de fazer uma viagem, de dar início a um processo de distanciamento de seu próprio país – daquele espaço sociocultural que lhe fora “destinado como pátria” (42), mas que, ao mesmo tempo, o “acolhera como um mendigo” (42). É talvez por causa desta sensação de desamparo que a necessidade do outro surge, revelada por meio da urgência da própria viagem, cujo intuito seria a chegada a outras terras, a possibilidade de “conhecer outras gentes” (42). Mas há também uma certa decepção pelo fato deste outro, que Artaud vai encontrando no decorrer da sua viagem, não ser tão diferente, pois “estes estrangeiros guardam muito da palatável e indesejada familiaridade europeia” (42). Esta passagem põe em debate a própria identidade latino-americana. Estou pensando aqui nas duas posições antagônicas que assinalam que uma parte da cultura latino-americana nada mais seria do que cópias corrompidas da cultura europeia. O outro posicionamento epistemológico entende a cultura latino-americana como um entre-lugar discursivo, um espaço em que as práticas culturais europeias teriam um locus de atuação, mas que tais práticas sofreriam as transformações e adaptações fornecidas pelas dinâmicas culturais locais (Santiago, 1978). É exatamente sobre este debate que Viagem ao México realiza o seu gesto discursivo.

Para efetivar este debate, em alguns momentos é possível perceber os signos representativos da viagem, do movimento, do encontro e suas implicações. Por este motivo, a enunciação do narrador estabelece uma diferença entre a constituição ontológica do marinheiro e do turista. O marinheiro, “amante do perigo” (43), estaria exposto ao “desenrolar do tempo” (43), inserido no contexto da “movência do corpo pelo espaço” (43). A identidade do marinheiro, nestes termos, não existiria mais. Ela teria sido substituída por um outro tipo de performance identitária: a do turista – aquele que viaja com tempo e espaço predeterminado. A viagem, neste tipo de performance, seria “uma vivência nos espaços repetitivos e monótonos do lazer” (43).

A performance do turista de maneira alguma é a de Artaud. A viagem que o Artaud ficcionalizado realiza, num “tempo-espaço comprimido” (43), é resignificada a partir de uma analogia com a “massa de pão fermentada” (43). A massa-sujeito “continua a ser o que era, mesmo depois de inchada e passar pela metamorfose do forno” (43). O forno funciona aqui como um símbolo de um espaço que refaz a formação cultural anterior do sujeito. O produto desta viagem transformativa, “depois de perdido a força extensiva do fermento” (43), revela-se a partir do ganho de um outro tipo de substancialidade: a massa ganha “a forma de um manjar dos deuses” (43). Este é um tipo de discurso que, em certa medida, alinha-se à representação da viagem como um mecanismo de autoconhecimento e de transformação pessoal que é muito enfatizado também por João Gilberto Noll, em Berkeley em Bellagio. Este seria um ponto de intersecção entre os dois modos de representação da viagem dos dois escritores aqui discutidos, resguardadas as diferenciações específicas que os constitui.

“Ser peregrino do meu próprio destino” (45) – eis o mote do viajante aventureiro (nômade, vagabundo). “A terra mexicana” – espaço do outro por excelência – configura-se numa espécie de mapa que guiaria o sujeito rumo ao cumprimento de seu destino. Que destino seria este? O posicionamento ético do intelectual no contexto sócio-político da primeira metade do século XX. No seu espaço de origem, o Artaud reconstituído por Silviano Santiago vivencia as dificuldades do intelectual que necessita do “dinheiro alheio” para fugir da situação de “eterno passageiro de ônibus”, ou deixar de ser um sujeito andarilho, a “carregar de um lado para outro (…) o peso dos ossos, da carne, das vísceras” (45). Para o tipo de produção cultural que o teatro de Artaud tem a oferecer para a sociedade burguesa francesa, a ideia de sucesso material é uma variável difícil de atingir. O seu teatro não encontra uma recepção de massa que possa transformar as suas condições concretas de vida. O artista vive, desse modo, o dilema de produzir um teatro crítico da sociedade burguesa às custas do financiamento desta mesma sociedade. No contexto da narrativa criada em Berkeley em Bellagio, como se verá mais adiante, o dilema dos modos de sobrevivência do viajante intelectual volta a ser tematizado, desta forma dentro de um ambiente econômico e cultural de início do século XXI e informado por questões relativas à globalização cultural e ao domínio do sistema capitalista como modelo econômico hegemônico dentro das sociedades ocidentais.

No caso de Viagem ao México, portanto, Silviano Santiago representa o debate político-ideológico que atormentou os artistas modernistas. A discussão em torno do papel social da arte promoveu a reformulação de projetos estéticos em função de valores éticos de cunho mais pragmático. Na primeira fase do projeto estético do Surrealismo, está implícita uma concepção de arte e sobre o papel do artista que colocava-o em franca oposição à arte burguesa, esta última baseada na transparência mimética da realidade, e colocando sobre os ombros da arte a responsabilidade de eleição do espírito humano, na melhor tradição platônica ocidental. Atacando diretamente a linguagem na qual se formatava tal projeto estético-ético, os críticos vanguardistas pressupunham que o modo de confrontar esta cosmologia estaria na desarticulação do seu mecanismo de produção: a própria linguagem que constrói arte e conhecimento. A linguagem é reestruturada para que, a partir de uma movimento de autoconsciência, o homem passe a ter mais compreensão dos processos envolvidos na enunciação dos discursos de saber. Este é um projeto de revelação dos mecanismos internos de articulação da linguagem, por intermédio da desautomatização do seu uso. Havia neste projeto, portanto, uma necessidade de criação de gestos culturais e artísticos que tomassem o interlocutor de ‘surpresa’ e o colocassem em ação de reconstituição das possibilidades de sentido – que já não estariam mais disponíveis a priori. Aciona-se, dessa forma, a responsabilidade do interlocutor na construção de um possível sistema de referência que dê sentido a ‘sua’ própria leitura do mundo. É comum, neste contexto, a sensação de se estar perdido em meio a um ambiente que só fornece estímulos, os mais diversos, mas que não proporciona mais uma narrativa teleológica.

Este é o dilema do artista de vanguarda situado numa linha fronteiriça entre a liberdade do indivíduo e os constrangimentos simbólicos impostos pela sociedade. O seu gesto estético, seu posicionamento como agente social e/ou artista está informado pela angústia do pertencimento. A sensibilidade do artista de vanguarda não abre mão do contato social, pois é desta relação que ele pode contactar o outro; mas, paradoxalmente, este encontro relacional gera expectativas conflitantes em ambas as partes. Tomando-se o teatro como metáfora, nos deparamos com o dilema da relação dialética entre o que está sendo representado (e como) e uma suposta audiência. Até que ponto a performance teatral pode romper com algum tipo de vínculo significativo (comunicativo) com a audiência? Qual o limite entre comunicar e não-comunicar dentro do jogo teatral? A discussão destas questões nos remetem para um domínio relativo à própria constituição da linguagem. O Artaud que Silviano representa teatralmente em sua ficção é um sujeito em busca de um outro verbo, ou melhor, um sujeito que viaja em busca de um modo de “comunicar” baseado no silenciamento do verbo escrito da História, e na tentativa de acionamento de um discurso, digamos, pré-simbólico, ou inconsciente.[4] Esta é uma viagem a um espaço semiótico, no qual os sentidos não estejam ainda estruturados; é um espaço no qual a audiência não seja uma passiva receptora de sentidos ‘caducados’, apresentados em novas roupagens para dar a impressão novidade. Talvez por isso, a viagem de Artaud-Silviano não seja tanto em função da revitalização da palavra estruturada linearmente, mas uma tentativa de resgate do poder significativo do próprio movimento, da imagem e do silêncio como potencialidades discursivas.

Viagem ao México representa, assim, uma aventura semiótica que não apresenta uma bússola ou um mapa. A liberdade, tanto para o autor, quanto para a audiência é um elemento crucial neste processo. Mas o estado de liberdade, como vieram a nos revelar os existencialistas, pode ser angustiante. É talvez pela constatação desta angústia que Sartre supõe que a liberdade seja – antes de tudo – responsabilidade. Uma responsabilidade sem um sentido moral estrito, mas entendida como a necessidade de participação ativa dos sujeitos em relação aos desafios éticos e estéticos com os quais ele irá se deparar neste encontro com o outro em sociedade. Esta liberdade também não significa qualquer falta de constrangimentos ou a impossibilidade de realizar concessões – na falta destes elementos, a liberdade ganharia um aspecto egocêntrico (senão, egoísta), oposto ao projeto sartreano. O Artaud de Silviano passa boa parte do seu percurso tendo de lidar com os constrangimentos econômicos e sociais por causa da ‘escolha’ que faz ao produzir um tipo de teatro de vinculação com o semiótico, dentro de uma sociedade burguesa que valoriza a dimensão produtiva do simbólico. A liberdade de que fala Sartre (e que Silviano dramatiza em Artaud) advém de uma capacidade do sujeito de articular os elementos disponíveis na sociedade com o propósito de construir um modo de compreensão que não mitifique a realidade, que não transforme os indivíduos e seus projetos em commodities, e que desarticule a engrenagem de qualquer sistema de automatização do sujeito e de suas práticas.

II. Viagem ao centro do universo pessoal

Berkeley em Bellagio é um dos romances mais importantes do escritor gaúcho João Gilberto Noll. Lançado em 2002, o romance chegou a ser finalista do Prêmio Portugal/Telecom e, juntamente com o anterior Bandoleiro (1985), e o posterior Lorde (2004), constitui uma espécie de trilogia que tematiza o deslocamento dentro do espaço cultural das Américas e as implicações epistemológicas e políticas destes escontros. Berkeley em Bellagio narra a história de um escritor brasileiro convidado para passar uma emporada na Universidade de Berkeley, na Califória, como professor de literatura brasileira. Durante este período como professor, o narrador precisa também escrever um romance, como parte das responsabilidades assumidas com as instituições que patrocinaram a sua viagem. Em sua passagem por Bellagio, na Itália, o narrador dá continuidade ao processo andarilho e desenraizado que alimentará uma escrita informada por impressões subjetivas da experiência de deslocamento.

A metaforização da viagem em João Gilberto Noll funciona como a representação de um movimento de descoberta existencial, no qual o sujeito tem como projeto o ‘descobrimento’ de si mesmo (em sua dimensão filosófico-existencial). Por este motivo, sua prosa apresenta um tom e uma estrutura textual que revela uma subjetividade em busca de auto-consciência. Não é à toa que em boa parte da produção literária de Noll o elemento auto-biográfico, disfarçado, seja um fator fundamental. O seu texto é construído na superfície da pele do próprio enunciador, ou seja, a fronteira entre o narrador e a experiência existencial do autor é intencionalmente fraturada. Em Berkeley em Bellagio (2002) e Lorde (2004), por exemplo, a narrativa nasce a partir de fatos reais acontecidos na vida do escritor, mas que passam a ser ficcionalizados. Este processo de ficcionalização dos eventos não se dá por meio da valorização dos fatos exteriores, mas constitui-se no limite entre os discursos literário e filosófico, na medida em que a viagem ao centro do universo pessoal é desencadeadora de uma teorização sobre o próprio self. Como afirma James Clifford (1989) relativamente ao termo grego theorein:  “The Greek term theorein: a practice of travel and observation. [...] Theory is a product of displacement, comparison, a certain distance. To theorize, one leaves home” (1)[5]. É o deslocamento espacial que desencadeia o processo de reflexão que percebemos na obra de Noll. Por esse motivo, seus narradores parecem mais interessados em teorizar sobre si mesmos do que construir narrativas explicativas sobre o outro, a não ser que este outro represente um domínio inconsciente do próprio sujeito da enunciação. Mesmo que em alguns momentos o narrador teça comentários sobre uma exterioridade de uma topologia espacial e cultural, tais comentários são imediatamente confrontados a um gesto auto-reflexivo de discussão das próprias motivações que constituiram tais enunciações. Se a viagem é geradora de novos posicionamentos epistemológicos, cabe perguntar aqui: Que tipo de conhecimento é possível produzir a partir do encontro com o diferente? Ou mais: em se tratando das formas de aquisição/produção do conhecimento, como colocar a questão sobre os modos através dos quais conhecemos? Estas não são problemáticas articuladas apenas por Noll, elas aparecem também na escrita de Silviano Santiago.

O componente fundamental para se esboçar qualquer tentativa de discussão das questões apontadas acima é a própria linguagem, que passa a ser dramatizada neste processo de construção/produção de conhecimento.  Uma das primeiras dificuldades com que este sujeito em viagem se depara é com a própria língua: a falta de habilidade lingüística para se adaptar ao novo espaço, a diversidade de códigos culturais, e até mesmo as dúvidas existências do personagem principal, etc. Esses componentes percorrem toda a escrita desta viagem e fornecem um quadro para a reflexão sobre o projeto ético e estético do narrador. O tipo de dramatização que o narrador-nômade reconstrói (pelo menos nas obras em questão) funciona ao mesmo tempo como uma metáfora, em um contexto de deslocamentos humanos em que os sujeitos deslocados têm pouco ou quase nenhum controle sobre as suas escolhas: a impressão que se tem é que tais sujeitos são escolhidos, ou submetidos a um processo migratório definido pelas dificuldades em seus espaços de origem e pelas possíveis oportunidades no novo lugar de destino, ou pela constituição formal que seus desejos ganharam. As dificuldades que estão presentes na representação do deslocamento para o espaço do outro, do não familiar, em Berkeley em Bellagio são também de ordem econômica.[6]

As atribulações da viagem para os sujeitos “sem altas formações acadêmicas” (16), desempregados e “sem endereço fixo” (16) não se iniciam somente com a chegada no novo espaço, elas começam no momento mesmo da autorização para a viagem. A ‘odisséia’ do sujeito moderno – pelo menos desses sujeitos dos países em situação periférica no contexto global – exige o enfretamento de atribulações advindas dos mecanismos de controle migratório impostos pelos países mais desenvolvidos. Do lado de quem tenta iniciar a viagem, ficam as marcas de um processo de autenticação: é preciso se provar e preencher os requisitos necessários. Nos primeiros momentos do drama encenado em Berkeley em Bellagio, o narrador se apresenta como um sujeito com nenhuma ou muito pouca disposição para enfrentar o processo de aprendizagem do novo, revelando a dificuldade de construir um aparato adaptativo para a vida neste novo espaço.

A dificuldade com a aquisição de uma nova língua(gem) chega a se transformar numa paralisia de quem “se cansava antes da hora”, ou de quem “parecia estagnado desde que viera para um país do qual não falava a língua” (12). O fato de, no seu trabalho, o narrador não necessitar interagir com seu alunos em uma língua estrangeira (o narrador  está trabalhando como professor de cultura brasileira em Berkeley, CA) dá-lhe um mínimo de possibilidade de interação, mas sem o conhecimento do código lingüístico e cultural  do outro para mediar as conversas mais informais e os conhecimentos pessoais, ele acaba “mantendo uma distância gentil de seus alunos” (12). É interessante notar que esta sensação de isolamento, de não pertencimento e paralisia da vontade não é privilégio somente do sujeito deslocado espacialmente. Mesmo alguns alunos, falantes nativos da língua e conhecedores das práticas locais, também são representados como desconectados de vínculos mais profundos uns com os outros ou com a própria vida: “ninguém no fundo dava a impressão de estar em gozo com a vida” (12).

Por este motivo, o narrador-autor faz uma análise crítica em relação ao desejo que mobiliza tais alunos em seu curso, bem como apresenta uma consciência bastante cética em relação à sua missão de professor de cultura brasileira e do impacto desse ensino em pessoas de cultura e realidade tão distintas. O ceticismo da sua percepção está ancorado na incompreensão sobre a real motivação e interesse dos alunos em relação a uma realidade tão diferente, e que se efetua em torno do contato com aqueles “quadros de miséria [da realidade brasileira expressa nos materiais que ele utilizava em suas aulas] afastados de seus cotidianos principescos” (19). O narrador está colocando em discussão os limites do próprio processo de compreensão: o que significa compreender/encontrar o outro? Na sua visão cética, a relação de sujeitos tão diferentes, no contexto acima apresentado, não passaria de um jogo de sedução e de simulação, cujo objetivo está além – ou aquém – da possibilidade de um conhecimento empático do outro (e principalmente de uma tomada de posição para a transformação dos mesmo quadros de miséria testemunhados no curso). A partir da visão de mundo impressa na voz do narrador de Berkeley em Bellagio poderíamos concluir que a complexidade do mundo globalizado deixaria os sujeitos inseridos num processo de impotência em relação a uma possível mudança no quadro de miséria global  ou – no mais das vezes também – inseridos numa rede de relações de poder na qual todos participam e contribuem para a sua manutenção – inclusive o próprio narrador.

O drama do enfrentamento do cotidiano – e a sua negação, por intermédio da viagem – é um aspecto recorrente para os personagens de Noll. A “prática do convívio” (10) com outras pessoas, a existência em torno de um “endereço seguro” (10) são situações que ao mesmo tempo que atraem, também assustam. A atração poderia ser perfeitamente entendida pelo viés da necessidade do ser humano de formar relações e pela necessidade de proteção – instintos de sobrevivência. A repulsa poderia advir daquela sensação de exílio, de não pertencimento que poderia se desenvolver e ganhar força com o deslocamento geográfico, fator que forçaria o indivíduo a sentir-se ainda mais estranho em relação ao ambiente que o cerca. Para Said (1994), a semente desta subjetividade já estaria presente no indivíduo desde antes do deslocamento geográfico. Said nos fala de que provavelmente o intelectual exilado tenha sido desde sempre este sujeito afastado de um imaginário mainstream em seu próprio país de origem. Nesse sentido, uma das performances visíveis do intelectual na sociedade capitalista pós-industrial seria o do outsider. Noll representa um sujeito que anda à margem das situações que preenchem o cotidiano da maioria das pessoas. Seus narradores são andarilhos nômades, sem ponto fixo de partida ou de chegada.

Esse comportamento andarilho proporciona à vida uma  “aparência” de liberdade, cujo paradoxo é a produção também de uma sensação de impotência. Este sentimento talvez seja derivado do fato de estes sujeitos não apresentarem vínculos significativos com a vida. A vontade de poder, pulsão fundamental da existência produtiva, aparece nessas obras enfraquecida. A viagem, nesse sentido, se coloca como uma tentativa de realimentar esta debilitada vontade de poder. O deslocamento em viagem abriria novamente (ou imporia, já que a vontade se apresenta tão indolente) um certo compromisso, algum tipo de vínculo com algo ou com alguém. A viagem passaria a ter a função de proporcionar pequenos projetos de engajamento, desencadeadores de um produto: neste caso o livro – mas com um ‘dizer’ pouco e diminuído, registro dessa aventura escassa, algumas vezes lírico, muitas vezes cético, outras tantas vezes irônico.

Entretanto, a vontade não está completamente desprovida de força. Em alguns momentos surgem projetos para além da rememoração de acontecimentos que geram a escrita de seus livros. É possível testemunhar um sujeito que se esforça para construir um engajamento ativo e prático com o mundo. É nesses momentos que vemos surgir a consciência de um sujeito que revela com clareza que “não adiantava se lembrar…precisava mesmo era ir à ação” (11). Mas a ação que este sujeito tenta efetuar tem curto fôlego. Seu projeto de revitalização da vontade e da ação está diretamente relacionado com a sua própria escrita – coisa de raro interesse: “testemunhar nessa língua a todos que pudessem se interessar pela sua vida. Quase ninguém naquela terra, era verdade”. (12) O espaço do outro, lugar atual do itinerário volátil deste sujeito, não proporciona a estabilidade necessária para o enraizamento de um projeto de existência de produção em massa. Não há, portanto, o estímulo do reconhecimento da experiência cultural idêntica capaz de despertar o interesse pelo que este sujeito teria a oferecer a partir da narrativa de sua experiência pessoal.

O próprio João Gilberto Noll, ao falar sobre Berkeley em Bellagio, faz referência ao fato de que seus personagens são seres contemplativos e que a sua narrativa busca revelar o interior de indivíduos que preferem a contemplação à ação. Seus personagens são também inadequados para um mundo que acelera cada vez mais o cotidiano. Nesse sentido, o livro forma aquilo que Noll mesmo chamou de:

(…) uma reflexão sobre o nosso tempo. Eu não estava interessado em fazer uma crônica a respeito dos costumes e da cultura de Berkeley ou Bellagio. Minha preocupação era falar sobre o brasileiro na condição de estrangeiro e, a partir disso, abordar a mundialização. (Zaccaria, 2).

É nesse processo de representação da contemplação que nos deparamos com um sujeito que se põe a “olhar mais para dentro” em busca de sentimentos que pudessem provocar “a noção mais antiquada de uma comunidade”. Comunidade que, se observada a partir da ótica de Zygmund Bauman (2003), fragmentou-se dentro do projeto de modernidade das sociedades pós-industriais, e que, por isso mesmo, deixou suas marcas na formação dos sujeitos contemporâneos. Paradoxalmente, diante desta fragmentação dos vínculos comunitários tradicionais, há também um desejo de restauração de novos laços afetivos. A escrita que revela tal desejo, portanto, se move em ritmo quase nostálgico a fim de “reacender a atmosfera idealizada da infância” (22). A memória passa a ser a responsável pela constituição de um suposto conhecimento de si que não abre mão do único elemento concreto possível, não mais de ser reconstituído, mas sim reinterpretado: os traços fragmentados do passado. Este é um vasculhamento da memória – viagem ao interior do sujeito – no sentido de refazer o percurso reconstitutivo dos momentos de sínteses dos desejos que o constituirá, criando identificações que estiveram coladas às “imagens de filmes e gravuras” (22) de uma infância irrecuperável. O sujeito está, portanto, numa viagem em busca de uma identidade perdida na poeira do tempo.

O que traz o sujeito como resultado dessa viagem interior? O que é recolhido nesta viagem? Qual o seu lucro ou a moeda de troca que faça valer a viagem e pague seus custos? O que o sujeito traz consigo como souvenir desta viagem não tem valor de troca. Ao contrário, são memórias de eventos e lembranças que muitos fazem um exercício racional para reprimi-las. No caso do narrador de Berkeley em Bellagio, o que vem à superfície da consciência são fragmentos de eventos marcados pela dor e pelo castigo, como se percebe numa passagem que rememora a adolescência do narrador:

Ao ser pego abraçado a um colega no banheiro, abocanhando a carne de seus lábios, alisando seus cabelos ondulados, ele era o culpado – já o colega, não, nem tanto; ele sim, apontado como o que desviava o desejo de outros jovens das “metas proliferantes da espécie” (23).

O resíduo dessa memória é o sentimento de dor provocado pelas formas de repressão e autoritarismo da cultura patriarcal: a dúvida presente sobre aquilo que lhe fora imposto como erro, mas que “ainda não tivera tempo de notar dentro de si” (23). O ‘souvenir’ da viagem só pode ter algum valor para o próprio sujeito, quando transformado em nova forma de percepção do passado e como forma de produção de um novo conhecimento de si – uma nova concepção (gestação) de sujeito. Para nós, leitores, esse quadro só pode ter algum valor como uma espécie de ‘pedagogia’ filosófica do ser, nos termos em que Deleuze e Guatarri entendem o processo de reflexão filosófica: “pedagogy of the concept” em oposição a um tipo de conhecimento estruturado em torno de uma “encyclopedia of the concept”. (Deleuze e Guatarri: 12).

III. Considerações Finais

Uma das rotas narrativas da ficção contemporânea brasileira, e em muitos casos também a latino-americana, tem tematizado a viagem como metáfora das mudanças que ocorrem no processo de constituição do sujeito em um mundo globalizado. Neste artigo, os romances Viagem ao México, de Silviano Santiago e Berkeley em Bellagio, de João Gilberto Noll foram discutidos como dramatizações de um modelo de deslocamento tanto físico como epistemológico. De acordo com Diaz-Zambrana (2005), o debate colocado pelas narrativas que tematizam a viagem e o deslocamento se constitui a partir da dificuldade que o sujeito contemporâneo encontra para definir as coordenadas e os valores que guiarão seus percursos em um mundo “pós-utópico” e globalizado. A viagem como motivo literário estaria fundamentada, portanto, na interação frustrada com o espaço circundante e na busca de novas formações identitárias para este sujeito contemporâneo. Nesse sentido, a expressão contemporânea da viagem radicalizaria o gesto de questionamento simbolizado pelo deslocamento e confrontaria os discursos hegemônicos constituidores das identidades individual e cultural (Diaz-Zambrana, 153). Seguindo esta mesma linha de raciocínio, os personagens de Noll e Santiago nos romances discutidos neste artigo representam exemplarmente esta sensação de desconforto propulsora do deslocamento.

As noções de espaço, de casa e de pertencimento articuladas nos dois romances são apresentadas de forma fragmentária, perdendo, portanto, a sua unidade ontológica e reificadora. O desaparecimento da noção arquetípica de casa, ainda segundo Diaz-Zambrana, ocorre nas narrativas contemporâneas por meio da implosão simbólica do eu, que sucumbe na crise de confrontação com o outro. Entretanto, apesar da fragilização do eu provocada pela perda da segurança, estes viajantes nômades continuam o seu périplo acidentado. Eles são configurados como personagens imigrantes, fugitivos, vagabundos, enfim, seres melancólicos que experimentam a distopia do mundo contemporâneo. (Diaz-Zambrana, 154).

No universo ficcional configurado por Viagem ao México e Berkeley em Bellagio, o deslocamento subjetivo desafia os limites das noções de identidade cultural até então constituídas para a existência dos personagens. Nesse sentido, a relação com o outro, descoberto no deslocamento, gera transformações, que segundo Julia Kristeva, em Strangers to ouservels (1991), produz angústia e resistência, porque força o sujeito a encarar sua própria condição de estrangeiro no espaço da linguagem que constitui o seu senso de identidade. Este predomínio de um percurso em busca de liberdade e novas formas de expressão que caracteriza o intinerário dos personagens dos romances discutidos constitui um modelo narrativo não teleológico, que não determina um fim pré-determinado para tal deslocamento. A pulsão que mobiliza tais personagens se revela pela vontade de aventura e pela esperança de constituição de uma rota cultural alternativa, desestereotipada e menos autoritária, na qual se possa compartilhar com outros  – vagabundos leitores – os percalços desse caminho sem garantias que é o encontro com a diferença e com a própria literatura.

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This paper is an attempt to read how Peri Rossi narrativizes this in her rendition of urban space. It is a space under the continuous surveillance of the town planners and managers (the Panopticon), while at the same time a critique of such spaces created and deployed to ”hide” the dehumanized faces of targeting thinking subjects (Heterotopia).[2] This is real space, and not an imagined one (utopia/dystopia) engineered for wielding power and control over the lives of citizens. Thus the most important point to reckon with is that this urban space is articulated neither as any linearity of causal relationships, nor in the sense of any binary oppositions such as “centre/periphery”; rather it is configured as performative so that the agents of surveillance and control who remain invisible are rendered exposed. The perception of the analogy between a Google earth view and this narrative, in this context, is very significant and politically charged and fits into the Foucauldian notions of the Panopticon. The sentry who keeps watch on the tower of the prison is now substituted by the new technology of digital surveillance systems enabled by Google Earth.

Now let us consider that while urban spaces have been known to be highly gendered, what about the cyberspace? Early colonizers, hackers and navigators of cyberspace had imagined it as virtual and hence as genderless, bodiless, raceless and without borders. Though this myth is no longer valid, we still find that urban planners who design corporatized infrastructure for smooth and efficient mass transit have increasingly striven towards creations of real space copied from Google Earth view cyberscapes, rendering irrelevant any difference markers and ironing them out into mere cyborgs. Imagining genderless, raceless and desexualized bodies is a copy of an imagined virtual space which pretends to be safe, without any risks and immediate consequences. Thus Peri Rossi’s cities are nameless global cities, which tease out the aesthetics and the politics of “inclusive social care” and “disparate economic competition” in neoliberal democracies. They are inhabited by nameless and rootless global citizens who navigate through unknown waters like blind and drifting mechanized dolls (one can’t help remembering Kafka’s Metamorphosis or Borges’ Ficciones) almost directionless, thus invoking the myth of the Ship of the Madmen, which is also a title of an earlier collection of stories by Peri Rossi. How are such spaces produced? There is a process of gentrification of elite centres (Rama’s proposal); however the rest is mapped out as a global friendly network based on the model of the designs of “optimal efficiency” flattened out graphically on available Internet stencils.

The maps that now govern our “globalised” world suggest a world in which public spaces are increasingly privatized, in which poverty exacerbated by neo-colonial and neoliberal economic practice pushes more and more people to migrate, only to find themselves criminalized as “illegal” aliens by those who guard “legitimate” access to nation-states. Shall such maps be reproduced in cyberspace? What recourse—what lines of flight, what type of travel, what practices of resistance—can be made in cyberspace for protest, justice, or alternative realities? (Lane 129)

It is no wonder then that global cities, increasingly privatized spaces, are nodes of global circuits through which there is a unidirectional flow of capital across the different ‘scapes’:. financescapes, technoscapes, ethnoscapes and mediascapes. To all of this I add ‘netscapes’ and ‘cyberscapes’. These comprise space as a process produced through which deterritorialization is implicated in South-North or East-West movements (exile, diaspora and migration). Such circuits may also be facilitated by cultural items for example; the hamburger, the sandwich or English cream. The overlapping and crossing over of these different ‘scapes’ implicate a new kind of economics and politics of exchange as local modes are woven into global neo-liberal systems. The city, instead of the nation, negotiates a new proposal for city-zenship in terms of its claims on the occupants of its spaces.

At the limit, this could be an opening for new forms of “citizenship.” The city has indeed emerged as a site for new claims: by global capital which uses the city as an “organisational commodity”, but also by disadvantaged sectors of the urban population, frequently as internationalised a presence in large cities as capital. The de-nationalising of urban space and the formation of new claims by transnational actors, raise the question, whose city is it? (Sassen 146-147)

Peri Rossi’s stories critique these urban architectures of order and power engineered to render mute any thinking subject. At the same time a nomadic kind of ethos is evoked to conceive of the states of cities inhabited by anonymous “men and women who float on air suspended in huge time and space” (Peri Rossi 71); transit and disorientation feature in these stories articulating anxieties of mobility and the disorder they produce. Peri Rossi’s city is such a space, richly carved out in text in ‘Los desarraigados’[3], negotiating these situations of spatial tropes on the one hand and of their subversion thereafter. This story maps the urban space from within the deep waters of the entire global space. The sense of not belonging is played out again and again like a poetic refrain. Heterotopias have stretched and extended their borders across global neoliberal spaces. The subjects do everything like eating, sleeping differently, they wake up in hotel rooms forgetting the name of the city they are in. Their condition of lack of rootedness makes them always vulnerable to suspicion though they themselves might feel that their mobile condition is a privilege; however when they are blown off, they are blown off more easily. The poetic evocation of their temporality as floating signifiers in a virtual space evading any conceptual or material form is significant. Metaphoric nomadism is portrayed with brush strokes of fluid idiom.

A menudo se ven, caminando por las calles de las grandes ciudades, a hombres y mujeres que flotan en el aire, en un tiempo y espacio suspendidos. Carecen de raíces en los pies, y a veces hasta carecen de pies. No les brotan raíces de los cabellos ni suaves líanas atan su tronco a alguna clase de suelo. Son como algas impulsadas por las corrientes marinas, y cuando se fijan a alguna superficie es por casualidad y dura sólo un momento. En seguida vuelven a flotar y hay cierta nostalgia en ello. [Peri Rossi 71][4]

Very often men and women afloat in the air can be seen walking down the streets of the great cities in suspended time and space. They lack roots in their feet, and at times even lack any feet. Roots don’t grow out of their hair either, nor do suave ropes tie their trunk to some kind of ground. They are like algae adrift through the ocean currents and when they stick to some surface, just by chance, they last only a while. Soon after they begin to float again and there is some nostalgia that remains. [My translation].

A zooming in closer to land renders visible a citizenship (as a belonging to a nation/community with rights and responsibilities) getting reduced to a “membership” programmed into the internet game, and thus submitting to the rules of the game such that any scope of her/his subjectivity as thinking and feeling agent is completely muffled out. One is easily reminded of the distracted viewer/reader as compared to the contemplative one in the beginning of the last century. Now we have the distracted, bodiless, genderless and raceless entities that move unthinkingly.[5] This is how citizens experience the spaces of global cities, which are engineered to “deliver development”. Infrastructural facilities network these spaces both materially and virtually so that citizenship as a “privilege and as agency” is produced, deployed and displayed as mass/crowd for smooth navigational controls following pre-meditated moves on the designs of the internet game for management of mobility. Such activated circuits, sometimes so fast that they are like an adrenal rush though Peri Rossi’s narrative, seem to move like slow turtles as passengers aboard a plane who can’t feel the speed. The Foucauldian conception of the Panopticon plays out here in its prime peak instant.[6]

Similarly in Peri Rossi’s “La grieta”[7] one small banal (thinking) hesitation of the subject’s move sets off a pandemonium ripple effect in the order of mass transit in a railway station. The grammar of the urban space management cannot accept even the most insignificant incorrect punctuation mark. The hesitating man becomes an unpardonable morpheme before the official syntax of a global network as he doesn’t remember, for a brief moment, whether he was going up or down the stairs of the over bridge. Whether an outsider or otherwise, the occupants of the global cities are anonymous passersby; their conditions of continuous movements constitute the global circuits which sustain the movement of the different “scapes” as mentioned above. The provisionality of their situation highlights the provisionality of their identities in terms of race, colour and gender. Exile is a general condition of all, as is their anonymity. They are the mass people.

El hombre vaciló al subir la escalera que conducía de un andén a otro del metro, y al producirse esta pequeña indecisión de su parte (no sabía si seguir o quedarse, si avanzar o retroceder, en realidad tuvo la duda de si se encontraba bajando o subiendo) graves trastornos ocurrieron alrededor. La compacta muchedumbre que le seguía rompió el denso entramado – sin embargo, casual – de tiempo y espacio, desperdigándose, como una estrella que al explotar, provoca diáspora de luces y algún eclipse. [266]

The man hesitated while going up the stairs which led from one station to the other of the   metro, and thanks to this brief moment of hesitation on his part (he didn’t know whether to   move on or stay, to proceed or regress, in fact he doubted whether he was climbing up or going down the staircase) serious disturbances occurred around there. The compact crowd that followed him broke the dense network, however casual, in time and space, scattering like a star, which on explosion, provoke a diaspora of lights and some eclipse. [My translation].

The staircase becomes a metaphor of a conduit in the network and discounts any articulation of passion by its occupants. The corollary is that any irrationality disables the efficiency of the conduit. Both the conduit and its occupants (the crowd) are vulnerable to a breakdown given their game plan kind of structures. The protagonist is just one in a crowd whose identity becomes irrelevant. Gender, ethnic, racial and even bodily confusions are played out as fragmentary and as borderless as language itself. The entire discourse of a smooth efficient network with its connectivity, communicability and reliability is critiqued. In a mass transit system, gendered entities are disoriented, bodies are disintegrated as wigs; dentures, glasses and fashion accessories fly off from their assigned places.

Hombres perplejos resbalaron, mujeres gritaron, niños fueron aplastados, un anciano perdió la peluca, una dama su dentadura postiza, se desparramaron los abalorios de un vendedor ambulante, alguien aprovechó la ocasión  para robar unas revistas del quiosco, hubo un intento de violación, salto un reloj de una mano al aire y varias mujeres intercambiaron sin querer sus bolsos. [266]

Perplexed men slipped, women screamed and children were crushed, an old man lost his wig, a lady her denture, the cheap items of a mobile salesman got scattered, someone got an opportunity to steal magazines from a kiosk, there was an attempt to rape, one watch flew out of someone’s hand and many women involuntarily exchanged their purses. [My translation].

The text thus exposes the porous borders that draw the global urban maps imagining safe, civilized and equally accessible spatial tropes. The guards immediately take charge to set everything in order.

El hombre fue detenido, posteriormente, y acusado de perturbar el orden público. El mismo había sufrido las consecuencias de su imprudencia, ya que, en el tumulto, se le quebró un diente. Se pudo determinar que, en el momento del incidente, el hombre que vaciló en la escalera que conducía de un andén a otro (a veinticinco metros de profundidad y con luz artificial de día y de noche) era el hombre que estaba en el tercer lugar de la fila número quince, siempre y cuando se hubieran establecido lugares y filas para el ascenso y descenso de la escalera. [266-267].

The man was detained and charged with having disturbed public order. He himself had suffered the consequences of his recklessness because, in the tumult, he broke a tooth. It could be established that at the time of the incident, the man who hesitated on the stairs that   led from one platform to another (at twenty five meters depth, lit with artificial light by day and night) was the man who was in third place row number fifteen, provided they had established rows and places for the ascending and descending the staircase. [My translation].

The narrative thus renders exposed how the city is a Panopticon. The security personnel knew exactly where this man was at the instant of his momentary hesitation which jammed the smooth functioning of this manufactured spatial apparatus. However, the cityscape with its fluid boundaries is recast almost immediately like an elastic matter ready to play its next game. But the odd man who peoples this space is unbendable as he begins gazing at the crevice on the wall. The crevice works like a metaphor for a break, yet it is also one that continuously draws the attention of the man. There is break in coordination between the state machinery and its subjects. The panoptic city hence continues to interrogate him. His answer is always the same: that he’d forgotten whether he was going up or down the staircase; that perhaps it did not really matter; that he had his right foot lifted and that a crowd was present ahead and behind, and for a moment he didn’t know! There was thus also a break between the man’s memory and his own body. The city and his body become analogous tropes of control and unitary perfection, which fail momentarily because of loss of memory. Ironically, he also reflects on the fact that the staircase was an artefact used to go up or down, antithetical actions. The crevice thus articulates a counter-narrative critique of the unitary perfections of a cityscape and its inhabitants.

The complete breakdown of communication between the man and the officer is a blotch on the entire paradigm of control by the state and its allies. This breakdown is located in a complex in-between-ness, as it works both ways. The officer’s interrogation cannot extract a satisfactory response from the man while the man too, as he spoke, continued to be distracted by the growing size of the crevice on the wall, which was grey or green. The only answer he claimed about the crevice was that it was a literary artefact. The crevice as a literary artefact also metaphorizes break and discontinuity, between language and silence as also between desire and reality. The growing crevice on the wall symbolizes a point of spatial critique and intersection of the panoptic, which breaks. It is at this point that the man’s mind drifts off towards conceptualizing the “spatialization of culture” as he reckons with the difficulty of grasping reality in terms of its time and ‘direction’, “si no hay continuidad, equivale a afirmar que no existe ninguna realidad, salvo el momento” (270) [“In the absence of continuity, you have to accept that no reality exists apart from the present”, [My translation]. Further down he says, “La altura en que estuviera colocado decidía, en este caso, la direccion.” [270] [“The direction was determined, in this instance, by the level at which the eye was situated. {My translation}]”  The narrative that follows is clearly reminiscence of an Internet game space.

Es curioso que el mismo instrumento sirva tanto para subir como para bajar, siendo en el fondo, acciones opuestas – reflexionó el hombre, en voz alta….un minuto antes de la vacilación – continuó – , la memoria hizo una laguna. La memoria navega, hace agua. No sirvió; quedó atrapada en el subterráneo. [270].

Its odd that the same instrument is good for going up and down-at heart two antithetical actions,’ the man thought aloud…A moment before hesitation ,’ he continued, ‘a gap opened in my memory. Memory can drift, spring a leak. Mine got stuck in the underground, it was no use.’ [My translation].

This momentary loss of a working memory is not amnesia but a ‘literary device’ and ‘una grieta inesperada’ or ‘an unexpected crack’ (271), like a hung Internet space. The citizen transiting this space had difficulty seeing as “solo una abstraccion nos permitía saber, cuando nos sumergimos, si la corriente nos desliza hacia el origen o hacia la desembocadura del río, si empieza o termina” (271) [‘when submerged, only an abstraction allows us to know whether the current is taking us to the source or the outlet of the river, to where it begins or ends’ {My translation}]. Like the Internet game space, there are neither beginnings nor endings, or rather they are just provisional and are meant to score a point. The foot, half raised, halted due to uncertainty. ‘No hay ningún dramatismo en ello, sino una especie de turbacion.’ [271] [‘There was nothing dramatic about it, just a kind of confusion.’{My translation}] The foot is narrated as a fragment of the body of the man, which is disabled due to a brief gap in memory resulting in confusion, not an epic hero who strives to change the world. He barely manages to survive it. It almost reads like the cursor on the computer screen, which can’t move because the computer is hung. The analogy of the real space with the virtual one only serves to highlight the nature of this spatial contour as heterotopias. Heterotopias are spaces, which exist in all cultures but function differently as per situations of each culture. They are such spaces which are real spaces but relate to/juxtapose with utopias and real spaces of both geophysical and virtual types. They are manufactured and artificially put in place and include for example prisons, asylums, zoos or gardens which are either forbidden or privileged spaces. Peri Rossi’s city-as-home, fits in as a heterotopic space which groups together citi-zens as members who have had to be permitted into “accommodation” in order to be subjected to control and surveillance. Such permissions are granted under conditions of a pre-figured, strict systemic grammar of behaviour and anyone who does not follow this grammar is coolly picked out to ‘cleanse’ the space and put it back in order. So this odd man, who invests in “thinking” can’t possibly belong to this order.

It is interesting for us, at this point to make note of the writer’s brief biography.[8] She is an Uruguayan who has lived in exile since 1972 in Franco’s Spain, in Barcelona. She was expelled again in 1974 for anti-fascist activism, after which time she took refuge in Paris for nine months. She then married and moved back to Spain. In an interview with the famous Mexican writer, Carmen Boullosa, she explains her experience of exile and abandonment thus.

This second exile lasted some nine months. It wasn’t only exile; the problem was that the dictatorship had revoked my citizenship, and then I had no   documents. I was, in fact, stateless and clandestine in France, which put me in a state of acute anxiety.

… … … …

I appealed to the brotherliness of my Communist comrades in Spain, and I found a husband. We were brave, because only the church could marry people, and divorce didn’t exist. I entered Spain secretly, and I found a leftist priest to marry us, and obtained Spanish citizenship. Luckily, my husband was gay. (The Artiste’s Voice)

Peri Rossi’s feeling of rootlessness and statelessness as a Uruguayan political exile also overlaps with a kind of economic abandonment of neoliberal agendas in her home country. Add to this the fact that she is gay herself and thus when the interviewer asks her if patriotism is an undesirable factor, she responds

I completely agree. But, if I tell you this, it’s because I put myself in the place of people who love their homeland. In other words, here, when they ask me, “What are you more, Spanish or Uruguayan?” I say, “I am a citizen of the world.” In any part of the world, I defend the same things. I lived in Berlin where I defended the same things. When I arrived here, I fought against   Franco, just like I would have fought for Allende, if I had been in Chile. But that doesn’t mean that all countries are the same to me. The ones I feel a kinship with are those in which justice, and human and animal rights are defended. That’s the true homeland. (The Artistes’ Voice)

Yet in post-Franco Spain she maintains that her favourite past time is playing games on the Internet, and not reading literature or seeing good movies.

There you have it! I believe that knowledge is uncomfortable, and when I want to amuse myself, I play games on the Internet. I don’t amuse myself with music, movies, or paintings. When it comes to those things, I actually suffer.   But suffering is also a type of knowledge. A biology book can seem very entertaining to me. I don’t ask that it be well written. I do ask that it provide information. I always demand that literature be written well, because that’s what pertains to literature, correct? (The Artistes’ Voice)

The point here to be noted is that in spite of what Peri Rossi claims, we do see how her experience with internet gaming as amusement has perforated into her literary disposition, which she believes only nurtures itself from her knowledge as suffering. On the contrary, amusement and suffering contribute equally. In another interview she says the following regarding her last collection of short stories, Habitaciones.

En los dos últimos años, al mismo tiempo que poesía, había escrito varios relatos, de temas y extensión diferentes. Cuando los leí, me di cuenta de que algunos se desarrollaban en habitaciones cerradas: una celda de prisión, la habitación de un psiquiátrico y varios hoteles. Tenían otra cosa en común: reflejaban el mundo estrictamente contemporáneo del capitalismo salvaje, con sus numerosos artilugios de comunicación – celulares, Internet, congresos, pantallas- pero no había verdadera comunicación. Había prisa, pero incomunicación, soledad, y poca esperanza. Es un tema que me fascina: en el primer mundo, la mayor cantidad de aparatos de comunicación, las personas se tocan menos, conversan menos, comparten menos.

Para ser escuchados, pagan al psicólogo, y para ser tocados, al masajista. Pero no son culpables de esta manera de vivir; la responsabilidad la tiene esta fase del capitalismo financiero, salvaje y destructivo. Esta transformación del mundo a principios del s. XXI me inquieta y la observo con la imparcialidad de una cronista. (Entrevista a Cristina Peri Rossi.)

During the past two years, I had written several stories as well as poetry of different themes and extension. When I read, I realized that some were developed in closed rooms: a prison cell, the room of a psychiatric, a hospital and several hotels. They had another thing in common: they strictly reflected the contemporary world of unbridled capitalism, with its many communication gadgets – phones, Internet, conference halls and displays, but there was no real communication. There was rush, isolation, loneliness, and very little hope. It is a subject that fascinates me: in the first world, the greater the number of communication devices, the less they talk, the less they actually play and the less they share.

To be heard, they pay the psychologist, and to be touched, the masseur. But they are not guilty of this conduct as the responsibility lies with this phase of financial capitalism, wild and destructive. This transformation of the world at the beginning of s. XXI makes me restless and I watch it with the impartiality of a reporter.) [My translation]

What she talks about here with respect to communication is also true of commuting through mass transit systems. What she talks of here with respect to closed spaces becomes relevant also with respect to public spaces. These are the heterotopias designed, derided and deployed to stupefy citizens as subjects and to “colonize” them in newer ways. There is no scope of any talking nor hearing, nor any touching or of sharing. However, only a hung space enables screaming, or a pinching, or a molestation, or a near rape amidst the confusion of violence, indifference and deafness. It is only in the hung space where “gender” plays out as pervert hysteria so that the ‘he’/ ‘she’ seems to disentangle themselves out into shameful prominence. Hybridity of peoples and their bodies, spaces and idioms and the uselessness of mechanical movements, driven to patterns of banal everyday gaming, thus render mute any scope of agency, whether as a collective or an individual. Only the crowd, anonymity and exile feed into nomadic global conduits of irrelevant/imagined economic and political “stances” of a culture of predatory ‘management’ system of neoliberalism constantly under the surveillance of a police state. The police state, however, is also fraught with the same risks of routine prescriptive moves, blind to any difference of any ‘literary device’

The post Cartography of Mass City-zenry in Global Netscapes in Cristina Peri Rossi’s Short Stories ‘Los desaarraigados’ [‘The Uprooted’] and ‘La grieta’ [‘The Crevice’]. appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Francisco Zamora Loboch[1], or simply “Paco” to those who know him, is one of Equatorial Guinea’s best-known writers. Born in 1948 on the Equatorial Guinean island of Annobon, his life has been profoundly marked by his country’s passage from Spanish colonial rule, to independence, to dictatorship, to diaspora. Although he came to Spain to study at university in 1968, the ascent of Francisco Macías Nguema’s brutal regime forced thousands of his compatriots into exile, thus making Zamora’s Spanish sojourn permanent. In 1979, Macías’ equally ruthless nephew, Teodoro Obiang, assumed the presidency, further cementing the impossibility of Zamora’s return. Zamora has since established himself as a journalist in Madrid. He has worked for several publications over the decades, most notably as a sports editor for As. His literary works, which include essays (How to be black and not die in Aravaca, 1994), poetry (Memory of Labyrinths, 1999; From the Viyil and Other Chronicles, 2008); and novels (Conspiracy on the Green, 2009; The Caiman of Kaduna, 2012),  examine such pressing issues as the role of nationalism in a land marked by ethnic tension, poverty, and state terror; the experience of exile in a former colonial metropolis; the contested belonging of an African nation in the global Spanish-speaking community; and the role of humor in bringing about change.

On May 28, 2013, Paco sat down with me in his Madrid office to talk about his life and his literature.

*****

Martin Repinecz:                            Can you talk a bit about how you came to Spain and about how you became a writer?

Francisco Zamora Loboch:                           Well, I was already a writer as a child. I have a poem that describes it. In Annobon, there were not many people that knew how to read in that period. When the mail boat came, the older men and women always depended on the kids, on the young people, who knew how to write, to write the letters. So from then on, I began to write, which was good because it was very well paid. What I mean is that, the better your letters were, the more yams you had, the more plantains you had, you even had more fish, etcetera. So I began writing then, or rather, I began to know the importance of what writing is.

And in terms of coming to this country, when I was young like you, it seemed I was as smart and intelligent as you–people believed that I was smart and intelligent, like you!

FZL:                           And they gave me a scholarship, so I came here to study economics. But after a while I realized that what really attracted me was journalism. So I switched to journalism.

MR:                            And that was in the ‘60s, right?

FZL:                           More like the ‘70s. I’m not that old; don’t be a jerk.

MR:                            And when did you begin to write creatively?

FZL:                           Even in Guinea I began to write poetry, perhaps when I was about 17 or 18. And even before, because as a kid, I learned to read very early; I think that I could read even at three or four years old.

MR:                            Your father was also a poet?

FZL:                           My father was a poet and schoolteacher. So, for me, to discover reading tebeos, or comics, as they are now called, was a very gratifying world. But it was also problematic because now my older sisters remind me how much I would laugh at them because they didn’t know how to read. At six or seven, I would still tell them, “how is it possible?”, and such. So obviously I began to get into problems, but of laughter; I have always laughed a lot at the ignorant.

FZL:                           But because the ignorant are always stronger, they always end up bringing you down by hitting you, or beating you up, or something like that. So anyway, yes, I began to write in Guinea, and when I arrived here, I underwent, naturally, a transformation of everything I had written, which was about palm trees, and similar things. And upon arriving here, thank God, I found people who were very critical with respect to politics and history, etcetera, in the classrooms of the school of journalism. I was very lucky in that sense because for others to be critical and tell you, “What is all this stuff about palm trees and coconut trees?” and such, forces you to get with the times. And as you write in newspapers at the same time, you begin to realize that regionalism has no raison d’être if it doesn’t have its projection in a common tree of culture. One cannot simply spend one’s life talking about ancestors, about caves, about palm trees and coconut trees; no, no, no. One must integrate all these things, as a certain Brazilian musician would say, in a common culture.

MR:                            And when you were small in Annobon, what texts were available for you? You mentioned comics, right?

FZL:                           Comics! Captain Thunder, Jabato, Mortadelo y Filemón; whatever there was from that period. I didn’t read any interesting books, if that’s what you’re asking.

FZL:                           Was I already reading Dickens? No. Not at all; my culture was limited to comics; to the world of Captain Thunder, the world of Jabato, the world of Mortadelo y Filemón; of the Guerrero del Antifaz; just like any Spanish child.

MR:                            And Western novels as well, right?

FZL:                           Ah yes, of course; my father had very good Western novels, but he didn’t let me read them. But I looked for them and found them. An in addition, it so happens that a beautiful story has come out in recent years about Western authors. I don’t know if you have read about how the authors that were persecuted by the Franco regime took refuge by writing Westerns, mysteries, and crime novels to survive, and they would use pseudonyms like Clark Karrados, like Silver Kane. The only one that used his own name was Marical Lafuente Estefanía. I am very taken by that moment. As an enthusiast, not to show off my readings. Now, when I began studying  at the Middle School in Santa Isabel, or Malabo, or Clarence, since it has three names…[2]

MR:                            Pardon, you left Annobon at a certain point?

FZL:                           Yes, of course; my father was a teacher, and when they sent him to Santa Isabel, I went there too. So two or three years later, I began studying at the Middle School Institute. When I was at the Middle School Institute, they started to allow black children to enter, because before the Institute was only for white children. So starting in the year ’58, when Equatorial Guinea was declared a province of Spain, just like Albacete, then we [black children] could also attend the Institutes. That is when I found myself with competent teachers who taught me who Juan Ramón Jiménez was, who Cervantes was, who other writers were, etcetera. And that is when I came in to contact with great literature, and when I began to read seriously, especially Juan Ramón, whom I read a great deal; Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer; in short, anything that people read in that period. And I remember perfectly when I read Platero y yo, that I was impressed at how one could write so well. And of course Juan Ramón Jiménez’s poems, even if he didn’t influence me much later on, but this fills you with culture, don’t you think?

MR:                            Yes, definitely. Even when you wrote letters in Annobon, you wrote in Spanish?

FZL:                           In Spanish, in Spanish. If not, what purpose did it have? From Annobon, you can only go to Santa Isabel, or Fernando Pó, or Bioko, or Malabo.[3] That was the vital itinerary of an Annobonese person. An Annobonese person would go to work in Malabo to build his house, etc. So we had no other panorama, and we are still that way today. In other words, an Annobonese person’s ideal is to set foot in the land of the Bubis,[4] to accumulate money or material to build a house of stone or a house of cement, etc.

MR:                            Can you speak a bit more about identity in Annobon? How do people on that island feel their Annobonese identity with respect their Equatorial Guinean identity?

FZL:                           The Annobonese feel very, very very Annobonese. I think that we feel Guinean because of the Bubis. Because the relationship between Annobon and the island of Bioko, or the island of Fernando Pó, however it is called, has always existed. Because as I have told you, it was our link to know what was happening in the world, to be able to buy things, to be able to use something called money, to have relationships with white culture. So of course, from Bioko, being connected with the mainland is no problem. At the end of the day, you are in Africa. Whatever you do. This is something that Africans don’t know: at the end of the day, it is going to be Africa.

MR:                            But the Annobonese identify more with the Bubis than with the Fang?[5]

FZL:                           Yes, of course. The contact between Annobon and the Fang is of the last forty or fifty years. By contrast, the contact between the Annobonese and the Bubis is many centuries old. We didn’t go to the continent, we went to the island in search of opportunities. That is where the Bubis are. But it is a melting pot, the capital, which is formbed by Bubis, Spaniards, and others. What it means to be a capital. A small one, but still a capital at the end of the day.

MR:                            And how was the experience of living in Santa Isabel [present-day Malabo] for you?

FZL:                           Of course! There I met my life-long friends, those who would become my friends, who were all a bunch of ruffians. My father was also in charge of a reform school for young people. So imagine, a kid my age, surrounded by so many scoundrels, delinquents, crooks! My whole life I’ve been around crooks, rascals, thieves, freeloaders! These were my friends!

FZL:                           And in addition to those I met in the Institute, I also met many friends in a semi-fascist experience, which was the OJE, the Spanish Youth Organization, when I came to Spain in ’62-’63. But that OJE was a work of Franco, and people used to say Franco called it his pet project, or something like that. Its purpose was so that Guinean teenagers, at age 14, 15, or 16, could come to the peninsula, to Spain, to integrate with other Spanish kids. So of course, your universe changed in two or three trips! It was amazing, because from the racial discrimination of Guinea, from the supremacy of whites over blacks, you come here and you think to yourself, “What the hell is this? I am just the same as these guys!” They would pull your leg, and you would pull theirs, and you would be integrated in a day or two. So the OJE played a very great role despite being a fascist organization of the youth of Equatorial Guinea of that period because it allowed them to leave the colonial environment and enjoy Spain. But certainly, the enrichment of this semi-fascist, para-fascist experience—can you imagine, with the blue and khaki uniform?—enabled us to wake up from a sluggish, colonial world. And it was a whole generation: it was not just me, but hundreds of kids that would come here in the summer to the OJE’s camps. Although Macías[6] finished off all these people, some saved themselves.

MR:                            So, when you came to Spain to start university, did you plan on going back to Guinea?

FZL:                           Yes, of course; I had no interest in staying; all the romanticism that I might have had for this country had been exhausted by the time I was 18. At 18, I knew it all.

MR:                            And with the OJE, you would come to Madrid?

FZL:                           Ah, no; they were incredible experiences for a kid born in Guinea. At 15, they left you in Cádiz in a boat. They would give you just enough money and a map, and they would tell you where you had to go and what day you had to be there. So we had to figure it out, either walking, or hitchhiking, or however we could to get to these places, of course. Imagine the experience you would get in the ‘60s around here. I remember one time we went to Galicia because the camp was in a place called Sada, a very famous beach. Six of us little Guineans arrived here with our satchels and whatnot, and the leader said, “OK, today we are going to make a paella.” We had the rice, we asked for a paella pan, and we started making the rice, and a couple of ladies approached us. “What are you doing?”, they said. “We are going to make a paella.” “Where are you from?” “From Guinea.” “Since when do you make paellas?” We told them, “No, it’s just that…”, and they said, “Look, sons: you are very young; you look great, very handsome. Go for a swim. Enjoy Galicia in peace. And when you come back, don’t worry, because we will make you a paella.” Wooooow! And when we came back, that was a huge paella, a party!

MR:                            So you said you came to study economics but then you switched to journalism, right?

FZL:                           Yes, in the Complutense.

MR:                            And you were at university when Guinea became independent?

FZL:                           No, I was there [in Guinea], in the Plaza de España, although I don’t know what it’s called now.[7] I was there that day.[8]

MR:                            Oh, you remember the day! What happened exactly?

FZL:                           Well, after that, about two months later or so, I came to Spain. And later came everything with Macías: the murders, the brutality, and so on, but I was here while that was going on. Later, we organized a few plans to return, but they failed; all of our attempts failed. We were also very naïve; we didn’t think money was important.

MR:                            So, in the early years, you were involved in political movements?

FZL:                           Yes, I always have been.

MR:                            Let’s talk for a minute about your career as a journalist. Can you speak a bit more about how you came to be a sports journalist in particular?

FZL:                           Ah, yes, because on one occasion I was talking with one of my teachers, and I was obsessed with Guinea. So he told me not to be so obsessed with it, and that I dedicate myself to journalism. First I had to subsist, and second, I shouldn’t label myself too strongly. So, I have always been alternating one thing with the other. But above all, in my opinion, where I have written the best has been in the world of sports because as a young man I was a great athlete. That is definitely true. I did track, basketball, hurdles, and of course soccer.

MR:                            Your last novel, El caimán de Kaduna, is about soccer. I assume your experience reporting about soccer helped you to write it?

FZL:                           Yes. The newspaper As has sent me to practically all the soccer championships in Africa. In the World Cup in Germany,[9] four or five African teams classified, so I had to go to all those African countries to report how the World Cup was seen there. I was at the African Cup of Nations in Ghana.[10] And at the one in Egypt.[11] And at the one in Angola.[12] And then I was in South Africa recently for the World Cup.[13]

MR:                            And when you were in all those countries, did you manage to establish contact with other African writers?

FZL:                           No, I was working like a madman. Because you have to fill two pages of newspaper every day. You don’t have time for anything. There is no time for anything except to eat badly. But it is the best time to visit those countries. You see the national explosion, the national depression, you see people who have nothing to do with soccer criticizing soccer. In addition, the organization isn’t usually very sophisticated. Here, if you show your press pass, they send you to a different place, and from there you have to go somewhere else. But not there. I prefer that chaos. It is more entertaining.

MR:                            So, going back to literature, the first literary texts you published were poems that came out in Donato’s anthology?[14]

FZL:                           Not quite in Donato’s anthology. Amidst the attempts to search for funds to fight Macías, we published a few books that we called Guinean literature, or something like that; I can’t remember. That was how the first writings started to come out.  Now I believe it’s been 25 years since those first texts that Donato, I and others published.

MR:                            And what is your opinion, in general, of the attempt to create a Guinean literature? Do you consider it important to label it that way?

FZL:                           Yes, I consider it important to label it that way because in this way, those of us who read in Spanish will realize that right now, the Spanish language has three legs. One is Spain: Madrid; Seville; the peninsula. Another leg is South America, and the third is in Africa. So it is important for us to be distinguished as such. You, as a good American, know that until something is named, it has no visibility. And you cannot make a movement. It is good, it is not bad.

MR:                            Do you feel that Guinean writers are obtaining more visibility?

FZL:                           The universities are giving them more visibility.

MR:                            In Spain too?

FZL:                           No, not in Spain. The Americans. Every time an American scholar calls me, I am unable to tell them no, because I know they are making a valuable effort, and people like Justo Bolekia, Ávila Laurel, and Donato Ndongo Bidyogo[15] know the dependence and the gratitude that we owe to the Americans. To American students.  Because they have taken what we are producing very seriously with their theses and their studies. There is no American university where people don’t know something about what is being produced in Equatorial Guinea. And that is thanks to them, not to Spain. In Spain, they don’t give us the time of day. They haven’t fully understood that a small country called Guinea is the embassy of the Spanish language in Africa. And if they have understood it, they don’t care. But damn, for a continent that speaks a zillion languages to have a special part dedicated to Spanish? Even if the writing is shit! It’s true that sometimes I think to myself, geez, this novel is crap, or this poem has nothing interesting to it; but it’s in Spanish!

FZL:                           And Spain, the Instituto Cervantes and the institutions should be more aware of what is going on. Because you can’t imagine the number of people that write in Guinea; a ton.

MR:                            What is the situation for writers in Equatorial Guinea?

FZL:                           I’m not sure, because I don’t live there. But I suppose it must be frustrating because they don’t have readers. The government doesn’t do much for them. As Ávila Laurel said, “Writing in Guinea is like being a skier in the Sahara.”

MR:                            Yes, that’s what I imagined.

FZL:                           Yes.

MR:                            Can you tell me a bit about your upcoming literary projects?

FZL:                           I am preparing a book of poems. I want to call it, “Spanish Blue.” “Spanish Blue” is about language, religion, and the poetic relationship between my Spain and my Guinea. On one hand, blue represents the uniform of the Falangists, of the regime. The Falangist hymn said, “cover your chest in Spanish blue.” But then there is also a poem by Juan Ramón Jiménez that says, “Every afternoon the sky will be blue and placid.”[16] I love this “blue and placid.” And I think it’s a very intriguing thing. I have started writing it but I am not in a hurry.

MR:                            Very interesting. As a final question, have you ever thought about returning to Equatorial Guinea?

FZL:                           Yes, of course! I have to teach the kids to play soccer right, because I think they are doing it badly. And I can also teach them to play volleyboll, and I can also teach them to play basketball. And if the Guineans don’t want to, I can do it in Annobon. No problem.

MR:                            Thanks so much, Paco.

FZL:                           No problem, man. That’s two or three beers you’re going to buy me now, pal!

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