According to Maya Deren in her seminal book Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, the Vodou rite of reclamation or the retirer d’en bas de l’eau, enables a family to “reclaim [an ancestor’s] soul from the waters of the abyss…and to lodge it in a govi [pot] where it may henceforth be …consulted … and so may participate in all the decisions that normally unite the members of a family in counsel” (46). While seemingly “primitive,” this ritual perseveres in the modern age because “the enduring presence of so many dead demands that it be tried again and again” (Lowe). This rite enables participants, both dead and alive, to performatively enact force in the material world through shared decision-making. I would like to argue that by bringing the dead back to life as a writer does when composing a text, in particular within a ritualized context such as publication and distribution, he/she enables a reading audience to participate in a cultural ritual, a performative act, one with external consequences: readers are affected by the voices they contact between the pages. Those rallied spirits alive in the book join the world once again as active participants. Like reading, Haitian Vodou is, through its “worship of metaphysical forces…ritualistic, rather than meditative, and involve[s] … [sustaining metaphysical forces] by feeding, or sacrifice, and [the spirits’] benediction [is] maintained by propitiation” (65). A Haitian’s religious system, Deren claims, “must do more than give him moral substance… it must provide the means for living. It must serve the organism as well as the psyche” (73). I aim to prove that the feeding of the spirits occurs in the reading, the praise in the writing. And the dead speak from the pages.

Collective memory is maintained through the performative act of writing. The writer becomes the mambo (priestess); the reader becomes a hounsis (initiate). Narrative construction must serve the writer, reader, and history by, according to Joseph Roach, “juxtapos[ing] living memory as restored behavior against a historical archive of scripted records” (242). Fiction functions as a record, promoting and maintaining culture. The voice of a text resounds with performative cultural iterations which reinscribe the identity of the writer, the reader, and the characters in the book. Too often readers are exposed to singular, authoritative voices from the Euro-centric majority and so marginalized voices are forgotten. While Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and Willa Cather write very differently, their narratives contribute to a North American western-centered sense of ethos: white, individualized, rooted, whole. But the Afro-American or Caribbean writer, as suggested by Derek Walcott, inherits a narrative fraught with loss and division, a history defined by the other. How then, can a post-plantation era writer contribute to his sense of cultural history? By resurrecting the past and offering, as Roach claims, “mnemonic materials- speech, images, gestures- that supplement or contest the authority of ‘documents’ in [any] historiographic  tradition”(242). Through the act of writing itself a Creole writer reestablishes the identity of ancestors and so weaves the past with the present. I see the dead speak through the text itself and shape the present in the extra-semiotic world. The text houses the cultural identity “of successive generations that sustain different social and cultural identities” (Roach 242), like the govi pot houses the dead.

James Weldon Johnson offers a complicated narrative in his fictionalized memoir The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, published in 1912. In his fabricated autobiography, “a veil has been drawn aside: the reader…[is] given a view of the inner life of the Negro in America… [and is] initiated into the ‘freemasonry,’ as it were, of the race” (Johnson 3). Theorist Brent Hayes Edwards claims that the novel offers a “small but crucial shift of authority” from an Anglo-centered narration to an Afro-centered narration (41).

But defining who that narrator is becomes challenging. The speaker is of mixed race- his father is white, his mother black- but his mother never communicates this to him, and he defers to a white identity. After hearing her son call a classmate “nigger,” the speaker’s mother “turned on [him and said] ‘Don’t you ever use that word again’” (7). Unwittingly, the speaker is forbidden to use a word which is a label of self-representation, albeit one of slander and shame. But the narrator, who is arguably a construction of Johnson’s psyche or an amalgamation of his personal experience, is writing the word and indeed his fictionalized self in the story speaks this word. The written signifier, “nigger,” stands in for the self, the “I,” and maintains a sense of permanence in shared memory as it is written and published. But the “I” in this tale is not the “signified” Johnson even though the text was published within the autobiographical genre, although it later was recanted and Johnson claimed the text as fiction. Herein lays complicated notions surrounding presence and absence in Afro-American texts. I rely on Deconstructionist Jacques Derrida in order to mine the self-referential nature of ‘beingness’ in text. The binary of who one is, is reliant on who one is not. We understand black in relation to white, reader in relation to writer, self in relation to someone else. Yet the true nature of the self is unknowable, there is no Platonic essence, as the self is an identifier for some indescribable interior consciousness which is paradoxically understood by who one is not. To further complicate deconstructionist notions of being, our Platonic understanding of self suggests a static, unchanging identity, a singularness, a purity. In a contact zone and in the context of postcolonial theory, I believe there is an added danger to trying to define static selfhood. If the narrator of Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man is defined in a singular way, he cannot have any other identity, he is solely white or solely “nigger”. But readers and narrators cannot get around self-referents. This is Johnson’s entire point- the limits of language and of consciousness. For the speaker there is a sense of Derridean essential drift, for the self and the identifier never align- the “nigger” and the “I,” as he doesn’t identify fully as black and definitely not as “nigger.” He continues to climb the American socio-economic ladder through playing ragtime music and in his later years as a white businessman. The narrator passes back and forth from the white and black world, defined by the gaze of others both black and white. Arguably, Johnson was not interested in a definitive notion of race or identity as the narrator remains unnamed; rather Johnson chose to pen a text representative of black experience at the turn of the century. This shifting sense of identity, this “dual personality” actually leaves room for Derridean différance, a play on the French for “to defer” as well as “to differ,” by deconstructing notions of selfhood, race, and representation. According to Heather Russell, the “narrative structure simultaneously veils and conceals while unveiling and revealing,” ‘leaving its readers’ “tasked with standing at the gateway… of The Autobiography’s hybrid structure” (Russell 30). Suzanne Scafe notes that with Johnson’s fragmentary voice of re- and un- representation, he “foreground[s]… the constructedness of the ‘I’ identity and privilege[es] the texture of experience and memory” (190). Through the “simmering gumbo pot” (Cartwright 100) of “I,” “nigger,” “white,” and “black,” “speaker” and “author,” Johnson summons readers to participate in his narrative by forcing them to wade through his various representations. Like the “composite and multiple” spirits, “every first-person consciousness, every “I”, is an assemblage, a plural ‘we’” (Cartwright 100). I argue that by adding an assemblage of narrative voices to the Afro-American literary tapestry, Johnson reclaims the unspoken lives of millions of men and women who have passed as white, or who have identified as black. The retirer d’en bas de l’eau of giving voice to the dead remedies breaches in black history by establishing the presence of an everyman, not deconstructing identity, but re-constructing it. This turn of the century text seems to me to take up Derek Walcott’s call for acts of presence through art, “allowing the group [(readers)] to act itself out by reiterating its structure [(identity)] and commenting on its [own] values” (Brown 210). I read The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man as a govi pot to consult on my road to selfhood as I shift through fluid self-representations, the narrator providing me a predecessor to consult for advice through the performance of race and identity.

If Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man allows Johnson to reclaim shared memory through narration, then Eileen M. Julien’s Travels with Mae: Scenes from a New Orleans Girlhood (2009) addresses the specific and personal dead instead of the death of assumed identifiers. Julien’s text functions specifically because she writes from place- a contact zone. Common culture makes for “ersatz families both created and reinforced through ritualizing” (Brown 207). The setting of New Orleans offers an amalgamation of people, voices, perspectives, and opportunities for filial connections, but grounded in a specific culture where “community is both occasion for and the product of its own ritual activity” (Brown 210). Due to the multitude of voices (in addition to a factious history of violence, environmental disaster, and gentrification) a single voice can get lost. Readers can approach Julien’s text as a reclamation of the spirit of her dead mother. The performative act of writing this memoir contributes to the uniqueness of post-plantation shared memory and reclaims the past of New Orleans, her ancestral space.

For anthropologist and Vodou initiate Karen McCarthy Brown, the term “Vodou” was coined by outsiders and considered a religion, but its practitioners do not “believe” in Vodou, rather, they claim to “serve the spirits” (205). With this emphasis on action or serving, Vodou ceremonies illustrate that performative ritual creates a symbiotic relationship between the living and the dead: “the living need advice, warning, protection provided by…the spirits… The spirits, in turn, have to be…honored if they are to muster the strength… to protect the living” (206). It seems the act of performative remembrance is perhaps all the more vital for underrepresented populations. According to Keith Cartwright: “Our corrective effort to go to the mouth of the govi of New Orleans… calls for difficult acts of listening to subalternized voices that are often poorly represented, if recorded at all, in available texts. These voices that would balance our vision and open our eyes to clashing energies and contradictory impulses have been censored, silenced, and ignored” (101). Often readers are granted a glimpse into the lives of poor, marginalized black New Orleanians in fiction, but Eileen M. Julien offers readers an under-represented demographic: that of a middle class black girl who attended bourgeoisie balls, social clubs and parties. The members of the black middle class in New Orleans, as portrayed by Julien, developed their own exclusive subculture that was not a reaction to whiteness but rather a celebration of the presence of Blackness. Julien’s story unfolds in a series of vignettes reminiscent of Derek Walcott’s Nobel Prize speech on the fragmentation of Caribbean history, which I see Julien repossessing. Travels with Mae is largely a celebratory novel filled with food, family, and humid New Orleans, neighbors where okra grows in the backyard, jazz music plays in the music hall, and dainty party dresses swirl around girls’ ankles.

Several vignettes in the memoir present insight into Julien’s relationship with her mother, most notably her mother’s last days when age and fear beset both Mae (Julien’s mother) and her aunt Fe. Julien “spend[s] Thanksgiving at home because death lurks here and everywhere” (99). Mae and Fe fret over food for mourners after a series of neighbors and relatives pass away. The sharing of food, in particular gumbo which is mentioned several times in the memoir, which I believe becomes a performative reclamation of the dead as those alive eat to remind themselves that they are still living and memorialize, through the act of living, those who have died. Gumbo, known widely as a New Orleans dish, also reminds those consuming it of their African heritage, as “Gumbo, Louisiana-style, shares common ingredients with Senegalese suppakanja”(105).

Another vignette, narrated through journal entries, brings Mae to life but in one of Julien’s dreams: “Her hands on my forehead- joy, ecstasy to know that even though she was dead, she was somehow alive!” (113). Interestingly Julien ends her memoir not with the death of her mother, but a scene when her mother was still alive, seeing her off at the airport, when she gestured to her mother from the terminal and her mother “came back!” (129). I offer that the return of her mother’s spirit and body seems an appropriate moment to end the text as Julien’s book becomes the public govi for Mae, “[b]ecause… of them, of my them, all that will be left is me, a book like this one, and my pen” (100). The use of the first person pronoun (my), and Julien’s claim over the city of New Orleans, is a performative act of reclamation. The ritual enactment of writing and reading Travels with Mae, or what Keith Cartwright infers is a “govi text,” seems to me to expose readers to her memorialized past, and brings her mother to life.

A fictive tale, Praisesong for the Widow by Paule Marshall (1983) offers another method for summoning ancestry and maintaining shared memory: ritual movement through the abject. Protagonist Avey/Avatara’s rebirth launches her through vomit, excrement, blood, and abjection to bring her dead ancestors back to life, as well as herself. It seems appropriate to mark this text as distinctly Modernist due to its self-conscious narration, rejection of Enlightenment notions such as free will, and its subtle commentary on fragmented family life in the face of racism and industrialization. Modernism is often thought to be a movement at odds with black/Caribbean/Afro-American experience. But Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic notes that some Afro-American literary ventures represent the notion of “the slave sublime” in which “the concentrated intensity of the slave experience is something that marks out blacks as the first truly modern people, handling the nineteenth century dilemmas and difficulties which would become the substance of everyday life in Europe a century later” (220-221). Paule Marshall, who was born to Barbadian parents and grew up in Brooklyn, was likely familiar with historical and cultural fracturing, and her protagonist Avery/Avatara has “slave sublime” experiences on her cruise vacation to the Caribbean in order for Marshall to explore her connection with our Afro-American past by “complicat[ing] individualist notions of personhood, authorship, filiation, or salvation, [by] present[ing] Avey as an avatar of lives that have preceded her, an avatar ritually bound to generations past and future” (Cartwright 50). Unlike the speaker in Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man who performs fluid identifiers and  presents readers with an ancestry of changeable identification in order to complicate our understanding of beingness, Avey of Praisesong for the Widow moves through an abject bodily experience to divorce her mind from the body, and in bodily absence focuses on the spirit, or inner world.

The notion of bodily absence is of course a familiar one in Caribbean culture. Slavery forces an abject state because the physical body is othered; a body absent of consciousness or soul is arguably not a person. According to Carole Sweeney, “the optimum functioning of the slave system required not only utter disregard for the…slave body but also the denial of the existence of consciousness in individual slaves” (52). Under the terrors of slavery the body was the privileged binary within the body/mind binary, therefore the slave mind did not exist for white slave owners and so slaves functioned as soulless commodities. Economics deemed the slave body “collective” because slaves were only worth the value of their labor (Sweeney 52). Any fungible slave represented labor, and so could stand in for another slave. Despite Marshall’s heavy hand at characterization- Avey is a well-rounded character- she is just a body, a slave, albeit a victim of Anglophile consumerism rather than plantation labor. Avey’s life is absorbed by materialism— she buys fashionable clothes and expensive dinners. She lacks self-actualization; she is not a whole person but an unconscious body. After her rebirth into full spiritual and cultural consciousness, her retirer d’en bas de l’eau or reclamation of her soul, I see her as standing in for anybody but this time, she “situates [her] place in an historical continuum,” in memory (Sweeney 52).

I’d like to posit that we first encounter the performative, ritualistic aspect of a retirer d’en bas de l’eau at Ibo Landing, where Aunt Cuney tells young Avey about the Ibo slaves who walked off the slave ship and chose to drown in defiance against their enslavement. This first gesture initiated by ancestors, constitutes a collective defiance against the white slave owners who attempted to make slaves of both the Ibos’ bodies and history. The Ibos’ drowning, returning to what a Haitian may call the Waters of the Abyss where the loa and souls of the dead reside, brought the living— Avey— back to life.

The blurring of lines between the living and the dead plays out through abject instances in the novel. Avey’s vacation on the cruise ship the Bianca Pride (White Pride) could be likened to traveling a kind of perverse Middle Passage and she experiences this voyage in an abject state. On board Avey eats a European- style parfait and “her stomach, her entire midsection felt odd.”  She maintained— “[I]t felt like a huge tumor had suddenly ballooned up at her center” (Marshall 50, 52). Avey’s discomfort continued until she seemed “in the grip of a powerful hallucinogen- something that had dramatically expanded her vision, offering her a glimpse of things that were beyond her comprehension” (59). In this semi-catatonic state Avey escapes the ship to the island of Grenada where she finds herself in an “unlikely sacred room of mourning (a hotel)” (Cartwright 51). From there she smells a child’s filth and sweat (arguably her own); she releases her bowels on a small boat and finds herself anointed while sick by rum shack owner Legbert who represents Papa Legba the loa of the crossroads, and his daughter, perhaps a representation of an initiate, or hunsis. In one of the final scenes in the novel Avey attends the nation dance where diasporic Caribbean attendees dance for their ancestors, “drawing on…[a] shared pool of memories…to reconstruct [ritual African dances]” (Brown 209). Avey performs her own nation dance; her subconscious connects with the other dancers, moves beyond her body, and she suddenly remembers Ibo Landing, the resting place of her African ancestors. It seems Avey’s symbolic death and rebirth as she proceeds through abject stages of physical discomfort, allow her to reclaim her ancestral spirits, in particular the spirit of her mentor Aunt Cuney and the spirits of the Ibos. I see Ibo Landing as also offering up a ritualized space for a retirer d’en bas de l’eau. The water submerges the slave bodies and Avey’s repeated visits memorialize those under the water, making for a performative, ritualized space. Avatara resolves to bring her grandchildren there and share her ancestral past. Marshall’s narration reverses the intentions of slave owners who attempted to empty the Afro-Caribbean body of consciousness. By emptying herself of consciousness through physical abjection, I see Avatara standing in for her ancestors themselves and reaches back through history to reclaim collective memory in the govi pot of the body, no longer mindless, no longer soulless, but conscious.

I conclude with arguably my most definitive offering of the retirer d’en bas de l’eau, Toni Morrison’s Beloved in which Beloved, a two-year-old, is murdered by her mother who intends to rescue her from slavery. Beloved, residing in a woman’s body, emerges from a kind of Vodou Water of the Abyss “full of venom” to haunt her mother Sethe. Eventually the reclaimed child consumes her mother as Sethe wastes away and Beloved grows fatter and fatter on guilt and love. Finally the community of Black women who previously rejected Sethe because she killed Beloved and tried to murder her other three children, circle the house and exorcise Beloved’s spirit and Sethe is accepted back into the community again. Beloved is a warning of what can happen when we ignore the whispers of the novel’s epigraph: “Sixty Million and more,” slaves Morrison memorializes in her novel. Un-reclaimed spirits sleep uneasily, and so will our history if we fail to recognize the voices of speakers with fluid identifiers, the soul reaching beyond the abject body, and our ancestors calling from home.  There may be no better way to allow those voices to be heard than through the act of writing, where they can speak for themselves.

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By the end of the 18th century, the French were proud to own the richest colony in the world, Saint-Domingue, where tens of thousands of enslaved Africans were disembarked off ships every year, most of them with a life expectancy of less than five years. The enslaved revolted in 1791, gained their freedom in 1793, and eventually declared national independence in 1804 after the French sent an expedition to re-establish slavery. Haiti was born.

In 1804, it was shocking that a group of formerly enslaved Africans and their descendants dared to form their own nation founded on the abolition of slavery. By this time, to be enslaved was a social status associated with people of African descent in the Americas, so fighting slavery required fighting the racism intrinsic to the institution. Haiti’s existence challenged the narrative that the West told itself: certain people were meant for enslavement and exploitation; therefore, the system of inequality foundational to the Americas was simply normal, not unjust. The West, faced with the shock of Haiti’s existence, worked hard to keep that narrative alive.

In order to promote that story, Haiti was maligned. Haitians were considered violent, barbaric, and incapable of running a nation. Actions such as Haiti’s 1825 agreement to pay France billions of dollars in exchange for recognition, which weakened the Haitian economy from the start, were used to prove that Haiti couldn’t stand—not to show that the West in fact needed it to fail. This attitude, this desire to prove true the “doomed to fail” narrative, is alive and well two centuries later and it’s closely related to the story that we tell about protests in Ferguson, New York, and Baltimore.

In 2010, the day after an earthquake in Haiti killed over three hundred thousand people, Pat Robertson announced that Haitians were paying for their “pact with the devil.” What was this “pact” exactly? Robertson suggested that in order to gain their freedom, Haitians needed the help of an evil force, to which they still owed their independence today.

Let’s break down this absurd accusation—Haitians’ ancestors dared to assert that they were not property; they dared to assert that their lives mattered. What made their freedom and eventual national independence possible? Their determination? Their inner sense of humanity? Their dream of a better life? No, says Robertson, opposing the institution of slavery was the “devil’s” work. And what’s worse, Robertson suggests that hundreds of thousands of people deserved to die two hundred years later because of it. Yet the most detrimental part of this accusation is that it props up the idea that violence belongs to and embodies Haiti and Haitians—not to the institution of slavery that offered misery and death to some and wealth and prosperity to others.

The fact that, two centuries after the first successful slave revolt in the Americas, people continue to locate violence only in the opposition to oppression rather than in the system that oppresses brings us to Ferguson, New York, and Baltimore today. Those who fight back and oppose a system that perpetuates inequity are “thugs” much like Haitian revolutionaries were “brigands.” We overlook the fact that life expectancy varies dramatically by neighborhood in Baltimore, the fact that minor traffic violations can ruin the lives of those who can’t afford to pay the fines associated with tickets, or the fact that certain police departments find racism funny. Slavery was abolished in the United States a century and a half ago, over six decades after Haitians claimed their freedom. Economic disparity and racism, both intrinsic to this institution that was foundational to the beginning of the Americas, have not been fully abolished. This, sadly, is why 2015 bears a striking resemblance to 1791.

Now you get the joke. Funny, huh?

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In this moment it appears increasingly clear that the growing levels of inequality and the tensions in national politics in the South African context are igniting a new era of post-Apartheid voices.  These are the rising voices of a youth who are increasingly distrustful of “rainbow nation” doctrines and talk of neo-liberal racial democracy. In what has quickly become a historic wave of student-driven protests at the University of Cape Town, an unprecedented level of widespread debate, conversation, and tactical demonstrations have taken hold of the atmosphere and imagination of countless participants across the country and now across the globe.

The protests focussed around the calls for the removal of a statue of the imperialist megalomaniac and renowned “philanthropist”, one Cecil John Rhodes. Rhodes was an avid businessman whose accumulated wealth stemmed largely from mining in Southern Africa, and he was also the colonial driver instigating the creation of the Rhodesian territory. The protest actions, since their inception, have demanded the removal of the statue along with firm commitments to address worker rights, curriculum and several other issues that have been laid out in full in a petition presented by students, workers, and staff.

The real catalyst for the international attention was born from a controversial demonstration, in the second week of March 2015, beneath the figure of Cecil John Rhodes perched on his throne, gazing dreamily at the still vastly unequal city from his timeless ivory tower, the University of Cape Town. The demonstration, calling for the statue’s removal, reached its climax when one protester, Chumani Maxwele, threw a bucket of faecal matter over the statue.

This spurred action and attracted a great deal of attention in both online and offline spaces.  The responses varied from damning condemnations to overwhelming support and mass mobilisation resulting in marches, petitions, open letters and hundreds of opinion pieces in national popular media outlets in particular.

On Friday the 20^th of March, a procession under the banner of the slogan “Rhodes Must Fall” was led from the main campus down to the University administration building, Bremner, were the Vice Chancellor’s office is located. Midway through the address the student driven contingent occupied the administration building and took up residence in a historic room named the Archie Mafeje room. In 1968 this room was occupied by hundreds of students at the university protesting an intervention from the then South African government that sought to rescind Mafeje’s appointment to the African Studies department, as a senior lecturer. Archie Mafeje, hailing from Ncobo in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, had studied and taught at the University of Cape Town while engaging in political activism and providing insight into fighting for the plight of Africa and its people. He went on to teach and work at the University of Dar Es Salaam before moving to work in The Hague, before finally returning to South Africa to continue his work developing social science research in the South African context.

Bremner building was quickly renamed by the student driven mass movement to “Azania House” invoking the spirit and legacies of the Black consciousness movements in South Africa in the 1970s. Azania house has become the center of operations for the social movement who have declared their unwillingness to move until the demands, particularly the removal of the statue, are met.

On the evening of Tuesday the 24^th of March in an address delivered by a cohort of black academics from the University of Cape Town, testimonials were given describing the difficulties around being a black staff member within the institution, and practical suggestions and dreams for “transformed” university spaces were shared in the lively, packed room, intermittently infused with protest songs and dances that served to raise spirits and refocus strength in the wake of the heaviness of the topic at hand.

Consistently over the days that followed, the collective occupying Azania House orchestrated protests and performance art demonstrations across the campus, interrogating the legacy of colonialism and how it is memorialised on campus. In a particularly powerful piece popularly titled Saartjie Baartman, a collective of artists left from Azania House and walked through the campus in chains, black paint and diapers, moving towards a sculpture on Baartman located in the University library.

SaartjieBaartman // Man walking with Chains. Photo credit: UCT Rhodes Must Fall

As the media attention, both national and international, continued to lock its gaze on the unrelenting “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign, the broader debates in and around the movement continued to drive for changes beyond the physical fall of the statue. Azania House, in the evenings that followed March 24^th, has been home to guest lecturers presenting on various issues and the Archie Mafeje room in particular continues to be a space generating intellectual debate, art in various forms, and conversations regarding alternative educational pedagogies in ways that have been rarely seen on the University campus.

These lectures and dialogues have provoked a conversation regarding changes in the curriculum of key interest areas within the University that have consistently marginalised Afro-centric views, thoughts and teachings. This was particularly discussed in the Politics, Psychology, English literature, Philosophy and History departments, respectively.  Much debate surrounded revisiting the disagreements within the university that led to the departure of Professor Mahmood Mamdani in 1999, former AC Jordan chair of African Studies at the University of Cape Town and a world-renowned post colonial scholar. Dialogue on the conditions surrounding Mamdani’s departure, approached in his paper “Teaching African in Post-Apartheid South Africa”, has provided a useful, tangible foundation from which this movement can begin to address specific curriculum deficiencies, particularly emphasising on how issues centered around the African continent are dealt with.

Another noteworthy trend stemming from the debates and conversations facilitated at the University has been the leadership shown by black women, and in many cases, black queer women. Several declarations and efforts have been made to ensure that the spaces and actions remain intersectional and develop through that lens going forward, which at present is no easy feat as issues continuously battle for priority.

International solidarity from other Universities outside of South Africa continues to flurry in, notably kicked off with protest action at from a radical collective located in Oxford University calling for the fall of Rhodes and for the “Decolonisation” of education.  The Black Student Union of the University of Berkley, California, issued a statement in solidarity and several other student groups in Universities in the region continue offer solidarity as the movement continues to pick up steam.

Oxford Student Protest. Photo credit: Ntokozo Qwabe 

De NieuweUniversiteit – vooreendemocratischeuniversiteit
Solidarity to the students of UCT. Photo credit: De NieuweUniversiteit – vooreendemocratischeuniversiteit

Within South Africa, universities across the country have responded to the chants echoing from the University of Cape Town. Protest action in Rhodes University, located in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, has reinvigorated conversations around the existing institutional culture in these universities and drawn connections to the symbolic, continued, existence of names, statues and sculptures left over from the colonial and Apartheid eras of South Africa. Debate has ensued about how these artifacts and names reflect the continued exclusion of different epistemologies of thought, different races, classes and gender based oppressions.

Notably, in Durban, at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, a statue of King George V has been defaced with paint as the ripples of anti-colonial rage continued to make waves on the East coast of South Africa. This campus, as with many university spaces in South Africa, is no stranger to protest, and this recent wave of student action locates itself within a broader conversation across the nation that seeks to apply pressure on the political imagination of the present day.

King George V vandalised, University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. Photo credit: Ntokozo Qwabe

Protest action, demonstrations and various other forms of activism continue to take place to varying degrees at many of the other universities across the country. Within the context of South African universities, an unbroken line of organized protest from the days of Apartheid has continued to characterise this landscape as groups of students and workers alike fight for improved worker rights, more inclusive University spaces, and progressive admissions policies tailored to meet the appetite for redress.  Concerns addressed include the limited financial backing and the lack of academic support measures for students, particularly students previously disadvantaged by the effects of the Apartheid system, and identification in part by using race as a proxy for disadvantage. These issues of debate, among many, remain firmly present in the mind, hearts and motivations driving many who now march under the banner of “Rhodes Must Fall.”

The removal of the statue, while largely symbolic, has been an appropriate rallying cry by which to tangibly address the practical implications of so called “transformation”, redress and the re-imagination of what the role and function of an African University should be.  The success of the removal of the statue will illustrate an important step in the ability for social movements under this banner to physically effect change in their environment. This process of physical change in the university space will begin to provide concrete, tactile shape to the intangible changes and transformations in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Indeed, several civil society organisations, notably the Marikana Support Group, and Equal Education have issued statements of support with the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign, citing the need for critical introspection and declaring their rejection of the oppression and exfoliation that the legacy of Rhodes in many ways embodies.

In the broader political climate of South Africa, leading up to the elections in early 2014 the country witnessed the rise of a new player in the political landscape, the Economic Freedom Fighters. The party locates itself as a radical, militant economic emancipatory movement whose political discourse lies squarely on the “left”.  Their introduction has come at a time when the legacy of the “rainbow nation” project has begun to wane as the country grows increasingly vocal in its desire to improve basic services, infrastructure, and social mobility and reduce corruption and exploitation. The party, while controversial in its tactics and engagements, has injected energy into public discourse and popularised a language against inequality that has undoubtedly affected how many young South Africans are framing the understanding of our concerning levels of inequality.

The series of protests, demonstrations and conversations that have been re-invoked with vigour allowing a revitalization of post-colonial thought and discourse into the popular public domain across South Africa, and more broadly across many countries at this moment, illustrate the fading dreams of miraculous peaceful transitions from colonies to independent states. Only time will tell whether this wave will give way to fatigue or grow and change into broader movements, and whether institutions and organisations will take these conversation to different levels of engagement. If we can be certain of one thing it is this: a change is going to come.

The post “Rhodes Must Fall” – Decolonisation Symbolism – What is happening at UCT, South Africa? appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Quelle réponse, s’inscrivant dans une perspective postcoloniale, apporter aux attentats terroristes qui ont eu lieu à l’encontre du journal satirique français Charlie Hebdo, et ont conduit au massacre brutal de l’ensemble ou presque de son comité de rédaction? Le 7 janvier 2015, deux hommes armés ont pénétré dans les bureaux de Charlie Hebdo, situés dans le 11^ème arrondissement de Paris, tuant des dessinateurs de premier plan tels que Charb, Cabu, Honoré, Tignous et Wolinski. Les deux tireurs auraient alors crié « Allahu Akbar » (Dieu est grand en arabe) et aussi « On a vengé le Prophète », faisant référence à une série de caricatures du Prophète Mahomet. On a identifié plus tard les tireurs comme étant les frères Kouachi, deux citoyens français musulmans d’origine algérienne s’étant formé au maniement des armes au Yémen, et appartenant à l’organisation terroriste islamiste Al-Qaïda dans la Péninsule Arabique (AQPA). Des preuves indiquent également que des liens existent entre les frères Kouachi et Amedy Coulibaly qui, deux jours après les attentats, tuait quatre otages dans un supermarché casher juif situé Porte-de-Vincennes dans le 12^ème arrondissement. Dans une courte vidéo posthume, Coulibaly affirme avoir appartenu à un autre groupe armé, L’État Islamique en Irak et au Levant (EIIL).

En tout, la tuerie de Charlie Hebdo a fait douze morts, y compris trois officiers de police. Une chasse à l’homme a suivi, à l’issue de laquelle les trois terroristes ont été abattus dans une embuscade policière se déroulant simultanément à deux endroits différents de Paris. La couverture sensationnaliste qu’a fait les médias de l’événement a contribué à l’intensification du choc post-traumatique que de nombreux Français ont éprouvé au lendemain des attentats. Le 11 janvier, environ deux millions de personnes, y compris 40 dirigeants à travers le monde, ont défilé dans les rues de Paris afin de montrer leur solidarité à l’égard des dessinateurs morts et de soutenir la liberté d’expression, ainsi que la liberté de la presse. Les gens n’ont pas manqué de pointer du doigt l’ironie causée par la présence de chefs d’état en provenance de pays tels que l’Egypte, la Turquie ou Israël, dont le bilan en matière de libertés est plus que discutable. Le slogan « Je suis Charlie » (I am Charlie) est devenu le cri de ralliement d’une foule autrement silencieuse dans son ensemble, encore en deuil et encore frappée par la signification des attentats. Les gens ont eu le sentiment qu’une partie de l’esprit irrévérencieux français s’était éteint dans les attentats. La question n’est pas de savoir si l’on aime ou non Charlie Hebdo, mais de comprendre que le journal était le symbole d’une époque vraisemblablement révolue.

Charlie Hebdo est d’abord apparu en 1970 dans le sillon de Mai 68, et comme successeur du magazine Hara-Kiri, interdit pour s’être moqué de la mort de l’ancien Président Charles de Gaulle. La posture gauchisante, anti-cléricale et anti-militariste du journal a amené ses dessinateurs à tourner en dérision toutes formes d’autorité, laïque ou non, comme le patriarcat. Son contenu sexuellement explicite, son langage cru et sa caricature du « beauf » (équivalent français du « redneck » américain) a servi à briser de nombreux tabous au sein d’un pays encore majoritairement rural, superstitieux et bigot. L’impertinence de Charlie Hebdo épousait à la perfection un des slogans révolutionnaires de Mai 68 : « Il est interdit d’interdire ». Après avoir cessé la publication du journal dans les années 80, Charlie Hebdo a repris son édition hebdomadaire. Depuis, le journal a comparu dans plus de 50 procès judiciaires, la plupart découlant de plaintes de la part de l’extrême droite, des grands médias, et de l’Église Catholique. Dans la plupart des cas, il a remporté ces procès. Depuis 2006 et la controverse au sujet des caricatures du Prophète Mahomet, Charlie Hebdo a systématiquement nié être un journal raciste et islamophobe. Le licenciement de l’éminent dessinateur Siné en 2008, suite à des accusations d’antisémitisme, l’incendie criminel contre les bureaux du journal en 2011, et les attentats terroristes en ce début d’année 2015, laissent cependant penser que si Charlie Hebdo est demeuré fidèle à son credo libertaire, la société française, quant à elle, a changé – et pas forcément dans le bon sens.

Étant Français, j’éprouve des sentiments très partagés s’agissant de défendre Charlie. En France, le blasphème n’est pas un délit et il existe une longue tradition de satire politique et religieuse faisant la fierté du pays, et remontant à la Révolution française. Ce n’est pas pour nier le contexte spécifiquement postcolonial dans lequel s’est inscrit la controverse autour de Charlie, ce qui m’a poussé à coucher sur papier mes pensées afin de provoquer davantage de débat au sein de la gauche. L’histoire commence dans les années 50 dans le cadre des luttes de libération anticoloniales, en particulier en Algérie. L’actuelle V^e République française est née du fait de la guerre d’indépendance algérienne, entraînant l’effondrement de la IV^e République. Ces luttes furent en général laïques, inspirées du nationalisme panarabe, du tiers-mondisme ou du communisme. Ces idéologies laïques n’ayant pas réussi à se constituer en alternatives viables au capitalisme, l’idéologie religieuse – « l’opium du peuple », pour utiliser une formule marxiste consacrée – est venue occuper un vide politique dans une époque que certains ont décrite comme étant « postrévolutionnaire » (Dirlik 1997). Ainsi qu’a ajouté un journaliste français du journal britannique The Guardian après les attentats, « le chaos qui a émergé pendant et après les guerres d’indépendance vis-à-vis de l’Occident (dont la responsabilité est clairement engagée) a fourni une excellente opportunité aux fanatiques de revenir au premier plan, dont la profonde rancœur face à l’évolution de leur pays était venue alimenter un désir de vengeance. »

Les Arabo-Musulmans qui ont émigré en France à partir des années 60 jusqu’à nos jours sont venus pour différentes raisons : pour fuir le fondamentalisme religieux (en Algérie : la décennie noire des années 90 et de la guerre civile), fuir la pauvreté, ou parce que ces derniers voyaient en France le pays de la liberté, égalité, fraternité. C’est je crois ici, toutefois, qu’une autre histoire commence. Les Arabo-Musulmans de deuxième et troisième générations sont nés en France et pourtant ont grandi dans un contexte de chômage de masse, de discrimination raciale et de montée du communautarisme ethnico-religieux. Les émeutes de 2005 furent un symptôme de la ghettoïsation rapide des banlieues, désormais largement racialisées (concomitant avec la montée de l’extrême droite), et qu’un film comme La Haine de Mathieu Kassovitz avait prédit dix ans auparavant. De bien des façons, les émeutes ont marqué un tournant décisif : considérées en France comme le plus grand soulèvement depuis Mai 68, celles-ci ont aussi conduit le gouvernement à réinstaurer la loi martiale. De manière significative, la dernière fois que c’est arrivé était pendant la guerre d’Algérie. Composé d’intellectuels publics, d’universitaires et de militants locaux issus d’origines diverses, la naissance en 2006 du parti politique décolonial Les Indigènes de la République est venu occuper un espace plus que nécessaire à gauche. Leur diagnostic était que la gauche française, à laquelle Charlie appartient, s’est rendue complice de la perpétration d’une situation s’apparentant à l’apartheid au sein d’une France néocoloniale.

C’est une réalité à laquelle des segments de la gauche, en particulier dans le monde anglo-saxon, n’ont pas hésité à se confronter en condamnant de façon quasi unilatérale le caractère islamophobe de la ligne éditoriale de Charlie Hebdo. Certains sont allés jusqu’à suggérer que n’importe quelle organisation de gauche digne de ce nom devrait faire de son mieux pour faire interdire Charlie Hebdo (par des moyens légaux, faut-il préciser!)[1]. Ce faisant, ces organisations se sont jointes au concert général de dénonciation et de colère émanant de Musulmans qui, à travers la planète, ont protesté contre la publication par Charlie Hebdo d’une nouvelle caricature du Prophète figurant sur la couverture de leur premier numéro suite aux attentats. Le journal indépendant a choisi de faire un tirage exceptionnel à 7 millions d’exemplaires au lieu des 60 000 habituels ; le numéro a été distribué dans plus de 20 pays, et traduit en espagnol, en italien, en anglais, en turc et en arabe. Il est significatif, cependant, que de nombreux canaux médiatiques anglo-saxons aient choisi de censurer le numéro afin de ne pas heurter la communauté musulmane. Beaucoup de critiques de Charlie, venant de la gauche, ont ainsi soulevé les préoccupations suivantes, que je n’essayerai pas de réfuter, connaissant bien le journal satirique : à savoir que Charlie a manifestement ignoré le contexte d’une islamophobie rampante en Occident; qu’il a appliqué une politique de « deux poids, deux mesures », en particulier depuis l’arrivée du directeur de la rédaction Philippe Val, quand il s’agissait de caricaturer les Juifs; et que de se moquer du christianisme, religion dominante en France, n’est pas la même chose que de se moquer d’une minorité religieuse opprimée telle que les Musulmans.

Je souhaiterais à mon tour soulever certaines préoccupations, dans la mesure où, que nous aimions ou non Charlie, ce dernier faisait et fait encore partie intégrante d’un certain esprit de gauche – libertaire, anarchiste, et anti-clérical. Devrions-nous nous précipiter pour « traiter » (ou interpeller, selon la terminologie de Louis Althusser) Charlie d’islamophobe, au risque d’étouffer notre critique de l’Islam politique et de la façon dont celui-ci a échoué au cours des quatre dernières décennies à remplir ses promesses de prospérité, d’égalité et de liberté ? Nous avons vu, en France et ailleurs, la manière dont l’accusation d’antisémitisme a servi à entraver toute critique du régime d’apartheid d’Israël vis-à-vis des Palestiniens. Ne devrions-nous pas aussi réfléchir au fait que des djihadistes aient choisi de prendre pour cible un journal gauchisant plutôt que, disons, le siège du Front National et de l’extrême droite de Marine Le Pen ? Cette simple réalité devrait nous alerter au climat politique profondément réactionnaire qui est le nôtre. La montée du fondamentalisme religieux, en outre, ne concerne pas seulement le Moyen-Orient et l’Islam, mais aussi l’Inde hinduvta et le sionisme juif, ou, plus près de l’Europe, un pays rongé par la crise tel que la Grèce, où l’Eglise Orthodoxe – avec la complicité du parti néo-nazi Aube Dorée –, a dans certains endroits remplacé l’État suite à l’effondrement du système social. Enfin, et surtout, ne devrions-nous pas réfléchir à la politique « représentationnelle » d’un journal satirique comme Charlie, au lieu de condamner ce dernier, et par là-même écarter des questions épineuses ? En effet, l’envie de conserver l’exclusivité de la (non-)représentation qui est faite de la figure hautement symbolique de Mahomet, sujet au demeurant contentieux même au sein de l’Islam, m’apparaît comme un geste auto-essentialisant renvoyant, par effet de miroir, à l’imaginaire orientaliste de l’Occident. Dès lors, on piège davantage l’Islam dans une image faussée d’elle-même, à savoir religieuse, dogmatique, ou arriérée.

Pour les Musulmans français, dont la condition est par certains aspects semblable à celle des Noirs américains aux États-Unis de par leur marginalisation de longue date, il n’existe guère d’autre choix que de se radicaliser ou de rester des « Musulmans modérés »  – l’équivalent français du « bon nègre ». Pourtant, le cas des frères Kouachi, qui parlaient à peine arabe et n’avaient rejoint le djihad qu’après de longues années de radicalisation, fait d’eux une parodie du « terroriste essentialiste » (Said 1988, 49) dépeint par les médias. Comme l’a fait remarquer dans le passé l’intellectuel Edward Said, « la chose la plus frappante concernant le “terrorisme” […] est son isolement de toute explication ou circonstances atténuantes, et aussi son isolement des représentations de la plupart des autres dysfonctions, symptômes et maladies du monde contemporain » (47). Souvent occulté des médias, en toile de fond apparaît l’enfance des frères Kouachi, qui ont grandi dans un ghetto parisien, avec une mère suicidaire et un père absent, ou encore le confinement d’Amedy Coulibaly dans les conditions sordides du système carcéral français. Cela montre qu’on ne peut pas évacuer le terrorisme en invoquant un acte irrationnel de barbarie (c’est-à-dire, étymologiquement, ce qui est étranger ou « Autre »). Cela ne signifie pas non plus que ces derniers ne furent que de simples « victimes du système ». Ils se posent plutôt en sujets rationnels portant des revendications spécifiques dont il faut tenir compte : de manière explicite, comme l’ont déclaré eux-mêmes les terroristes, l’exigence que la France cesse sa politique militaire interventionniste tuant des Musulmans à l’étranger ; et, implicitement, qu’elle se mette à « écouter » les nombreuses frustrations des banlieues françaises. Ainsi que l’a affirmé Gayatri Spivak, « la résistance prenant la forme d’attentats-suicides est un message inscrit à même le corps lorsque qu’aucun autre moyen ne réussit » (2012, 385).

Tout en gardant ce contexte à l’esprit, l’une des marques de fabrique du postcolonial (de caractère diasporique, discursif et privilégié tout spécialement) est sa célébration de la moquerie, de l’ironie et de la dérision, perçues comme étant subversives et transgressives. Comme l’a écrit la critique littéraire Sneja Gunew,

[Les minorités] n’ont pas le droit à l’ironie ou à d’autres hétérogénéités de langage et se limitent simplement aux contraintes linéaires ou uni-dimensionnelles, à la nécessité de « parler clairement » ou de risquer de souffrir du fardeau de se voir traduit, relayé par un porte-parole, représenté au sens double. (1994, 94)

La question n’est peut-être alors pas de déterminer si oui ou non nous jugeons les caricatures de Charlie Hebdo offensives, puisque pour beaucoup elles le sont, mais plutôt qui parle, et pour qui. La distinction qu’utilise Spivak entre représentation politique (vertretung, « se mettre à la place de ») et re-présentation artistique (darstellung, « mettre en place ») dans son essai réputé Les subalternes peuvent-elles parler ? suggère que l’action de représenter est à la fois « procuration et portrait » (1988, 276). Alors qu’un petit groupe de terroristes armés se sont auto-désignés porte-paroles des Musulmans opprimés, Charlie a affirmé le droit de re-présenter, et de se moquer, des Musulmans, tandis que d’autres segments de la gauche (principalement blanche et laïque) cherchent maintenant à défendre ces derniers, après avoir longtemps nié l’existence de l’islamophobie en tant que catégorie valide[2]. En termes absolus, cependant, aucune représentation ne semble plus légitime qu’une autre, car en toute circonstance, les subalternes ne peuvent pas parler – c’est-à-dire que celles-ci sont privées de la possibilité de s’exprimer en leur propre nom. Ceux que Spivak appelle « impérialistes bienveillants » incluent aussi bien la gauche libérale (au sens anglo-saxon) que la gauche radicale-marxiste occidentale, dont le discours court toujours le risque de tomber dans l’essentialisme (stratégique ou non), constituant un autre exemple de « violence épistémique ». Pour Spivak, « [s]i, dans le contexte de production coloniale, les subalternes n’ont pas d’histoire et ne peuvent pas parler, la femme subalterne, elle, est davantage plongée dans l’ombre » (1988, 287). Cela a été vrai en France, qui a par exemple interdit le port de « signes religieux ostensibles » dans les écoles publiques en 2004, et la « dissimulation du visage » dans les espaces publics en 2010. Les femmes musulmanes, clairement visées bien que la loi ne le dise pas explicitement, ont été à peine consultées, sinon pas du tout.

Il n’est pas surprenant que l’auteur primé Salman Rushdie ait déclaré son soutien à Charlie Hebdo suite à une invitation à l’Université du Vermont le 14 janvier. Tout en étant « postcolonial » de par ses origines culturelles (l’Inde), Rushdie a toujours été un ardent partisan d’une remise en cause du statut quo, et connu pour sa contestation de l’islam en particulier. On a aussi accusé Rushdie de blasphème et d’avoir abusé de la liberté d’expression avec la publication des Versets Sataniques (1988), et on l’a forcé à vivre sous la menace d’une fatwa pendant de nombreuses années. Je crois que le positionnement cosmopolite privilégié de Rushdie est ce qui lui a en partie permis, avec un détachement suffisant, d’ « abuser » de ses origines indiennes comme moyen de décrire les dangers de l’anomie et de l’aliénation sociales dans une Angleterre multiculturelle, postcoloniale, à travers ses personnages Chamcha et Farishta. Cependant, alors que Rushdie a survécu à une menace de mort de l’ayatollah iranien Khomeini, d’autres, comme son traducteur japonais Hitoshi Igarashi, ont été assassinés. Des autodafés du roman ont eu lieu à travers la planète et, comme pour Charlie Hebdo, beaucoup de gens de la gauche se sont pressés d’accuser Rushdie, bien que ce dernier ait toujours affirmé que son livre n’avait, au final, pas grand chose à voir avec l’islam – et encore moins avec l’islamophobie. Ce qu’on a jugé incorrect dans le roman de Rushdie est sa lecture non-littérale (c’est-à-dire à la fois fictionnelle et fictive), ambivalente (capable d’être interprétée de deux façons) et parodique de l’islam, du Prophète et du Coran, entre le sacré et le profane, et à travers l’utilisation par Rushdie du réalisme magique.

De la même façon, on pourrait arguer que les caricatures de Mahomet venant de Charlie Hebdo constituent un détournement (au sens littéral comme au sens figuré) du signifiant religieux que représente le Prophète sur le terrain laïque, en tant qu’Être tangible faisant partie de la superstructure sociale et de la sphère idéologique, plutôt que/tout en étant simultanément un artefact figé symbole de la « différence tiers-monde ». Pour Chandra Mohanty, c’est ainsi que la différence tiers monde se lit et est lue aux yeux de l’Occident : « religieux (comprendre réactionnaires), orientés vers la famille (comprendre traditionnels), mineurs légaux (comprendre ils-ne-sont-pas-encore-conscient-de-leurs-droits), illettrés (comprendre ignorants), tournés sur eux-mêmes (comprendre rétrogrades), et parfois révolutionnaires (comprendre leur-pays-est-en-état-de-guerre- ils-se-doivent-de-se-battre !) » (1991, 72). Une action de glissement (« sliding-effect ») du langage, entre le dire (discours) et le vouloir dire (intentionnalité) est à l’œuvre lorsque Charlie, en 2006, reproduit des caricatures de Mahomet provenant d’un journal danois de la droite conservatrice (l’une d’entre elles montrant le Prophète, une bombe sur la tête), ou quand, en 2011, est fait le portrait, en page une, d’un Mahomet en pleurs déclarant que « c’est dur d’être aimé par des cons… », affublé du gros titre « Mahomet débordé par les intégristes ». Le langage, comme l’a observé le théoricien de la déconstruction Jacques Derrida, est, à partir du moment même où nous nous exprimons, toujours déjà rendu «Autre », altéré : « Cette structure d’aliénation sans aliénation, cette aliénation inaliénable n’est pas seulement l’origine de notre responsabilité, elle structure le propre et la propriété de la langue » (Derrida 1998, 25).

L’herméneutique entourant les caricatures (du latin caricare, « charger, exaggérer ») révèle l’indécidabilité fondamentale du système signifiant et ouvre ainsi le sens à l’excès, à la contingence, à l’indétermination : faire le portrait de Mahomet est blasphématoire; faire le portrait de Mahomet une bombe sur la tête est raciste/islamophobe par la suggesetion que tous les Musulmans sont des terroristes; faire ainsi le portrait de Mahomet fonctionne comme moyen de dénoncer l’extrémisme religieux. Au bout du compte, ces perspectives s’invalident les unes les autres, échouant à atteindre un consensus ou l’unanimité – ce qui est le propre d’un journal satirique et polémique comme Charlie[3]. Les éditeurs de Charlie ont constamment déployé leur droit à l’ « erreur » (du latin errare, errer ou vagabonder), à la démystification, à la liberté de rire de ainsi que (quelquefois) avec. Charlie Hebdo n’a cessé de réaffirmer le droit d’avoir tort, par-delà une partie de la gauche qui a depuis longtemps désavoué le journal; par-delà les menaces terroristes, mais aussi le politiquement correct. Sur la première couverture de Charlie suite aux attentats, l’on peut voir un Mahomet en pleurs, une pancarte « Je suis Charlie » autour du cou, disant que « tout est pardonné » – là encore, un message hautement ambigu qui résiste à l’interpellation.

Le militantisme laïcard affiché de Charlie Hebdo fut lui-même parfois dogmatique, sinon problématique dans un pays où la laïcité est devenu le cheval de bataille d’organisations issues de l’extrême droite telles que Riposte Laïque, ou bien du gouvernement et de ses tentatives de suppression de la différence culturo-religieuse. Encore une fois, je ne souhaite réfuter aucune des critiques suivantes de la laïcité émanant de la gauche : que la version républicaine française de la laïcité (c’est-à-dire la séparation de l’Église et de l’État dans toutes les questions relatives au affaires publiques) est, en pratique, appliquée de manière sélective; que l’État demeure partial vis-à-vis des Catholiques, à travers le financement direct d’écoles privées catholiques par exemple; que la laïcité ne devrait s’appliquer en principe qu’aux représentants de l’État (loi de 1905), plutôt qu’à ses citoyens (Musulmans récalcitrants), comme c’est désormais le cas depuis 2004 et l’interdiction du foulard islamique (hijab) dans les écoles publiques, ou l’interdiction de la burqa (voile intégrale) dans l’espace public. Cependant, je crois que Charlie  – peut-être malgré lui  – a tout de même aidé à « rendre possible… un sens de l’histoire et de la production humaine, ainsi qu’un scepticisme sain vis-à-vis des diverses idoles vénérées par la culture » (Said, 1983, 290). La compréhension qu’a Said du fait laïque ou séculaire se refuse à une simplicification à l’excès consistant à présenter un sécularisme intrinsèquement progressiste, et un fait religieux rétrograde, ou vice versa. Comme il l’écrit dans son livre The Text, the World, and the Critic:

Un érudit entend la religion en termes séculaires mais passe à côté de ce qui dans l’Islam donne encore à ses adhérents une nourriture spirituelle sincère. L’autre voit l’Islam en termes religieux mais ignore largement les différences séculaires qui existent au sein de la diversité qui compose le monde islamique. (276)

On se doit de maintenir cette double articulation non-manichéenne afin que la subalternité arabo-musulmane puisse un jour tendre à l’auto-représentation, en France, mais aussi ailleurs en Europe, où la principale menace à laquelle nous faisons désormais face n’est pas l’« islam », mais le fascisme. À moins que la gauche ne se mette à se mobiliser pour faire cesser les nombreuses « guerres contre l’erreur » de ce monde, en Afghanistan, en Irak, en Libye ou au Mali, où le néo-impérialisme français est lourdement responsable de la propagation de guerres confessionnelles et du fondamentalisme islamiste, l’exclamation célèbre de Kurtz face aux monstruosités du Congo belge dans le roman (post)colonial classique,Au Coeur des Ténèbres de Joseph Conrad (« L’horreur ! L’horreur ! ») continuera de se faire la chambre d’écho d’une autre apostrophe toute néocoloniale (« La terreur ! La terreur ! »). Considérée comme étant produite par la peur de l’invisible/indicible (par opposition à l’horreur vivide d’un cadavre), la terreur peut frapper n’importe où et à tout moment, rendant à leur tour les mesures antiterroristes futiles, certes, mais pas inoffensives. L’imposition dans les écoles d’une minute de silence en mémoire des victimes des attentats de Charlie Hebdo, en même temps que la criminalisation de voix contestataires, ne va servir qu’à réprimer davantage les libertés citoyennes et à réduire le droit à la désobéissance civile – en particulier pour celles et ceux dont la voix est déjà muselée.

Pour conclure, je citerai Jacques Derrida, qui dans son « discours sur la terreur » suite au 11 septembre 2001, nous rappelle ce qui rend unique la contribution historique européenne. Loin d’être eurocentrique, Derrida, ne serait-ce que de par ses origines juives algériennes, était bien conscient du fait que les idéaux laïques des Lumières se bâtissent alors sur la dépossession systématique du colonisé, dont les répercussions se font ressentir aujourd’hui. Nous voici donc face à une aporie, ou ce que Spivak appellerait un « double bind », auquel la gauche révolutionnaire aurait tort de renoncer, au prétexte qu’une telle problématique appartient exclusivement à l’héritage libéral, au même titre que le concept abstrait de « liberté d’expression » :

Dans la longue et patiente déconstruction qui est requise pour la transformation à venir, l’expérience qu’inaugura l’Europe au temps des Lumières (Enlightenment, Aufklärung, illuminismo) dans la relation entre le politique et le théologique ou, plutôt, le religieux, bien qu’étant encore inégale, irréalisée, relative, et complexe, aura laissé dans l’espace politique européen des marques parfaitement originales en ce qui concerne la doctrine religieuse (remarquez que je ne parle pas de religion ou de foi mais de l’autorité de la doctrine religieuse sur le politique). On ne peut trouver de telles marques ni dans le monde arabe ni dans le monde musulman, ni en Extrême-Orient, ni même, et voici le point le plus sensible, dans la démocratie américaine, dans ce qui dans les faits régit non pas les principes mais la réalité prédominante de la culture politique américaine.

 

Photo Credit:  Peinture murale, Oberkamf, 11^ème arrondissement (Paris, France); Copyright © Anne Marie Ricaud

The post « Je suis Charlie » ? Laïcité, islam et guerre de l’erreur appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Photo credit: Morgana Damásio. In protest in 2014 against the genocide of the Black population in the city of Salvador, Bahia promoted by the courageous and fearless campaign REAJA OU SERÁ MORT@! (REACT OR YOU WILL DIE!)

On February 6, 2015, the police of the Brazilian state of Bahia executed twelve Black boys and men with gunshots to the neck in the Vila Moises area of the Cabula neighborhood in the city of Salvador. There were signs of torture, such as broken arms and sunken eyes, violent treatment that could have equally been the work of the police of São Paulo, Alagoas, Rio de Janeiro, or Pernambuco. These are law enforcement practices disseminated throughout the country. The youngest victim was fifteen years old. The oldest was twenty-seven.

A massacre isn’t simply an isolated anomaly, and it shouldn’t be seen as such. Massacres practiced by the police forces of Brazilian states[1] exemplify a complete failure of public safety policy and of our republican values, as well as a human rights violation.

Rather than the deaths themselves, the novelty of this massacre was the ensuing public discourse of the recently elected governor of Bahia, Rui Costa, who defended the killings. The police chief[2] went further on the morning after the massacre, inspired by the never ending police chronicles, deeming the massacre a successful police operation that killed preventatively. The chief of police defined the massacre as a goal of the police snipers who, rather than police alongside a community and meet its individual needs, decide to eliminate targets in seconds from a calculated distance. This illustrates the ways in which the police trivialize and disrespect the lives of people who pay taxes and the salaries of a police force that kills when it should be protecting them.

Terrified witnesses in Cabula stated that the twelve boys and men were unarmed, there were no signs of confrontation, and they were rounded up and beaten before being taken to a field surrounded by bushes and executed. Since the governor belongs to the left-wing party, there were those declaring nostalgia for the truculent times of Antônio Carlos Magalhães, the three-time governor of the state of Bahia, in what amounted to a cruel joke, as bad as those likening Governor Rui Costa with the retired Portuguese soccer player with whom he shares the same name.

Further fanning the flames, the governor responded ironically to a question posed at a February 6^th press conference[3] about the possible scare that the violence perpetuated by the operation could cause to tourists from São Paulo, habitual visitors to Bahia’s carnival. In an attempt to be witty, he attacked the public safety record of the southern state by implying that São Paulo tourists are accustomed to violence since São Paulo has the highest rate of bank robberies in Brazil. Since it is known that the police executioners alleged that the twelve massacred boys and men were going to assault banks, it wouldn’t be frivolous to infer from the context that the twelve Black Bahians were killed (preemptively) to protect White São Paulo tourists. It is also widely known that White tourists from São Paulo flood Bahia’s carnival annually in search of the famed ‘exoticism’ of the Black Bahian woman. The racist intertextuality of government discourse is as macabre as the application of the death penalty for young Black males.

The Secretary of Public Safety of São Paulo, Alexandre de Morães, did not hesitate to respond. He in turn called the governor of Bahia “feeble and ignorant,” [4]in an exchange of informalities reminiscent of comic book dialogue. He revealed that the crime rate of Bahia is four times worse than that of São Paulo, and concluded that the statements of the northeastern representative disrespected the affection that Paulistas[5] have for Bahians and the importance of tourism to Bahia. Done—the geopolitical supremacy of São Paulo ended the conversation! Even the response, logically, of the modern football captain is no match for the Robocop captain of the metropolis that looks down upon Brazilian Northeasterners, revealing the country’s regional fractures.

And where are the twelve dead boys and men in this discussion? They disappeared in the volatile and folksy speech of the murderers who justify their act as a fight against crime.  And what about the families of the victims? No one listens to, supports, or compensates them. They are victims of the deadly artillery deployed in a dreadful game that’s been bought in advance, in which the loser is already declared before the referee’s coin toss. An isolated voice has a name, last name and an address; a lady, or a young brother or victim’s cousin who might be the next victim. The grandfather of one of the deceased, Natanael de Jesus Costa (age 17), screamed at the entrance to the hospital that his grandson simply went to deliver pizza to his girlfriend’s house, which was next to the field that later served as the stage on the night of the crime. The boy disappeared from home, only to reappear on the list of bodies to be recognized in the coroner’s office.

And what do the bulk of the population in poor and indigent neighborhoods do now? They repeat, like parrots, the discourse of the legitimization of death heard in the sensationalist bandit-hunting television programs. They believe that if they align with the strongest contingent, the owners of weapons, they will receive protection because they are the workers and the others are the outlaws. What a farce! No one – no one – is a citizen when there is impunity! And the taste of the victims’ blood will only reach the mouths and the eyes of the supporters of the massacre when the gunshots destroy the lives of the children raised by their families and their community—the people who have seen them grow and bring pizzas to their girlfriends, or who were overcome by substance abuse, or by overt pressure as well as the allure of drug trafficking. It’s always our dear boys who become dead bodies littering ground.

None of these twelve ‘preemptive’ deaths is justified, even if one of them had a criminal record. And they are certainly not a testament to the success of a police operation. An operation that purposefully results in twelve deaths is arbitrary and illegal. It is catastrophic. Policing should preserve life, not eliminate it to then be excused by explanatory technicalities.

The survival of young Black men throughout Brazil is at stake in the face of a racist construction of the preferred suspect. This is already inadmissible. More reckless still, is that the governor publicly legitimizes and defends the massacre as a kind of winning shot, all the while immortalizing police shootings in poor and unprotected neighborhoods that cannot, and should not, be transformed into gladiator stadiums, where the police practice shooting young, Black male targets in accordance with the wishes of the governor.

This article was originally published in Portuguese on February 9, 2015. Quando a execução sumária é legitimada como gol de placa no campeonato de extermínio da população negra, jovem e masculina

Additional Reading

• PM de Salvador ameaça comunidade após chacina, denuncia Anistia Internacional
• Brazil police kill 13 would-be bank robbers: officials
• Massacre do Cabula e o gol do Governador

The post Summary Execution: A Recent Episode of Police Violence Against Young, Black Males in Bahia, Brazil appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

What postcolonial response can be made of the terrorist attacks on French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, which led to the brutal massacre of most its editorial board? On January 7, two gunmen entered Charlie Hebdo’s offices in the 11th district of Paris, killing – amongst others – leading cartoonists Charb, Cabu, Honoré, Tignous and Wolinski. The gunmen are believed to have shouted “Allahu Akbar” (God is great in Arabic) and also “the Prophet is avenged”, in reference to a series of caricatures of Prophet Muhammad. The gunmen were later identified as the Kouachi brothers, two Muslim French citizens of Algerian descent who received weapon training in Yemen, as part of the Islamist terrorist organization Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Evidence also indicates that Amedy Coulibaly, who two days later killed four hostages at a Jewish kosher grocery in Porte-de-Vincennes in the 12th district, was connected to the Kouachi brothers. In a short video posted posthumously, Coulibaly claims to have belonged to another armed group, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

All in all, the Charlie Hebdo shootings killed twelve, including three police officers. The three terrorists were hunted and ultimately gunned down by a police raid following a double hostage crisis, taking place simultaneously in two different Paris locations. The media’s sensationalist coverage of the event contributed to relaying and intensifying the post-traumatic shock that many French people felt in the aftermath. On January 11, about 2 million people, including more than 40 world leaders, marched in the streets of Paris to show solidarity with the dead cartoonists and support freedom of speech and of the press. The irony of political leaders being present at the march from countries like Egypt, Turkey or Israel, with dubious records with regards to freedom of speech and freedom tout court, was not lost on many people. The slogan, “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie) became the rallying cry of an otherwise largely silent crowd, still mourning and still struck by the significance of what had happened. People felt that something of the French spirit of irreverence had died in the attacks. Whether or not we liked Charlie Hebdo, the newspaper was the symbol of an epoch that seems by now definitely gone.

Charlie Hebdo first appeared in 1970 in the wake of May 1968, and as a successor to the Hara-Kiri magazine, banned for mocking the death of former French President Charles de Gaulle. The newspaper’s left-leaning, anti-clerical and anti-militarist stance led its cartoonists to lampoon all forms of authority, both secular and non-secular, such as patriarchy. Its sexually explicit content, crude language and caricature of the “beauf” (French equivalent of the redneck) served to break many taboos in a still largely rural, superstitious and bigoted country. Charlie Hebdo’s impertinence espoused to perfection one of the revolutionary slogans of May 68: “Il est interdit d’interdire” (it is forbidden to forbid). After ceasing publication in the 1980s, the newspaper resumed its weekly edition. Since then, Charlie Hebdo has been involved in over 50 legal trials, most of them stemming from complaints from the far right, mainstream media, and the Catholic Church. In most cases, it won. Since 2006 and the controversy over the caricatures of Prophet Muhammad, Charlie Hebdo has routinely denied being an Islamophobic, racist newspaper. The firing of leading cartoonist Siné in 2008 over allegations of anti-Semitism, the arson against the newspaper’s offices in 2011, and the terrorist attacks earlier this month however show that while Charlie Hebdo may have remained true to its libertarian credo, French society, on the other hand, had changed – not necessarily for the better.

Being French, I find myself deeply conflicted when it comes to defending Charlie. France does not forbid blasphemy and there exists a long and proud secular tradition of both religious and political satire, dating at least as far back as the French Revolution. This is not to deny the specifically postcolonial context in which arose the Charlie controversy, which pushed me to put my thoughts down on paper in what will hopefully trigger further debate on the Left. The story begins in the 1950s with anticolonial liberation struggles, particularly in Algeria. The current 5^th French Republic was born as a result of the Algerian war of independence, which caused the collapse of the 4^th Republic. These struggles were largely secular, inspired by pan-Arabic nationalism, third worldism, or communism. With the failure of these secular ideologies to prove inspiring alternatives to capitalism, religious ideology – “the opium of the people”, to use a consecrated Marxist formula – came to fill a political vacuum in an epoch described as “postrevolutionary” by some (Dirlik 1997). As one French journalist added in The Guardian after the attacks, “the chaos that emerged during and after independence wars (for which the west clearly has responsibility) provided an excellent opportunity for fanatics who had deeply resented the evolution of their countries, to return to prominence with a vengeance.”

Arab-Muslims who migrated to France from the 1960s onwards came for different reasons: to flee religious fundamentalism, to flee poverty, or because they saw France as the country of liberté, égalité, fraternité. This is, though, where I believe another story begins. Second and third generation Arab-Muslims were born in France yet grew up in a context of mass unemployment, racial discrimination and the rise of ethnico-religious communalism. The 2005 French Riots were a symptom of the rapid ghettoization of the now largely racialized banlieues (concomitant with the rise of the far right), and which a film like La Haine (Hatred) had predicted ten years earlier. In many ways, the Riots were a turning point: considered to be the biggest upheaval since May 1968, it also led the French government to re-institute Martial Law. Tellingly, the last time this had happened was during the Algerian War. The birth in 2006 of the decolonial political party Les Indigènes de la République, comprised of public intellectuals, academics and community activists from a variety of backgrounds, came to fill a much-needed space on the Left. Their diagnosis has been that the French Left – to which Charlie belongs – remains complicit with the perpetration of an apartheid-like situation within a neo-colonial France.

This is a reality that segments of the Left, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world, have chosen to insist on in their quasi-unilateral condemnation of Charlie Hebdo’s editorial line as Islamophobic. Some went as far as to suggest that any left-wing organization worthy of the name should try its best to ban Charlie Hebdo (by legal means that is!)[1]. In doing so, these organizations have joined in the chorus of denunciation and anger on the part of Muslims across the globe who protested against the publication of another caricature of the Prophet by Charlie Hebdo on the front cover of their newest issue following the attacks. The independent newspaper chose to print an exceptional 7 million copies instead of the usual 60 thousand, and the issue was distributed in more than 20 countries as well as translated into Spanish, Italian, English, Turkish and Arabic. It is significant, however, that many Anglo-Saxon media channels chose to censor the issue in order not to shock the Muslim community. Many leftist critiques of Charlie have thus raised the following concerns, which, being well acquainted with the satirical newspaper, I will not attempt to refute: that Charlie conspicuously ignored the context of growing Islamophobia in the West; that it applied a double-standard, in particular since the arrival of editor-in-chief Philippe Val, when it came to the caricaturing of Jews; that poking fun at Christianity, being the dominant religion in France, is not the same as mocking a religiously oppressed minority such as Muslims.

Here, I would like to raise a few concerns of mine, for whether we like it or not, Charlie was and still is very much part of a certain – libertarian, anarchist, and anti-clerical – spirit of the Left. Should we rush to “call out” (interpellate, in Louis Althusser’s terminology) Charlie as Islamophobic, with the risk that it muffles in turn our critique of the failures of political Islam over the last 40 years to deliver its promises of prosperity, equality and freedom? We have seen in France and elsewhere the ways in which calling out someone as anti-Semitic has in effect served to stifle any critique of Israel’s apartheid regime with regards to the Palestinians. Should we also not pause a minute on the fact that Jihadists chose to target a left-leaning newspaper rather than, say, far-right Marine LePen’s National Front headquarters? This alone should alert us to the profoundly reactionary political climate in which we live. The rise of religious fundamentalism is, besides, not only true of the Middle East and Islam, but of proto-fascist “Hindutva” India and of Jewish Zionism, or, closer to Europe, of a crisis-ridden country such as Greece where the Orthodox Church – in collusion with neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn – have in some places replaced the State following the collapse of the welfare system. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, should we not further reflect on the “re-presentational” politics of a satirical newspaper like Charlie, instead of condemning it and effectively brushing off some thorny questions? Indeed, the urge to retain the exclusivity over the (non) representation of the deeply symbolic figure of Muhammad, which remains a contentious issue even within Islam, appears to me as a self-essentializing gesture that mirrors the West’s Orientalist imaginary. In effect, what it does is to further entrap Islam into a false image of itself as religious, dogmatic, or backward.

For French Muslims, whose condition is in some ways akin to Black Americans in the United States given their long standing marginalization, there now is little choice other than to either become radicalized or to remain “moderate Muslims” – the French equivalent of the “good nigger”. Yet the case of the Kouachi brothers, who hardly spoke Arabic and had only recently embraced the Jihad, makes a mockery of the figure of the “essentialist terrorist” (Said 1988, 49) depicted in the media. As Edward Said once remarked, “the most striking thing about ‘terrorism’ […] is its isolation from any explanation or mitigating circumstances, and its isolation as well from representations of most other dysfunctions, symptoms and maladies of the contemporary world” (47). Mostly occluded by the media, the Kouachi brothers’ background growing up in a Paris ghetto, with a suicidal mother and an absent father, or Amedy Coulibaly’s incarceration in the squalors of the French jail system, show terrorism cannot be explained away as an irrational act of barbarism (i.e. etymologically what is foreign and “Other”). This is not to say the latter were mere “victims of the system” either. Instead, they appear as rational subjects with specific demands of their own to be reckoned with: explicitly, as was stated by the terrorists themselves, that France ought to stop its politics of military intervention and killing of Muslims overseas; and, implicitly, that it should “listen” to the French banlieues’ many frustrations. As Gayatri Spivak argued, “suicide resistance is a message inscribed in the body when no other means will get through” (2012, 385).

Keeping this context in mind, one of the postcolonial’s hallmarks (especially of a certain diasporic, discursive and privileged kind), has been its celebration of mockery, irony and derision, seen as subversive and transgressive. As postcolonial literary scholar Sneja Gunew has written,

[Minorities] are not permitted irony or other heterogeneities of language and are bounded simply by the linear or one-dimensional constraints, the necessity to ‘speak clearly’ or risk suffering the burden of being translated, spoken for, represented in its double sense. (1994, 94)

Perhaps the question, then, is not whether we deem Charlie Hebdo’s caricatures offensive, as for many they surely are – but rather who speaks, and who is spoken for. Gayatri Spivak’s useful distinction between political representation as vertretung (“stepping in someone’s place”) and between artistic re-presentation as darstellung (“placing there”) in her renowned essay Can the Subaltern Speak? suggests that representing is both “proxy and portrait ” (1988, 276). Hence, one ought to speculate upon the complicity between “speaking for” and “portraying” (1988, 277). When a small group of armed terrorists self appointed to speak on behalf of oppressed Muslims, Charlie affirmed its right to re-present, and mock, Muslims, while other parts of the (mainly white, secularist) Left now seek to defend the latter, after having dismissed Islamophobia as a valid category for many years[2]. In absolute terms, however, no representation seems more legitimate than the other, for in every circumstance, the subaltern cannot speak – that is, Muslims are prevented from speaking for themselves. Those Spivak calls “benevolent imperialists” include both the Liberal as well as the radical-Marxist western Left, whose discourse always runs the risk of falling back into essentialism (strategic or not), becoming yet another case of “epistemic violence”. “If,” for Spivak, “in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow.” (1988, 287) This was true in France, which for instance, banned the wearing of “ostensible religious signs” in public schools in 2004, and “face covering” in public spaces in 2010. Muslim women, clearly the ones targeted although the law does not explicitly say so, were hardly or not consulted at all.

It is no surprise that award winning literary author Salman Rushdie has come out in defense of Charlie Hebdo following an invitation at the University of Vermont on January 14. While being “postcolonial” in that he is from a postcolonial culture (India), Rushdie has always been a staunch advocate of upsetting the status quo, and known for challenging Islam in particular. Rushdie was also accused of blasphemy and of abusing freedom of speech with the publication of The Satanic Verses (1988), and was forced to live under the menace of a fatwa for many years. I believe Rushdie’s privileged cosmopolitan positioning is what in part allowed him, with sufficient detachment, to “ab-use” his Indian origin as a means of describing the dangers of cultural anomie and alienation in a postcolonial, multicultural England through his two characters Chamcha and Farishta. While Rusdie survived a death sentence by Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini, others, like his Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi, were murdered. Burnings of the book took place across the globe, and, as with Charlie Hebdo, many on the Left were quick to blame Rushdie, although the latter always claimed his book had, in the end, little to do with Islam – and even less with Islamophobia. What was judged wrong with Rushdie’s novel is its non-literal (i.e., both fictive and fictitious), ambivalent (able to be interpreted in two ways) and parodic reading of Islam, the Prophet and the Quran, in-between the profane and the sacred, and through Rushdie’s use of magic realism.

Similarly, we may argue how Charlie Hebdo’s Muhammad caricatures constitute a détournement (hijacking) of the religious signifier of the Prophet onto secularized terrain, as a tangible Being part of the social superstructure and the realm of ideology, rather than/while being simultaneously, a frozen artifact of “third world difference”. For Chandra Mohanty, this is how the third world difference reads itself/is read: “religious (read not progressive), family-oriented (read traditional), legal minors (read they-are-still-not-conscious-of-their- rights), illiterate (read ignorant), domestic (read backward), and sometimes revolutionary (read their-country-is-in-a-state-of-war; they must-fight!)” (1991, 72). When in 2006, Charlie reproduced caricatures of Muhammad from a Danish far-right newspaper (one of which shows the Prophet with a bomb on his head), or when in 2011, a crying Muhammad is portrayed saying “it’s hard to be loved by morons”, along with the heading, “swamped by integrists”, what in effect takes place is an act of glissement (sliding-effect) of language, in-between dire (“to say”, i.e. speech) and vouloir dire (“to mean”, i.e. intentionality). Language, as Deconstruction theorist Jacques Derrida has observed, is, from the moment we speak, always-already made “Other”/altered: “This structure of alienation without alienation, this inalienable alienation, is not only the origin of our responsibility, it also structures the peculiarity and property of language.” (Derrida 1998, 25)

The hermeneutic surrounding caricatures (from Latin caricare, ‘load, exaggerate’) reveals the fundamental undecidability of the signifying system and opens up meaning to excess, contingency, indeterminacy: to portray Muhammad is blasphemous; to portray Muhammad with a bomb suggests that all Muslims are terrorists and it is therefore racist/Islamophobic; to portray the Prophet in this way works as a means of denouncing religious extremism. This multiplicity of perspectives ultimately invalidates each of them, failing to reach consensus or unanimity – which is what a polemical, satirical newspaper like Charlie does[3]. The editors of Charlie constantly deployed their right to “err” (from Latin errare, to stray, to wander), to demystification, to laughing at as well as (sometimes) laughing with. Charlie Hebdo has kept reaffirming its right to be wrong, pace a section of the Left that has long disavowed the newspaper, pace terrorist threats, pace political correctness. In the last Charlie cover following the attacks, a crying Muhammad is seen with a “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie) placard around his neck saying “tout est pardonné” (all is forgiven) – yet again a highly ambiguous message that resists interpellation.

Charlie Hebdo’s self-proclaimed laïcard (secularist) militancy was itself sometimes dogmatic, if not problematic in a country where secularism has become the trumpeted cause of far-right organizations such as Riposte Laïque or of the French State’s attempt at suppressing culturo-religious difference. Again, I do not wish to refute any of the following leftist critiques of secularism: that the French Republican version of laïcité (i.e, the separation of Church and State in all matters of public affairs) is, in practice, being selectively applied; that the State is partial to Catholics, with direct State financing of private Catholic schools for instance; that secularism ought to exclusively apply to State representatives (Law of 1905), rather than to its (recalcitrant Muslim) citizens as well, as is now the case since 2004 and the ban of the Muslim headscarf (the hijab, or foulard in French) in public schools, or the Burqa ban in public spaces. But I believe Charlie – perhaps against its own will – nonetheless helped “enable…a sense of history and of human production, along with a healthy skepticism about the various idols venerated by culture” (Said 1983, 290). Said’s understanding of the secular speaks against over-simplification of secularism as inherently progressive, and religion as backward, or vice versa. As the latter wrote in The Text, The World, and the Critic,

One scholar understands the religion in secular terms but misses what in Islam still gives its adherents genuine nourishment. The other sees it in religious terms but largely ignores the secular differences that exist within the variegated Islamic world. (276)

This double, non-Manichean articulation must be sustained for Arab-Muslim subalternity to one day be able to represent itself, in France, but also elsewhere in Europe, where the main threat that we now face is not “Islam”, but fascism. Unless the Left starts mobilizing to put an end to the many “Wars on Error” of this world, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or Mali, where French neo-imperialism has had a heavy responsibility in the spreading of confessional wars and Islamist fundamentalism, Kurtz’s famous exclamation in the face of the monstrosities of the Belgian colonial Congo in Joseph Conrad’s classic (post)colonial novel Heart of Darkness (“The horror! The horror!”) will keep piercing through the historical chamber of yet another neocolonial apostrophe: “The terror! The terror!” Terror, as that which is produced by fear of the unseen/unknown (as opposed to the graphic horror of a dead corpse), may strike anywhere and at any time, in turn rendering counter-terror measures meaningless – though not harmless. The imposition in schools of a one-minute silence in memory of the victims of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, along with the criminalizing of any dissenting voice, will only serve to further repress citizens’ liberties – particularly those whose voice is already muzzled – and curtail their right to civil disobedience.

To conclude, let me quote Jacques Derrida, who in his “terror speech” following September 11, reminds us of what makes European historical contribution unique. Far from being Eurocentric, Derrida, if only because of his Jewish Algerian background, was well aware that the secularist ideals of the Enlightenment are built upon the systematic, enduring dispossession of the colonized. An impossible double bind, as Spivak would have it, which the revolutionary Left would be wrong to forsake on the pretense that such a problematic exclusively belongs to the Liberal heritage, like the abstract of “freedom of speech”:

In the long and patient deconstruction required for the transformation to come, the experience Europe inaugurated at the time of the Enlightenment (Lumières, Aufklärung, Illuminismo) in the relationship between the political and the theological or, rather, the religious, though still uneven, unfulfilled, relative, and complex, will have left in European political space absolutely original marks with regard to religious doctrine (notice I’m not saying with regard to religion or faith but with regard to the authority of religious doctrine over the political). Such marks can be found neither in the Arab world nor in the Muslim world, nor in the Far East, nor even, and here’s the most sensitive point, in American democracy, in what in fact governs not the principles but the predominant reality of American political culture.

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En una actividad de presentación de un proyecto comunitario en el municipio costero de Loíza para “dar voz” a los jóvenes de comunidades marginadas mediante talleres de escritura creativa, la discusión se abrió al público y de inmediato giró hacia la falta de movimientos organizados, sostenidos de oposición política en el Puerto Rico. El público, en su mayoría proveniente de los sectores más radicales dentro y fuera de la universidad, de activistas comunitarios y gente solidaria en general, se debatió por unos veinte minutos acerca de las dificultades para aunar fuerzas, motivar a personas, establecer alianzas, pasar del ciber-activismo al trabajo de base y de pensar más allá de la convocatoria para una marcha o un piquete aislado. Varios de los y las presentes intervinieron para traer a memoria lo acontecido durante la lucha contra la Marina de Guerra Norteamericana en Vieques quince años atrás, durante la más reciente huelga universitaria 2010-2011 y durante la exitosa campaña ciudadana en defensa del derecho constitucional a la fianza en el 2012. Esto con el propósito de identificar los factores que posibilitaron movilizaciones considerables de la población en el pasado reciente, y de auscultar las razones por las que estos aparentarían estar ausentes ahora. A estos fines, las y los presentes argumentaron cómo en esas instancias o bien se logró fraguar un imaginario compartido de la oposición, o se había realizado un trabajo de bases extenso, o simplemente existía un consenso acerca del “mal” a derrotar. La conversación fue algo frustrante y en extremo aburrida.

Antes de eso hubo poesía. Antes de la poesía, el fundador del proyecto comunitario habló extensamente acerca de la desinformación que existe en torno a la historia de las comunidades más pobres en el País (por qué mayúsculas?). Habló más extensamente aún acerca de sus viajes y su conocimiento en temas de pobreza, activismo y apoderamiento comunitario. Habló de su poesía y recitó un poema. En fin, de lo menos que habló fue del proyecto. Acerca de éste, lo único que recuerdo al presentador decir es que sería demasiado estúpido e irresponsable compartir la poesía de la poeta americana Emily Dickinson con los jóvenes de una comunidad negra, costera y pobre en el caribe. Semejantemente, y en relación a la discusión que se suscitó entre el público en torno al actual panorama de la oposición política en Puerto Rico, parecería ser que existe un consenso acerca de lo estúpido e irresponsable que sería imaginarnos un panorama político actual atiborrado de diversos actos de oposición que pasan desapercibidos por la mayoría. Esto porque los mismos no acontecen en los escenarios tradicionales para la protesta en el País o porque los reclamos no son articulados de formas fácilmente comprensibles por el público, o porque son escenificados por sujetos que no son reconocidos como actores políticos. En este ensayo, intereso abrir paso a la estupidez e irresponsabilidad del pensamiento en torno a la oposición política en Puerto Rico. Es decir, pecaré de iluso, de inevitablemente optimista.

“Hope is the thing with feathers”[1]. Así comienza un poema de Dickinson—tan comprensible y contundente, se me ocurre, en su natal Amherst, Massachusetts como en el municipio costero de Loíza. Sin embargo, el presentador de la actividad antes descrita insistió en que la poesía de Dickinson no tendría resonancia alguna entre los jóvenes de la comunidad que él buscaba impactar. Esto porque no compartían los mismos referentes socio-culturales. Lo que resulta a lo menos paradójico cuando consideramos que el mar ocupa un lugar prominente en el imaginario poético de Dickinson, y los jóvenes que el presentador se disponía a cautivar viven marginados por razones de raza y clase social frente al mar. Esta paradoja, se me ocurre, hace evidente un imperativo de la crítica y la creación literaria: Para abordar poesía es necesario desprenderse de presunciones con respecto a cuáles podrían ser los y las interlocutoras de un texto. Descartar a una posible audiencia para un poema significa abandonar a priori un universo inesperado de interpretaciones en torno a su forma y contenido. Esto es grave, puesto que estas interpretaciones, en muchos casos, podrían trascender los contornos discursivos del ámbito poético para asentarse en los imaginarios propios de la acción política, que a su vez dan forma e inciden directamente en el devenir de una comunidad. Dice Zizek: “Words are never only words’; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do”.[2] Añade Rancière: “If words serve to blur things, it is because the conflict over words is inseparable from the battle over things”.[3] De ahí que en materia de análisis literario, como de teoría y práctica política, resulte imperioso precisar el significado de los términos con que armamos el imaginario solitario y singular de un poema, al igual que el imaginario colectivo, dinámico de una comunidad.

Ahora bien, si se nos permitiera hurgar en y jugar con las palabras de la poeta, y al hacerlo, tomar un atajo discursivo de una discusión sobre poesía a una sobre política, podríamos decir que “protesta es cualquier cosa con esperanza”. No importa si el acto en cuestión no comparte las mismas señas y signos de las manifestaciones políticas estereotípicas. O que éste no haya sido realizado por manifestantes con una postura bien definida en cuanto a sus reclamos, o que estos incluso carezcan de la conciencia de que han incidido en el espacio público con el fin de oponerse políticamente. De acuerdo al filósofo puertorriqueño Bernat Tort, “lo político o lo ético en el arte o en el activismo no se define según la intención del artista o autor de los actos, sino por las reacciones del público, por el contexto social en que se instaura la pieza o el gesto; son los espectadores quienes le dan su sentido”.[4] Siguiendo la pista de Tort, podríamos decir que actualmente en Puerto Rico, las manifestaciones de oposición política protagonizadas por sindicatos y partidos sufren de una deficiencia de sentido en tanto y en cuanto, las mismas siguen un libreto harto conocido por el público, que las asume con relativa naturalidad. La marcha, el piquete, el cese momentáneo de labores por los y las empleadas de alguna agencia gubernamental, por ejemplo, con camisas y pancartas y consignas coreadas son presenciadas por la multiplicidad de espectadores con la certeza de que nada remotamente significativo ocurrirá. Esto porque dicho tipo de manifestación se ha vuelto parte de nuestra cotidianidad compartida y si bien podría incomodar al interrumpir el flujo regular del tráfico momentáneamente o las funciones gubernamentales durante un día normal de trabajo, lo cierto es que su escenificación regular, invariable, no comunica una amenaza real al gobierno de causar una interrupción mayor a su funcionamiento. De hecho, la repetición de las mismas, sin mayores disturbios a lo largo del tiempo, podría incluso dar fe de la estabilidad y recrudecimiento del orden imperante. Podríamos decir, entonces, que las protestas tradicionales en Puerto Rico han dejado de ser, que han devenido en otra cosa, en tanto carecen de esperanza.

A propósito de la desesperanza, el historiador puertorriqueño Carlos Pabón, en su reciente libro Polémicas: Política, Intelectuales, Violencia, señala la necesidad entre las y los intelectuales críticos de desarrollar y lanzar nuevos conceptos para armar un nuevo imaginario político que nos permita interpretar lo que nos acontece a nivel local y global. Particularmente, y ante los diversos eventos de oposición política que se han desatado alrededor del mundo, Pabón hace hincapié en la responsabilidad del intelectual de hacer las preguntas precisas—“¿resultarán estos movimientos en transformaciones radicales o se disiparán sin lograrlo?”[5]— antes de dejarse llevar por el entusiasmo y optimismo espurio que determinados levantamientos podrían provocar. Se me ocurre pues que tanto en el campo de la acción política como en el ámbito intelectual-académico actual se percibe una aparente aversión hacia esa cosa con plumas que Dickinson llama esperanza y que propongo, es un elemento esencialismo tanto para aquellos que inciden en el espacio público a reclamarle al estado de manera informal, como para aquellos espectadores críticos, que interesamos desarrollar un marco teórico apropiado para interpretar el quehacer de los y las manifestantes. Sobre todo cuando el quehacer del sujeto que protesta resulta en extremo alocado o desagradable o errático o caprichoso y el mismo toma lugar en el sitio menos adecuado, en el momento menos indicado; lo que bien podría denotar demasiada estupidez y/o irresponsabilidad de parte del actor como para catalogar su gesta como una manifestación clara de oposición política. Aquí seguimos a Rancière cuando propone:

“Politics, then, has no proper place nor any natural subjects. A demonstration is political not because it occurs in a particular place and bears upon a particular object but rather because its form is that of a clash between two partitions of the sensible. A political subject is not a group of interests or of ideas, but the operator of a particular dispositive of subjectivation and litigation through which politics comes into existence. A political demonstration is therefore always of the moment and its subjects are always precarious.”[6]

En lo que sigue posaré la mirada sobre tres actos precarios de protesta provenientes de nuestra contemporaneidad en Puerto Rico, marcadamente distintos a las protestas tradicionales y protagonizados por sujetos disímiles a aquellos que típicamente las escenifican, con el fin de, como espectador, aquilatar su contenido político. Cada uno de estos eventos recibió cobertura mediática local—dos de ellos de hecho fueron tema de conversación, parodia y debate durante varias semanas y meses—sin embargo, ninguno fue abordado por los medios o por la crítica como actos bona fide de protesta ciudadana ni mucho menos reclamados por grupos de oposición. Esto, argumentaré, se debe en gran medida al perfil demográfico de los sujetos envueltos: su raza, género y/o posición social; como también al carácter y contenido de sus reclamos. Sobre este particular adelanto una teoría de forma alocada e irresponsable: las protestas sólo son esperanzadoras cuando sus reclamos resultan incomprensibles y por tanto imposibles de atender sin transformar el entramado de entendidos sociales en una comunidad. Veamos.

ii.

SENOR GOBERNADOR LO PEOR K A ECHO ES JO… KON EL DINERODEL PUEBLO NO SIGA ASIENDO BRUTALIDADES K LE PUEDE KOSTAR LA VIDA”; “USTED ANDA EN UN 300C Y YO EN… BIEN KA… NO SIGNIFIK K NO SEA APRUEBA DE BALA NOSEA PUREKO SAKO D AKI PA METER AKA”; “Manana marcha a la 1 pm… Mi reintegro o SEKUESTRO AL K… GIBERNADOR Y K VENGA KIEN KIERA AREGLARME POR LO DICHO SE VA AMORIR ATT YO”. [7]

En diciembre 2013 el autor de este tweet—un joven padre— fue sentenciado a seis meses y medio de cárcel por un juez de la corte federal de los Estados Unidos, distrito de Puerto Rico, quien aprovechó la ocasión para aconsejarlo y advertirle de las consecuencias del mal manejo de su temperamento. El texto del tweet, apenas comprensible, fue interpretado por las autoridades que diligenciaron el arresto y por el juez que lo sentenció, como una amenaza de muerte al gobernador. Basta con decir que ningún grupo, organización o partido político se expresó en solidaridad con el convicto, ni mucho menos acogió el contenido del mensaje como propio. Esto, supongo, porque ningún grupo de oposición interesaba quedar en récord apoyando la amenaza de secuestro y muerte del gobernador. Adicionalmente, no hay nada en el tweet que remita a un conflicto eminentemente político entre el autor y el primer mandatario. De hecho, el objeto principal de la disputa parecería ser el tipo de carro que ostenta el gobernador. O más bien el hecho de que el emisor, suponemos, no tiene uno comparable o que simplemente no tiene vehículo propio. Es decir, se trata de un asunto de mera envidia, producto seguramente del consumerismo rampante que por décadas ha arremetido contra la fibra moral de nuestra ciudadanía; de esa pulsión que sienten miles de individuos por tener más, haciendo menos. O, lo que es peor, tomando en cuenta el lenguaje empleado, se trata de la pulsión de tener más, a toda costa, no importa a quienes se les haga daño.

Esta lectura, se me ocurre, resultaría ser la más lógica y quizás hasta más acertada. Partamos, sin embargo, desde la estupidez e irresponsabilidad del pensamiento y digamos, en cambio, que se trata de una diferencia de estatus social y/o poderío económico que el emisor interesaba resaltar—sumada a un aparente disgusto con el uso del fondos públicos— lo que lo motivan a comunicar su frustración en las redes sociales. El problema, claro, es que uno no tiene derecho a desahogarse de esa manera—las amenazas de secuestro y muerte no son expresiones protegidas constitucionalmente. No obstante, ante el desenlace de esta historia, y visto desde una perspectiva de criminología crítica, uno bien podría argumentar que seis meses y medio de cárcel por un tweet resultan en extremo punitivo para lo que a todas luces no fue más que un desafortunado desahogo producto de un aparente desasosiego con el lugar que el emisor ocupa en el mundo en comparación con aquel ocupado por nuestro gobernador. Pero, qué tal si en vez de hacer una apología al autor del tweet, consideramos las posibilidades de acoger su reclamo y solidarizarnos con su expresión.[8] Para ello habría que, en primer lugar, tomar conciencia de la severa desigualdad social y económica que existe en Puerto Rico.[9] Luego habría que potenciar otra lectura de lo acontecido en corte. ¿Qué tal si en lugar de una sanción penal impuesta sobre el autor de una expresión que cumple los requisitos del delito de amenaza, se haya castigado al emisor por abrir un horizonte de acción política imprevisto e impermisible para el Estado ante la severa desigualdad social y económica en la Isla? Es decir, ¿acaso el carácter ofensivo del tweet no radicará en la aparente negativa del emisor a acoger y asumir la desigualdad como una realidad social a la cual cada individuo se debe atener? Visto de esta forma, el texto es punible en tanto amenaza con el desarrollo de un subjetividad política que contempla acciones violentas, descabelladas, como respuesta a la inequidad en nuestra sociedad. Su tweet entonces es una invitación al público a considerar si en efecto la brecha entre ricos y pobres en el País es lo suficientemente grave como para que un individuo cualquiera tome las armas y cometa una locura. Más importante aún, el tweet—y la posible incomodidad que el mismo podría causar de tomarlo en serio (tal como hizo el juez)— es una invitación a sopesar la diferencia entre actos particulares de violencia a manos de sujetos individuales y la violencia sistémica del Estado. Sobre este particular, Zizek arguye:

“One should learn to step back, to disentangle oneself from the fascinating lure of this directly visible ‘subjective’violence—violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent. We need to perceive the contours of the background which generates such outbursts. A step back enables us to identify a violence that sustains our very efforts to fight violence and to promote tolerance: the ‘objective’violence inscribed into the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems. The catch is that subjective and objective violence cannot be perceived from the same standpoint: subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a non-violent zero-level of ‘civility’. It is seen as a perturbation of the normal, peaceful state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent in this ‘normal’ state of things.”[10]

Desde Zizek, entonces, argumentaría que resulta útil y necesario visualizar al emisor condenado a cárcel federal como un prisionero político dentro del marco de un orden político y social en Puerto Rico que censura y castiga a todo aquel que intente abordar la desigualdad social como un problema público y cuya solución requiere cambios radicales al orden imperante. De ahí que el gobernador, recientemente sentenciara: “Puerto Rico está para propuestas. Y no para protestas.”[11] Claro, procede preguntar: ¿acaso este tweet cuyo registro discursivo nos remite al bajo mundo y a los protagonistas de la violencia callejera constituye una protesta? ¿Podríamos argumentar de forma seria que ha quedado cifrado en el texto algún reclamo al poder ejecutivo producto de una frustración válida, reconocible del emisor? ¿Es el tweet indicativo de algo más allá de la crisis de valores y del fin trágico que le espera a miles de nuestros jóvenes ligados a o inspirados por el mundo criminal que continúa cobrando sus vidas a niveles alarmantes? Sobre este particular, Carlos Pabón propone:

“El asesinato de miles de jóvenes —sobre 15,000— constituye una guerra social (in)visible, que opera como una “limpieza social” de sectores socialmente excluidos o “desechables” en el país. Se trata de una suerte de un nuevo tipo de conflicto social, de una suerte de auto-purga social, que produce cadáveres indiferenciados, cuerpos de personas cuyos nombres no conocemos o recordamos, cuerpos de una población excedente que se asume con demasiada frecuencia como una excrecencia social”.[12]

Para Pabón, la violencia ligada el narcotráfico debe ser abordada como un problema político, no como un mero issue de seguridad—abordaje que, según él, ha acrecentado los niveles de exclusión y desigualdad en Puerto Rico a través de los ámbitos de la educación, el trabajo, la salud, y la vivienda, entre otros. Ante este panorama, yo leo el tweet una y otra vez y siento que leo las palabras de un sujeto que tiene más probabilidades de matar y/o morir violentamente por una cuestión de drogas, que de irrumpir en el espacio público y obtener una audiencia. Leo sus palabras una y otra vez, y luego de intentar despacharlas como un simple desahogo, intento abordarlas con seriedad y urgencia, como una expresión dirigida, consciente, emitida desde algún rincón del bajo mundo a nuestro centro de gobierno. Y me perturba, por supuesto, la idea de que la violencia callejera continúe desbordándose de sus límites. Pero, siguiendo a Pabón, esa preocupación, sin más, me haría cómplice de lo que en esencia es una política pública dirigida hacia la invisibilización y desaparición de un sector—joven, varón, predominantemente negro y pobre—de nuestra población. Quien habla entonces es un sujeto atravesado por efectos de raza, clase y género que lo marcan como sujeto y objeto de una violencia que el estado permite en tanto no está dispuesto a abordarla como un resultado directo del sistema social. Lo cierto es que durante las últimas tres décadas en Puerto Rico se ha atendido el problema de violencia desde la perspectiva exclusiva de la seguridad y la privatización. Quienes cuentan con los recursos suficientes viven en urbanizaciones y complejos de vivienda con control de acceso, matriculan a sus hijos en colegios privados, equipan sus residencia con sistemas se seguridad y vigilancia, frecuentan los costosos e inaccesibles centros de comercio cada vez más lejos de centros urbanos. Quienes no cuentan con esos recursos, quedan sujetos al patrullaje policial intenso en sus barriadas y residenciales públicos, a la ineficiencia del sistema de educación pública y a la creciente ola de encarcelamiento en un estado cada vez más punitivo.

Entonces vuelvo a leer, y me propongo acoger la expresión como una protesta política y pregunto ¿cómo exactamente debo esperar que estos jóvenes articulen sus reclamos, sino a través de los códigos discursivos que manejan en su cotidianidad, con toda su crudeza? Exigirle otro registro discursivo es insistir en su invisibilidad. Visto así, por supuesto que el tweet debe ofender, porque la violencia objetiva a la que apunta es en extremo ofensiva. Desde Pabón, quien habla aquí no supone tener voz; supone morir o caer preso antes de los treinta años. Quien habla no tiene representantes autorizados, ni tiene audiencia. O más bien, su única audiencia fue en corte abierta. Y, sabemos, la corte es uno de los lugares más riesgosos desde donde articular una protesta.

iii. [13]

El 6 de enero del 2013, dentro del marco de la Tradicional Fiesta del Día de Reyes, ofrecida por el gobernador y la primera dama, una joven madre fue entrevistada para la televisión. La mujer, a preguntas de la reportera, se mostró inconforme con la actividad, en particular con el obsequio que recibió su hija—una bola de baloncesto. Se refirió a la misma como un “trapo de bola”[14] y lamentó haber traído a la menor, quien estaba enferma. La entrevista que culminaba un reportaje especial de la estación, donde se recogían las expresiones de agradecimiento y las apreciaciones positivas de varios de los asistentes, obtuvo gran difusión en las redes sociales. Analistas políticos, académicos y funcionarios públicos comentaron la intervención de la mujer, calificándola como lamentable, vergonzosa. Ella, a su vez, fue tildada de malagradecida y mala madre—culpable de haber llevado a su hija enferma a buscar un regalo gratis, y culpable también de su aparente incapacidad para inculcar en la pequeña los valores correctos. De hecho, por espacio de meses, la mujer fue la “poster child” de lo que para muchos resulta ser hoy el principal problema social en la isla: la dependencia de ayudas gubernamentales.  Si nos fuéramos a dejar llevar por la prensa y por los comentaristas en los sitios de noticias web, la crisis social y económica que enfrenta el país se debe en gran medida a una población excedente que vive de dádivas y del trabajo y esfuerzo de los demás; que no aporta nada al país, en tiempos en que el país necesita de las aportaciones y el trabajo de todos y todas para salir de la crisis. De ahí que los comentarios de la mujer fueran recibidos como desafortunadas y despreciables quejas de la boca de una “buscona”. No obstante, otra lectura es posible. Pero antes es necesario volver atrás.

La Tradicional Fiesta de Reyes ofrecida por el gobernador y la primera dama se distingue principalmente por la entrega de regalos. Desde el amanecer, familias enteras esperan en fila largas horas para que sus hijos e hijas obtengan algún obsequio de manos del gobernador y su equipo de trabajo. En el pasado, esta actividad ha servido como una manera en extremo efectiva para ganar el favor del electorado mediante la entrega de juguetes electrónicos y computadoras, por ejemplo. También ha sido escenario de discordias, principalmente debido al largo rato que las personas han tenido que esperar, las condiciones bajo las cuales permanecen en espera, y/o por las cantidades insuficientes de los regalos prometidos. Para algunos, la actividad es representativa de una cultura de mantengo gubernamental, mediante la cual el estado satisface una vez más las necesidades y caprichos de personas—provenientes de los sectores más desaventajados—que no hacen nada por ellas mismas ni por otras. Ante esta situación, el gobernador de turno había anunciado que el propósito principal de su celebración del Día de Reyes sería la unión familiar, el fomento de valores morales y el desarrollo integral de nuestros niños. De ahí que los juguetes a ser obsequiados serían exclusivamente de índole educativo y/o deportivo, y de bajo costo. Adicionalmente, la entrega de regalos cobraría la forma de un intercambio: los niños asistentes tendrían que hacer un dibujo de los reyes para obtener su obsequio. Esto con el propósito de fomentar en ellos una ética de trabajo y una cultura del mérito. No es sorpresa, entonces, que la reacción de la joven madre, desde la perspectiva de nuestros funcionarios públicos y otros, pusiera en evidencia la urgente necesidad de educar e inculcar valores entre nuestras clases más bajas. Su queja pues terminó dándole la razón al gobernador, en tanto las expresiones de la mujer ante las cámaras simplemente sacaron a relucir la deficiencia de integridad y la falta de fibra moral que caracterizaban su vida domestica privada. De esta forma, el trapo de bola se convirtió en la metáfora para una cotidianidad al garete, vivida malamente en miles de hogares a lo largo y ancho de la Isla. Es decir, la crítica lanzada por la mujer a la actividad fue redirigida, transformada al momento mismo de su enunciación en una alegación de culpabilidad. No era un trapo de bola, sino un trapo de madre con un trapo de vida, ofreciéndole a su hija un trapo de crianza, y qué rayos se cree el trapo de mujer esa para venir ahora y quejarse. De esta forma su expresión se convirtió en la razón principalísima para no reconocerle derecho alguno a hablar.

Dice Rancière: “If there is someone you do not wish to recognize as a political being, you begin by not seeing him as the bearer of signs of politicity, by not understanding what he says, by not hearing what issues from his mouth as discourse.”[15] En este caso, esperar en fila para obtener un regalo de navidad—que suponía ella comprar—con su hija enferma—que suponía ella cuidar— alegadamente la desautorizó como actor político que interesaba manifestar su oposición al gobierno a raíz de su participación en dicha actividad. Asumir esto como correcto implicaría que sólo aquellos y aquellas que no sufren de la necesidad económica necesaria para estar ahí podían articular su disgusto, desde la comodidad del afuera. Es decir, que protestar—ser reconocido como un actor político—también sería un privilegio en Puerto Rico. Ciertamente no estoy de acuerdo con esa visión y por tanto, propongo considerar las expresiones de la mujer como lo que Zizek llama  “la condensación metafórica de una demanda”[16] donde el trapo de bola representa no la falta de valores de la hablante, sino un emplazamiento al gobierno por el trato  condescendiente que le ofrece a los sectores más desaventajados de la población. Por hacer de una fiesta navideña una lección de moralidad dirigida a un grupo de personas que quizá no tienen otro remedio que asistir a ella, en tanto y en cuanto interesan obtener un juguete para sus niños. Y que evidentemente al tomar la palabra no pueden más que fingir agradecimiento por la lección brindada. En ese sentido, la Fiesta de Reyes resultó en una perfecta lección en estrategias de coerción.

Ante este escenario, nuestra responsabilidad como espectadores críticos consiste en acoger las expresiones de la mujer según estaban intencionadas. Esto es, como una crítica al gobierno. Y jugar creativamente, críticamente con la metáfora empleada por ella en toda su especificidad. Esto requiere, primero, situar a la joven madre dentro un contexto socio-político donde la vida de mujeres está en riesgo. Actualmente en Puerto Rico, las mujeres representan una mayoría de la población bajo niveles de pobreza. Enfrentan niveles alarmantes de violencia de género, acoso y agresión sexual. Adicionalmente, en el imaginario colectivo, una de las razones principales por la difícil situación económica y social que enfrenta el país es la supuesta crisis de la mujer puertorriqueña (en singular) que no sabe ni controlar su sexualidad, ni criar correctamente a sus niños, en hogares marcados por la supuesta ausencia del padre. A esto se le añade una renuencia tanto del poder ejecutivo como del judicial de promover la equidad entre hombres y mujeres mediante decisiones de política pública y de política jurídica con perspectiva de género. Tomando esto en consideración, esta joven madre hablaba  (“se quejaba”) desde la vulnerabilidad extrema de una mujer que ante todo, era culpable de haber tomado las decisiones (malas todas) que la llevaron a hacer esa fila en ese día. Y si estaba ahí era porque merecía recibir cualquier cosa que el gobernador estuviera dispuesto a dar. De hecho, ni eso.

¿Se trataba pues de un trapo de bola? Diría que depende de la bola. Y de qué se puede jugar con ella. Y cuántos son. Y si hace falta guante o raqueta o líneas en la tierra o mallas en los canastos o un set de palos. Depende de cómo se coge y a dónde se tira. Depende de si tienes quién te enseñe a jugar. O si tienes donde jugar cerca y más o menos seguro. Depende de la bola. De si basta con tirarla contra la pared. De si puedes o no pasar horas viéndola picar y rodar. De si tienes quién te mire y te practique y la pique y la ruede contigo, más rápido, con mayor gracia y dominio. Depende de si la puedes agarrar con una mano o con dos. Si necesitas membresía a un club para jugar o si el punto se trasladó a la cancha y los canastos hasta nuevo aviso permanecerán cerrados. Depende de quién te la tire y cómo y para qué. De si la bola supone ser un pasatiempo en tu vida o tu vida. Depende de la bola. Y si un poco la bola, vista de cierta forma, te recuerda al globo terráqueo y sientes que sujetarla es sujetar el mundo con una mano o con dos. Depende de si en el salón hay suficientes globos del mundo para darle vuelta y vuelta y pensar el mundo tan accesible como salir y agarrar un balón. Depende de con qué manos. Depende de si sabes de las manos de los grandes que alguna vez sujetaron esa misma bola y la lanzaron o la encestaron o la sacaron del parque. De cómo llegaron a darle la vuelta al mundo con la bola debajo del brazo. Depende de si tuviste alguien que tuvo el tiempo y el amor y el conocimiento para hacerte las historias de los grandes y te hizo sentir que tú con la bola debajo del brazo eras lo más grande en el mundo. Depende de la bola y de las circunstancias en que llega a tus manos. De manos de quién por ejemplo. En ocasión de qué por ejemplo. Siendo tú quién ante los ojos del mundo. Siendo el mundo qué cosa exactamente en los ojos de quien te obsequia la bola. Depende de lo que la bola significa como regalo para un nene como tú en el mundo. Depende de qué representa la bola como regalo en tus manos. De cuánto vale. De si la bola vale más que tú.

iv.

Y tú eres una ignorante, lee un maldito periódico. ¿Quiénes pagan la reforma de la salud de este país? Yo con mis taxes. ¿Tú pagas taxes? Ah, pues, nosotros somos los que pagamos la reforma…“¡Maldita sea! Yo me ‘escocoto’ en el Recinto de Ciencias Médicas para venir aquí a bregar con ustedes…Por eso es que este país es una porquería. Coge un maldito libro ignorante.[17]

Estas expresiones le pertenecen a una doctora recién separada de sus funciones en el Hospital Regional de Bayamón. Las mismas salieron a la luz pública luego de que una paciente grabara con su teléfono celular una diatriba de la galena contra un grupo de pacientes en la sala de espera del hospital, ocurrido en agosto de este año. El vídeo, como el del trapo de bola, ha sido diseminado y comentado hasta la saciedad por individuos particulares, noticieros y funcionarios de gobierno. La doctora quien fue sancionada de inmediato por la Secretaria de Salud, debido a lo que ésta determinó fue un trato discriminatorio hacia los y las pacientes que suponía atender, ha gozado, no obstante, del apoyo de amplios segmentos de la población que aparentan identificarse con ella. Para muchos, la galena—una mujer blanca, miembro de ese grupo altamente cotizado de puertorriqueños y puertorriqueñas profesionales que actualmente migran del país en grandes números—simplemente expresó una frustración colectiva hacia esa masa vaga, indecente y problemática del país, que no sabe apreciar la ayuda y el servicio que personas como ella le brindan. Lo que dijo la doctora, entonces, lejos de ser percibido como discriminatorio o reprochable, fue una dosis de “medicina amarga” tanto para sus interlocutores en la sala de espera como para el gobierno, que mediante dádivas fomenta y premia la indecencia y dependencia extrema de estos sectores.

Esta identificación con la doctora y el apoyo demostrado por medio de foros en línea, sondeos y entrevistas para radio y televisión, tiene su contraparte en el odio vertido no sólo hacia las pacientes con quien la doctora discutió (quienes no aparecen en el vídeo), sino que hacia la mujer que grabó y difundió el mismo. Ésta, previo a que fuera identificada por la prensa y concediera entrevistas para la televisión, ya había sido descrita como una mujer negra, pobre y “cafre”, quien seguro también estaba ahí como beneficiara del plan médico que ofrece el estado y que según la doctora, ella ayuda a costear mediante el pago de impuestos. De ahí que, para muchos, lo verdaderamente ofensivo y lesivo a los derechos de las personas envueltas fuera el acto de grabar, ya que sirvió para perjudicar a una mujer profesional y “fajona” que tuvo un mal día y dijo la verdad de forma cruda ciertamente y quizás hasta lamentable; pero no por ello, dejaba de ser verdad.

De esta forma, entiendo, se perdió de vista el gesto políticamente esperanzador de la mujer que grabó. Esto es, delatar una manifestación clara de los patrones de prejuicio, discriminación y exclusión por razón de raza y clase social que activamente empobrecen la vida de miles de personas en el País. Este acto transgresor, sin embargo, no fue acogido por ningún grupo u organización política. La autora del mismo no obtuvo defensa contundente alguna. De hecho, todo lo contrario aconteció—los medios se limitaron a hacer públicos ciertos detalles acerca de su vida privada y su situación económica, que sirvieron para confirmar las sospechas y satisfacer los prejuicios de los y las comentaristas; quienes, a través de los distintos foros, solicitaron algún tipo de sanción penal para ella.  Esta reacción visceral, hiperbólica, multiplica el carácter políticamente radical del gesto puesto que pone en evidencia no sólo el grave problema de exclusión por raza, clase y género en Puerto Rico, sino que deja claro que el problema de la oposición política en el País no se remonta a una falta de activismo sino a una carencia crasa de un contexto de recepción e interpretación crítica progresista que recoja, desde la solidaridad, las protestas que sí toman lugar en el País. Actos que más allá de responder a una decisión particular del gobierno de turno en materia de convenios colectivos, por ejemplo, arroja luz a la desigualdad estructural y la violencia sistémica en Puerto Rico y que fuerza al público espectador a lidiar con hablantes y actores que por razón de su raza, clase y/o género no suponen tener ninguna agencia política.

Estos sujetos, entonces, cuando irrumpen en el espacio público se propasan desde el inicio—la mujer que no debió haber grabado, el hombre que no supo expresar sus frustraciones, la madre que no sabe aceptar dádivas. Son aguafiestas, un excedente incivilizado de la población cuyo único lugar en el imaginario es el de ser una carga y chivo expiatorio para la diversidad de males sociales que nos acechan. Por ende, como manifestantes, ocupan los lugares más precarios en nuestro entorno. No son estudiantes ni empleados públicos ni obreros (todas categorías que connotan un valor de producción)—son hombres que suponen morir en la calle o en prisión y las mujeres que o los crían o tienen hijos con ellos. De ahí que sus intervenciones pasen desapercibidas como protestas, sus reclamos resulten incomprensibles y reciban el reproche colectivo, el castigo o la amenaza de sanción penal como respuesta. Se trata entonces de los y las manifestantes más peligrosas en el país: aquellos actores particulares, que no teniendo otra alternativa y desde la vulnerabilidad extrema—en el sentido de que no pueden darse el lujo de no hacer la fila para un regalo, de no tomar asiento en esa sala de espera—con la más mínima acción interrumpen nuestra cotidianidad; nos aguan la fiesta ideológica, si se quiere, de pensar felizmente que la desigualdad social es un asunto personal. Lo hacen a la mala, desde la diversidad de espacios—siempre los menos indicados—sin organización ni comité ni consignas, halando por los pelos esa cosa emplumada, en forma de protesta.

The post Aguafiestas: Marginalidad y Protesta en Puerto Rico appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Por mais poderosos, articulados e sofisticados que sejam os aparatos filosóficos, epistemológicos, institucionais e teórico-ideológicos em favor  do capitalismo e do imperialismo, os sujeitos sociais e coletividades oprimidas têm sido capazes de responder com alternativas. Ainda que a modernidade ocidental hegemônica, forjada em grande medida pelo eurocentrismo e pelo etnocentrismo, tenha longo alcance através de suas “mãos” (vísiveis e invisíveis), é possível realçar, de forma paralela, variados exemplos concretos, forjados nos mais distintos contextos, que revelam o protagonismo, a rebeldia e a inventividade de subalternos que, compartilhando de outras matrizes de pensamento, conhecimento e experiência de vida, não se submeteram a (e até subverteram) o que lhes foi imposto.

Este artigo busca destacar alguns aspectos do complexo processo de “formação”[1] de um movimento que constitui um desses exemplos. O movimento katarista da Bolívia desafiou as regras pré-estabelecidas e ganhou terreno, especialmente a partir do final dos anos 1960, duas décadas antes da formalização por Krenshaw (1989) do conceito de “interseccionalidade”[2] – que descreve a opção pela relevância prática e teórica da complementaridade entre as normalmente distintas categorias de “raça” e “classe”. No bojo do enfrentamento ao sistema corrente de relações de poder marcado pela opressão aos povos originários, camponeses-indígenas[3] Aymara da região do Altiplano andino formaram uma inovadora articulação e estiveram à frente de mobilizações com fortes demandas étnico-culturais em um dos países com maior grau de exclusão social da América Latina.

O Katarismo emergiu, grosso modo, como resultado da confluência de dois processos (Hurtado, 1986): um de longo prazo, marcado pelos sucessivos atos oficiais de deslegitimação e expropriação de amplas terras coletivas e respectiva conversão das mesmas em propriedades rurais individuais privadas – que tiveram início no longo período marcado pelo colonialismo espanhol, mas continuaram durante o período republicano (a partir de 1825); e outro mais de médio e curto prazo, caracterizado pelo ambiente de alta tensão resultante do tenebroso massacre de soldados camponeses-indígenas na Guerra do Chaco (1932 a 1935), seguido das políticas públicas de incorporação e cooptação adotadas pelo bloco em torno do Movimento Nacionalista Revolucionário (MNR) que, com a ajuda dos próprios camponeses-indígenas empenhados na extinção do pongueaje econômico[4], deslocou a elite extrativista e mais conservadora que dava corpo à chamada rosca[5] e assumiu o comando do Estado Boliviano após a Revolução de 1952.

Uma das medidas estruturais que fizeram parte da agenda inicial do governo revolucionário[6] foi justamente a reforma agrária (no sentido de garantir legalmente as posses de terras a comunidades “tradicionais”, especialmente em áreas andinas), associada à aplicação, a partir dos gabinetes da República, de um modelo de organização das comunidades rurais com base nos sindicatos agrários. À medida que cumpria, ao menos parcialmente, a promessa de evitar a continuidade da desterritorialização dos povos e nações indígenas, a coalizão à frente do governo que se seguiu à Revolução de 1952 colocava em prática também, com a compulsória exigência da sindicalização rural, uma tentativa de enquadramento dos beneficiários aos padrões sociopolíticos da modernidade. A intenção era forçar o deslocamento de todo esse contingente, que mantinha um peso populacional enorme, para a condição de camponeses, dentro de um regime de organização classista, enfraquecendo, ainda que de forma gradual, as demandas de ordem étnico-culturais.

Em compasso com a implementação de um modelo educacional “integracionista” – ou seja, que assumia o aprendizado formal concentrado na língua espanhola, sem espaço para a diversidade social[7]-, a sindicalização rural compulsória foi pensada e implementada como mais um recurso de engenharia social dentro do paradigma moderno de dominação e incorporação de povos e culturas “inferiores” ao modelo institucional “universal” construído a partir de modelos de países do Norte.

O que os idealizadores da “inclusão por decretos” dos indígenas ao quadro institucional moderno não esperavam é que os próprios “objetos” das nomeadas políticas pudessem vir a atuar como “sujeitos” dotados de saberes, demandas e estratégias próprias. Em resposta à tentativa positivista de invisibilização e extinção de seus padrões distintos de modos de vida, camponeses-indígenas aymara do Altiplano Andino trilharam um “caminho próprio” – sem seguir necessariamente o receituário da modernização assumindo-se como camponeses nem se refugiar no essencialismo indígena de cunho “purista” que, pelo lado oposto, também acaba se acoplando perfeitamente à divisão simplista entre aqueles ocidentais e não-ocidentais.

Essa escolha “imprevista” que toma como base o diálogo – e não o divórcio – entre estruturas de cariz “moderno” (sindicato agrário) e práticas aparentemente “tradicionais” (mantendo a organização em ayllus[8] e o papel de jilaqata[9], por exemplo) permite identificar no movimento katarista insinuantes características pós-coloniais, no sentido sublinhado por Young (2003), em seu compêndio de síntese sobre o tema. Para este autor, o pós-colonialismo oferece a possibilidade de “ver as coisas diferentemente”, de acordo com uma linguagem e uma política em que os interesses dos subalternos “estão em primeiro plano, e não em último”.

Imagem 1 – Monumento em homenagem a TupacKatari na cidade de Achacachi (Bolívia) – Fonte: Maurício Hashizume (2009)

2. Antecedentes e contextualização

A análise da formação do Katarismo não pode prescindir da revisão do perfis e dos caminhos percorridos por alguns personagens que vieram a se firmar como precursores e primeiros líderes do movimento. Para este fim, destacaremos as biografias de dois artífices que lhe foram centrais: Raimundo Tambo e Jenaro Flores.

Há um consenso – presente em variadas obras que de alguma forma abordam o movimento, entre as quais as de Hurtado (1986), Albó (1987), García Linera (2008) e Tapia (2007) – de que os primórdios do Katarismo estão ligados ao surgimento de “uma corrente de opinião entre jovens aymaras residentes em La Paz que empreenderam a revalorização de sua cultura” (Hurtado, 1986: 11). Esses jovens – quase todos vindos de áreas rurais do interior da Bolívia – encontraram nas reivindicações étnico-culturais, ainda durante a década de 1950, não só uma forma de nutrir a auto-estima para enfrentar o intenso racismo nas áreas urbanas (ou seja, como um mecanismo de defesa em território hostil), mas também de dar visibilidade às suas intenções de atuar e interferir como sujeitos políticos na definição dos rumos do país. (ou seja, como mecanismo de ataque, ainda no bojo da “abertura”, especialmente com a reforma agrária nas terras altas e nos vales, proporcionada pela Revolução de 1952).

Entre os jovens indígenas que despontaram no interior desta articulação na área urbana, despontaram nomes como Raimundo Tambo e Constantino Lima. De acordo com este último, o grupo realizava reuniões clandestinas em lojas de comerciantes simpatizantes e decidiu fundar a primeira entidade política de inspiração na cultura indígena (Hashizume, 2010). Em 5 de novembro de 1960, 21 índios se reuniram na capital boliviana para formar o Partido Autóctone Nacional (PAN), que pode ser considerada como a primeira agremiação política a abraçar a ideologia indianista. O PAN defendia, grosso modo, a autonomia dos povos indígenas por meio do resgate integral da civilização pré-colombiana e a extinção da organização social com base no Estado-nação, copiada do modelo europeu. Tambo e Lima faziam parte do rol dos 21 que estiveram presentes no que pode ser considerado um marco do Indianismo[10]. Em 1962, os militantes do PAN recebem o reforço decisivo do intelectual Fausto Reinaga, que veio a consolidar obras que se tornaram referência indianistas.

Com Reinaga, o PAN se converte primeiro em Partido dos Índios do Qollasuyo  (PIQ) e, logo depois, em Partido dos Índios Aymara Quechua (PIAQ). Fundado em 15 de novembro de 1962, no mesmo dia e mês da morte do mártir indígena Tupac Katari[11] no final do século XVIII (1781), em Peñas (Departamento de La Paz), local no qual fora esquartejado em praça pública. O período que se seguiu à criação do PIAQ foi marcado pela crise de governança enfrentada pelo comando político do MNR. Essa situação de instabilidade culminou, em 1964, com o golpe militar do astuto general René Barrientos, um dos articuladores do que veio a se chamar de Pacto Militar-Camponês, que teve grande relevância no relaxamento temporário de tensões entre os setores descontentes do campesinato-indígena e o governo central.

Dois anos após o golpe, em 1966, o PIAQ se converteu no Partido Índio de Bolívia (PIB). Mesmo sob os auspícios das perseguições da ditadura militar, Reinaga é nomeado para presidir o PIB, junto com uma nova direção, na qual Raimundo Tambo aparecia como secretário geral e vice-presidente.

Como já foi dito, mesmo antes do regime militar, jovens estudantes aymaras vinham se reunindo em núcleos de discussão em La Paz. E Tambo, como um desses estudantes, permaneceu na operação dessa forma de agitação ao longo da década de 1960, paralelamente à sua participação como militante indianista. O colégio militar Gualberto Villaroel, situado numa área de grande concentração aymara em La Paz, era um dos principais focos de movimentações. Juntamente com outros que também vieram do campo, Tambo fundou, em meados dos anos 1960, o Movimento 15 de Novembro, grupo secreto formado em homenagem a Tupac Katari (data de sua morte[12]) que se dedicou ao estudo e discussão dos valores e da história indígena.

Nesse exercício de reinterpretação do passado a partir da perspectiva indígena, redescobrem as figuras lendárias de Tupac Katari, Bartolina Sisa e Zarate Willka, além de promoverem ampla reflexão sobre a discriminação étnico, racial e social cotidiana sofrida no “exílio” que enfrentavam na urbe. Todas as questões discutidas no âmbito mais intelectualizado do círculo indianista sendo compartilhadas por meio de Tambo (e não só por ele) com a “base” dos estudantes indígenas.

Ele terminou o ensino secundário e tentou, sem sucesso, galgar posições nos colégios militares. Matriculou-se então na Faculdade de Direito da Universidade Mayor de San Andrés (UMSA) e, junto com outros ex-participantes do Movimento 15 de Novembro[13] fundou o incômodo Movimento Universitário Julian Apaza (Muja). Ao mesmo tempo em que combatiam o preconceito e a discriminação no meio acadêmico e urbano, os jovens do Muja também procuravam denunciar o conjunto de problemas enfrentados pelas comunidades camponesas-indígenas da área rural.

Curiosamente, Tambo também estreitou laços com segmentos da esquerda sindical, ligada às ideologias originadas na Europa e alojada na COB, entidade que concentrava grande parte dos trabalhadores “formalizados” da Bolívia. Já no final da década de 1960, com apoio da COB, Tambo se engaja em uma manobra ousada – forma o Bloco Independente Camponês (BIC), que almejava se firmar como uma espécie de núcleo político rival  ao sindicalismo agrário marcadamente dependente do governo central – instituído oficialmente pelo MNR no contexto de 1952 e depois largamente “aproveitado” no contexto do Pacto Militar-Camponês.

A montagem do BIC se deu em paralelo aos esforços da COB, de partidos de esquerda (com destaque para o POR trotskista, com Guillermo Lora à frente) e de organizações independentes em fazer prosperar a Assembleia Popular – mobilização com ambições de gestar e aplicar uma agenda paralela popular, surgida no hiato democrático após a queda de Barrientos (1969) que se estendeu pelas administrações dos generais Ovando e Torres, até 1971. Uma das principais fragilidades da Assembleia foi, por sinal, a sua limitadíssima participação camponesa.

Enquanto o BIC, de Tambo (bastante influenciado tanto pelo Indianismo como pelo Marxismo sindical e partidário), não conseguia alcançar os seus objetivos, outra liderança katarista dava os seus primeiros passos por dentro da complexa estrutura do sindicalismo agrário, institucionalizado e fomentado pelo Estado (seja pelo MNR, no bojo de 1952, ou pelos militares que assumiram o poder) com inegável intuito de controle dos camponeses-indígenas.

Jenaro Flores, então jovem indígena que havia também frequentado o colégio Villaroel e retornado à comunidade  onde nasceu, assumia, em 1969, o comando do Sindicato Camponês de Antipampa (Subcentral de Lahuachaca, Província de Aroma).

Antes de iniciar a sua carreira dentro do sindicalismo agrário, contudo, Jenaro Flores passou por uma experiência marcante, mas pouco conhecida, até entre pesquisadores do tema. No final da década de 1960, quando voltou para Antipampa , foi escolhido para trabalhar como assistente de investigação de um estudo sobre os reflexos da reforma agrária de 1953 que estava sendo levado a cabo pela Universidade de  Wisconsin, nos Estados Unidos. Coordenada por Ronald Clark, a investigação era financiada pelo Comitê Interamericano para o Desenvolvimento Agrícola (Cida) e apoiada pelo Serviço Nacional de Reforma Agrária do governo boliviano. Essa experiência, segundo Albó (1987), permitiu que Jenaro aprofundasse os conhecimentos técnicos sobre as questões rurais. Ao mesmo tempo, o jovem testemunhou de perto a discriminação sofrida pelos pongos aymaras, que tinham o trabalho explorado em relações de servidão e ainda tratados, inclusive pelos próprios funcionários oficiais (que também participavam da pesquisa), com extremo desprezo.

“Mais do que qualquer coisa”, define Albó (1987), “esses estudantes de mão cheia criaram uma identidade baseada nas suas próprias experiências como camponeses e aymaras em face aos desafios da cidade”. Na comparação direta entre os indianistas (articulados em torno dos partidos e movimentos dos quais Raimundo Tambo e Constantino Lima fizeram) e os kataristas, que passaram a focar esforços na organização por meio dos sindicatos agrários, Yashar (2005) ressalta que os kataristas foram “mais bem-sucedidos na formação de redes transcomunitárias” (Yashar, 2005: 169). Os ativistas do katarismo viam a sua luta de forma “diferente em termos ideológicos e estratégicos”, como também realça Hurtado (1986: 262). Ideologicamente, eles concordavam que o colonialismo era um instrumento de opressão que vigorava há séculos contra camponeses-indígenas. O final do período de domínio oficial do colonialismo político em 1825 (independência da Bolívia como Estado-nação) acabou se desdobrando em um novo período de colonialismo interno (González Casanova, 1969) que manteve a condição de subordinação e de exclusão dos indígenas, mesmo depois da Revolução de 1952. “Mas eles se recusaram a reduzir a sua luta à questão racial ou à questão de classe” (Yashar, 2005: 169).

Nesse sentido, como deixa poucas dúvidas o Manifesto de Tiwanaku, documento de 1973 que é apontado como referência inicial do Katarismo, é bastante abragente. “Nós nos sentimos economicamente explorados e cultural e politicamente oprimidos”, destacam os signatários[14], reforçando o potencial de ações efetivas de  “tradução intercultural” (Santos, 2006) e de “ecologia dos saberes” (Santos, 2007), com espaço para as “epistemologias do Sul”[15] (Santos e Meneses, 2007).

Imagem 2 – Sede da CSUTCB, que tem sua origem ligada ao Katarismo, em La Paz (Bolívia) – Fonte: Maurício Hashizume (2008)

3. Diálogo entre lideranças e “tradução intercultural”

Como se nota pelas trajetórias de Raimundo Tambo e Jenaro Flores, os kataristas optaram pela escolha mais complexa de cruzar permanentemente as fronteiras estabelecidas pelo “cardápio cognitivo” então existente. Cruzaram sistematicamente não apenas a “linha abissal” (Santos, 2007) entre o que o mundo moderno (escolas, universidades, instituições do Estado e sindicatos) e o que pensamento hegemônico classifica como “pré-moderno”, obsoleto, rudimentar e descartável (cosmovisão, herança cultural, práticas e rituais aymaras), mas também a linha das grandes ideologias identificadas pelas correntes de esquerda e de direita, reciclando os conhecimentos adquiridos no contato com esses diversos campos de conhecimentos.

Uma das linhas divisórias do conhecimento mais subvertidas pelos kataristas foi a que tende a separar o rural e o urbano. Por exemplo, ainda em 27 de maio de 1969, aymaras que residiam em La Paz – entre os quais Mario Gabriel, cunhado de Jenaro Flores -, criaram o Centro de Coordenação e Promoção do Campesinato – Mink’a[16], um espaço cultural na principal aglomeração urbana para tratar das tradições, histórias e da cultura camponesa-indígena, como um todo, que inclusive é uma das signatárias formais do Manifesto de Tiwanaku. Manteve-se um fluxo de trânsito de pessoas entre campo e cidade. Todos os familiares de uma comunidade retornavam (e ainda continuam retornando até hoje, em algumas regiões andinas), por exemplo, para ajudar a recolher a produção agrícola no período de colheita. Ao mesmo tempo, estudantes camponeses-indígenas eram frequentemente enviados para a cidade, assim como ocorreu no caso do núcleo que veio a formar o Katarismo. Incontáveis deslocamentos para o perímetro urbano também eram feitos por conta da venda de muitos dos produtos agropecuários produzidos no interior.

Um episódio envolvendo os dois principais líderes do movimento katarista ajuda também a mostrar esse insinuante caráter híbrido do movimento. Em março de 1970, realiza-se um congresso na localidade de Ayo Ayo para a escolha da direção sindical agrária da Central da Província Aroma. Mais de mil delegados compareceram e assumiram uma posição antioficialista, afastando conhecidos “dirigentes amarelos”  como Pascual Lara, Francisco Lima e Angel Morales, enfraquecidos por terem apoiado o Imposto Único Agropecuário instituído pelo general Barrientos. No entanto, a disputa pela secretaria geral da Província colocou frente a frente Jenaro Flores, da Subcentral de Lahuachaca, e Raimundo Tambo, da subcentral de Ayo Ayo. Este último tinha muito mais experiência sindical e política: era quase um advogado formado e havia sido condutor tanto do Movimento 15 de Novembro como do Muja, no período em que viveu na capital La Paz. Cinco anos mais jovem, Flores não apresentava grande experiência no sindicalismo, mas atraía atenções com seu carisma pessoal. Em menos de um ano e meio, Flores tinha saltado do sindicato de sua comunidade para a subcentral, e já concorria à central, numa carreira veloz (Hurtado, 1986: 36).

A eleição foi muito disputada, mas as bases acabaram elegendo Flores, jovem que era casado e, detalhe que veio a se mostrar importante, atuava concomitantemente como jilaqata (autoridade rotativa “tradicional”) de sua comunidade; o preterido Tambo era solteiro, e não ocupara nenhuma posição dentro do sistema indígena de organização social. Ou seja, numa acirrada disputa pela chefia de uma instituição tipicamente “moderna” – e por que não dizer, colonial? -, teria pesado o fato de que um dos candidatos tinha uma conexão mais efetiva com a identidade e os valores de extração “étnico-cultural”. Esse caso mostra como a hibridação pode se dar na prática, com base no diálogo intercultural entre os distintos conhecimentos.

Conta-se que, após a divulgação do resultado da disputa, o público exigiu um abraço de unidade entre os dois concorrentes (Rocha Monroy, 2006: 12). O perdedor Raimundo Tambo teria, então, partido para um abraço em Jenaro Flores. A partir dali, começaram a trabalhar juntos. Tambo passou a ocupar posição estratégica no Conselho de Amautas (ligado ao modelo indígena de organização social), que assessorava a Central Agrária de Aroma, e consolidou-se como quadro político e formulador do Katarismo. Enquanto isso, Flores se firmava cada vez mais como dirigente camponês de massas.

Formado na encruzilhada da cidade e o campo, Jenaro Flores utilizou habilmente os ensinamentos e os contatos mantidos entre essas duas esferas. Organizou, por exemplo, campeonatos de futebol para atrair camponeses e fazer ressoar as idéias kataristas. Estimulou e manteve canais relevantes com La Paz, com destaque especial, além dos já citados Movimento 15 de Novembro e do Muja, para duas emissoras (Rádio Méndez e Rádio San Gabriel[17]) que passaram a transmitir programas com conteúdo e história indígena, e o Centro Mink´a .

Em 1970, dois fatos relevantes fortaleceram a imagem de sindicalismo “cultural” dos kataristas (Hashizume, 2010: 22). Pela primeira vez, a simbólica bandeira wiphala[18] apareceu hasteada, em 6 de junho, por ocasião de um encontro de camponeses no dia do professor, em Corocoro (Província Pacajes, vizinha à Aroma). E no dia 15 de novembro, a wiphala voltou a tremular em Ayo Ayo diante de cerca de 30 mil camponeses-indígenas que compareceram para homenagear Tupac Katari.

Por meio da aproximação com políticos como José María Centellas e Juan Chambilla (ambos da ala mais à esquerda do MNR), Flores promoveu o evento de 189º aniversário da morte de Tupac Katari, no qual foi inaugurado um monumento em homenagem ao mártir, e conseguiu atrair a presença não só do presidente naquela ocasião, Juan José Torres, mas também de outras autoridades bolivianas (Hurtado, 1986: 38). Esse primeiro impulso de ascensão dos kataristas[19] foi sucedido pelo golpe de Banzer, em 21 de agosto de 1971, que colocou todo o movimento na clandestinidade. Mesmo nessa condição, o Katarismo continuou a conquistar espaço. Primeiro, surgiu o já citado Manifesto de Tiwanaku (1973). Ladeado por assassinatos, desaparições, prisões e perseguições, o massacre de Epizana, Tolata e Melga, em 1974, que ceifou a vida de camponeses-indígenas que protestavam contra o governo, tornou o clima ainda mais tenso (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2003: 147). Após aprovar mais uma declaração de apoio ao programa katarista em 1977, o setor consegue realizar um importante encontro em 1978 que, por sua vez, permitiu estruturar duas conquistas centrais em 1979: a fundação da Confederação Sindical Única dos Trabalhadores Camponeses da Bolívia (CSUTCB) e as mobilizações populares contra o governo que resultaram numa paralisação nacional contra o pacote de medidas de ajuste econômico receitadas pelo Fundo Monetário Internacional (FMI) da presidenta interina Lidia Gueiler, em dezembro do mesmo ano.

Como desdobramento desse processo de lutas, a CSUTCB reiterou a adoção da análise dos problemas e da busca de soluções com base na “teoria dos dois olhos”: como camponeses, juntamente com toda a classe social trabalhadora explorada, e como povos indígenas (aymaras, quechuas, ayoreos, moxeños etc.).

Em junho de 1983, com sua tese política, a CSUTCB de certa forma conclui o seu programa político, que pode ser sintetizado no seguinte trecho:

Nosso pensamento não admite uma redução unilateral de toda nossa história a uma luta puramente classista nem puramente etnicista. Na prática, dessas duas dimensões reconhecemos não apenas nossa unidade com os operários, mas também nossa personalidade própria e diferenciada.

Imagem 3 – Reprodução de cartaz exposto em prédio municipal de Sica Sica (Bolívia) – Fonte: Maurício Hashizume (2009)

4. Formas de luta e “ecologia de saberes”

Na prática, portanto, o movimento katarista utilizou a estrutura formal e institucional formada em torno do sindicalismo moderno/colonial para cultivar e disseminar outros conhecimentos, ou melhor, a hibridação de conhecimentos, sempre de acordo com os contextos nos quais os problemas eram apresentados. As jilaqatura e sindicato agrário foram (e continuam a ser) utilizados como duas faces, uma mais institucional (com registro formal junto às autoridades estatais) e outra mais simbólica (com forte influência na vida comunitária), de uma proposta comum. Há depoimentos que garantem que a luta sindical ganhou com os ensinamentos culturais, e vice-versa. Em vez de recusar em absoluto possíveis ensinamentos “vindos de fora”, o katarismo escolheu absorver e reorganizar as ideias de acordo com as suas necessidades.

Evidentemente que essa sobreposição não se dava de maneira natural, tranquila e sem sobressaltos. Em inúmeras vezes, a convivência entre essas duas lógicas gerava “faíscas”: impasses, entreveros e contradições. O caso do Katarismo demonstra claramente, porém, que o pressuposto paradoxo social formatado pela matriz colonial pode se misturar, embaralhar as regras pré-estabelecidas e funcionar como elemento de contestação das relações de poder, saber e, inclusive, ser.

Se é inegável que não chegou a dar forma final a um projeto alternativo completo (não só no aspecto epistemológico e intercultural, mas também nas esferas política, econômica e social) de relação entre sociedade e Estado, capaz de articular os níveis local, nacional e global, também é possível afirmar que ajudou a ampliar e embaralhar as margens que dividem o previamente bom do irremediavelmente ruim, o válido do inválido, o possível do impossível e, em última instância, o real do utópico.

Em larga medida, o movimento katarista inspirou e abriu as portas, com décadas de antecipação, a uma série de mobilizações, reivindicações e programas políticos que vieram a se consolidar na Bolívia desde então[20].

Por não permanecerem confinados e se afastarem de “purismos” conceituais adotados por grupos políticos mais convencionais de esquerda, os militantes kataristas colocaram a “interseccionalidade” na prática e ganharam espaço em diversas frentes de atuação. Atualmente, a imagem do movimento pode ser associada por alguns à demasia “flexibilidade” de alguns de seus notórios membros – como é o caso de Victor Hugo Cárdenas, que ocupou o cargo de vice-presidente entre 1993 a 1997 na gestão francamente neoliberal de Gonzálo Sanchéz de Lozada (MNR). Ainda assim, o Katarismo segue como relevante referencial político-ideológico de contestação para as organizações camponesas-indígenas até hoje.

Na prática, a experiência katarista ratifica a problemática das dicotomias como obstáculos à interpretação da “ecologia dos saberes”, apresentada por Santos (2007) como alternativa diante do sistema colonial, capitalista e imperialista que, nos últimos séculos, tem determinado o desperdício da experiência social que o próprio Santos (2000) define pela desigiação de “epistemicídio”. A escolha pelo diálogo e combinação recíproca entre diferentes conhecimentos contribuiu para furar os bloqueios e limitações armadas pelos esquemas e relações de poder estabelecidas.

O questionamento à relação intrínseca entre colonialidade/modernidade – duas faces da mesma moeda, conforme conceituação de Mignolo (2000) – não implica o anseio por “sociedades congeladas no tempo, ilhadas e essencializadas”, como adverte Blaser (2007: 14). “É muito fácil constatar que estas sociedades não existem, que são fantasias românticas”, conclui este último.

“A capacidade inovadora, a adoção de tecnologias e conhecimentos ‘externos’ úteis, a adaptação e a mudança, a conexão com e a abertura relativa com relação a outras sociedades”, prossegue Blaser (2007: 14), “não são atributos exclusivos da sociedade moderna; são atributos de todas as sociedades”. Não se deve, contudo, assumir que as diferenças sempre significam antagonismos, mas tampouco se “deve dar por certo que existe complementaridade entre elas ou que essa complementaridade pode ser imposta de cima para baixo” (Blaser, 2007: 14).

Uma formulação interessante para essa mescla sobreposta de culturas pode ser encontrada em Rivera Cusicanqui (2006: 11). Ao se auto-definir ela própria, ela diz se considerar uma mestiça – não mais nos moldes da integração por meio dos programas modernos de mestiçagem, mas no sentido de mistura conflitante – ou simplesmente chhixi, em língua aymara. A palavra chhixi, de acordo com ela, tem diversas conotações: é uma cor produto da justaposição, em pequenos pontos ou manchas, de cores opostas ou contrastantes: o branco e o negro, o roxo e o verde, etc. “A noção chhixi, como muitas outras, obedece à ideia aymara de algo que é e não é ao mesmo tempo, ou seja,a lógica do terceiro incluído” (2006: 11).

Além disso, na arena imaginária em que os diversos e recombinantes conceitos pós-coloniais estão em contínuo encontro, conflito e sobreposição, a experiência do Katarismo dialoga diretamente com a escolha do “essencialismo estratégico” (Spivak, 1999), pois apresenta um componente de ressignificação da condição do subalterno por ele próprio como protagonista da ação política e sujeito social. Também guarda relação com as reflexões acerca da “outra modernidade” (Chatterjee, 1997) forjada por diferentes pontos de vistas e das especificidades dos contextos de ex-colônias.

De alguma maneira, este trabalho procurou seguir a dica deixada pela própria Spivak. “Se o sujeito (…) foi mascarado como o sujeito de uma história alternativa, devemos refletir sobre como ele está escrito, em vez de simplesmente ler sua máscara como uma verdade histórica.” (Spivak, 1994: 188)

O que a autora indiana reforça é que escrever e ler, em um sentido mais amplo, “marcam duas posições diferentes em relação à ‘oscilante e múltipla forma de ser’”. (Spivak, 1994: 188). Segundo ela, “produzimos narrativas e explicações históricas transformando o socius, onde nossa produção é escrita, em bits – mais ou menos contínuos e controlados – que são legíveis”.

A forma como essas leituras emergem e a definição a respeito de qual delas será legitimada são questões que têm implicações políticas em todos os níveis possíveis, reitera. Ou seja, o subalterno e seu discurso não são apenas e necessariamente as formas como alguém é capaz de lê-los, mas é inclusive como ele mesmo se produz por meio da ação social. Por isso, o Katarismo como “epistemologia do Sul” é resultado não de heranças ou legados mantidos pelos camponeses-indígenas do Altiplano Andino, mas da iniciativa coletiva daqueles que agiram diante da subalternidade e conferiram um significado convertido em conhecimento contra-hegemônico, ou seja, em “outros saberes” que, diferentemente da “pureza” reivindicada pelas teorias produzidas pelas ciências sociais do Norte[21], são repletas e constituídas de “contaminações” e interferências mútuas, no sentido do que pode ser definido como exercício prático de “tradução intercultural” (Santos, 2006).

Imagem 4 – Manifestações em El Alto: wiphalas tremulam ao lado da bandeiras nacionais – Fonte: Maurício Hashizume (2009)

5. Conclusão

No campo dos estudos coloniais, é bastante comum ver citada a obra do  psiquiatra e ensaísta negro Frantz Fanon, nascido na Martinica, como um dos principais referências “históricos”, visto que sua obra data justamente da década de 1960: a mesma em que se deram desdobramentos determinantes para a formação do Katarismo. É notável a convergência entre os escritos de Fanon sobre os conflitos socioculturais na Argélia e as formulações kataristas no que diz respeito à “inadequação” dos marcos teóricos do Norte hegemônico para o Sul Global.

Quando se examina de perto o contexto colonial, é evidente que a divisão do mundo começa pelo fato de pertencer ou não a uma determinada raça, a uma determinada espécie. Nas colônias, a estrutura de base econômica é também a superestrutura [da teoria marxista]. A causa é a consequência; você é rico porque é branco, você é branco porque é rico. Esse é o motivo pelo qual a análise marxista deve sempre ser ligeiramente alargada toda vez que temos que lidar com o problema colonial (Fanon, 2001: 31)

Tal “coincidência” não reflete exatamente uma espécie de pensamento único e uniforme a respeito das experiências coloniais na Argélia (principal referência para as inquietações de Fanon) e na Bolívia, mas antes uma latente discordância, moldada pelos respectivos contextos sociais, quanto aos quadros-gerais eurocêntricos e etnocêntricos.

No caso mais específico do Katarismo, os camponeses-indígenas Aymaras bateram de frente não só com a colonialidade (do poder, do saber e do saber) – que, como ressalta Quijano (2000), vai muito além do colonialismo em sua concepção convencional e se perpetua através de práticas sociais de subalternização assimiladas e incorporadas pelos próprios colonizados, mas também do supracitado colonialismo interno (Gonzáles Casanova, 1969), desafiando conspirações elitistas a partir de massivas mobilizações de nações e povos indígenas, originários e camponeses.

Esta forte vinculação com as experiências sociais vividas no terreno faz dos pensamentos pós-descoloniais não uma escola de pensamento “de vanguarda”, conforme léxico usado com frequência no âmbito das ciências sociais convencionais. Em vez disso, ancoram-se na concepção de pensamento “de retaguarda”, em linha com as reflexões de Santos (2012). Daí a relevância de sublinhar os processos de enfrentamento protagonizados pelos movimentos por trás da emergência de tendências acadêmicas. As lutas dos movimentos sociais são prévias a quaisquer giros pós-descoloniais. Estes últimos podem ter sido beneficiados pelo acúmulo, consistência e abrangência derivados do aparecimento de um conjunto posterior de escritos – que incluem o aclamado Orientalismo (1981), de Edward Said -, mas as primeiras são as fontes e as bases da concretude e repercussão da perspectiva pós-decolonial como crítica sociopolítica.

Sob o manto das pretensas neutralidade e universalidade (repletas de pré-concepções, direcionamentos e limitações de caráter eurocêntrico e etnocêntrico), destacadas lutas como as do movimento katarista têm enfrentado cânones, postulados, proposições e intervenções modelares de transformação social. Esses sujeitos sociais expuseram problemas e exigiram direitos, cavando e ganhando terreno em espaços científico-acadêmicos. Empurrada por interpelações “sentidas na pele” e por contestações vigorodas dos movimentos sociais, as portas, então, se abriram. Como detalha um reconhecido investigador dedicado aos estudos pós-descoloniais, desenvolveu-se, desde o início dos anos 1980, “um corpo de escritos que tentam deslocar as formas dominantes pelas quais são vistas as relações entre povos ocidentais e não-ocidentais e seus mundos” (Young, 2003: 2).

O que isso significa? Isso significa virar o mundo de cabeça para baixo. Isso significa olhar a partir do outro lado da fotografia (…). Isso significa se dar conta de que quando os povos ocidentais olham para o mundo não-ocidental o que eles enxergam é frequentemente mais a imagem deles mesmos e de suas próprias suposições do que a realidade daquilo que de fato lá está, ou ainda a forma como as pessoas fora do ocidente realmente sentem-se e entendem-se a si próprias (Young, 2003: 2).

O segmento final da referida definição (“a forma como as pessoas fora do ocidente realmente sentem-se e entendem-se a si próprias”) remete novamente às experiências protagonizadas por sujeitos políticos do Sul, tais como o movimento katarista, que desafiaram o status quo (político, econômico, cultural, epistemológico e ontológico) com a sua opção pelo ativismo sindical com forte influência étnico-cultural.

Isso faz com que se torne imperativo evitar a delimitação territorial, temporal e sociocultural da ideia de interseccionalidade e do pensamento pós-descolonial. Há evidências de que essas proposições analíticas não são propriamente “novidades” das últimas décadas, desconectada das lutas anticoloniais do passado levadas a cabo pelos povos colonizados. Muito antes da “onda” de produções e reflexões que passaram a ser categorizadas “técnica e cientificamente” como pós-descoloniais, diversas mobilizações concretas protagonizadas no Sul já tinham sido formadas não só para pensar, mas para aplicar programas político-ideológicos que não se restringiam aos manuais engessados e moldes pré-fabricados dos setores “de vanguarda”. Tais iniciativas, a despeito de suas incomensuráveis heterogeneidades, se coadunam no diálogo e intercâmbio horizontalizado entre diversos conhecimentos e modos de vida ocidentais e não-ocidentais, ou seja, tendem a combinar justamente, cada um da sua forma, elementos “clássicos” da luta de classes com a defesa dos direitos “diferenciados” nos campos étnico-culturais.

Este artigo foi desenvolvido no âmbito do projeto de investigação “ALICE, espelhos estranhos, lições imprevistas”, coordenado por Boaventura de Sousa Santos (alice.ces.uc.pt) no Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade de Coimbra – Portugal. O projeto recebe fundos do Conselho Europeu de Investigação, 7.º Programa Quadro da União Europeia (FP/2007- 2013) / ERC Grant Agreement n. [269807]

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Les Troubles en Ulster sont propices à donner lieu à ce genre de pièce expérimentale comme le met en avant Ophelia Byrne, spécialiste du théâtre en Irlande du Nord : « theatre has […] had to find imaginative ways to respond to an always vital, often dangerously energised, and sometimes brutal society » (Welch 66). Dans Protestants, première pièce de l’auteur irlandais catholique Robert Welch, jouée à Belfast le 28 avril 2004, le thème abordé met en effet en lumière une tentative de (re-)définir le protestantisme. Welch fait coïncider le fond et la forme dans la mesure où la pièce monologique est également un moyen de retracer les contours du théâtre. En outre cet éloignement délibéré de la norme théâtrale sous-tend un acte de résistance à une autre norme, le colonialisme. Cette pièce aspire à démontrer qu’un détachement du joug impérial de la Grande-Bretagne sur l’Irlande du Nord est possible artistiquement.

Nous nous interrogerons tout d’abord sur les raisons pour lesquelles le théâtre expérimental minimaliste de Welch est un acte de résistance au colonialisme, assis sur une conception particulière du protestantisme en Irlande, héritage du passé. Nous nous pencherons donc sur sa stratégie de résistance en appuyant notre démonstration sur les travaux de Helen Gilbert et Joanne Tompkins. L’étude des signes linguistiques et paralinguistiques nous permettra d’articuler études post-coloniales et théorie brechtienne du théâtre. En effet, la théorie du théâtre épique de Bertolt Brecht viendra nourrir notre réflexion première. L’analyse de la crise du sujet ainsi que l’étude des arts littéraires et musicaux illustreront le désir du dramaturge et nous permettront de comprendre comment le monologue devient un outil post-colonial pour l’auteur dans sa démarche de redéfinition de cette religion à travers ses multiples représentants.

1. Le poids du passé

Dans ce monologue, Robert Welch montre à quel point le passé pèse sur le présent en Irlande, thème qu’il reprend à la tradition littéraire irlandaise pour annoncer sa tendance à mêlertradition et modernité. Welch s’attache ainsi à démontrer que le colonialisme reste gravé dans les esprits en Irlande du Nord. Pourtant, s’il a intitulé sa pièce Protestants c’est précisément pour démontrer que le colonialisme est assis sur une définition erronée du protestantisme. Le protestantisme n’est pas ce que l’Histoire, notamment celle de l’Irlande du Nord, laisse apparaître. De fait, le pluriel du titre nous indique qu’il existe plusieurs façons de considérer ceux qui incarnent au mieux la religion, les Protestants, et, par conséquent, plusieurs manières de faire l’expérience du protestantisme. Il nous livre donc plusieurs autres visions, d’autres définitions. Afin de déconstruire l’image que renvoie la notion de protestantisme, l’auteur adopte une stratégie particulière, qui s’inscrit dans un double discours : celui du post-colonialisme et de l’héritage de Brecht. En d’autres termes, il articule théorie brechtienne du théâtre didactique et études post-coloniales.

Le dramaturge souhaite remonter aux origines du protestantisme et de son adéquation avec l’impérialisme. Pour mener à bien son objectif, il utilise tout d’abord les personnages que le seul acteur doit camper sur scène. Si ces derniers n’apparaissent pas dans un ordre chronologique évident, c’est avant tout pour mettre en lumière l’idée que le passé prend toute son importance. Welch convoque ainsi, dans leur ordre d’apparition, un narrateur contemporain, en réalité le seul personnage sur scène qui doit camper six autres personnages. Dans ses premières didascalies, Welch nous annonce que ce narrateur, aux allures néo-brechtiennes, doit être un Protestant de classe moyenne, la quarantaine, et résidant à Belfast. Ce personnage campe alors Elizabeth 1ère dont le règne sur l’Angleterre marqua la domination de la foi protestante.Vient ensuite un supporter de l’équipe de football des Glasgow Rangers, qui s’emporte contre les révoltes au sein de sa propre communauté. Puis l’acteur endosse le rôle de Martin Luther qui déclame son amour pour Dieu et sa haine contre les secrets des prêtres catholiques. Puis, un homme originaire de Cork, soldat dans l’armée d’Oliver Cromwell et témoin de l’exécution du roi Charles 1^er, un dresseur de serpent dans le sud des Etats-Unis qui force sa foi à vaincre sa peur ; enfin un jeune garçon observant son grand-père qui se prépare pour le défilé des Orangistes un 12 juillet dans le comté d’Armagh en Irlande du Nord. Nous constatons donc que sur les sept personnages, trois appartiennent à l’histoire de l’Europe : Martin Luther, Elizabeth 1ère et le soldat de Cromwell. Martin Luther renvoie aux origines du mouvement protestant, Elizabeth 1ère à l’affirmation de la suprématie du protestantisme sur le catholicisme en Irlande lors de la période des Plantations, et, en ce qui concerne Cromwell, Benedict Nightingale, critique littéraire pour The Times, nous explique qu’il n’est mentionné que dans la mesure où il rappelle le passé colonial de l’Irlande : « Cromwell is soon remembered, presumably to make the point that Protestantism became and perhaps remains a colonial weapon, wielded most ruthlessly against the Catholic Irish. » (Welch 76). Avec ces trois personnages se tissent donc des liens étroits entre l’impérialisme et le protestantisme.

Pour souligner à quel point le passé pèse sur le présent, le temps dominant est le présent simple. Si le présent de narration n’existe pas véritablement en anglais, il est possible de l’utiliser afin de donner une information brute sans notion temporelle, valeur que Welch semble avoir privilégiée dans cette pièce. Le passé dans la pièce est raconté, voire vécu, au présent pour montrer à quel point il marque le quotidien dans cette partie du monde. Ainsi lorsque tous ses personnages racontent leurs histoires et anecdotes, ils utilisent le temps du présent. La première stratégie que le dramaturge a choisie afin de retracer les contours du protestantisme est donc celle du brouillage des pistes temporelles. Cette stratégie a une dimension post-coloniale comme Helen Gilbert et Joanne Tompkins le soulignent dans Post-Colonial Drama lorsqu’il s’agit de définir le post-colonialisme : « history is a discourse which is ‘culturally motivated and ideologically conditioned’ in the present. » (Gilbert & Tompkins 112). Si pour ces deux auteurs le théâtre fonctionne comme une arme anti-impériale, nous constatons que Robert Welch s’approprie cette définition pour faire de sa pièce une arme contre le colonialisme. Cette stratégie lui permet également de redonner à ses personnages du pouvoir sur l’Histoire puisqu’ils en livrent leur propre version.

Nous remarquons en outre que si l’unité du temps, chère à Aristote, n’est pas respectée, celle du lieu, également aristotélicienne, ne l’est pas non plus. En effet, à cette discontinuité temporelle (le présent, qui code la continuité, est utilisé afin de raconter le passé) s’ajoute une discontinuité spatiale puisque tous les personnages ne se trouvent pas en Irlande du Nord. Si l’Ulster est le lieu que Robert Welch a privilégié, la raison en est, selon l’auteur lui-même, que l’Irlande du Nord est un lieu où les divergences passées sont toujours présentes : « Northern Ireland is one of those places, across the world, where the differences in conviction and religious practice that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe still animate contemporary life. » (Welch 16). Il lui apparaissait donc plus pertinent d’inscrire sa pièce dans un contexte nord-irlandais. Pourtant, lorsqu’il le met dans la peau d’autres personnages, Welch projette aussi son personnage – narrateur dans d’autres lieux : Martin Luther se trouve en Allemagne, la reine Elizabeth 1ère en Angleterre, le dresseur de serpent dans le sud des Etats-Unis. Nous assistons donc à une fragmentation de l’espace et du temps qui n’est pas sans rappeler à nouveau la théorie brechtienne du théâtre et sa vocation didactique. Dans Bertolt Brecht, L’Homme et son œuvre, Wolfgang Jeske et Gunter Berg, rappellent que « dès 1926, Brecht proclame l’idée d’une œuvre scénique comme construction d’éléments narratifs, texte, musique et tableau, qui sont indépendants les uns des autres mais agissent les uns sur les autres, se complètent, ou se perturbent sciemment grâce à la mise en scène, empêchant dans tous les cas une action fluide, homogène » (107). La conception de la réalité est, pour Brecht, fragmentaire.

Robert Welch montre sa résistance à nourrir l’héritage laissé par la colonisation à travers Protestants de deux manières. Il semble en effet combiner l’élément post-colonial et la résistance à la norme théâtrale afin de déconstruire la définition de protestantisme et aborder le sujet selon une approche didactique où le public aura aussi un rôle à jouer. Il part des origines de la religion, puis du lien qui fut tissé entre colonialisme britannique et protestantisme, et montre d’emblée que son objectif est de déconstruire cette adéquation. Effectivement, il y a non seulement brouillage des pistes temporelles et spatiales, mais encore brouillage d’autres codes, notamment le code vestimentaire. L’auteur écrit en effet que son acteur doit être ainsi vêtu : « bare chested, black jeans, Doc Martens » (Welch 23). Il fait donc naître une tension entre ce qu’il porte et ce qu’il doit représenter. Il évoque une nudité pour que son personnage puisse revêtir divers personnages et devenir ainsi un acteur protéiforme. Cependant il est chaussé de Doc Martens aux lacets défaits pour ancrer son existence dans le temps présent, mais aussi pour marquer une certaine marginalité. Cette tenue peut aussi refléter la difficulté qu’ont pu éprouver certains Protestants d’Irlande du Nord à définir leur identité à la fin du XXème siècle. L’arrivée des colons britanniques en Irlande a d’abord privé de leurs repères identitaires les Catholiques irlandais, puis, depuis les multiples tentatives de Westminster d’engager un processus de rapprochement entre les deux communautés en Irlande du Nord, les Protestants se sont eux aussi peu à peu sentis trahis par le gouvernement britannique au point de ne plus se considérer tout à fait comme des Britanniques. Le personnage de Welch incarne ces générations qui se sont progressivement éloignées de leurs repères identitaires, héritiers du passé colonial de l’Irlande. Joanne Tompkins et Helen Gilbert soulignent que le corps de l’acteur est un outil permettant de véhiculer le malaise lié à la perte de repères identitaires, elles considèrent le corps post colonial comme étant : « a vehicle for subverting and problematising the roles of identity, subjectivity, and corporeality that colonialism has assigned to the colonialised subject. » (Gilbert & Tompkins 1996 : 253). L’utilisation de la corporalité est ainsi un des éléments de stratégie de résistance au colonialisme sur lequel Welch prend appui.

Cette pièce repose donc sur de nombreuses tensions qui mettent en évidence une certaine absence de cohésion et de linéarité, un manque de repères et qui corroborent par la même occasion l’enjeu de l’écriture du monologue, c’est-à-dire la crise, et plus particulièrement celle d’un sujet en proie aux questionnements autour de son identité.

2. Lacrise du sujet

Cette crise d’identité est due à la violence et aux dissensions balayant l’Irlande du Nord à la fin du XXème siècle, période durant laquelle les Républicains nord-irlandais (catholiques) luttaient contre le pouvoir britannique dans l’espoir de s’en affranchir. Ces hommes et femmes qui n’avaient jamais accepté le contrôle des Britanniques (et par conséquent des Protestants) en Irlande, souhaitaient un rapprochement géopolitique avec la République d’Irlande. Ces troubles affectèrent aussi bien la communauté catholique que la communauté protestante. Aussi, dans un article intitulé « ‘Am I talking to Myself ?’ Men, Masculinities and the Monologue in Contemporary Irish Theatre », Brian Singleton considère que la culture nord-irlandaise en est ressortie profondément abîmée. Il explique que cette crise affecte les hommes plus que les femmes, précisément à cause de la relation qui lie la violence au pouvoir masculin en Ulster. Il s’agit donc pour Welch de retrouver la définition gâtée de cet homme protestant en crise, et s’il convoque une femme, la reine Elizabeth 1ère, ce n’est que pour en souligner les traits masculins puisqu’il lui fait dire : « I’ll show them whose daughter I am. The daughter of the great lion of England and terror of Spain. I have, I know, his lion heart even though it’s stuck in this woman’s body. » (Welch 25). Eckart Voigts-Virchow & Mark Schreiber écrivent ensemble que le monologue est un genre qui se prête particulièrement à l’expression de la masculinité en détresse en s’éloignant de la théorie aristotélicienne :

In rejecting the Aristotelian stage interaction, the male narrators have, both in terms of form and content, been transformed from men of action to static wordmongers, who tell their stories with varying degrees of confidence in the cathartic healing this limited congress with an audience may afford. The monologue, this much is clear, is an excellent means in expressing masculinity in crisis. (Wallace 296)

Dans Protestants, la crise du sujet masculin est indubitablement liée à la crise que la religion traverse en Irlande du Nord pendant la période des Troubles. Cette crise est à la fois politique et sociale et héritée du colonialisme. Welch utilise le monologue afin de mettre en exergue la violence du colonialisme qui prend son origine dans une définition erronée du protestantisme, marquée dans le corps, dans l’esprit et dans le discours de l’acteur sur scène. Une analyse de l’utilisation de l’espace scénique, de la kinésique et de la proxémique nous permet de constater que l’acteur, qui doit incarner le protestantisme au mieux, tente d’investir toute la scène.

Nous avons vu précédemment que la scène ne représentait pas seulement l’Irlande du Nord mais aussi d’autres lieux. Dans une volonté de redéfinition du protestantisme, il semblerait que le principe émis par Eamonn Jordan dans « ‘Look Who’s Talking, Too’ : the Duplicitous Myth of Naïve Narrative’ » à savoir « dislocation, rather than location » (Wallace 153) est important chez Welch. En effet, c’est à travers la multiplication des lieux, la fragmentation de l’espace, que l’expérience du protestantisme doit être faite. L’analyse du déplacement de l’acteur dans ce décor minimaliste montre qu’il commence debout sur l’estrade à gauche pour terminer, sept scènes plus loin, en bas de l’estrade à droite, après avoir investi le centre de l’espace scénique. Etant donné que les enjeux du colonialisme furent fondés sur un conflit territorial dont le Protestant nord-irlandais a hérité et qu’il ne veut pas perdre, il est possible de souligner que cette tentative de réinvestissement de l’espace scénique symbolise la tentative de reprendre toute sa place dans l’espace, et par extension dans l’Histoire. Notons par ailleurs, l’utilisation d’une estrade sur la scène, pour ajouter à la prise de possession de l’espace horizontal, une prise de possession verticale, qui peut en outre symboliser le rapprochement direct de l’homme et de Dieu (et rappelle qu’il n’y a pas besoin de médiateur pour les Protestants). L’utilisation d’une échelle corrobore cette idée. Cette estrade et cette échelle, comme les quelques accessoires utilisés par l’acteur, ont donc un sens bien précis.

Dès la première page de son œuvre, l’auteur nous livre la liste des objets dont se servira l’acteur. Ainsi Welch cite-t-il le tuyau d’une pompe à essence, une échelle en aluminium, une scie, une chaîne en fer, un télescope, un seau en métal, un pentacle (ou une étoile de David selon l’auteur lui-même en didascalie, qui brouille encore une fois les pistes). Chaque objet, associé à un personnage, est destiné à avoir une utilisation particulière. A propos du télescope que le jeune garçon de descendance orangiste manipule, Welch nous dit:

The boy is given as prop a telescope hinting at the play’s attempt to bring up close for scrutiny what lies far off; and also at the spirit of scientific inquiry that accompanied the Reformation’s stress on the individual mind’s capability to appraise evidence for itself, free of the dictates of dogmatic authority (Welch 19).

Si l’utilisation du télescope est à la fois pragmatique et symbolique, en revanche, les autres accessoires ont une fonction détournée. Donnons pour exemple la scie circulaire qui devient la collerette royale de Elizabeth 1ère ou encore le tuyau qui se transforme en un serpent. Ce détournement des objets dans leur fonction peut s’inscrire dans la stratégie de résistance au colonialisme de Welch dans la mesure où il semble faire écho au détournement de la définition du protestantisme. A travers ces accessoires et leur utilisation détournée par l’acteur, Welch met en lumière la définition erronée du protestantisme et s’en insurge. En effet, Michael Portillo, critique littéraire pour The Spectator, remarque: « one by one, Hickey [c’est le nom de l’acteur] tosses the props from the stage, as though angry with these symbols of prejudice and hate » (Welch 78). L’acteur doit incarner le protestantisme, ce que la religion a subi à travers les siècles, et son discours vient accompagner les mouvements de son corps afin de redéfinir la notion de protestantisme. Ses propos ont une résonance post-coloniale mais aussi didactique puisqu’ils doivent provoquer la réaction du public.

3. L’art pour redessiner les contours du protestantisme

Lorsqu’il évoque les origines de sa pièce, l’auteur, catholique, livre également la définition suivante du protestantisme :

It was in fact an engraving by Blake, “the Traveller makes haste towards evening” that provided a unifying thread for the play. Blake’s traveller became the narrator, a figure setting out on a journey, towards evening, leaving the comfort and security of the known and the familiar, the suburban, the gravelled pathways, the lamps being switched on as dark falls, to head into the uncertainty of memory and the fragmented recollection of history. The journey is one into what I imagined to be Protestant freedom and solitude, because it seems to me, rightly or wrongly, that one of the great discoveries of Protestantism was the terrifying isolation of the mind and the personality when confronted with the complex mystery of being (Welch 18).

A la lecture de ces explications, nous comprenons mieux pourquoi l’auteur a choisi la pièce monologique comme forme théâtrale (il s’est ainsi senti libre de rejeter la norme)mais aussi pourquoi le champ lexical de la peur est omniprésent. Néanmoins, les nombreuses répétitions de mots tels que « fear » et  « panic » sont contrebalancées par le discours de paix délivré par Martin Luther, technique qui rappelle la vocation dialectique du théâtre de Brecht selon laquelle des éléments de nature différente sont confrontés afin de faire naître un questionnement chez le spectateur. Welch souhaite ainsi mettre en évidence le fait que si le Protestant, et en particulier Martin Luther au moment de sa scission avec l’Église catholique romaine, éprouve un sentiment de peur, il ne doit pas la susciter, comme il en est trop souvent le cas en Irlande du Nord. La pièce de Welch repose ainsi sur cette évolution détournée, déformée de la religion en Irlande du Nord où la violence des colons protestants, puis de leurs héritiers, a pu effrayer. En outre, le discours de Martin Luther n’est pas au début mais au cœur de la pièce, alors que selon un enchaînement chronologique, il devrait ouvrir la pièce. L’expérience de Martin Luther se voit ainsi encadrée par celle des autres personnages. La structure de Protestants met donc une fois de plus en évidence l’importance des origines du protestantisme et la nécessité de les retrouver afin de mieux les comprendre, en comprendre l’évolution pour les déconstruire. Le monologue, et en particulier cette multitude de personnages qu’un seul acteur doit incarner lui permet, dans un second temps, de retrouver le message central de Martin Luther, précisément par le recentrement sur l’individu, la prise de conscience du personnage sur son individualité ; il lui permet ainsi de mettre en lumière l’évolution du protestantisme au fil des siècles.

Ces pistes de réflexion doivent provoquer la réaction du public, qui intervient et participe activement à la pièce. En effet, la fragmentation, le brouillage des pistes, les tensions entre linéarité et absence de linéarité, entre tradition et modernité, le discours dialectique de Welch, doivent susciter l’attention du spectateur, qui à son tour peut retrouver la chronologie, la fluidité et la continuité de ces éléments éclatés, des scènes juxtaposées. Pour le metteur en scène, Rachel O’Riordan, la forme et le contenu participaient à l’intervention du public : « the monodrama, and that format deeply affected the way in which the show was received. By communicating to the audience without character interplay the subject of the piece was thrown into the spotlight without any of the easy familiarities of naturalism. » (Welch 62). L’absence de naturalisme combinée à l’intervention du public fait écho à la théorie brechtienne du théâtre didactique. Pour Brecht, le théâtre doit susciter l’intervention du spectateur qui prend conscience d’un besoin de changement. Brecht écrit : « with the learning-play, then, the stage begins to be didactic. The theater becomes a place for philosophers, and for such philosophers as not only wish to explain the world but wish to change it. If there were not such entertaining learning, then the entire theatre would not be able to instruct. » (Brecht 80). De la même façon, la réception brute du message par le public est prépondérante pour Welch, elle fait partie intégrante de la pièce. En effet, des tables rondes et discussions furent organisées après chaque représentation pour recueillir les questions et réactions des spectateurs mais aussi pour échanger leurs points de vue.

Il s’agit donc de retrouver une définition plus juste de ce que représente le Protestant après avoir soumis à la fragmentation les critères qui le définissaient jusque là. Clare Wallace démontre en effet que le monologue dramatique permet de mettre en lumière la perception de l’Homme comme un produit fragmenté qui a subi les pressions des forces sociales et historiques :

Dramatic monologue enables the poet to inhabit a range of personae that may, as opposed to the confidential, earnest lyric ‘I’, open a space for doubt and ambivalence around the speaker. […] The perception of the self as ‘not autonomous, unified or stable, but rather the unfixed, fragmented product of various social and historical forces’, is fundamental to the emergence not only of this poetic genre, but also to the later development ofmodernist aesthetics (Wallace 10).

Ainsi, l’acteur, qui, dans une performance vocale incroyable, doit adopter les divers accents des personnages qu’il campe tour à tour dans un souci de cohérence physique et vocale, doit également, à travers son discours, montrer que la définition du protestantisme n’est pas immuable et figée, et qu’elle peut encore évoluer, qu’il faut la faire évoluer. La stratégie de Welch a, ici encore, une dimension post-coloniale et une vocation didactique. Il a recours à l’intertextualité, à la transgression des frontières littéraires et à la musique, code non-verbal dont le dessein n’est pas d’illustrer la scène mais de la compléter.

Welch renvoie à de nombreux auteurs avant lui, il cite les œuvres d’autres dramaturges irlandais tels que Brian Friel, ou Samuel Beckett. Les thèmes qu’il a choisis renvoient à de nombreux égards à la pièce de l’auteure nord-irlandaise, Marie Jones, A Night in November, mais il se réfère aussi à d’autres œuvres d’auteurs internationaux tels que George Steinbeck. Lorsqu’il s’agit de (re-)-définir les identités, de nombreux chercheurs en études post-coloniales considèrent que l’intertextualité permet d’assurer à d’autres langues d’être exprimées. Dans le cas de Protestants, il ne s’agit pas de langages, mais plutôt de points de vue. Ici, Welch rend hommage à ses prédécesseurs, mais les utilise à des fins modernes et expérimentales qui permettent à sa pièce de s’inscrire dans un mouvement littéraire nouveau à vocation didactique et de faire valoir son œuvre parmi celles d’autres auteurs.

L’auteur s’autorise aussi à transgresser les frontières littéraires, et mélange les genres pour montrer cette absence de figement et d’immanence, et au contraire, la possible mobilité et l’évolution de la définition du protestantisme. Ainsi, sa pièce devient un poème, regorgeant d’allitérations, d’assonances comme à l’occasion de cette réplique du narrateur où les termes thrill (frisson) et fizz (pétillement) sont juxtaposés : « and nothing else matters but the thrill, the fizz, of grinding someone else down » (Welch  29). Il est intéressant de rappeler ici que Robert Welch est également un poète. Il a écrit de nombreux recueils de textes poétiques tels que Muskerry (Dublin: Dedalus, 1991); Secret Societies (Dublin: Dedalus, 1997) ; Blue Formica Table (Dublin: Dedalus, 1999). Welch n’hésite pas non plus à conférer des titres à ses scènes, afin de mettre l’accent sur l’absence de linéarité et d’enchaînement chronologique d’une scène à une autre (un autre des principes brechtiens en rupture totale avec la pièce dite classique), mais aussi dans un but de transgression des frontières littéraires, car ces titres ne sont pas sans faire écho au genre du roman.

Enfin, le dramaturge incorpore chants et musique à son œuvre, comme pour rendre hommage aux origines du théâtre, mais il les utilise dans une perspective nouvelle, à la fois post-coloniale et didactique. En effet, selon Gilbert et Tompkins, « musical signification generates cultural meanings in its own right » (193). Ainsi, pour les chercheurs en études post-coloniales, la musique et les chants peuvent être des outils de résistance au colonialisme :

Song also affects the agency of language, altering the way that it ‘means’, while silence on stage can be a forceful and effective manner in/through which to express a post-colonial discourse of alterity, difference, and autonomy. The careful redeployment of linguistic signifiers – such as tone, rhythm, register, and lexicon – can generate as much political resistance as the rewriting of history or the introduction of politically embedded properties to a stage (Gilbert et Tompkins 168).

Si une étude sur le silence se révèlerait être impertinente dans Protestants du fait de sa rareté dans l’œuvre, l’analyse de la musique à portée post-coloniale s’avère plus riche. A l’étude de la pièce, il ne nous aura point échappé la sensibilité de Welch pour l’art musical, notamment le gospel, le bluegrass, le blues et la musique country. En effet, l’auteur a choisi de ponctuer les interventions de son narrateur par des interludes musicaux, sans leur donner une fonction structurale particulière. Ainsi, si certaines chansons annoncent la scène suivante, ce n’est pas le cas pour d’autres. En revanche, les titres qu’il cite, directement inspirés de la musique afro-américaine pour la plupart, mettent particulièrement en lumière une volonté de se détacher des thèmes musicaux traditionnels d’Irlande du Nord. De la même façon, les instruments de musique qu’il nomme, tel le banjo (47), ne sont point les flûtes et tambours utilisés par les Orangistes protestants d’Ulster pour commémorer la victoire de Guillaume d’Orange sur les Catholiques. Cette stratégie répond donc à la nécessité de se détacher des représentations du protestantisme qui évoqueraient la violence. A travers cette insertion, Welch montre que le protestantisme est capable de transcendance musicale et d’ouverture.

Dans l’œuvre de Welch, la musique est également utilisée à des fins didactiques si l’on adopte un point de vue brechtien. Pour Brecht, la musique, qui n’illustre pas les scènes mais fait partie intégrante de l’action, a une résonance didactique dans la mesure où elle apporte découpage et fragmentation à l’œuvre afin de créer un effet de distanciation pour le spectateur. Brecht explique sa démarche expérimentale dans laquelle la musique occupe une place fondamentale en ces termes :

Another series of experiments that made use of theatrical effects […] led to the ‘Lehrstücke’, for which the nearest English equivalent I can find is the ‘learning-play’. [This includes] the use of music and of the chorus to supplement and vivify the action[s] on the stage […] so as to call for a critical approach, so that [the actions] would not be taken for granted by the spectator and would arouse him to think; it became obvious to him which were right actions and which were wrong ones. The learning play is essentially dynamic; its task is to show the world as it changes (and also as it maybe changed). (Brecht 79).

C’est pour cette raison que l’auteur inclut dès le début de la pièce la chanson de Van Morrison « Sometimes I feel like a Motherless Child » parmi d’autres mélodies de musique country, bluegrass et de gospel dont il ne cite pas les titres de manière systématique. Cette chanson, dont le titre rappelle l’importance des origines, thème dominant de Protestants, est interprétée par un musicien nord-irlandais dont les performances sont réputées pour être expérimentales. Ce titre peut jouer le rôle de fil conducteur au sein de la pièce dans la mesure où il évoque la spiritualité (il était un chant spirituel des noirs américains) et où il reprend le thème principal de la pièce sans l’illustrer. Un autre exemple pertinent dans le cadre de notre démonstration : l’inclusion d’une mélodie irlandaise, dont le titre est en gaélique, au beau milieu de l’intervention de Elizabeth 1ère. Welch incorpore  « Ag Scaipendh na gCleiti » de Sean O Riada dans cette scène afin de créer un effet d’étrangeté, d’inattendu, visant à marquer la surprise du spectateur qui devra réagir. La musique est pour Brecht une façon de « faire sortir le spectateur du cours de l’intrigue, de dévoyer son attention. » (Banoun : 349). C’est ainsi que Welch l’utilise.

Le texte de Welch repose donc sur de multiples tensions. Le sujet ouvre la voie à la polémique, et la forme donne lieu au questionnement. Pourtant, le fond et la forme coïncident : ainsi nous trouvons de la cohérence au-delà des tensions et contrastes. L’objectif de l’auteur n’est pas de donner une définition du protestantisme. Selon Jane Coyle dans the Irish Times : « Protestants is not an end in itself. It is a provocative, mischievous spring board to wider discussion and debate, comparison and analysis » (Welch 73). C’est pourquoi, l’impact sur le public est très fort, la participation du public est vivement requise. Si l’expérience du protestantisme se fait de manière solitaire, la redéfinition de l’homme protestant doit se faire à l’aide du public pour Welch; la performance devant le public devient ainsi une technique de redéfinition à la fois du contenu et du théâtre. Ophelia Byrne considère que l’Irlande du Nord est entrée dans une nouvelle ère, post-conflit, annonciatrice de changements : « it is perhaps only now as Northern Ireland is beginning to move away from conflict that plays like this can perhaps be staged here, and that there is the space for them to emerge. » (Welch 69). Il est désormais possible d’inventer de nouvelles normes théâtrales inspirées de divers mouvements et théories pour le XXIème siècle en Irlande du Nord ; c’est pourquoi ces pièces expérimentales qui s’inscrivent au carrefour d’un discours post-colonial et néo-brechtien foisonnent aujourd’hui.

The post Au Carrefour du didactisme brechtien et de la résistance post-coloniale : Protestants (2004) de Robert Welch appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Whenever I am asked about the Brazilian elections, people expect me to say something about the presidential run. It is the only election to which I am entitled to participate as a Brazilian living abroad. But it is only one of five choices voters had to make (voting is mandatory). Every four years for the last 26 Brazilians have voted for state governor and state legislature, a third of the senate, and the 513 representatives in congress. It has been this way since the end of the long and painful transition to democracy that started in 1974 with a warning by the general in charge that it was to be “slow, gradual and safe.”

The key to the safety to which the general alluded is the election of the next congress. Bear this in mind: even though the election in two rounds guarantee the president will get more than 50% of the vote, not a single president since 1990 has had more than a hundred representatives from his own party elected to congress. As a result, every presidency since then has been based on an intricate patchwork of heterogeneous alliances to govern. The relative shortcomings of each of the six administrations since 1990, besides their ideological leanings, are to a great extent the result of a majority which has always been – whether prone to corruption or not – very conservative in congress.

Consider, for instance, the two caucuses primarily identified with conservative causes. The so-called ruralistas or agro-business caucus (a modern packaging for the old landowning class that once ruled the country) and conservative evangelicals are together worth at least 235 votes in congress. Different assessments give the Bancada Ruralista between 159 to 227 congressmen and eleven senators. Calculations for the Bancada Evangélica vary from 73 to sixty-six members of the caucus in congress and three senators. Other notorious right-wing special interests’ groups that have had an important role in specific votes in congress are the Bancada da Bala [“Bullet Caucus”] with 11 members that defend the right to bear arms and the interests of the weapon industry and the bancada da Bola [“Football Caucus”] with 7 members that defend the interests of the national and state soccer federations.

These caucuses, especially the first two mentioned, guarantee that the federal administration, regardless of who wins the election, will do nothing substantially different about land distribution, forest conservation, and the rights of indigenous peoples, women or the LGBT community. The political power of the agro-business caucus has its source in the boom in the international commodities market causing a rapid expansion throughout the flatlands of the Midwest on to the north of the country and the encroachment of large properties growing crops such as soy beans and sugarcane. Evangelicals have, with one notable exception,[1] increased their presence in congress after each election in tandem with the fact that, according to the 2010 census, Protestants make up 42.3 million Brazilians or 22.2% of the population, up from a mere 9% in 1990. They are not as homogeneous a group as most people think: evangelicals make up 65% of these Protestants and are split into numerous antagonistic groups – internal conflict divides even the most powerful of the evangelicals, Assembléia de Deus, with 8.5 million members spread all over the country. They all tend to agree, however, on seeing women’s reproductive rights and LGBT marriage and adoption rights as threats to the foundation of society.

Even though almost half of congress seems to get elected on these platforms, too much proximity with the causes identified with these two groups may hurt a campaign for executive office. The agro-business politicians face rejection outside their political turfs and have become infamous for their positions against campaigns that intend to curb modern slavery or widespread logging while religious and class prejudice compounded with rejection of moralistic conservative activism curtail the political appeal of evangelicals beyond their constituencies. This is a good point of entry into some of the puzzles of this year’s presidential campaign.

After the promise of excitement, for the sixth consecutive time, the two candidates with most votes were candidates from PT and PSDB. Disappointment followed the thrill around Marina Silva, who started this campaign as vice-president in the ticket led by Eduardo Campos until he died in a plane crash in July. She ran a shorter campaign with much less time on TV – since mid August one hour of prime time Radio and TV is reserved daily to all the candidates according to the number and size of the parties that support them. But it is undeniable that, after a sudden rise to first place in most opinion polls, Marina Silva frustrated those who thought she could change the course of the election. Neither did she appeal to a more conservative electorate nor could she differentiate herself from PT, the political party in which she built most of her career. The beginning of her fall might have been when Marina Silva backpedaled on support for gay marriage after she was sternly admonished in a series of tweets by pastor Silas Malafaia. She ended up in third with more or less the same support she had four years ago. Silas Malafaia is one of a few US-style televangelists that vie for the leadership of the powerful Assembléia de Deus, organization for the most part under control of 77-year old pastor José Wellington Bezerra da Costa. The candidate for president officially supported by the elders of Assembléia de Deus was pastor Everaldo Pereira, who received a meager 0.75% of the vote.

Most major Brazilian politicians nowadays play a cynical game of mixed messages that try to please the religious electorate without seeming too close to it. Their powerful sway over an important parcel of the working class urban vote explains the uncanny number of “thanks to the Lord,” for example, in the final remarks during presidential debates. Shady alliances practically guarantee the ruralistas will support whoever wins the election and will be duly rewarded for doing so. Too much proximity with these groups during the campaign may hurt the chances of a candidate running for presidency, governorship or even the senate, but, once the election cycle is over, those 235 plus votes will be awaiting at the negotiating table.

Contrary to the cliché in conversations among disenchanted Brazilians, who say politicians are all “farinha do mesmo saco” [flour coming from the same sack], politicians and political parties are quite different. The five democratically elected presidents [Fernando Collor, Itamar Franco, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Lula and Dilma Roussef] differ widely in style and substance. Inflation went from 80% a month in 1990 to 6% a year in 2014. The minimum wage was around $100 a month in the 1990s and is now well above $300, which means that one of the most unequal countries in the world has finally done something to reverse a perverse trend of income concentration that had been imposed with the 1964 military coup. But the nature of the accomplishments and shortcomings of these administrations can only be properly understood taking into account the elephant in the room: they all dealt with a reactionary congress, some to their advantage, others, not. This political system seems to have exhausted its capacity for meaningful reform and this perhaps explains the explosion of diffused dissatisfaction that shook the streets of every major city in Brazil in June 2013.

Another cliché claims that whatever is going on “could be happening in Brazil only.” But political crises caused by the seeming incapacity of systems of representative democracy to present real alternatives to the fatalistic mantras of financial capitalism are now the rule rather than the exception all over the world. It is hard not to notice the stark contrast between fierce campaigns led by doggedly opposing political groups and administrations that, by and large, offer more or less the same with slight changes in emphasis. The will to project political antagonism between the three major candidates this year did not obscure that all of them carefully followed scripts written by marketing professionals, who “sell” a left-leaning candidate this cycle and a conservative one in the next. Much is made to obscure differences in new proposals for education and healthcare as well as continuities in anti-poverty and anti-hunger as well as economic policies that point to a complaisant acceptance of the conservative political status quo. While the conservative media insist that corruption is a matter of specific politicians appropriating public funds for themselves, the political system becomes universally corrupt because powerful private economic interests hold a tight grasp on the legislative and the executive on federal, state and municipal levels. The system becomes increasingly domesticated and choices narrow down to different versions of more of the same. The malaise is palpable and fuels the prospect of a Berlusconi-style political apparition or the return of neo-liberal orthodoxy to power.

The angst that permeates the election cycle this year can be summed up by one of the most popular slogans of the 2013 demonstrations: “Contra tudo o que está aí” (Against Everything That’s There). A quick retrospective of those events is necessary. The protests led by a group of daring young activists in São Paulo against inefficient costly public transportation were galvanized by the brutality of the police repression documented in traditional and social media. Suddenly, millions joined loosely organized demonstrations ranging from far-left anarchists to conservatives willing to bring back the military to power. Myriad groups chanted slogans against the World Cup, against the media conglomerate Rede Globo, against the police, against the homophobic congressman Marco Feliciano, against president Dilma Rousseff, against state or municipal authorities. Individuals held placards in favor of causes such as the sterilization of pets, “the army of Jesus,” the end of gun control and road tolls. The only slogans more or less universally accepted were either vague such as Vem pra rua (“Come to the Streets!”) or anti-politics such as Sem partido (“No Political Parties!”). Later at night the customary brutality of the military police was met with violent resistance. Media pundits feverishly tried to give the unrest a definitive meaning and politicians were shaken out of their complacency and scrambled to quiet somehow the unrest. For example, in one of his most pathetic moments, political commentator Arnaldo Jabor appeared on the prime time TV news first to excoriate the protesters as spoiled middle-class brats and then a few days later to hail them as great patriots about to change the country. The media was only truly outraged when some of their own were victims of the violence, first by the police and then by the protesters. A discourse was built around the idea of a clear-cut separation between small left-wing bands of evil-spirited but disciplined vandals bent on the subversion of the order and the good folk that made the bulk of the demonstrations.

Ultimately, fare increases were cancelled and in some places prices were even reduced. Then, an infamous corrupt politician was sent to jail. After a long silence and relative complicity with statewide repressive measures, the federal government decided to propose a thorough reform of the political system to be decided by officials elected specifically for that purpose. Outraged reformers suddenly became savvy pragmatists and vice-versa and absolute nothing substantive came out of it. It seems clear now that the only palpable result of those demonstrations “against everything that’s there” was not a Brazilian Berlusconi, but an even more conservative congress: the equivalent of throwing gasoline to try to put out a fire.

The post Beyond the Elections: Politics in Brazil appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Sempre que me perguntam sobre as eleições no Brasil, as pessoas esperam comentários sobre a disputa presidencial. É a única eleição em que posso participar como brasileiro vivendo no exterior. Mas é apenas uma de cinco escolhas que os eleitores têm que enfrentar. A cada quatro anos os brasileiros votam para governador, deputado estadual, um terço do senado e deputado federal. Assim tem sido nos últimos 26 anos, desde o fim da longa transição para a democracia que começou em 1974 com uma resalva do general em questão de que ela seria “lenta, gradual e segura.”

A chave para a segurança de que falava o general e a eleição do congresso nacional. Para entender claramente o que estou dizendo, é preciso ter em mente que, ainda que a eleição em dois turnos garanta que o presidente eleito tenha sempre mais de 50% dos votos válidos, nenhum presidente eleito desde 1990 teve mais que cem deputados de seu partido no congresso. Por causa disso todos os presidentes desde então governaram com base em uma complicada rede de alianças heterogêneas. As limitações relativas dos seis governos eleitos desde 1990, além das tendências ideológicas de cada um, se explicam em grande medida como resultado de um maioria no congresso que é sempre – independente de tendências à corrupção ou não – muito conservadora.

Consideremos, por exemplo, duas bancadas identificadas com causas conservadoras. Os ruralistas ou a bancada do agro-negócio (uma embalagem supostamente moderna para os descendentes das velhas oligarquias latifundiárias que já comandaram o país) e os evangélicos conservadores juntos tinham pelo menos 235 votos no congresso. Cálculos diferentes dão à Bancada Ruralista entre 159 e 227 deputados e onze senadores. Com respeito à Bancada Evangélica as avaliações variam entre 73 e 66 membros no congresso e três senadores. Outras bancadas conservadoras que eventualmente aparecem com destaque em votações e em comissões no congresso são a Bancada da Bala com 11 membros que defendem os interesses da indústria de armas e a bancada da Bola com 7 membros que defendem os interesses das federações de futebol e dos clubes. Esses votos, principalmente os que vêm das primeiras duas bancadas mencionadas, são a garantia de que o governo federal, não importa quem ganhe as eleições, fará muito pouco de substancial sobre reforma agrária, desmatamento e os direitos dos povos indígenas, das mulheres e da comunidade LGBT.

O poder político da bancada ruralista tem sua fonte no grande crescimento do Mercado internacional de commodities que ocasionou uma rápida expansão pelo planalto central e o norte do país de latifúndios produtores de soja e cana-de-açúcar. Nas últimas eleições os evangélicos, com uma exceção significativa,[1] aumentam sua presença no congresso a cada eleição em sintonia com o crescimento dos protestantes que foram de 9% em 1990 para 22,22% da população brasileira, totalizando 42.3 milhões. Esse não é um grupo tão homogêneo como muita gente pensa: os evangélicos são apenas 65% dos protestantes e estão divididos em vários grupos antagônicos – conflitos internos dividem até mesmo a Assembléia de Deus, igreja mais poderosa com 8.5 milhões de membros por todo o país. Todos os evangélicos parecem estar de acordo, entretanto, em imaginar os direitos reprodutivos das mulheres e o casamento e adoção de crianças por pessoas do mesmo sexo uma ameaça às fundações da sociedade.

Ainda que quase a metade do congresso seja eleita com base nessas plataformas, uma proximidade excessiva com causas identificadas com os dois grupos pode prejudicar uma campanha por um cargo executivo. Políticos ruralistas encaram forte rejeição fora dos seus redutos políticos e têm péssima reputação por combaterem tentativas de reprimir a escravidão ou o desmatamento enquanto preconceitos religiosos e de classe contra os evangélicos pioram por causa da rejeição do ativismo conservador moralista reduzem em muito seu apelo além do seu eleitorado. Está aí uma boa maneira de tentar decifrar um dos mistérios da campanha presidencial deste ano.

Após uma promessa de novidade, pela sexta vez consecutiva os dois candidatos com maior número de votos foram os do PT e do PSDB. Desapontamento acompanhou o frenesi sobre Marina Silva, que começou essa campanha como vice-presidente na chapa de Eduardo Campos até que ele morresse num acidente de avião em julho. Marina fez uma campanha mais curta e com menos tempo de televisão – desde meados de agosto reserve-se uma hora do horário nobre de todas as rádios e canais de televisão para propaganda política dividida de acordo com o número e o tamanho dos partidos de cada coligação. É inegável, entretanto, que após uma ascenção meteórica nas pesquisas de opinião, Marina Silva frustrou aqueles que pensaram que ela poderia mudar o curso das eleições ao se mostrar incapaz de atrair o eleitorado mais conservador sem alienar sua base de apoio formada por eleitores de esquerda insatisfeitos com os rumos tomados pelo PT, partido no qual Marina fez a maior parte da sua carreira. O começo do seu fracasso pode ter sido o momento em que Marina Silva voltou atrás em compromissos de campanha pelo apoio ao casamento entre homossexuais após ter sido severamente advertida pelo pastor pastor Silas Malafaia em uma série de tweets. Marina terminou em terceiro lugar, mais ou menos com o mesmo número de votos.  Silas Malafaia é um televangelista à moda estadounidense que luta pelo controle da poderosa Assembléia de Deus, organização em sua maior parte controlada pelo pastor José Wellington Bezerra da Costa de 77 anos. O candidato apoiado oficialmente pela Assembléia de Deus era o pastor Everaldo Pereira, que recebeu apenas 0.75% do voto.

A maioria dos políticos brasileiros hoje em dia faz um jogo cínico de mensagens mais ou menos indiretas que tentam agradar ao eleitorado religioso sem parecer demasiadamente próximo dele. A força desse eleitorado entre a classe trabalhadora explica o incomum número de graças ao senhor que, por exemplo, aparecem no final dos debates presidenciais. Alianças em manobras de bastidores praticamente garantem que os ruralistas darão apoio a qualquer um que ganhar as eleições e serão bem recompensados por isso. Uma proximidade excessiva com esses grupos durante a campanha pode prejudicar as chances de um candidato a presidência, governo estadual, ou mesmo ao senado, mas, ao fim do ciclo eleitoral, os mais de 235 votos no congress estarão aguardando o novo presidente na mesa de negociações.

Estou completamente em desacordo com o clichê que diz que politicos são todos “farinha do mesmo saco”. Os cinco presidents eleitos democraticamente [Fernando Collor, Itamar Franco, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Lula e Dilma Roussef] diferem muito em estilo e substância. A inflação foi de 80% ao mês em 1990 para 6% ao ano em 2014. O salário mínimo estava em torno de $100 nos anos 90 e agora está acima de $300, o que significa que um dos países mais desiguais do mundo finalmente dispôs-se a fazer algo para reverter a perversa concentração de renda que foi imposta desde o golpe militar de 1964. Mas a natureza das conquistas e dos limites desses governos só pode ser compreendida levando-se em conta esse pequeno imenso detalhe que raramente figura nas conversas entre brasileiros: todos eles lidaram com um congresso reacionário, alguns a seu favor, outros em seu detrimento. Esse sistema político parece ter exaurido sua capacidade de produzir reformas substanciais e isso talvez explique a explosão de insatisfação difusa que tomou as ruas de todas as cidades brasileiras em junho de 2013.

Discordo de um outro clichê que diz que o que quer que esteja acontecendo “só poderia acontecer no Brasil”. As crises causadas pela aparente incapacidade dos sistemas de democracia representativa de apresentar alternativas reais aos mantras do capitalismo financeiro são antes a regra do que a exceção no século XXI. Não é difícil perceber o contraste gritante entre campanhas eleitorais ferozes entre grupos políticos polarizados e programas de governo que oferecem mais ou menos a mesma coisa com pequenas diferenças de ênfase. A vontade de projetar antagonismo entre os três candidatos com chances e vitória este ano não pode obscurecer o fato de que os três tentaram seguir scripts cuidadosamente escritos por profissionais de marketing que “vendem” um candidato progressista hoje e um candidato conservador amanhã. Faz-se muito para disfarçar diferenças entre propostas para a educação e saúde assim como as continuidades em políticas contra a fome e a pobreza assim como políticas econômicas que se baseiam numa aceitação complacente do status quo capitalista. Enquanto a mídia insiste que a corrupção é uma questão de políticos se apropriando de fundos públicos, o sistema político torna-se universalmente corrupto por causa de interesses econômicos que mantém controle do legislativo e do executivo nas esferas federal, estadual e municipal. O sistema se domestica cada vez mais e as escolhas se resumem e versões ligeiramente diferentes do mesmo. O mal estar é palpável e cresce a possibilidade da aparição política de algum Berlusconi ou o retorno da ortodoxia neoliberal ao poder.

A angústia que perpassou grande parte do ciclo eleitoral deste ano pode resumir-se em um dos mais populares slogans das manifestações de 2013: “Contra tudo o que está aí”. Faz-se necessária uma rápida retrospectiva dos eventos do ano passado. Os protestos organizados por um grupo ousado de jovens ativistas de São Paulo contra o alto-custo e ineficiência do transporte público ganharam uma nova dimensão com a brutalidade policial documentada pela mídia tradicional e pelas mídias sociais. De repente milhões se juntaram a protestos organizados de forma difusa por grupos de iam da extrema esquerda anarquista aos conservadores dispostos a trazer de volta os militares ao poder. Grupos os mais variados criavam gritos de guerra contra a Copa do Mundo, contra a Rede Globo, contra a polícia, contra o deputado homofóbico Marco Feliciano, contra a presidenta Dilma Rousseff, contra autoridades estaduais ou municipais. Indivíduos isolados seguravam cartazes a favor de causas como a esterilização dos animais domésticos, “o exército de Jesus” ou o fim do controle às armas de fogo e dos pedágios. Os únicos slogans aceitos de forma mais ou menos universal eram aqueles que primavam por serem vagos como “Vem pra rua” ou anti-política como “Sem partido”. Mais tarde à noite a costumeira brutalidade policial encontrava resistência violenta. Especialistas na mídia tentavam freneticamente dar um sentido definitivo a agitação social generalizada e a classe política saiu da sua complacência habitual para tentar aplacar a ira pública. Em um dos seus momentos mais patéticos, o comentarista Arnaldo Jabor apareceu no horário nobre criticando asperamente os manifestantes caracterizados como piralhos mimados de classe média e, poucos dias depois, celebrando os mesmos como grandes patriotas capazes de mudra o país. A mídia se indignava seletivamente com a violência quando esta atingia um dos seus, primeiro pela ação da polícia e depois dos manifestantes. Um discurso se construiu em torno de uma separação clara entre pequenos grupos organizados de vândalos mal-intencionados dispostos a tudo para subverter a ordem e a boa gente que era maioria nas manifestações.

Aumentos de passagens foram cancelados e em algumas cidades preços foram reduzidos; um político condenado por corrupção foi mandado para a prisão. Após um longo silêncio e relativa cumplicidade com as medidas repressivas tomadas pelos governos estaduais, o governo federal decidiu propor uma completa reforma do sistema político a ser proposta por uma constituinte eleita especificamente para esse propósito. Reformistas ultrajados de repente se transformaram em pragmáticos cautelosos e vice-versa e nada de substancial foi feito. Até agora parece que o único resultado palpável dos protestos “contra tudo o que está aí” não foi um Berlusconi brasileiro, mas um congresso ainda mais reacionário: o equivalente de atirar gasolina para tentar apagar o fogo.

The post Sobre Eleições Brasileiras appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

It was my first exposure to a nationalist rhetoric, the business of nation-building, even if the nation in question was still a part of a larger country. I was, as an Anglophone, not a part of the narrative, not really. And even as a young kid, I recognized some of the holes in the story; I still have a clear picture in my head of a drawing of a demure-looking peasant girl, one of the “filles du rois” who were brought over to New France to marry the men who were here. We had been taught about how hard life was in New France, and what orphan girl from France would not relish the chance to come here, marry a man she had never met, in a new land?

And what of the Natives? We dutifully made our model longhouses, learned where the various tribes lived, but never spoke of the taking of Native lands, only of the English taking of French lands once the Seven Year War was over. We learned about Louis Riel only because he stood up to the English and spoke French and the fight was framed around linguistic rights. Nowhere were the stories of Residential schools, or of the Catholic missionaries and other representatives often violently repressing Native religion and spirituality.

All that changed in 1990, with what is known as The Oka Crisis. Issues of race and class and language came to head during the crisis. Building a golf course and condos on sacred burial ground. Blockades that prevented suburbanites from going to their jobs in the city. White people throwing stones at women, children, and the elderly. Hearing my parents and grandparents grumble about how much the Natives “already were getting out of our hard-earned taxes.” I was about to be a teenager, and I couldn’t understand why anyone would be so callous as to build a golf course over (what I understood to be) a cemetery.

The 1990s were a time of great tensions between the Francophone and the Anglophone and Allophone communities. Laws changed, and there were battles over store signs, lawsuits over someone in a store saying “Hi” instead of “Bonjour” when addressing a patron in a store… Our high school had a French side and an English side, and there would be brawls monthly after school. A separatist government was elected into power at the provincial level and as the Official Opposition at the federal level. Friends and I were often greeted with graffiti or taunts of “Anglos Go Home” when walking around downtown Montreal. When the 1995 Referendum came, it was my first opportunity to vote in my life: I voted against separation.

The Premier of Quebec blamed “money and the ethnic vote” after the loss. By money, he really meant the Anglophones. It was under that atmosphere that I decided that I was going to attend a Francophone university… to study English. My Anglo friends warned me that I would face hostility there, that I would be miserable, and that I was wasting my time going to a French university when there were perfectly good English universities I could attend instead. Friends who thought themselves so much more worldly than I because they had traveled overseas, but would never think to visit anywhere in Quebec other than Montreal.

College is often an utopic time for a youth, where you come into your own as a person. It was no different for me. Despite the warnings of my friends and family, I loved my five years in Sherbrooke. I studied Canadian and Québécois literature in a truly bilingual setting, made friends with people from across the province, and in fact from French-speaking communities from all over Canada, and learned a great deal about Quebec, its culture, and its people. My people. Nationalism became at once more problematized, but also more sympathetic to me than it ever had before.  I learned more about La grande noirceur, where the political class and the Church worked together to keep Quebec in “a Dark Age”, and about the Quiet Revolution that followed in the 1960s. I read radical Québécois literature alongside nationalist English-Canadian works, in an environment that challenged my thinking on a host of issues around race, class, and language.

Of course, all good things must come to an end, and starting a PhD on the other side of the country is a good way to realize that your bilingual bubble of goodwill isn’t shared. Resentment out West for the special treatment Quebec was seen to be getting. Resentment by the French populations of Western Canada for the erasure of their presence and identity. Realizing that most people didn’t care about Canadian literature. Going to a postcolonial conference and being dismissed because, as an eminent scholar put it to me, “I don’t read theory in French.” Seeing the colonial mentalities everywhere, but still especially in myself.

Move to the United States. I grew up in a racially homogeneous area, in a country with a different history of racial strife. But in the States, I realized how fraught my ignorance of the history and significance of race in particular really was. Teach at a Hispanic-Serving Institution. Teach at an HBCU. Teach at a regional state university in one of the poorest rural regions in the country. Watch, listen, measure my reactions. Get on Twitter and diversify my timeline in a way that stretches my thinking on race, class, gender, and intersectionality.

I tell this story because it has been less than five years since I’ve taken the time to think about being a body within a colonial and colonialist setting, even still today. How my students are also navigating through the messages they are getting about their place, their position, their due, and their view. I am an educator, getting an education, undoing another education, making another.

The post A Colonial Miseducation: Language & Unmaking Canadian Identity appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Faltando dias para a eleição presidencial, no dia 5 de outubro, com tantos temas em jogo (veja aqui um resumo), a novela política e ideológica do Brasil segue em suspenso. Ao invés de entrar nesses debates, discutirei uma nova política em nível menor, o do município de São Paulo. Os eventos atuais na cidade me levaram a considerar o seguinte: o que acontece a uma sociedade quando a urbanização está completamente orientada para o lucro? Se houver desenvolvimento social do espaço urbano, como será?

Durante a minha última estadia na cidade, entre maio e agosto de 2014, algo curioso ocorreu. O prefeito de São Paulo, Fernando Haddad (PT)  criou o Plano Diretor (agora referido como PDE, “E” significa “estratégico”), um complemento ao Estatuto da Cidade (2001). Na verdade, o PDE está longe de ser um esforço individual por parte do prefeito. Em vez disso, foi resultado de mais de nove meses de debate, envolvendo 114 audiências públicas, incluindo diretamente mais de 25 mil moradores. O plano de desenvolvimento urbano, criado em 30 de junho de 2014, foi sancionado um mês depois. Com um mandato de dezesseis anos para “humanizar” o desenvolvimento urbano, valorizar o meio ambiente, aliar  o conceito de “função social “à urbanização, além de apoiar “iniciativas culturais”, a experiência do PDE em São Paulo merece a atenção de todos.

Sim, chegamos a esse ponto. Por gerações, desde o boom da industrialização e da grande onda modernista, uma montanha-russa financeira  que empurrou São Paulo ao centro econômico no início do século 20, a cidade não dispunha de nenhum plano sério. A urbanização ocorreu em sua maior parte em função da especulação imobiliária, com milhões de deslocados, residentes migrantes improvisando espaços residenciais e comerciais, bem como serviços básicos, como eletricidade, água e transporte. São Paulo tem tomado forma, como resultado de acordos de curto prazo, amplificados por uma infra-estrutura maciça dos meios de comunicação comerciais, e não por  planos sócio-geográficos sustentáveis.

Photo Credit: Derek Pardue

Por que o PDE agora? Houve uma mudança de cima para baixo e o contrário também. Ora, Haddad tem sido comparativamente mais proativo do que prefeitos progressistas anteriores, tais como Marta Suplicy (2001-2004) e Luiza Erundina (1989-1992). Em retrospectiva, as administrações da cidade de São Paulo têm abertamente apoiado o desenvolvimento “wild west” combinado às forças policiais repressivas para controlar os protestos populares. O Partido dos Trabalhadores ou qualquer partido com agenda similar raramente ganha em São Paulo. Talvez, a mudança mais importante tenha sido a atitude e e a organização de base (grassroots) em torno da questão da moradia. Ocupar e reaproveitar prédios abandonados para moradia e centros culturais tornaram-se práticas comuns nos dias de hoje, especialmente em bairros centrais, mas também em alguns bairros da periferia. Grupos como FLM (Frente de Luta pela Moradia) e MTST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem-Teto) têm sido protagonistas na sensibilização para as questões cada vez mais urgentes relacionadas à moradia e à especulação imobiliária.

O PDE é uma nova tentativa, robusta, para reestabelecer o “social” no desenvolvimento urbano. A especulação imobiliária é um jogo de baixo ou nenhum risco para a elite que tem o capital. Ela se beneficia não só da  mídia publicitária,, cheia de panfletos de sonhos distribuídos em quase todos os semáforos, de outdoors em avenidas e rodovias, e propaganda na Internet, mas também frequentemente conta com o apoio do estado. Uma ala dos protestos contra a Copa do Mundo criticou precisamente as conexões entre o desenvolvimento do megaevento e o aumento da especulação imobiliária.

Não é que as administrações políticas dos últimos anos não tenham levado  em conta o planejamento urbano. Órgãos burocráticos, como EMURB (Empresa Municipal de Urbanização de São Paulo) já existem há décadas. Criada em 1971, a Emurb usa fundos públicos para a renovação de edifícios históricos, como o Edifício Martinelli, uma marca da indústria paulista moderna e gestão de elite. No entanto, nunca houve qualquer menção ao desenvolvimento sustentável e muito pouca ação no desenvolvimento de moradias populares, além dos projetos habitacionais distantes, que muitas vezes demonstraram o pior do populismo: infra-estrutura de má qualidade, resultando em políticas rápidos e escândalos subsequentes. Em 2009, a EMURB foi dividida em duas empresas públicas. A SMDU (Secretaria Municipal de Desenvolvimento Urbano) é a agência mais pertinente. Em maio de 2013, a SMDU foi reorganizadoa em face de um potencial PDE.

Em um mapa novo de São Paulo, o governo dividiu a cidade em setores para destacar os objetivos específicos do PDE. As categorias de desenvolvimento sustentável e igualitário propostas abordaram o problema em nível micro (bairro) e macro (a cidade como um todo). Por exemplo, território e sociedade se unem numa das iniciativas, conhecida como ZEIS (Zonas Especiais de Interesse Sociais). Na sua versão atual, o projeto prevê que a cidade irá utilizar fundos públicos para desenvolver até 33 quilômetros quadrados, sessenta por cento dos quais para famílias com renda inferior a 3 salários mínimos (cerca de 2.100 reais por mês). Em contraste à habitação pública anterior, esta construção é projetada não para a periferia, mas para o centro da cidade e bairros históricos, como Bela Vista, Brás, Santa Ifigênia, Campos Elíseos e Pari. Além disso, semelhante a um conjunto de leis de urbanização em Nova York, o PDE exige “cotas de solidariedade,” que estipula que qualquer proprietário (pessoa física ou jurídica) de uma propriedade com uma área superior a 20.000 metros quadrados deve dedicar 10% do espaço de habitação “social” em conformidade com o Estatuto da Cidade. Este espaço deve ser no local ou numa área do mesmo bairro.

Mudanças inspiradoras, mas será que pegam?

No Brasil, a crença na lei é sempre ligada à fiscalização, o processo complexo de regulação. Como foi observado várias vezes nos últimos dois meses, por Raquel Rolnik, em seu blog, há atualmente uma desconexão entre o PDE e a realidade de aplicação da lei. Como alertado anteriormente, os ativistas certamente sabem em o que o PDE implica, uma vez que eles e os seus representantes contribuíram para sua formulação. No entanto, o mesmo não pode ser dito para a polícia ou, infelizmente, muitos juízes, pois eles continuam a ignorar ou recusar-se a aceitar o conceito de função social da cidade. Para os investidores imobiliários, a “função social” do planejamento urbano representado pelo novo PDE é um dreno no lucro e um obstáculo injustificado ao desenvolvimento. Esta minoria tem muitos porta-vozes à sua disposição para culpar a cidade por causar especulação. Ironia brutal de braços com fingida ignorância.

A visão do Plano Diretor é que uma cidade deve ser organizada como um direito humano e não um recurso econômico. A cidade não é como diamantes ou tecnologia informática. Para o governo, esse tipo de desenvolvimento empreserial é de importância secundária. Em vez disso, a função principal de gestão da cidade deve ser a alocação e regulação do espaço como um gesto de contribuir para o bem comum. Dado o fato de que a maioria de nós vive em cidades e que esta tendência deve se intensificar, todos nós temos algo em jogo no tocante ao que vai acontece em São Paulo.

The post Lições de São Paulo: Uma Mudança Merecida na Política Urbana appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

With only a few days left before Brazil’s presidential election on October 5th, and so many important social issues under scrutiny (see this review, for example), the political and ideological novela of Brazil remains a cliffhanger. Instead of prediction and pontification on the federal level, I will discuss a policy turn on a somewhat smaller scale, the municipal level of São Paulo. Current events in the huge city provoked me to consider the following: what happens to a society when urbanization is completely driven by profit? If there is to be any social development of urban space, what might that look like?

During my last stay from May to August of 2014 something unusual occurred, the mayor of São Paulo created the “Directive Plan” (Plano Diretor, referred to for the rest of this essay as PD), a new complement to the City Statute (2001). In fact, it was far from a solo effort on the part of Mayor Fernando Haddad (PT). Rather, over nine months of debate, involving 114 public discussions (audiências públicas) including directly more than 25,000 residents, the urban development plan was created on June 30, 2014 and signed into law on July 30th. With a mandate of sixteen years to “humanize” urban development, valorize the environment, bring urbanization more in line with “social function,” and to support “cultural initiatives,” the PD experiment in São Paulo deserves everyone’s notice.

Yes, we’ve gotten to that point. For generations, ever since the boom of industrialization and the great modernist wave of roller coaster finances thrust São Paulo into the economic limelight in the early 20th century, the city has lacked a serious plan. Urbanization has occurred for the most part in function of real estate speculation with millions of displaced, migrant residents improvising residential and commercial spaces as well as basic services such as electricity, water and transportation. São Paulo has taken shape as a result of short-term deals amplified by a massive infrastructure of commercial media rather than sustained socio-geographical plans.

Why the PD now? There has been a change from above and below. Namely, Haddad has been comparatively more proactive than previous labor party or progressive mayors, i.e. Marta Suplicy (2001-2004) and Luiza Erundina (1989-1992). Taken overall, São Paulo city administrations have overtly supported “wild west” development combined with repressive police forces to control popular protests. The Worker’s Party or anything like it rarely wins in São Paulo. Perhaps, a more important change has been the grassroots attitude and organization around the issue of housing or moradia. Occupying and repurposing abandoned buildings for residency and cultural centers have become commonplace these days, especially in downtown districts but also in some periphery neighborhoods. Groups such as FLM (The Struggle for Housing Front) and MTST (Homeless Worker’s Movement) have been central players in raising awareness of the increasingly urgent issues regarding housing and real estate speculation.

The PD is a new, robust attempt to reestablish the “social” in urban development. Real estate speculation is a game of low to no risk for the elite who have the capital. They benefit from not only media propaganda, filled with dreamscape flyers distributed at almost every traffic light, billboards on avenues and highways, and internet sidebar advertisement, but also frequently state support. One wing of the anti-World Cup protests targeted precisely the connections between mega-event development and the rise of real estate speculation.

It is not that the political administrations of years past did not take into account urban planning. Bureaucratic bodies such as EMURB (Empresa Municipal de Urbanização de São Paulo / Municipal Company of São Paulo Urbanization) have existed for decades. Created in 1971, EMURB’s objectives were to use public funds in the service of renovating historic buildings such as the Martinelli skyscraper, a landmark of modern São Paulo industry and elite management. However, there was never any mention of sustainable development and very little in popular housing development beyond far-flung housing projects, which often demonstrated the worst side of populism, shoddy infrastructure resulting in quick political gain and eventual  scandal. In 2009, EMURB was divided into two public companies. The SMDU (Secretaria Municipal de Desenvolvimento Urbano / The Municipal Secretary of Urban Development) is the more pertinent agency. In May of 2013 the SMDU was reorganized in prediction of a potential PD ordinance.

In a newly designed map of São Paulo, the government has divided the city into sectors to highlight the specific goals of the PD. The categories of proposed sustainable and egalitarian development approach the problem from both micro (neighborhood) and macro (the city as whole) levels. For example, territory and society come together in one of the initiatives, referred to as ZEIS (Zonas Especiais de Interesse Social / Special Zones of Social Interest). In its current version, the project stipulates that the city will use public funds to develop up to 33 square kilometers (approx. 12.75 square miles), sixty percent of which is for families whose income is below 3 minimum wages (roughly 900 US$ a month). In contrast to previous public housing, this construction is designed not to be relegated to the periphery but rather be part of downtown and historic neighborhoods such as Bela Vista, Brás, Santa Ifigênia, Campos Eliséus and Pari. In addition, similar to a set of urbanization laws in New York City, the PD calls for a “solidarity quota,” which stipulates that any owner (corporate or individual) of a property unit with an area above 20,000 square meters (approx. 215,000 square feet) must dedicate 10% of the space to “social” housing in compliance with the City Statute. This space must be located either in that construction site or in an area in the same district.

Inspiring changes but will they stick?

In Brazil, belief in the state and law is always posed in terms of fiscalização, the tricky process of policy regulation. As noted several times in the past two months by Raquel Rolnik in her watchdog blog, there is currently a disconnect between the PD and the grounded reality of law enforcement. As signaled above, the squatters and activists certainly know what the PD entails, since they and their representatives contributed to its formulation. However, the same cannot be said for the police or, unfortunately, many judges as they continue to ignore or refuse to accept the concept of the city’s social function. For real estate investors the “social function” of urban planning represented by the new PD is a drain on profit and an unwarranted obstacle to development. This cadre has plenty of mouthpieces at their disposal to blame the city for causing speculation. Brutal irony meets feigned ignorance.

The vision of the Plano Diretor is that a city must be organized as a human right not an economic resource. A city cannot be equated to diamonds or internet technology. For government, this sort of entrepreneurial development is of secondary importance. Rather, the primary function of city management should be the allocation and regulation of space as a contributing gesture towards the common good. Given the fact that the majority of us now live in cities and that this trend will only intensify, we all indeed have a stake in what happens in São Paulo. 

The post Lessons from São Paulo: A Deserved Shift in Urbanization Policy appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

There’s no never-again ending to their stories of displacement: From Congo to Burundi, from Iraq to Syria, From Darfur to Tripoli to Tunis, to New Haven.  They’ve had to flee persecution on foot, by boat, by air, moving under duress with the traumas of forced migration.  They are walking with scars, and yet they are marching, in protest of yet more violence near their new homes in Connecticut.  The struggle for justice can be as hard as trying to march on crutches. But every hop-step we take with another is a movement towards solidarity.

…

Last spring, sitting beside an Afghani grandmother whose name means Moon in Farsi at the Criterion Cinema, I got a taste of the beloved community Martin Luther King, Jr. envisioned.  Moon and I were among a group of IRIS clients and volunteers who went to a screening of “Girl Rising,” a documentary film about nine young women who were deprived of a basic education in their home countries.  It was Moon’s first American movie. She only speaks a few words of English.  When the tub of butter popcorn came around to her, she took a handful and then dropped the kernels in the cone shape she’d made of the movie flyer, a small, make-shift tub of her own—I should say our own.  Every few minutes, she would look at me and smile, pushing the cone-tub of popcorn towards me, saying khosh, khosh. I was not hungry, but I took the popcorn. I don’t know a word of Farsi, but I could tell khosh, khosh, means something like “Take, Eat.”

The following week, Moon came to participate in a cooking group for refugee women to pool their culinary skills using Connecticut Food Bank Food to prepare a meal to share together.

The food-bank item most left behind in the IRIS pantry, the iron-chef secret ingredient of the week, was artichokes.  “Ard shawqy,” a woman I’ll call Zeinab said, Arabic for “thorn of the earth,” I recognized.  I’d never learned the word for artichoke before.  But I’d learned earth, and I’d learned thorn, from my Uncle Latif, my dad’s brother, who taught me how to speak Arabic.

“Ma feesh ard shawqy fiy Eritrea, mish kidda?”  (“There are no artichokes in Eritrea, right?) I asked a woman I’ll call Aamina, one of the few Eritrean refugees with whom I can communicate.  I don’t speak a word of Tigrinya, but Aamina speaks the Arabic dialect most familiar to me: She lived in Sudan for nine years, and Sudanese Arabic sounds much like the Upper Egyptian accent of my dad’s side of the family.

Talking to Aamina is like going back to a place where I was from, a home that never was my home, in a language foreign and yet strangely native to me.  Talking thorns of the earth with Aamina is an inkling of what I imagine speaking phrases in Tigrinya must be like for her.  Though my experience growing up with an Egyptian father in an affluent suburb of Birmingham, Alabama is not comparable to Aamina’s coming of age as a refugee in Sudan, our disparate stories converge in the guttural cadences, the slang phrases, of the dialect we half know by heart.

“Aiwa, bas fiyha fiy Malta,” she told me, they have [artichokes] in Malta. It was the artichokes that got Aamina telling her migration story.  She’d spent her first nine years in Eritrea, the next nine in Sudan.  Then, like many Eritrean refugees, she crossed the desert by jeep to get to Libya.  From Tripoli, she took a boat to Malta.

We took a walk with Zeinab through the irises, opening wider by the day, in the garden outside the church kitchen we use for cooking group.  I saw a loose, half-built, empty bird’s nest in the crook of the limbs of small dogwood tree, and I took a few pictures with my phone.  Zeinab looked up, to the place higher in the tree where the sound of a bird was coming from.  “We can hear her, but we cannot see her,” she said.

Aamina was exploring another tree. “Shufty!,” she said, “Look! Beit al asfoor, house of the birds,” she said, showing me a complete nest holding three blue robin’s eggs.

I remembered, from my days of learning Arabic with my Uncle Latif in Alexandria, the root word for bird, safara, means to travel, journey.  My father, aunts and uncles have all passed away.  That day, Aamina and Zeinab helped me remember them. That day, we had journeyed from thorns of the earth to house of the birds.

We could have sat out there under the dogwood trees all day, but we were called inside.  It was time to eat.  The feast had been laid out on the table: spinach-potato latkes, cabbage-apple slaw, a cake and muffins made of the canned carrots that always get left behind in the food pantry.

On her way up the stairs, to the kitchen, I heard Moon whispering with each and every step, gingerly, B’ism allah al-rahman, al-raheem, “in the name of God, the most merciful, the most compassionate” the beginning of every Muslim prayer.

While the women were serving themselves, one of my fellow volunteers was putting the muffins she’d baked in Zip-lock bags for the ladies to take home to their families.  She was cutting the cake she’d made with the same batter, saying “Here, we eat from the same cake.”

We didn’t know what to do with the fennel leaves, so Zeinab put them in a vase of water at the center of the table next to a white flower Moon had improvised out of paper towels.  Our grace that day was B’ismallah ya rahman ya raheem, Amen.

IRIS Community Liaison Ashley Makar shares stories about refugees in her presentations to congregations and community groups. This piece is an excerpt of a sermon entitled “Making the Shapes of Justice,” which was published in full on the website of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Hartford: http://www.ushartford.com/sermons.html.

The post Refugees, Language, Family, and Cooking: Sermon Excerpt by Ashley Makar appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

[H]e was considered the foremost of authorities on the Mexicans of Texas.  Hank Harvey had been born in New York City some sixty years before.  He had gone to grade school there and then worked in a delicatessen to make some money so he could come down to his dreamland, Texas….  After he had come to Texas with only a few years schooling, he resolved to become an authority on Texas history and folklore.  In a few years he had read every book there was on the early history of Texas, it was said, and his fellow Texans accepted him as the Historical Oracle of the State.  There was a slight hitch, it is true.  Most early history books were written in Spanish, and K. Hank didn’t know the language.  However, nobody mentioned this, and it didn’t detract from Harvey’s glory.

—Américo Paredes, George Washington Gómez:  A Mexicotexan Novel

What, then, does the de-colonisation of culture actually mean:  the recuperation of an essential culture that existed before the historical moment of colonisation, or the idea of admitting different histories to a complex and syncretic present composed of cross-cultural transfigurations?

—Iain Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity

******

“We Americans,” Walt Whitman wrote in 1883, “have yet to really learn our own antecedents . . . Thus far, impress’d by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States have been fashion’d from the British Islands only . . . which is a very great mistake.”[1]  Whitman’s critique of the skewed understanding of the U.S. and of U.S. history viewed from the limited vantage point of the Northeastern seaboard remained pertinent well over a hundred years later. David J. Weber writing a history of the Spanish frontier of North America in the nineties found himself once again having to confront this seemingly intractable ideological stance. As he writes, “Although the United States has always been a multiethnic society most general histories of the nation have suggested that its colonial origins resided entirely in the thirteen English colonies.”[2] Little has changed in the intervening years. In fact, at no other time has the US turned its back on Latin America so long and so blatantly as today.

As a Latin American living in New England and teaching at Dartmouth College, it has been difficult if not impossible not to notice (and ponder) the intersection between colonial past and imperialist present that is so apparent here, and to which Whitman’s critique alludes. The “new” in New England of course refers us back to a colonial history still visible today in the quaint British-style towns with their “village green” and churches mapped onto indigenous cultures. The enormous pines that were cut down in the eighteenth century to make masts for the British Royal Navy have been replaced by forests of smaller, second or third generation growth trees, reminding the newcomer that the “new” also refers to a new understanding of nature.  The gloomy forests of long ago have given way to a “managed,” instrumentalized landscape.  The indigenous presence, erased from the landscape and re-situated on the margins of this society, has been displaced onto the symbols of the “college on the hill” where I teach:  as the kneeling Native American receiving “the Book” from a man of learning who occupies a central position (still central today, alas), and as the much-disputed “Indians” sign of the football team still adamantly worn by some students who mistake insult for resistance to change—or perhaps, even worse, intend it.

The College’s biblical VOX CLAMANTIS IN DESERTO voices Dartmouth’s initial mission.  By turning existing indigenous cultures into a wilderness, it reproduces Columbus’s gesture three hundred years earlier, of claiming populated islands in the Caribbean for the Spanish Crown by planting a flag on their shores and whispering empire-building words into the wind. In the logo VOX CLAMANTIS IN DESERTO, colonial past and imperial present intersect:  the British colonial subject, the subject created and interpellated by an empire, is in turn already intent on colonizing and/or Christianizing other subjects. Indeed, in the race between France and England for North America, evangelization (Catholic vs. Protestant) plays a crucial role.  As one of the historians of the College writes:  “The country able to win the allegiance of the Indians might ultimately gain the huge prize of North America.”[3]  Understanding this, Eleazar Wheelock’s lifelong goal had been that of founding a college where American Indians could be Christianized and hence also acculturated.  His goal however was not devoid of imperialist ambivalence:  Dartmouth College, previously known as Moor’s Indian Charity School, ended up being a missionary college where the future evangelizers of Native Americans were trained.  As one account of Dartmouth’s founding has it, “The Indian charity school, which he instituted in 1755, proved reasonably successful; quite a good many Indian boys came to it, and quite a good many English youths, also on charity, came there to prepare for college. Wheelock saw that if these English youths could be induced to become missionaries to the Indians, they might be of even greater worth than the Indians themselves.”[4] That is, Dartmouth fast became a college of paying white students and not a college for Native Americans.  In fact, shortly after its founding in 1771 as the “ninth of America’s Colonial institutions of higher learning and the last to receive its charter from the Crown of England,” the Trustees in Scotland and England were “adamant in their criticism that funds intended for the schooling of Indians were being spent for whites.”[5]  In a gesture which repeated Columbus’s infantilization of the natives of the New World—and which prevails to this day in representations of the colonial and/or so-called “Third-World” subject—Wheelock justified the derailment of funds destined to Native Americans by attributing his failure to the Native American worse-than-childlike “sloth” and total unconcern with the future. Despite his growing conviction about the futility of Christianizing and educating Native Americans and because he needed to gain economic support, Wheelock’s son was teaching twenty one Native Americans in Hanover by 1774.[6]  Indeed, because of father and son’s diplomatic and educational efforts among indigenous communities, Dartmouth was the only college that did not close during the Revolution irrespective of whether the tribes in the vicinity fought for or against the British and today prides itself on its annual Pow-wow and Native American Studies Program.

The story of Dartmouth’s founding poignantly illustrates three things: the intersection of and tension between the colonial and the imperial has to be read not only within the “new” of New England but also as the underlying ideological framework that shaped the establishment of the disciplines at Dartmouth.  Unlike the history of any Latin American country which saw a pre-Columbian, colonial, and independence period and which is now struggling to surmount that legacy while at the same time facing multinational neocolonialism, the U.S.—in little over a hundred years— effected the transition from colony to empire in its own right.  Partly because this transition came about so fast and partly because the “logic” of empire has dominated the present, the colonial legacy of this country, which includes the reach of Spain into most of what is today the U.S. is invariably by-passed with the one exception being to tell the foundational story of the thirteen colonies of the eastern seaboard. Wheelock’s dealings show the imbrication of education with politics or perhaps, better put, the fact that epistemologies are also always ideological—something we all know yet knowingly forget when we talk about the “Ivory Tower” or when we tell one another that academia is not the “real” world or—more seriously—when in our critical praxis, we overlook the fact that disciplines arise during different historical junctures and out of different political needs (i.e., Area Studies). Finally, the story of Dartmouth’s founding shows that the Caribbean and its complicated multi-imperial (Spanish, British, French, Dutch) colonial history were “present” in New England from the start. We must also not forget that Wheelock, also a key player in Dartmouth’s founding, was a Yale graduate and that Yale too owed its existence to the fabulous fortune its founder had made as a clerk in the East India Company and as governor of Madras.[7]  As with the official or popular history of the U.S. which erases the Spanish/Mexican colonial past of this nation, even in an Ivy League institution which would imagine itself as a near to perfect British copy, much like the relegation of the colonial and Antillean source of England’s wealth in Jane Eyre to the “attic,” the Wheelock household too, as recalled by a student, was notorious for its detestable “cookery.” Bad food stood in stark contrast to the fine “furnishings of the house, the linen sheets and pillow cases trimmed with lace . . . brought to Hanover by Wheelock’s wife, the daughter of a former governor of the island of St. Thomas.”[8]

Likewise, the “new” in New Mexico or in New Spain (Mexico) reproduces the colonial action of making the unknown known and the foreign familiar by mapping a past and a space left behind onto a here and now.  Spanish names such as California, Montana, La Florida, Los Angeles serve as an index of that previous Spanish and Mexican colonial presence just as the “new” in New England points to a former British colonial presence.  However, given the preponderance of a historiography and a dominant culture shaped from the bird’s eye view of the thirteen English colonies, the Hispanic and Native American subtext of the U.S. is deleted from that history despite the fact that ¾ of what is today the U.S. was once first a part of the Spanish Empire and then independent Mexico.  That historiographic and historical marginalization continues today in the form of racial and cultural discrimination.  Someone born with a Hispanic or Native American surname is denied full citizenship rights in the United States regardless of how many generations their family has been here and whether or not their family had been “here” before the U.S. acquired its present boundaries in 1848 and 1898—crucial years which saw the birth of the greatest empire of modernity.  The uneasy overlapping of two spaces and two times in the United States is perhaps best illustrated by the state of New Mexico’s 1990 decision to address the confusion between Mexico and New Mexico by issuing license plates that clarify:  New Mexico, USA.

As a Latin American academic situated between Spanish and Portuguese, Comparative Literature, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Latin American and Caribbean Studies, I was drawn, of course, to Fernando Ortiz and Angel Rama’s theorizations of transculturation as a way of countering top down models of acculturation or assimilation. And I find it more relevant to focus on the Americas hemispherically than I do to think of them in terms of discrete nations or to view the history of “Our America” in Martí’s famous formulation, in terms of this country’s English colonial history. However, I am constantly confronted with new generations of students that arrive at Dartmouth completely unaware of this country’s US Hispanic colonial legacy. While this lack of knowledge might be excusable in other parts of the country and among less educated classes, this is often the case with students hailing from the US Southwest—many of whom are Hispanic yet have never been taught that history. Increasingly too, as the country shifts ever more to the right and efforts intensify to literally whitewash its history, we are witnessing attempts to ban ethnic studies from universities in the Southwest—not to mention the “editing” of textbooks in Texas currently underway eliding the Spanish colonial period of US history. It might not be entirely hyperbolic, then, to assert that this country’s idea of the national has come to depend on the suppression of that Native American and Hispanic indigenous subtext giving the impression that “the English and Americans expanded west and south onto vacant lands, except for those held by a few wild aborigines.”[9] Largely because of these efforts, the fact that the greater part of the territory that is today the U.S. was once first a Spanish colony and then Mexico continues to be overlooked in the American popular imagination despite all the debates regarding multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and transculturation we are having across US academia.  Hence North Americans continue to celebrate “Columbus Day” as the day of “discovery” whereas Latin Americans celebrate October 12th as El Día de la Raza, that is, as the celebration of the birth of mestizaje or a new race and culture as a consequence of the conquest.

The kind of historiographical sleight of hand that creates a wilderness where there are many different cultures and peoples in fact is made possible when a whole Spanish and Mexican colonial legacy is erased turning all Hispanics into “wetbacks” just as the term “American” which until 1776 had referred to the indigenous population of the whole continent (e.g., Joseph François Lafitau’s Moeurs des savages américaines (1724) or Corneille de Pauw’s Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains 1768) came to designate “exclusively those who have “inherited” the right to the land:  the European colonists who, by shedding their blood on American soil and wrenching it from the hands of the British, believe to have established themselves as its rightful owners.”[10] Thus, all other Americans have had to adopt a minority status as evidenced by the special designations “Native” American or “Latin” American that also go hand in hand with stereotypical characterizations which arose as early as 1492. Since then, indigenous peoples have been seen either as friendly (read gullible and servile) natives or as savages/cannibals (read guerrillas today).[11]  That is, they are read as “others” whose difference is invariably weighed in negative terms and measured in terms of distance in space and time thus denying them contemporaneity or co-evalness. U.S. academia does little to contest this erasure in part because the disciplines in the U.S. have emerged in a colonial/imperial context. As Fabian points out, given that the temporal discourse of anthropology and of related disciplines “was formed decisively under the paradigm of evolutionism [and] rested on a conception of Time that was not only secularized and naturalized but also thoroughly spatialized…. ever since, anthropology’s efforts to construct relations with its Other by means of temporal devices implied affirmation of difference as distance.”[12]  Reflecting on this praxis Vine Deloria will write:  “To be an Indian in modern American society is in a very real sense to be unreal and ahistorical.”[13]  Today, even the term “Our America” coined by José Martí, the Cuban thinker who was so instrumental in criticizing increasing U.S. imperialism in Latin America already at the end of the nineteenth century and recuperated today by Mexican-American critics has been appropriated by the U.S. academy to designate the US exclusively.[14]

Along with this subalternization of Latin America and the Spanish and Mexican colonial era of the U.S. comes a hierarchization in academia, which mirrors the political, economic, and racial division of the world and which belies our belief in our academic independence.  In fact, the nineteenth century, as the modern/colonial period, is the moment in which European languages (English, French, and German) constitute themselves as the languages of modernity; Amsterdam replaces Seville; the “center” of Europe shifts away from the Iberian peninsula and Castilian and Portuguese; the languages of waning empires are relegated to a marginal position and came to be thought of as not well suited for “scientific and philosophical discourses.”[15]  It is no accident then, that the current debate in “postcolonial studies” is dominated by the English language:  the Indian subcontinent and Africa are “central” while there is hardly any mention of either Latin American colonial theories or the Spanish and Mexican colonial legacy of this country.  Superficially, the focus on British colonialism in India and Africa would seem to be attributable to the sheer intellectual prominence of thinkers like Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and others. But the main reason is obviously the preponderance of English as a theoretical lingua franca. Thus  critics like many of us who fall into the new category of the “migrant” intellectual and who bring into the “center” problems of the periphery from which we stem as well an in-depth knowledge of two or more cultures, two or more languages, and hence an intrinsically transcultural critical practice do not always succeed in being heard.  That ex-centric knowledge has to be translated into English and Latin American intellectuals have until recently resisted the English-only bias of US academia. Given that publishers tend to translate more from the French, it should come as no surprise that the most important French intellectuals who are transcultural as well such as  Héléne Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Tzvetan Todorov, et al. all have been translated into English whereas prominent Latin American intellectuals have not until quite recently and only, seemingly, once the debate around colonialism and neocolonialism had waned.

In fact, there are prominent Latin American intellectuals both in the U.S. and in Latin America who have been intent on thinking about colonialism, imperialism and neocolonialism and who have applied these critiques to the US academy, yet they have not even managed to be incorporated into what we now know as “postcolonial studies.”  I am thinking of intellectuals such as Josefina Ludmer, José Martí, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Angel Rama, Nelly Richard, Edmundo Desnoes, Eduardo Galeano, Beatriz Sarlo, Rigoberta Menchú, Antonio Cornejo Polar, Edmundo O’Gorman, Leopoldo Zea, Paulo Freire­, Edmundo Dussel—to mention but a few—who have theorized Latin America’s troubled relation to the Colossus of the North, refusing to think in terms of “post” colonialism, and who have instead highlighted the processes of globalization and transnationalization as yet another guise colonialism has taken. Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos Jáuregui’s collection of essays including and reflecting on the contributions of these thinkers has achieved quite a lot in this respect but it seems that this volume has come too late in some ways, since the raging debate around questions of coloniality has largely been superseded by current debates on globalization and transnationalism.[16] The refusal of Spanish as a national and academic lingua franca is also to blame since the dominance of English will necessarily skew the discussion towards the English and American empires.

Indeed, Spanish—and by extension anything Hispanic such as Latino Studies—is relegated to a second-class position geopolitically as well as academically.  Thus, to advocate for multiculturalism and/or interdisciplinarity without also pushing for multilingualism is merely a superficial gesture and we end up in the ridiculous position of advocating a monolingual multiculturalism.  It is indeed ironic that the “English Only” movement arose precisely around the same time as the inception of NAFTA which we would have assumed, would have led to a much greater investment in language acquisition, particularly Spanish across the US. While that has indeed happened, and increasingly students enter college with 3-4 years of high school Spanish, that has been achieved thanks to students’ living in ever more bilingual contexts and despite the government’s disinvestment in schools across the nation and despite the fact that Spanish is still being called a “foreign” language. Indeed, as Mary Louise Pratt observed long ago, in the United States, to call Spanish, French, Cantonese, Italian, Japanese, Lakota, Navajo, Cree foreign languages is a misnomer (these are not “foreign” languages).[17]  Spanish, which has had a long and rich literary production before English became dominant in the U.S. is ideologically being made to become more foreign than ever by and in the publishing and film industries given the current practice of assuming an Anglophone audience.

In her introductory essay to the path breaking volume Cultures of United States Imperialism Amy Kaplan suggests there is a “denial of history” in the U.S., which cuts across English, American studies and history departments.  The pattern reproduced ad absurdum is the following:  “the absence of culture from the history of U.S. imperialism; the absence of empire from the study of American culture; and the absence of the United States from the postcolonial study of imperialism.”[18]  These “absences,” in fact, make it conceivable to talk about the U.S. as a world power and at the same time dismiss the notion that it is also an empire.  Yet in this edition too—which is crucial, even radical—from within the context of American Studies and English departments, Kaplan starts with Perry Miller’s conception of American studies on the banks of the Congo in an attempt to reinscribe and recuperate what Toni Morrison has called “an africanist presence” as subtext to the U.S. imaginary.[19]  While Kaplan’s attempt to reinscribe Africa at the heart of America is timely and welcome—especially in relation to the vindication of African-Americans—in so far as it avoids coming to terms with the Hispanic and Native American present and past of this country as well as the African, it again only reinforces what I have been arguing.  In fact, while trying to undermine the insularity of American studies which mirrors the insularity of a historiography based on/in New England, Cultures of United States Imperialism unwittingly reproduces the academic and linguistic hierarchy that literally makes impossible any kind of dialogue between American studies and Latin American studies.  Significantly only 5 essays out of 26 partially relate to Latin America. Yet an even lesser ratio prevails in most publications in this country since then whether academic or popular.  And while there were over three hundred movie theaters in the US showing Spanish language films, particularly Mexican films of the Golden Age in the 30s and 40s we would be hard put to find one anywhere in the US today.

While we pride ourselves, then, in the (apparent) breakdown of the insularity of the disciplines in the last twenty years—an era characterized by the development of multicultural and cross-disciplinary curricula—and hence once again potentially open to Bolton’s seminal idea of a “Greater America” we nevertheless have not managed to transcend the parochial historical vision criticized by Whitman. Whereas a Chicano performance artist like Guillermo Gómez Peña will argue that every encounter between two people taking place here today constitutes a “border experience,” the lack of a connection between the Spanish/Mexican colonial past of this country and its present Latinization is accompanied by the increasing rigidity of conceptions of the border as well as the literal transformation of a once fluid border into a new iteration of the Berlin Wall. Despite the fact, then, that “the signifier Latin American itself now refers also to significant social forces within the United States” [20] and that people do not tire of pointing out that New York is the largest Puerto Rican and Dominican metropolis and Los Angeles the second-largest Mexican metropolis (not to mention Chicago and other cities increasingly becoming Latin American centers in the heartland of the US), indeed, given the increasing Latinization of the US one would expect that it would no longer be possible to erase the Spanish/Mexican colonial legacy of this country —not to speak of the presence of Latinos. But that is unfortunately not so given the power of the media, the English only approach of the publishing industry, as well as the academic reproduction of archaic epistemological and disciplinary hierarchies. Symptomatic of these times, a senior administrator at Dartmouth College recently justified gross inequality in pay scales among male and female full professors at the College in the following manner: “Determining salaries varies by individual, … so the range of salaries among full professors is relatively large. …For example, computer science and economics will typically pay more than Spanish literature.” While he is stating the obvious, that he chose Spanish (and not French or German or even English) as his example for pay disparities across the disciplines is telling.

As is implicit in the theory of transculturation, we have to recuperate the past in all its fullness and radical heterogeneity in order to create the conditions for the possibility of finally establishing a true transcultural politics and epistemology. For, even if submerged and/or banished to the margins, our intellectual praxis should entail a mere shifting of accents, for colonization in effect only means “that dominant views of languages, of recording the past, and of charting territories become synonymous with the real by obstructing possible alternatives.”[22] Transcultural critics have therefore opted to study continuums such as Plantation America, the Black Atlantic, the Pacific Rim, and the indigenous continuum across the Americas as is perhaps best evidenced by Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead in which the Native American interfaces with the Latino on both sides of the border. This new hemispheric, transcultural and transborder understanding is of course undermined by the powers of globalization to continue all that 1492 has signified historically, culturally, and economically—only by other means. Indeed, as Masao Miyoshi argued in the nineties at the height of the debate around postcolonialism, our preoccupation with questions of post-colonialism and multiculturalism, look “suspiciously like another alibi to conceal the actuality of global politics [given that] colonialism is even more active now in the form of transnational corporations.”[23] He forgot to mention the actuality of global politics in US academia’s reproducing ad nauseam the epistemological biases that arose when the US transitioned from colony to empire and which lies at the heart of the disciplines here, now, still.

The post Ivy League Foundational Narratives and Academic Disciplinary Hierarchies appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

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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.

The place that I occupied in the world made itself apparent very early. The first time I experienced direct racism was in my first year of primary school when a fellow pupil called me a “black bum”[1] and I got in trouble for pushing her. Many incidents followed that point, throughout the schooling years. Some were blatant, but others were more subtle, such as a teacher informing my mother that I must have been “drawing attention” to myself when I’d complained about being bullied. I simultaneously encountered gendered comments that would make me feel uncomfortable. I knew that I wasn’t supposed to be as strong and boisterous as the boys. I was supposed to like playing with Barbies and My Little Ponies, and enjoying the ballet classes I was enrolled in despite my other inclinations. In short, I felt continually limited and ridiculed by virtue of my race and sex and therefore considered the oppressions interconnected and to be contested together.

That’s how I continue to see it now. My responses to issues of gender are very much informed by my experience of race, and vice versa. My experience of structural forms of oppression was heightened due to these intersecting forms of oppression, and are particularly acute due to being of a working class background. Therefore, when it comes to Aboriginal feminism, I very much see our questions and tactics occupying the more “radical” end of the feminist spectrum. By radical, I am referring to streams such as socialist/marxist feminism, anarcha-feminism and radical feminism. I feel personally that the issue of race keeps me focussed on community rather than individual advancement, and therefore my feminism reflects this. Additionally, I seek self-determination as both an Aboriginal person and a woman, and therefore need to challenge the structures that negate this freedom. To borrow a quote from the Combahee River Collective Statement: “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression”. In an Australian context this carries a slightly different resonance due to the experiences of colonisation, but to decolonise from both a race and gender perspective is imperative.

I strongly believe that as Aboriginal women, whilst our fights are related to ongoing feminist struggles within other racially marginalised groups, they are not the same. By virtue of the fact that we are first peoples who have suffered under the process of colonisation within our own homelands, our struggles can be quite unique. Recently, for example, I was engaged in a markedly frustrating discussion on the concept of “fair skin privilege” as someone of a migrant background took issue to how I was utilising the term “black”. Fair skin privilege of course exists to an extent in an Aboriginal context, however the “Stolen Generations”[2], for example, highlight how limited this privilege has historically been. Additionally, migrant populations, whilst suffering marginalisation in Australia, also benefit from the displacement of Aboriginal people. Therefore there is a need to tell our own stories, and expand our own theories rather than simply drawing upon the experiences of others.

When I am highlighting why I feel a specific Aboriginal feminism is necessary, I tend to point to three formative elements that structure this need: the white patriarchy, the black patriarchy and “mainstream” feminism. As a point of oppression, the white patriarchy is self explanatory given its continuing historical legacy and political privilege. Aboriginal women feeling excluded by mainstream feminism is a topic that has been covered many times, most recently in an article by Kelly Briggs, which poignantly proposed that arguments regarding the lack of racial diversity in parliament are sorely lacking from mainstream feminism. Yet how the patriarchy operates within the Aboriginal community is not something that is discussed as often. It does have impact, even if the politics of race bind us. I am seeking to define how these elements play out in our communities more and more, because through better understandings we can build better and more inclusive movements that don’t leave the most vulnerable behind.

Many Aboriginal feminists have been rightly critical of mainstream feminisms in the past, due to lack of collaboration that centralized the individual over the communal, or the imposition of privileged viewpoints as if these were a universal experience for women. In addition, an “Orientalist” understanding that misread Aboriginal culture has sometimes been applied by feminists to cultural issues and practices that are ours to challenge. This is not because we necessarily perceive these things differently but rather, we need the space to interpret and challenge these things in our own communities. One example I like to highlight is the constant questions I receive from non-Aboriginal feminists regarding whether women should be allowed to play the didgeridoo, an Aboriginal wind instrument typically played by men. Considering the multitude of pressing issues that Aboriginal women face in Australia, a question such as this is not a defining Aboriginal feminist question, and the questioning of this cultural practice by non-Aboriginal women simply comes across as another act of imperialism. There is nothing to be gained for the feminist movement as a whole by non-Aboriginal feminists challenging these cultural practices; rather it just negates our rights of self-determination and indeed cultural ownership.

Over time, Aboriginal feminists (for example, Aileen Morton-Robinson in “Talkin’ Up to the White Woman”, 2000) have continued to highlight additional hurdles that they face due to the intersection of race and gender. Aboriginal women experience the issues that non-Aboriginal women experience due to the process of colonisation, but often there are additional complexities. For example, whilst equal pay is important for all of us, for many years Aboriginal people were historically not paid for their labour at all, and this acutely affected Aboriginal women working as domestic servants. Our wages were, in a lot of cases, held in trusts by the governments and therefore our “stolen wages” claims are ongoing many years later. “Victim blame” is something we face often, and indeed, a number of the Indigenous movements’ more conservative commentators tend to replicate these viewpoints. When we experience victim blaming as women, it is compounded by race to the point where Aboriginal women dying from domestic homicide at a rate ten times that of other women in Australia barely rates a mention. We tend to be subjected to the same issues of body shame and arbitrary and commercialised notions of beauty, but we are also judged on our skin tone and whether or not we possess certain features deemed to be tellingly “Aboriginal” (eg: a wide nose, deep-set eyes, etc). We can also experience fetishisation on the basis of our skin tones despite being mainly socially excluded because of them. In short, our experiences can add layers to feminist understandings and there are many ways in which a notion of a universalised women’s experience can exclude us or only tell part of the tale.

When it comes to the notion of a “black patriarchy”, I see this being perpetuated on two fronts. The first is through the patriarchal structures that we inherit through the process of colonisation by the mainstream culture, and the second manifests itself in our own community-based forms, through our traditional practices and how we view and deploy gender roles. To start with our internal patriarchy, it is always interesting to me when members of the Indigenous community argue that traditional societies had gender equality due to our understandings of gender complementarity, which presumes that the separate and set roles of men and women had equal importance in communities. This is not necessarily the case. From one side of this vast country to the other, different practices existed in different clan groups and therefore the experiences of “equality” for women via a notion of gender complementarity would have differed. If we state otherwise, then as black people we run the risk of universalising our own experiences similar to what mainstream feminism has been accused of doing. Secondly, gender complementarity has not been known to equal gender equality in many regions of the world. We have practices such as polygynous marriage that are arranged from birth, alongside norms such as specific forms of governance and punishment for women. At times, due to the fact that we (as Aboriginal people) are protecting family and culture in the face of ongoing colonialism, we lose the ability to critically examine our own practices because we are worried that anything perceived as negative will be used to further discredit us as peoples.

The patriarchy we inherited and in some ways continue to perpetuate from the dominant culture tends to manifest itself when we adopt external cultural practices and use them in ways that may enhance pride in Aboriginality but reinforce gender disparities. Examples of this are events such as the Miss NAIDOC pageants, which are based upon the idea that we need to celebrate the “beauty” of Aboriginal women. Beauty, as a concept, may be harmful to women as it often centralises the appearance of a woman as being her most important attribute. One of the points I made back when I first examined this in the above linked article was that we actually come from a culture that values age and wisdom, assigning great value to our older women. When it comes to beauty however, older women are almost completely excluded. Additionally, our women have been achieving highly in a number of fields for a long time; we have been obtaining tertiary education qualifications at a rate nearly double that of Aboriginal men. So why do we consider it important to celebrate the “beauty” of Aboriginal women whilst barely mentioning these wonderful achievements? The idea that something becomes empowering if it is community organised and run fails to examine what it is that we are instituting from the cultures of those we have been oppressed by, and if these are indeed worthwhile things to adopt. Without such questioning, we run the risk of merely contributing to the subjugation of our own rather than enacting true positive change.

It continues to be imperative to challenge the prevailing structures of power on the dual fronts of race and gender, both internally and externally. Australia, despite the rhetoric to the contrary, continues to privilege a very white and patriarchal culture in which exclusionary legacies, rather than being a source of shame, tend to be celebrated. I would even go so far as to argue that due to our complex history and culture wars, begun in the early 1990s then reinforced by the Howard government, we have gone backwards when it comes to being a space inclusive of race and gender. During the Howard years, Aboriginal people were continually rebuked for “focussing on the negative” when telling the true stories of what we have faced under centuries of colonisation. Women were told that fights for gender equality were “political correctness gone mad,” or otherwise not essential. Australia reflects this perspective today. Australia Day, which was of little importance to most of the population only a couple of decades ago, is now a day to drape flags across your shoulders and be “proud” at the cost of any acknowledgement of the true history of this day and what it has meant to Aboriginal peoples. ANZAC Day, which was also criticised because feminists drew attention to victims of war and rape as a tactic of war in particular, is again focussing on the “brave people who served our country” in the various conflicts. There is a need to challenge Australian historical narratives on a number of fronts, and Aboriginal feminists have an incredibly important role to play in this.

I strongly feel that Aboriginal feminism is going to continue to grow and develop. We have a number of incredibly strong Aboriginal women who are moving to the forefront of public discourse. A lot of them are unapologetic about their race and their gender, are highly educated, and ensure that they use these knowledges to continue educating and inspiring others. Through social media and online platforms such as blogging, their bodies of work continue to grow and circulate. The Internet offers a wonderful opportunity for those that have been traditionally denied a voice to claim a space. And claim it, we shall!

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El haber sido miembro del Movimiento Homosexual de Lima (Mhol), una de las organizaciones gay/lésbica más antigua de Sudamérica[1] debería producir orgullo y satisfacción, pero ¿qué ocurre cuando dicha organización pertenece al Perú? Pues, se entremezclan muchas sensaciones y emociones. Claro, existe una sensación de orgullo hacia el movimiento, pues hablamos de una organización que viene trabajando por un poco más de 30 años, manteniéndose vigente en un contexto donde el tejido de las organizaciones sociales es débil y fragmentado. Pero también existe frustración debido a que después de todos esos años no se ha logrado ningún marco de protección por parte de los diferentes gobiernos frente a la comunidad LGBT. Contrariamente, lo que ha existido, existe y se halla institucionalizado en la cultura estatal es la negación sistemática y estructural de derechos hacia a esta comunidad específica. Esta situación lleva a cuestionar las estrategias, las acciones y la postura que el movimiento ha tenido frente al Estado.

Mientras son muchos avances y conquistas que se han producido en la región como en el caso de Argentina, Uruguay y Brasil, las reformas constitucionales de Ecuador y Bolivia, en relación al reconocimiento de derechos a la comunidad LGBT; el Perú se encuentra entre los países más homofóbicos, exactamente en el puesto 113 de 138 países evaluados, el peor puesto en la región Latinoamericana^[2]. Y claro, definitivamente el contexto homofóbico trae consecuencias tangibles en la comunidad LGBT, lo cual se evidencia a nivel cotidiano, económico, social y principalmente a nivel político, lo que se traduce en la inexistencia de políticas públicas LGBT inclusivas en el país hasta la fecha.

Sin embargo, no es que no exista ninguna política pública dirigida a la comunidad LGBT, sino que se debe mencionar la existencia de una exclusión deliberada por parte del Estado. Por un lado, existe una política pública por omisión (Béjar, 2011: 36), la cual se traduce en un comportamiento sistemático de negación de toda propuesta normativa enfocada en la comunidad LGBT. ¿Qué sentido tiene que en el censo de población y vivienda del año 2013 se omita literalmente a las parejas del mismo sexo que viven bajo un mismo techo, como si se consideró en Chile? Por otro lado, en el Perú, así como en la mayoría de países de la región andina, la principal estrategia de inclusión de la comunidad LGBT ha sido las políticas de salud pública, específicamente las relacionadas a enfrentar la epidemia del VIH y focalizada en ciertos grupos considerados en situación de mayor vulneración (Jaime: 2013).

Para tener una mirada de la situación, desde el primer reporte de Sida en Perú, la epidemia del VIH se ha concentrado en las comunidades de travestis, gays, hombres bisexuales y hombres que tienen sexo con hombres, alcanzando prevalencias de 24.3% en travestis y 17.1% en gays, que constituyen el 56% de casos nuevos, según reportes de la vigilancia centinela (CONAMUSA: 2011). Según Mhol (2012: 7) los servicios de prevención, diagnóstico y atención de ITS y VIH que brinda el Estado peruano alcanzan únicamente al 9.77% de las personas TGB/HSH (teniendo en cuenta el universo de 429, 489 personas), acciones para las que solo se destina el 3.2% del gasto nacional en VIH según el estudio de Medición de Gasto en Salud MEGAS (MINSA: 2012). Además, no más del 50% de personas TGB/HSH alcanzadas por dichos servicios han tenido acceso a una prueba diagnóstica de VIH. Así, aún en tiempos de acceso supuestamente universal y gratuito al tratamiento antirretroviral, cada día mueren tres personas por sida en el Perú. Mientras tanto, el desabastecimiento de condones y antirretrovirales es constante (Mhol, 2012: 7).

En relación a la violencia, el primer informe de derechos humanos de la comunidad LGBT en el Perú (Alvarez y Bracamonte: 2006) identificó que una persona LGBT moría cada cinco días; en la actualidad se ha identificado que cada semana muere asesinada una persona LGBT entre el 2006 al 2010, como expresión más extrema de la violencia sistemática y recurrente que viven las personas por su orientación sexual o identidad de género (Romero: 2011).

Frente a esa situación, el Congreso ha claudicado en su deber de sancionar los crímenes de odio. El proyecto de Ley 3584/2009-CR que proponía la Incorporación de los Crímenes de Odio en el Código Penal fue archivado por presión de los grupos antiderechos y las principales bancadas de ese entonces. En diciembre de 2011 se presentó el proyecto de Ley multipartidario 609/2011-CR contra Acciones Criminales Originadas por Motivos de Discriminación, que fue discutido en comisión y en el pleno en julio del 2013, pero que lamentablemente no fue aprobado.

Sobre el acceso a empleo y trabajo, si bien es cierto que dentro de la comunidad LGBT existen diferencias, resultado de variables como clase, raza, etnicidad, ingreso, pobreza, educación (Sardá-Chandiramani, 2008: 196-197), es bastante claro que la situación de estos sujetos es vulnerable si la analizamos desde la perspectiva del Decent Work, propuesta por la OIT (Ghai: 2006), ya que como es discutido por Ferreyra (2010: 208), donde es posible obtener trabajo fuera de la prostitución, no hay protección frente a la discriminación, como ocurre con los gays y las lesbianas que deben ocultar su orientación en sus lugares de trabajo por temor al despido. En el caso de las travestis, la situación es más cruda, pues la visibilidad intrínseca a la construcción de la identidad y el cuerpo las coloca en una situación de exclusión laboral, donde una de las pocas opciones es el trabajo sexual y otros oficios menores como la cocina, la cosmética y la decoración (Salazar y Villayzan, 2009: 12). Incluso, en el ejercicio del trabajo sexual, ellas buscan la oportunidad de ejercerlo en el exterior, pues éste se percibe como una buena oportunidad de hacer dinero, como ocurre con muchas travestis peruanas que migran hacia Buenos Aires, Madrid y Milán.

La respuesta desde el movimiento

Cuando comencé mi trayectoria en la lucha por mis derechos y los de mis compañeros LGBT, estaba aún en la universidad y fue el llevar un curso de género con la genial luchador feminista Gina Vargas, lo que inspiró en mí una serie de ideas, compromisos y, sobre todo, ánimos y entusiasmo por querer lograr un cambio sustancial. Claro, estando en tercer año de Sociología, tenía más interés en generar cambios a través de la investigación. Sin embargo, fue ya como egresado, cuando empecé a laborar en proyectos relacionados con la salud –específicamente en la respuesta al VIH/Sida– la incidencia política y la promoción de derechos, que entendí que la pura ciencia y la academia no podían entender ni pretender resolverlo todo.

Fue cuando mi entrada al Mhol significó –utilizando las palabras de Tito Bracamonte– el empezar a “contaminarme”, a conocer de primera mano las condiciones de vida de nuestros compañeros, sus luchas cotidianas, sus resistencias personales y comunitarias; a aprender y dialogar desde una posición horizontal entre ellos, incluso a divertirme y disfrutar de sus espacios, que luego se convirtieron también en míos. Ello trajo muchos aprendizajes y recompensas, personales la gran mayoría, pero también académicas y profesionales, pues nunca renuncié a ser un investigador, sino que ello empezó a cobrar un sentido más humano y conllevó un mayor posicionamiento político, desde una voz con identidad LGBT, dejando atrás nociones abstractas, desbordadas de contenido pero no desde una cartografía específica.

Desde entonces  me permito hacer “el viaje” de un lado a otro, aunque en algunos espacios académicos he sido relegado por ello, pero a estas alturas y valgan verdades no me interesa lo que la academia tenga que decir al respecto. Fue en mi estadía en una universidad holandesa donde experimenté la clara división que existe entre el activismo y el trabajo intelectual, y cómo el ser activista implicaba que en un salón de clase, una PhD alemana me mencione: “a claro, es que tú eres activista”, donde ese “ah claro” implicaba que ni mi trayectoria ni mi reflexión era suficiente para dialogar sobre la importancia de la identidad en los sujetos insertos en actividades de economía informal.

En Perú actualmente no es que exista –o en todo caso no le he percibido con mayor claridad- una división así, pues existe un diálogo entre ambos campos. Aquí es más frecuente que los activistas se relacionen con la academia, pues es uno de los pocos canales para visibilizar la realidad, a falta de uno formal e institucional por parte del Estado. Lo que existe en el Perú es un estamento o “realeza” académica, mayormente cerrada e instaurada en universidades y que funciona a través de la monopolización de contactos, cooperantes y el acceso a fondos para publicaciones frecuentes. Ellos, donde algunos sin ser parte de la comunidad, tienen licencia para constituir las voces de los sujetos y sus comunidades, incluso de representarnos en espacios internacionales donde se discuten temas desde epidemiológicos hasta de identidad, homofobia y derechos humanos. Sin lugar a duda sus discursos ejercen poder en la construcción de los otros, los subordinados, de la posibilidad de nombrarlos. Y claro, ellos son también la puerta de invitación para procesos de colonización del lenguaje, agendas sociales y políticas, representaciones, etc. Ello me recuerda que hace algunos meses atrás tomó lugar la organización de una “reunión informal” con profesores angloparlantes para dialogar sobre la situación de los estudios sobre sexualidad en el Perú, en donde se invitaba a personas relacionadas a la academia, activistas y grupos de investigadores. El número de asistentes fue muy reducido y pensé, claro, si hacen la acotación que la reunión será en inglés, ello ya desanima la participación de los colectivos existentes. Desconozco la intención real de dicha reunión, pero ¿por qué se asume un idioma que no es el nuestro para discutir sobre la situación de los estudios en sexualidad en el Perú? ¿no es bastante colonialista tener que discutir sobre el Perú en inglés, siendo además el punto central de la discusión?

Acerca del movimiento peruano LGBT, a estos tiempos, la geografía social y política de las organizaciones ha cambiado mucho, hasta inicios del nuevo milenio no eran muchas, y no tan intensa las relaciones entre unas y otras. Recuerdo además que existía una dinámica más enfocada en temas de no discriminación, unión civil y deshomosexualización del VIH/Sida en la capital, Lima, dominada mayormente por colectivos universitarios y jóvenes. Por otro lado, existía otra realidad en el resto del país de la cual no se conocía mucho: la situación de precariedad al interior de las regiones. Cuando se inician esos primeros contactos de activistas de Lima con organizaciones al interior del país, es que se descubren prácticas solidarias y de supervivencia en las regiones, dinámicas que constituían muchas veces el fin y motivo de las organizaciones, como las colectas o actividades de venta de comidas para recaudar fondos para la compra de medicamentos paliativos de compañeros enfermos por causa del VIH o para la compra del ataúd y el nicho de los que iban falleciendo, claro está, en una época pre acceso gratuito a los medicamentos anti retrovirales.^[3]

Y es a partir del 2000, en el marco del Primer Encuentro Nacional de Líderes LGBT, que las distintas organizaciones inician un proceso de reconocimiento y diálogo, en donde a partir de las necesidades de las regiones se reincorpora en la agenda política el tema de la prevención y atención en salud.  A partir de ahí y con el intensivo apoyo de la cooperación internacional es que ahora existe un número significativo de organizaciones y algo de interrelación entre ellas. Recuerdo que hasta hubo en algún momento los esfuerzos por construir bloques regionales y que derive en la existencia de un Frente Nacional, pero que no tuvo suficiente empuje ni ánimo para lo que constituye –a mi entender– una carrera de largo aliento. Ello se podría comparar en visión al proceso que existe en Brasil a la hora de elegir representaciones federales y nacionales y la construcción de agendas integradas, democráticas y construidas desde las bases sociales.

Los actores y sus vicios de importancia

Los recursos financieros de la cooperación internacional han alentado y promovido el incremento de organizaciones, el activismo social, político y cultural, para generar cambios favorables en la normativa, acceso a mejores servicios de salud, educación, empleo, entre otros. Además se buscaba que en ese proceso se fortalecieran y sobretodo se perfilaran nuevos liderazgos, lo que era importante para un necesario proceso de renovación, y sobre todo para enfrentar lo que en un mediano futuro ya era casi evidente: la disminución o ausencia de fondos de la cooperación internacional y la eternamente ansiada autosostenibilidad de las organizaciones.

El Fondo Mundial de Lucha contra el Sida, la Tuberculosis y la Malaria es el cooperante en VIH, Sida y empoderamiento de comunidades gay y travestis que más ha invertido en el país, a través de proyectos nacionales que integraban al Estado y a la sociedad civil (principalmente a través de ONG responsables de la ejecución de las actividades en coordinación con las instancias estatales), lo que se denomina public-private partnership projects. El Fondo Mundial  entendía que el fortalecimiento organizacional era necesario para la respuesta al VIH y por ello sus acciones incluían desde financiamiento para conformar legalmente a los colectivos, cursos de capacitación hasta alquiler de espacios para su funcionamiento operativo. Sin embargo, dada las características de estos programas, cada año el cooperante reducía los fondos conforme el Estado debía de aumentar su contrapartida, situación que nunca ocurrió, pues el Estado nunca asumió ni política ni presupuestalmente la transferencia real de los programas, hecho que se refleja en que hasta la fecha existe nula inversión en programas y/o políticas dirigidas a nuestra comunidad. Además, actualmente el Perú es considerado un país de ingreso medio, por lo que ya no es  elegible para los programas del Fondo Mundial, salvo algunas convocatorias especiales dirigidas a poblaciones vulnerables específicas.

Aparte de ese contexto, se tiene un movimiento LGBT fragmentado, con pocas coordinaciones inter regionales y nula proyección de un plan político nacional. Más bien se tiene una comunidad donde algunos actores que han tenido la posibilidad de estar involucrados en las direcciones o presidencias de sus organizaciones, mandos medios de coordinación o responsables de actividades relacionadas a la administración de los centros comunitarios financiados por proyectos de Fondo Mundial, se han convertido en dueños y señores de algunas organizaciones en el país. Más aún, algunos de ellos han desarrollado un perfil ególatra, con espíritu autosuficiente, arrogante y compulsivamente mediáticos, pues desean ser la cara visible y protagonista del todo el movimiento LGBT en el país, pero que no tienen la capacidad de convocatoria e interlocución para que la gran mayoría se sume a las reivindicaciones políticas.

¿Por qué aquello último? Al interior del movimiento LGBT, las carencias económicas, políticas, organizacionales por un lado y  la fragmentación y falta de solidaridad política por otro, han debilitado su capacidad para incidir a favor de derechos. A nivel nacional, no es que exista una red articulada de organizaciones LGBT ni la promoción de la misma por parte del Estado, sino un grupo humano diverso, atravesado por la pobreza, discriminación, exclusión y marginación. La interseccionalidad de clase, raza y género, produce una “comunidad” fragmentada, donde son mayormente algunos del sector medio y pobre quienes se visibilizan, organizan y demandan, mientras que los “otros blancos, clase media-alta” desarrollan un bajo nivel de solidaridad e indignación, y más bien un alto nivel de indiferencia, debido a la no percepción de discriminación, pobreza y exclusión por sus mejores condiciones de acceso a recursos (educación, empleo, salud, etc.)

Explicando mejor, diría que una buena parte de la clase alta y media de personas LGBT -la cual enfatiza lo masculino sobre lo femenino y sus valores, se considera blanca o con matices que aspiran al blanqueamiento- no participa de las demandas, o incluso contra argumenta en la cotidianeidad frente a las reivindicaciones de la comunidad LGBT organizada, pues aquello es de indígenas, negras, mestizas, afeminadas, travestis, pobres, machonas y escandalosas: “Yo nunca he sufrido de discriminación, voy dónde quiero y si puedo pagar nadie puede discriminarme”, “eso del activismo es para los cholos escandalosos y pobres, yo nunca he sufrido de discriminación”, por mencionar algunos ejemplos. Y a la vez, otra buena parte que pertenecen a la mayoría empobrecida, indígena, travesti, afro, mestiza, no participa o no le interesa dichas reivindicaciones, pero por otras circunstancias que más bien se encuentran dentro de una racionalidad más enfocada en cubrir necesidades inmediatas y evaluar el costo-beneficio de dicho involucramiento.

No es que no exista movimiento y activistas en el Perú, sino que éste es un híbrido pequeño, que se encuentra en el medio o en la intersección de los grupos de clase baja, media y alta. Claro, compuesta por sujetos con compromiso de cambio, voluntad política y capacidad de indignación; sin embargo, este proceso no se encuentra exento de los vicios de distinción y diferenciación racial, clase y género, lo que genera tensiones al interior de los mismos. Analizando, queda claro la existencia de micro relaciones de poder, basada en categorías que funcionan como capital social y simbólico: la raza, el género y la clase. Estas relaciones pueden ser casi invisibles, se reproducen de manera tan sutil en diferentes espacios o se han asumido como cotidianas o normalizadas, que hace complicado tomar conciencia de ellas para cuestionarlas y transformarlas. O claro, algunos se logran servir de ellas para mantener su hegemonía dentro del feudo, pero que, además, no es sino el espejo del racismo, sexismo y clasismo que existe en nuestra sociedad.

¿De dónde viene la importancia? Acercamientos al enfoque interseccional

Un punto importante, clave para dar respuesta a muchas preguntas ligadas a nuestra compleja sociedad marcada por la desigualdad social; la cual ha devenido en cliché, pero más en forma que en contenido, es acerca de los rezagos de nuestra experiencia colonial, la que generó e instauró una sociedad estamental, dividida en estados con acceso diferenciado a la riqueza, la educación, el ejercicio de profesiones oficios, y que hasta estas últimas incluso eran heredadas de padres a hijos.

La comunidad LGBT no escapa de este último argumento, y es justo lo que podría explicar la configuración y distribución del poder entre las organizaciones y al interior de las mismas, atrapando algunas veces a sus liderazgos en personificaciones despóticas y líderes caudillistas.

Teniendo en cuenta aquellos argumentos, me atrevo a afirmar que las organizaciones de base comunitaria en general y las LGBT en especial, son sensibles a convertirse en pequeños feudos, en donde en vez de construir y reproducir los valores y principios que se esperan alcanzar en la sociedad, se instauran más bien relaciones de poder, las cuales se hayan instrumentalizadas desde la dieta y el refrigerio para atender el taller de capacitación hasta la membresía, y el viaje con todo pagado a la capital o al extranjero. Por ello, es que a veces en las reuniones orgánicas se cuelan ciertos susurros, pero que muchas veces están silenciados por temor a cuestionar la autoridad, “porque es siempre él (ella) es la que viaja para los talleres, congresos, encuentros”.

Definitivamente esto produce una fragmentación a interior de las organizaciones.  Cuando los liderazgos empiezan a tener conciencia de los relativos beneficios que tienen por ser el delegado, el presidente o el representante es que empieza a operar un proceso nocivo: la distancia con las bases y los principios, y más bien el matrimonio con el poder. Y aquí se desliza una pregunta curiosa, ¿es el cargo el que corrompe o la personalidad de los liderazgos? ¿O es la conjunción de ambos que detonan en liderazgos importantes pero verticales, impositivos y berrinchudos? Pues me ha tocado observar a líderes con la tarea de bloquear o aniquilar y expulsar a potenciales líderes, claro más jóvenes que ellos, que pueden hacerle sombra; y más bien incentivan y promocionan a quienes ayudan a expandir o reproducir su poder a través de una actitud servil, “sus hijas”^[4], nada más simbólico y estructural en una sociedad estamental.

En general son sólo algunos y no la gran mayoría de los activistas que reciben el privilegio de acceder a información y conocimiento técnico, pero éste al mismo tiempo se convierte en un recurso de mucho poder. Sobre todo en grupos con mayores desigualdades como la comunidad travesti. Por ejemplo, el acceso a información (epidemiológica, propuestas de proyectos de la cooperación, presupuestos de inversión pública, convocatorias para capacitaciones y talleres) puede verse hasta como un privilegio, un recurso que las puede colocar en una posición jerárquica frente a las otras.

Tampoco creo que las organizaciones LGBT deban funcionar desde una lógica partidaria ochentera ni noventera, que no es lo mismo a que las organizaciones tengan alguna adscripción partidaria o con alguna ideología en particular. Y entiendo esa lógica basada en prácticas de disciplinamiento partidario como “el cierre de filas”, el cual muchas veces sólo favorece la continuidad de relaciones serviles, jerárquicas, la defensa de intereses netamente egocentristas, y la protección de los líderes “importantes”, pero verticales y autoritarios.

Si ya la comunidad LGBT es objeto de negación de derechos, si en el Perú nuestra comunidad es excluida de las pretensiones inclusivas del gobierno actual y lo más probable es que así siga siendo en un futuro medio, ¿por qué reproducir esas mismas negaciones y jerarquías hacia el interior del movimiento? ¿Por qué se mantienen esos feudos –el cual ya no es sólo el espacio de la organización, sino todos los campos sociales y simbólicos que se vinculan con ella–, donde se asienta que una es más bonita que otra, que ésta es más blanca que aquélla, que ésa tiene más recursos que todas las demás?

Por supuesto que una configuración estamental al interior del movimiento produce sus propios “privilegiados importantes”, el político y el académico se convierten en categorías exclusivas para denominar a los otros –que repito son la gran mayoría– ignorantes, apolíticos, y hasta traidores, convirtiéndose en una actitud tendenciosa y que termina generando diálogos entre unos cuantos y no entre todos que conforma la base social y comunitaria.

Además, es cierto que entre los diferentes feudos dialogan, pero también bajo intereses que a veces son irreconciliables, lo que no ha ayudado en nada en la generación de frentes amplios y nacionales en base a objetivos comunes que enfrenten además problemas comunes como la discriminación, el reconocimiento de las uniones civiles, la falta de acceso a educación, empleo, salud integral y los crímenes de odio. Para ello se requiere una revolución primero al interior del movimiento, que quiebre dichos privilegios, que democratice los recursos y que rompa con las líneas de sucesión por nacimiento, a “mis hijas”.

La dilatación de una transformación efectiva, hace que el movimiento esté a merced de los vicios generados por la estructura estamental y también de los discursos externos que pretenden homogenizar la lucha comunitaria en todo el sur global, a partir de teorías foráneas, academicistas y desarrollistas que no han tenido ningún logro efectivo. Ello implica que haya una revitalización de las apuestas de transformación que partan de las propias racionalidades o cosmovisiones LGBT del país, basadas en sus propias voces, posicionamientos geopolíticos, sus políticas del cuerpo, sus economías emocionales, y sus tejidos afectivos, y que pueda dialogar en un contexto sur-sur y que interpelen las teorías hegemónicas del norte, en donde incluso el estado pueda brindar su apoyo en los procesos de diálogo con ellos. Solo así se podrá trazar una estrategia políticamente situada no abstracta, totalizante y homogenizadora, sino con cuerpo, rostro y nombre(s) propios(s).

Definitivamente no queremos un sumo pontífice, no necesitamos oráculos que concentren y centralicen el conocimiento y los recursos, que reproduzcan verticalidad y que conviertan el discurso de la asistencia técnica en una herramienta de asistencialismo y dependencia perversa. Tampoco necesitamos de herramientas de otros contextos ni copiar sus realidades. En la actualidad se requiere desjerarquizar y desmantelar el aparato de privilegios de aquellos liderazgos y sus vicios, así como las relaciones entre los miembros al interior de las organizaciones. Sólo renovando el diálogo entre pares de manera horizontal, se podrán involucrar a diferentes actores que tendrán el derecho de ser importantes y líderes, elegidos por la propia comunidad y respaldados principalmente por sus bases y no por las ONG’s, la cooperación o el propio Estado; pero eso sí, identificando muy bien esas micro relaciones de poder, revertiéndolas en relaciones democráticas e inclusivas.

The post Las fallidas transformaciones al interior del movimiento LGBT en el Perú: una interpretación crítica desde la perspectiva interseccional appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Panning through the dismal space of out-of-service garbage trucks against a dreary city skyline, the opening scene of The Salt Mines (1990) introduces us to Sara, a self-identified Latina transvestite working as a prostitute in New York City. A diamond in the rough with goldilocks hair similar to Farah Fawcett of the 1970s, she is presented as both a seasoned veteran of the streets and a mentor to Gigi and Giovanna, two other transvestite prostitutes whom we also meet in the film. As an image of grace surrounded by the squalor of poverty, disease, and death, Sara is also an image of queer defiance, seemingly unfazed by her physical environment and oppressive life experiences as an exile from Cuba and a refugee of the Mariel boatlift. One year later in the follow-up film The Transformation (1995) we meet Sara again; only this time, Pastor Terry Wier is our medium to her life, or rather, death as a woman and “born again” into a man. Sara is now Ricardo, transformed by his devotion to the Christian faith and teachings of a heteronormative lifestyle.

While the Salt Mines follows the unique lives of Gigi, Giovanna, and Sara as they make a home among the salt deposits used by the New York Sanitation Department to clear away snow in the winter, The Transformation centers on Sara’s new life as Ricardo, undergoing the transition in order to be “rescued” by a conservative Christian ministry after discovering she is HIV positive. As seen in these documentary films, how is it possible that, in the space of cinematic time, what once was an image of queer defiance – Sara in The Salt Mines – becomes the epitome of queer catastrophe and Christian fundamentalist triumph, as embodied in Ricardo in The Transformation?

Figure 1. Sara in The Salt Mines (left) and Ricardo in The Transformation (right).

Viewed side-by-side, The Salt Mines and The Transformation charts a series of dynamic ambiguities and continual movements across differences of race, gender, sexuality, class, and religion. Moreover, as a genre of film intended to record and interrogate aspects of reality, the latter documentary does not offer a “picture perfect” conclusion to Ricardo’s new life as a born-again Christian who is happily married to the woman of his dreams. Rather, it ends with a brutally honest moment in which Ricardo, now physically impaired by the onslaught of the AIDS virus, reveals his desire that if he still had a choice, “I would choose to be a woman.” Concluding on a somber affect that leaves viewers stunned at Ricardo’s self-confession, The Transformation challenges the notion of fixed, visible, and transparent identities, as captured in The Salt Mines.

When making the films, directors Susana Aikin and Carlos Aparicio utilized a style of documentary that allowed viewers to deduce their own conclusions of what is seen on screen, free from stylistic choices of music, interviews, scene arrangements, or voice-over narrations. Known as the “observational mode” of documentary, this perspective helps to demonstrate the role of documentaries as instances of discourse rather than “window[s] on unscripted, undirected, unrehearsed, and unperformed realit[ies].”[1] Nevertheless, I would argue, the force of these films stems from the fact that they remain narratives grounded in some version of actuality and experience, involving social actors as opposed to stock characters. By engaging the visual texts as offered in these films, this essay explores the incongruities that exist between reality and representation.As separate texts, The Salt Mines and The Transformation also offer distinct examples of what Donna Haraway terms “situated knowledges,” where each film holds a distinct and partial point of view—rather than a disembodied objectivity—that provides a more nuanced account of information constituting a specific context or environment.[2] The questions these documentaries raise are thus linked and different: while The Salt Mines looks at an exceptional group of transvestites in order to question the precarious nature of queer kinship formations in public spaces, The Transformation follows the new Christian life of Ricardo (Sara in The Salt Mines) to demonstrate and document the forceful nature of ideological state apparatuses—to borrow Althusser’s term—in constructing and maintaining the dominant norm of cisgender heterosexuality. In using Cynthia Fuch’s description of the self-conscious representations of documentary conventions, The Salt Mines and the Transformation ultimately map “a constellation of anxieties about queer expression, verification, and representation by complicating traditional links between visibility and identity and, in particular, by insisting that race, gender, class” – and, I would add, religion – “are inextricable from sexuality in any conception of identity or reality.”[3]

Technique for Visibility: Queer Reframing in Observational Documentary

In Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image, Roger Hallas (2009) examines a corpus of queer films and videos made between the mid-1980s and the early 2000s in response to the AIDS epidemics in North America, Europe, Australia, and South Africa. While he does not incorporate The Salt Mines or The Transformation as films within his body of “queer AIDS media,” Hallas’ use of the term reframing is particularly useful for my analysis of the two documentaries. Hallas explains how his archive of queer AIDS media radically reframes not only how viewers perceive HIV/AIDS but also the spaces in which they circulated.[4] As these films are “neither mere ideological critiques of the dominant media representation of the epidemic nor corrective attempts to produce ‘positive’ images of people living with HIV/AIDS,” their importance lies in the ability to document both the individual and collective trauma of AIDS. As he clarifies further:

This discursive act required a sustained dialectical tension between directly attesting to the medical, psychological, and political imperatives produced by AIDS and contesting the enunciative position available to people with HIV/AIDS in dominant media representations, which had consistently subjected their speech to either a shaming abjection or a universalistic humanism. Moreover, the dialectical dynamic of these works reframed not only the bodies of the witnesses seen and heard on the screen but also the relationship of such represented bodies to the diverse viewing bodies in front of the screen.[5]

In line with Hallas’ description, The Transformation highlights the specific capacity of documentary to “bear witness” to the historical trauma of AIDS, as evidenced by the circumstances that inform Sara’s decision to become Ricardo. However, unlike the films analyzed by Hallas that also document the culture of care emerging from the queer community’s response to the epidemic’s effects of illness, death, and loss, The Transformation does not incorporate AIDS activism or any type of political mobilization against queer discrimination. Rather, and more tellingly, the film attest to the ways in which dominant discursive regimes, as depicted through Pastor Terry Wier’s use of religious rhetoric, have the power to shape queer bodies into “right” subjects. In using Althusser, to what set of interpellating calls does Sara respond?

Because Aiken and Aparicio reframe the discourse on AIDS within narratives of the ordinary and everyday versus through sensationalist accounts, The Salt Mines and The Transformation must also be understood as falling within the observational mode of documentary filmmaking. In Bill Nichols’ influential study (2001) of contemporary documentary film, he identifies six types, or modes, of documentary. While his classification scheme recognizes the performative mode as particularly salient for social groups who have been historically shunned from the lens of the camera, it is the observational mode of documentary that is at play within Aiken and Aparicio’s films. Arising from technological innovations of the 1960s that made possible mobile lightweight cameras and portable sound recording equipment, observational documentary allows the viewer to get an intimate and immediate sense of individual human character in quotidian life. As Nichols elaborates further the perspective of observational documentaries:

We look in on life as it is lived. Social actors engage with one another, ignoring the filmmakers. Often the characters are caught up in pressing demands or a crisis of their own. This requires their attention and draws it away from the presence of the filmmakers. The scenes tend, like fiction, to reveal aspects of character and individuality. We make inferences and come to conclusions on the basis of behavior we observe or overhear. The filmmaker’s retirement to the position of observer calls on the viewer to take a more active role in determining the significance of what is said and done.[6]

From Nichols’ description, viewers of both The Salt Mines and The Transformation see and hear firsthand the daily struggles of Gigi, Giovanna, and Sara – ranging from material conflicts between Gigi and Giovanna over feminine articles of clothing and hormone injections to better “pass” as women, to the internal struggles of Ricardo as he questions his decision to transition for communal and social belonging outside of his former life in the streets as Sara.

The social commitment of observational documentary is wholly apparent, then, given the presence of the camera “on the scene” that records daily events and lived experiences in the historical world. However, “this also affirms a sense of fidelity to what occurs that can pass on events to us as if they simply happened when they have, in fact, been constructed [and edited] to have that very appearance.”[7] This constructed nature ultimately demonstrates the power of the queer moving image to simultaneously depict the historical world as it participates in the fabrication of the historical world itself. Given this assertion, how do we read the representations of Gigi, Giovanna, and particularly Sara: are they agents of their own reality, or is it the artistic choices of the filmmakers themselves that makes conceivable the agency (or lack thereof) we see on film?

The Salt Mines: Who Are The Salt People?

The Salt Mines is the first of two documentaries about the lives of Gigi, Giovanna, and Sara, three Latina transvestite prostitutes living among heaps of snow-melting salt, pieces of scrap metal and debris, and broken-down garbage trucks converted into makeshift homes in an area cordoned off by the Sanitation Department of New York. As the camera provides a glimpse into the everyday and internal realities of these three transvestite women – covering their distinct personal histories of family abandonment, experiences of coming out, and their decline from drugs to prostitution and vice versa – the viewer encounters images of abjection depicted through non-normative bodies, subjects who are spatially and socially confined to the lower rungs of society. While the film chronicles the relations among the three close friends as they navigate the evening streets of Manhattan to support their ongoing drug addictions, it also provides the viewer a glimpse into the varied community of homeless people they inhabit “The Salt Mines” with, affectionately known as “The Salt People.” From J.R., a male-identified crack addict, to Ruben, a black gay male whom we later learn develops AIDS through prostitution, The Salt Mines depicts a community of exiles who cling to each other for mutual aid and support. “In a culture which appears to arrange always and in every way for the annihilation of queers,”[8] as Judith Butler reminds us, The Salt Mines is depicted as a safe haven for outcasts of mainstream society. This is most evident through the statement of recently unemployed Bobby, another member of this shunned community, who emphatically declares:

[I] got laid off. [I] used to see people who stayed at The Salt Mines and decided to stay with them. Our lifestyles are different, you know? They go out, they hustle. As far as tricks, selling your body, that’s not my thing. [However] I don’t condemn them… because they’re my friends right now. As far as I’m concerned, they’re my family.

By “offering a window into understanding the ethics of association and sociality between strangers and anonymous individuals who, through recurring encounters, become familiar with each other,”[9] the use of observational documentary creates an intimacy among the viewer and the community of The Salt People projected on screen, thus making their cinematic experiences a part of historical reality.

Ranging from George Chauncey’s (1994) seminal account of “vice” districts in Manhattan that illuminated urban gay life and culture in New York City from 1890-1940, to Nayan Shah’s (2011) recent study of intimate relations among transient male laborers in the United States and Canada at the turn of the twentieth century, The Salt Mines draws attention to queer kinship formations absent in conventional accounts on poverty, homelessness, and prostitution in New York City. Moreover, despite the difference in medium from Chauncey and Shah’s written historical texts, the use of film nonetheless reveals the way “people manipulate the spatial and cultural complexity of the city to constitute neighborhoods and community despite the interference” of outside agencies and institutions.[10] Specifically, an analysis of Gigi, Giovanna, and Sara’s testimonies provides a rich picture of the cultural terrain on which they navigate, a space often intruded by people malevolent to queer identities and by born-again Christians “benevolent” to “saving” transgender people through the healing power of Jesus Christ.*

Dressed in a black leather jacket and faux denim jeans with thinly sculpted eyebrows, Gigi provides the first testimony into a day in the life of “living in the salt.” While her narrative speaks strongly to the everyday struggles for food, clean water, and protection from the elements, I want to focus on two aspects of her story that stress the precarity of transgender lives within public spaces, as well as the identification she makes of being and feeling like a woman.

First stating that “life in the street [prostitution] is miserable and it’s more so for us because we are also living in the street,” Gigi goes on to provide an example of avoiding a certain city block notorious for bodily violence, particularly the shooting of transvestite prostitutes with pellet guns. Additionally, she explains her move from the salt deposits to making a home inside the spaces of dilapidated garbage trucks because of persistent police surveillance. These two examples lend weight to the film’s importance in highlighting otherwise hidden histories of queer lives that are silenced and erased by a society dominated by heterosexual and gender normative regimes of power. The Salt People, even in their abjection, are ultimately seen as beings that threaten the greater social order and thus warrant government control and suppression.

This assertion is most poignantly demonstrated at the end of the film where the removal of salt by plows in the winter stands in as a metaphor for the destruction and disintegration of queer public spaces and culture, as described in such works as Samuel Delany’s (1999) Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. In speaking to the urban center’s redevelopment for the safety and well-being of tourists and families, “the city… instituted not only a violent reconfiguration of its own landscape but also a legal and moral revamping of its own discursive structures, changing laws about sex, health, and zoning, in the course of which it has been willing, and even anxious, to exploit everything from homophobia and AIDS to family values and fear of drugs.”[11] As Gigi acts as a tour guide to The Salt Mines, showing the viewer the barbed wire fence erected around the now-abandoned space she once called home at the conclusion of the film, the documentary functions as a piece of evidence to demonstrate the impact of state and government repression in the lives of The Salt People. Within the space of New York City, as the film alludes to, individuals like Gigi, Giovanna, and Sara are not allowed nor welcomed to exist in their difference as transvestite prostitutes of color.

In terms of Gigi’s discussion of identifying as a woman, she speaks candidly to the camera about her revelation, at the age of 13, of feeling she was “a woman encased in the body of a man.” The viewer soon learns that this identification is what leads to her exclusion and loss of support from her family, led by her mother’s lack of acceptance of what Gayle Salamon calls the “felt sense” of the body that Gigi experiences.[12] Moreover, the viewer watches as Gigi becomes teary-eyed when speaking about the admiration she holds for her father, a man who accepted his child’s identification with something other than their assigned gender at birth. We thus empathize with Gigi’s affective loss and longing for her father’s love.

What this provocative scene highlights is the way Gigi explores what it means to be embodied and the subsequent costs, consequences, and sacrifices of living out that embodiment. In discussing Gigi’s felt sense of the body versus her bodily materiality, it is useful to invoke Salamon’s summary of the connection psychoanalyst Paul Schilder makes between the two via the body image:

We only have recourse to our bodies through a body image, a psychic representation of the body that is constructed over time. The body image is multiple (any person always has more than one), it is flexible (its configuration changes over time), it arises from our relations with other people, and its contours are only rarely identical to the contours of the body as it is perceived from the outside. … Thus our sense of the body image, the postural model of the body, is a sedimented effect without a stable reference or predictable content, since it may be different in form and shape, moment to moment, through each new iteration.”[13]

As understood from this description, the (trans) body is a site that encompasses an abundance of materiality and meaning that denaturalizes gender—the presumed binary categories of male and female—as a self-evident or natural fact. Far from being a biological given, the body, according to Schilder, must always be understood as contextually situated and formed, in relation to other bodies and to the world writ large: our bodies and the genders they inhabit are malleable. This assertion is not one held by Gigi’s mother, whose lack of recognition of gender’s constructed nature causes her eventual rejection of Gigi and her subsequent alienation from the family. Despite Gigi’s fear of not being able to see her father as he aged toward death—a father who accepted her transition but was unable to sustain a paternal relationship because of his wife’s disapproval—the documentary ultimately frames Gigi’s embodiment of a female subjectivity as more than enough reason to sever immediate family ties.

As Salamon quotes Schilder to further explain how “changes in the body-image tend immediately to become changes in the body,”[14] the viewer recognizes this on screen with the use of hormone injections by Gigi and Giovanna to better “pass” as women. Conspicuously absent from this scene, however, is Sara, whom we later learn is staying at the Terminal Hotel at the end of the film. Given this conclusion to The Salt Mines, it then comes as a surprise when The Transformation presents us with Ricardo, the formerly homeless transvestite prostitute once known as Sara. As Gigi abruptly responds to this turn of events: “To hell with that man business… to me he’s always a woman!”

I now turn to a reading of the film to analyze the power of Christian rhetoric that informs Sara’s transformation to become a cisgender, heterosexual man we are confronted with on screen. Ultimately, Ricardo’s presence in the second film speaks to the shaky grounds on which observational documentary can capture “reality” as experienced in everyday life.

The Transformation: The Interpolating Calls of the Christian Church

The opening scene of The Transformation, the companion piece to The Salt Mines, resembles that of an expository film more so than an observational documentary, as narration takes precedence over the images on screen that influences viewer perception of what is taking place. Within the introductory frame we are presented with a photo album held open by two white hands: on the right side of the album we recognize a black and white photo of Sara, while on the left side we see another black and white photo of a person assumed to be male, given the cues by their gender presentation in posture, demeanor, and clothing. As the camera focuses on these two photos, we hear the voice of Pastor Terry Wier, whom the viewer learns is the one holding the album. Speaking contemptuously about Sara’s life on the street as a prostitute and transvestite, he then reveals to the viewer that the photos we are looking at are of the same person: Sara is now Ricardo – with the help of Terry’s Dallas ministry of born-again Christians – who, in his life as the former, was missing an aspect of his identity that did not make him a whole person, and thus is the reason why he ended up on the streets. As Terry states, “[Ricardo] never knew what it was to be a man.”

Terry’s opening narrative introduces a moral and ideological perspective that sets up the chronological sequence of the documentary, which chiefly follows the life of Ricardo as a churchgoing and married man in Dallas who has renounced his gender presentation as female, as well as his homosexuality, for the sake of a life espoused in biblical scriptures. The Transformation also exposes the power at work through the personhood of Terry, whose missionary goal of “saving” transvestites and drag queens through offerings of shelter and monetary assistance comes at a deep price: the renunciation of their queer identity in order to become subjects of the Christian Church and to experience the redeeming grace of Jesus Christ. By highlighting the point of view of Ricardo’s new life from two distinct yet interrelated narratives, The Transformation raises provocative questions regarding gender identity and the strive toward self-determination. Given the film’s conclusion with Ricardo’s painful disclosure of wishing he could once again become a woman, the piece ultimately questions whether authentic conversion and representation of queer subjectivities can be achieved, respectively in the life of Ricardo/Sara and within the medium of documentary film itself.

Up until the concluding five minutes of the film, the camera provides a perspective of Ricardo that presents him in what seems to be a genuinely cheerful and happy demeanor. Here the documentary records and acts as evidence of Ricardo’s transformation into a cisgender and heteronormative man by accomplishing what are considered “milestones” within American society. From tying the knot with Betty, another member of Terry’s church in Dallas, to moving into a new home to start a nuclear family, the viewer listens to Ricardo’s chilling words of appreciation and gratitude for contracting AIDS, the virus that “enabled” him to lose any semblance of Sara and that brought him within the fold of the Christian Church. As he relates in a rather charismatic tone: “I thank God that I have AIDS. If I hadn’t found out I was HIV positive, I wouldn’t have come off the street and I wouldn’t have devoted myself to God. I am not a fanatic: I just love you the way God loves me… and it doesn’t matter if you are a hooker or a crook because I’ve been there before.”

Ricardo’s chilling statement stands in direct contrast to such “AIDS as punishment” narratives espoused by prominent conservative religious leaders like the late Jerry Falwell,[15] as well as to results from a 2013 survey that revealed fourteen percent of Americans believing AIDS might be God’s punishment for “immoral sexual behavior.”[16] By reframing the narrative so that AIDS becomes the divine catalyst to a life off the street and a life free from Sara, Ricardo produces a discursive and material subjectivity aligned with the fundamentalist beliefs espoused by Terry Wier’s ministry. Here we are reminded of Schilder’s assertion that “there is no question that our own activity is insufficient to build up the image of the body.”[17]

Ricardo’s narrative and new subjectivity as a born-again Christian is further supported by the filmmakers’ inclusion of interviews with Jim and Robby, a church couple from Terry’s ministry whom the viewer learns provided shelter and mentorship to Ricardo on the “correct” ways to be a man. These interviews further support Schilder’s statement that the body image is something that is flexible and can arise out of relations with other people, considering the responsibility placed upon Jim and Robby in helping to “discipline” Ricardo with male mannerisms – for, as Jim proudly relates, “If something needs fixing, it’s generally fixed by the man. … So I started showing him how to do things, showing him how to do a little yard work, things he had never done before.” This statement automatically creates a binary model of gender in which masculinity is defined by what it is not, which is embodied in all things that are weak, submissive, and incapable – or, stereotypes of what it means to be feminine. Here Robby speaks for Ricardo by saying, “He had a heavy desire that no one would look at him and see any kind of female mannerisms or traits. He worked at it very hard.” She goes on further to state: “He never believed he could be anything ever different than a homosexual… Then all in a sudden he had a desire for women that he never had before. You know, a helpmate, a wife. He couldn’t believe that the Lord could do that for him. And when he met Betty that was it. It was history from there.”

I include this quote to highlight the gross conflation that Robby makes between gender and sexuality, in which sexuality replaces something that is really a critical issue of gender for Ricardo. In Susan Stryker’s (2004) commentary on the relationship between trans and gay and lesbian studies in “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin,” she rightly asserts that

… all too often transgender phenomena are misapprehended through a lens that privileges sexual orientation and sexual identity as the primary means of differing from heteronormativity. Most disturbingly, “transgender” increasingly functions as the site in which to contain all gender trouble, thereby helping secure both homosexuality and heterosexuality as stable and normative categories of personhood. This has damaging, isolative political corollaries. [18]

While the exploration of this question is beyond the scope of this article, are such “damaging [and] isolative political corollaries” symbolized through Ricardo’s regret and eventual death at the end of the film?

Turning now to Terry Wier’s role in the documentary, The Transformation characterizes him as the pastor Ricardo/Sara relies on for guidance (read: material and financial support) after discovering he is HIV positive. Terry, in describing the significance of his ministry for the “salvation” of transvestites and prostitutes, justifies his missionary work through constant appeals to biblical scriptures. Specifically, he invokes Bible verses that speak to the similarities that exist between transgender individuals and eunuchs in biblical narratives, who he states are people “born without the desire for the opposite sex” and who are “upheld to a higher standard within the Kingdom of Heaven.” Here he cites Matthew 19:12 to self-righteously state: “Satan says you are either a man, woman, or gay. God says you are either a man, woman, or eunuch.” This leads him to conclude that, given their privileged status in the afterlife, transvestites should rejoice in their temporal suffering – because in a theology of sanctification through suffering, earthly trials will lead to greater glory in heaven.[19]

This example is just one out of the many instances throughout the film in which Terry’s appeal to Christian fundamentalist rhetoric justifies his patrolling of queer identities. In God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence, Michael Cobb (2006) describes Christian speech as a forceful entity, describing religious rhetoric as a secure form of language:

Its semantic security reveals something unique about religious rhetoric, at least in the United States: there’s something about Western religious language – mostly white Anglo Protestant Christian religious language – that makes one feel its importance for reasons well beyond the actual content the language communicates. This seemingly inherent social conservatism of religious language guards, if not creates, a nation that does not want to have its foundational social organization, the family, substantially and systematically changed or challenged.[20]

Cobb’s analysis helps to demonstrate how Terry’s use of Christian theological discourse becomes the complicit actor in some of the worst forms of social coercion and injustice seen in the documentary, evidenced by Ricardo’s regret at becoming a man at the end of the film.

Moreover, theologian Dale Martin provides the most striking critique of Christian fundamentalists (as represented by Terry, Jim, and Robby) who use theological discourse to justify oppression. Martin states that such Christians fail to understand the simple concept that the Bible does not speak:

When people talk about “what the Bible says,” they are using a metaphor that has confused them into thinking that the Bible actually exercises its own agency in “telling” people what to do. … Real knowledge of the text of scripture and the history of Christian churches shows that opposition to [LGBT] Christians and their full inclusion in the church is motivated not by loyalty to scripture and tradition but by prejudice and discrimination.[21]

Given Terry’s use of the Bible as a “rule book” to sustain a life of Christian morality for Ricardo and the transvestites he proselytizes in the streets of New York, its contemporary use as an epistemological foundation for ethics is ultimately what informs the walking away of queer individuals from any type of organized religion. Consequently, “Why does Ricardo stay?” becomes a key question for viewers at the end of the film, when it is revealed that Ricardo’s story is selfishly used for fundraising efforts by Terry’s church to build a live-in program for transvestites, drag queens, and other gender variant people to “free themselves” from sin. As the documentary concludes with a follow-up with Ricardo a year after the film’s initial recording, we hear his final words in the film:

I repented for my past life and now when I think about everything I lived, I get very emotional. [However] I remember some of it as beautiful because the real truth is that I enjoyed it… If I still had the choice, even if I could change my life right now – even now that I have my wife and everything – I would choose to be a woman.

This stunning revelation signals a moment in the documentary when viewers are left to question the “success story” of Ricardo’s transformation. While having the capacity to become a woman, he feels as if the choice is no longer an option. How come? According to Gigi, it is because the material and social sacrifices to become Sara (i.e., renouncing his chosen “family” of the Church and access to medication for AIDS) would be too heavy of a burden to bear. As she states: “Finding out he was HIV+ affected his mind: he grew afraid of dying alone in the street. The church as the only way out, the only chance he had to take care of himself because in the street, it would have been impossible.” The Transformation thus leaves its viewers with a lingering and haunting question: does Terry’s ministry really “save” Ricardo?

Conclusion: Reflexivity and Documenting Subjectivity

When questioned about Ricardo after filming The Transformation, co-filmmaker Susana Aikin reflects:

I think there are many layers in what happened to Ricardo. There was a material layer where he basically transformed from a very marginal social person to an integrated social being into our mainstream society. I think also that he went through a spiritual change in the sense that he learned to appreciate himself better as a human being. … But in terms of whether he became a straight man, I think we’re talking about very shifty things here, and I think the film speaks for itself.[22]

Presented with Aikin’s acknowledgement of the “shifty” nature of Ricardo’s identification as a born-again Christian and a newly straight man, the documentary ceases to be purely observational. Rather, it becomes one that is reflexive in nature, as Aikin and Aparicio ask the viewers themselves to see documentary for what it really is: a construction and/or representation. As Nichols explains the “reflexive mode” of documentary: “Rather than following the filmmaker in his or her engagement with other social actors, we now attend to the filmmaker’s engagement with us, speaking not only about the historical world but about the problems and issues of representing it as well.”[23] As the filmmakers provide space for the viewing audience to come to their own conclusion of Ricardo’s life, we are allowed to question how The Salt Mines and The Transformation represent the historical world, “as well as to what gets represented.”[24]

Furthermore, as both films function as politically reflexive documentaries, The Salt Mines and The Transformation permit us to engage and reframe “our assumptions and expectations about the historical world more than about film form.”[25] Such visual texts call social conventions into question; so while the former film involves most of the aspects of observational documentary, it also seeks to produce a heightened consciousness about the marginalization and policing of queer public life and sexuality in the contemporary world. It counters the prevailing tropes of transvestite prostitutes with radically different representations and displaces them with innovative forms of queer kinship relations despite the hardships of poverty, illness, and death that define homelessness in urban spaces. In terms of the latter documentary, The Transformation challenges entrenched notions of the goodwill of Christian missionary work and serves to give name and face to what was once before invisible: the oppression and destruction caused by Christian fundamentalist rhetoric. Specifically, Ricardo’s painful transformation acts to support a new way of seeing, a distinct perspective on the social order created when “the code of the penetrator”—to use Robert Goss’ term to describe people who employ a heteronormative reading of the Bible—is taken to be the literal word of God in all matters of the secular.[26]

Although this article has detailed the lives of Gigi and Sara/Ricardo as (re)presented on screen, I would like to conclude with a final comment on the transformation Giovanna undergoes between the two documentaries for the encouraging implications it has for the future. Like her two close friends, Giovanna’s presence on the streets is defined by drug use and prostitution, but with one major difference: we also learn of her dreams to escape the confines of The Salt Mines, replete with “a job and a home that [she] can go to. To be looked and be treated like a regular human being. It’s simple.” As she bluntly questions, “It’s not too much to ask for, is it?” While such dreams exist as phantasms in the first film, the second documentary demonstrates those visions becoming a reality. Here we meet Giovanna again; and while she goes through a similar transformation to Ricardo, her change is not one of becoming a man through the saving grace of Christianity. Rather, it is a transformation to live fully as herself – a woman living at home with her mother and sister, two individuals who respect and understand Giovanna’s “felt sense” of the body.

Taken together, the narratives of Gigi, Giovanna, and Sara/Ricardo, as stated by Paige Johnson, “point the way to a different understanding of how bodies mean, how representation works, and what counts as legitimate knowledge, all of which are epistemological concerns [that] have material consequences for the quality of transgender lives.”[27] Ultimately, The Salt Mines and The Transformation provoke viewers to achieve a heightened state of consciousness regarding the precarity of queer kinship formations and non-normative bodies. They stimulate the viewer to make a critical assessment of not only how trans lives are visually depicted but also how trans lives are lived, and how they can survive, in the historical world. By making visible the “stuff” of social reality that contributes to the policing of The Salt People and the disciplining of Gigi, Giovanna, and Sara/Ricardo, the documentaries give a sense of what we understand reality itself to have been, of what it is now, or of what it may become for transgender lives.

The post “To Hell with that Man Business!”: Gender Anxieties in The Salt Mines and The Transformation 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.

In fact these organizations’ omissions help us understand precisely what is illiberal about them. Probing the Egyptian experience of Copts and Shi’tes as well as the nexus created between the human rights complex based in Washington DC, local civil society organizations, the media and the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCRIF), it is found that Copts and Shi’tes have their voices muted. This discursive lacuna is created despite what these community leaders have been fighting against, largely because of the role of ‘activists’, some from those communities, who continue to play by the ‘human rights agenda’ to advance their own gains and ostracize their communities further. This pits those community leaders against a niche of activists who utilize the ‘human rights agenda’ to continue to gain access to Western media and reformulate identity based on a Rights Based Approach (RBA), that internationalizes such conflict and identity formulations.

Again the phrase ‘human rights agenda’ has positive connotations that espouse equality and inclusion but in fact is nothing more than a mechanism of exclusion that is apologetic to US power. In fact, as will be shown, some community members and ‘activists’ have had their voices hidden for their decision to speak out against the interests of those who define and dictate what the ‘human rights agenda’ is—in this case US policy towards the transition in Egypt. This is a clear demonstration of how the ‘human rights agenda’ is exclusionary. This paper first surveys the discursive field and episteme in which the appropriation of RBA’s, individualism and liberal discourse creates the ‘Coptic cause’ by looking at how Egyptian and Coptic actors appropriate these analytics. Secondly, it moves on to show how these discourses are used at the international level in controlling, serializing and influencing power relations in Egypt.  This paper ends by asking if those who attempt to modify and alter the discourse from within and ‘recapture’ Western notions of human rights, ‘activism’ and advocacy, can escape the subjectivity of Western discourse and accrue gains. Can Western discourse on human rights be recaptured to augment RBAs so that they are not exclusionary? This paper shows how Western RBAs pick up such issues in order to further US hegemony under the guise of said ‘liberalism’.

‘Activism’

As was the case for most segments of society, Copts participated in the lead-up to the June 30^th 2013 protests as well as the protests themselves that overthrew Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. Though this was the focus of most Western analysts and think tanks, focusing on Copts’ ‘activism’ against the MB and former President Morsi, few questioned or problematized said ‘gaze’ of Copts and their ‘activism’.[4] Indeed a minor grammatical change denotes a different Cartesian power plane; Coptic ‘activism’ is not synonymous with Copts’ ‘activism’. However by conflating the two Western analysts would have us believe that ‘Coptic’ ‘activism is unitary, uniform and representative of the majority of Copts under the rubric of human rights. The problematic gaze of ‘activism’ and ‘social movements’ creates a binary by bringing ‘activists’ and human rights organizations that do ‘advocacy’ to the frontline of the debate. This occurs by making them the authority on Copts and Shi’tes. Thus they speak, debate and designate what these ‘issues’ are. These activists and ‘rights’ based agendas serve as effective mechanisms in perpetuating the ‘Coptic question’ and ‘Shi’te issue’ and the discussion of their ‘integration’ in society, most often in the form of quotas. This is as opposed to the sidelining of the ‘Coptic question’[5] during instances of mass societal participation in protests, which usually happens by claiming that protests are harmonious and filled with people from all walks of life, thus collectivizing subjectivity and sidelining any grievances that other segments of society may have. Viewing Coptic ‘activism’ as synonymous with protests encourages the idea of campaigning for rights and the consolidation of democracy.

Similarly, on January 25^th 2011, throughout the Mohamed Mahmoud clashes of 2011 and in other instances of mass protest, there is emphasis on ‘equal participation’ by all segments of society to highlight that Egyptian society does not suffer from problems that affect Copts distinctly. Usually these protests are called for, organized and include activist participation.

In this regard ‘activism’ is an escape valve for delaying much needed discussion surrounding the issue of Copts, Shi’tes inter alia. This happens either in chorus with other protests in which this is used as an indicator of harmonious coexistence, or independently when showcasing the need to fight for ‘rights’ based issues. Thus the binary is two-fold: either there is a complete denial of the problem during instances of mass protests and a simultaneous celebration of the harmony among protestors from all walks of life; or an alternative reactionary discourse that perpetuates the ‘Coptic question’ or the ‘Shi’te issue’ by talking about the need for ‘integration’, ‘citizenship’, and ‘equality’. The latter is often conceived through mechanisms such as an electoral quota or quotas in state bureaucracy. This pluralism hides more than it integrates; it displays all identities merely within the categorization of ‘protestor’ or ‘activist’ as an unmediated and un-negotiated fixation that negates any grievances. This is how the sidelining of the ‘Coptic question’ occurs. Statements such as “Copts protected Muslims as they prayed in Tahrir Square”,[6] an incident that became the object of fixation by Western media, become mantras that espouse and delineate boundaries of power along an axis of ‘activism’ solely. By increasing this ‘gaze’ a host of other issues are omitted.

This form of ‘activism’ and ‘solidarity’, as the Western media propagates, falls into the hands of a few individuals. Ihab Ramzy, Mamdouh Ramzy (no relation) and Ramy Kamal join the chorus of those who make a niche for themselves in ‘Coptic activism’. In continually calling for side issues such as a quota for Copts in legislative elections they show their previous ties: Ihab Ramzy was elected in Minya on the list of the Party of Freedom, a former NDP party (the party of the former regime of Hosni Mubarak) while Mamdouh Ramzy, the former MP responsible for the statement that “the Shoura council [the upper Legislative chamber] has been wronged for the past 30 years”[7] was in fact the MB appointee to the Shoura Council who had to endure the theatrical performance in condemning the attack on the Coptic Cathedral under Morsi’s tenure. After that statement, Mamdouh gave himself the title of ‘special papal advisor’. Ihab Ramzy has given himself the same title. The Coptic Pope then issued a statement[8] saying he has no advisors and nobody speaks in his name or the Church’s and went on to reprimand Ihab privately for continuing to host conferences such as the Sonesta conference,[9] which called for an electoral quota for Copts. Ihab has continually been sidelined after the Pope’s reforms, which have brought to the Church new lay voices to Episcopal hierarchy.  Ramy Kamal joins the cohort of both Ramzys in breaking away from the Maspero Youth Union (MYU), the original organization that was born out of the ‘Maspero Massacre’ by Military Police. He went on to found the ‘Maspero Youth Foundation for Development and Human Rights’ and is quoted by Western think tanks[10] under another purported capacity as organizer of the ‘Free Copts’ movement and debates issues of ‘Coptic activism’ for a Western audience in a manner that is detached from reality on the ground. Ramy’s activism spree joins other ‘activists’ who seem to be bent on muting and overshadowing the MYU. During November 2013 some decided to commemorate the Maspero Massacre at a time when the original Maspero Organization, MYU, decided to cancel that year’s proceedings. This was done to avoid associating with newfound MB disdain for the Armed Forces, and instead be content with a Church service in Muqattam, Cairo. However ‘activists’ decided to protest in a show of irony that left MYU’s proceedings underreported and not covered.[11] That is why the quota, a non-issue amongst most Copts (who seem to have settled this in 1923),[12] has encapsulated DC think tanks that continue to make generic one size fit all approaches to “appoint Coptic elites,”[13] arguably what Mubarak used to do. In fact Ihab Ramzy has made the same demand with respect to the Egyptian bureaucracy[14] because it is beneficial to him and a small oligarchy of pro-Mubarak elites. Proponents of ‘activism’ seem to romanticize modernist citizenship empowerment approaches that are both ahistorical and narrow.

Church reform: swimming against the tide of activism

Western analysis that laments the need for civil society is imposed based off the academic transition paradigm. This very analysis dislodges organic change happening on the ground, which goes unreported by virtue of this ‘gaze’ and cooptation of Western media and its nexus with think tanks. Earlier in June the Coptic Orthodox Pope, Tawadrus II, approved the Church councils law. These laws in effect decentralize churches by having a council made up of laymen that rule it at each church, with a papal representative making up 1/3 of it while the remaining 2/3 are elected.  This creates a local electorate for each church. A standard 50%+1 is required to reach decisions. Yet Western think tanks and media seem fixated on the fact that the state’s authoritarianism permeates into the Church and that it similarly needs a ‘revolution’, ‘activism’ and ‘(Coptic) civil society’.[15] It is deeply ironic that a post-Westephalian notion of direct democracy was missed by these very Western academics.

This is at a time when the previous laymen’s council has been frozen off pending new elections for it. The Pope has also struck down the first hurdle for inter-Catholic and Orthodox marriage while continuing on ecumenicalism at the national level in Egypt. This fundamental shift in lay-clerical relations has left figures such as Mamdouh, Ihab and other former Coptic figures that enjoy(ed) the status of elites in a precarious position. This is in contrast to earlier rigid attitudes by the previous Pope Shenouda III towards horizontal and vertical power structures within the different confessions and inside the Coptic Orthodox Church. These two examples of reform break such power structures and make it difficult for the previous elites to wield a monopoly on Church-civil society relations within the classic ‘state-civil society’ paradigm, it is thus ignored and unreported.

In some of Egypt’s new parties Copts have risen to the ranks of Vice President (VP); examples include the Social Democrat’s Ihab el Kharat, Fredy Bayady and several others. This is a different structure that manages to contest previous power economies that conventional old powers such as Ihab and Mamdouh Ramzy fail to make gains inside of, especially post 2011 in Egypt. This is to be added to other new forms of participatory gains. Minister of Environment Laila Iskandar’s new Zabaleen initiative[16] is an example of how the Coptic community has made participatory gains that fall outside first wave approaches of equality and legislation. The Zabaleen initiative is a small unannounced and unknown victory because it falls outside the scope of classic ‘citizenship’ empowerment, subsequently outside the Western media and think tanks’ gaze. The initiative involves Egypt’s previously outlawed ‘Zabaleen’ Coptic community[17], a garbage collecting and recycling community in the area of Manshiyet Nasser, a poor-middle income informal housing area, that has felt the brunt of the previous government’s neoliberal authoritarianism.[18] The government continually clamped down on the community and its informal housing, specifically by granting garbage collecting contracts to foreign multinationals; euphemism for neoliberal concessions. Not only did this not solve the problem but it outlawed the collection of garbage by this community, despite it having achieved higher rates of recycling than the new multinational and keeping its profit margin within Egypt and not abroad. At one point the government clamped down on them after the spread of the H1N1 virus, colloquially named ‘swine flu’, because most families had a side business of pig farming. This was despite the World Health Organization (WHO) declaring that there was no risk of transmission of the virus through pigs. It represented a clear signal of the government’s continued neoliberal clampdown. The new Minister of Environment, however, has reinstated the Zabaleen community and for the first time given them a government legal umbrella in cooperation with the ministry. Iskander’s NGO, which she started before her ministerial post, not only advocated for the participatory inclusion of this community, but also helped in teaching them new recycling techniques. This reversal and termination of garbage collecting contracts to foreign multinationals is a direct omission made by virtue of the ‘human rights gaze’ towards Egypt.

Shi’te ‘activism’

The Shi’ite community in Egypt faces the same problems stated above: the issue of ‘universality’ and the host of interventions it invites as well as the problematic gaze of ‘activism’. Those who highlight Shi’ite suffering as synonymous with their ability to publicly celebrate Ashoura do so as part of a ‘human rights agenda’ of ‘religious freedom,’ yet no one has bothered to ask how Shi’tes want to celebrate or practice their rituals and whether it is far from the ‘religious freedom’ mantra espoused by Western civil society, a mantra also espoused and internalized by local civil society in Egypt. The fact that we know far less about Shi’tes in Egypt than other groups is likely due to the fact that they are only focused on around the time of Ashoura, as well as because of the Western gaze towards their ‘activism’ (defined as their right to publicly celebrate Ashoura). It is no surprise that community leaders have said that there are no official plans to go the Al Hussein mosque and that the media in fact has created problems for them, thus making it a more difficult time than it usually is. Continued fascination by individual decisions to go and commemorate Ashoura in Al Hussein has received vast media coverage because of the purported title ascribed to those quoted in the stories as ‘activists’.[19] The binary ‘activism’ creates is readily observed here with major Shi’te communities denying any intention of commemorating Ashoura as these activists would have the media to believe. While Shi’tes do call on the authorities to allow them to practice more openly, the media portrayal of ‘Shi’ite activists’ going to clash with the Salafis and police forces are only false and counterproductive. Any observer of the Shi’te community knows that they celebrate quietly, predominantly in rural Egypt and the urban Delta such as in Mansoura at many smaller shrines, which, while sometimes closed around Ashoura, tend to be open most of the time. In that regard the fascination with ‘Shi’ite activism’ hides more than it tells us about a community that for obvious reasons will remain unwelcoming to current approaches. Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) should not approach the Shi’ite community with a ‘universal’ rights based agenda that would seek to make them a sui generis community, while they specifically highlight that their festivities and rituals are not recognizably different from mainstream Sunni Muslims. There are no visible self-mutilating rituals as practiced in the Gulf and Iran, Shi’te community leaders have constantly said that Egyptian Shi’tes are no different than Egyptian Sunnis, particularly in the call for prayer, adhan, and their rituals.[20]

The constitution as a false panacea

The core issue around the Constitution that I will focus on is the decision to ignore the Church’s push for an amendment of article 3,[21] despite it being unclear what they would stand to gain from it. The Church virtually pushed for this amendment alone, but an acute focus over the Shoura Council, affirmative action and the question of a quota dominated instead. This comes from the influence of media, civil society and think tanks. The source of this focus and its reason will be elaborated on later. Such ‘activism’ seems oblivious to the political economy map of power relations outlined previously. There is also the underestimation of the removal of article 219, an article that defined Islamic jurisprudence and equated it with legislation. According to some jurisprudence, this would have institutionalized and formalized the designation of non-mainstream Islamists as second tier citizens and turn Egypt into a theocracy. The Church knows only too well, as witness to the article 2 debacle with the late President Anwar al-Sadat,[22] that the problem of discrimination, despite some new think tank reports,[23] lies not in what is inked on a piece of paper called a constitution, but beyond that.

Here it could be useful to draw on feminist movements as an example. Many postcolonial feminists have critiqued the problematic approaches and assumptions inherent in first wave feminism and its liberal, individualistic theories and praxis. This is usually in the form of pro-activism policies, lobbying for legislative reform as a panacea and ignoring societal stigmas. This same process can be seen with regards to ‘activist’ groups and movements in Egypt; most are enamored with legislation as a panacea. Let us also not forget the near silence on part of many key players who have ignored the Church’s purposefully leaked internal memo expressing deep frustration towards the sluggish pace towards removal of article 219 and stonewalling on article 3 inter alia. It is telling that only Ahmed Harrara, one activist amongst the many groups, picked up on this leaked memo in an interview with TV talk show host Mahmoud Saad.[24]

Lastly, no one has bothered to look at the process of discussion internally for the Church and in the constituent assembly rather than at the outcome. While most constituent assembly members know this is a temporary constitution, media reports have either sought to overemphasize the Church’s stance on voting to keep the Shoura but ignore the battle for article 3, or emphasize the military tribunals article. While all state institutions and Salafis seem to be supporting such a restrictive article, which allows the trial of civilians in military tribunals (under cases that involve civil-military disputes), it hardly seems to make sense to expect the Church to take on yet another frontal battle. Victims of violence against Copts seem to be unable to garner justice either in civil or military tribunals. This is hardly an issue likely to be resolved by civilian judiciary or a constitution. Anyone familiar with the episodic violence against Copts in the 80’s will know that all too well. It is precisely because it falls out of the Western ‘gaze’ of human rights that it becomes unknown; context is a luxury for some which Copts have not been afforded because of omissions made by virtue of the ‘human rights agenda’. The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) issued a report that attested to this shortcoming, an increasingly sidelined nuance missing amid the loud activist-driven ‘No to Military Trials’ campaign:

The judiciary, particularly sitting judges, does not often hear cases of sectarian violence, and it is extremely rare for such crimes to be referred to trial. On the other hand, the Public Prosecutor’s role in dealing with the violence is shameful: although Egyptian law gives that office the prerogatives of investigating judges authorized to conduct immediate, independent investigations to identify the perpetrators and bring them to justice using evidence of their crimes to protect society from lawbreakers, the Public Prosecutor’s Office tends to aid the security establishment in imposing “reconciliation” procedures, even when these are against the law—for example, accepting reconciliation in felonies, which is not permitted by Egyptian law. At other times the Public Prosecutor conducts investigations for show that lack all evidence, which means that either the perpetrators are not identified or they are acquitted if they are referred to trial. As such, impunity is the norm.[25]

Therefore the ‘No to Military Trials’ campaign also has a problematic gaze that seeks to universalize its cause and victims, citing that Copts too suffer from military trials, such as the case with Maspero. This clearly shows they can even politicize mourning for their own civil society ends. The ‘No to Military Trials’ initiative, while important, assumes that all victims are treated equally and unjustly before a military court, but what about those who are treated unjustly before civilian judiciary as reported by EIPR?  In this case, the ends are making the civilian judiciary the domain of ‘reform’ approaches as if it functions for the most part equally for Copts, Shi’tes and other heterodox societal segments that fall outside the modern conceptualization of the ‘citizen’.

Forward

Perhaps the most immediate and tentative conclusion of the process now is that such a ‘transition’ paradigm, or ‘transitional justice’ seems bankrupt and unable to express current realities past a Western focus.[26] This divides issues into two factions, those that need ‘reform’ and deserve institutional focus and those that by association encourage ‘activism’. The latter are issues that are classified as ‘low-level’ politics that are not prioritized in a transition paradigm and should work themselves out after democracy has been ‘consolidated’. However this consolidation negates how in a ‘transition’ such questions are open ended and ongoing power struggles. This firmly excludes participatory approaches to addressing the discourse that binds and controls Copts and Shi’tes. It also ignores how it formulates Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) subjectivity as a project of modernity that is equally blind to such issues. Particularly notable is the spectrum of CSOs that fail to understand or comprehend that the Church is between a rock and a hard place, and that in fact, it has been between a rock and a hard place for almost the entire modern history of Egypt and will continue to be. Nominal allies such as civil society, with the examples of Ihab and Mamdouh Ramzy whose efforts accentuate the plight of Copts rather than ‘empower’ them, adhere to modernist discourse that propose ‘citizenship’, ‘empowerment’, and ‘activism’; buzz words not only on social media but for all those who undertake low-level CSO work or ‘democracy’ promotion (a similar ruse for intervention). In fact this continues to be the talk and focus of the US State Department.

Take Hillary Clinton’s inaugural 2011 ‘religious freedom report’ speech, given not surprisingly at a think tank—the same think tank whose previous ‘gaze’ and recommendations were criticized: the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.[27] Clinton remarked:

Now meanwhile, Egypt is grappling with these challenges as it navigates its unprecedented democratic transition. And during my recent visit, I met with members of the new government, including President Morsi, and representatives from Egypt’s Christian communities. Religious freedom was very present behind closed doors and out in the streets. President Morsi has said clearly and repeatedly, in public and private, that he intends to be the president of all the Egyptian people. He has pledged to appoint an inclusive government and put women and Christians in high leadership positions. The Egyptian people and the international community are looking to him to follow through on those commitments. Another important aspect of Egypt’s transition is whether citizens themselves respect each other’s differences. Now we saw that capacity vividly in Tahrir Square, when Christians formed a circle around Muslims in prayer, and Muslims clasped hands to protect Christians celebrating a mass. I think that spirit of unity and fellowship was a very moving part of how Egyptians and all the rest of us responded to what happened in those days in that square. And if, in the years ahead, if Egyptians continue to protect that precious recognition of what every single Egyptian can contribute to the future of their country, where people of different faiths will be standing together in fellowship, then they can bring hope and healing to many communities in Egypt who need that message.

In this regard Hillary Clinton’s comments affirm the vanguard role attributed to activism: during moments of mass protest the ‘harmonious’ exhibition of national unity, or to be more blunt the lack of violence, is used as a marker of citizenship that hides the otherwise unwanted realities; participatory gains, class mobility or critique of the ‘universality of rights’ and citizenship in general. Such critique would arguably criticize the foundations upon which most Western states are built and would infringe on high-level politics and US interests; it would be unwarranted for the US to embarrass Egypt over such an issue. But this is key, its performativity and claim to be moved by such an issue, such as the ‘universality of religious freedom’ is false. This exhibition of liberalism is also used hypothetically-“in the years ahead”- meaning that the US will monitor, advocate and recommend the practices. Thus a transition paradigm[28] is quintessential to serializing, locating and identifying key performance indictors, ones that have not been locally ascribed or agreed upon. Indeed it is quite telling that the US failed to pick up on the incidence of the police attack on the Egyptian cathedral. Clearly that does not fit the narrative in which “Tahrir Square’s…unity” is espoused. Hillary Clinton continues:

As we look to the future – not only in Egypt, not only in the newly free and democratically seeking states of North Africa and the Middle East, but far beyond – we will continue to advocate strongly for religious freedom. This is a bedrock priority of our foreign policy, one that we carry out in a number of ways [emphasis added]. Earlier today, the United States did release our annual International Religious Freedom Report. This is the fourth time I’ve had the honor of presenting it. It comprehensively catalogues the official and societal restrictions people around the world face as they try to practice their faith, and it designates Countries of Particular Concern that have engaged in or tolerated particularly severe violations of religious freedom. This report sends a signal to the worst offenders that the world is watching, but it also provides information to help us and others target our advocacy, to make sure we reach the people who most need our help. In the Obama Administration, we’ve elevated religious freedom as a diplomatic priority. Together with governments, international organizations, and civil society, we have worked to shape and implement United Nations Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18.[29]

The discursive performance here of the widening of a religious freedom agenda that encompasses the Middle East without mentioning Israel; is a spatial designation of power. These remarks should make us pause for a number of reasons. Religious freedom is taken as the bedrock of US foreign policy. This assumes a liberal universality to it which it endows the ‘free’ world with the duty to help others while evoking universal declarations such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In doing so the US gains a foothold, not just universally, but exceptionally in the Middle East as Clinton remarked. It is only here we understand the crucial role that civil society plays to affirm not so much a ‘rights based’ agenda as much as a US agenda. But is this really the bedrock of US foreign policy? Or is part of an exclusive gaze in the Middle East? Does Saudi Arabia fall in the same category equally? Take Paul Sedra’s important words when discussing the nexus of US foreign policy and the plight of Copts with respect to DC based think tanks:

What I find disturbing is the alacrity with which particular US political forces have taken up the cause of anti-Christian persecution, notably over the past decade, just as the “war on terror” has gained so much momentum. And perhaps unsurprisingly given these political links, “persecution experts” have, much like their counterparts in the ‘terrorism expert’ industry, tended to find their way to particular think-tanks in Washington.[30]

The discursive performativity being exercised here is reminiscent of NSC-68 during the Cold War where the communist “threat” was hailed in such a way that religious freedom was designated to be the bedrock of US foreign policy. NSC-68 paved the way for intervention and rollback of communist regimes, and this new policy arguably does the same. Sedra continues commenting on the nexus of the human rights complex in Washington, DC:

…Arguably the leader in this regard is the Hudson Institute, which houses the Center for Religious Freedom under the directorship of Nina Shea. According to the Hudson Institute’s website, the center “promotes religious freedom as a component of U.S. foreign policy by working with a worldwide network of religious freedom experts to provide defenses against religious persecution and oppression.” Despite the emphasis in this description on a ‘worldwide network,’ a quick scan of op-eds by Center staff reveals that the geographic scope of their concern is substantially narrower: The vast majority of the articles concern the Muslim world, and among them, Egypt features most prominently.[31]

In this regard the Muslim world is the equivalent of the ‘free world’ during the Cold War that “needs” protecting and guidance. In the Cold War the free world needed protection, contemporarily the Muslim world needs a partner for its ‘democratic transition’. In this regard think tanks have their work equally distributed between those who white-wash ‘Islam’ as democratic and call for engaging Muslim leaders under the guise of ‘democratic support’, such as Mohamed Morsi, much to safeguard US interests, and by association legitimate him as Hillary Clinton did as a proponent of “minority rights”.[32] It is because Hilary Clinton has uttered it that it has been taken to be the truth. Meanwhile, other think tanks such as the Hudson Institute work on ‘minorities’ and turn their ‘cause’ into a pressure card. Thus ‘causes’ become intervention mechanisms much the same as “minority rights” can be. This gives the US the cozy place of arbitrator. A function of pluralism and ‘advocacy’ is that it creates the performativity of ‘choice,’ meaning that when the US goes to Egypt it has a host of ‘issues’ to select from. This becomes one of them and is activated to their liking. Sedra continues:

… Why would American conservatives take a particular interest in sectarian tensions in Egypt? As is well known, in recent decades, evangelical Christians in the United States have moved increasingly rightward in political orientation. At first glance, it would appear that Christian conservatives are moved by the plight of fellow Christians like the Copts. In practice, however, these Christian conservatives are moved to a still greater extent by Israeli protestations of insecurity. Given their track record of unstinting support for Israel, and relative disregard for the plight of Palestinian Christians, the focus on Egypt’s Copts emerges as a function of ‘Realpolitik’ rather than ideals.[33]

Realpolitik indeed. That is the very part of deconstructing the nexus of ‘activism’, ‘advocacy’, ‘social movements’ and the nexus with think tanks and foreign policy. All come together to hide and mask apologia to politics of a lower-level, but one that is crucial nonetheless to US presence in the region. More recently the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCRIF), a “bipartisan” and “independent” body tasked with fighting for the “values of our [US] nation”,[34] held a joint subcommittee hearing on human rights abuses in Egypt. Coptic Bishop Angaleos, USCRIF Vice Chair Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, and Samuel Tadros of the Hudson Institute (the same one in question in Sedra’s article), as well as a host of other ‘experts’ testified. These ‘experts’ are also part of the illiberality that Said spoke of: they are orientalist ‘experts’ of the same kind that create knowledge apologetic to US power. However before continuing it is important to analyze the US State Department statement on the passing of the 2012 constitution:

The future of Egypt’s democracy depends on forging a broader consensus behind its new democratic rules and institutions. Many Egyptians have voiced deep concerns about the substance of the constitution and the constitutional process. President Morsi, as the democratically elected leader of Egypt, has a special responsibility to move forward in a way that recognizes the urgent need to bridge divisions, build trust, and broaden support for the political process. We have called for genuine consultation and compromise across Egypt’s political divides. We hope those Egyptians disappointed by the result will seek more and deeper engagement. We look to those who welcome the result to engage in good faith. And we hope all sides will re-commit themselves to condemn and prevent violence. Only Egyptians can decide their country’s future. The United States remains committed to helping them realize the aspirations that drove their revolution and complete a successful democratic transition. Egypt needs a strong, inclusive government to meet its many challenges.[35]

This omits and fails to mention how the constituent assembly was dominated by the MB and its allies, required no 67% threshold to pass an article (if there was no 67% approval the first time then during the second vote all that was required was 57%) and how Morsi passed a constitutional declaration that immunized the assembly against court rulings that dissolved it. It also negates to mention the violence against protesters in the enthusing battle after the constitutional declaration, a process that was far from democratic particularly when you see that the MB strongman Khairat al Shater, Deputy General Guide, claimed that “80% of protesters [were]…Copts”.[36]

Compared with Zuhdi’s recent testimony, the 2012 State Department statement on the constitution is almost identical, pro-status quo and seeks to highlight the positive aspects of the 2013 constitution while saving face for the State Department’s statement on the 2012 constitution. In that sense the USCRIF is a discursive self-correcting tool for the US, and perhaps only in that light can it be called a ‘bedrock of US foreign policy’ in so as much as it maintains its ‘gaze’ on the region and remedies previous US foreign policy hiccups. But what is most interesting is how Zuhdi posits the plight of Copts, Baha’is, Shi’tes, Sufis and even Jehovah’s witnesses, as well as Jews in Egypt. This pluralism serves to discursively create a foothold and make the issue universal, despite clear messages from perhaps all those segments of society that they do not wish to identify themselves with the US. The statement by Shi’te leaders discussed previously is perhaps the most indicative. As for Jews, a similar statement has been made to that effect in which Magda Haroun, the head of the Jewish community in Egypt said “I don’t want anything from France or any country…Eastern Jews are not like Western Jews and their rituals are different”, thus trumping any semblance of universalism.[37] But its mention by Zuhdi means it exists, and as such it is an issue that can be activated; creating the foundational discourse of ‘religious freedom’. His testimony is ahistoricized and hides the colonial legacy of Jehovah’s witnesses and their arrival to Egypt by way of American missionaries.[38] Zuhdi concluded it by saying “[F]or the sake of stability and security, and because of Egypt’s international human rights commitments, the United States government should urge Egypt to choose this pathway to democracy and freedom.”[39]

The link between security and the “pathway to democracy and freedom” reads directly out of the neo-neo IR debate between neo-realism and neo-liberalism. This is correlated with Samuel Tadros’ testimony of the Hudson Institute, clearly more informed: “[O]n the national level, the scarce Coptic representation that existed in the government further declined.”[40] A clear correlation with Ihab Ramzy’s demand and continuation of ‘activism’ based discourse and a human rights agenda that is top-down. Though Tadros has a more historicized approach one cannot shake off Sedra’s remarks and the use of an Egyptian native informant by the Hudson Institute in such a setting before the House Foreign Relations Committee. Again it is not so much a function of who advocates for what, rather than who advocates for whom and is used to prove legitimacy.

Finally Bishop Angaleos’ testimony sought to counter both testimonies. He started by talking about Copts’ historical standing since the 7th century and how ancient law still governs society, mentioned the attack on the Coptic Cathedral under Morsi, the impunity of the Maspero Massacre, the rights of Shi’ites and contextualized Morsi’s “democratic credentials”, or lack there of. Lastly Angaleos gave a different view to transitional justice than is conventionally found, arguing:

Finally, the model of reconciliation that is called for is one that must be built upon prior criminal acts being investigated and accordingly dealt with, and future ones being subject to a stringent rule of law; only then will Egypt be able to live true reconciliation and work towards a common future.[41]

He also affirmed that Copts “absolutely negated accusations of their reliance upon and loyalty to foreign powers or negatively-perceived domestic authorities.”[42] Neither  Zhudi nor Tadros mentioned this point; on the contrary, Angaleos sought to counter all claims that Copts need US assistance while Zhudi and Tadros created the conditions and rhetoric that makes US intervention welcome. It is however unfortunate that a member of the Coptic clergy continued to see salvation within a rights based agenda. Though this is an internal debate among the Coptic community, particularly the more nuanced ‘movements’ such as the MYU, few realize that those who hold the keys of defining what is and is not part of the rights agenda are not those affected by or those whose “rights” are being violated. Some however have offered to fight and contest that meaning. Angaelos’ testimony shows an attempt at recapturing that discursive space. It is however unlikely that a discursive battle can be one where a rights based subjectivity is maintained while changing the power economy that is so firmly entrenched with Western civil society, be it in the West or Cairo, the media, a transition paradigm and incumbents in both the US and Egypt. Angaelos’ plea is apparent:

More recently, an incident in the Upper Egyptian governorate of Minya evokes experiences of the persecution faced by Christians in the Dhimmi period centuries ago. In this incident, two men, Emad Damian and his cousin Medhat Damian, were killed by Islamists in the Assiut governorate for refusing to pay a jizya tax. In the current day and age, and in the context of the ongoing process of democratisation in Egypt, such an incident should be unthinkable, yet it is indicative of the reality lived by some Christians in certain parts of Egypt on a daily basis.[43]

Indeed the contradiction is readily made apparent, but can be drowned out on account of several other factors and “gains” towards democracy. A case in point is the US State Department Egypt Country Report on Human Rights Practices. The 2012 report lamented:

…progress in moving towards accountability for civilian security forces compared with the previous year. The ENP [Egyptian National Police] adopted a code of conduct in October 2011, and in July the government established the Civil Rights Defense Committee to examine issues relating to the use of force by security services during the 2011 revolution.[44]

Yet the report failed to mention that this was decorative “reform” designed to placate local CSOs who issued a report highlighting the failure of Morsi to refer anyone to trial through this committee, its vast shortcoming in makeup, its lack of agenda, and non-conclusive investigations it undertook.[45] Furthermore, the report wrongfully claims the constitutional declaration was cancelled amidst increasing ‘advocacy’ by the opposition; failing to ignore that its effects remained firmly in place. Morsi issued another constitutional declaration to annul the previous one, but it included an article that gave immunity to the previous constitutional declaration’s effects. Thus the main goal, to pass the constitution without judicial review, was accomplished by preventing the Supreme Constitutional Court (SCC) from convening to issue a ruling to disband the constituent assembly. Later the SCC would issue the ruling disbanding the constituent assembly, but after the draft constitution went to a referendum and was passed. The ineffectual reform seems to have achieved its primary goal of addressing a Western audience.

Conclusion

When it comes to the issue of Copts and the Shi’a this hard hitting axiom seems more relevant than ever: the more you know, the less you know. Looking forward, Coptic ‘activism’, and ‘activism’ in general is likely to remain dominated by demands unrepresentative of those on the ground, and continue to be blind to issues of Copts and Shi’tes except when they are attacked, particularly with regards to Shi’tes. Why do these ‘activists’, ‘social movements’, and NGOs continue to occupy this role that has been assigned to them by liberal rights based discourse? A tentative conclusion points towards the fundamentally Western makeup of the state as conceived in a neoliberal world. For most issues to be addressed, lobby groups become essential components of the state, and the more organizations there are the better, much à la pluralism. In this regard Steve Fish’s words about the misgrievances of liberalism and pluralism as smokescreens for liberal inoculation are on mark.[46] As an immediate remedy there should be grassroots based approaches of participatory development, such as the Zabaleen initiative that serves to tackle neoliberal agendas. Such initiatives, which are combated by rights based agendas, are a practical step towards fighting neoliberalism. With the events in Egypt so firmly grounded in a ‘transition’ paradigm, it is no surprise that Western notions of development translate economically to neoliberalism and politically to ‘activism’.

The post False Ideas About ‘Activism’ in Egypt and the Case of Egypt’s Copts: Outside the State and Within the Economy of Power appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Track Two diplomacy pertains to policy oriented discussions that are non-governmental, informal and un-official in nature, but which are quite close to governmental agendas and often involve participation of the people who are close to governmental quarters and influential in policy matters, such as retired diplomats, retired civil and military officials, public figures, and policy analysts. On occasions it may also involve the participation of government officials in their private capacities.

The concept and practice of ‘Track Two’ diplomacy as a conflict resolution and conflict prevention approach originally emerged during the Cold War between the USA and the Soviet Union.[2] Since then, it has been used as an important tool to advance the dialogue process among parties in dispute in many conflict zones across the globe, for example Israel-Palestine, Northern Ireland—Great Britain, India-Pakistan, and so on. The Track Two process is a more comprehensive and broader approach, encompassing a variety of non-official dialogues between members of adversary groups or nations which aim to develop strategies, influence public opinion and organise human and material resources in ways that might help to resolve conflict. The exponents of Track-Two diplomacy value the psychological and cultural awareness associated with the Track-Two dialogues in addressing the human aspects that are appropriate in a workshop setting and in similar activities, but which tend to create difficulties in official processes. The agenda of Track-Two work is fluid and responsive to the psychological and systemic barriers to conflict resolution, thus overcoming them. Moreover, Track Two proponents are of the view that such unofficial initiatives broaden the range of participation in the dialogue process among the antagonist groups, allowing consultation with parties that need to be represented but are not officially involved. In fact, it is now quite widely recognised by Track One diplomats that it is unlikely that modern day conflicts can be resolved without the cooperation of Track Two diplomacy, as it helps in easing the various barriers between adversarial groups.

Given its focus on both fostering relationships and on strengthening civil society, Track Two is especially useful with regards to India and Pakistan. India-Pakistan relations have been intricate and strained following independence from British colonial rule in 1947. It is a well-established fact that over the last six decades both nations have remained at logger-heads with each other, primarily because of the political dispensation of the Jammu and Kashmir problem[3]. The two countries have always used their substantial resources to outwit  each other, economically, diplomatically and militarily. Three full-fledged wars in 1947, 1965, and in 1971, the first two explicitly over the Jammu and Kashmir issues, were fought between the two countries.  In addition, there have been a number of serious but localised military confrontations, for example, Operation Meghdoot (1984), Operation Brasstracks (1986), and a small-scale war at Kargil (1999). During the rest of the time, the relationship can be at best characterized as a state of Cold War or Cold Peace. The relationship between the two states came to its lowest point in 1989-90 with the eruption of militancy in Kashmir. It was believed in India that Pakistan had a direct role in supporting cross-border militancy first in Punjab and then in Kashmir, creating a dangerous and explosive situation in the region. Simultaneously, the two nations sought nuclear parity. It was subsequently late in 1998 that both India and Pakistan exploded nuclear devices; on 11 and 13 May at Pokhran and 28 and 30 May at Chagi in 1998, respectively.

The failure to achieve substantial progress on issues confronting the two countries made a strong case for unconventional diplomacy, particularly in post-1990 situation when violence in the state of Jammu and Kashmir became a medium of asserting political will. Prevailing tensions between the two nuclear states became a genuine cause of alarm to the international community and for citizens of the two states, each with much to lose in an escalated conflict. It was in this context that the Track Two initiatives began to be mobilized and used to influence the relations between India and Pakistan in a positive direction.

The first prominent Track Two initiative between India and Pakistan was the Neemaran dialogue that took place under the auspices of the United States Information Services (USIS) in 1990 and was later joined by American foundations and German nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Its first meeting was held in Neemrana Fort in Rajhasthan, India in October 1991. The group was comprised of former diplomats, former military personnel, media persons, NGO workers and academics from India and Pakistan. Since then, there has been a significant increase in the number of Track Two initiatives between India and Pakistan. Of late, some new such initiatives have started, such as the Chaophraya Dialogue, the WISCOMP annual workshop, the Pugwash Conferences, Ottawa Dialogue, and so on.  There exist more than twelve highly institutionalised Track Two groups, as well as over twenty other people-to-people exchange programmes operating between the two nuclear powers[4], with both external and internal funding.

However, given its western origin there have been varied views and opinions vis-à-vis the role and relevance of Track Two diplomacy in the South Asian Context. Critics generally argue that the various non-official dialogues-particularly Track Two initiatives-have largely remained confined to the quasi-official realm with a few retired government officials, both civil and military, dominating most of the activities. The situation becomes further complicated as most of these people have represented their governments at some point in time, and thus they tend to adopt positions very similar to those of their governments once the core issues come to the fore.[5] Furthermore, given the prolonged hostile atmosphere between India and Pakistan, questions and queries over the role and relevance of Track Two dialogues have intensified. The ‘track two’ activists, however, hold the view that it is a useful and effective conflict management mechanism. For instance, it has led to increased understanding and a prevention in escalation of tensions. Moreover, it may help resolve on-going disputes by preventing the emergence of new disputes, as well as build confidence between the parties involved. A general consensus has evolved among many scholars and peace practitioners that the Track Two diplomacy between India and Pakistan has been able to:

• Facilitate the track one dialogue process between the two countries
• Keep the channels of communication open even during the times of crises at the official level
• Effectively break down the stereotypical and enemy images of each other
• Expand the peace constituencies across the border

Just a few years back, it was taboo in both India and Pakistan to discuss peace and reconciliation with each other. Contrary to that, the situation has significantly changed. Government as well as civilians on both sides of the border have recognised the pros and cons of peace and conflict. There is a very strong realisation among civil society groups operating on either side of the border that the costs involved in maintaining animosity against each other are much higher than any gains from the current hostile situation. At a time when the relations between India and Pakistan have lurched from crisis to crisis, Track Two has been able to sustain an element of unbroken engagement. For example, immediately after the Kargil crises [6]in late 90’s, when the interactions at the official level completely ceased to exist, several dialogue processes through Track Two and other unofficial means were in progress to prevent exacerbation of the situation. Similarly, after the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, despite complete suspension of official diplomatic relations, many Track Two initiatives were pursued by the two governments to ease tensions and resume a state of normalcy.

Conclusion

Despite some of the limitations and constrains within which Track Two diplomacy operates, it has been an important medium to explore new policy options between India and Pakistan. It has acted as a platform upon which to have discussions about many contentious issues such as Kashmir’s political dispensation, demilitarization of the Siachen glacier, and cross border terrorism. It has been helpful in bringing down the psychological barriers, bridging the cultural differences, promoting mutual trade and developing an atmosphere conducive to the betterment of the region. Furthermore, the bilateral Track Two dialogue processes have also played a pivotal role in bringing key issues to the forefront and applying intellectual capacity and civil activism to broad policy stalemates where the state has essentially failed. While non-official diplomacy should not be a panacea for the mistrust amassed over decades of hostility, it provides a unique opportunity for the citizens of India and Pakistan to prevent the bitterness of the past from tainting the future. The future role of Track Two in South Asia may be minimal without a concurrent improvement in relations at the official level, as a sustained multi-faceted dialogue will help build confidence and prove constructive for both sides’ perceptions of one another. This in effect will ease domestic tensions and hostility and pave the way for enlightened political action.

The post Track-Two Diplomacy between India and Pakistan: A Study in Diplomatic Overture appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Après son succès  à Beijing, Mao Zedong a vu dans le Tibet une région stratégique pour la Chine à la fois sur le plan politique et économique. En 1950, il a donné l’ordre à l’armée de la libération populaire d’« entrer par la force militaire au Tibet进军西藏 ». A la différence des explorateurs européens du continent africain ou des conquistadors de l’Amérique latine, les masses de colons chinois  pénétrèrent sur le territoire tibétain dans un but politique précis: intégrer le Tibet au sein de la grande famille chinoise ; tel était le pari de Mao Zedong.

Le pays de neige apparaît très lointain et mystérieux dans la présentation historique qu’en donnent les Chinois. Le mariage de deux princesses chinoises avec des princes tibétains en 640 et en 710 a donné naissance à un légender[2] empreint de mélancolie et de tristesse. On y cite les noms des montagnes et des rivières croisées par les deux  héroïnes chinoises sur la route du mariage, soulignant ainsi la longue distance semée d’embûches qui sépare la Chine du Tibet. Pays fort grand[3] et difficile d’accès, le Tibet a très justement été baptisé le « toit du monde »[4]. Comme l’écrit le géographe chinois Xu Huaxin, la peur n’épargne personne dans cette géographie, car les oiseaux eux-mêmes ne peuvent en volant traverser les montagnes[5]. En réalité, avant 1950, le peuple chinois manque de véritables connaissances sur le Tibet, ainsi que sur l’Histoire de la relation entre la Chine et le Tibet.  Ce n’est qu’à partir de 1950 que le peuple chinois commence à croire, à cause de la propagande gouvernementale, qu’il faudrait faire évoluer le système politique tibétain, que le Tibet constituerait une partie sous-développée de la Chine, et, que le peuple chinois exercerait sur les Tibétains misérables un pouvoir libérateur.

Afin de réaliser son projet d’immigration chinoise au Tibet, Mao Zedong  fit construire deux routes menant au Tibet: l’une partant de la province chinoise du Sichuan au sud-ouest de la Chine, l’autre du nord-ouest. Un seul ordre : surmonter toutes les difficultés, quel que soit le risque physique ou matériel. Durant quatre années, des milliers de soldats et de techniciens chinois, ainsi que les prisonniers de guerre, qui ne sont pas habitués à vivre en haute altitude, mais aussi des paysans tibétains s’attellent sans relâche à une tâche titanesque : 430 ponts sont construits, 3781 tunnels percés et ouverts dans 14 montagnes au-dessus de 4000 mètres. Enfin, en 1954, une route de 2416 kilomètres de long  relie la province du Sichuan au Tibet, tandis que, parallèlement, 2122 kilomètres carrossables conduisent désormais de la province du Qinghai à Lhassa. Selon les ouï-dire, chaque kilomètre de route avait été tracé au prix d’une vie humaine[6]. Dès lors, le Tibet entre dans une période de son histoire « particulièrement sombre »[7].

Face à ces obstacles géographiques, Mao Zedong avait besoin de convaincre le peuple chinois du bien-fondé du projet colonisateur afin d’obtenir le soutien moral et matériel nécessaire à la conquête du monde tibétain. Alors que des milliers de soldats chinois sacrifiaient chaque jour leur vie à son ambition, l’encouragement psychologique était d’une nécessité capitale. La propagande avait donc pour tâche d’éduquer le peuple sur le Tibet et d’inciter son héroïsme révolutionnaire. .

 Entrée et installation dans le Monde tibétain

I. L’apologie de l’héroïsme révolutionnaire en poésie

L’héroïsme est la caution par excellence de la colonisation. Mais l’héroïsme loué par la littérature chinoise coloniale au Tibet au début des années cinquante du siècle dernier n’est pas celui de Daniel Defoë ou de Joseph Conrad. C’est avant tout un outil de propagande pour asseoir une autorité et un moyen de cultiver massivement le sentiment identitaire sous le sceau de la Révolution.  Le PCC (Parti Communiste Chinois) au pouvoir avait besoin de convaincre le peuple chinois qu’il s’engageait dans une bataille plus ardue encore que la Longue Marche, la Guerre sino-japonaise ou le combat contre le Guomindang (l’ennemi de Mao), une bataille plus difficile encore que la guerre de la Corée du Nord contre les Américains. La mort de milliers de soldats et la destruction d’une civilisation avec laquelle, depuis des siècles, la Chine avait rarement entretenu des relations de voisinage ne pouvaient se justifier que par l’idéal politique, lequel venait d’ailleurs de permettre au PCC d’unifier la Chine tout entière. L’héroïsme révolutionnaire  était d’ailleurs mobilisé pour la première fois durant la Longue Marche, entre octobre 1934 et octobre 1935, sous le commandement de Mao Zedong, lorsque les trente mille soldats de l’Armée rouge traversaient à pied les vingt-cinq mille kilomètres des onze régions chinoises, endurant d’innombrables épreuves afin d’échapper à l’ennemi lancé à leur poursuite. Le Grand Timonier composa alors de nombreux poèmes qui exaltaient le courage des soldats et les incitaient à franchir les obstacles les plus insurmontables. Toute l’adresse du poète consistait à métamorphoser sur un mode romantique les difficultés rencontrées : les hautes chaînes montagneuses se transformaient en fines vaguelettes de la rivière, les pics élevés devenaient de petites mottes de terre[8]. Le masque des métaphores venait à bout de tous les dangers et cette culture de fanatisme idéologique devint une arme puissante pour faire avancer l’armée en marche vers le Tibet. Le PCC tira gloire de cette réussite à peu de frais : « manger du millet et tirer avec le vieux fusil » suffisait « pour conquérir le Monde »[9]. L’héroïsme révolutionnaire à lui seul renversait les montagnes et menait le soldat jusqu’à l’oubli de sa souffrance sous les ordres de Mao Zedong.

L’héroïsme révolutionnaire chinois fait éclore des poèmes de forme libre ayant recours à la langue du peuple. Ils constituent à eux seuls l’essentiel de la littérature chinoise des débuts de la Chine communiste à partir de 1949 : ce sont des outils de propagande idéologique qui faisaient l’éloge de Mao Zedong et du PCC, un critère esthétique et édifiant au service de l’éducation du peuple de la Nouvelle Chine : que chaque lecteur soit fier de vivre sous le nouveau régime[10]. Lors de l’entrée au Tibet, ce type de poème sert également de support médiatique ; d’une part, il encourage l’héroïsme des soldats, d’autre part, il influence l’ensemble de la population chinoise dont il sollicite la confiance et le soutien. C’est pourquoi le poème du jeune officier Gao Ping a été diffusé dans toute la nation dès sa première publication en 1952. « Percer la Montagne de  moineau » devint l’un des poèmes les plus cités dans le pays et fait partie des plus connus dans le répertoire contemporain du PCC. Après sa première édition à Beijing dans le numéro 5 de a revue littéraire L’art de l’armée de la libération [11], organe du PCC, ce poème a été immédiatement rediffusé dans de nombreuses autres revues, puis transformé en chanson populaire. C’est l’emblème glorieux de l’héroïsme des Chinois lancés à la conquête du Nouveau Monde tibétain.

Gao Ping n’avait que vingt ans lorsqu’il participa à la construction de la route vers le Tibet. Inspirées par l’héroïsme révolutionnaire, les trente-deux strophes de son poème en vers libres proposent l’image d’un Tibet qui refuse de se laisser pénétrer, telle cette « montagne du Moineau/ depuis des lustres inhabitable/ dont les oiseaux mêmes ne peuvent atteindre le sommet», car  « Il neige sans cesse des années durant/ le sol gèle jusqu’à trois mètres de profondeur/ les rochers se mettent en travers du chemin ». Ainsi, les lecteurs chinois découvrent l’hostilité d’une nature avec laquelle leurs soldats doivent quotidiennement composer. Le poète réussit à communiquer la force héroïque des soldats au service de la Révolution et à faire partager leur détermination à conquérir non seulement le Tibet, mais aussi la nature elle-même. Car la réalité de la colonisation commence par l’aventure périlleuse d’une route qui dompte le paysage en le faisant plier sous la volonté de l’homme : « Construire la route de Chine au Tibet/ c’est une étape-clé/ l’armée de libération populaire/ veut absolument trouer la montagne/ la montagne du Moineau est très haute / moins haute que notre esprit/ les pierres sont très dures / moins dures que notre volonté »[12].

Les autorités encouragent la composition de tels poèmes écrits à la gloire des héros de la conquête du Tibet. Yang Xinghuo est une jeune diplômée en chimie ; à vingt-six ans, elle abandonne ses activités scientifiques pour se consacrer au panégyrique de la sinisation du Tibet. Bientôt une poète militaire célèbre en Chine, elle est toute dévouée à la propagande colonisatrice, et ses strophes brillent comme des enseignes idéologiques : « grimpe n’importe quelle montagne/ tu es soutenu par l’esprit du parti/ traverse n’importe quelle rivière/ n’est-ce pas? » Yang Xoinghuo exploita toutes les formes littéraires pour servir la sinisation du Tibet : elle publia aussi des nouvelles, des ouvrages en prose, une pièce d’opéra et un scénario, et elle composa des paroles de chansons. La Chine, le PCC, l’idéologie, la fierté de parti, la patrie, la nation et le haut plateau sont autant de leitmotivs récurrents d’une œuvre à l’autre. Yang Xinghuo exalte la fierté collective d’être le maître d’un pays occupé où la terre est désormais apprivoisée : « la rue de Lhassa couverte de goudron/ L’avenue de lumière/ j’y marche/ écarte mes bras/ si fière ! / La rue de Lhassa couverte de goudron/ L’avenue de lumière / j’y marche/ songe au temps de l’entrée au Tibet/ le petit sentier caché dans la tempête de neige ! ».

Ce n’est d’ailleurs pas une coïncidence si le « je» lyrique chez Yang Xoinghuo ressemble au promeneur solitaire de la poésie romantique, bien qu’il exprime également la nostalgie et la distanciation typiques plutôt de l’époque victorienne. Selon Erik Erikson, l’identité se conçoit chez l’individu comme un sentiment d’harmonie, le « sentiment subjectif et tonique d’une unité personnelle et d’une continuité temporelle » au sein de la société. Il est d’abord et avant tout question d’inspirer le sentiment héroïque de l’identité chinoise révolutionnaire. En effet, les analyses nuancées d’Elleke Boehmer révèlent les similitudes entre l’époque de conquête chinoise du Tibet et la période victorienne en Angleterre, quand, à la fin du dix-neuvième siècle, le peuple britannique, s’intéressant davantage aux conquêtes territoriales de l’impérialisme anglais, avait soif de partager la gloire des colons. La poésie, la chanson et toutes les formes de jeux linguistiques qui portent  les rêves de l’impérialisme[13] se mettent alors à satisfaire le besoin d’admirer les héros au sens fort du terme. À l’époque où les Chinois cherchaient à entrer au Tibet, que les médias chinois nomment la période de « l’avancement forcé »,[14] un service collectait les comptines composées par les soldats sur le lieu du chantier, puis les diffusait pour fabriquer de nouveaux  héros,  les jeunes Chinois recrutés au bord de la route menant au Tibet. La poésie occupe une place de choix dans la littérature chinoise à cette époque où l’on assiste à l’efflorescence de tout un corpus propagandiste[15].

 2) L’implantation douloureuse en terre tibétaine dans le récit     

Viser la campagne pour révolutionner le pays était également la stratégie militaire de Mao Zedong pour conquérir la Chine à dominante paysanne. D’une part, la majorité de la population se trouve à la campagne ; d’autre part, c’est la terre qui fournit les ressources de survie. Dès leur installation sur place, les soldats chinois avaient comme objectif une « mission civilisatrice » qui consistait non seulement d’un devoir militaire, mais aussi d’un devoir agricole, celui de faire exploiter les terres cultivables par les paysans tibétains. A partir du moment où s’entame cette nouvelle étape de sinisation, la forme poétique attire moins l’inspiration des colons.

Sous l’égide de Beijing, la littérature coloniale changea d’objectif : l’éloge de l’héroïsme révolutionnaire est remplacé par la volonté de défaire le système politique ancestral par la transformation de la mentalité des Tibétains à l’intérieur du pays.  La forme poétique, qui est, de par sa nature même, lyrique ou épique, s’avéra être peu adaptée à l’argumentation que requiert un tel objectif. Le roman du pouvoir et le roman du devoir y suppléeront. Très tôt, les colons chinois empruntent l’écriture romanesque réaliste qui est caractéristique des littératures coloniales. Jean-Marie Seillan distingue globalement quatre sortes de roman dans la littérature coloniale[16] que l’on retrouve également dans la littérature coloniale chinoise: le roman du pouvoir, le roman du devoir, le roman du savoir et le roman de l’avoir. Apparaissent surtout chez les écrivains colons de la première génération ces deux premières catégories où il est question de s’imposer et de s’enraciner en territoire tibétain.

Le premier roman colonial chinois au Tibet s’intitule Nous semons l’amour[17]. Ecrit par un officier de vingt-six ans au Tibet, Xu Huaizhong, la fiction traite de l’actualité vécue par les colons chinois qui s’y implantent. Unissant trois protagonistes, tous des colons chinois, l’intrigue amoureuse se déroule dans un service du développement technologique agricole à la campagne tibétaine. L’introduction dans le récit  du représentant du PCC local, un personnage important, a lieu le 1er octobre, date de la commémoration de la naissance de la République Populaire de Chine décrétée par Mao Zedong en 1949. Lors de ce jour de fête nationale, le représentant du PCC, qui est le directeur chinois du district nommé par le gouvernement à Beijing, inaugure auprès des paysans l’usage d’outils chinois pour labourer la terre. La démonstration symbolise bien sûr la prise de possession de la terre tibétaine, en même temps qu’elle signale la construction d’une nouvelle puissance politique chinoise. De sa propre main, le représentant du PCC sème des graines sur un lot de terre vierge. Planter des graines chinoises dans la terre tibétaine, utiliser les outils chinois sur la terre tibétaine, cela signifie l’implantation dans le pays au sens propre comme au sens figuré.

Le premier amour semé dans le roman est celui que le directeur chinois, qui incarne l’ordre politique du PCC, porte à sa fille ainsi qu’à tous les habitants de son district, à l’égard de qui il fait preuve d’une attachement paternaliste. Notamment, il demande à sa fille de travailler d’abord comme observatrice de météo, puis comme infirmière et, enfin, comme institutrice dans une école pour enseigner le chinois aux enfants tibétains. Aussi met-il son amour paternel au service de la sinisation du Tibet. Le second amour semé dans le roman est celui éprouvé par une spécialiste chinoise du pâturage, dont l’objectif est de changer radicalement le mode d’alpage tibétain. Se prenant pour la maîtresse des lieux, la Chinoise demande aux bergers de quitter leur vie nomade pour se sédentariser dans le bourg. Face à ce personnage de jeune intellectuelle chinoise, l’auteur crée la figure du nouveau travailleur en campant dans le service Lei, un jeune technicien chinois. Malgré qu’il n’ait pas étudié à l’université, celui-ci s’applique à la recherche d’une nouvelle sorte de blé convenable à la géographie du Tibet, et ses découvertes permettront d’obtenir une belle récolte. L’amour de l’intellectuelle et celui du technicien se conjuguent donc pour faciliter simultanément le contrôle des habitants et la culture de la terre.

Voilà trois personnalités, trois sortes d’amour soi-disant bienfaiteur, formant les trois composants que la grande nation chinoise apporte à la nouvelle société coloniale du Tibet. Le référent colonial, qu’il se rapporte à une expérience directe de l’auteur ou à celle de ses lecteurs, fait appel à une mythologie–au sens barthien du terme–des revendications essentialistes, greffée sur une idéologie selon laquelle un peuple supérieur en intelligence et en innovation saurait réinventer une culture déjà vieille de plusieurs siècles[18]. La réussite de la fabrication du mythe politique consiste à conquérir  la confiance des lecteurs chinois qui croient désormais en la force de la pensée de Mao.

En dénonçant  la cupidité et la cruauté des colonisateurs, Elleke Boehmer indique qu’au début de l’installation coloniale, la véritable nature de cette entreprise politique et économique se cachait derrière des actions de charité auprès des indigènes[19]. De même, au Tibet, le PCC s’érigea en sauveur du peuple autochtone: pour cela, il substitua à la notion traditionnelle de la souffrance, sa propre conception idéologique de l’héroïsme. En 1956, pénétrant les campagnes tibétaines par la force militaire, les Chinois entreprennent une réforme agraire de grande ampleur, qui sape les fondements de la société tibétaine traditionnelle.  Historiquement, ce n’était pas la première fois qu’une armée étrangère arrive sur le territoire tibétain, mais aucune n’avait jamais pu y demeurer. Parvenue enfin à Lhassa après avoir sacrifié des milliers de vies chinoises, l’armée du PCC ne voulait pas revivre l’expérience de ses précurseurs. La possession prolongée du Tibet nécessitait encore une nouvelle forme d’héroïsme pour s’y implanter durablement.

En créant dans ses nouvelles galeries de jeunes Tibétaines révolutionnaires, très jolies, mais très pauvres, l’officier chinois Liu Ke[20] s’apitoie sur le destin des paysannes. Selon la vision qu’en donne le PCC, ces femmes—, soit abandonnées par leur mari, soit violées par les riches propriétaires—, souffrent de conditions de vie provoquées par le système colonial sans avoir conscience de l’origine de leurs malheurs. Elles s’y résignent parce que la religion tibétaine traditionnelle enseigne aux croyants que la vie n’est que souffrance. Sous la plume de Liu Ke, des Tibétaines prennent en main leur destin en devenant membres du PCC. Grâce aux bons soins des communistes chinois, certains protagonistes féminins choisissent d’émigrer vers une ville chinoise, promesse d’une vie meilleure. Prenons le cas de Yang Jin : au début, c’est une fillette joueuse et pleine de vivacité. Soudain, à l’âge de cinq ans, Yang Jin perd son père qui part en abandonnant sa famille, qu’il laisse désormais sans nouvelles. La mère, belle et fragile, est obligée de travailler pour survivre. Violée par un riche méchant, elle meurt et l’orpheline devient une esclave. Mais habitée par l’espoir de retrouver son père, Yang Jin demande aux Chinois de l’aider. En contrepoint de cette intrigue, la description du visage de l’héroïne est lourde de sens. D’abord sale et laid, il devient progressivement beau et radieux au fur et à mesure que Yang Lin échappe à sa triste condition. Enfin, métamorphosée par la joie, l’héroïne part étudier en Chine puis revient au Tibet comme fonctionnaire : son visage rayonne alors de bonheur.

Le cruel processus dont les protagonistes féminins de Liu Ke sont victimes se déroule sur le même arrière-plan politique que celui où se trouvent les Tibétaines de Yang Jin. Les critiques littéraires à la solde du PCC approuvent : « nous sommes contents de voir que le peuple tibétain peut désormais vivre heureux dans la nouvelle Chine » affirma l’un de ses dirigeants en 1962[21]. Il s’agit sans doute aucun de récits au service du pouvoir et du devoir.  

Le passage de l’identité héroïque à l’identité personnelle souffrante

Dans les années soixante-dix, trois paysages littéraires coexistent au Tibet : la littérature tibétaine d’expression chinoise de la première génération, celle de la seconde génération en pleine éclosion et la littérature coloniale chinoise. Ces trois littératures manifestent chacune un vif intérêt à décrire la complexité du monde tibétain. Dans un climat de liberté d’expression relative, ces trois visages de la littérature s’influencent et s’attachent à satisfaire la curiosité des lecteurs, principalement des Chinois. Cependant, c’est la littérature chinoise coloniale qui a la prééminence. A la fin du XXe siècle, elle regroupe deux catégories d’auteurs dont la première comprend d’anciens colons arrivés au Tibet au début de la colonisation ; ayant participé à la destruction de l’ancien Tibet, ils sont profondément attachés au Nouveau Monde qu’ils construisent. La deuxième catégorie se constitue par contre de la deuxième génération des écrivains colons chinois, majoritairement de jeunes diplômés de l’université. Contrairement à leurs aînés, ils sont plus sensibles à la liberté de penser et de vivre. Ils sont attirés par les paysages et le mode de vie au Tibet. L’usage qu’ils font de la première personne du singulier favorise l’expression de sentiments individuels. Ils ont plus de difficulté dans le contact avec les Tibétains, car ils ne sont pas comme leur aînés les constructeurs du Tibet sinisé, mais plutôt des consommateurs du travail accompli, il leur manque le sentiment de sacrifice et ils ne partagent pas le traumatisme de voir des milliers de morts sur la route entre la Chine et le Tibet.

 1) L’expression du mal-être personnel 

Les colons chinois de la seconde génération vivent une période de changement. La disparition de Mao en 1976 a été décisive pour la renaissance de la littérature chinoise[22]. Parallèlement, la Chine est de plus en plus traversée par divers courants de pensée occidentale ; ceux-ci sillonnent davantage les œuvres littéraires qui sont autant de sources de réflexion et d’inspiration pour les Chinois. En découvrant le Tibet, beaucoup se rendent compte que la réalité ne correspond pas aux informations officielles. Loin de la modernisation, les conditions de travail et d’existence sont rudes. Cependant, avec l’appui du gouvernement colonial local, ces représentants d’une autre culture extérieure[23] fondent la deuxième génération de la littérature coloniale au Tibet. Elle choisit d’exprimer les sentiments personnels et là réside sa grande différence avec la génération précédente. C’est alors la déception qui domine, le sentiment d’exil, la pénibilité de la vie quotidienne, la difficulté de s’acclimater à ce pays de haute altitude… la souffrance individuelle devient ainsi le thème majeur traité par cette deuxième génération de colons. Le « je » colonisateur est en effet accablé de mélancolie, de tristesse et d’angoisse.

Alors qu’à la même époque, la littérature en Chine dénonce les souffrances vécues durant la Révolution culturelle, les auteurs colons au Tibet privilégient le poème lyrique jusqu’à la fin des années quatre-vingt. En 1983, la revue officielle Littérature tibétaine en chinois crée la rubrique « Poème de la Neige sauvage » pour publier un grand nombre de leurs productions.

A l’instar de la génération précédente, les nouveaux poètes suivent les ordres du Parti si l’on en croit la force d’autorité qui émane de cette métaphore solaire[24]:

• Le soleil dit: je t’appelle
• Ta première réponse est sans motivation
• Quand tu entends le mot(Tibet), la force revient
• Le soleil t’encourage
• tu peux devenir un très bon coureur
• Le soleil te dit : tu peux être un très bon acteur et un très bon cheval
• Le soleil te dit, va de l’avant. 

Malgré le contexte politique et la diversité des régions dont ils sont originaires, les poètes souffrent unanimement du mal du pays, et s’interrogent sur la réalité d’une sinisation efficace car, au bout de trente ans de présence chinoise, le Tibet ne s’est guère modernisé. Alors, le poète Zang Qing exprime avec désespoir son aspiration à la vie moderne: « Mon cœur ne veut plus continuer ce vieux rêve trouble/ Je veux être un sifflet éclatant et faire de mon cœur un pont reliant le passé et l’avenir »[25].

Le poète reconnaît que la ténacité de la vie tibétaine quotidienne le séduit. Cependant, l’attrait est moins fort que l’espoir d’atteindre les objectifs communistes, puisque « De l’autre côté de la montagne enneigée, se construit déjà un monde merveilleux qui fait rêver et amasser du bonheur »[26]. Séduit par ce monde, le poète demande au crépuscule de faire s’envoler les bergers vers la mère patrie: « Sorti de la mémoire chagrine, l’espoir s’envole d’un battement d’ailes »[27].

Les souffrances endurées quotidiennement par les Tibétains mettent Zang Qing particulièrement mal à l’aise. Même s’il soutient le PCC au pouvoir au Tibet depuis 1951, il appelle à une amélioration plus nette des conditions de vie du peuple tibétain. Bien que Zang Qing demeure, dans le fond, l’un de ces jeunes diplômés chinois ne sachant pas réaliser le socialisme dans les campagnes tibétaines, il déplore cette situation dans le recueil intitulé La rivière noire[28]. Selon la critique de Liu Zhihua[29], cette série de poèmes est représentative de l’angoisse de toute sa génération. Dans ses soupirs exprimés sous forme interrogative, le poète montre qu’il est enfermé dans une spirale sans issue : le mythe que les Chinois ont tenté de créer au Tibet n’est plus crédible ; il faut édifier un nouveau mythe, souhait intense mais peut-être vain. En mettant l’accent sur le passé du Tibet, Zang Qing donne l’impression de plonger son âme dans les errances de l’isolement.

Nombreux sont les auteurs chinois qui, comme Zang Qing, souffrent de se perdre dans la steppe[30]. La couleur noire évoqué dans le titre de ce recueil rappelle un passé lourd d’obscurantisme. Dans le présent, aussi, malgré les multiples couleurs des drapeaux de prière, le progrès n’apparaît pas. Dans les cinq parties du recueil, intitulées la légende, la géographie, la sensation, la vallée et le lyrisme, certaines strophes se présentent comme des flammes brûlantes. Le poète n’a pas le droit de reculer dans son engagement politique, mais la poésie met du baume à son amertume, elle se présente comme étant l’unique moyen de se consoler. C’est pourquoi, dans le dernier texte, le poète emporte son secret : il continuera à avancer et laissera l’eau de la « rivière noire » noyer son cœur. Ayant déjà senti dans l’eau la pourriture et l’angoisse mortifère, il accepte cette fatalité. Alors, avec l’ironie amère des désillusions, il conclut sa série de poèmes en s’accordant un visa tibétain de soixante-sept ans.

Par contre, les poèmes de Ma Lihua démontrent la supériorité de grand Han, les Chinois, qui, venant de l’extérieur, défient dans la solitude l’immensité de la Nature[31]. « Du bout de cette route jusqu’à l’autre bout, avance à l’appel de l’époque, couvert des traces de l’époque/ je suis jeune, pur et plein de vie/ sans souci, sans crainte, ignorant, naïf/ nous avançons vers le plateau tibétain laissant nos chansons joyeuses…/ le vent emporte nos âmes vers nos pays natals » [32]. De façon plus intime et plus poignante, les poèmes militaires de Yang Xianmin mêlent la force de l’héroïsme à la nostalgie de l’exilé : «Je veux utiliser la pointe de mon fusil pour enlever un bout de l’arc-en-ciel/ je suis certain qu’un jour, il reliera mon pays natal et le pays étranger…Un vent violent efface la couleur fraîche de mon nouvel uniforme / ah! Où est la plus douceur de mon pays natal? »[33] De plus, empruntant l’image d’une déesse, les strophes de Yu Si révèlent le conflit entre la souffrance du mal de pays et l’identité militaire au Tibet : « elle est enfermée dans par les montagnes/ qui peut l’apporter pour le pays? /lointain, qui ente sa voix? /mourir en souriant pour la gloire de notre époque » [34]. Le poète de la première génération Gao Pin rejoint le sentiment de ses cadets comme l’indique l’un de ses vers écrits en 1988 : « Le Tibet est le synonyme de la souffrance »[35].

a) Le mal du pays

Cela dit, les jeunes colons chinois ont également recours à la prose pour exprimer leurs sentiments. Une sorte de nouvelle-reportage commence à paraître, offrant un paysage narratif très varié et personnalisé[36].

Le court roman de Sun Dannian, une Chinoise immigrée au Tibet, porte un titre emblématique de la thématique qui le parcourt : Maladie de nostalgie du pays natal. La souffrance de l’exilée est exprimée sans ambages, dès son entrée dans la chambre rustique qui lui était imposée à Lhassa. La description du décor laisse deviner que la narratrice ne désire guère se tarder en ce lieu pauvre, sombre, monotone, perdu, triste et rustique. Dès la première page, le lecteur s’interroge sur les raisons qui ont poussé la narratrice à accepter la proposition du gouvernement de rester cinq ans, huit ans, voire plus au Tibet. Depuis deux ans déjà, elle s’y est installée et n’a pas vu le temps passer. Elle se trouve dans un état de confusion, la vie n’a concrètement pour elle aucun sens. De toute manière, n’est-elle pas emportée comme une feuille au gré du vent ?   Elle demeure apatride et n’a trouvé aucun endroit où s’enraciner. La souffrance singulière qu’évoque la narratrice a pour origine la quête d’un lieu où se poser de manière définitive. Le « je » narratif manifeste un sentiment finalement aux antipodes de l’héroïsme. L’arrivée au Tibet ne chante plus la gloire du PCC mais pleure la souffrance de l’individu perdu.

De même, l’œuvre de Li Yaping révèle une souffrance directement liée à l’idéologie de la sinisation en racontant la tragédie d’une héroïne chinoise, Jiang Ying, au Tibet.[37] Diplômée en médecine, Jiang Ying s’installe en 1953 avec son mari dans l’ouest du Tibet, où tous les deux travaillent à l’hôpital. L’auteur décrit d’abord la souffrance d’une mère qui doit élever ses trois enfants en se contentant de les voir une fois tous les deux ans. Le cas de Jiang Ying est généralisé chez les colons chinois installés au Tibet : ils souffrent d’être séparés de leurs enfants éduqués en Chine. Le sujet relève d’une préoccupation collective mais, rarement traité dans la littérature chinoise au Tibet, il semble tabou. La souffrance de Jian Ying en tant que mère se double d’ailleurs de la douleur d’une épouse : au cours de la Révolution culturelle, son mari, un pédiatre brillant, calomnié par ses propres collègues de travail, a fini par se jeter dans un puits. Il est interdit à Jiang Ying de protester ni de montrer son chagrin, ni même de revoir, pendant trois ans, ses enfants restés au pays natal. Avec une ironie acerbe, l’auteur raconte les efforts de la malheureuse pour devenir membre du PCC ; depuis 1956, elle travaille d’arrache-pied pour en être digne ; et pourtant, elle devra attendre vingt-sept ans pour être enfin acceptée, juste avant de mourir. Le véritable objectif de ce « reportage » littéraire est donc de rendre hommage aux nombreux colons chinois au Tibet qui ont sacrifié leur vie à l’application scrupuleuse de l’idéologie de la sinisation.

Le triste sort de Jiang Ying invite aussi tous les colons chinois vivant au Tibet à méditer leur propre destin. La nouvelle « Apparition de la lune »[38] explique la souffrance des amoureux éloignés l’un de l’autre, comme celle d’une paysanne chinoise et d’un militaire qui perdra la vie en faisant son service au Tibet. Le roman Raison pour le Tibet publié en 1998[39] aborde bien ces mêmes difficultés émotionnelles en racontant le service de quatre diplômés d’université qui ont signé un contrat de huit ans. Les raisons de leur souffrance sont multiples : l’éloignement familial, une santé qui se dégrade, la crainte de décevoir le gouvernement si le contrat n’est pas respecté. A la lecture de leur quotidien, on en conclut que la vie des Chinois au Tibet n’est que peine perdue car les personnages du roman sont obligés de sacrifier leur jeunesse à l’idéologie : le Tibet est un paradis pour les touristes, mais l’enfer pour les Chinois immigrés[40]. Comment se situer quand on est une immigrée comme Li Die ? Lorsqu’elle est en vacances au pays natal, elle perd ses points de repère ; au Tibet, elle ne sent pas chez elle ; où donc demeurer ? Quelle est sa véritable identité ? Les doutes l’assaillent à la rendre malade. La question de l’identité se pose chaque jour et la Chinoise du Tibet est impuissante à maîtriser la situation.

Le manque d’amour

Vivre au Tibet, c’est vivre sans amour pour la plupart des Chinois immigrés selon les textes littéraires de cette époque, où la souffrance de ne pas pouvoir aimer ou de ne pas pouvoir être aimé est un thème fréquent. La nouvelle intitulée « Bise du pays de neige »[41] évoque cette carence chez les jeunes soldats, isolés par des milliers de kilomètres qui les séparent de leurs proches, coincés dans les hautes montagnes enneigées. La visite d’une stagiaire dans une poste à la frontière vient troubler ces militaires qui n’ont pas vu de femme depuis au moins deux ans. Durant les trois jours qu’elle passe parmi eux, la jeune ne leur pose qu’une seule question qui pique le cœur de chaque soldat comme une aiguille : As-tu une amoureuse ? Le jour de son départ, la jeune stagiaire donne un bisou à chaque soldat, ersatz dérisoire face à un manque d’amour cruel.

Plus près de nous, et selon une appréhension toute tchekhovienne du manque d’amour, la nouvelle « Sentiment prouvé »[42], publiée en 2004, montre que le besoin d’amour va parfois jusqu’à mettre le protagoniste dans un état psychologiquement anormal. Guo Min, diplômé de l’université, se porte volontaire pour investir sa jeunesse et sa compétence dans l’exploitation de la plus grande mine de bronze au Tibet. Il s’installe donc dans la ville de Chang, où il ne craint ni le manque des légumes frais et de dentifrice, ni l’éloignement de sa famille. A l’université, il collectionnait les conquêtes féminines et ce séducteur ne peut imaginer travailler dans un endroit où il n’y aurait pas de femmes chinoises. Sur la route de l’exil, il rencontre une Chinoise Tian Xin, sa future collègue dans la mine. Comme elle est la seule Chinoise à sa disposition, Guo Min séduit immédiatement Tian Xin qui se sent fière et heureuse, car durant les quatre années qu’elle a passées à l’université, aucun garçon ne s’est intéressé à son physique disgracieux. Rapidement, Guo Min tombe malade et Tian Xin passe ses nuits à jouer aux cartes avec les hommes. Tous les jours à 21h15, Guo Min attend le retour de Tian Xin. En vain. Quelques mois plus tard, Guo Min est sans nouvelle de Tian Xin qui vit déjà avec un autre homme. Guo Min attend toujours le regard fixé au plafond de sa chambre rustique qu’il se met soudain à aimer. Un jour, un collègue lui téléphone et lui annonce, tout ému de la nouvelle, que les dirigeants ont décidé de faire venir une vingtaine de jeunes Chinoises diplômées à la mine, mais Guo Min a déjà perdu le goût de vivre; il meurt en regardant le plafond de sa chambre solitaire du Tibet.

La nouvelle identité: l’aventurier et le chasseur de trésors

Les parents éloignés de leurs enfants et le célibataire en mal d’amour ne sont pourtant pas les seules figures à exposer les difficultés rencontrées par les colons chinois au Tibet. Dès 1988, dans la nouvelle « Toile sans peinture »[43], où Liu Wei met en scène un groupe de personnages, il s’agit encore de jeunes diplômés chinois vivant à Lhassa, mais ceux-ci y sont attirés par le goût de la découverte personnelle. La ville est un théâtre où les personnages vivent à leur manière, décalés. Xinye, le personnage central, un peintre chinois, vit à la mode occidentale. Comme ses amis, il est attiré par l’exotisme tibétain : objets divers, ancienne monnaie, sculptures en argile, et il s’intéresse tout particulièrement, comme eux, aux squelettes tibétains utilisés pour les rites funéraires. Chaque rencontre entre Xinye et ses amis est l’occasion de comparer leurs collections. Avec fierté et un certain sens de l’aventure, ils racontent chacun à leur tour comment ils ont déniché leurs trésors.

L’auteur introduit alors dans l’histoire des Tibétains opposés à la modernisation afin de montrer à quel point ils sont aujourd’hui sinisés. Il y a d’abord la Tibétaine primitive dont Xinye fait sa petite amie. Puis, un jeune Tibétain Jia Cuo à qui Xinye apprend la peinture. Leur relation est celle nouée entre un maître et son élève. Mais il existe une incompatibilité entre les personnages. Jia Cuo apparaît encore plus « rustique » que la petite amie de Xinye, comme le montre la scène où Jia Cuo fait l’amour en se trompant de partenaire. La nouvelle s’apparente à une fresque aux images crues et, pour les corser encore un peu plus, Liu Wei joue sur les registres sensoriels en associant des odeurs douteuses à l’évocation des paysages. Le comportement des deux « Tibétains » qu’il côtoie au quotidien met en évidence la souffrance de Xinye ; elle est certes atténuée par sa passion pour les objets singuliers, mais les colons chinois ne sont-ils pas présentés comme écartelés entre l’envie de posséder toutes les richesses du Tibet et les ravages psychologiques d’un séjour prolongé dans un pays où ils ont du mal à s’adapter, dans lequel ils ressentent immanquablement les affres de l’exil ?

Le court roman Fureur[44] présente une autre manière de compenser la douleur de vivre loin de sa culture d’origine au Tibet. Le narrateur, un Chinois migrant sans diplôme qui raconte son histoire à la première personne, a pour seul objectif de s’enrichir matériellement en arrivant au Tibet. En deux années à peine, il tue un homme pour son argent, se cache dans le nord-ouest du pays, devient le chef de la mafia chinoise, ouvre une maison close et y fait venir des jeunes femmes chinoises—, même des diplômées de l’université—, et il réunit des délinquants chinois pour attaquer les convois et les touristes, après avoir pris soin de corrompre la police locale. Pour éviter les complications, il demande de ménager les autochtones. Les péripéties du récit guident le lecteur au cœur d’un Tibet troublé par des malfaiteurs chinois : on n’y trouve plus de relents de la propagande qui invite à construire un autre Tibet moderne.  

Le Tibet sous la plume des Chinois de Chine

Depuis l’installation du pouvoir du PCC au Tibet, le pays en neige est à la fois un sujet politique auquel  les instances du pouvoir doivent répondre et un sujet exotique pour les intellectuels n’ayant pas l’occasion d’y vivre. Traiter le sujet du Tibet et s’inspirer de ce lieu sont considérés comme étant des assurances de l’innovation tant au niveau du contenu qu’au niveau de la forme, et son traitement thématique répond bien à l’attente des dirigeants chinois. Voici l’exemple de trois  écrivains chinois célèbres : Zhang Xiaotian, Wang Meng et Su Yang ont chacun publié un court roman sur le Tibet sans véritablement y habiter.  Dans le roman de Zhang Xiaotian qui s’intitule Ouverture d’un document secret,[45] l’héroïne, Ge Yilan, est surnommée « la libératrice sexuelle ». Après une vie d’échecs successifs aux  U.S.A., cette Chinoise part pour le Tibet qu’elle considère comme l’endroit le plus pauvre du monde, un enfer aux antipodes du paradis américain. Elle devra y vivre pour expier l’une de ses fautes : avoir trompé son mari qui s’est plongé alors dans l’univers de la drogue. Souffrir parmi les Tibétains qui endurent eux-mêmes une vie rude depuis les temps les plus reculés lui apporte de l’apaisement, non sans orgueil. Car, si elle a échoué dans son rêve américain, elle atteint une espèce de rédemption en s’imposant une vie de souffrance au Tibet.

L’ancien ministre de la culture et de la propagande, Wang Meng, raconte une trajectoire inverse. En janvier 1985, il publie dans la revue officielle Littérature du peuple[46] son roman Vent du haut plateau. Inspiré par un voyage de quelques jours au Tibet, ce texte raconte les mésaventures d’un couple chinois. Issu d’une famille aisée, Long Long n’a aucun projet de métier : il passe son temps à rêver d’une vie moderne. Grâce à la richesse de son père, il ne manque pourtant de rien jusqu’à ce qu’il tombe amoureux de Xiao Li qui avait quitté la ville pour s’installer à la campagne pendant la Révolution Culturelle, répondant ainsi à l’appel de Mao Zedong encourageant tous les diplômés à être rééduqués par les paysans. Durant cette période, Xiao Li vivait selon les préceptes d’un fanatisme idéologique et avait donné naissance à un enfant hors mariage. Long Long s’éprend de cette femme de quatre ans son aînée dès leur première rencontre. Il décide de tout abandonner et de partir, avec Xiao Li, vivre parmi les Tibétains. Celle-ci souhaiterait plutôt s’installer aux U.S.A., mais avant d’y aller, elle veut bien vivre avec les Tibétains pour connaître l’expérience de l’extrême pauvreté, pour mieux goûter par la suite au paradis américain. Aller au Tibet est aussi une manière de suivre la politique du gouvernement et d’aider les pauvres Tibétains à sortir de leur souffrance. Le père de Long Long, haut fonctionnaire du gouvernement central, n’approuve pas la décision de son fils et considère qu’il se berce d’illusions, sinon de snobisme. L’influence de Wang Meng, à la fois homme de lettres et homme politique, a beaucoup contribué à la diffusion du thème tibétain.

Chez d’autres écrivains, le Tibet apparaît également comme un purgatoire. C’est en 1984 que Su Yang publie, dans le premier numéro de la revue littéraire officielle Le contemporain, son roman intitulé Le pays natal. Il y est question d’un jeune et brillant médecin nommé Bei Tianming. Sa femme, une amie d’enfance, est atteinte d’un cancer. A cause de sa maladie, elle a quitté les U.S.A. pour retourner dans son pays natal. Après une séparation d’une vingtaine d’années, Bei Tianming et la jeune femme font un mariage heureux. Malheureusement, le jeune homme se retrouve veuf. Vivre seul lui est une souffrance insupportable, mais il ne peut pas accepter l’amour d’une autre femme car, lorsqu’il postule pour être chef de service, les autres critiquent sa vie privée. Pour trouver une issue à cette situation, il décide alors d’aller au Tibet où il vivra dans le dénuement complet et s’infligera la souffrance physique de la pauvreté qui pourra peut-être apaiser sa souffrance morale. L’intérêt de cette histoire ne réside pas uniquement dans le destin du personnage, mais aussi dans la solution que l’auteur envisage pour lui. Su Yang présente le Tibet comme un bagne pour les Chinois, mais, n’y ayant jamais vécu, son roman ne propose qu’une échappatoire imaginaire pour ceux qui ne trouvent pas d’autre issue à leur vie dans leur pays d’origine.

Dans l’esprit de ces trois écrivains chinois contemporains, le Tibet constitue un endroit hostile. Ainsi, chaque fois qu’un personnage se trouve dans une situation inextricable, le Tibet, pays de haute altitude à l’oxygène raréfiée, devient un refuge infernal mais incontournable, d’autant plus qu’au-delà de la souffrance, il offre un dépaysement magnifique.

Xu Mingxu, critique littéraire chinois immigré au Tibet, dénonce chez ces trois écrivains un manque de respect à l’égard des intellectuels chinois qui vivent au Tibet—, ou encore à l’égard de tous les jeunes Chinois venus en ces lieux dans le but louable d’aider à la construction d’un pays moderne[47]. Xu Mingxu souligne par ailleurs les lacunes de ces textes d’écrivains qui connaissent mal la réalité de la vie au Tibet. Selon lui, les personnages dans leurs œuvres n’ont été créés que pour suivre la mode et  rejoindre les lecteurs. Il leur reproche de négliger la nouvelle génération intellectuelle chinoise vivant au Tibet qui, en lisant de telles fictions, n’y retrouvent que des ratés, des hommes en quête de refuge ou des utopistes. En fait, le propos de Mingxu sont provoqués par une réticence à être mis sur le même plan que les protagonistes de ces trois écrivains. Il se présente comme le porte-parole de tous les intellectuels chinois vivant au Tibet, et il indique clairement que ni lui ni ses confrères ne connaissent la souffrance et les difficultés auxquelles sont confrontés les personnages romanesques. Même s’il insiste aussi sur les rudes conditions de vie dans l’environnement tibétain, et s’il reconnaît que les Chinois vivant au Tibet souffrent au quotidien, il affirme que son départ pour le Tibet n’était pas motivé par des troubles personnels.

L’opinion de Xu Mingxu ne fait guère l’unanimité. Depuis les années 80, d’autres auteurs d’origine chinoise vivant au Tibet dénoncent la souffrance engendrée par l’idéologie héroïque et par les difficultés de vivre au Tibet. C’est le sujet principal de cette littérature, dite « littérature chinoise coloniale au Tibet ». Les auteurs s’attachent à décrire les coutumes et les paysages tibétains, mais, saisis par la peur de s’éloigner de la vie moderne, ils expriment aussi leur angoisse et leurs doutes. Ces jeunes Chinois immigrés au Tibet, ne peuvent renier leur devoir politique[48]. C’est alors que leurs œuvres deviennent une sorte d’exutoire, destiné à leur permettre de manifester leurs sentiments personnels et également à leur servir de réconfort où ils s’appuient sur l’interprétation idéologique du passé tibétain.

Conclusion

Née du but politique d’occuper une terre étrangère et difficilement domptée, et œuvrant au service de l’idéalisme colonial, la littérature chinoise coloniale au Tibet enregistre principalement la souffrance de la vie quotidienne et les difficultés psychologiques des colons chinois. Cependant, elle sert aussi comme un outil de révélation  du sentiment personnel opposant l’héroïsme fanatique du PCC, surtout sous la plume des écrivains de la seconde génération. Que le lecteur favorise la poésie ou la prose,  il ne peut s’empêcher de ressentir de la pitié pour les milliers des colons chinois ayant sacrifié leur vie à l’idéologie politique. Cette littérature finit par devenir en elle-même une ressource de survie : les auteurs chinois plus récents s’identifient étroitement donc à une écriture personnelle. Mais, somme toute, les aspects éthiquement douteux de la « mission civilisatrice » chinoise engendrent une souffrance qui finit également par humaniser ceux qui y participent.  Avec orgueil, les auteurs chinois recourent à la poésie, à l’écriture romanesque, tout à la fois consolatrice et utilitaire, pour exprimer les périls de la vie quotidienne, l’isolement du travail, la séparation des proches—, enfin bref, la nature de leur épreuve. Dans leurs œuvres, requêtes et suppliques se mêlent aux descriptions, aux plaintes et aux démonstrations d’affection. En ce sens, la littérature chinoise coloniale n’est plus simplement un outil au service de l’héroïsme idéologique, mais un miroir où se reflète la souffrance inconsolable dans la colonisation au Tibet.

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Walk in a straight line, don’t make any trouble, keep a low profile, maintain the status quo; all because change is unpredictable. Change is scary.

Until the Egyptian Revolution broke out in 2011, Egypt consisted of a state of cronies walking next to the wall. Stability was precious, even if it meant a stability defined by eating out of the garbage every day. People wanted to live their lives and secure retirement. And today, three years later, the old cronies want their stability back. They don’t trust a youth movement that wants change so radical that they would sacrifice their own lives for it. The old generation wants to decide on a future they will not live to see. And as they are heading to the polls they curse the young revolutionaries who made it possible for them to vote in the first place.

By the end of the May 2014, now-retired army leader Abdelfattah al-Sisi – the man who removed former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi from office after massive protests brought Egypt to a standstill last year – is expected to win the presidency by a landslide so remarkable that the numbers would be reminiscent of Nasser’s 99% or Mubarak’s more conservative 97%. The only other candidate on the ballot is opposition leader Hamdeen Sabbahi, a lifelong thorn in the neck of previous regimes. The elections will strengthen his support base, but will do little harm to Sisi’s victory. The most prominent opposition figure, former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Mohamed al-Baradei – who was among the first to call for a regime change – has long returned to exile in Austria after none of his advice in support of reconciliation was heeded.

In mid-May, I went to cast my vote for Egypt’s second presidential election in two years. It was a rainy day in New York, and a few dozen Muslim Brotherhood supporters had gathered in front of the Egyptian consulate to protest the “coup” that first wasn’t and is now in the process of becoming, as the man who deposed the previous president is poised to take his place.

As opposed to all previous elections, I have experienced this one without emotion. I was in and out of the consulate within minutes, casting my vote without the monitors checking if I was even registered. I wanted to evade the cheesy smiles and cringe-worthy happiness of Egyptian officials. Egypt is going through its sixth major election since 2011, and as always I was weary of the fruits it would bring.

But something is different this time around. The liberal opposition yearning for a secular civilian president has learned its lesson and this time rallied around one candidate. This is in stark contrast to the 2012 election, during which there were nine other candidates for liberals to choose from, resulting in a split vote (echoing the Bush-Gore-Nader conundrum). This ultimately brought Morsi to power. But even this realization has come too late: because the immediate needs of the poor were neglected during three years of ideological head-banging, the majority of Egyptians don’t see the revolution as having had a positive impact on their lives. A longing for the days of Mubarak’s “stability” permeates public life.

They don’t care that Sisi’s win would turn the alleged coup against Morsi into an official one. They don’t care that Sisi – like both of his imprisoned predecessors Morsi and Mubarak – had once vowed not to run for presidency. They don’t care that his campaign has openly stated that they had no electoral program. They don’t care that following nine months of Sisi’s pledges to end terrorism, no significant progress has been made.

They just want their “stability” back, a stability stemming from a state in perpetual inertia, as was the case during three decades of economic and political stalemate under Mubarak.

Alone in the voting booth for a moment, my mind began to drift. For a second, I contemplated ticking the box next to Sisi’s picture. I was angry. I felt like punishing everyone for not standing their ground, for giving up on a revolution that was so exemplary it will be remembered for centuries to come. But I am as guilty as everyone else. What have I contributed to stop another military state from coming into effect?

I remembered a night I spent in the southern province of Qena earlier this year. It was the third anniversary of the revolution. Thousands on the street were celebrating not the revolution, but Sisi and the army. People were celebrating the return of a military state on the anniversary of their revolt against a military state. I couldn’t hold back my tears in the face of the absurdity. A man tapped me on the shoulder, saying “Don’t worry, Sisi will crush the Brotherhood.”

During the first days of the revolution against Mubarak, euphoria ran high and optimism was everywhere. It was a brave new world, everything was possible.

But things have changed. I stopped talking about politics with people. I’m tired of listening to endless rants about “terrorism” and witnessing the creation of a new pharaoh to revere. The majority wants the return of the “Iron Fist,” as long as its fangs don’t reach them. They will “keep walking next to the wall” as they try to convince others that criminals have to be dealt with without the due process of law. But the fact remains: every time a weapon has been held to my face in the past years, it was by the police.

Fascism is the virtue of the impatient. A problem as huge as extremism cannot be dealt with in a “scorched earth” manner. Case in point: Rwanda is in the process of becoming a regional political power because their reconciliation efforts made it possible to seek forgiveness and move forward, whereas a bomb-flattened Afghanistan only created a new generation of terrorists. Egypt has turned very swiftly from religious fascism under Morsi to elitist fascism after his downfall. Liberal media and news outlets that were once the voices of reason have turned into mouthpieces for the military and police state, justifying and protecting their actions of cracking down on free speech. Sisi does not need to spend time or resources campaigning; he is receiving the publicity for free. A four-hour taped interview with prepared yet vague answers did not weaken his credibility. His refusal to meet his opponent Sabbahi in a live debate – likely knowing his own sweet yet hollow talk about patriotism would not have endured against a man capable of answering complex questions – did not do anything to quell the support. Sisi is young, charismatic, soft-spoken, and knows how to induce emotions among all social classes. He adeptly leverages his standing as the hero who saved Egypt from the Muslim Brotherhood and its disastrous fiasco of a presidency – an action that made the masses feel indebted to him.

The former general might indeed bring progress to Egypt. His ascent has certainly been paved by the support of the people, the government and the media. But at what cost? He is not a statesman of international standard, he has an uneven understanding of democracy, and his bloody cleanup of Brotherhood protests at Rabaa Mosque taints his record before even taking office. If I were to judge him on merit, he has not made Egypt a safer place. If I were to judge him on principle, he promised a civilian Egypt and is about to deliver a military one.

As I left the consulate I once again looked across the street, where Brotherhood supporters were still standing in the rain. I wanted to tell them something, but the past years had robbed me of the energy for political conversation. It has become almost impossible to change anyone’s mind or engage in productive dialogue. Should I hold up the four-finger “Rabaa” sign to show that despite my contempt for their party, ideology, political practices and leadership I am against the massacre of a thousand civilians by the state? Or should I gesture a CC (“Sisi”) sign to rub in their faces that they had played their cards wrong since taking power? I did neither.

In Sherif Arafa’s 1993 film “Terrorism and Kebab”, a down-and-out Egyptian laments the state of the nation: “Anything that happens is a blessing. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad. The catastrophe is that nothing is happening.”

I thought about this as I left the consulate, walking briskly next to the wall.

(Image credits:  Abu Bakr Shawky)

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