I spent my summers growing up at my grandparent’s residence in Lahore, Pakistan. Every morning, despite the sleepless nights spent goofing around with my cousins, I was begrudgingly woken up by my mother and taken to the breakfast table. “Eat!” nanabu (maternal grandfather) would say, “This is halal!” Despite his repeated insistence, my American upbringing conditioned me not to stomach (pun intended) the lahori delicacy of siri paye, or the head and hooves of goat. I looked on; however, as I could tell how much enjoyment my beloved grandfather took in eating and also giving food to others. Perhaps feeding others freely was an acquired trait rooted in his impoverished past as a laborer in pre-partition Amritsar. As my cousins and I had compromised on minced meat sandwiches with butter slathered toast – made by nanabu himself, mind you – the lethargy from the previous night subsided as our oblong breakfast table in Lahore converted into an intellectual coffeehouse.

Despite having completed only a fifth grade education, Nanabu would recite poetry from memorization. My grandfather was not educated; he was knowledgeable. His intellectual prowess would today be castigated by western secular epistemology, which de-legitimizes knowledge rooted in indigenous and religious traditions, attained outside the context of an institution. Many of his favorite poems mirrored Eastern/Islamic philosophy or political thought. He revered Iqbal; many Muslim colonial subjects from the Punjab did. “Nanabu agar aap parh likhe hotey aap shayad Einstein bante! (If you finished school perhaps you would have become Einstein!)” I would tell him. “Nahi,” he would say, “mai kuch nahi hoon.” (No, I am nothing.) He carried himself with humility, a rare trait to be found these days. After all, such morals only serve to strengthen human beings, yet weaken citizenship, the central social identity defined by the nation-state and its restrictive parameters.

His room smelled of a hint of cigarettes, English toffee, and cologne. If I were to smell his sweater long enough today, I am able to place myself back in his room, twirling from his music collection to his books to his chairs and coffee table for his guests, whilst catching a whiff of that intoxicating scent. It is an odd combination of smells for a young girl to adore, but I loved it nonetheless. Much to our parents chagrin, my cousins and I would mimick nanabu — and not TV or billboard ads — as we held the perfectly crafted cigarette between our fingers. I don’t know why our parents hindered us from constantly barging in his room, it was clearly the most exhilarating! The man had an aura of magnetism around him, which his eight children and twenty-five plus grandchildren can attest – although I admit, we are perhaps biased. I have always felt that it was his undying belief in self and community empowerment which made him unique; he exuded an understated confidence. “Khudi ko kar buland itna kay har taqdeer se pehle khuda bande se pooche ‘bata teri raza kya hai? (Elevate yourself so high that before every decree, God asks you ‘What is your wish?’)” he would often remind us. Nanabu sought refuge and agency in Iqbal’s concept of khudi; it allowed him the political imagination to envision a future beyond an occupied existence. He was amongst the Muslim underclasses of British Punjab; an ordinary man. And yet, in this ordinary existence of odd-end jobs, political turmoil, and social isolation, his rigorous and continuous engagement with intellectual advancement made him extraordinary.

My poetry classes at the breakfast table were complemented by evening lectures and discussions surrounding classical Urdu and Punjabi ghazals, or lyrical poems set to music. Nanabu taught us to recognize enlightenment through various mediums – whether in music, human relationships, or poetry. My cousins and I would often tip-toe into his room, paanch (meaning ‘five,’ as the rooms of the house were numbered) and turn on his stereo system. We were disappointed when a click of the on button did not result in the latest Western pop music as it did on MTV India, however, later on in life we would appreciate the wisdom behind nanabu’s mystical collection of poetic ghazals. Faiz taught me the multiple meanings behind struggle, Habib Jalib and Ustad Daman became a language for those silenced, and the raags, or musical notes, accompanied by Ustad Barkat Ali Khan and Begum Akhtar allowed me to envisage love as a metaphor for a broader political and spiritual vision. There is a well-known phrase in Urdu related to the complex art of raising children: taaleem-o-tarbiyat. Nanabu’s tarbiyat, or upbringing, of his children is (hopefully) apparent in our commitment to ihsan (the Muslim responsibility to seek excellence in worship), and his instilling of taleem (education) is in our constant search for knowledge, which elevates human beings.

Besides being my respected elder and fashion inspiration, nanabu was also my go-to political analyst in Lahore. His morning routine consisted of feeding the animals in our front yard, followed by reading his newspaper in the garden. As a quiet yet curious teenager, I was eager to inform myself about the world, and so I asked nanabu if he would subscribe to the English language newspaper for me. We read our Urdu and English newspapers and mutually reflected knowledge based on our respective times. He brought in wisdom rooted in poetic politics and spirituality. I was the young woman who asked questions – still a daring concept in many contexts. After 9/11, I would inform him about the plight of American Muslims. As I detailed the stories of mass surveillance, detainment, and racial profiling, my capricious tone – sometimes reflecting anger, sometimes desolation – revealed my adolescent reaction to the extremity of the situation. Nanabu; however, would simply nod with a monotonous expression as if he was somehow familiar with the narrative of isolation. His wounds as an occupied subject of British colonialism allowed him to relate to and critique post-9/11 geopolitics. He would speak of the economic disenfranchisement of Muslims in colonial Punjab, for instance, as an integral component of occupation. While the economic condition of Muslims in post-9/11 American cannot act as a parallel, the ideologies of power and occupation still permeate political and social contexts. Nanabu understood such ideologies, their centrality to US Empire, and their influence in peripheral institutions. My camaraderie with my grandfather reflected what I yearned for in the US: a detailed critique of Empire and its consequences. Our conversations provided me with the intellectual vigor to examine politics not from the perspective of those in power, but from the sea of people whose existence and resistance serves as a reminder of the spiritual heights the human race is capable of.

Like soldiers returning after a sanguinary war, survivors of the colonial and partition era also embodied significant trauma. Life moved on for my grandfather and others, but they were never able to revert to the previous state; I’m not sure if my grandfather ever did. Despite wounds rooted in enforced poverty, violence, and war, nanabu also shared stories that represented kindness, human empathy, and the will to implement ihsaan, or good, which Islam teaches is a part of worship. There was a particularly special story in which nanabu remembered the benevolence and companionship provided to him, a young Muslim boy, by a newly wedded Sikh woman in his time of distress. During one of his odd jobs, he had to deliver a package to someone’s house. He couldn’t find the house; however, and came across a Sikh woman who — through her ghoongat, or uniquely styled scarf which gave away her identity as a new bride — spoke to him in Punjabi: “Veer, ai lo roti kha. Assi chadd awaan ge. (Brother, here eat some food. We will drop off the package.)  Nanabu remembered the softness in her voice sixty-five years later as he lay on his deathbed in post-partition Pakistan, her kindness remembered across newly drawn geopolitical lines.

The humanity exemplified in my grandfather’s story problematizes the orientalist tropes of the ‘intolerant’ Hindu, Sikh, or Muslim taught in prevailing westernized discourses. Indigenous narratives evoking memory of a South Asia once known for its interreligious harmony, political unity, and camaraderie challenges the matrix of Empire and client state patronage and thus acts as a politicized weapon of truth-telling and resistance.

In a way, my grandfather’s generation represented a lost tribe. Freedom, for them, was a glimmering memory of the past. And yet memories often have the power to reinvigorate the beauty and consciousness found within the collective human spirit. Pakistan was created in 1947, and my grandfather’s love for his land was spiritually kinetic. I often wish my grandfather and Edward Said could have met, as Said’s writing often follows a theme on homeland and displacement.[2] Nanabu’s sentiments can be explained by a simple truth: as the country grew, so did he. As Pakistan’s newly born population crafted statehood, nanabu immersed himself in Islamic intellectual history, poetry, and grew intellectually. As the country neared its fifth year, nanabu laid the foundations for his business and contributed to Pakistan’s industrial growth. And when our repackaged colonial ‘leaders’ sold the country in promises of multi-billion dollar deals and validation from western interests, nanabu’s lamenting sighs echoed those of Faiz in poetic form: Chale chalo, kay woh manzil abhi nahi aye (Let us go on, for that goal has not yet arrived). What else is there to describe about a traveller’s compassion towards his fellow traveler?

He was not a class theorist, yet his critiques on the subject were much more refined than those of the elites of the country. “Inka bhi dehan rakhna chahiye” (We should take care of them too), he told me once as he pointed to the servant staff in our house. As I grew older my interest in the family business piqued, and so I would ask nanabu questions about his employees — ‘approximately how many employees?’ ‘What is their pay?’ ‘Are there unions?’ While memories have faded, I recall him always prioritizing the rights of workers in his responses. He did this in other contexts as well; car rides home after meeting with relatives or friends were slightly daunting, as everyone anticipated nanabu’s interrogation sessions.‘Kithon aye ho? Khane kinney da si? Ik mazdoor di kamaai day barabar tussi Ik din da khana kha lita! (Where are you coming from? How much was dinner? The dinner you all ate was equivalent to a worker’s salary!’) He would ask this in a pre-partition Punjabi vernacular that now seems like a wistfully lost art. I dearly miss that line of questioning; it reminded me to live amongst the people.

Towards the end of his life nanabu found it difficult to speak due to illness. What was perhaps most difficult for his family, and presumably for him as well, was to witness the slow acquiescence of a man brimming with stories, travels, lessons, and other remnants of wisdom. South Asian women are the ones usually depicted as vivacious, with their rich clothing and jewelry – however my grandfather was no less colorful. On one August 14th, Pakistan’s independence day, in an effort to get my grandfather to speak, my mother asked him the obvious question. “Aaj chauda August hai abaii, aaj kera din ai? (Today is August 14th dad, what happened today?)” With eyes wide open and his neck lifting from his reclined state nanabu replied — in a rather confident and doting tone: “Pakistan bana tha! (Pakistan was made!)” I remember his love for homeland not as a cry for nationalism but rather as a profound trust in the fruits of liberation and struggle for justice.

Islamic philosopher Syed Naquib al Attas defines knowledge as an individual’s recognition of his/her place in God’s hierarchy of beings.[3] My grandfather was not a theologian, but rather an individual part of a sea of people who recognize their existence as spiritual beings with a collective commitment to pursue knowledge as a means to implement ihsan in worldly and spiritual affairs. Part of this commitment also entails restoring the balance of tawheed, or oneness of God and His creation, within the self and greater society. Nanabu was not without flaws, but that is exactly the point. Iranian intellectual Ali Shariati says that human beings are constantly migrating – migrating within the soul – which parallels jihad al akbar, or the greater struggle with one’s ego.[4] He embodied a constant struggle: as a subject of a colonial occupation, as a laborer, as a self and community taught thinker, and as a self-made industrialist.

A month ago I sat in a mosque nanabu had built in Sheikhpura, a small industrial village on the outskirts of Lahore. I offered the early afternoon prayer, and as my forehead met with the carpet I thought about the significance behind such an act. In an age of modernity, where the technologies of progress are constantly defined by the self, my prayer represented the antithesis of what we call progress. That act of prostration, that dire need for the spirit to find its way home, represents sagely wisdom lost amidst today’s talk of progress. My grandfather’s praxis represented a softer revolution: to realign the soul with its Divine origin. The memory of him embodying khudi and revolutionary love is with me today, and continues to remind me of the deeper imperative to decolonize and indigenize collective political systems, but also individual hearts and minds as well.

The post Dispatches from Lahore: The Importance of Politicized Ancestral Narratives appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hopefully, these glimpses do not nullify that greater purpose…

********

All photographs courtesy of Fodei Batty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Great Wall goes South: Chinese car dealership in Freetown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Total gas station. Next to residential dwellings…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is also the everyday.

Ingenuity — Freetown, Sierra Leone, July 2012.

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

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

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

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

…this beautiful sunset

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Represión, persecución y estrategia de lucha del independentismo puertorriqueño appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

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

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

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

                             À  la naissance du sens

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

The post À la naissance du sens (Poetry) appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Greece,
Your no is also a yes
To other things,
You spurned usurers
For Athens’ pride

Greece,
You stood through war
Resisted fascists,
Your poets wrote poems
On cigarette packs

Greece,
Your silences are oracles
Of time’s future,
With your aching hands
You fisted tables

You resisted the enemy
Greece,
You sabotaged
The plans of annexation
Burning bridges

Greece,
You let Marx sit on your
Stoic shoulders,
Your cynics defied kings
Trusted workers

Your history is a miracle
Greece,
You are a library
Of words that escaped fire
Survived Caesar

The world is in your debt
Greece,
They can’t repay
The wonders of your urns
And your verses

Today you brave penury
Greece,
With the grit
Of a working class poet
Who resisted

He left behind omens
On paper
They remain inscribed
In the eyes

“But perhaps dawn will reveal a new face”^[1]

Manash Bhattacharjee
July 10, 2015, Delhi

The post No is Yes (poetry) appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

“Yuni and his Mákina” – Photo credit: Annie Gibson

I walk over the broken eggshells on the corner of E and 13 and wonder what paths Eleguá opened today?

Cuba is the daughter of Ochún. Be careful because the smile is a front for her to get what she needs by leading you astray.

I remind myself to keep my foreign gaze so as not fall into the routine of the Cuban experience. The street is a great spectacle of drama, comedy, and sometimes horror– alive with humanness and expression as is no other city I know.

Each trip to Cuba, I arrive to find another Cuban friend suelto por el mundo [let loose to the world].

People on the street are constantly asking me the time in order to figure out where I am from, not because there is somewhere they need to be.

Constant sizing up to try to figure out, what kind of foreigner are you?

When the students arrived at the University today, they found out that classes were cancelled because it is “The day of the student.”

To be reminded of the preciousness of a plastic bag or a pen…

The students bought hamsters for their room but I am pretty sure one of them is a mouse.

Learning to live and navigate another country is like being born again.

Tiempo

“Boy with flag in pioneer uniform” – Photo credit: Miriam Psychas

One of my first transformations upon arrival in Havana is walking at the slow, local pace. There is no rush to get anywhere because time is not a commodity.

Cuba’s tempo of tomorrow is counter time. Rather as if the chacha lo kafún [ceremonial step of the orishas] was to take over Miami.

My guitar teacher is always late to our classes because there is no máquina service from his house and the bus is never on time.

Getting official signatures: Closed for lunch. The secretary went to the doctor. He already left for the day. Come back tomorrow morning. She had some issues to resolve. The power is out. His mother was sick. I don’t know where he is. He went to the bank but he might be back soon. Take a seat.

The repetition of daily events…

The melodrama of crumbling buildings alongside new businesses dressed up in 1950s décor, bringing the past back to life.

I wonder if they will make a museum out of the Riviera that depicts Meyer Lansky and the mafia years in Cuba before the hotel crumbles beyond repair.

There is a different kind of exceptionality in the Cuba post-Special Period, one that involves identifying with and meditating a peculiar sense of time.

History is an ongoing process that moves at accelerated revolutionary speeds.

“History will absolve me.” –Fidel

Imágenes

“Havana from the 18th floor” – Photo credit: Annie Gibson

As I watch from the 18^th floor, the storm clouds roll across the ocean and bathe Havana in its afternoon shower.

Mojito green, strawberry daiquiri red, guayabera white, cement grey, ocean turquoise, sky blue: the colors of Havana.

On my evening run along the malecón, I watch the man with the sad eyes who is cradling the black doll in a blue dress and speaking gently to the sea. I wonder if Yemayá will show her kindness to his supplications?

Shades of sunset illuminate Havana from the malecón as the flag is folded to start the cañonazo ceremony.

“Havana Sunset” – Photo credit: Annie Gibson

Along the malecón, the turbulent sea, the salt air, and time erode the walls of the apartment buildings. Eroded but not vanquished.

A sea of white medical school jackets walking down San Lázaro to the Punta del Prado on November 27…

Tropical storm waves over the malecón.

Grateful for nature’s beauty when sitting in the lookout tower inside the castle of shells and sand in the Japanese garden of 1830 Restaurant… Watching the sunset over the malecón.

I almost stepped on the human shit in the middle of the malecón this morning.

The students laugh and take pictures of the fisherman blowing up condoms to use as floaters on their fishing lines. And the mother inflates another one for her child to play with like a balloon as she nibbles on peanuts.

From the luxurious pool of the Meliá Cohiba hotel, I can see both a girl hanging her laundry from a window of her tenement apartment building and the abandoned balconies of the Rivera hotel, former symbol of 1950’s mafia glory.

The abuelos meet at sunrise to gossip and to swim at the playita of 16^th. Wearing shoes to protect their feet, they carefully step over the sleeping man to plunge their bodies into the ocean and swim along the coast of the malecón. Bart, the dog, stands guard for emergency.

The solar is a living organism.

Centro Habana, a glamorous 1950s shopping district, deprived of stock, now divided into barbacoas for families to stack up generations… Buildings change the structures of their interiors in accordance to their new uses.

Centro Havana, most densely populated municipality, where personal lives spill into public spaces… The two mothers dressed in bathrobes stand gossiping while they watch their children play with toy cars in the street.

Two children in school uniforms chase chicks between the billowing sheets of laundry hung on lines across the patio under the watchful eye of the man fixing the red high heel shoe. Someone yells, “¡Hasta cuando!” [Until when!] from inside the solar with the Industriales sign over the door.

The park smells of grass, freshly cut by the old man with a machete. The young boy laughs as his father teaches him to ride a bike around the waterless fountain that now serves as the field for the neighborhood children to play soccer. I think of sitting and watching from the bench beside the bust of Jose Martí, but find all the wooden boards have been stolen. There is nothing left but the frame.

I like to try to imagine what lovers are whispering into each other’s ears as they sit folded together on benches along Prado.

At the Taller Experimental de Gráfica in la Chorrera we break for lunch and J. leads me into a solar on the corner and into someone’s kitchen, where the workers in Habana Vieja make lines for lunch. The sweet woman serves up a tasty plate of pollo con congris for 1 CUC that rivals any of the paladares that are being pushed on the foreigners below.

The pastel de guayaba.

Turquoise, blue, purple, and pink enliven the facades of crumbling Vedado. Laundry billows from the windows.

“Se Vende” reads the sign beside the pile of rubble that was once an apartment building on the corner of B and 5^th St.

The Iwayós, dressed in white, hide from moonbeams under their umbrellas as I walk to the theater soaking in the full moon.

Havana fashion represents the hustling and ingenuity between Europe and the New World. Tropical interpretations of zoot suits meet santería. The brighter the better. Lycra and rhinestones die hard.

How long will the unfortunate yonki mohawks be in fashion?

– Photo credit: Annie Gibson

In the living room at the santero house, the saints are whispering in the babalao’s ear. On one side of the living room is the altar for the orishás. We sit down on the other side of the room on the couch below a framed pin-up of a half-naked woman wearing underwear and heels who is lounging on a motorcycle.

Green and yellow bracelets of mano de Orula…

The students are allowed into the back room to watch the babalao feed coco to the santos on Y’s 18^th birthday as the daughter of Oyá.

October 4th, Orulá’s birthday. The sound of batá comes out of unexpected corners. The dulceria is all out of dulces. The woman sitting in the sidecar of the scooter is carrying a cake decorated with the Cuban flag and the woman getting into the collective taxi beside me can’t stand up for so much rum.

We pull up to photograph the apartment building across the street from the US Interest Section. “You want to take pictures here? I could lose my job.” And the car drives off and leaves us on the corner, not even accepting payment.

Today’s máquina was a shockless 1953 Buick tank. It’s like riding in a Flintstones cartoon.

Tattoo sleeve on the arm out the window of today’s yellow máquina driver.

We are riding in a 1952 Ford Customline, but the motor is a Toyota. The Virgen of Charity sits proudly on the dashboard protecting our journey.

There was a colt running the highway alongside our Transtur bus outside of Bayamo.

The police officers excitedly stopped our bus on the way from Baracoa to Santiago and asked the driver if he had seen a dead cow beside the road. (There had been a hit and run and they were searching for the culprit.) The policeman jumped on the bus to be taken to the nearest town to get back-up. His partner tried to come aboard, too, with a group of prisoners, but the bus driver refused since we were full of yuma.

We are following the tracks of the old filmmakers, chasing yesterday as we re-film “Tempo of Tomorrow.” The project is like a scavenger hunt across Cuba, through time backwards and forwards; past, present, and future overlap.

The Kurhotel Escambray sits out of place in the cool air and green mountains of the Tope de los Collantes National Park. Dreamt up by Batista in the 1930s, now the ex-military come here for homeopathic medicine and relaxation and to walk the grounds in tracksuits.

“Danger of Collapse” – Photo credit: Miriam Psychas

Observing architecture in Havana is like observing nostalgia for worlds that were abruptly ended.

Photographs of decaying buildings are politicized evidence of Havana stuck in time. Image has always been necessary for the Imperial project. But how do you photograph the Cuban experience when every image requires a caption about what is visible and what is missing? The foreign and the Cuban gaze collide.

The camera lens is focused on the changes taking place in Cuba?

Ciego de Ávila

Ciego de Ávila, the city of porches, where we can walk the whole historic center protected from the rain and the contradictory beauty and despair of decrepit buildings and crumbling staircases that lead to home.

Camagüey

Camagüey has narrow streets that keep out pirates and large buses. The tourists line up for bike taxi tours. All streets lead to a church. Ileana Sánchez found an original 18th century fresco on her wall when she chipped away at old paint to expand her studio. Tiny ballerinas in black leotards, their hair tied up in yellow bows, file out of the crumbling yellow building and double up on bikes with their mothers to ride home for dinner. The smell of maduros fritos at 6 pm drift out of open doorways in the narrow streets of Camaguey. The slow pace of the countryside…

Santiago

The Conjunto Santiaguero blares out of the speakers and is projected on the screen above El Encanto Department Store; the smell of fried chicken and oil drifts from the street vendors; the chess players hover over their tables in the park beside Heredia Street as shoppers saunter to and fro.

The women sit embroidering detailed guayaberas and sun dresses at the Quitrin.

The students ask if they will get lice by putting on the helmet to ride the collective moto taxis around Santiago.

Climb the Padre Pico steps to the Tivoli neighborhood and wind through the hilly streets that look down over the Bay. A grandfather is teaching his two grandchildren to ride a bike but their feet don’t quite reach the pedals. Neighbors are playing dominoes on the street corner to catch a breeze; the students are invited into a living room to dance salsa played loudly on a stereo. I sit to have a Bucanero as the Tivoli Son Band rehearses for their show at Casa de las Tradiciones.

The students question the giant penis coming out of the Monumento del Cimarrón [Monument to the Runaway Slave] looking over El Cobre copper mines. There are flowers and bones left at the statue’s ngangá. We seek out the Eleguás hidden in the woods. Art creates ritual and ritual creates art.

Alberto Lescay is expanding his studio and he leans over and whispers that the back door with the beautiful stained glass transom is the escape route for the cimarrón. “How many children do you have?” I ask L, “As of right now I have 7 but I haven’t shut down the factory yet.”

Rafael brings us through the living room where his grandmother is watching the Brazilian novela “Paraíso Tropical.” We go under the sheet that divides the living room from his bedroom. He pulls out a needle, anesthesia, and an assortment of studs for D’s lip piercing.

Baracoa

Curves over la Farola and fog over el Yunque as we make our way to Baracoa.

We order chocolate in la Casa del Chocolate but they are all out.

Local legend has it that if you take a bath in the Rio Miel you will always return to Baracoa.

S. hasn’t shaved since arriving in Cuba. In Baracoa people call him Pelú, like the crazy unshaven man of local legend who is supposed to bring misfortune. They keep steering him towards the barbershop.

Our flight out of Baracoa was delayed because there are no lights on the landing strip so the incoming flight had to land in Santiago. We must wind the 5 hours down the Farola in the dark.

Son y Movimiento

“Oyás” – Photo credit: Annie Gibson

Sitting under the flamboyanes on the patio of the Conjunto Nacional and listening to the rumba in the Palenque… Eight Oyás spin their skirts with the winds of the cemetery.

At 8:30 am the park comes alive with viejos in black pants and white tops gracefully practicing tai chi.

The sound of 50 voices singing “Para su ayo omo niala guana omonianama keke ayo é” as we run lines of dancing Eleguá in Baile Folklórico…

“Listen to me so that you can learn the step correctly,” said the dance teacher to the Cuban student ogling the German student instead of paying attention. “Then you can teach it to the yuma. Be careful; if you don’t pay attention, then the yuma will be dancing better than you. And then how will you catch a yuma in the Palenque?” The Baile Folklórico class (which costs 30 MN [$1.25] for 4 months) erupts into giggles.

“You have to brush the floor with each step,” says the dance teacher explaining Eleguá’s step. He says to correct me, “I know that in your country you all don’t have to scrub your shoes with toothbrushes, but here we do. So pretend like you are scrubbing.”

R, who sings with the Coro Folklórico Nacional, improvised amazing verses to “Chan Chan” as I strummed the new chords on the guitar. “Stop strumming like a yuma. Where is your cubaneo?” she says.

What music is the soundtrack to your Havana?

At the outdoor concert in El Sauce a packed crowd of Cubans grind their hips to the harmonious sounds of the seventeen Los Van Van musicians playing their souls out into the night.

With the breeze from the rocking chair on the second floor balcony, I listen to the music of the man selling brooms harmonize with the woman selling crackers up and down Calle E.

The New Jersey school bus decorated by Pastors for Peace drives the dancers of the Ballet Nacional Cubano home after rehearsal.

The tambor has begun in thanks to Yemayá and Ochún for saving Marta from her injuries incurred when a neighbor put on a spell of brujería.

Rap group Obsesión organizes a Saturday party for the elderly in Centro Habana so that they can have a space to “dance, socialize, and be relevant” [bailar, socializar, y ser relevantes].

Los Aldeanos sing, “A La Habana ya no aguanto más, se acabó el querer.” [I can’t stand Havana anymore, I have fallen out of love.]

Rain, lightening, and thunder smashes as Síntesis sings to the orishas at Casa del Alba.

At the Peña del Ambia at the UNEAC, the percussion that got everyone on their feet was made out of armoire drawers.

The craziness of my days here seems worth it when in the evenings I can go to see the National Ballet of Cuba, the American Ballet, the New York City Ballet, the Chinese Ballet, and the Stuttgart Ballet all for the equivalent of 50 cents.

Dozens of young jazz musicians improvise on stage at the Jardines del Mella as part of JoJazz [Jóvenes Jazz] Festival, which sounds like jóias [jewels]. The electricity goes off but they keep playing even louder and even funkier in the pitch-blackness.

The rumba dancer on stage at Muñequitos de Matanzas used a pañuelo [handkerchief] with an American flag to prepare his vacunao.

Danza Contemporánea performed “Identidad-1,” a choreographed dance by George Céspedes imagining the story of Cuban cultural exchanges and dance genres if the cubaneo were to be replaced by robotic repetition. The Indian dance critic behind me didn’t understand, saying loudly to her friends that the piece didn’t say anything. Understanding Cuba means perceiving subtle cultural movements.

She spent intermission telling her Cuban guide that he should acknowledge that the government is controlling him while he held his breath to keep from bursting.

Francisco used to dance abakuá but lost his leg to diabetes. Now he sits at the park outside of my house and greets me every evening with a promise to take me out dancing to a Disco Temba party for senior citizens.

Voces

“Plaza de la Revolución” – Photo credit: Annie Gibson

Welcome to Cuba! “Se fue la luz” [The lights went out] and your room is on the 18^th floor.

“Tengo fé en el mejoramiento humano, en la vida futura, en la utilidad de la virtud.” [I have faith in human advancement, in times to come, and in the utility of virtue.] José Martí

Words spoken in the rhythm of son…

Exasperated visitor storms out of the registration line for the film festival saying, “Why is it that in Cuba they seem to want to complicate everything?”

Daynaris tells me to go change my clothes because I am wearing all black on the Día de Santa Bárbara (Changó).

“Are ruins really shame?” asks S.

“Pero amar y ser feliz es algo,” says the graffiti at Línea and Calle G. And I wonder if the voice is spraying out despair over having nothing material or happiness for having the company of others. And I think to myself that scarcity reveals the secret to a good life.

“Step exactly where I step,” says E as I follow her across the crumbling balcony to her home. Who is responsible for ruins in the hallway?

“La gente vive como puede, no como quiere.” [The people live as they can, not how they want.]

Y. tried to shove her wallet into her disheveled bag and then said, “Wait a minute, let me do this the way white people do,” as she organized the clutter.

Cuba is “orden con relajo” writes Damián Fernández.

“Quién no tiene de Congo, tiene de Carabalí.”

“Sueño con papas” [I dream of potatoes], says A. “What I wouldn’t give to eat a potato right now.”

“If they made t-shirts here like they did in New York for every time there was a blackout, I would have all the pullovers I need,” says Ale with a laugh. “Blackout at 2pm. Blackout at 6pm…”

I stand in the park on Neptuno and San Lázaro. “¡Celia!” I yell up to the 8^th floor apartment. Celia leans out the window and throws down the keys to open the door because the buzzer is broken. “¡Doctora, traigo jamón!” [Doctor, I have ham!], yells the vendor. “Should I come up?”

M’s godmother in santería made her hacerse Oyá because she had never had an Oyá as an ahijada, even though the caracoles said that M. was the daughter of Ochún. “¡Que trabajo pasé para Oyá asumirse a la cabeza!” [What difficult times I went through for Oyá to assume her position on my head], M. says, as she tells me about her misfortunes for being initiated as the daughter of the wrong orisha.

“De dos en dos, las maracas se adelantan al yanqui para decirle: ¿Cómo está usted, señor?” [Two by two, the maracas move toward the Yankee to say, How are you, Sir?] – Nicolás Guillén

“Hershey Sugar Factory” – Photo credit: Annie Gibson

Luis, who once guarded the Hershey sugarcane factory when it was in its heyday, now guards its ruins. He chats with me to pass the time. “Life in Cuba is not easy. $300 pesos isn’t much to live on. It is a shame to think about how beautiful this place used to be.” And as we wander around the factory he warns, “Don’t walk too close because it could collapse at any moment.” And I think about how the collapse of Hershey somehow makes this place levitate in our camera’s gaze.

We had steak for lunch. “Where did you get that?” M. asks. “Don’t ask so many questions,” says Ivo. “En Cuba nada se puede y todo se hace.” [In Cuba you can’t do anything and you do everything.]

“Los cubanos son pegajosos.” [Cubans are sticky.]

“Estoy complicada”=I am busy.

Problemas

“March from the University of Havana, 27 November 2014″ – Photo credit: Miriam Psychas

“Todo mundo se busca solución al problema. Estamos acostumbrados a pasar problema.” [Everyone searches for solutions to their problems. We are used to getting through problems.]

Day 2 in Havana: “Get out at Parque Central and wait for the rest of the group there. Don’t trust anyone,” I said on their first trip in the máquinas. José Martí points and laughs at me from Parque Central and tension builds as the men argue baseball at the Esquina Caliente and I wait for my students who don’t arrive. One hour later and 25CUCs lighter, they crawl back to me embarrassed, my pollitos led astray by the young man who promised to take them to a salsa festival that never was. It’s a good first lesson.

The students can’t get into the Artes y Letras building without a carnet and the facultad is out of carnet paper. The solution is to forge UH ID cards at the corner computer printing business and get the secretary to give me the official stamp so that my students can get to class this semester.

“Suave pa que se te de,” says Angel when I come home exasperated after another trip to immigration without receiving the student’s carnets. And I think how the Special Period has made sexuality and violence daily expressions for dealing with daily struggle.

The preciousness of water: Carrying bucket by bucket up the crumbling steps to fill the barrels outside Y’s apartment.

The Arquitecto del Barrio from the Ministerio de la Vivienda who was supposed to fix the hole in the hallway of E’s solar moved to the United States.

When winter comes, the waves break over the wall of the malecón and take away our evening lounging spot.

Seems as if all the 12-seat micros in Havana are broken…

The Cuban bureaucracy is a Kafkaesque machine.

I have to leave the house with Plan A, B, and C and consider the day a success when I complete one of them.

Mercedes fell through the floor of her rotten barbacoa onto the kitchen counter. Then, she dusted herself off, left the barbacoa in the sink, and went to work cleaning the house of the Colombian woman from UNESCO. Just as she does every morning.

D’s frantic phone call, “I don’t know what happened, but L. slipped and fell and there is blood everywhere. Come quick!” And I arrive to hold L’s hand as the doctor tells me, “Hay que luchar por la juventud,” as she meticulously ties 30 stitches to save the skin that had been sliced off L’s knee when she slipped on the mopped floors.

And the woman in the high heels is taking the passport with the paper to be signed into the next door and from there it is a mystery. We wait. And we wait. And we wait some more. “Chicas, no vale la pena coger lucha.” I tell them as I slump back dejected in the waiting room. And I put on that smile that by appearances means all is under control.

As both Brazilian and mulatto, Leo can pass as Cuban by his looks. ¿Quién es el hombre de color? , asks the highway patrol who pulls over our purple Customline 1952 Ford. They take him out of the car for questioning and check his passport and documents while Josh and I, who are clandestinely filming in Cuba, are never questioned. White is not always the color of innocence.

“You have to take advantage of the beach, the art, and the avocado when in season,” says A. in his explanation about how to deal with the difficulties of daily Cuban reality.

Ivo taught me to make tea with onion skins and dandelion to cure A’s cold.

When the rest of the world runs out of natural resources, Cuba will have learned how to make steaks out of marabú.

“Virgen of Charity and bike taxi” – Photo credit: Miriam Psychas

Josh forgot the charger for his camera back in the US. We walk onto the porch of Cellandia and ask, “Does anyone know anything about electronics?” R. gets to work trying to make us a new charger, testing the voltage with his tongue.

Y. can’t replace his stolen drivers’ license because the office is all out of stamps.

You can only get a t-shirt for Marhabana [marathon race] if you paid to participate as a foreigner or if you qualified in the race last year. T-shirts are rationed.

Registering 3,000 participants for Marhabana by hand, the old fashioned way. I wait in line for the woman from INDER to write down my name and my carnet number. Days later I will return for my race number but they can’t find the paper where they had written down my name.

Wear a guayabera and you will be dressed for any occasion.

A piece of metal protruded out of the seat of the collective taxi and tore a hole in my guayabera. The seamstress at the Quitrin in Havana Vieja shuffled me into the bathroom and instructed me to hold the door shut so no one would see me shirtless while she took my favorite shirt to her sewing machine, and using tailoring and problem-solving skills, magically repaired the hole in under 2 minutes.

H. calls to tell me that her carnet was pickpocketed and wants to know what scam the pickpocket was trying to pull when she broke into the bathroom and started chatting with D. as she squatted over the toilet. Hours in immigration paperwork await me.

S. broke his leg trying to jump down on the rocks of the malecón so that he could find a private place to hook up with his girlfriend.

Students arrive angry after waiting all day outside the professor’s office because she didn’t show up to class again and it is the last day for foreign students to take their final exams.

In order to leave the country, International Relations has asked us to turn in our carnets so that they can take them to immigration to be hole-punched. Making that hole is a 3-day process. Didn’t Cuba do away with exit permits? Can’t I just buy a hole-puncher?

Major crises of Tulane in Cuba semester: 2 physical assaults, 1 fall from a 20-foot ledge (luckily into water causing minor bruising), 1 fall resulting in 30 stitches in the knee, 1 fall resulting in leg and ankle break in 3 different locations, 1 dislocated shoulder, 2 stolen carnets, 2 deceased parents, 1 deceased best friend, 1 parent in the hospital in critical condition, 2 food poisonings, 2 allergic reactions needing cortisone injections, 1 crazy sub-letter back home who will not pay my last month’s rent.

Trabajo y Dinero

“Private Enterprise” – Photo credit: Miriam Psychas

“Sueña que no cuesta nada.” [Dream because it doesn’t cost you anything.]

Inventos Cubanos! [Cuban Inventions]

In the voice of a praying monk, Pedro Luis Ferrer and his audience repeat, “The people pretend to work and the state pretends to pay.”

The onion costs 75 pesos and the average state monthly salary is 500 pesos.

M. can’t retire from her secretarial job at the University because then she wouldn’t find students to fill her casa particular.

L. wanted to buy E’s father a drink to celebrate their new friendship. Unknowingly to L., the bartender and E’s father split the commission on his $8 mojito.

I ask to see the menu at the paladar and look the waiter in the eye while inquiring if this is the menu with or without commission.

Writing receipts because no one gives me one…

I make a reservation for the students to go snorkeling and Chirino insists on giving me the commission in hopes that I will bring another group to Punta Perdiz. I buy the students lunch with the commission they were charged for being yuma in Cuba.

We live in function of our infrastructure. The receipt for payment wasn’t prepared today because the power went out. Maybe tomorrow.

Cuba is a smileless customer service industry.

Always being aware of how much every fruit and vegetable costs at the agro…

“Agro Cooperative” – Photo credit: Annie Gibson

It is beautiful to watch neighbors give to neighbors, but nothing is for free. As I listen to snippets of conversations down Línea, everyone is preoccupied with money, food, and getting what is theirs.

She came up to sell yogurt and cheese but she got a much better price for her body from the Canadian tourists renting the room next to me.

“How long have you been in Cuba?” asks T., one of the most important professors and researchers on race in Cuba. “I can’t believe that you have been here for two months and you haven’t invited me to give a talk! Do you want me to starve to death? You have lived here long enough to know that we don’t live off our salaries. I make $500 pesos cubanos a month. How am I supposed to eat if you don’t invite me to give a talk?”

R’s job is to watch the statue of Salvador Allende on the corner of Calle G and 17 where he earns $500 pesos a month, just like Professor T. at the University of Havana. “When I leave for Chile there are going to be people fighting to take my job,” says R. “Statue watching gives you plenty of time to ‘resolver los problemas de la vida.’”

Listening to the Beatles used to be prohibited. Now there is a statue of John Lennon in the park in front of the Yellow Submarine and a statue watcher because people are always trying to steal his eyeglasses.

The owners of the garage on 3ra y C turned it into a private fast food restaurant with the signage modeled after Burger King.

“Why do foreigners think they need so much toilet paper? All you need is one square. The toilet paper está perdido for a month and I have to get it from Julita’s house and she is charging 3 times the cost!” says Ivo as she cleans the bathroom of her casa particular.

At the seamstress’s house in the solar across the street, the seamstress yells out the door for me to come back tomorrow because she is having diarrhea coming out like water.

“Cakes Ana María” is on the second floor of the bright pink building. No sign. Just walk through the door and past the quineañera pictures where the birthday girl poses wearing nothing but a scarf and take your position in line for the best cake in Havana.

At the Cajonera, the warehouse has now been subdivided into living spaces. As we arrive with our cameras, we are offered a photo assistant, gas for our car, cigars, percussion classes, and to hacerse el santo [to be initiated into santería]. Though no longer a place of trade, the neighborhood is ready to do business.

I hand the teller 40CUC and she dispenses a huge stack of CUP through the plastic partition.

“$ pa que me mantenga.” [$ so that I can maintain myself.]

The Colombians staying in the room next door ran out of money and couldn’t pay for their casa particular because all they had was a Citibank card.

Misconceptions of the US: “You can do anything you want in Cuba. If you want to go out and spend $600 every night you can do it, no problem,” says the taxi driver who wants to overcharge us for a ride home.

“Parque Lenin” – Photo credit: Annie Gibson

At the Monument to Celia Sanchéz in Parque Lenin, the old man poses as a tour guide to get a few pesos for his inaccurate historical analysis and I make up a fake phone call to help my students escape.

At N’s apartment, a woman makes her rounds with a bag of shirts, pants, and shoes for sale sent from her brother living in Portugal…

Y’s husband moves back in with his parents during the one-week a year when Y’s Canadian boyfriend comes to visit. How else would they pay the rent and keep money on their cell phones?

I stand with a huge stack of cash at the accounting office of the University of Havana. Fidel and Raúl stare down at me from the poster that reads, “La revolución pujante y victoriosa sigue adelante.” X. holds up a calculator through the bars of the payment window, “They prepared the issue of payment wrong, see? Sign here and on these other 10 copies. I don’t want anyone to think I stole the money.” And he starts counting, bill after bill and I start signing. The two young workers gossip on the lone black couch in the waiting room about how they would redecorate the office. It’s a blank slate. The line to get a receipt to process payment grows. The gossip distracts Y who reprimands them to return to work. He loses count and starts over. The student from Denmark walks in and asks where she should go and I point towards the line to get the receipt for the receipt to process the payment for her tuition.

Turismo

“Coco Taxi” – Photo credit: Annie Gibson

Ivo picks the stale crackers out of the trash where the tourists discarded them. One of the most important lessons to be learned from Cubans is that everything has a use. She will mash them up to make croquetas.

“This is not a tourist experience. Do you see any tourists here?,” says the historian who mediates our contact with the “real” indigenous people of Nengón Kiribá. “They didn’t know that what they were doing was anything special until the teacher discovered them.” We are ordered to sit in the chairs strategically lined up for us to stare at the natives who will cook, sing, and dance for us. After it is over, they will go back to their lives as students, teachers, farmers, and artisans until the next tourist bus rolls up. This was the “real” Cuba.

The clave beat of son and changui ring out from the balcony of Casa de la Trova while the tourists sit and drink their mojitos. The jineteros wait below, dancing in place, hoping to catch a tourist looking for a late-night local tour of buildings and bodies on their way back to the hotel.

Candles, votive figures, and copper rocks are shoved into our hands as we approach El Santuario del Cobre. “It is a gift! Take it my friend!” they shout, in hopes of whatever small change they can get from the students.

Artisans walk back and forth all day, waiting for the moment that a tourist allows them to spread out their hand-cut wood boxes for viewing. These same artists hover in the background ready to cut down coconuts or bring chocolate and cucuruchos or perhaps even to give a coconut oil massage. I buy a wood cutting board, not because I want it, but because I’m made all too aware that the local economy depends on my presence. The little boy throws a rock at the bus as we slip out of town and the artisans mumble under their breath.

Does Baracoa really house the cross that Cristopher Columbus planted on the Americas? It is the holy grail of local tourism.

We meet Señor Fuentes #5, the campesino from the Lonely Planet Guidebook, who will take you to the Cueva del Agua. They should start making Lonely Planet ID cards in Baracoa.

“All the bald men look just alike,” says Ivo as she watches the street through the binoculars to see if she can find Angel. Maybe he stopped for fruta bomba in the market? Angel still hasn’t returned from immigration where he went to report and the tourist and his Cuban companion are ready to check out of the room. They chain smoke impatiently.

Yacht travelers are allowed to stay at port in Cuba for up to 3 days without a visa thanks to Hemingway’s sport fishing tournaments. At the Hemingway Marina posed beside a boat from Wilmington, NC: “You aren’t from the Interest Section, are you?” (It is illegal for Cubans to board a boat in Cuba unless they have a special license for taking tourists sport fishing.) Where do all these boats come from and where do they go?

As the foreigners get goodie bags for their participation in Marhabana, they pose beside a cardboard mascot of a tropical mulata wearing a fruit hat and Adidas running shoes.

“Easy on the door!” say the máquina drivers anytime a foreigner gets into the 1950s vintage taxis because delicate care is needed in closing the doors.

There are plans for a new Hotel Internacional of Varadero, but Lansky’s vision for 1950s resort-style Cuba keeps pouring all-inclusive drinks. How much cheap Santiago rum until the Hotel Internacional of Varadero has been revived to its former mafia glory?

The true magnificence of the Cuban beach resort experience is to watch the foreigners in their vacation haze shaking their rusty hips behind the dance coach during the exercise hour.

“I have a license to take you into Varadero, but not a license to take you out,” says our taxi driver. (There is a special license with higher taxes for taxi drivers working with tourists in Varadero.) “Walk over this bridge and past the security checkpoint and I’ll pick you up where the highway curves.” So we walk over the bridge, umbrellas to block the sun, taking pictures of the signage for the Literacy Brigade that trained young teachers at Varadero beach and eliminated illiteracy in 1961.

The road to the ruins of 19th century sugarcane plantations like Mañach Iznaga is paved with vendors selling embroidered sheets and guayaberas. “I got conned into buying a banana and a cricket made out of sugarcane fronds,” says the Canadian tourist as she finally emerges from the gauntlet.

Standing behind the yellow line – Photo credit: Annie Gibson

There is a yellow line around the Plaza de la Revolución to mark where tourists are allowed to stand to take pictures of the martyrs of the Revolution. The guards keep watch and blow their whistles if we step outside the line.

The foreign voyeur finds his desires met by Cuba. There is a symbiotic relationship between foreigners and their host.

There is always a political rationale behind images produced for foreign consumption.

Cayo Coco: When the tourists eat at the buffet table at the Iberostar Resort of Cayo Coco they have no idea what food shortages Cubans find in the agro when they are bused two hours home from work. “I am so happy to be in Cuba!” say the Canadians in a drunken haze with their all-inclusive wristbands while watching the Michael Jackson impersonators on the pool stage.

A. won a bottle of rum last night by quickly changing clothes with a Canadian stranger during the nightly entertainment show.

J. returned to Cuba after 3 years and rented a car for his visit. He picks up as many hitchhikers as he can on the highway from Santa Clara to Havana. The trauma of living 29 years with poor transportation… He brings his parents on vacation to Havana and Varadero. His dad tells me that J. is now un hombre realizado [complete] because he is behind the wheel of a nice car going on a joyride along the malecón.

“Go to your room! My student is coming over!” I scold the drunk 50-year-old Spanish tourist and his naked Cuban lover sitting on my couch at 9 am. And to think that Cuba eradicated prostitution.

It is ironic that classic American cars are the symbol of revolutionary Cuba. A caravan of classic convertibles carrying tourists to the Meliá Cohiba hotel cruises down the malecón.

The Colombian tourist who came for Baila Cuba got conned into buying overpriced drinks in an empty bar as he naively trusted that the man he met on the street was leading him to a salsa festival.

Pillo Chocolate and his dog are professional costumers in Havana Vieja. If Pillo tells the dog that the tourists watching the act are Americans, then the little dog naughtily refuses to pose for the camera.

Am I like the tourists who come to take pictures of the living decay?

“Renta una fantasia,” says the coco taxi.

Políticas de Género

“At the santero house” – Photo credit: Annie Gibson

On the days that the catcalls on the streets are too exhausting, I decide to spend the rest of the day at home.

Y. thinks it is normal to go over to her stepfather’s house to cook and clean for him because he never learned to do it himself.

At Casa de la Música, a strange show of masculinity: Maykel Blanco sits in a chair onstage sipping a glass of wine while his band plays behind him. A male dancer from the crowd, dressed head to toe in Cuban athletic gear inspired by the Juegos Centroaméricanos y del Caribe, jumps on stage to perform abakuá and breakdancing moves while Maykel Blanco inspects him from his chair sending nods of approval. The male dance circles around Maykel’s attentive gaze.

“Don’t you like mulaticos feos” asks the micro-driver with a flirtatious smile.

“Necesito hablar con su superior” I say, so that I can get the boss to get the boss who finally gets the boss who will do something…

I stuck my hip out with attitude and told the old man asking A. for a kiss to, “Deja la mecánica y coje tu rumbo.” And he looks at me with a surprised face and saunters away.

“It is her fault for being strangled and his fault for stealing the woman,“ says the policeman as we fill out a report in the waiting room.” As if she was paid for merchandise… We all know who was the paying member of that relationship.

I covertly find out the address and phone number of the jinetero that the police wouldn’t deal with as he laid game on me from Yara to Calle G. “Que si te haces el guapo con uno de los míos, lo que te voy a formar es candela,” [If you mess with my job I mess with yours], I say to him with attitude. We shake hands to confirm he will stay away and then he disappears around the graffiti wall of Nelson Mandela.

At CENESEX (Centro de Educación de la Sexualidad) D. tries to explain why she thinks catcalling in the street is machista and the head research librarian responds, “Yes, those piropos in the street are the good side of our machismo. I will see if I can find you a list of them so that you can take them home with you to your country.”

“Chocolate is an aphrodisiac.” That must be why you can find so many 70-year old men with teenage Baracoans at La Terraza night club. They must all have eaten the chocolate.

“Please not again.” I think to myself as the 70-something man with a cane sits down right beside me in an almost empty movie theater at the Yara. I wait tensely until that moment when he unzips his pants to masturbate and I put on the guapería that I wasn’t born with but have learned for survival purposes and, say, “¡Oye niño, ¿no te da vergüenza sacar esa pinga tan chiquitica?!” The theater turns to look. I change seats. And the old man hobbles quickly out the back door. Just another day at the afternoon movie show.

A man with dick in hand chased them down the street again last night. What is the psychological reason for so much public masturbation in Havana?

J. loves the attention at the gay club. “Why don’t you girls like the catcalling you get on the streets?” he asks.

At the adult puppet show, “Charco Seco,” I am handed rainbow-colored anti-discrimination propaganda, condoms, and instructions for proper anal insertion. Cuba sure is doing something right.

Revolución/Evolución

“Chavez at Fuster” – Photo credit: Miriam Psychas

“Fidel Te Queremos, Raúl Te Seguimos, Chávez Te Recordamos” [Fidel we love you, Raul we follow you, Chavez we remember you]

Ciudad Libertad and its barracks stand tall like a ghost town except for the laughter of children in their pioneer uniforms on their way to the schoolroom.

What does the poverty of resistance look like without war? The Special Period in times of Peace is the dignity of the quiet decay of infrastructure.

On 5^th Avenue, there is a statue built in homage to the egg, the salva vida of many a Cuban family during the Special Period.

1950s Cuba showed tropical paradise turning into a tropical nightmare.

All that is left of the statue on G and 1^st is the feet. What counterrevolutionary was removed from his immortality?

The caldosa at the CDR party on July 27th has the smoky flavor of hours over an open flame. The neighbors arrive with their plates and to-go containers and respond with a hardy “Viva la revolución” while rolling their eyes. And at the stroke of midnight we sing happy birthday to the revolution and the grandmothers and grandfathers fold up their chairs and take their plastic cups and plates home until the next time.

The Isaac Delgado concert was cancelled because Sunday, December 7 is Día de los Mártires and you can’t play music after 11pm.

December 8 is Día de los Derechos Humanos and the government organized a party in the square on Calzada and Calle D to cover up the madres en blanco who make laps in support of the freeing of political prisoners in Cuba.

José Martí, Che Guevara, and Camilo Cienfuegos stare down at me at dusk as I walk through Plaza de la Revolución to flag an almendrón down Calle G. Havana is more than a city. It is a monumental dream.

What they fought to prevent happened anyway.

La Guarida is now a solar that Cubans can’t afford to enter.

Dilapidated buildings are the result of historic evolution. The structures of the Cuban nation are aging.

In a capitalist country all the socios would die of hunger.

“Che está liberando y ganando más batallas que nunca” [Che is liberating and winning more battles than ever], says the billboard in front of Calixto Garcia Hospital. Che sure has been busy postmortem.

“Jose Marti” – Photo credit: Miriam Psychas

The heroes have all become statues.

Every day when I walk past the National Office of Normalization [Oficina Nacional de la Normalización], I think of the scene in the movie La Muerte de un Beaurócrata where the uncle’s machine keeps spitting out busts of José Martí.

There are two rides working at the Parque Lenin. Families walk around eating popcorn and observing the rusting metal.

The adrenaline rush you get when getting onto “The Caterpillar” (La Oruga) mini-rollercoaster in Parque Lenin… It may not move fast, but there is real danger that it may fall off the track at any moment.

The psychological hunger of Cubans eating at a resort buffet.

All of Nuevo Vedado is out of power until 5pm today because Fábrica del Arte is doing some electric work. The clash between new private enterprises funded from abroad and Cuban neighborhoods begins.

Is Fábrica del Arte one of the first examples of Cuban cooperatives in the field of culture?

Tonight the theme of the nightly news show “Mesa Redonda” is the conflict between morality and legitimacy in Cuban society. Honesty is actually an expensive virtue. It is easy to be honest when you have everything that you need.

The comedian says, “Havana is like an onion, the more layers you peel back, the more you cry.” The audience bursts into laughter.

The first signs of creeping capitalism are the Bucanero mascot and his sexy dancers promoting beer at Casa de la Música.

The opening scene of Rascacielos by Jazz Vilá: If Cuban theater is the pulse of Cuban society it makes sense that there always seems to be someone on stage masturbating. It is also telling that it may be the first play promoting the small businesses that were the financers of its production. It’s virtually an advertisement for paladares StarBien and Catedral.

Behind every new small business is foreign capital.

We interview two students from California and New York studying at ELAM [Escuela Latinoaméricana de Medicina] and leave feeling as if we need more doctors in the US to practice preventative medicine. The living conditions at ELAM may be eleven students to a dorm room and rice and beans everyday, but med school means sacrifice no matter where you attend. At least ELAM doesn’t put a price tag on health.

I ask P. if she wants to come along to the march on November 27 in honor of the eight martyred medical students shot by Spanish firing squads in 1871. She says she had to spend her whole schooling being obligated to attend marches, receiving bad grades if she didn’t show up. She wishes me well on my adventure.

The tensed shoulders of the Cuban Americans in Terminal 2, arriving for their vaccination against nostalgia, for the part of themselves that they left behind. Or that left them behind. It’s unclear who abandoned whom.

After 3 years of living in the US, J. says that he no longer feels Cuban. But his father never tires of showing off the video of when J. was 11 singing on stage in his pioneer uniform for Fidel.

Medios de Comunicación

“Billboards” – Photo credit: Annie Gibson

Informes [Reports]: the art of writing circles around what I really want to say.

Waiting passengers along Línea point their thumbs over their shoulders while others gesture forward to the oncoming 1950s Chevy collective taxis. Fluency is much more about interpreting gestures than language.

At the opening of the movie Contigo Ajo y Cebolla in the Chaplin, director Héctor Quintero, dressed all in white, comes on stage to present his movie with a sign that says “Viva el Cine Libre.”

“Reading is Sexy. Be prepared. Free Condoms. Si, son de afuera,” says the note attached to the empty basket at Cuba Libro bookstore.

It is Cuban character to crack jokes at their own shortcomings.

“Último,” I call to the blob of people waiting in line. And I mark my ground behind the old woman in the pink skirt sitting in the corner. “Último” says the man walking up and I raise my hand and give my último position to him and he gives it to her and on and on again.

I wonder if there will be Internet today?

The importance of a flash drive: You never know when someone will have music, film, or pdf versions of rare books to pass along.

– Photo credit: Annie Gibson

Socialist slogans adorn city walls in an attempt to overwrite the city.

“El Bloqueo: Genocidio más largo de historia” [The Blockade: The longest genocide in history] reads the billboard in front of the Facultad de Artes y Letras.

Are billboards of socialist propaganda any different from billboards of consumer culture telling us what we should buy, what we should look like, and how we should behave?

Futuro

“Filming in Havana” – Photo credit: Annie Gibson

Sitting at the bookstore, we are approached by the young producer of “Bikinis and Boardwalks,” who is working on a TV segment for an American audience about travel to Cuba. He wants to film us showing them around the beach and a cigar factory in Havana, “like any normal day,” he says. Poor planning by Indigo Films since OFAC doesn’t allow Americans to go to the beach or to cigar factories. I will not be showing my face on that TV show.

Cuba is the country of the future when it comes to managing resources. Y. gives three-year old M. a bath, brushes her teeth, and washes her face with one bucket of water.

How will we cross the street to sit along the malecón when the embargo ends and Havana fills with traffic?

Iconic presence. Nostalgic travellers.

Delírio Habanero. Restored to former glory. I feel as if I’m on South Beach.

D. asks, will new economic changes get rid of Cubans sharing with neighbors as the haves and the have-nots become more visible?

What is the strange alchemy that holds this place together?

Viewers do not get a picture of the present. It is the picture of the past that helps imagine what the present and future will be.

Each fall, the University of Havana organizes a talk with the family of the 5 heroes so we can write to our Congressmen and Senate to plead for the freedom of 5 Cuban spies caught in a political stalemate. What talk will we hear next year?

You want to know what will happen when they open up Cuba to foreigners? The rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. And Cuba will shuffle all tourists to all-inclusives in Varadero or control them through entrance visas. They have had 50 years to think up a plan.

The US and Cuba announced the end to the embargo on the day of San Lázaro, Babalú-Aye in santería, the orisha of healing. Cubans take to the street on hands and knees in thanks. We all must heal.

“Hasta La Victoria Siempre” [Towards Victory Always]. –Fidel

“CDR” – Photo credit: Miriam Psychas

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You are a body that needed a home / now you are ruins and home is wound

Why I left when I did and could not say goodbye:

The prison cell of memory / the decade of letters to the boy in Brooklyn/ the bleached bones / the runway of nightmare / the parched stillness echoed in hospital rooms / the clenched fists / the shivering night sky / the shattered glass in balconies on three continents / the silence/ the pity/ the rage in bones / the “I feel butchered / like someone / cut and cut and cut / all the humanity/ left nothing but rage”

The mother outside morgue paralyzed by grief / cries “I am not sorry for the martyr in you” / the revisionist history / the it did not happen / the they said it was different / so it was different / no one ever asked how or why / the sea of tents / the echo of lifeless / the limelight vertigo/ the blood soaked streets / the it did not happen / the revisionist history / my children will one day ask about

You are a body that needed a home/ now you are ruins and home is wound

The stillness of the midnight sky / before tear gas climbs down staircase of metro station the bodies start falling like thunder/ like applause / like paralyzed mind/ waiting to be jolted by lightning

The I do not sleep / the I wake for memory / the close my eyes and all I hear is gunfire / tilt head back and exhale for quiet / instead I am falling / falling / falling / into the broken teeth of this city / with blood-crusted fingernails / bruised knuckles/ and burnt bodies sketched with charcoal on the back of my eyelids/ the letter this week is about losing myself

You are a body that needed a home / now you are ruins and home is wound

The arms wrapped around blanket during October sunrise / no map / no mercy / no melody / only cloud as corpse to guide the way / the unwritten letters

The months go by/ the I do not recognize myself/ overdose on pills /as shrapnel fills throat/ asleep with the intimacy of loss / resting on my side table/ with yesterday’s coffee grains / the trying to remember to forget / and always forgetting to not remember / the I do not write to him for 64 days

The count to five and breathe / the 1-2-3-4-5 exhale / close my eyes and /all I see is ornament of burial shroud / sunset painted with massacred veins / city of lanterns with purple haze / marketplace of sorrow/ glass shards meet concrete / another balcony / the unkempt hair / the midnight walks / the hollowed out / clawed out / the rotting and ripe presence / of batons and blockades / and another and another and another / letter from prison cell / the are you okay? / the are you happy?/ the before I sleep I am still talking to your silhouette on walls

You are a body that needed a home / now you are ruins and home is wound

Suez is burning / Sinai is burning / Port Said is burning / Maspero is burning / Ittahadeya is burning / Tahrir is burning / my world is burning and all I can do is write / to the boy in Brooklyn / who taught me how to be / the hollow frame of a body / in spite of the flames

The aftermath/ the mayhem of survival/ the mayhem of empty/ the mayhem of the broken hymn / of the hundredth goodbye

The I left when I did / nothing familiar / about myself / left / I left the letters behind / box full / overflowing / of handmade paper / flowers pressed between the map to the morgue and memory overflowing of / nothing but hollow

You are a body that needed a home / now you are ruins and home is wound

The I still write to him / the I still write to him / not of hollow / not of loss / not of adventure / or defeat / or love / but of finding a way out / of lifeless and love in spite of loss / of starting over / of lifeless and love in spite of loss / of leaving / of lifeless and love in spite of loss

You are a body that needed a home / now you are ruins and home is wound
You are a body that needed a home / now you are ruins and home is wound

The you can walk away / the you can always say enough / the you can always say today / I will watch the world burn / from another balcony

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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.

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Talk Show Hosts, Radiohead

When you are on a plane, trapped in the clouds, you are nowhere. Not really nowhere: you are somewhere. A moving point in space mapped by some sophisticated cartographic technology. But, you are detached from everything that transforms spaces into places; in a sense you are detached from reality. It is suspended like you within an atmospheric cushion. Somewhere within this specific dot crossing the Atlantic, I sat in the forced darkness intending to mimic a natural night, while we were buckled into our leather seats, breathing the artificial air. I tried to close my eyes, to sleep like the others around me, but sleep would not come. I glanced at his sleeping profile next to me, at his translucent skin, his straight nose, his thin lips. In his sleep, he lost his fierce intensity, the stony veneer that demanded respect. In his sleep, he looked vulnerable, and I felt both protected and protective. Without turning the light on, I opened my sketchbook, flipping through the pages quickly without lingering, past sketches and charcoals, collaged pages dried stiff with primers and glue, thin wrinkled pages covered with lists of things I had to do or should have done but had forgotten to. The faint, comforting chemical smell of gesso mingled with the chilled, recycled air, until I arrived at an empty page. With the strange music playing in my ears just loud enough to cut the throbbing of the engines but not loud enough to be perceptible to anyone else, I took out the pencil and began to draw him, my hand moving blindly in the dark. My focused but quick glances transferred the details to my fingers with an understanding that was beyond vision. Lines turned into shapes and shapes into volumes, exactly as I was once taught, the traditional way, to follow the positive space. Whenever I was under stress, I reverted to old habits and learned ways of seeing. I shaded the pocket of skin under his eye, the shadow that fell across his face, and his lips so thin they looked as if they could disappear. In the dim light of the cabin, I could not make out exactly what I had drawn. The sketch was incomplete, half a sketch of half a face. It was only an impression – or even less than that: it was a mood.

The songs playing in my head continued to speak to me even as my desire to draw ended. I began a game I have played since I was a little girl. I began to write the words I heard coming through the headphones. And the words I did not understand, that I could not decipher, I made up, filling the blanks with my own lyrics. At some point, you cannot write fast enough to the pace of the rhythm and you lose the thread. When this happens, the short lines change into sentences, and the words break into a trajectory of their own. And the words began to take over the page, to occupy the negative space around the drawing, that sacred whiteness we were taught to always respect. The scribbles in the margins became the center and the center shifted into the margins. I could not see the letters as I transcribed the lines, but it did not matter, I continued until the song ended. And when I looked up, after long minutes that had stretched beyond measurable time, he was awake again, watching me, his lips slowly formed a half-smile, sleepy and lazy. And although he was the one waking up, I looked back at him as if I had been the one dreaming, as if he had woken me up.

I shut the sketchbook in the half darkness, my own expression invisible as I pulled off his headphones and turned towards him.

***

How come I end up where I started?
How come I end up where I went wrong?
Won’t take my eyes off the ball again.
First you reel me out, and then you cut the string.

15 Step, Radiohead

When my grandmother gathered us to tell a story, as she reigned on the blue velvet bergère while we claimed our territories on the worn antique Persian carpet that covered her cold gray marble floors. She would always begin with a soft, trembling voice, “Once there was, and once there was not.” We knew, of course, she told these stories to imprint her moral of the day on our impressionable ears: the young must always respect their elders; the kind always win; the obedient always get the prize; “our” culture always prevails; nevertheless we listened, as we were transported from our boring lives to magical and grotesque lands where virtuous girls were transformed to princesses and rebellious ones were doomed to have slimy frogs spewing out of their mouths forever. As she recited her carefully formed lessons disguised as stories, hybrids of French fairy tales meshed with Arabian Nights, I fixated on those first words, that contradictory opening, on the confusing duality of what was and what was not, distracted by the impossibility of something both being and not being, of a story happening and not. Did it or didn’t it? Years later, you learn that some things in fact both happen and don’t happen, that your life teeters on an invisible line between existence and absence. You realize that a story unfolds in infinite possibilities; that what wasn’t and what didn’t define your life as much as what was and what did.

The only story that exists is the one we remember, right now, in this moment. All other versions disappear and become irrelevant. It’s the truth: once there was, and once there was not. Once, the past is clear, and once again, the memory is blurred.

Gather around and listen to the tale before it is erased, listen as we glorify parts of our past and selectively change others, as we shift and stretch our truth. And so we begin with, once there was, and once there was not. But there was, there was…

My story ends where it began. Waiting. How long do we wait, thinking, “What if?” Obsessing about “What if?” What if the choices you thought were right were not the right ones? What if you just played a part that someone else had written for you? What if you lived your life through the words of others, the rules of others, the expectations of others, the lyrics of others? What if you waited too long, just to see what if, just to see what is? How long do you wait? Years pass as you wait, and you realize our childhood  dreams of what we would be do not match up to what we have become. This is the dark age of life, when we are unable to change the past, yet we are haunted by our perfect, gained-in-hindsight wisdom, and we are unable to accept the future as we now know it will unfold. So we wait, and we delay enlightenment in perpetual procrastination. We kill time, we start over, start again.

My name is Naya, from the reeds, from the ney, the ancient flute made from sugar canes that grew tall on the banks of the Nile. Each golden column is picked out of the marshes, its head and tail lopped off, its sweetness sucked out, and it becomes an empty vessel, depleted and useless, until someone picks it up and puts it to his lips and breathes into the dried tube a new life, a sound, a melody, creating something beautiful out of nothing. The ney, the instrument of the wind and the page, is older than time. It was etched onto the walls of the Pyramids, it was prized in Roman courts, it inspired countless poems of Rumi, it was sharpened and used as a pen to fill blank pages with the history of men. When the reed grew too long to play, it was used as a walking stick, propping up those who leaned unto it for support. Sometimes, when the weight of men became too heavy to bear, the reed would splinter and puncture their tightly clasping palms, their blood staining the golden surface, their flesh digging into the vertical fibers.

You don’t know me, but you have read my words, you have heard my notes. I live in your headphones, whisper in the night, and lull you to sleep. I exist to inspire, to enchant, to depress, to haunt, to tell my fragmented story. I’m in the middle of your picture, hiding in the reeds. But you don’t see me, you don’t hear me, for I am invisible. For I am nothing but an instrument.

***

I shift my weight from one aching foot to the other. I shouldn’t have worn these shoes. I wonder if I should change into the flats stashed in my purse. It’s crazy; he isn’t even going to see my feet, but I’m convinced the extra four inches will improve my view. With my earbuds in place, I try to focus on the music and forget the pain shooting up the backs of my legs. I pass the time watching people walking past me to join the back of the growing line. While waiting in line for a band you love, you are surrounded by people who have nothing in common with you but your obsession. Waiting in line for a concert is as important as the concert itself. This is where you meet the die-hard fans, the ones who upload their carefully recorded videos on YouTube, grainy evidence that they were there and were willing to stand still for an entire song to freeze the memory and share it with everyone else who could not be there. In the line, their abstract user names flesh into reality, virtual Facebook friends who finally acquire a real face. This is where you can discuss the songs and the lyrics in minute detail without sounding crazy. You can freely analyze the implications of a change of a word in a song between live and recorded versions, and exchange theories behind the intention of the changes. No judgment. After years of no one in your real life understanding this passion, here you belong, with your like-minded tribe of fundamentalists, all searching for meaning in the same place. These unwavering, intense feelings should have been a red flag telling me I had gone too far. But is it insane to find a home, a belonging, in a Radiohead concert line? Not at all.

The guy next to me leans against the brick wall, a lanky indie-type dressed in faded jeans and a grungy, frayed t-shirt. He was trying too hard to fit in with the nonchalant, just-rolled-out-of-bed and probably stoned majority of the crowd. Not that I cared – I didn’t fit in either, overdressed as I usually am when I’m nervous. He tells me he is not from New York, he drove down from Maine. He is an environmental lawyer and used funds from a corporate settlement to bid on this last-minute charity concert for ultimate Radiohead fans to raise money for Haiti. He tells me he went to the Met today to look at the Van Goghs. He describes, with obvious pride, his elaborate, complicated theory that the singer is Van Gogh reincarnated. He goes on and on, comparing songs to paintings of bedrooms and sunflowers. I listen, having heard weirder Radiohead theories. To keep him talking and stay in my half zoned-out state, I nod in agreement.

Then he looks at me and asks, “Do you think he has a muse?” I smile, and say, “Every artist has a muse.”

Muse, I think. Why do people always want to find out where things come from, to dissect the origin of inspiration? We have a need to explain the intention of art, an urge to take it apart and see how it works, as if we could explain it, as if it would become tangible, as if we all could tap into it like a mythical fountain of creativity and absorb it for ourselves. An instinctive need to figure it out and steal away its magic. A muse doesn’t create the art, she drives it; to be a muse is to be used, analyzed, objectified. To fulfill her duty, a muse must weave an invisible web of truthful lies – deep lies excavated from memory, with a glossy sheen of truth applied to the surface – at once inspiring and intoxicating.

To change the subject, I wonder aloud about what the setlist will be tonight. As expected, a heated discussion concerning possible song selections and speculation about new tracks begins between the lawyer and a group of guys behind me. I leave them completely now, relieved to be finally alone with my music and my thoughts. I used to be like them but I’m not anymore. I’m just playing the part of a regular (okay, intense) fan. When I know that with just a couple of texts I could be on the other side of this brick wall. With him.

The line begins to move forward when the doors open, and I turn and give my new friend a piece of advice. “Stand in front of the piano. Left of stage.” I try to erase thoughts of the past as I turn the volume up. The line inches forward.

Listen to my story, before the wait is over, before it slips away from my memory, before it shifts again, listen, while I can still remember. Slip inside my headphones. Step into the infinite tunnel between my ears and my mind, where my thoughts are triggered by a voice, a note, a word. Can you hear them?

Once there was a muse, the daughter of memory and the lover of inspiration. She held all the desires of the world within her. Once there was not.

***

transport, motor ways, and tram lines
                               starting and then stopping
            taking off and landing
                                    the emptiest of feelings
                                                                disappointed people
shell smashed, juices flowing
                                 wings twitch, legs are going
                                                                don’t get sentimental
                                                            it always ends up drivel

Let Down, Radiohead

I hate waiting in line. Especially airport lines. I hate check-in lines, security lines, boarding lines, lines that snake in endless labyrinthine mazes, lines that make you rock from one foot to the next, twisting your neck and your back, until every minuscule movement ails your body, and still the line doesn’t move. My people hate standing in line, except in prayer. When they pray, they submit to the line that represents the belief that all men are equal in front of Allah. But that equality evaporates at the bakery, in front of the bus stop, or in an airport; anywhere else it’s every man for himself, pushing and shoving to be first. But, since the fateful September morning when everything changed forever, we navigate a world where we are not only not equal to, but we are officially less than all others. You must not complain, you must not attract attention. You must appear normal, you must stand in line and try to disappear.

I watch the smug airline employee behind his station moving as slowly as possible. Was he trained to read our collective stress, boredom, and exhaustion? I wonder how he learned to move in opposite proportion to the frustration level of the passenger, to type continuously while gazing at the screen with glazed eyes, to speak in slowing syllables in a monotone voice. He must be addicted to our suffering, inhaling our fumes of distress and anxiety. I imagine he would be a sadistic torturer in another life, in another country.

You hate it but you have to go through it, like everyone else who has to get from point A to point B. And eventually, if you make enough international flights, from the Middle East to the US and back, sooner or later, you will connect through London Heathrow. This is where I am today, on the 5^th of January 2003, waiting, in line.

Terminal 5 is drab and nondescript. The best thing about Terminal 5 is leaving it. Whenever I’m here, I wonder why they couldn’t have built a better airport, one that welcomes you to England, instead of this massive, uninspiring gray block.

I know airports are hard to design because I have designed one. Not a real one, but on paper, which to an architecture student feels like the real thing. There aren’t many ways to create interesting spaces that meet the endless criteria and needs of gates, security, and runways. Mechanics and logistics make it difficult to insert inspiration and so the coolness that true architecture is supposed to exude dies in an airport. The airport is a building designed for maximum efficiency of movement: moving people with their overstuffed suitcases, moving everything along, up and down escalators, zipping across walkways. The airport is made for motion; once you stop, the flaws appear. All the design mistakes crystalize in the immobile moments. The still perspectives and carefully constructed 3D renderings that architects use for presentations tend to disguise the spaces as perfect snapshots, covered in appealing surfaces and filled with happy tourists. It is far from the messy reality you only experience by being there. We try our best to distract you, to make you forget where you are. We cover the walls, ceilings and floors with signs, colored flags or whatever cultural emblem or historical artifact that signifies: you are here; you are an international traveler; you have arrived! Like the interiors of Vegas casinos that artificially place you somewhere specific, to distract you from where you really are, the flimsy facade cannot disguise the fact that you are in an airport, in isolation. You are not in a place at all, you are expected to move quickly, spend money, and lately, strictly adhere to convoluted security policies. The slickest of architectural tricks can try to make you forget that you are a passport number in a line, but no amount of fancy sky lights, over-designed geometric columns, or in-house museums can make frustration disappear. Nothing can make you forget that you are in an airport.

While you are stuck in line, personal methods of distraction and defense work the best. Your cell phone, a book (though I find it hard to read while standing), and your music are essentials. I am addicted to my new, glossy iPod, both minimalist and trendy with the all-important white ear pods. Keep the volume low or even off if you want, but keep those white earbuds in place at all costs. It is your barrier against intrusive people asking for directions, asking if there is a delay, asking if you are on the same flight, asking if they are in the right line, or worse just to chat. As I wait, I try not to stress because I should be in Providence right now, getting ready for studio tomorrow. But of course I can’t forget, I’m stranded in Terminal 5.

***

I must admit, with all its faults, Heathrow doesn’t compare to the horrid excuse for an airport that is Aleppo International. The building is an iconic representation of the smoky, dusty, and cold socialist Syrian architecture of the last thirty years. Although winters in Aleppo are mild, the desert night chill leaks through the unheated interiors, the kind of cold that my mother says seeps into your bones. In these public buildings you must wrap yourself in as many layers as possible, not just for warmth but to visually bulk up and look as unattractive as possible to avert the looks of the sleazy men who hang out in dark corners watching every person who comes and leaves. Gawkers who have nothing better to do than loiter around the airport in the middle of the night, eating you with their eyes, studying your movements like hawks, listening in on your conversations and mentally taking notes. Don’t look directly at anyone; your eyes must be kept down at all costs. Here, an iPod is not a distraction but a red flag of frowned upon over-westernization; I keep it hidden away in my bag, but I mentally shut myself down and put on an impenetrable expression as cold as the stone walls.

Although I made my teary goodbyes to my family hours ago, it always feels like I’m continuously saying goodbye until I set foot in America. Until then, I cannot think of my life in Providence or my freedom. Until then all I can think of is my home, my mother and my father, and everything I left behind. I was supposed to depart on yesterday’s three a.m. British Airway’s flight from Aleppo to London on an plane coming from Damascus, but after a series of unfortunate delays, overbookings, and missed connections, I spent last night in London and was rerouted on the next evening flight to JFK, scheduled to arrive at my final destination exactly 48 hours later than expected. Delays are a standard part of experiencing Middle Eastern travel, so in reality this Heathrow line was not too bad.

There is a word architects love – ‘threshold’: the border between two separate yet connected spaces. The threshold of a house separates inside from out. At an airport, security separates being in and out of transit. Because we architects are taught to insert meaning into the mundane, we use the word to describe limits, boundaries, spaces of transition. Although I don’t know it yet, the line I wait in is a “threshold moment”, a temporal boundary, between what happened before and what will happen after. These moments can only be analyzed later; no one knows what exact moment will define who we are to become: an accident, a job interview, a meeting, a coincidence. Some are obvious clichés: getting married, having a baby, the death of your parents, these are expected transitions and can be prepared for in advance. Others are hidden, encoded into your DNA, they wait to emerge, to change the future and bring the past into focus. Sometimes it’s called luck, fate, free will, bad choices, all the words we use to explain our lives, but this is what my father has been saying to me for years: everything is written. We are not accidents waiting to happen.

Destiny waits with me in line. Or in two lines, to be precise.

***

Open your mouth wide,
a universal sigh.
And while the ocean blooms,
it’s what keeps me alive.
So why does it still hurt?
Don’t blow your mind with why.

Bloom, Radiohead

I pass the time watching people around me, particularly in the enviously short first class line. My only consolation was that I knew I looked better than most in the business and first class lines. I was dressed mostly in black, save the fuchsia cashmere scarf that my mother wrapped around my neck as I was leaving our apartment, to shield me from the cold, she said, and to break the depressing black. My mother always wrapped a warm gesture around a criticism. Architects, like artists, like to wear black because it is the color of the intellectual yet artsy, smart yet creative, types. Fitted black clothes, black messenger bags, and black thick-rimmed glasses, render us a blank canvas, with no distracting colors or fussy details. My scarf peeping out of my jacket was like the sliver of a metal zipper, or the slim red strip of rubber peeking from the back of your Prada shoes. Whether an ethnic detail or trademark glasses or a discreet logo, we want to be blank but also known. We also judge harshly, even though we pretend we don’t. You learn to “curate” your image early on in art school if you haven’t already in your teenage angst years. From your thoughts to your voice, every detail on and within your canvas is an opportunity to display this carefully formed image. The worst thing to happen to an architecture student is to be called a slacker (for actually needing and getting over six hours of sleep) or an idiot (for wearing bright colors or sounding too American). No one wants to sound “too American,” not even the Americans. Having a slight Euro accent is extremely useful at design school. Not too thick, just a faint sound of otherness is enough. For me having the accent was no problem, I could go either way, perfectly American at the Stop and Shop grocery store, to slightly “other” in studio, creating the coveted “European” twinge, to the point that my professors thought I knew French or at least Spanish when I didn’t. Worldliness, real or feigned, is necessary to survive. I was surprised when I found this need to be slightly foreign was so important in America. In Syria the expats’ kids who were dragged to visit the homeland every summer would be tormented every time they made a mistake while speaking to relatives, until they gave up on learning Arabic and reverted to the natural American drawl that we all secretly wanted for ourselves.

I entertain myself by texting back and forth with my best friend, Lamia, already in Providence. I know I am going to be screwed with charges, but I convince myself this is necessary to keep my sanity. Rocking on the balls of my black on black leather Pumas, back and forth, a familiar scent mixes with the canned airport air. I glance to my left, and in an instant I wish the entire floor of the airport would break open and swallow me.

He is in the line next to mine, supporting a tall, blonde girl leaning casually against his chest. She whispers something to him and they both laugh. I glance at them sideways, moving slightly to hide behind the guy in front of me. They look like the typical jet-setter couple, the ones you see in magazines, the ones that tell you how you are supposed to look while traveling. Casual yet fitted jackets and jeans and just enough tonal but visible logos on shoes and bags to mark themselves as different, as better. I watch as he slowly massages her shoulders with his clean-shaven face close to her golden, sleek hair. The memory of him touching my hair chokes me. I blink back my tears and try to arrest the flush that creeps unto my face. Of all the fucking British Airways’ flights from London to New York, I have to be stuck on one with him. I wish I were in studio like I was supposed to be, I wish I were anywhere else but here. I keep glancing towards them and turn away a moment too late, just as he catches me watching them. He steps out of the line and walks over.

He taps my shoulder, says, Hey.

I slip off my earbuds, pull my shoulders back and smile, secretly grateful for stretch jeans that don’t lose their cling and for freshly blow-dried hair, because as image-conscious Lamia reminded me that morning, you never know who you will meet in an airport. Because I haven’t spoken for hours, my voice cracks as I say, Hi Omar.

He grasps my shoulders and kisses my cheeks three times in the Lebanese style that Syrians love to imitate. His strong cologne envelopes me in a heavy cloud of past moments just like this one. He asks me about my classes, haven’t they already started?

I tell him that I’ve had a bit of a delay, hating him for remembering my schedule and nothing else. I look up and watch the sympathetic words fly out of his mouth, while his ill-concealed smirk tells me he doesn’t feel bad at all.

I smile and tell him it actually worked out perfectly, I had a great time in London. He keeps going, that I should have texted him, that I knew he was here for the week, that we could have had dinner together, with Elise, as he points to the blonde girl who smiles and waves perkily.

I try to think of a way out of this dead end, but I am stuck in my frozen line, hostage to his faux compassion and annoyingly effective charm. I can hear him telling me how they just met in London, and how she lives in New York, and how she works at a museum, one of the ones I love, but I am only half-listening, my eyes taking in the fragments of him which I can get away with, his jaw, his hand gesturing, the glint of silver from his watch peeking out under his white shirt sleeve. I let out a relieved sigh when he finally stops speaking.

Tilting his head towards me, he asks, Habibti, what’s wrong? The sound of his old endearment jolts me back to my senses. He’s throwing around “my love” with such carelessness, and I wonder, not for the first time, if he’s ever meant it.

My eyes slant slightly as I look up into his dark eyes, and they become tender for a moment as they always used to do when he knew he’d got to me, always so easily. He asks me how long I’m going to be in New York and before I can answer his real-life Barbie calls out in a high-pitched whine, Omar, it’s our turn honey, butchering his name, O-mar, mispronouncing the first letter. Non-Arabs can never pronounce it, the guttural ‘ayn they make into a long O, their mouths shaped into a perfect circle. But really, it starts with a harshness in your throat, softly bypasses your mouth to slip effortlessly out of your lips.  He used to make fun of people like her.

Isn’t she cute? he says, distracted for a moment. Gotta go, I’ll catch up with you at the gate. He stops and turns back and says, Change your attitude, grudges don’t suit you. How long are you going to stay mad? He gives me a quick peck on the cheek and squeezes my shoulder.

Forever, I think to myself, feeling my bones under his tight grip. But again, I just smile back.

As he walks back to his line, I try to see what was holding up mine. The culprit is a family with two kids and a screaming baby, overloaded with heavy luggage and American “need special treatment” attitudes. Now that I am aware of them standing three feet away from me, the cool calm I was feeling before evaporates. My applied glaze of confidence shattered into pieces, I feel exposed, standing alone, next to him but not next to him. The line becomes unbearable as each minute stretches into the next. All I can think is, we can’t be moving parallel to each other.

I wave to an airline employee patrolling the cordoned edge, and tell him that I’m about to miss my flight and need to check in immediately. I use every ounce of charm I have in me. If I were in Syria, I would have bribed him with five hundred lira, but of course all I can do here is use my sweetest tone and hope I will get my way. He eyes me with suspicion, he can tell it’s bullshit, but he unclips the cord and leads me to the empty first class line. Just wait here, he says. I can feel the rolling eyes of the economy line on my back, but I pretend I don’t care. I catch Omar’s eye as I walk past, and he gives me an amused look, the one he always gave me when I would manipulate a situation to my advantage. I ignore him as well. I pull out my ticket and passport and step up to the counter.

Miss, this is a first class line, she says holding my ticket, without looking at me.
Yes, but the kind gentleman led me here since there was no one in this line. I say this as I think, you are such a bitch.
But look behind you, there is a passenger waiting.
I turn around and see the back of a guy. In the saccharin tone I’m still using, I say, I’m sure that he doesn’t mind. Look, he’s on his phone.
She proceeds with extremely slowed motions, clucking her disapproval at having to serve a lowlife economy passenger. It occurs to me that as long I am here, I may as well ask for a better seat, maybe even one in business class. I take a deep breath and say in my most sophisticated voice, with my slanted accent, Is there any way I could get an upgrade? I just had the worst trip ever and…
She cuts me off briskly, I can’t give you an upgrade to first class. I hope that isn’t why you came to this line.
No, no, listen, I say, lowering my voice to a whisper, Do you see that guy in the business class line with the blonde? He is my ex-boyfriend, and I need to change my seat, just to business, not first.
She looks at my passport again, You are only twenty-four. He looks much older than you, dear.
I know, I know, as I hide the side of my face with my hair so Omar cannot see this exchange of desperation.
She stares at the computer. I can’t bring myself to look behind me at the growing line of people who paid triple what I did for their tickets.
Sorry, I can’t do anything about it now. We’re completely booked. Try at the gate.
It’s okay, I appreciate it, I say in my normal voice, with no effort to hide my disappointment.
You’re going to have a great flight, dear.
I can’t convince myself to believe her cheery prediction.

****

there are front doors,
and there are revolving doors
doors on the rudders of big ships
we are revolving doors
there are doors that open by themselves
there are sliding doors and there are secret doors
there are doors that lock and doors that don’t
there are doors that let you in and out but never open
but there are trap doors
that you can’t come back from

Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors, Radiohead

The Roseland, with its seedy history, touristy location, and banal facade, is a building with an attitude. Tonight the building with nothing to prove, with no sparkle or fancy lights, has a string of people wrapped in a necklace around the city block, which begins to overlap at the seam, starting a second human strand. As I approach the entrance there is a solemn aura mixed with anticipation hovering around the doors. The last time they played in this former ice-skating rink turned roller-skating rink turned disco nightclub and finally generic ballroom, was in 2000, after the release of Kid A. I found out much later that the tickets had sold out in minutes, that it was one of the most anticipated shows that year. Back then, I still lived in Syria, a world away from New York, and Radiohead was just another band I listened to among many others, before they occupied my playlists alone. But tonight, I have my coveted ticket in my hand, after bidding a dear price for it in the name of charity, although it may be hard to determine who really needs to be saved, the people of Haiti or me. The concert’s agenda is to be an intimate affair, a performance for the most dedicated of fans, most of whom have only seen Radiohead play at festivals, watching them projected onto massive screens while they swim in a sea of tens of thousands of people. But tonight I am prepared. I’ve made sure I’ll get a great spot inside. I paid a homeless guy yesterday to stand in line for me, and a few hours ago I took his place, to experience the anticipation myself.

On the floor, I am surprised at how large the space is when empty. People rush to the front but still they are scattered. I know that soon my personal space will be as small as my footprint, bound by the people who will crowd around me. And now bodies begin to press forward, heat and odors rolling off them. By the end the scent will be much stronger but less noticeable, because, by then, after seeping into our skin and hair, it will belong to all of us. I maneuver myself to the front, one row behind the rail, to the left, near the piano, to be as close as possible. Everyone knows being on the rail is not cool; there’s too much pressure and not enough space. Everyone knows he doesn’t focus on the people on the rail, the clamoring girls and guys who spend the entire concert trying to catch his eye, holding up their cameras and phones, red lights and flashes shining in his face. He looks just beyond, at the true fans who have just enough room to dance and listen without hanging on his every breath.

In the moments before it begins, everything is still perfect, after our expectation has been set and before any disappointment arrives. It’s been so long since I’ve looked forward to anything. It feels strange. Once I looked forward to everything. I have stood exactly in this place dozens of times in dozens of cities, and I try not to think why I am so nervous this time, why I feel this time will be the last time. I shake off the negativity and immerse myself in the crowd. They lift me out of the past and into the present tense.

***

After finally checking in, as I walk outside for a last cigarette before boarding, I text my Lamia quickly. I sit on the edge of a concrete planter and light up. Within thirty seconds I receive “asshole” back from her. I smile, twirl my finger on the white wheel, hearing the clicks in my ear as I turn up the volume and stretch out my legs. I inhale the smoke and exhale the stress. Someone sits right next to me even though there is plenty of space around. I turn my back slightly as I text “I know” back. Thank God for earbuds, although my obnoxiously loud music makes me feel rude. When the guy taps me on the shoulder, I take my left earbud out slowly without pausing the music, slightly embarrassed by the song blasting out of the tiny white piece, but at least it is a good song. I say, Excuse me?
May I bum a smoke? His clipped British accent barely registers on my one pounding ear.
With his black skull cap and worn leather jacket, he has grunge written all over him. I classify him in a two-second glance: an artsy type, maybe high. I dig into my  bag and hand him a cigarette. As I turn away again, I hear him ask softly, Lighter, dear? I sigh loudly, take the lighter out of my coat pocket, and give it to him. It is imperative to use the Arab girl rule of survival when faced with these situations: avoid eye contact at all costs.
I text Lamia: “This creep is sitting next to me and won’t leave.” And then, “Can’t even enjoy a smoke before boarding.” She replies, “You should quit. What did Omar say?”
I start to text something back as the song ends, and in the two second gap before the next begins, he asks, So where are you headed?
Now emboldened, I turn to look him directly in the face to show him this is not okay, and I freeze when I see him. My face flushes. The guy who was behind me in line talking on his cell, I wouldn’t have known him from the back but I now recognize his angular, boyish face, even recognize his voice as the same one floating out of my ear pods. He watches intently as I stammer, Um, New York. Hi.
He laughs and says, Hi, I’m Thom, giving me a wave.
Naya, nice to meet you. I’m a fan.
He smiles and says, I can hear that, I know it’s my music but is that even good for your ears?
All I can think to myself is keep cool, keep cool, keep cool. My phone beeps, it’s Lamia’s text “Tell me more.” I slip the buzzing phone, unattended, into my pocket.
He has already turned away, towards the gray airport hardscape as his right leg shakes. He stares at his cigarette, rotating it, studying it, not really smoking. I flick mine and the ashes drop to the pavement. The silence is awkward, but I’m not about to risk breaking it.
He finally says, You didn’t look too happy in there, is everything okay?
I answer, Yeah, just tired. I needed to get out of there.
I could see that. So what’s so upsetting? His t’s disappear completely.
I hesitate, not knowing quite what to answer, not knowing quite what he’d like to hear, and say, Well, I’ve had the flight from hell to get here and my ex is on my flight with his new girlfriend. So I haven’t had the greatest morning. With my fingers I air-quote girlfriend.
That sucks. His eyes crinkle as he suppresses a smile. His voice is low, lower than I imagined it to be. His words come out as mumbles and, along with the accent, I need to lean a bit towards him to capture the sounds coming out of his mouth. He doesn’t speak directly towards me but around me, almost to the point that I don’t know for sure if he is really speaking to me, or speaking to the air, or the ground, or the white-gray swirls of smoke that dance out of his cigarette.
I know, thanks for your pity. My day is getting a bit better though. I point to his ticket, New York as well?
Yeah, some meetings and stuff. He coughs again while facing the ground.
You don’t smoke do you?
Is it that obvious?
Yeah. It is.
Well, not cigarettes at least, I haven’t for a long time. They’re bad for you! We both laugh.
I wouldn’t know about smoking anything else. Sorry I cut the line. Or queue, as you say. I feel my insides cringe. If Lamia was with me, she would have known how to make an impression. I try to conjure up her aloof nature, wishing she could text me through this.
No worries, no worries. He accentuates the r’s, rolling them a bit harder, faking an American accent. I enjoyed the wait, it was entertaining.
Really?
I don’t usually see a girl who looks like you, blasting Radiohead into her head, trying to talk her way to a free upgrade.
I wasn’t aware there was a specific Radiohead stereotype, I respond quickly, trying to hide that I’m flattered he’s noticed me. Then I realize I probably haven’t been an impressive sight, so I defend myself, I wasn’t trying to scam the system, I was just trying to get back at my boyfriend. Make him uncomfortable by sitting nearby.
By stalking him, right?
Like pretending to smoke so you can talk to a girl?
He laughs. His leg is shaking just slightly now. He’s on the extreme side of thin, like the goth guys in my class, the ones who make your thighs look huge no matter how thin you are. I try to discreetly suck myself in to make my body smaller.
We sit side by side, in silence, smoking.  The wind begins to blow harder and I zip up my jacket higher.
Wind is my favorite weather, he says, looking straight ahead, speaking more to the atmosphere than me.
Wind is not a weather.
Really? Then what is it?
It’s the air swirling around, I say slowly. The expression of weather. Really, it’s beyond weather.
He turns to face me and I am able to see his eyes, which are much bluer in person. I know he has a lazy eye, but looking at him directly, I can’t tell which one it is. He seems to contemplate what I just said, or maybe he wants to get the hell out of an awkward situation. He leans back, breaking the gaze. He grinds the cigarette on the side of the concrete ashtray.
Feeling like I’ve definitely blown it, I’m mentally preparing to say goodbye when he turns to me and asks, Are you still interested in making your flight? Or do you just want to hang out here and think about the weather? Or non-weather, as you put it? He stands and extends his arm to me.
I look up at him first to make sure he is not being sarcastic. He holds the pose, so I stand and place my arm in his, and ask, Do you do this with all your fans? I can’t believe you have such a bad reputation.
Rumors, dear, all rumors.
Well, you are quite the gentleman. I shiver a little.
Are you okay?
Yes, just cold and nervous. Flying makes me nervous, especially now. You know taking off and landing, passing through security.
He winks at me: Nice, sounds familiar. Let’s get you inside then.
He leads me to the entrance and I hide a smile behind my scarf. For the first time in thirty-six hours I’m happy I’m wearing it. And although I’m engulfed in gray concrete and clouds, shrouded in black fabric, I feel a lightness that I haven’t felt in months.

The double doors slide open like a sharp breath and clip closed behind us. Doors that swallow you whole.

** Accidents Waiting to Happen is an excerpt from a novel-in-progress: It Girl, Rag Doll. The excerpt was first published in Critical Muslim.

The post Accidents Waiting to Happen (fiction) appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

*****

“To my compatriots, I have no hesitation in saying that each one of us is as intimately attached to the soil of this beautiful country as are the famous jacaranda trees of Pretoria and the mimosa trees of the bushveld… a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world” (Nelson Mandela, 1994).

Vistas is a visual project about landscape featuring paintings by Raél Jero Salley and photographs by Jared Thorne.

The artwork focuses on land, farm, territory and ways of seeing in contemporary South Africa. Vistas is interested in land’s relationship to culture, and the exhibition appears with the legacy of the Native’s Land Act of 1913 in mind.

Salley’s paintings approach landscape from different directions. ‘To landscape’ is an active process of making space into place. It involves intersections between historical, aesthetic and concrete forms.

Thorne’s photographs question the ways in which the contrasting demographics of the neighboring Western Cape suburbs Kraafontein and Brackenfell depict the new South Africa.

In articulating a post apartheid vision of the South African landscape, the exhibition challenges romanticized visions of the ‘Rainbow Nation’, and seeks to provoke questions how such visions and views have expanded or collapsed.

By juxtaposing paintings and photographs, Vistas highlights practices of visual representation while looking toward the boundaries, horizons and possibilities of contemporary landscape.

The post Vistas: A Visual Project by Raél Jero Salley & Photographs by Jared Thorne appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This project is also about reimagining marginalized beings, social positions, and places as ‘liminal spaces’ that are in constant processes of cultural translation, or ‘moving across.’ Starting from Victor Turner’s (1967) concept of liminality as an “interstructural situation” in a society of “structure of positions” (93), we approach liminal beings and places not as in a ‘passage’ that leads to more stable structural positions, as in rites de passage, but as contingent spaces that appear, disappear, reappear, and travel around between cracks of structures, resisting any concrete definitions or developmental progress.

The Centipedes consists of nine short stories initially written in Korean by Woo, Yun Jin alluding to folk tales and current social issues in South Korea, which were then translated to English by Mathew Bumbalough, a self-taught translator who lived in South Korea for six years working for the US Army and Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education. Each story was written either from the perspective of a marginalized entity (e.g. a parasite, pet, bug, elder, widow, and the deceased) or in relation to a peripheralized place (e.g. an old rental house, outskirts of a large city, and internal spaces of human and non-human bodies). These stories are connected to each other by some mention of centipedes, alluding to Korean folk tales where centipedes having the ability to transform their appearances at will. Because of this, these narratives could be read as an entity reappearing in different bodies or shapes. The following text shows the translation process of Specimen, one of the nine stories, from Korean to English with words in red indicating how changes were made.

• 표본
• 한국구비문학대계 (韓國口碑文學大系) 8-3, 1981
• 분야: 구비 전승 언어/문학
• 유형: 설화
• 채록지: 경상남도 진주시 수곡면 사곡리 식실마을
• 제보자: 박순악. 68세, 여성.

• 옛날 어느 마을에 과부가 살았다. 혼자 살기가 외로워 검은 닭을 키웠는데, 그럭저럭 자라 알을 낳기 시작했다. 암탉이 알을 낳으면 과부는 늘 닭을 몰아내고 알을 가져다가 삶아먹곤 했다. 6년째 되는 어느 날, 닭이 갑자기 죽었는데, 그 날부터 과부의 배가 불러오기 시작했다. 과부는 이상한 생각이 들어서 의원을 찾아가 진맥을 하고 약을 먹고 용하다는 사람을 찾아다니며 약초를 달여먹었으나, 배는 점점 불러왔다. 아이를 낳고보니 잘생긴 사내아이였다. 아이는 무럭무럭 자랐고, 총명하고 재주 많은 것으로 동네에 소문이 자자했다. 하루는 아이가 책보따리를 메고 서당에 가는데, 마침 그 근처를 지나가던 스님이 이상한 것을 보게 되었다. 아이가 집을 나와서는 담 위에 책보따리를 놓고 지붕 위로 올라가더니, 큰 지네가 되어서 살살 용마루로 기어들어가 눕는 것이었다. 깜짝 놀란 스님이 줄곧 지켜보니, 저녁이 되자 지네가 용마루에서 기어내려와 다시 사람으로 둔갑을 하여 보따리를 메고 집으로 들어가는 것이었다. 이를 본 스님은 다음 날 힘센 편수 대여섯과 기름을 한 가마니 구해 과부의 집으로 찾아갔다. 스님은 과부에게 자초지종을 설명하지 않고 그저 시키는 대로 해보면 이유를 알 수 있으리라고 했다. 영문을 모르는 과부는 겁이나 할 수 없이 시키는 대로 마당에 가마솥을 놓고 기름을 부어 끓이기 시작했다. 스님은 편수 대여섯에게 사다리를 놓고 용마루로 올라가 지붕을 걷어내고 집게로 지네를 잡으라고 주문했다. 기운 센 편수들은 기와 아래 숨어있던 커다란 지네를 집어 내려와 끓는 기름에 삶아버렸다. 지네가 죽고 나자 스님은 과부에게 자초지종을 이야기했다. 과부는 지네로 변한 닭이 아들행세를 하면서 자신을 잡아먹으려고 했다는 이야기를 믿을 수 없었다. 과부는 차라리 자신이 죽는 것이 나았을 것이라며 울었다. 울다가 눈물이 더이상 나오지 않자 과부는 우물에 뛰어들었는데, 그 후로 그 우물에 붉은 지네가 들끓어 마을 사람들은 큰 바위로 못을 막았다.

• Specimen
• An outline of Korean Oral Literature, 3 August, 1981
• Field: Oral Transmission/Literature
• Type: Narrative
• Location: South Kyongsang province, Jinju City, Siksil Village in Sukokmyeon, Sakokri
• Narrator: Park Sun-ak, Age 68, Female

• Once upon a time there was a widow that lived in a village. There was a black chicken living alone with her and one day it started to lay eggs. The widow would always go and find the hen once it laid eggs and take them away a to boil the eggs to and eat. After six years the hen suddenly died and from that day the widow got very hungry. The widow had a strange idea and went to a clinic to find a person to give her an examination and medicine, she took a lot of herbs and slowly her stomach became fuller. Then she had a handsome baby boy. The child grew up quickly and his cleverness was the gossip of the neighborhood village. One day the child got his book bag and went to go to school but it just so happened that a passing monk saw something strange. The child put his book bag on the wall and crawled up on the roof and became a big centipede and began creeping around, finally resting on the crest of the roof. The surprised monk watched until dinner when the centipede crept back down, became a boy, took up his bag and went back inside. The next day the that same monk that saw all this went to the widow’s house and brought six strong rice cakes and oil in a rice sack. The monk didn’t explain the details of what he saw to the widow but just said that he had his reasons she would understand if she watched. The widow didn’t know understand what he was talking about but trusted him and brought a kettle out into the yard where she started to boil the oil. The monk told her to bring the rice cakes up the ladder and catch the centipede with forceps. The widow lured it down with the rice cakes and then threw the hug centipede into the boiling oil. As soon as the centipede died the monk told the widow what happened. The widow couldn’t believe that the chicken turned into the centipede and impersonated a boy and tried to eat her???? child was impersonating the chicken and by catching the centipede, it was like she was eating herself*. The widow said she would have rather died, and then started criedying. She cried out all of her tears and then threw herself into a well, after which the well swarmed with red centipedes and the villagers had to block it up with a stone.
• *The widow saw the eggs were like the chicken’s children, and then she realized she was boiling her own child like she did those eggs.

Among other liminal entities in this project, we draw specific attention to the role of the translator as an ethnographer, or a cultural mediator. Ritva Leppihalme (1997) takes note of the discourse on how translators are often culturally marginalized as producers of mere copies of original texts in their traditionally “invisible” roles (18). Ironically, however, through this ‘translation’ project, it became clear that culture is not something that can be stabilized as “text” to be “read” and “moved across” into another language without any changes of its “original” meaning. The very act of textualization and translation of languages turned out to be already entangled with the complex processes of culturally interpretative decision-making. Culture turned out to be segments of lived experiences and relations that do not compose a coherent whole but resonate and overlap in a multitude of layers. “Moving” something, whether text or culture, from one place “across” to another proved to be a social performance of bringing attention to particular interpretations since the movement is always an embodied experience.

One of the nine stories, Specimen, ‘translated’ to a paper collage. Paper, fabric, plastic bag, glue, 30′x8”

The collage inserted into a book. Virtuous Women: Three Masterpieces of Traditional Korean Fiction. Translated by Richard Rutt & Kim Chong-un. Korean National Commission for Unesco. 1974.

After these translation processes, the stories were “translated” again to paper collages by Woo in collaboration with Bumbalough as an attempt to find a way to perform this ethnography more affectively (see figures 1 and 2). These collages were then remade into a large number of small prints by Woo, which were inserted into library books in and outside of Bloomington, IN USA (see figure 3). By inserting the unendorsed narratives into places where official records of history and culture are archived, The Centipede seeks to become ‘liminal spaces’ in which unheard narratives and unspoken feelings reside, breed, and leak out to the sanitized surface of the everyday. By borrowing others’ territories of knowledge and narratives, these strange intruders may disturb the spatial order of knowledge from within it.

In order to produce a large number of “centipedes,” the collages were remade into small prints and inserted into library books on relevant subjects like immigration and foreign policies. Total five stories of the nine were remade into prints with several different kinds of paper. The Herman B. Wells Library, Indiana University Bloomington.

Five stories of the total nine were remade into prints with several different kinds of paper. Books were chosen based on the relevancy of their subject matters to each story. The Herman B. Wells Library, Indiana University Bloomington.

Artist Statement (Woo, Yun Jin)

My body is not mine. I listen to the sound of floating strangers who make up my body. They move around in a system, and jump from body to body in their invisible trajectories. They are bacteria, fungus, viruses, and parasites that connect bits of me to bits of you. In their world, nothing is alone. Everything is connected. We overlap. My art lives like these secrete intruders. I reappropriate public spaces and systems in order to produce and circulate my work, similar to how viral or parasitic vectors borrow their hosts’ metabolism or biological cycles. Rather than producing more, I choose to re-produce or ‘para-produce,’ altering existing relations of matter and perception. As floating strangers in a system, my artworks appear, disappear, and reappear through others’ discoveries and involvements.

All photos copyrighted to Woo, Yun Jin (http://wooyunjin.com).

The post The Centipedes: Liminal Narratives Traveling through Others’ Bodies appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Santurce es un área que cuenta con una escena artística y cultural variada. Antiguamente un municipio por derecho propio conocido como San Mateo de Cangrejos, hoy día es un barrio de San Juan, ciudad capital de Puerto Rico. Quien decida aventurarse a explorarlo encontrará una rica diversidad de alternativas culturales que incluyen museos, conciertos, teatros y cines, entre otros ofrecimientos. No debe de extrañar, entonces, que hayan surgido distintas iniciativas para designar oficialmente a Santurce como distrito de las artes.  Pero antes que cualquiera de las manifestaciones artísticas mencionadas, lo primero que llamará la atención del transeúnte es la abrumadora variedad de arte público casi dondequiera que se pose la vista. Esculturas, murales y grafiti se erigen rebeldes en(tre) los espacios comunes, llevándole la contraria a la dejadez y al deterioro que sufre buena parte de lo que una vez fue uno de los distritos comerciales más importantes de Puerto Rico.

La actividad económica de la zona comenzó a decaer con el advenimiento de los centros comerciales (shopping malls) en las décadas de los sesenta y setenta, prefiriendo la gente hacer sus compras en espacios cerrados bajo techo con aire acondicionado en lugar de caminar en la ciudad. El corazón de la actividad económica se movió de Santurce a la zona de Hato Rey, obligando a muchos pequeños comerciantes a cerrar operaciones. Ya para las décadas de los ochenta y noventa el deterioro en Santurce era evidente.

En los últimos años se han dado algunos esfuerzos para revitalizar la zona, concentrándose mayormente en las áreas aledañas a una de las arterias principales de San Juan, la Avenida Ponce de León. Estos esfuerzos han tomado varias formas, desde el desarrollo de proyectos de vivienda, infraestructura y comercio hasta actividades multitudinarias al aire libre. Sin embargo, el efecto real en muchos casos ha sido la eliminación de comunidades enteras, dando paso al aburguesamiento (gentrification) de las áreas que buscan impactar.

En parte como respuesta a esto, han surgido iniciativas desde la comunidad artística para contrarrestar tanto el abandono de Santurce, como la apropiación del futuro de la zona por intereses cuyo fin principal no es necesariamente ayudar a las comunidades del área. Estas iniciativas de arte público son clave para el esfuerzo de revitalizar a Santurce. Aunque no son necesariamente iniciativas gestionadas por miembros de la comunidad santurcina, cuentan con el apoyo y la participación de ella.

Dos de los ejemplos más exitosos son los festivales de arte urbano Los Muros Hablan y Santurce es Ley. Ambos festivales han logrado repercutir más allá de las fronteras nacionales y son directamente responsables de la proliferación del muralismo en los lugares públicos en Santurce. Los dos festivales tienen como atracción principal la creación de murales por artistas locales y del exterior en paredes de edificios deteriorados o abandonados, e incluyen también música, representaciones teatrales, quioscos de comida y paneles de discusión en el caso de Los Muros Hablan. Artistas del muralismo internacionalmente reconocidos han participado de los festivales, dejando sus obras en las paredes de edificios de toda el área.

Santurce es Ley comenzó como una idea del artista Alexis Busquet, dueño del espacio Clandestino 787, para contribuir a mejorar Santurce. En 2013 el festival celebró con mucho éxito su cuarta edición, incorporando a artistas puertorriqueños y a artistas provenientes de países tales como los Estados Unidos, la República Dominicana, Perú, Portugal y Ucrania. Pero lo verdaderamente genial de Santurce es Ley es que se llevó a cabo en una de las calles más ignoradas de Santurce, la Calle Cerra, convirtiéndose así en un agente de cambio real para la comunidad. La acogida entre los residentes del área fue sumamente buena, inspirándolos a continuar esforzándose por mejorar la calidad de vida en su vecindario, el cual en su momento llegó a ocupar un lugar prominente en la industria musical de Puerto Rico como centro de producción disquera.

Los Muros Hablan ha sido un caso particularmente exitoso. Su fin es similar al de Santurce es Ley, pero se diferencia de aquel en que también se comenzó a celebrar el festival en el vecindario de El Barrio en la ciudad de Nueva York. La encarnación neoyorkina de Los Muros Hablan es organizada conjuntamente por La Respuesta (un espacio cultural en la avenida Fernández Juncos en Santurce donde convergen distintas corrientes artísticas alternativas y de la escena indie) y El Museo del Barrio en Nueva York, con apoyo del gobierno local de la ciudad. Al igual que su contraparte puertorriqueña, Los Muros Hablan: New York busca reunir artistas locales y latinoamericanos para rescatar espacios públicos perdidos y deteriorados.

Más allá de ser meramente un festival, Los Muros Hablan es el reflejo de una realidad que Puerto Rico vive actualmente: la emigración masiva de puertorriqueños hacia el exterior, particularmente hacia los Estados Unidos.

Las olas de emigración no son nada nuevo en la historia del país. A principios del siglo XX se dio una emigración masiva de puertorriqueños hacia Hawái, y luego en la década de los setenta se dio otra hacia ciudades como Nueva York y Chicago. Sin embargo, con la cantidad de gente que se ha ido en los últimos diez años en busca de oportunidades de empleo, es la primera vez que el número de puertorriqueños en el exterior sobrepasa el número de puertorriqueños en la Isla.

No es casualidad que los proyectos de arte público sean un vehículo tan efectivo para tender puentes entre la Isla y la diáspora. En momentos en que las comunidades puertorriqueñas son amenazadas por la fragmentación, tanto a nivel micro como macro, por fuerzas de índole económica, el arte público es un medio poderoso para conservar y estrechar lazos de identidad cultural y de solidaridad social, de retomar los espacios de la ciudad y humanizarlos, devolviéndole su función de servir como lugares de encuentro, puntos de referencia o sencillamente romper con la banalidad del entorno urbano. El urbanista Edwin R. Quiles Rodríguez lo expresa de la siguiente manera:

Puerto Rico tiene un gran déficit de espacios públicos. A falta de opciones recae cada vez más en la propia gente, en los grupos ciudadanos dar respuestas a sus necesidades, crear sus propios lugares. Solo el atreverse a actuar, a reclamar territorios, hará esto posible, solo la solidaridad, la concertación y la acción colectiva permitirán que se sostengan y se mejoren. Ya se ha dicho, las ciudades se hacen de muchas maneras, a veces con, a veces sin permiso, pero siempre con creatividad.

 

The post El arte urbano y su poder revitalizador: el caso de Santurce, Puerto Rico appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

The sequence offers a sense of space, time period and, in some ways, the transitory theme driving Sydelle Willow Smith’s short film. Smith is an award winning freelance photographer and filmmaker. A South African born in Johannesburg and based in Cape Town, Smith studied at The Market Photo Workshop and The University of Cape Town, focusing on Social Anthropology and Cinematography. She travels widely to produce her photographic works, which have been recognized in South Africa and beyond. Smith describes her artistic practice as focused on “memory, place and home making with a strong focus on migration” and “as intrigued with how people who are a minority, such as African ‘migrants’ in Barcelona, navigate the city” (Africaisacountry.com).

In Neighbours, Smith follows three African migrants as they navigate the urban space of Barcelona. The project was produced as part of an International Artist Residency in ‘Urban Creativity’, a program inspired by the idea of “establishing a creative and sustainable relation between neighbours in a district” (jiwarbarcelona.com). Smith’s stated theme comes in the form of a question: “How does one hold on to a deeply rooted sense of self, a cultural identity, and make new paths whereby lines of ethnicity, race, and nationality begin to shift and become malleable in order to adapt and make new forms of home?”. To address these issues by visual means, participants were offered disposable cameras, with which they made pictures of what they wanted to show in the city of Barcelona, Spain. This mode of image making and collection enables the participant to show—in terms of their unique personal experience of navigating and negotiating the city. Smith calls this working method ‘neighbourhood making’, part of an overall project that includes several working modes, including documentary portraiture and participatory photography.

This article takes the picture offered by Neighbours as a point of departure. It brings the participatory narrative into conversation with a politics of diaspora that works to disrupt links between nation and knowledge. The dynamics of this conversation may appear by asking: How may we understand the relationship between the black traveling self, the photographic and filmic image, and the dynamics of African diaspora? What happens when we linger on such images? In the context of a short film or brief essay like this, some features may be mentioned but not elaborated upon. However, the impact on understanding the complex conditions of black people everywhere may form grounds for cultural resistance.

Photographs and films are media through which complicated processes of desire, projection, and identification come into view. The mediums frame the embodied self in self-evidentiary ways and, at the same time, open it to interrogation.[1] In Neighbours, there are dynamics of difference, specificity, and belonging in operation. The participants share an investment in showing and seeing spaces of belonging—neighbourhoods, in this case—as both geographic spaces and as active ideas that may cover over less approachable issues of difference among peoples.

Dynamics of difference that include self-hood, culture, race and ethnicity are viewable through photographic and film-based media. In particular, documentary and participatory filmic modes provide a unique vantage point from which to consider issues of connection. In Neighbours, the focus is on collaboration among people of African descent living beyond African soil.

In Neighbours, three people of African descent now living in Europe are interviewed and filmed: Xumo Nunjo, a musician born in Cameroon; Mamadou Dia, a writer and educator born in Senegal; and Gelia Barila Angri, from Equatorial Guinea. These participants offer viewers an opportunity to consider notions of home and belonging in Black Europe.[2]

Neighbours features and follows people of African descent, framing its narrative around a real or symbolic return to Africa. In this way, the film invokes discourses of internationalism and coordination of the interests of peoples of African descent around the world. These are dynamics of black diaspora.

Neighbours registers a particular moment in the history of the African diaspora in Europe. The Africans pictured in the film describe their lives as they unfold on European soil. Noting these practices of everyday life troubles any nationalism and racial essentialism suggested by the film’s premise or narrative. It also piques my interest in the film—the short documentary indicates productive moments of tension in the emergence of racialised and ethnicised subjects.

Such moments of tension may be openings: windows through which articulations of black diaspora may be seen and explored. The three subjects that appear herein are Black, of African descent, and settled in European territory. The people here celebrate contemporary African diaspora in ways that challenge a viewer’s available markers of identity. Diaspora as a term of analysis allows for an account of black transnational formations that attends to their differences in make-up. Brent Hayes Edwards describes this as “the political stakes of the organization of the ‘African abroad.’ The accepted risk is that the term’s analytic focus ‘fluctuates.’”[3]

The present analysis is part of my thinking about what it would take to see black people as central to “the landscape of everyday life” in Europe and beyond.[4] A different view or filmic premise to that in Neighbours might show the three participants as central and internal to everyday life in Barcelona, not marginal, foreign, or aberrant. Such a view means giving more attention to the participant’s communities, exploring interactions between people and spaces of Barcelona, and featuring participants engaged fully and actively in authoring European everyday life. Neighbours does not have room to elaborate this alternate view.

Instead, Neighbours provokes its viewer to consider what it would take—that is, to make room for the possibility—that African diasporic experience is emergent. Cultural contact happens on different terms and contingent interests, and may take place independently of social, economic and political marginalization. A picture of what is required to realize this sort of cultural politics does not fit the frame of this film—in fact, such a picture is a different challenge to black African visual production than that presented by Neighbours. However, the participant’s comments underscore the possibility for just this different sort of scene. Xumo Nunjo warns African travellers must be “universal, you have to be planetary. Home is the cosmos, home is this planet. Don’t accept anything else.” Nunjo comments: “I feel comfortable here [in Europe]… at home with problems, but I am home.” Nunjo continues: “Today, many African people want to go to Europe, because with the propaganda, people think Europe is the place where the knowledge is happening… but it is not true.” Nunjo seems to struggle with conventional understandings of belonging and cultural identity, refuting the paradigm in which Europe is the “centre of knowledge.”

As a term for knowledge production, the use of diaspora comes out of Pan-Africanism and black Internationalism. This discourse of internationalism aimed generally at the cultural and political coordination of the interests of peoples of African descent around the world. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1933: “Pan-Africa means intellectual understanding and co-operation among all groups of Negro descent in order to bring about at the earliest possible time the industrial and spiritual emancipation of the Negro peoples.”[5] Du Bois’ interest was part of an ideological “return” to the figure of Africa, as a figure for the question of origins. The problematic of return and cultural retention has, since then, animated a series of black ideologies. If Neighbours does not initially aim to theorize black Internationalism, it does so in its assembly of participants from across the continent.

One participant, Mamadou Dia, notes the impulse to move, to walk, to discover and to explore is human, but in reality, people travel for a better future. Filmed while on a beach, Dia appears in a red jersey sweater with two white stripes and blue jeans, strolling along the shore. He recounts, in brief, his experience of traveling to Europe—a precarious and traumatic boat journey across the Atlantic during which he lost many brothers. It is an elegiac narrative that recalls his experiences, but also his sense of being-in-the-world. Dia calls for justice, equal opportunities, equal rights. Dia describes his life, including his 3052 km long journey to Europe, as a life of practice, little theory. Dia’s life practice is described as one of integration, encounter and learning in order to be part of a community and culture encountered on arrival.

In some ways, the film motivates a desire to explain, challenge, or consider the racialised experiences of individuals like the three participants pictured herein. In the film, black Africanity dictates their appearance and belonging, and thereby chart their life’s course. More than a document that works as evidence, the film asks the viewer to question its subject’s humanity in terms of racial and ethnic authenticity. What is more, it urges a search for tools that dispute the participant’s lives as they take shape in Europe. The basis for the dispute depends upon our (the viewer’s) own ability or inability to see her/him as European and thereby evaluate the legitimacy of her/his claims to racial victimization. How might we register this particular moment where black Africans appear, impossibly, as Europeans? How might viewers come to terms with a national idiom that shows the black participants as undeniable members of European society?

What emerges in the short film Neighbours is a subject that simultaneously rearticulates european-ness, blackness, and diaspora.[6]

The images in the film work together with biographic detail and the viewer’s own understanding of what constitutes human being. Black, African, European converge in the participants pictured herein.

Gelia Barila Angri explains she travelled to Europe to “fight for [her] future, to make a better future,” and debunks the negative views of Africa that appear in the media. Angri arrived in Europe to study. In the first year she felt alien and alienated—until she formed her own circle of friends. While she accepts and believes racism exists where she lives, she claims to have never experienced racism. Like Dia and Nunjo, Angri also feels at home living in Europe, and she is able to experience daily life without a sense of loss. She remembers her birthplace, but is able to live, feel and make meaning beyond such boundaries.

The folks interviewed and pictured in Neighbours are shown on the margins of society, at the seaside or on a rooftop, on a street corner or in appearing as reluctant and inauthentic members of groups that can only be poor substitutes for remembered (or imagined) communities in Cameroon, Senegal and Equatorial Guinea. Basic facts of birth and the circumstances of travel act as historical captioning that attempt to make sense and meaning of the lives pictured.

The fifth minute of the film shows young black males selling faux designer handbags. The bags are displayed in rows, placed on a sheet. The four men stand close to each other, each holding a set of stings, displaying their wares to passers by. In a crucial moment, they yank the strings they hold in their hands, an action that gathers together the four corners and edges of the cloth. In an instant, this pull brings the full stock of handbags together within the sheet, which is slung over a shoulder and quickly carried away—all in the moment before a Spanish police officer arrives on a motorcycle.

The viewer watching Neighbours is given license to question the participant’s ethnic, racial and national identity, to juxtapose European being and African existence, and evaluate the participant’s claims—to community or autonomy, to being at home or feeling irredeemably estranged, to a right to earn a living. As I suggested earlier, the strength of the film may be the pressured challenge it presents to conventional terms of identity and to analyses of diaspora, even as it puts those analytical tools to use.

Featured image credit:  Screen capture from Neighbours. Director: Sydelle Willow Smith

The post Vecinos. Neighbours. Film Review: “Home is the planet, don’t accept anything else” appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

This piece is part of a continuing series in which The Postcolonialist seeks to highlight and engage issues of refugee status, conflict, and asylum.

As the conflict in Syria rages on and the refugee crisis deepens, media outlets and governments alike risk becoming inured to the massive scale of the resulting humanitarian crisis. Yet, even as it continues to be greatly difficult to access reliable reporting on Syria—the dangers are great for journalists, and few are able to enter the country—social media has provided continuous coverage of the indiscriminate loss of life and scope of the displacements, one tweet, Facebook post, and Instagram image at a time. The role of social media as both a source of news and as a tool of advocacy has facilitated the steady and quick diffusion of conflictive and simultaneous narratives. Social media platforms have functioned as real-time sources of event notification, as well as digital archives and keepers of memory.

The complex and fragmented narratives on Syria sustained through social media allow an immense amount of public access to and participation in the chronicling of history. Yet they are also capable of abstracting events from their human context and consequences. The volume of concurrent (re)tellings and the circulation of innumerable horrific images of violence and death have paradoxically insisted upon an awareness of happenings, while also allowing a detachment from the Syrian people most affected, among them the many children left orphaned or hungry in refugee camps.

Syrian-American painter Kinda Hibrawi, co-founder of the Zeitouna Program for Displaced Syrian Children, which works with children at the Syrian-Turkish border as well as at refugee camps and schools within Syria, has witnessed the needs of youth in conflict situations. As a result, she has undertaken a series of Twitter portraits that seek to reconcile fragmented narratives with a complex and humanized lived reality. Ms. Hibrawi has begun a painting series that deploys the multiplicity of texts on events in Syria, using Twitter posts as a visual backdrop for the carefully crafted visages of real children residing in refugee camps. Each canvas recalls the site of a particular massacre (Ghouta, Houla) and overlays words with the face of a child gazing directly at the viewer. Hibrawi creates powerful text-images that highlight the quotidian nature of these events for the children of Syria, who must constantly negotiate the lives they once knew with the world they now inhabit.

Kinda Hibrawi is currently working on her next Twitter memorial portrait, based on the Qubeir Massacre outside the city of Hama.

The post Seeing Syria: Kinda Hibrawi’s Twitter Portraits appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

There is a rich and diverse contemporary culture that rarely makes it to the news. There are artists, craftsmen, designers, musicians who struggle everyday to preserve a sense of normality that allows for the expression of their creativity.

They are profoundly rooted in the culture and tradition of their country while striving to explore new languages and creative forms.

The Little Book of Kabul is a narrative in fifty photographs and twenty short stories; it is a book made of small close ups and emotions that aim to disclose this hidden face of the city. It is a book of photos and words, of visual and textual snapshots that wants to tell the story of Kabul from a different angle. The Little Book of Kabul is composed of evocative fragments of the ordinary moments of artists’ daily life. It is a homage to Kabul as it is a celebration of creativity, determination and the unexpected potentials of beauty.

The post The Little Book of Kabul: a project by Francesca Recchia and Lorenzo Tugnoli appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Last December, we visited the Turkish town of Reyhanli, close to the Syrian border, to volunteer at a local Syrian school for refugee children with the Karam Foundation’s Zeitouna programme. Many of the children had been displaced as a result of the Assad regime’s repression after an initially peaceful revolution. The escalation of violence meant many families had to seek refuge across the border in Turkey.

When you cross over into the Atmeh refugee camp just within the Syrian border you are crossing into another world. It is a world of mud and despair peppered with a few specks of hope. There is bitterness, and people quickly shout at us, telling us to stop taking pictures, to bring blankets and heating gas instead. We pick our way through what is the main thoroughfare, a thoroughfare that had only recently had members of ISIL driving up, who would surely have taken exception to expat Syrians wandering freely through the camp and mixing with the inhabitants. Atmeh had, on the day of our visit, about twenty five thousand cold, hungry and desperate souls encamped within its olive groves.

As we walked past a makeshift clinic we came across a long queue of children holding buckets. This was the central kitchen where food was prepared once a day with whatever food was in their stores. We were yelled at and told to wash our shoes with water. It wouldn’t do to bring the mud of the camp in there. An apologetic supervisor explained to us that it had taken a long time to try and bring up hygiene standards in the kitchen, and we watched as the cooks prepared a gruel of some sort in half a dozen large vats. The children were still jostling outside when we walked out, and a man who stood guard outside had to yell at them to stand back. The mud sucked gratefully at our shoes as we returned to its fold.

This was my first time back in Syria since before the revolution, even if I was only less than a hundred meters past the border. My two companions had been there six months before, but it had been easier then, before the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) had started to overrun the border areas. The Atmeh crossing is an unofficial crossing where people can ferry back and forth using a rudimentary microbus system that seems to go through based on the whims of the commanding officer at the Turkish guard post.

In their last visit my companions had taken pictures of some of the children in what had been called the School of Return. The School had now been moved out of the tents where it was held previously into a rudimentary set of rooms that one could almost have mistaken for stables, were it not for the sign that declared it to be the School of Wisdom. Its central muddy courtyard sloped and lacked proper drainage. If rains fell the lower level, classes would flood. This was the harsh world that the children of the Atmeh camp had to endure.

Photo Credit:  © Mohamad Ojjeh, 2013 (Syria)

Remarkably, and in spite of the material hardships, life has found a way to carry on. There was a butcher, a green grocer, and a man who had opened a “supermarket” which consisted of a tent and a square cut in the side through which people can buy the merchandise on offer. There was a “fast food” shop proprietor selling soft drinks who had shrewdly invested in a bit of marketing by throwing a morsel of fat onto the hot coals. The sizzling sound and the smokey flavour of barbequed meat floated past us, giving a surreal impression of normalcy for what was anything but. In one small brick shop a barber busily plied his trade. Life also carried on for the children. On his previous visit, one of my companions had taken pictures of several children in the camp, and as he proceeded to take more pictures he was angrily rebuked, “No more pictures. We are tired of pictures. We are dying of the cold!” But thankfully these protests quickly died out as we were mobbed by the cries of children asking to be photographed. It was the simple, innocent curiosity of children who, in spite of spending over a year in such conditions, still felt it a novelty to have their picture taken. And my colleague had thought of that. Since his last visit he had printed out the pictures of dozens of the children he had met previously, and we walked around the camp seeking them out, asking our guides if they knew who such and such a person was. Often it was the groups of children themselves who would recognize their friends, and who would helpfully lead us to their parents’ tents.

When we arrived at the tents we were entreated to stay and join the tenants for tea, with many inhabitants even insisting that we join them for dinner or stay the night. We experienced a remarkable hospitality that stood in sharp contrast to the wretched conditions of the hosts. We politely declined and moved on after sipping our tea. During this visit, I saw a child with some kind of scarring over her nose. Surely, I thought, this isn’t the leishmaniasis I had read about? It was, and the girl I saw it on was one of the lucky children who was being treated. It’s worse the deeper you go inside, we were told. Deeper, I thought. It sounded like they were referring to some terrible and dark place, a jungle, or maybe something like in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. And always there was the mention of ISIL, in hushed and fearful tones. In my mind’s eye I saw our little group being surprised by them, taken calmly somewhere and shot or perhaps beheaded. It gave the whole visit an underlying rawness and reality. It was only as we left the camp that I noted with some irony that fear of the regime was the last thing on anybody’s mind.

Earlier, as we had stood by the camp soup kitchen, I had noticed a pretty blonde girl with a pony talking and wearing a black baseball cap bearing an Islamic creed of faith, the Islamic Front’s logo, emblazoned on its front. We had also seen a jeep marked with the Islamic Front drive down the muddy thoroughfare as we entered the camp. The girl had been staring vacantly, her mind elsewhere, when she noticed me smiling at her. In an instant her face lit up in a toothy smile that melted my heart. My colleagues had been busy talking with children and asking about the pictures. Later I met her with her friends as they asked us who we were and where we had come from. They didn’t go to school, they told me, but intended to enroll in the “new school,” the School of Wisdom with the muddy courtyard and the classes that flooded when it rained. As we chatted a man drove up the thoroughfare with a pickup truck. He was selling lettuce and cried out, calling for people to buy. A gang of children had already gathered, and I watched silently as they picked the errant remnants of his produce. Sometimes they would pick it out of the mud and munch on it hungrily. There were no fat children in Atmeh.

When my colleague finally found a child or children he had photographed, all the other children would gather around, chattering away or squealing with excitement. “Is that what I look like?” asked one of the girls. It then struck us that even something as mundane as a mirror would probably be a luxury for most of the people in this camp. The young girl probably hadn’t even seen what she looks like since arriving. Perhaps that was a good thing, that they could not see the utter hopelessness of their situation. Their parents, however, saw it, and one man who was wondering what the fuss was about came over to see if we were distributing anything useful. He sucked through his teeth and nodded indifferently. “Pictures?” he said, and gave a look of disgust. “That’s no good to anybody.” But for the children it meant the world, specks of hope floating amidst the misery.

The post A Day in Atmeh: Reflections and Images from Syria appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

English translation

L’arrivo di due navi militari, durante l’arco di tutta la giornata, che hanno trasportato vivi e morti: i superstiti dei recenti naufragi, insieme a decine di profughi di sbarchi delle ultime settimane e le prime 100 bare del naufragio di Lampedusa del 3 ottobre 2013.

Nessuna parola può restituire certi drammi. Le immagini di questo video sono il resoconto di un film già visto in passato, le cui scene hanno come protagonisti sempre gli stessi attori. Il tempo è scandito dal ritmo delle stesse operazioni di routine, che sono ormai il simbolo di una sconfitta storica di quella che qualcuno definisce, ancora una volta, civiltà.—Enrico Montalbano 

Il 13 ottobre scorso sono stati trasferiti a Porto Empedocle diversi superstiti di alcuni recenti naufragi, la maggior parte dell’11 ottobre e molti altri profughi rinchiusi da tempo nel Centro di Accoglienza di Lampedusa. Secondo racconti dei superstiti, la loro barca è stata colpita da proiettili provenienti da una nave militare libica, poco dopo essere partiti da Zwara. La maggior parte dei superstiti era per lo più profughi siriani.

Si pensa che la barca trasportava più di 400 profughi ed è affondata vicino acque libiche.

Navi militari dell’Italia e di Malta hanno soccorso 202 persone, fra cui anche donne e bambini, che sono poi stati portate all’Italia e in Malta. Dagli ultimi aggiornamenti sono stati recuperate 34 corpi e le ricerche continuavano.

Il 13 ottobre è arrivata nel pomeriggio una seconda nave militare che trasportava i migranti che non sono sopravvissuti alla tragedia del 3 ottobre. Le bare poi sono state tumulate nel cimitero di Agrigento e in diversi cimiteri di comuni limitrofi. Le promesse di un dignitoso funerale di Stato sono venute meno.

Il 21 ottobre scorso nel borgo marinaro di Agrigento (San Leone) si è tenuta una commemorazione farsa, che ha visto oltre la presenza di qualche ministro del governo italiano, anche quella di rappresentanti eritrei filo-governativi. Questa cosa ha suscitato scandalo e proteste da parte di cittadini e attivisti antirazzisti presenti alla commemorazione. La presenza di questi soggetti, infatti, è in netto contrasto con l’dea di tutela delle garanzie per chi chiede rifugio in Italia e che dai propri Stati fugge, molto spesso morendo poi in mare.

A nulla sono serviti gli appelli dei sopravvissuti al naufragio del 3 ottobre a presenziare il funerale di stato del 21 ottobre. A distanza di più di un mese i superstiti erano ancora rinchiusi nel centro d’accoglienza di Lampedusa in condizioni disastrose. Il 12 novembre sono stati trasferiti a Roma e ospiti di un centro d’accoglienza dei Salesiani.

Chronicling a Day of Disembarkations at Porto Empedocle, October 13^th, 2013

Throughout the course of the day, two military ships transported both the living and the dead: survivors of recent shipwrecks, together with tens of refugees from recent landings, arrived with the first 100 caskets from the Lampedusa shipwreck of October 3^rd, 2013.

No words can ever adequately describe or recreate certain events. The images from this video are an account from a film that has already been lived many times—a film whose scenes always have the same actors. Time has been striated by the rhythm of these repeated, routine operations, which have now become a symbol of the historical defeat of what one might call, once again, civilization. –Enrico Montalbano

On October 13^th, survivors from various recent shipwrecks, the majority from the October 11^th shipwreck approximately 65 miles south of Lampedusa, together with refugees who had been detained in the Lampedusa center for some time prior, were transferred to Porto Empedocle. According to survivors’ accounts from the October 11^th shipwreck, their boat was fired upon by a Libyan boat carrying military officers shortly after it departed from Zwara while transporting mostly Syrian refugees.

The boat was thought to be carrying more than 400 refugees and sank near Libyan waters. Italian and Maltese military ships rescued 202 men, women, and children, who were taken to Italy and Malta. At last count, thirty-four migrants were found dead as search operations continued.

In the afternoon of October the 13^th, the caskets containing those who did not survive the October 3^rd shipwreck were also transferred to Porto Empedocle via military ship, and subsequently sent to Agrigento and various neighboring communities for burial. The promises of state funerals were not kept.

A farcical commemoration took place on the 21^st of October, in the maritime community of San Leone (Agrigento). Along with the participation of various Italian government ministers, representatives and the ambassador from the Eritrean dictatorial government were also present. Their attendance sparked outrage and protests by local citizens and anti-racism activists also present at the ceremony. In fact, the presence of these individuals seems mutually exclusive to the need to protect and safeguard the rights of those who flee their own, repressive countries and seek asylum in Italy—often only obtaining death at sea.

The appeals of the surviving refugees to attend the state ceremony on the 21^st of October were not heeded. A month following the shipwreck, the survivors were still detained in the Lampedusa reception center under appalling conditions. On November 12^th, the refugees were transferred to Rome and housed in a reception center run by the Salesian order.

Translation by Tina Catania

The post Superstiti e bare: Il Tradimento dell’Europa (Survivors and Caskets: The Betrayal of Europe) appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

These photographs arose out of a long-standing interest in the modes of authority—religious, economic, political and cultural—in visual culture across the world. This set of images, dated between 2010 and 2012, was taken during field research throughout North Africa and the Middle East, in my capacity as a regional analyst, artist, photojournalist and academic. In each of these fields, my work explores the performance of political legitimacy and contestation in a variety of media—aiming to illuminate the processes by which individual actors play on sensory affect to articulate visions of idealized future(s) through reference to localized inheritance of the past(s).

The post Picturing Legitimacy: Snapshots from the Arab World (Photo Series by Amanda Rogers) appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

J’ai longuement réfléchi avant de vous écrire. Je sais que vous avez de nombreuses préoccupations et non des moindres. Vous êtes à la tête du plus vaste Empire de l’histoire, vous êtes son timonier et sa lumière. Je ne suis qu’un simple citoyen, mais un citoyen engagé et qui a à cœur les intérêts de l’Empire. Empire qui, est-il nécessaire de le rappeler, depuis bientôt quatre siècles, rayonne de tous ses feux. C’est l’empire de loin le plus riche dans l’histoire du monde. Nous sommes la première puissance militaire au monde, nous disposons des meilleures universités, nous avons effectué des découvertes monumentales dans le domaine scientifique, nous avons colonisé Mars et bientôt d’autres planètes, notre vie culturelle est d’une richesse inouïe mais, plus encore, l’Empire a permis d’établir, grâce à la diplomatie, la paix dans une bonne partie de la planète.

Et bientôt, Maître, sous votre sage gouverne, on réalisera l’impossible, l’Utopie sur terre.

Se pointent néanmoins à l’horizon des dangers, anodins si on en croit certains, mais qui sapent les fondements de l’Empire, qui pourraient même le détruire. L’objectif premier de nos ennemis est la décomposition de nos pays. Oui, Maître, ils veulent les détruire, je vous l’assure. La situation, à vrai dire, est grave. Et il est important d’agir au plus vite. Ils sont partout. Il faut être d’une extrême vigilance.

Il est cependant impératif de procéder de manière rationnelle. L’Emperationalité est le propre du génie de notre peuple ; nous récusons les émotions primaires, les jugements hâtifs à l’emporte-pièce, nous devons donc analyser les problèmes avant de proposer des solutions. Je précise que mon ambition est modeste : comme je ne suis qu’un humble citoyen (ni savant ni intellectuel), elle consiste uniquement à susciter un débat, à éveiller les consciences.

Permettez-moi, Maître, de vous faire une confidence. Je les vois parfois la nuit. Ils hantent mes rêves. Ils hantent mes cauchemars. Ils sont passés maîtres dans l’art du déguisement. Ils parviennent à se nicher dans les rêves et les cauchemars des innocents. On croit parler à un des nôtres et on découvre, avec terreur, un Occidental. Ils sont semblables à des fourmis, des millions de fourmis, qui fomentent, sur leurs petites pattes dégoutantes, la subversion.

Ils sont partout, vous dis-je Maître. Ils grouillent sous ma peau. Des millions, que dis-je, des milliards de petites fourmis, mesquines et méchantes. Savez-vous, Maître, que ces fourmis par millions, par milliards grouillent sous la peau ? Savez-vous, Maître, que le visage des ces fourmis toute la nuit durant hurlent leur haine de l’Emperocratie ?

Permettez-moi de vous donner un conseil. Il faut se méfier : l’être le plus anodin, le plus sympathique est peut-être un Occidental. Et ils n’ont qu’un objectif : nous défaire.

Certains de nos plus brillants intellectuels réclament une nouvelle interprétation de l’Histoire. Ils prétendent que le succès de notre peuple n’est pas dû à son génie propre mais à l’influence d’autres civilisations, notamment l’Occident. Ainsi, l’Occident qui sombre depuis longtemps dans le déclin–, rappelons ici que son déclin a commencé au début du 21^e siècle pour les raisons que l’on sait : le surendettement, un modèle politique archaïque, le culte de l’argent facile et surtout l’échec éthique et spirituel—, cet Occident aurait suscité l’émergence de l’Emperocratie. Quelques-uns affirment, par ailleurs, que nos historiens pratiquent l’Emperocentrisme, qu’ils ramènent tout à l’Empire en négligeant la contribution de l’Occident. On aurait donc détourné l’histoire, fait de l’emprise occidentale qui n’a duré en tout et pour tout que deux siècles, un égarement avant que l’Empire ne reprenne le dessus. Ces critiques tentent de démontrer que l’Occident serait à l’origine de nombreux progrès accomplis : les découvertes effectuées à la fin du 20^e siècle dans le domaine aérospatial auraient permis la colonisation de Mars, ou encore celles dans le domaine de la physique quantique, l’invention de l’ordinateur simulateur d’une réalité parfaite. Ce sont évidemment des thèses farfelues.

Soyons justes cependant. L’Occident a effectivement dominé le monde pendant deux siècles mais en saignant les peuples conquis jusqu’à la dernière goutte, en les réduisant en esclavage, en pillant leurs ressources. Et s’il est vrai que des progrès ont été réalisés à cette époque, ils ne sont nullement comparables à ce qui a été fait depuis. Comment peut-on comparer la théorie de la relativité avec la théorie de l’interelativité, qui nous permettra bientôt d’explorer des univers parallèles ? Comment peut-on comparer l’invention de l’ordinateur avec l’invention de l’Ordinatrix, une machine capable de fabriquer de nouvelles espèces ?

Comment mettre de telles merveilles (voyage spatio-temporel, téléportation d’objets ou l’énergie perpétuelle) sur le compte d’une vieille civilisation qui se morfond aujourd’hui dans la superstition ? Certes, on peut leur reconnaître un mérite, celui d’avoir agi comme une courroie de transmission relayant le savoir ancien et perdu de l’Empire, mais sans plus. Notre civilisation, il faut le réitérer, a réussi grâce à son génie propre, c’est-à-dire une véritable éthique du travail, le respect de la hiérarchie, la discipline, une intelligence rationnelle et systémique.

Rappelons, Maître, que nous voulons instaurer la paix et il est malheureux de constater qu’on sabote cette démarche en propageant le mensonge.

Je dois vous avouer que je suis parfois las. Je me dois d’exercer la plus grande vigilance car ces Occidentaux prolifèrent partout. Mais je veille au grain. Je ne vais pas me laisser faire. Récemment j’ai eu recours à une méthode pour le moins radicale. Je n’ai pas fermé l’œil pendant plus de trois jours. Sans sommeil, je n’ai pas rêvé et les fourmis ne m’ont pas persécuté. Je ne compte pas m’arrêter en si bon chemin. Désormais, je me propose de les extirper de mon corps avec un couteau. Je vais les tuer, ces maudites fourmis. Je vais me les faire.

On prétend que j’ai perdu la tête. Que je devrais consacrer mon temps aux soucis des communs des mortels. Mais les autres manquent de raison, Maître. Je sais que vous comprenez ma démarche. Je me bats pour un idéal. Protéger l’Emperocratie. Peu importe les palabres, peu importe les qu’en-dira-t-on.

Bientôt quand je me mettrai à lacérer mon corps, les imbéciles insinueront que je suis un fou. Je suis prêt, Maître, à affronter leurs quolibets. Je me propose (sous votre bienveillante autorisation, évidemment) de leur expliquer la gravité de la situation sur la place publique. Ils n’y comprendront rien. Ils ne veulent pas comprendre. Mais le spectacle de mon sang embué de fourmis maladives ébranlera les consciences.

Et je vais les tuer, Maître. Les petites fourmis. Toutes les petites fourmis. Avec mon beau couteau.

Mais revenons, Maître, à des considérations intellectuelles, plus dignes de votre attention. Je dois m’élever à votre niveau et non vous rabaisser au mien.

Pour ce qui est de l’Emperocentrisme, il est évident que c’est une thèse absurde. Si nos historiens ont ancré l’Empire au centre de la trame de l’histoire, c’est pour une raison toute bête, qui a évidemment échappé aux intellectuels bien-pensants : nous avons fait l’Histoire, nous l’avons forgée et elle est indissociable de notre histoire. Il est de bon ton, de nos jours, de pratiquer du masochisme intellectuel, certains estiment qu’il est plaisant de s’auto-lapider ;   il faut au contraire avoir le courage de ses convictions, il faut pouvoir s’affirmer, dire, haut et fort, sans complexes, sans aucun sentiment de supériorité, que nous sommes le souffle qui a façonné l’Histoire des quatre derniers siècles.

On peut certes se livrer à des acrobaties intellectuelles, prétendre qu’une vétille a une portée historique (par exemple, les frasques politiques des pays Occidentaux) mais un fait demeure, l’Empire domine le monde et l’Histoire du monde (la grande, pas celle des dérisoires) est l’histoire de l’Empire. Qu’on le veuille ou pas.

J’estime que nous souffrons d’un mal, le complexe du vainqueur. Il faut faire preuve de modestie, c’est une des qualités de notre peuple, mais cette modestie ne doit pas se transformer en haine de soi. Sinon, nous risquons de devenir un peuple occidentalisé, incapable de réaliser ses ambitions, peureux et sans courage. Et surtout mesquin. Qui trouve le moyen de se déguiser en fourmi et en humain. Qui ne respecte pas les règles les plus élémentaires de la décence. Qu’il faut extirper systématiquement de ses rêves et de son corps.

Fourmis qu’il faut exterminer avec un couteau. Avec un bon gros couteau. Cou. Teau. Four. Mis. Je les tue. Tu les tues. On les tue. Les Four. Mis. Les fourmis mises dans un four. Ça me tue !

Permettez-moi, Maître, de vous raconter une anecdote. Je me suis récemment rendu en Europe. Je comptais aussi visiter les Etats-Unis (désormais désunis) mais, comme vous le savez, c’est un pays ravagé par la guerre et seuls les plus intrépides y ont désormais accès. Je dois avouer que j’aime bien le vieux continent, son histoire, son pittoresque, la cuisine est merveilleuse et les Européens dans l’ensemble ont su préserver un art de vivre ancien. On y rencontre aussi des personnes merveilleuses, ils ont un sens inné de l’accueil, il règne d’ailleurs une perpétuelle atmosphère de beuverie, joviale et conviviale. Et, franchement, on se laisse prendre au jeu, on boit de la bière et on mange des frites, on rigole et on rote. Il faut dire qu’ils sont sympathiques, les Européens.

Il y a chez eux un curieux mélange de rusticité et de générosité. Et il est évident qu’ils ont bon cœur, il leur est difficile d’exercer l’Emperationalité mais ils sont bons dans le fond. On comprend ainsi que le vent de révolte qui souffle dans ces pays est l’affaire d’extrémistes qui manipulent les modérés. L’Européen moyen désire comme tout le monde une vie paisible (donnez-lui du cochon, de la bière et des frites et il sera heureux) ; il se trouve pourtant des extrémistes, notamment religieux, les fameux Europats, qui attisent les flammes de la sédition.

Il est une chose qui m’a ému et c’est le spectacle de la déchéance. Ainsi les grandes villes sont dans un triste état, les pauvres se promènent partout, ils vivent entassés, par millions, dans des bidonvilles géants mais, pire encore. ils sont sous le joug de chefs religieux, des exaltés qui leur inculquent leur pseudo-savoir. Ils sont fanatisés par le désespoir et sont manipulés par de dangereux gourous. Figurez-vous que lors d’une visite à l’université d’Oxford, un jeune homme a piqué mon porte-monnaie. Mais je ne lui en veux pas, le pauvre. Je me dis que c’est peut-être un affamé ou un de ces aliénés qui errent dans les villes. Après, j’ai ressenti comme une étrange nostalgie. C’est un grand penseur de l’Occident qui a un jour écrit que ‘les civilisations sont mortelles’ et elles le sont effectivement. Comment donc expliquer le déclin de cette belle civilisation ? Suffit-il donc d’un rien pour que tout s’écroule ? Où sont passées les belles capitales, Amsterdam, Paris ou Londres?

Je me suis ensuite rendu dans la British Library qui est désormais une salle de spectacle accueillant des foules déchainées qui acclament des chanteuses déjantées, qu’elles se déhanchent en mini-jupes afin de célébrer leur culture ancestrale. Mais, pire encore, Maître, la Sorbonne, célèbre université française, est désormais un lieu de culte, on y prêche le fanatisme Europat, un cocktail explosif, comme vous le savez, de superstitions et de violence. Le plus affreux fut la visite dans les quartiers de cette grande maison d’édition française, Goguenard. Qu’est-ce qu’on y trouve désormais à votre avis ? Une librairie ? Une bibliothèque ? Non, Maître, on y trouve des fous qui brûlent des livres ! Que sont devenues les langues européennes, l’anglais, le français ou encore l’espagnol ? Pourquoi sont-elles désormais des terres arides, incapables d’inventer des concepts, des langues mièvres et moribondes ? On ne sait que trop bien les raisons de cette métamorphose, mais cela ne nous empêche pas d’éprouver un sentiment de nostalgie.

Retenons une leçon pour nous. Nous ne devons pas dormir sur nos lauriers. Le monde a besoin de l’Emperocratie, il a besoin de nos valeurs, de notre éthique, sans quoi il succombera à la barbarie gauloise. Il faut donc tout faire pour préserver notre suprématie. Cela dit, je suis convaincu après mon bref séjour en Europe que nous devons étendre notre programme d’aide aux pays pauvres. La solidarité Emperohumaniste est essentielle. Nous devons voter un budget conséquent pour les soutenir. Mais, plus encore, nous devons leur inculquer nos principes et nos valeurs.

Voyage agréable mais constat désespéré.

Tout n’est pas perdu pour autant.

Car on peut compter sur de nombreux Occidentaux, ceux qui soutiennent notre action. Je pense à un intellectuel en particulier qui a récemment publié, La Maladie de l’Occident, livre remarquable qui nous démontre que l’Occident est depuis longtemps empêtré dans une attitude régressive, dans le culte d’une gloire passée, d’un idéal à jamais défunt et qu’il est impératif de procéder à une réforme. L’élément clé de cet ouvrage est la déconstruction de la culture victimaire qui rend l’Emperocratie responsable de tous les problèmes de l’Occident. Le message est fort : nous en sommes là parce que c’est de notre faute. On conviendra que ce sont des idées subversives dans le contexte actuel.

Rappelons que nombreux sont les intellectuels, semblables à l’auteur de cet ouvrage, qui siègent dans des Emperothinktank, où ils interviennent régulièrement dans les grands médias et élaborent des stratégies pour aider les Occidentaux. Signalons aussi qu’ils ont soutenu notre intervention en Italie et la politique de ségrégation positive en Suisse. Ces intellectuels, et il faut s’en féliciter, sont d’excellents interlocuteurs. Ancrés dans leur culture d’origine, ce sont des Occidentaux authentiques mais qui comprennent tous les rouages du modèle Emperocratique. Ce sont des hommes et des femmes-ponts pouvant contribuer à combler le fossé entre nous et les Occidentaux. Ils ont besoin de notre soutien.

Toutefois, les rétrogrades ou victimaires répandent leurs slogans creux que je me permets, Maître, de résumer en une seule phrase pathétique : vous nous persécutez. Ainsi, ils nous accusent de tous les maux de la terre. Vous avez probablement lu, Maître, cet ouvrage qui a eu un certain écho, Peau blanche, Masque jaune qui évoque les complexes d’infériorité de l’homme blanc, qui l’invite à s’en débarrasser, à affirmer son identité, à se battre pour renverser l’Emperocratie. Tant de textes du même acabit ressassent les mêmes blâmes. Mais ce sont des peccadilles, Maître. L’Occident aujourd’hui est le fardeau de l’Empire.

Ayons le courage d’énoncer quelques vérités toutes simples. L’Occident a besoin de nous. Ses foules doivent se libérer de leurs carcans. Elles ont besoin d’un nouvel Einstein, d’un nouveau Newton, il en va de leur avenir. Un Occident qui aura renoué avec le dynamisme sera au service de la paix et se mettra enfin en marche vers le progrès.

Pas à n’importe quel prix, Maître. Avez-vous déjà vu une fourmi gluante et puante ? Savez-vous qu’il n’en reste plus dans mon corps ? Je les en ai extirpées. Je me suis beaucoup amusé, à vrai dire. Il est tout à fait agréable de transpercer la chair molle, libérant par le biais du couteau tout un arc en ciel de couleurs suintant de leur abdomen, de leurs glandes et de leur tout petit cerveau.

Je vous avoue, Maître, que je suis fou de joie car il n’en reste plus une seule. Permettez-moi de vous inviter à venir me rendre visite car je les ai incinérées dans un petit four construit à cet effet. Il n’est en rien grandiose mais il rend hommage à ma volonté de fer. Je ne suis pas homme à me laisser faire. Et s’il le faut, je m’en prendrai bientôt aux fourmis qui s’attaquent au corps de nos concitoyens. Je sais qu’elles y sont, bien cachées, prêtes à déferler leur bandeau de bébêtes carnivores au moment convenu.

Peut-être qu’il y en a une dans votre corps, Maître. Mais je ne le crois pas. Je ne sais pas encore. Je ne l’espère pas. Mais on tuera toutes les fourmis en temps et lieu.

Une nouvelle idée a fait son chemin dans nos universités : l’Occidentalisme. C’est, comme vous le savez, Maître, un jeune et brillant intellectuel d’origine allemande qui a développé ce champ d’études. Que signifie donc l’Occidentalisme ? En deux mots, un système de représentation dans lequel l’Emperocratie a cloisonné l’Occident et l’inventé à sa propre guise. Le savoir occidentaliste serait donc tributaire du pouvoir et représenterait surtout un fantasme des intellectuels de l’Empire. Cette thèse ayant ses prophètes est évidemment fausse. L’Occidentalisme n’existe pas. Nos scientifiques sont motivés par le désir de comprendre l’Autre dans toute sa vibrante humanité. Leur savoir a permis d’excaver l’âge d’or occidental. De fait, nos chercheurs ont redécouvert les grands écrivains occidentaux : sans eux, qui se souviendrait encore des grandes œuvres de Proust ou de Faulkner ?

J’ai eu l’occasion, par ailleurs, de rencontrer certains de ces grands Emperohumanistes qui travaillent sur l’Occident ancien. Je ne les retrouve absolument pas dans les caricatures des prêcheurs de l’Occidentalisme ;  ils seraient, selon ces derniers, des ‘racistes, qui souhaitent perpétuer la domination coloniale.’ Vous conviendrez, Maître, que c’est absurde. Cet homme qui a consacré toute sa vie à étudier les tribus barbares anglaises, qui a publié un ouvrage fondamental, Foot et Bière ou le retour du Barbare, serait-il donc un Occidentaliste ? Non, Maître, les recherches de nos savants expriment un désir sincère de comprendre l’Autre. Ceux qui en doutent en se focalisant sur quelques stéréotypes par-ci, par-là font preuve de mauvaise foi. On se voit contraint de leur dire, sur le ton de la plus grande politesse, que ce sont, messieurs dames les intellectuels bien-pensants, des foutaises.

De telles thèses ne sont en rien anodines. Elles visent à détruire l’Emperocratie.

Et comment s’y prennent-ils ? En infiltrant les corps. In. Fil. Trant. Le mien. Le vôtre. Mon corps, le vôtre. Votre fil d’Ariane, le mien. Je perds le fil, je le retrouve, je l’écrase ! Nos corps. Ils y sont filtrés. Par le sang. Par le feu. Par tout. Une ligne de fourmis, une colonie, partout.

Il faut aussi parler de l’Occidentalaphobie. Nos intellectuels génèrent des mots à sonorité bizarre, qu’ils sont souvent les seuls, en compagnie de la clique des snobs et des prétentieux, à comprendre. L’Occidentalaphobie serait donc la diabolisation de l’Occident et, on peut dire, pour une fois, qu’ils n’ont pas tout à fait tort. Je ne parle pas évidemment des élucubrations des théoriciens du complot, mais des hypothèses parfois justes de certains modérés. Aussi est-il vrai de dire que les médias (qui servent surtout à assouvir les instincts les plus primaires des foules), ressassent le stéréotype de l’Occidental apte à des actes fanatiques, amateur de paninis et de boissons gazeuses, personnage souvent grossier et primaire, dont le cerveau se situe dans un lieu que la pudeur m’interdit de nommer.

On se souvient, par exemple, d’une série récente à succès sur les errances d’un Espagnol apparemment parfaitement intégré dans l’Emperocratie mais qui se révèle être un Européen ‘traditionnel’ (bon vivant et pas tout à fait intelligent) et, évidemment, terroriste. Certains diront que ces stéréotypes ont un fond de vérité mais nous récusons de telles analyses. Bien que l’homme occidental ait ses défauts, il nous faut faire preuve d’empathie. La caricature ne servira qu’à entretenir la haine. Il faut rappeler aux grands propriétaires des médias que nous luttons pour conquérir les cœurs, pour qu’il y ait un rapprochement entre les peuples, pour accomplir notre mission conciliatrice.

Cela dit, il est hors de question de pratiquer la censure. Nous sommes un peuple qui respecte au plus haut degré la liberté d’expression. Je vous vois mal, par exemple, demander à un cinéaste de censurer son film. Il faut, par contre, engager une réflexion constructive, tendre la main à l’autre dans un véritable esprit de partage. Signalons à cet effet un film remarquable, L’Anglaise, qui raconte le retour d’une jeune Anglaise dans son pays après un séjour dans une grande ville de l’Empire. Un film subtil qui parvient à éviter tous les poncifs du genre. Je ne veux pas gâcher votre plaisir, mais la protagoniste parvient, après de nombreuses péripéties, à libérer ses concitoyennes des contraintes de la société traditionnelle, notamment, du double phénomène de l’anglicisation des esprits et de l’Europatisme, dont le symbole est le string en l’air sous un jean moulant. Il faut aussi préciser que, si je suis critique à l’égard de l’Occidentalphobie,  je considère, néanmoins, que son utilisation abusive relève de la supercherie. Trop souvent, l’on accuse à tort à travers tout le monde d’être Occidentalophobe. C’est une tentative d’empêcher le débat d’idées.

On veut contraindre la pensée, on veut subvertir la liberté d’expression, on s’en prend aux valeurs fondamentales de l’Emperocratie. Vive l’empathie ! Mais il faut se méfier des fourmis.

Hier, j’en ai repéré une, Maître, qui remuait sous la peau de mon frère. J’ai failli pousser un cri de joie à la percevoir sous son épiderme. Car cela confirme mon intuition. Elles sont partout. Elles s’insinuent sans cesse dans le corps des vénérables habitants de l’Emperocratie. Est-ce que vous me permettez de vous faire un aveu, Maître ? Figurez-vous que j’ai été contraint, oui contraint, contraint, contraint, haha haha, contraint, de l’exterminer. J’ai exterminé l’insecte. Je l’ai renvoyé ad patres en dehors de son cuir.

Qui est le plus fort ? Répondez à la question. Qui est le plus fort ? Qu’on réponde à la question. Qui veut répondre à la question ? Qui ose répondre à la question ? C’est moi, seulement moi, car, moi, j’ai tué la fourmi et, ce faisant, j’ai cuit mon frère. Puis, j’ai rigolé un bon coup. Après que j’ai tué mon frère. Le pauvre ne méritait pas de mourir. Mais il n’est plus… pas plus que la fourmi. J’ai fait d’une pierre deux coups. Mon frère et une fourmi. Mon frère est une fourmi qui n’est plus. Une de plus, une de moins. Qu’importe ? La pauvre n’est plus. Il faut rigoler, Maître, de nos bons coups.

Suis-je mort Maître ? Non. Êtes-vous mort, Maître ? Non. Alors, rigolons encore le temps de vivre. Carpe diem ! Carpe Tergum ! Vive l’Emperocratie !

Mais passons. L’objet de cette lettre n’est pas d’évoquer les frasques des fourmis ni la mort de mon frère. Passons, Maître. Mais avant de passer il est recommandé de rigoler un bon coup. Un bon coup à deux. Et comment rigole-t-on ? On rigole ainsi. Haha haha. Hihi hihi.

Votre rire a le mérite d’être magnifique.

Où est mon frère Maître ? Il est en bonne compagnie dans le cimetière des fourmis. .

Le reproche est grave. Des voix—, et pas des moindres—, nous accusent d’avoir envahi l’Italie sous de faux prétextes. Car notre ambition est, paraît-il, de mettre fin à ses velléités d’Indépendance, qui représenteraient une menace pour l’Emperocratie. Rien de plus absurde, Maître. L’Italie est désormais un véritable nid de terroristes, qui se livrent à un combat acharné contre l’Empire. Est-il nécessaire ici de rappeler la lâcheté de ces soi-disant insurgés, qui massacrent impunément enfants, femmes et vieillards ? Nous avons agi ainsi parce que nous ne pouvions faire autrement. Rappelons que nous avons soutenu l’établissement d’une Emperocratie modelée sur la nôtre, malheureusement les Italiens ont choisi un Empereur plus soucieux de terreur que de liberté. Nous respectons évidemment le choix de ce peuple fier et parfois vantard ; il est pourtant des limites qu’on ne peut outrepasser. Et rappelons, par ailleurs, que nous avons tenté d’engager le dialogue avec les ex-dirigeants de ce pays mais ils y sont réfractaires. On sait pertinemment qu’ils soutiennent les terroristes. L’invasion, dans ces circonstances, était la seule option.

Il est facile de nous pointer du doigt, de dire que nous sommes des colons mais qui se souvient de l’attaque contre le bâtiment symbole de l’Emperocratie ? Qui se souvient aussi des morts, des milliers d’enfants ? Qui s’en souvient ? Et aujourd’hui on nous parle d’hypocrisie. Qu’est-ce qu’on est censé faire? Dialoguer avec les terroristes qui jalousent notre mode de vie, nos valeurs ? Dis, donc ! Il faut arrêter avec de telles fariboles. Il est si facile de critiquer autrui, bien assis dans le confort de son salon, mais que savent nos intellectuels bien-pensants de ces hommes et de ces femmes se battant au quotidien contre le Mal sur le terrain ? Ils risquent leur vie au nom de nos valeurs. La situation s’est d’ailleurs considérablement stabilisée en Italie. On sait que ce peuple a le goût du spectaculaire mais notre régime Emperocratique a su les ramener à la raison.

Je persiste et signe, je le trouve scandaleux de décrire cette invasion comme étant illégale. Personne n’aime la guerre mais elle est parfois le moindre mal. Il faut donc tuer les bêtes (et fourmis) avant qu’il ne puissent exercer leur férocité, ôter le masque, ouvrir leurs grosses bouches pleines de dents jaunes pourries, nous avaler de l’intérieur, manger à leur faim sous notre peau à nous. Que les chiens de la médiocrité aboient. La caravane de la lumière, le fil de l’Histoire de l’Emperocratie doivent pouvoir avancer.

Et elle avancera, ne cessera d’avancer. La voyez-vous, Maître, la caravane, la belle caravane, la splendide caravane qui avance à vive allure ? Savez-vous Maître que la caravane écrase les fourmis puantes sous ses roues ? Savez-vous qu’elle leur roule dessus et qu’elle les écrase à plat ? Et que ça fait un drôle de bruit, bruit de fourmis qui meurent. Pachak. Ça fait pachak et pachouk. Un bruit remarquable, Maître. Petite musique des rouages du temps. Mais la mélodie qui me plaît le plus,  c’est celle du couteau qui extrait la fourmi du corps de mon frère. Comme il criait, le couteau ! Un chant de libération !

Quel est donc ce bruit, Maître ? Pas de pachak, encore moins un pachouk. Mais un autre bruit, des plus étranges.

Qu’importe, il n’est qu’une chose qui compte : la mort des fourmis. Il faut les tuer. Mais avant que je n’en tue d’autres, des milliers d’autres, avant que je ne vous raconte mes exploits, il faut rigoler un bon coup.

Rigolons Maître.  Haha haha ha. Hihi hihi hihi hi. Riez après moi, dans la bonne humeur. Hahaha. Hihihihi.

Est-ce que vous riez, Maître ? Je ne vous entends pas. Faut pas arrêter car c’est bon pour la santé et le rire éloigne les fourmis. C’est le rire qu’ils aiment pas, eux, qui adorent la musique des cris.

Désormais, j’enfonce mon couteau dans les corps de tous les contaminés. Je sais l’art délicat de tuer la fourmi. Je suis expert. Et je rigole.

Qu’est-ce que je fais ? Je rigogogogogogle. Qu’est-ce que je fais ? Je rigoogle. Je rigoogle. Je google le rire et j’en ris.

Ha ha ha. Hi hi hi hi. Avez-vous déjà vu le corps sans vie d’une personne sans fourmis ? Sans vie, sans fourmis. Four. Mis. Sans. Vie. For. Me. En langue barbare anglaise. À l’ancienne, on regoogle en anglais !

Riions un peu. Le rire Anti-Four-Mis. J’ai tué, il y a quelques jours de cela, une vieille femme. Petite mimi. Parce qu’il y avait des Four. Mis. Qui. Que. Quoi. Où ? Comment ? Pourquoi ? Pour rire. N’arrêtons pas de rire.

Hahahaha.

Hihihihi.

Hahaha. Hihihi.

Four. Mis.

AAAAAAAAAAAA. IIIIIIIIIIIIII.

Autre problème important à évoquer, à mon modeste avis, celui de la Suisse, pays que nous avions envahi en 2250 pour les raisons que l’on sait. On se souvient que la populace avait commis des actes ignobles à l’égard de la population immigrée, originaire de l’Empire. Alors que cette invasion a rétabli le calme, on nous accuse aujourd’hui de reléguer la population suisse dans des quasi-prisons et de les persécuter. Une de fois plus, nos intellectuels bien-pensants ont tout faux. Notre pratique est celle de la ‘ségrégation positive,’ car il reste des clivages pour le moment insurmontables entre nos compatriotes et les autochtones. Pour établir la paix que nous souhaitons si vivement, il nous faut des interlocuteurs sensibles. Nous constatons le refus systématique d’engager le dialogue et le recours à des méthodes peu louables. Certains prétendent même que ce qu’on appelle désormais la ‘quasi-prison de Neuchâtel’ serait une honte, alors que c’est l’exemple le mieux réussi de ségrégation positive. Mais peut-on procéder autrement quand on sait que ce lieu fabrique du terrorisme ? Nous avons affaire à un peuple qui ne comprend guère le langage de l’Emperocratie.

Il nous faut des interlocuteurs qui inspirent confiance, ayant les mêmes objectifs que nous. On bute, au contraire, sur le silence. On nous affirme vouloir la paix, puis on procède à des attaques terroristes sur les civils. Cela est scandaleux. Ce sont des jaloux, ceux qui veulent miner notre suprématie, alors que l’Emperocratie tient à cœur les intérêts des peuples faibles. La ségrégation positive est au service de ceux qui veulent se protéger des terroristes vivant parmi eux.

Une fourmi putride est-elle apte à assimiler nos valeurs ?  Voilà la question.

Hahahaha. Hihihi.

Four. Mis. Four. Mis.

Maître, avez-vous déjà vu une fourmi volante ? Elle fait vroum dans le ciel et elle a de nombreux pouvoirs. Pou. Pou. Pou. Voirs. Voyez-vous les poux ? Nous devons les tuer, vous dis-je. Hahahaha. Hihihihi.

Mais revenons à nos moutons pouilleux.

Il faut aussi parler du Mur, le fameux Mur de la discorde, objet de toutes les polémiques. Les esprits chagrinés nous accusent d’avoir construit le ‘Mur de la honte’ afin d’officialiser le racisme. Sornettes que tout ça, Maître. Il est des réalités que nul aveuglement ne peut dissiper. Nous sommes tous humains mais, bon, il n’empêche que nous sommes différents. Il est déshonorant, de nos jours, de dire la vérité. On peut tout dire sauf la vérité. Il faut mettre un terme à ce bonenfantisme qui nous fait accroire que tous les humains sont faits pour vivre ensemble. Non, messieurs dames les intellectuels, messieurs dames les adeptes du bonenfantisme, il n’y a, il est vrai, qu’une seule race, la race humaine mais des millénaires de culture et de raffinement nous séparent.

Et s’il est de notre devoir d’éduquer les masses, il faut néanmoins rester lucide et reconnaître que cela prendra du temps, sans doute des siècles. D’où le Mur. Non, ce n’est pas, comme on l’a dit, une ode au racisme, c’est le fruit d’un constat : les membres de l’Emperocratie ne peuvent coexister avec les Suisses. D’une part, il s’agit d’une question de sécurité : au sein de la communauté suisse, laquelle comprend des personnes souvent charmantes, se trouvent des terroristes prêts à tout. On sait que, depuis la construction du Mur, le nombre d’actes terroristes a brutalement chuté. D’autre part, il est un fait : les citoyens de l’Emperocratie n’ont rien en commun avec les Suisses. Est-ce qu’il nous est permis d’énoncer la vérité alors que le politiquement correct sévit ? Nous sommes, Maître, différents.

Nous sommes des êtres cultivés alors qu’il vivotent dans la barbarie. Nous sommes des êtres raffinés alors qu’ils en sont encore à apprendre les bonnes manières des moutons. Nous mangeons des plats raffinés alors qu’ils bouffent de la paille indigeste. Nous sommes des êtres paisibles alors qu’ils sont les partisans de la violence. Nous sommes des êtres dotés d’une vision alors qu’ils sont incapables de prévoir des lendemains. Et ces différences, Maître, ne sont pas les élucubrations d’un esprit fatigué, mais des réalités bien concrètes. Incontournables. Rien n’est plus réel.

Qu’on le veuille ou pas. Ce mur est, en d’autres mots, l’expression de notre pragmatisme. On aimerait bien les voir, Maître, nos intellectuels bien-pensants, à subir au quotidien l’attaque des barbares. On se demande si les grands esprits du salon trouveraient alors le temps de vanter les mérites de la fusion des cultures et d’autres âneries du même genre quand ils connaîtraient les cris du couteau dans le ventre de la fourmi.

Riions encore un coup, Maître. Un coup dans le ventre de la Méditerranée, comme une caravane de pirogues que le vent de la tempête fait écouler sans histoire.

Hahahaha. Hihihihi.

Peut-on coexister avec les fourmis ? Certes, on peut les respecter. On peut éprouver de l’empathie à leur égard, on peut s’amuser avec elles, on peut même aimer leur chant quand elles se meurent. Mais vivre avec elles ? Coexister ? Quelle horreur !

Four. FOU. Mis.

Mettons qu’on les tue, ces fous mis à l’épreuve dans la prison de nos corps.

C’est pour mieux les aimer !

Hahahahaha.

Hihihihihihi.

Rigolons un peu :

Alors que je vous écris, Maître, j’apprends qu’il se produit, en ce moment, de graves événements, en Europe, qui confirment, si besoin en était, mes intuitions. Ainsi, selon la ENN et la EBC, des terroristes hollandais en collaboration avec leur collègues suisses lancent des missiles sur les habitants de Neuchâtel. Ces mécréants (pardonnez-moi ce mot excessif Maître—, j’écris sous le coup de l’émotion) ont tué trois personnes. Je ne cesse de dire qu’on ne peut leur faire confiance, je ne cesse de dire qu’ils sont barbares, et pourtant personne ne m’écoute. On me croit un plaisantin, un citoyen-bouffon, alors qu’on n’entend que l’explosion de bombes.

Et nous pouvons aujourd’hui faire le constat que nos indifférences, ils assassinent des vieillards. Qui viendra maintenant nous reprocher d’avoir construit le Mur ? Qui viendra maintenant nous reprocher d’avoir instauré la ségrégation positive ? Où sont-ils, ceux qui osent nous critiquer ? Où se cachent-ils ? Derrière quelle peau de vache ?

J’ai appris, par ailleurs, Maître, que nos troupes ont envahi le camp de Neuchâtel, ils se livrent à un combat impitoyable contre des terroristes. Ces derniers ont pris en otage la population et, ce faisant, ils mettent en péril la vie des innocents. Nos soldats n’ont d’autre choix que de bombarder leurs tanières. Il faut en finir une fois pour toutes avec ces fourmis, Maître. Il faut les exterminer, ces fanatiques. Nos soldats ont donc raison d’agir avec détermination. Le viol, le vol, ce n’est pas volontaire. On n’a pas le luxe de s’élever au-dessus de la mêlée quand on se trouve au cœur de la bataille.

Les âmes bienpensantes affirment que nos troupes se sont montrés excessives mais, dans les circonstances, elles n’ont pas le choix. Il est en effet malheureux de constater que des enfants sont morts, plus d’une vingtaine apparemment. C’est la guerre : que voulez-vous ? On ne peut faire d’omelette sans casser d’œufs. Pourquoi les terroristes se réfugient-ils dans les maisons des civils ? Et on avait prévenu ces derniers, leur avertissant des dangers. Ce peuple souffre indéniablement du complexe du martyre. Ainsi, certains ont choisi de sacrifier leurs enfants (vous avez bien lu Maître, sacrifier leurs enfants). On ne peut guérir un peuple primitif de sa maladie.

Au contraire, saluons, avec votre accord, Maître, nos valeureux soldats, qui se battent à cet instant même pour préserver la vie des innocents. Saluons leur courage, leur abnégation, leur dévouement à ceux qui croient la paix possible. Notre survie dépend d’eux.

Il faut aussi prier, Maître, pour que les Suisses et tous ces peuples qui se croient opprimés comprennent enfin que nous agissons pour leur bien, que nous n’avons qu’un seul but : une nouvelle fraternité à l’aune de l’Emperocratie. Purifiée des fourmis une bonne fois pour toutes.

Un jour, Maître, le Mur cédera sa place aux constellations de la fraternité mais il faut d’abord que ces peuples cessent de pactiser avec le terrorisme. Il est temps qu’ils se débarrassent de l’emprise de philosophies obsolètes, de leurs cultes monothéistes d’un autre temps, qu’ils s’adaptent aux normes civilisatrices de l’Emperocratie. En attendant, la lutte—, impitoyable il est vrai—, continue.

Luttons tous ensemble contre les fourmis !

Dans cette lutte, Maître, je me dois aussi de dénoncer une publication, Medias mensonges et l’Emperocratie, qui se veut provocateur mais qui n’est lui-même qu’un tissus de mensonges. Ce livre se propose de ‘déconstruire le discours dominant de l’Emperocratie, démontrant ainsi la manière dont le langage sert à consolider et à exercer le pouvoir.’ Cet ouvrage mérite l’attention qu’on accorde à un âne en mal d’intelligence. C’est un catalogue de platitudes, mais dont il est important de discuter, étant donné qu’il s’est néanmoins bien vendu. Certains intellectuels bien-pensants osent affirmer que c’est un chef d’œuvre, un livre qui ouvre de nouvelles perspectives sur les relations Emperocratie-Europe et qui nous permet de comprendre ‘les logiques du pouvoir.’ Rien de plus faux.

Je m’explique. L’auteur, qui est, soit dit en passant, un jeune freluquet, nous propose un mini-dictionnaire. Loin de respecter les conventions du genre, ce dictionnaire politique, dont l’objectif est de révéler ‘l’archéologie du discours de l’Empire,’ ne nous mène pas à connaître une nouvelle langue. Le ton est évidemment pompeux ; on en a désormais l’habitude. L’auteur éprouve le besoin d’utiliser des mots grotesques car on sait qu’il se trouvera des adeptes du snobisme intellectuel pour acclamer son vocabulaire insolite. Parmi les nombreux exemples de ses bêtises intellectuelles, la définition que nous propose l’auteur à la page 12 du ‘dommage collatéral.’ On sait bien ce que cela veut dire : en période de guerre, quand on s’en prend aux terroristes, il arrive que d’autres meurent, aussi. Selon l’auteur, ‘dommage collatéral’ est un terme substitué aux mots plus humains, tels que ‘mort’ et ‘personne,’ pour manipuler les esprits, déshumaniser les victimes et justifier la politique impérialiste. Ce serait une tentative de ‘maquiller les véritables desseins de l’Empire.’

Ce jeune auteur a du talent mais ce talent sert à concocter des niaiseries.

Il est vrai que, dans le cadre de notre combat contre ces pseudo-martyres, quelques innocents meurent. On le regrette. Mais nous n’avons pas le choix. Peut-on laisser une maladie ravager un être sous prétexte que le remède a des effets secondaires ? Que doit-on faire ? La guerre est meurtrière. On ne tue pas, contrairement à ce que l’on croit, pour le plaisir. Nos militaires ne sont pas des enfants de chœur. Comment ose-t-on dire que cette terminologie militaire sert à ‘déshumaniser les victimes’ ?

Encore faut-il compter sur les théories du complot : on aurait délibérément inventé ce terme pour justifier notre combat, on aurait tout planifié, tout organisé depuis le début et nos objectifs seraient machiavéliques. Cet intellectuel, et il n’est pas le seul, se veut un spécialiste des complots imaginaires. Selon lui, le ‘terrorisme’ signifie véritablement ‘résistance.’ Je dois vous avouer que j’ai failli m’étouffer en lisant cette tartufferie. J’ai dû boire un fleuve d’eau. Mais comment ce jeune monsieur ose-t-il associer des criminels aux résistants ? La résistance désigne le combat contre l’axe du Mal, le souci de la Justice et la quête du Bien. Comment ose-t-il vociférer de la sorte alors que le péril européen est à nos portes ? Alors qu’ils n’attendent qu’une chose : nous envahir, pour ensuite proliférer sur nos terres. Celui qui détonne une bombe dans un supermarché serait-il un résistant ? Et celui qui tue un enfant ?

Nos chers intellectuels sont tous les mêmes, Maître. Toujours à argumenter, toujours à vouloir prouver qu’ils savent plus que les autres, toujours à répandre leur vomi et leur verbiage alors que des gens crèvent. Je m’emporte, Maître, mais ma colère est légitime, l’enjeu est trop grave et on ne doit pas laisser de telles idées se glisser dans les corps. Il n’est qu’une vérité : un combat oppose le Bien au Mal, un combat oppose ceux qui veulent le règne des Lumières de l’Emperocratie aux fanatiques des Ombres du Mal.

On peut chipoter à propos des mots, en discuter pendant des heures et même des siècles, on peut trouver qu’un vocable convient mieux qu’un autre, mais les faits demeurent. Ce n’est pas une fiction qu’on fabrique dans son salon après un bon dîner, un verre de vin à la main, ce n’est pas un jeu dont l’objectif est de se montrer plus futés que les autres, ce n’est rien de tout ça, Maître. La mort est à nos trousses, le sang gicle déjà, la barbarie se propage pendant que les intellectuels lèvent un verre à une boutade.

Un corps qui se meurt n’est pas une théorie de l’esprit. Et voici le paradoxe : alors même que les intellectuels tentent de subvertir l’Empire, leurs droits fondamentaux sont préservés. Ils sont libres d’écrire, d’exprimer leurs idées, les plus folles soient-elles. Au sein de l’Empire règne la liberté d’expression. N’est-ce pas le signe le plus évident de sa grandeur ?

Et les maudites fourmis ne vont pas s’en prendre à sa grandeur, hein ?

Chantons. Qui tue les fourmis ?

Qui les tue ?

M.O.I. M.O.I.

C’est moi qui les tue à coup de gros couteau. Mon beau couteau. Dans mon corps. Dans celui de mon maître.

Hahaha. Hihihihi.

Mais revenons à nos moutons pourris.

Interrogeons, Maître, une critique émise à l’égard de l’Emperocratie, qui exploiterait, selon certains, les pays de la périphérie. La thèse est la suivante : depuis la découverte du Xqz en 2114, une matière qu’on ne trouve qu’en Europe, l’Empire aurait mis sur pied des stratagèmes pour avoir accès à cette précieuse ressource (qui sert surtout dans les domaines quantique et aérospatial), mais en abusant des droits des Européens. Selon un rapport publié par Emperocraty, des entrepreneurs Emperocrates seraient coupables ‘d’asservir et de dominer’ les Européens. Emperocraty évoque la servitude, le retour aux temps féodaux, des Européens réduits à travailler pour une pitance, blessés ou assassinés quand ils osent se révolter. Moi, je ne suis pas homme à me laisser séduire par la déraison et le pouvoir. Ces histoires ne me font pas marcher.

Rétablissons d’abord les faits. Les grands chercheurs de l’Emperocratie ont découvert les fabuleux pouvoirs du Xqz. En effet, c’est grâce à la Révolution Xqz  qu’on est parvenus à coloniser Mars et à augmenter considérablement l’espérance de vie, jusqu’à deux cents ans. Soutenus par des entrepreneurs, nos chercheurs n’ont eu d’autre choix que se rendre en France et en Espagne pour exploiter ce minéral. Etant donné que le Xqz est enfoui profondément sous terre, il a été nécessaire d’avoir recours à la main d’œuvre européenne, très douée, comme on le sait, pour les travaux manuels. Et, dans l’ensemble, cela se passe sans hic. L’Européen est un être chaleureux et jovial, il lui faut le minimum pour être heureux : de l’argent, de la piquette et de la bouffe. Nos entrepreneurs, qui sont des hommes inspirés, ont su les chouchouter en leur procurant un très bon salaire et d’excellentes conditions de travail. Il n’a jamais été question d’exploitation, l’Emperocratie a toujours eu à cœur les intérêts des peuples de la périphérie.

Des entrepreneurs Emperocrates se sont montrés parfois excessifs, mais on peut mettre cela sur le compte de l’enthousiasme. Comment ne pas se réjouir quand on entend le chant lointain des univers parallèles ? Il est indéniable que des abus ont été commis et que l’association Emperocraty n’a pas tout à fait tort. Cela dit, on utilise des termes qui sont, à mon avis, incorrects, comme par exemple, ‘quasi-esclavage’ ou ‘subjugation.’ Au même titre que nos intellectuels bien-pensants, cette association souffre de la bougeotte des mots.

Pardonnez-moi, Maître, de vous assommer de toutes mes réflexions. Cette lettre qui devait être concis s’est transformée en un torrent de mots. Mais l’heure est grave et tout citoyen se doit d’exprimer son opinion. On ne pourra pas un jour dire qu’on ne savait pas. Il y a ceux, Maître, qui sont naïfs, trop épris de leurs égoïsmes ; d’autres comprennent mais, lâches, ils préfèrent se taire.

L’Histoire se souviendra de leur silence de moutons.

De ceux qui se sont laissé bouffer par les fourmis. De ceux qui ne les pas ont pas extirpées du corps de leur prochain. De ceux qui n’ont pas fait hihihihi.

Puis hahahahaha.

Puis hihihihi.

Puis hahahaha.

Les fourmis puent. Mais l’argent n’a pas d’odeur.

Voilà un autre problème : celui des rapports économiques avec l’Occident. On sait que, pour ce qui est Etats-Unis, ce terme d’économie ne convient hélas plus. Une guerre insensée opposant les Rouges aux Bleus depuis plus de deux siècles, ce pays est à genoux. Selon nos critiques, ces fourmis glutineuses, lovées au sein même de l’Empire, l’Emperocratie pratique une politique économique impérialiste qui vise à imposer aux pays de la périphérie le modèle de l’Emperocapitalisme, qui a pourtant fait ses preuves. Celui-ci n’est pas, comme on le prétend, contraire à leurs intérêts. Il ne les exploite pas par l’intermédiaire de nos deux institutions les plus nobles : la Banque Emperocratique et le Fonds Empecrotique. Rien de plus faux, une fois de plus.

À qui donc est-ce que l’Emperocratie doit sa réussite ? Question toute simple, toute bête, à laquelle il est important de répondre. La méconnaissance de l’histoire est à l’origine de tous nos problèmes. Et quelle en est la réponse, messieurs dames les intellectuels bien-pensants ? L’Emperocapitalisme qui permet une croissance rapide tout en atténuant les inégalités, qui est fondé sur une connaissance intime et précise de la nature humaine, qui puise dans les qualités de notre peuple et qui est, aujourd’hui, indépassable. On peut certes améliorer ce modèle—, la perfection n’est pas, Maître, de ce monde—, mais on ne peut s’en passer. Dire le contraire c’est vouloir retourner à l’époque de la Grande Crise.

Soucieux des peuples pauvres, l’Emperocapitalisme a mis sur pied une politique d’aide exigeant que ces pays s’adaptent aux normes articulées autour quatre grands axes (1) Autoriser les entrepreneurs de l’Emperocapitalisme d’investir dans ces pays, en créant les infrastructures requises et en établissant des lois qui facilitent l’investissement. (2) Faire la part belle à l’entreprenariat et s’attaquer au problème du parasitisme, c’est-à-dire à la fainéantise de ces gens qui ne veulent rien faire et qui dépendent de l’état. En somme, il faut cesser de donner des chèques en blanc à ceux qui refusent de travailler, qui font trop d’enfants, qui sont paresseux, qui n’investissent pas dans l’éducation de leurs enfants, qui pratiquent une culture du je-m’en-foutisme. (3) Réaliser des réformes structurelles (notamment la privatisation des secteurs clés de l’économie) sous la haute autorité des instances internationales. (4) Implanter une pratique de l’éthique de l’Emperocratie, difficilement inculquée aux Européens, des êtres encore primaires dans leur ensemble. Rappelons quelques aspects essentiels de l’éthique : Travail, Discipline, Rigueur, Originalité, Respect de l’Empereur, Vénération de l’Empereur, Patriotisme, Respect de l’ordre et des hiérarchies.

L’Empereur aurait pu se contenter de laisser les pays pauvres se morfondre dans la fange. Il a choisi, au contraire, de les épauler. Mais les pays pauvres doivent faire preuve de patience. Bien que la pilule soit difficile à avaler, au bout de quelques décennies, ils récolteront tous les fruits de leurs efforts. Si on suit toutes nos directives à la lettre, un nouveau monde émergera. Et qui osera alors parler d’exploitation, qui osera dire que notre modèle économique sert les intérêts des riches, quand l’Europe aura retrouvée sa prospérité d’antan ? Qui se souviendra des premières mines du Xqz ?

Au bout du compte, on mangera à sa faim.

Tout le reste n’est qu’histoire.

Il est clair que certains de nos critiques sombrent depuis longtemps dans la paranoïa et qu’ils ont perdu tout contact avec la réalité. On serait porté à croire que l’Emperocratie est une omniscience divine, sinon diabolique, qu’elle a tous les pouvoirs, qu’elle peut s’immiscer partout. C’est un ogre qui voit tout, qui entend tout, niché dans le cœur de tout individu.

Mais revenons donc à ces accusateurs. Qui sont-ils ? Les théoriciens du complot croient avoir raison, ils ont la foi, une foi que rien, ni personne ne peut ébranler. Selon eux, l’Empire a instauré des frontières ayant attisé des haines, ne prenant pas en considération les réalités ethniques des pays concernés. Fictives et dangereuses, ces frontières obéiraient à la logique coloniale. Comme les fervents d’une nouvelle religion, les théoriciens du complot reprennent donc cet adage de la vieille Angleterre, divide and conquer.

Rétablissons donc les faits. Pourquoi est-ce que vous avons dessiné une nouvelle ligne séparant la France de l’Espagne ? Messieurs dames les complotistes, nous avons ciselé ces nouvelles frontières parce que les tribus de ces deux pays maintenant sous tutelle se livraient à une bataille infernale dans le désir d’occuper le même territoire sur la carte. Il fallait gérer cette guerre intestine de peuples en mal de paix. Depuis notre intervention, nos citoyens peuvent y émigrer sans crainte, ils y apportent nos lumières tout en facilitant le transit de l’Xqz, aujourd’hui indispensable au progrès, comme vous le savez, Maître.

Certains vont jusqu’à prétendre qu’il faut encourager l’immigration provenant de l’Europe. Mais a-t-on réfléchi aux conséquences ? Pendant combien de temps, Maître, est-ce que nos concitoyens devront subir ces aficionados de la culture des frites et de la bière ? Le nombre démentiel d’immigrés occidentaux dans nos terres provoque une lente et insidieuse occidentalisation des mœurs. À cet avilissement, nous proposons l’alternative suivante : une immigration sélective. On dispose de techniques sophistiquées nous permettant quasi instantanément de déterminer le profil génétique de chaque individu. L’Occidental est avant tout un être charnel mais, grâce à ce test effectué en quelques minutes, on peut savoir si tel ou tel extra-altern fait inhabituellement preuve d’Emperorationalité—, condition essentielle, vous en conviendrez, pour intégrer notre civilisation.

Il nous faut agir, il en va de l’équilibre de l’Emperocratie. Aujourd’hui, on leur permet d’ouvrir un bar occidental, demain on leur permettra d’instaurer leur système juridique d’inspiration religieuse.

Il faut se méfier des Four. Mis. Maître. Ils colonisent l’Empire petit à petit de l’intérieur.

Enfin, l’Emperocratie n’est pas et ne sera jamais ‘antireligieux.’ Elle est au contraire convaincue que la diversité religieuse permet l’épanouissement de l’humain. Il est donc d’autant plus malheureux de constater que nos amis les Européens ont abusé de notre générosité, étant dans leur grande majorité des adeptes de l’Europat. Ce nouveau culte, ayant émergé au début du vingt-deuxième siècle, est fort admirable pour ce qui est de ses enseignements spirituels. À maintes reprises, nous avons invité les Europats à procéder à une relecture de leurs textes sacrés, lesquels véhiculent un message de paix et de dénuement.  Leurs leaders et fidèles restent néanmoins sourds à nos appels. Au sein des communautés européennes, on constate au contraire l’émergence des Europatistes, qui prônent une lecture littéraliste des textes sacrés et qui cherchent à instrumentaliser la religion comme une arme politique. Prenant de l’ampleur, l’Europatisme recrute de nombreux adeptes parmi les jeunes Européens et au sein même de nos terres.

Il ne faut pas se leurrer, Maître. L’Europatisme récuse toutes les valeurs de l’Emperocratie, il est rétrograde, il fanatise les foules, il relègue l’Europe dans les eaux boueuses de la barbarie. Au sein de l’Europe, au cœur de l’Empire, des milliers d’Europats tissent la toile de leur mépris sanguinaire. Demain, ils érigeront des lieux de prière dans l’Empire, ils obligeront nos femmes à porter la mini-jupe, ils nous obligeront à étudier leurs langues vulgaires, à obéir à leurs lois obsolètes, à coller des chips gras et infectes au palais de la bouche, à participer à leurs guerres tribales et à leurs cérémonies frivoles, ils ramèneront l’Emperocratie à l’ère des Obscurités. La seule stratégie plausible est la fermeté. On ne peut ni négocier avec des maniaques religieux ni dialoguer avec des terroristes. Il faut combattre le feu par le feu.

Vous me pardonnerez, Maître, de vous avoir écrit une si longue lettre. C’est le cœur blessé d’un citoyen ordinaire qui s’exprime. Je sais que vous ne cessez d’œuvrer pour le bien-être de l’Empire, vous êtes son timonier et sa lumière. Il est pourtant évident que des forces maléfiques, jalouses et vengeresses ont procédé à une alliance dont l’objectif est l’annihilation de l’Empire et l’instauration d’un régime barbare.

L’heure est à l’urgence.

Nous voulons instaurer l’utopie, Maître, d’un nouveau monde. Sans fourmis cachées dans le corps des innocents. Un monde qui fera sien la culture de l’Emperocratie et qui cherchera sa perfection en tous lieux. Un nouveau jour se fera. Il y aura une seule et unique humanité réunie sous la volonté de l’Empereur.

Mais la fourmi occidentale est parmi nous, elle attend son heure, elle saura quoi faire pour nous dévorer, elle est insidieuse et, si on ne réagit pas fermement, l’Empire succombera à sa voracité. Les Four. Mis. sont bien là, Maître. Je les vois trop bien. Elles sont là. Comme des milliers de petites pilules qui vont nous avaler.  Et je les vois, Maître, je les vois qui arrivent, les Fourmisdentaux, les taux qui montent, les taux qui descendent et les fourmis qui zigzaguent, déguisés en hommes, gluants et puants, et je les vois, ils arrivent en leur beau déguisement d’insecte de couleurs marbrées, ces fourmis glutineuses et pestilentielles, et les Occidentaux, taux, taux, taux vont nous dévorer, ils vont s’infiltrer dans le corps de l’Emperocratie, et ils sont nombreux, des millions, des milliards, des multi-milliards, ils arrivent, à toute allure, les voyez-vous, Maître ? Voraces, ils sont affamés et ils vont détruire L’Emperocratie, vont tout manger de l’intérieur, ils vont nous miner, vont manger à leur faim l’Xqz de nos entrailles.

On va s’amuser : un coup de couteau par-ci, un coup de couteau par là. Tra la la la, chantons ensemble. Allez, on chante. Vous voulez chanter, Maître ? Un coup de couteau par-ci, un coup de couteau par là. Faut pas brûler les livres. Pas de complot dans mes songes et nul mensonge dans les merveilles de notre génie, Maître. Dans le fond, le masque est la peau et la peau masque la mort et il faut les cuire ensemble.

Plus fort.  Coup par-ci, coup par là. Dans la mâchoire. Hahahaha. La mâchoire de qui ? De l’empereur.

Pourquoi faire ? Pour en finir avec les fourmis aux dents pourries. Pour diviser. Pour conquérir. On ne se laissera pas faire ! Maître n’a pas que ça dans le ventre. Veuillez admirer notre Ordinatrix. Et marchez, voulez-vous, Maître, vers ce four où les cendres sont de la poudre anti-âge. Que reste-t-il de nos amours ? Vieille chanson. Et je ch.An.|Te. F.O. >urmis  Pour en finir avec les Fourmidentaux.

Dans votre panse, Maître, votre pensée, les fourmis. Je vais les extirper, les ex-triper, les faire triper sur la zique. Je les tue. Je vous TUE. Tous. A vos marques. Prêts. Chantez ! Hahahaha. Hihihihi. Des centaines. Des milliers. Hommes ou FOURMIS. Je ne sais plus. Et je suis une fourmi, la plus grosse, la plus gluante et je pue parce que je suis un four à l’eau et au moulin chantons car nous brûlons ensemble tra la la. Bientôt vous, le vôtre, M.a.it.re. Hahahahaha. Ohohoh. Elles a ri. Vent. Rivent. Elles sont en mo.i.moi. Hohoho. Je est un est une Four. Mi. Etes-vous four.mi ? A vos marques. Prêts. Brûlez !

Hahahahah

Hihihihihi

Ils s’en viennent et ils en viennent à nous détruire, ils vont nous bouffer en friture, il faut les ENFERMER dans des camps, faut les TUER, ce sont des bébêtes trop bêtes, nous sommes des moutons trop Panurge et mon frère est une fourmis trop morte.

Hahahahah

Hihihihihihi

…. mais, chhhut, ne riez pas, vous allez leur faire peur.

Vive l’Empereur !

Vive l’Emperocratie !

The post Lettre d’un Citoyen Engagé à L’Empereur du Grand Empire (année 2560 après Jésus-Christ) appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

1

• Initial Disquietude.
• How easily people claim their actions are directed by the will of God.

• Initial Question.
• Why do people so abuse this phrase?

• Second Question.
• What was wrong with Adam and Eve eating fruit from the Tree of Knowledge?

• Initial Error.
• Adam and Eve thought they could know. The Tree of Knowledge gave them, they thought, true vision. Seeing is knowledge. Knowledge is power. It is control. Seeing gives you the impression that you have a method for control, for obtaining power.

• Analogy #1.
• This is the mode of the Panopticon. If you keep prisoners constantly visible, then you have complete control over them. A prisoner completely visible is one that you perfectly know and so can perfectly control.

• Analogy #2.
• In India, the British colonial authorities maintained control over the subcontinent not just, or merely, by arms but also through records. The British were prodigious record-keepers. A prime example of this is Phillip Sleeman and his successful prosecution campaigns, most importantly in 1829-30, against highway robbers loosely known as Thugs.

• Sleeman was able to almost eliminate highway murders after he began taking profuse notes on the criminals brought into custody. Through his note-taking, the scope of the crimes became visible.

• Through his informants, he compiled information (reality made visible through notation) that he used to suppress crime. This sort of documenting was among the important means the British used for controlling colonial India: note-taking making visible, the visible being categorized, then these categories being controlled through effective administration.

2

• Analogical Error #1.
• If in the case of Adam and Eve, this presumption to know was an error as it created a false confidence about knowing something, the will of God, which remains rationally unknowable (this is, however, the paradoxical power of the idea of the will of God—its unknowability), so how does this error reconcile with the British success as colonial administrators? How does it reconcile with the apparent success of the Victorian Panopticon as a mode of controlling criminals?

• Concession #1.
• It doesn’t reconcile. British colonialism and the Victorian Panopticon were successful in ways that Adam and Eve’s eating of the Tree of Knowledge was not.

• Will of God Analogy #1.
• If the will of God is always unknowable, even if to subjects it seems apparent, even if it maintains the illusion of appearance, then the objects within the two analogies, the criminals and the Indian populace, who are treated as though fully seen by the Panopticon’s wardens and by the British in their respective cases, are never fully grasped.

• The seer misapprehends their vision because the criminal, though fully apparent, cannot be known by outward means alone. Likewise, the Indian populace, despite whatever exhaustive notation may be used to describe it, cannot be contained by categorical representations.

• Orientalism Quotes #1 and 2, Edward Said.
• “[...] the real issue is whether indeed there can be a true representation of anything, or whether any and all representations, because they are representations, are embedded first in the language and then in the culture, institutions, and political ambiance of the representer.” 272

• “[...] the role of positive knowledge is far from absolute. Rather, ‘knowledge’—never raw, unmediated, or simply objective—is what [...] Orientalist [thought] distribute[s] and redistribute[s].” 273-4

• Will of God Analogy, Cont’d.
• The criminal is never fully suppressed.

• India is never truly understood. It would not be understood even on its own terms, as no terms can ever be fully representative of such a large and various country.

3

• Perversion, Linking to Initial Disquietude.
• Those who claim to know the will of God are always wrong. After winning a sporting event, those who claim it was the will of God are wrong, though this claim does have its comic rewards. This is the original delusion, the primary human flaw, the presumption of knowing what by definition is meaningful only when not known.

• Answer to Second Question.
• It’s not wrong intellectually to aspire toward knowing the unknowable, but spiritually, it might prove fruitless or worse.

• Deleterious Consequences, Analogies Revisit’d.
• In the Panopticon, the warden enforces his claim to knowledge. Believing himself fully knowledgeable about the criminal, he treats the criminal as he imagines he must be treated, and yet this is always wrong. This action is always premised on a false conception of who the criminal is. And yet the criminal, from being treated in a particular way, begins to act that way. The criminal has changed. He has partially lost sense of his secret, unknowable identity and has been co-opted into becoming what he is not.

• So too the Indian populace. Never fully understood by the British, the Indian populace changed under the British gaze, changed due to the categorical adumbrations of Orientalist scholarship and colonial bureaucracy. This perverted what was real into a new order conducive to being ruled by a colonial power, indifferent or ambivalent to Indian self-determination.

• Postscript.
• So the first, practical efficacy of seeing, though in time its categorizing dimensions become a corrupting lens that eventually returns the seers to themselves.

• Result.
• Postcolonial reflux syndrome.

The post Poetry, by Matt Reeck appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

• When Frida Kahlo and Josephine Baker kissed, was it
• a red line
• or an amorphous shadow
• obscured by distance? Tea

• with strawberry creme

• early autumn
• splattered across the summery canvas
• in meticulous detail

• who tucked the gardenia above whose ear,
• and whose hand felt like
• fury? whose hip
• chiseled pyramids
• or broadened where continents met?

• whose scars
• were sinuous paths
• to a womb riddled with miles
• hungry for freedom
• bearing pain, not children?

The post Poetry, by V. Shayne Frederick appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

In Revolution, the black, red, and white of the flag splattered all over the canvas as if the flag burst into a fire, and the entire country was caught in it. In a revolution there is no order, or defined subject but more of dissonance, chaos and uncertainty felt at every level of society.

The Voice of Egypt, on the other hand, was inspired in 2011 during the first 18 days, when everyone was glued to the television watching the rising clamor of the Egyptian people. This painting is an imagining of this voice, and how it reached the sky and challenged the entire world.

‘La’ or ‘No’ was inspired from the first voting process with regards to the proposed amendment of the constitution. Only a minority voted no, and unfortunately events have proven that this was the correct assessment.  ‘No’ is also a refusal and pervasive negativity that extends to all consequences following that voting process.

‘Tahrir & Martyrs’ was motivated by the violence that erupted in the midan against the demonstrators.  Presently, many continue to die from both the civilian and government sides in hopes of birthing a better Egypt and achieving the goals of the revolution: freedom, social equality, and bread for the poor.

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Revolution

Tahrir Martyrs

The Voice of Egypt

Laa No

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• Dawn, the sooty film on that cherub’s face
• Two years, some months, a quantum of days –
• I guessed—engrossed in his joyful waddle

• Through the gutter, I follow this potbellied nude
• Who licks the humid air with tongue and giggles
• Playing alone, at this hour where stillness is life
• He moves. I flounder in tears, touch my stomach.

• I, with him, move carefully passed sleeping cabs
• Under the frail doting arms of rickshaws and masters
• We crawl.  Two stealthy bodies heaving of cardamom
• Of chaa and cane sugar we are made—untouchable

• Temporal. I watch a woman rise as she gathers her wares
• Plucks the playful cherub.  A nomaashkaar and the city wakes
• Car horns, spinning wheels, screams push me to light.
• Across I see his plump body swaddled in his mother’s sari.

• I hope his dreams can withstand mourning.

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