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.

While academe was certainly never immune to exclusions and privilege, it has also long sought to be regarded as a meritocracy in which “the cream rises to the top.” The pervasiveness of this mentality, in which systemic failure is often assimilated as personal inadequacy, has frequently impeded vital discussions on the fractures within academia. The realities of disparate access to tools of research and cultural production (books, journals, search engines, arts materials, institutional support), according to one’s rank and institution, longstanding difficulties in implementing work-life balance, and the ways in which individual identity is imbricated with one’s standing in a chosen field creates a self perpetuating hierarchy unknown to most outside of higher education. Simultaneously, this inaccessibility of a quality education in many places remains intertwined with the intersection of race and class, failing to provide a means of entry—to both knowledge and opportunity – to populations that most need it. While a typical student is unlikely to recognize or understand the difference between a “Professor” and an “Instructor,” the reality of those distinctions is likely to manifest itself in the time the faculty member is able to spend on teaching and advising, activities that are most crucial to student development. The unfortunate truth is that students may be obtaining an education from a skilled work force that is all too frequently struggling to make ends meet.

Such inequities were always freely recognized in (post)colonial societies, where access to papers behind a journal pay wall or to conferences held in major European or North American centers have long presented a barrier to prominent visibility or achieving diffusion of research. Particularly and most ironically for (post)colonial or subaltern studies, critical debates have often elided or marginalized those they intend to speak of. These dialogues can and often do fail to engage with vital voices whose subject-positions may not be neatly defined within a discursive paradigm. Similar disparities are only recently being recognized as also true across disciplines in the United States, as contingent academic labor becomes a prominent topic, the practices of academic publishing and author rights become cause for increasing alarm, and all forms of knowledge not immediately translating to quantifiable “value” are subjected to suspicion and ridicule – or eliminated altogether.

Nicholas Kristof’s recent editorial, “Bridging the Moat Around Universities,” hits upon the zeitgeist of the moment, as there is general consensus that something is broken, yet he misses many of the structural components that support the distant and disengaged academic body he describes. He also overlooks positive, potentially disruptive elements that are driving change such as the many (primarily digital) efforts being furthered by young and contingent faculty and their tenured allies, or the rising tide of highly capable and educated individuals choosing to leave academe to broaden the conversations around higher education. Indeed, it is in this place of structural fracture that fruitful discourse and knowledge not only survives, but may thrive. Social media and independent publications not only allow but encourage voices that have been marginalized to move from the periphery to the center, and to transcend what may otherwise have been insurmountable structural confines.

It is as a response to this crossroads in academe, and in recognition of and in solidarity with the many engaged academics attempting to build bridges to systems and structures outside of the academy, that The Postcolonialist was created. We seek to create a global, digital space in which the boundaries and constructs of (post)coloniality, as a thought tradition and geographical and historical category, may be deepened and questioned. Moreover, given issues of scholarly access, a greater need for inter-disciplinarity, and fluid disciplinary landscapes, The Postcolonialist endeavors to shift the geography and epistemological direction of critical thought in a way that empowers (de)colonial and broad thinking within academe and far beyond. By featuring peer reviewed work in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese from across the world (with a particular focus on voices that speak from and of (post)colonial regions), alongside cultural production and analysis in other genres, we aim to provide an open access platform that broadens the scope and reach of academic research, creating vital integration and collaboration with the journalists, artists, writers, and policy makers who impact postcolonial societies. There is a need, and a responsibility, to foster dynamic public intellectual work that supports, furthers, and questions the role of civil society and open debate.

There are many engaged scholars, journalists, artists, and writers validating and (re)claiming the humanities as both public and human. We must support and continue to value—critically, intellectually, and ethically—the contributions of those who work to foster knowledge both within and outside academe. By creating avenues of access and collaboration and by deploying critical thought in alternate, public spaces, we support the role of scholarship and cultural production as integral to and indeed constitutive of societies of the future.

Lara Dotson-Renta
Editor-in-Chief

The post The Public Humanities and Academe: A Letter from the Editor of The Postcolonialist appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Moreover, the idea itself of classifying writers by language is already for me a rather provincial idea. I’m not a French-language, nor a Francophone writer, I am a writer. – Dany Laferrière, interview with Pénélope Cormier, The Postcolonialist, October 10, 2013

Great changes were on the horizon. It was the end of March 1789. The Estates General had been summoned by King Louis XVI, and the forty “Immortals” of the Académie française gathered in an “secret extraordinary session” to decide what steps to take with respect to the historic assembly that would soon begin. In the eyes of the Perpetual Secretary, Jean-François Marmontel (1723-1799), their very honor as academicians was at stake, for the silence they had kept up to that point had been interpreted “as a guilty lack of concern, or as humiliating incompetence.”[1] Certain of the role that should be played by the institution, founded by Cardinal Richelieu a century and a half before, Marmontel laid a sizeable challenge to his colleagues: “Guardians of genius, wit, taste, light, and skill, Literary Citizens, we owe it to the Nation to light its way, to mark out the path that will lead it most surely to complete regeneration.”

At the end of a stormy debate pervaded by a strong feeling of helplessness—“Let us resign ourselves to our future obscurity,” sighed one member—a resolution was nonetheless taken: to delegate to the Estates General a representative invested with “all the necessary powers for the restoration of Literature and Taste.” The measure was accompanied by a declaration that called for the renewal of the Académie, and an increase of its powers. The provisions of this text are less significant, for us, than its major presupposition: the fundamentally national character of the institution and the responsibilities that pertained to it. In other words, the Académie’s linguistic mission, which consisted “in giving certain rules to our language and rendering it pure, eloquent, and capable of dealing with the arts and sciences,”[2] was merged with the destiny of France.

A few weeks ago, we learned of Dany Laferrière’s election to the Académie Française. It’s the first time a writer born in Haiti has been accepted into the ranks of those men and women (but especially men) who sit beneath the Cupola of the Institut de France; it’s also the first time a Québécois has received this honor. Facing five rivals, one of them the teenager prodigy Arthur Pauly, Laferrière won handily, with 13 of 23 votes. He also succeeded in this feat on his first attempt, thereby becoming, as has been said in a playful allusion to his first book, Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer (1985) (How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired [2010]), a “academician without getting tired.”[3] Like that of his candidacy a few weeks earlier, the news was announced with great pomp. Something new is afoot on the Quai de Conti. A revolution perhaps?

Leaving to others the job of interpreting this noteworthy event, I propose here to situate it—certainly a much more modest task, but not one to be taken for granted, as Dany Laferrière has always wished to be unplaceable.

Having left Haiti in 1976 under the threats of the Duvalier regime, he has experienced the torment of political exile as well as the intoxication of America, which he has roamed from his adopted Quebec to Miami, where he resided for several years. The trajectory that is traced and retraced in his “American autobiography,” a cycle of twelve-odd novels, is recorded with staggering humor and unfailing tenderness mixed with unflinching lucidity, chronicling the combination and scrambling of identities of a man who willingly qualifies himself as “an American writer” in the continental sense and even as a Japanese writer, as his 2008 book proclaims. Although it is Haiti, and more precisely his childhood in Petit-Goâve with his grandmother Da, that are the beating heart of his work, Laferrière’s rejection of labels stands as the the sign of his oft-asserted writerly liberty.[4] And displacement has been one of its sine qua non conditions. Even when he attempts to resolve L’ Énigme du retour (2009) (The Enigma of the Return [2011]), he continues to affirm the imperative of departure: “Only a journey without a return ticket can save us from family, blood, and small-town thinking.”[5] Being and writing, indistinguishable activities for Dany Laferrière, are movement. And here he is moving one more time.

From all points of view, the writer possesses all the requisite qualities for sliding into seat number two, previously warmed by Hector Bianciotti, who died last year. Le Figaro reminded us of the criteria formulated by the historian Jacques Chastenet (1893-1978): “One must have talent, notoriety, and good company.” Where does Laferrière fall in this? His literary star has not waned since he debuted, in spite of the uneven character of certain works, which cannot help but occur when someone writes so much. His books are published in Québec and in France (with Grasset), and L’ Énigme du retour (2009) (The Enigma of the Return [2011]) won the Prix Médicis. In Quebec, Laferrière is a well-known media personality, a journalist on television after having been a journalist in Haiti; on the scale of all the Francophonie, his is an active and inescapable presence in the literary universe. After the grande séduction of the reading public, it was the turn of the Company members to fall under the Laferrière charm during the traditional candidate visits. Bolstered by an impressive career, he thus presented, still according to Le Figaro, “the right academic profile.”

Admittedly, getting elected to the Académie Française is not like landing a literary prize, not even one of the most prestigious. This honor does not necessarily represent recognition of an author’s importance: the cases of Balzac and Zola, respectively turned down two and nineteen times, have often been cited. In principle, putting together a scholarly academy confers the institutionalized right to act on a specific field (cultural, scientific, etc.) by contributing to establish its values. The Académie Française styles itself as the guardian of the French language’s very essence, its so-called quality. As such, it is clothed in a sacred character that, let’s say, the Académie Goncourt (its rival a century ago) does not possess. (Though let’s not forget that Laferrière’s candidacy was backed by Bernard Pivot, now president of the Académie Goncourt.) And, in the manner of Nietzsche’s dead God, its sacredness is a vestige of the past insofar as the Académie Française is itself a highly ceremonious relic of “the State recognition of the Grand Siècle.”[6] (In the years following 1789, this is without a doubt what provoked its disbanding by the 1793 Convention, followed by its integration into the Institut National as a scholarly society before being completely refounded by Bonaparte a few years later.) Gaining access to the Académie means inscribing one’s present into an undying past: it is in this that the immortality of the forty Immortals consists.

An immortality that is doubtless fragile in the contemporary context. No actual revolution may be at work, but isn’t it nevertheless true that a more general crisis is taking shape? Bernard Descôteaux from the Montreal daily Le Devoir advanced this hypothesis in an insightful editorial: “Could it be [...] that in choosing Dany Laferrière, the Immortals were announcing a new preoccupation with the French language’s immortality?” It’s no secret to anyone that its pretense of having authority in matters of linguistic usage is something of a joke. By dint of attacking windmills like the feminization of professions, it has contented itself with fighting losing battles, attracting adjectives like “retrograde,” stained with the political conservatism it has often embodied. For Descôteaux, the Académie Française seems totally out of synch with the collective Francophone world, its demographic evolution as well as its linguistic realities. The journalist hopes that the non-conformist Laferrière will jostle worn customs instead of “falling into line.”

Some predict a real turning point. Frankétienne, certainly the greatest Haitian author alive today, announced his reading of the event during Haiti’s Foire Internationale du Livre: “If a writer like Dany Laferrière, a black Haitian, can manage to get elected to the Académie Française, that really proves that that institution, which was a closed box, has now been opened.”[7] The effects of this “closed box” now being opened in such a manner and of the stronghold of linguistic purism now being ready to “accept hearing from other voices”[8] could go beyond the symbolic level, Frankétienne thinks, if Haiti can reap some benefits from plans to promote culture and education. Something that Laferrière must ardently wish, as well.

We should stress that this is not the first time a person of “foreign” origin has donned the green habit. Until now, however, these Academicians from elsewhere have had solid ties in the Hexagon, beginning with the great Senghor, who kept his French nationality in spite of being the founding father of Senegal. However, unlike Assia Djebar, Amin Maalouf, and the bilingual poet Michael Edwards, elected earlier this year, Laferrière has never lived in France and, faithful to his vocation as a nomadic writer, he has declared his intention not to move there. He will thus be the only truly non-French academician.

This is what he was anxious to highlight when he reacted to the results of the election from Port-au-Prince, where he’d gone to await the announcement: “I offer this entrance into the Académie to Haiti and to Québec. These two countries have structured me.” Besides the de-centering desire expressed by the discursive projection of his academic triumph outside of France, the choice of the word “country” reveals itself to be meaningful. Québec hasn’t exactly managed to establish itself as a “country”; at the same time, the politics destined to assert its national specificity have made its apparatus of language planning a serious—and much more progressive—rival to the Académie Française. As for Haiti, the “Black Republic” clearly exists as a country since it won its independence in battle in 1804, ripped away from a France that had become pro-slavery again under Bonaparte. Today, the country of Toussaint and Dessalines chafes under the UN protection that was imposed in 2004 with the expulsion of President Aristide.

Historically speaking, the mages of the Cupola could never be accused of ignoring Haitian literature and intellectual production. Though the diplomat and writer Demesvar Delorme (1842-1901), Francophile to excess and a friend of Lamartine, never gained the entrance he dreamed of, several Haitians have been celebrated since the beginning of the twentieth century, the last of whom was Jean Métellus, recipient of the Grand Prix de la Francophonie in 2010 and resident of France. This provided recognition that Haiti has produced great French-language writers, but such a gesture of recompense is not the same as welcoming a Haitian as an equal into the bosom of the awarding institution.

That is the great triumph of Dany Laferrière. Yet how does one keep complete independence as a writer while transforming oneself into an academician? The author asked to become a member of the Company: it’s a wish that he needed to formulate explicitly in his candidacy letter, submitted to the Perpetual Secretary, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse. To do that, he had to have fit himself into a more traditional mold without losing his own form. The scrutiny now past, he has the liberty to decide on the impact of the election. He’s working the issue subtly, with infinite finesse: that is to say he accepts the academic stature while pretending to (re)define its terms.

In addition to his refusal to set up residence in Paris, he has also touched upon the proverbial “immortality” conferred by the state of academician. In Haiti, listeners of Emmelie Prophète-Milcé’s show on Radio Magik 9 heard an amused rejection of the qualification “Immortal.” The Le Nouvelliste newspaper reported his comments: “If they’re grafting immortality onto my name, maybe it’s got to do with the French language,” he said, adding, “The members of the Académie Française are not immortal; if they were, I wouldn’t be here today.”

The feint is clever. The sobriquet “Immortals” comes from the motto instituted by Richelieu, “To immortality.” The Académie’s website reminds readers that it “is a reference to their mission as bearers of the French language. It is this language which is immortal.” Suffice it to say that the newly elected member is only repeating the conventional explanation, with the exception that he attaches this curious “maybe,” making his witticism pass for personal interpretation: “maybe” the immortality belongs to the language and not to a human being? Or is it its very longevity that is (very subtly) targeted? Since this was an oral remark, we would be wrong, maybe, to insist too strongly on this point. Nevertheless, his remark brings us back to the fact that Laferrière has never brandished any banners promoting the French language. For him, language is an instrument: if he writes in French, it’s simply by the chance of his own existence. He has professed this linguistic agnosticism countless times, including in the interview I cited in the epigraph. In the same interview, he also denies the idea that “because we speak the same language, we necessarily have underground solidarities.” Here, the entire Francophone ideology is rejected.

There is nothing in this that should surprise us. After all, Laferrière was one of the signatories of the famous “Manifeste pour une ‘littérature-monde’ en français” (“Toward a ‘World-Literature’ in French”), which “signs the death certificate of so-called francophone literature,” described as the “light from a dying star,” the fading gleam of a colonial reminiscence characterized by a centralized logic and its marginalized peripheries.[9] The Académie is, of course, one of its mainsprings.[10] Its lineup of prizes bears witness: on one end, we have its Grand Prix de Littérature and its Grand Prix du Roman, rarely (that is, practically never) attributed to writers from the ex-colonial “Francophonie,” and, on the other end, its Grand Prix de la Francophonie, destined to “crown the œuvre of a francophone person who, in his country or on an international scale, has contributed in a distinguished way to the maintenance and demonstration of the French language.” The surprising thing, then, is that Laferrière can go along with such a division of work.

Perhaps it’s necessary to return to the promise of immortality, however little the writer claims to cling to it. After all, death is a preponderant theme in his œuvre, across all his works. Wasn’t the catalyst for his writing the assassination of his friend Gasner Raymond by the Tonton Macoutes? By fleeing Haiti, Laferrière himself escaped a similar fate. Later, it was the death of his father, another political refugee, which would haunt him. Following the earthquake in January 2010, Tout bouge autour de moi (2010) (The World is Moving Around Me [2013]) offered up a poignant testimony of a disaster that took the lives of countless Haitians.

“In every effort there is a natural ignorance of death,” once claimed Jacques Roumain (or rather, the narrator of Fantoches [1931]). In Laferrière’s work, one can see, to the contrary, that an over-consciousness of mortality pushes his pen forward—as though ceasing to write would already mean death.

A few pages of L’Art presque perdu de ne rien faire (2011) are dedicated to this theme. “In making someone immortal, we make him deader than ever” in the sense that he “will live more in the media than in the hearts of the people.” The literary glory that one may have wished for in Antiquity, when “the work alone could render an author immortal,” has been supplanted by the media consecration that consists in “creating an event rather than simply broadcasting it.”

What is there to say, then, about the media-created event that is Dany Laferrière’s élection to the Académie Française? Will it replace the writer’s actual works? Is it the author who needed the institution, or was it this institution that needed the author—so disdainful of outdated notions regarding French—to guarantee the language’s immortality in this era of rupture for a France-centered francophonie?

All efforts to respond to these questions should take into account diverse and often highly relative conceptions of death. In J’écris comme je vis (2000), a collection of interviews with Bernard Magnier, Laferrière explains the specificity of “Haitian death,” characterized by an “absence of disappearance” or a “possibility of living in another time and space”; even after departure for the “pays sans chapeau,” or the kingdom of the dead, the living continue to speak of a deceased man as though his life had never stopped. That immortality, which has nothing to do with the French language and even less to do with its Académie, is an immortality that the writer has a right to as a Haitian. In a Haitian perspective, these kinds of things matter a great deal, given the extreme precariousness faced by much of the population on a daily basis, a situation that translates into an average life expectancy significantly beneath that of surrounding countries.

Dany Laferrière has never lost sight of these realities: the auto-fictional narrator of Pays sans chapeau (1996) (Down Among the Dead Men [1997]) hears of a Haitian village that is being studied by American scientists because its inhabitants keep living after having been deprived of food. A sad immortality.

In Haiti, as in Québec, the writer’s triumph was heartily greeted. President Michel Martelly rolled out several warm platitudes expressing the hope that Laferrière’s œuvre would remain “eternal in the memory and personal experience of all Haitians.” The enthusiasm of Emmelie Prophète-Milcé in front of her microphone was even more palpable: “It’s been a long time since something so good has happened in Haiti,” she smiled. As the third anniversary of goudougoudou approaches, this is no small thing. For Gary Victor, one of the most original voices in contemporary Haitian literature, who recently discussed the matter in Le Nouvelliste, “it’s an example that proves to our youth here in Haiti that work, resolve, and intelligence pay off.”

In the midst of an explosion of pride, some still have questions. In the same daily, Frantz Duval asks, “Do we have to leave in order to fully succeed?” Many readers, as evidenced by the comments thread, echo his disillusionment. “To leave means to succeed… in leaving,” says one of them.

Unless—maybe—it means to better return.

The post Dialectic of Immortality: Situating the Election of Dany Laferrière to the Académie Française appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Internationally famous for her wide and varied oeuvre, Nobel Laureate in Literature Doris Lessing’s early work is strongly autobiographical. The Grass is Singing is her first novel. Lessing chose the title from the fifth section of T.S. Eliot’s famous poem The Waste Land: which is entitled,  “What the thunder said”:

• If there were rock
• And also water
• And water
• A spring
• A pool among the rock
• If there were the sound of water only
• Not the cicada
• And dry grass singing…

Water in Africa is always a sign of hope, of fertility. Here the dry grass and the singing cicada hint at the weaknesses in the colonial system, which Raeburn’s film explores with restrained subtlety.

Lessing’s novel reflects much of the experiences of her childhood growing up on an isolated farm in Mashonaland, in the former Rhodesia, where her English parents had settled after her father was wounded during World War I. From the outset Lessing’s fiction is critical of the society in which she grew up, the arid, self-satisfied colonial culture which, even as a young woman, she found suffocating. She was deeply questioning too of the dispossession of Africans. Rhodesia had been named after Cecil Rhodes, a mining magnate and politician who, in 1889 had formed the British South Africa Company and had fought and wheedled his way into the lands of the Mashona and the Matabele.Lessing’s novel was understandably attractive to the film director and writer Michael Raeburn who has built his career analysing the social and economic upheavals of post-colonial Africa, particularly of Zimbabwe where he has not always been welcomed. Raeburn shot The Grass is Singing in Zambia, in the National Park where the immense, open landscape, across which the eye is immediately drawn towards the distant mountains, is typical of much of southern Africa. This is not the Hollywood image of the luxury safari, but the Rhodesia of the period shortly after the Second World War when some white farmers were making fortunes in maize and tobacco amid the murmurings against colonial rule blown by winds of change that, at the time, were almost as silent as the surrounding bush.

In the opening frames of the film, the camera focuses on what are obviously African artefacts swinging from a tree in the wind, among them the fetish of a white doll pierced by an assegai (spear). This is a dark film in every sense, a film in which the characters do not speak a great deal and the viewer is always aware of the presence of Africa in the changing seasons: the rain, the wind, and the shifting clouds which form a backdrop to the group of black men at work on the farm. Silence and, at times, the evocative music of Lasse Danberg, Björn Isfällt and Themba Tana, play an important part in creating mood and tension. Raeburn has taken much of what sparse dialogue there is straight from Lessing’s novel. The language of white people in the period, casual remarks about the laziness of kaffirs, comments on the untrustworthiness of the “educated native” and the general stupidity of “blacks” will shock contemporary audiences.

The depressing brick farmhouse where the central drama unfolds is in strong contrast to the brief scenes of family life in the adjoining compound, where the labourers and their families live. The visual impact of this film is strong, from the vivid sequence showing workers fighting a veld fire, a common hazard in Africa, which threatens the crops and the cattle, to the casual shots of buck drifting silently through the bush, oblivious of what might seem to them to be the lunatic activities of humans.

The story line is very simple. Mary Turner (Karen Black), a white farmer’s wife, has been murdered. Nobody seems to know any details and the film moves in flashback to an account of Mary’s life as a vivacious but sexually cold secretary working in a nearby town. One day she overhears friends gossiping about her. They remark that she has reached her thirties and shows no sign of marrying because, someone adds, she “is not like that”. These comments throw Mary into a state of confused introspection so rapidly that the viewer finds her reactions scarcely credible. Mary marries a diffident young farmer, Dick Turner (John Thaw) who has been struggling for some years to turn a profit from his thousand acres of land mortgaged to the government. Dick is honest with Mary. He explains his relative poverty and the primitive conditions in which he lives. However the reality is a shock to his wife who is used to the normal comforts of town life. She finds that his three-roomed house with its corrugated iron roof has no ceilings, so that it turns into an oven in the summer. The curtains are made of grain sacks and there is no mosquito netting on the windows. From her small savings she buys material, makes curtains, and does her best to improve her home. Later she whitewashes the walls herself, an activity almost unthinkable for a white Rhodesian woman.

Mary is afraid of Africans. She thinks of them as savages who stink like animals. From the outset, Mary’s behaviour to one house servant after another is cold, at times even cruel and abusive. She stubbornly refuses to listen to Dick’s attempts to broaden her understanding and change her behaviour. One by one, she either dismisses the men or they ask to leave. Her attitude does not begin to change until her husband, in despair at the constant rows, introduces his best worker, Moses (John Kani) into the household, to be trained as a domestic servant.

John Kani is a celebrated South African actor, playwright and dramatist who has won many awards and who, from his collaboration with Athol Fugard in Sizwe Banzi is Dead (1972) and The Island (1973) onwards, did much for protest theatre during the apartheid years. His performance as Moses is moving and thought-provoking.

Karen Black’s notable career in films from her early success in Easy Rider (1969) and during the succeeding decade when she became almost a cult figure, particularly for her representation of women on the edge of sanity, made her an excellent choice for this role. The entire drama is dependent upon the slow degeneration of this obstinate woman whose irrational anger at black people is part of her cultural inheritance rather than innate viciousness. Mary is driven by fear; a fear fanned by the white colonizer’s horror of miscegenation, a horror expressed by Charlie when he notices the signs of intimacy between Moses and Mary in the scene where he stays for supper.

However, Mary’s first encounter with Moses had been far more amicable. When Dick collapses with a severe bout of malaria, Mary is forced to go down to the lands (fields) to supervise the workers who have taken the opportunity to enjoy some well-earned rest. At first Mary cannot bear the sight of the men whom she treats with the utmost contempt, scarcely able to recognize them as human beings with normal human needs. Karen Black creates a woman in whom fear of Africans paradoxically begins to feed a sense of power in her new role as overseer. Moses, who is a powerfully built man, catches Mary’s attention for the first time when he stops working and helps himself to a mug of water. When she orders him back to work, Moses replies casually that he needs a drink. Mary finds his attitude so provocative that, almost without realizing what she is doing, she lifts the sjambok she carries and slashes him across the face. For a moment Mary fears the man will attack her but, surprisingly, he restrains himself and returns to work. Significantly, Mary does not tell Dick about this incident, an incident which reverberates even more powerfully in the novel than it does in the film where the sjambok looks more like a thin stick than the destructive weapon it is.

Karen Black’s depiction of Mary’s gradual metamorphosis into a deranged woman who meets a tragic end is thoroughly convincing. Apathy creeps over her. She scatters grain among the hens, apparently unaware that they are dying. It becomes difficult to sympathize with this woman because the dignified bearing and restrained responses of John Kani’s Moses to Mary’s vindictive outbursts demand respect.  Black’s Mary, though convincing in her sad decline, is not perhaps as easily understandable as the Mary of the novel where the reader is given a detailed account of her unhappy childhood, an account which does much to explain, for instance, her inability to respond sexually to her husband, a reluctance which is, however, made clear in the film.

The core of the plot is the total reversal of power acted out between the African house servant and the white woman. It is the breakdown of the mistress/servant relationship with its manifold invisible boundaries and the slow development of a human interchange between Moses and Mary. When Dick collapses with another bout of malaria, Moses insists on nursing him so that the ill and exhausted Mary gets some sleep. When Mary stops ordering meals, Moses brings food on a tray and persuades her to eat. His attitude to the sick woman is almost paternal; he even tucks her up at night. Mary drifts zombie-like through the house shadowing Moses on whom she becomes totally dependent. He even combs her tangled hair and helps her to dress.

In the meantime Dick, forced by circumstances to sell his farm to Muller in an arrangement which allows him to stay on as farm manager, is heading for a total breakdown. John Thaw’s creation of Dick as a thoroughly decent, somewhat idealistic man lacking the ruthlessness, or the strength, to manage either his personal life or his land, is a foretaste of Thaw’s later successful career on stage and screen, perhaps most memorably as Inspector Morse in the British television series which established him as a National Treasure.

Eventually, Tony Marston (John Moulder Brown), a young Englishman new to the Colony, arrives to manage the farm so that Dick, now recovered, can take his sick wife on holiday. Unnerved by glimpses of intimacy between Mary and her house servant, Tony confronts the couple. The distraught Mary, who has been clinging to Moses, suddenly flings herself into the arms of the young white man, almost a complete stranger to her. Tony dismisses Moses on the spot. Later on, Moses stabs Mary, who practically offers herself up to his knife, on the veranda.

Significantly, Raeburn then departs from Lessing’s text, inserting a brief exchange between Moses and a black woman, presumably his wife, in their own language, which is not subtitled. We then see Moses engaged in a fleeting encounter with a witchdoctor, also not subtitled. The film then shows the tree with its ominous speared white doll fetish. The final shot is of the impassive face of the handcuffed Moses walking calmly behind Muller’s farm truck into which Mary’s body has been loaded.

Is this a simple revenge tragedy, payback for his slashed face and the numerous indignities he has suffered? I think not. Raeburn’s fetishes swinging from a tree, which frame the entire film, might be taken to imply that Africa will always be primitive and dangerous. Such an interpretation would make nonsense of Lessing’s novel, and of Raeburn’s film. Instead, this deliberate flashback to these ominous African artefacts could be thought to emphasize the latent power of Africa and its people, despite colonial subjugation. Moses kills as a matter of pride because the white woman has refused in the end to acknowledge him as a fellow human being.

The post Film Review: Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing (Michael Raeburn, 1981) appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

“Fire in the Blood”, written and directed by Dylan Mohan Gray and narrated by William Hurt, is fundamentally about crime in a postcolonial world where legacies of the colony abound. In this scenario the crime is the AIDS related deaths of millions of citizens in the Global South who cannot access generic, cheaper drugs due to patents designed to protect the profits of the pharmaceutical companies that bar the production of generic versions. Profit over people is the lesson here. This point is driven home further when it is revealed that Western citizens coping with AIDS are also being taken for a ride, as they must pay market prices for medications that would be considerably cheaper if generic versions were made available.

While “Fire in the Blood” is very much an indictment of the exclusions and excesses of modern day capitalism, it is also a lesson on how to create and sustain a viable social movement. Mix civil society, social justice activists, doctors in the field, rock star leaders, pharmaceutical industry insiders, and tireless investigative journalists with a conscience, and access to the highest levels of political and economic privilege, and the result is a fierce, fearless movement.

This story, however, is not all sadness and travail. We learn that in 2001 through the efforts of Dr. Yusuf K. Hamied, the head of Mumbai based Cipla, and William F. Hadad the father of the American Generic Drug Movement, the triple cocktail of AIDS drugs was made available to countries for less than $1 per day. By 2007, President William J. Clinton and his foundation succeeded in pushing down the cost of anti-retroviral treatment in Africa to below $100 per patient per day. Certainly, before any of these major victories there were the grass roots efforts. Individuals on the ground, like South African activist Zackie Achmat and Ugandan doctor and researcher Peter Mugyenyi,  raised the standards of leadership on this issue, illustrating their resolve and refusing to be dissuaded from the struggle to achieve a basic right for their people: the right to live.

“Fire in the Blood” is a sobering film that reminds us that the privilege of a few is often predicated on the destruction of many. The beauty and value of this film is that it is generating new discussion and has transformed existing conversations about inequity and injustice. History teaches us that change can come from anywhere, and this film is a worthy catalyst for positive change in the global health field.

The post Fire in the Blood: Medicine, Monopoly, and AIDS in the Global South appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

[U]ne image, dans le fond, c’est comme une bouteille à la mer. J’écris un message que je mets dans une bouteille, que je lance à la mer. Elle peut arriver chez quelqu’un qui ne peut pas lire mon écriture ou chez quelqu’un qui me lit mais qui ne comprend rien à ce que je lui dis.

- Hassan Musa [1]

Mondialement connu grâce à sa participation à des expositions internationales d’envergure, notamment Africa Remix et la Biennale de Venise, Hassan Musa pratique la performance, la calligraphie, la peinture, la tapisserie, l’illustration et l’aquarelle tout en restant fidèle à lui‑même. Né à El Nuhud (le Soudan) en 1951, cet artiste transnational a l’originalité de remanier les grands « classiques » de l’histoire de l’art occidental pour y superposer la vision contemporaine que peuvent en avoir les ressortissants de pays postcoloniaux. Sur ses images, les figures adoptent essentiellement deux postures : les unes luttent debout contre des forces invisibles — à savoir, l’imposition des idéologies monolithiques de l’Occident et le regard objectivant du marketing —, les autres s’allongent sous des mots qui transforment les lieux communs et idées reçues de ces mêmes forces en miroirs d’une critique lancinante.

Jamais Musa ne perd de vue la nécessité de l’engagement artistique dans un monde miné par l’avarice du capitalisme international débridé, ainsi que par la violence que celui-ci engendre sous les multiples visages de la foi, non seulement la foi religieuse, mais aussi la naïveté de certaines convictions politiques, le culte du marché de l’art et la loi de la pensée unique. En effet, il lui arrive souvent de reprendre à son compte la célèbre phrase de Kateb Yacine, « la langue française est un butin de guerre.[2] » À cela, il ajoute néanmoins que la richesse glanée de la domination culturelle englobe également, pour lui, l’ensemble de la tradition occidentale, y compris les balises symboliques et références historiques en arts visuels. L’art est donc violent chez Musa parce qu’inévitablement héritier d’une histoire violente.

Cet adepte du détournement de l’objet a étudié d’abord à l’École des beaux-arts de Khartoum, de 1970 à 1974, avant d’obtenir en 1989 son doctorat de l’Université de Montpellier. Après avoir travaillé à la télévision soudanaise et aux Presses universitaires de Khartoum, il est devenu, en France, enseignant d’arabe et d’arts plastiques. Jusqu’à nos jours, il continue à animer ponctuellement des ateliers de calligraphie pour les jeunes et pour les adultes.

Avec Chéri Samba, Rachid Koraïchi et Ousmane Sow, Hassan Musa compte aujourd’hui parmi les artistes contemporains les mieux connus dans le monde francophone. Si l’art est d’abord et avant tout pour lui une forme d’action, cela ne l’empêche pas de manier les mots avec une rare finesse philosophique et littéraire. Dans la métaphore filée citée en exergue, l’image, telle une bouteille à la mer, devient progressivement écrit, message et parole. Voilà pourquoi il semblait pertinent de lui poser quelques questions sur ses pratiques artistiques.

*******

Alisa Belanger : Vous vous décrivez comme un « créateur d’images » ou, parfois, un « faiseur d’images ». Évidemment, ces deux descriptifs sont plus aptes à saisir la mouvance de vos multiples pratiques artistiques que des termes plus spécifiques, tels que « peintre » ou « calligraphe », mais pourquoi ne pas simplement vous désigner comme « artiste » tout court ?

Hassan Musa : Dans l’expression « faiseur d’images » il y a le principe de faire qui ancre la réflexion artistique (lire : spirituelle) dans la dimension réelle. Quand je me désigne comme faiseur d’images, je m’inscris dans une lignée de « faiseurs » qui gèrent les relations de l’espace concret (volume, vide, couleur, lumière, textures…). Ce sont des êtres qui réfléchissent avec la matière pour faire voir l’invisible.

Je trouve la qualité de « faiseur d’images » plus précise que celle d’« artiste ». Les artistes, dans mon imaginaire, sont des personnages romanesques. Ce sont des êtres extraordinaires (lire : des prophètes ou des chamanes !) qui peuplent la littérature européenne. Joseph Beuys, Che Guevara, Antonin Artaud, Vincent Van Gogh sont des prophètes. Moi, je me vois du côté des Antonio Tapies, Cy Twombly, Francis Bacon, Henri Matisse, Paul Klee, Edward Manet, C. Monet, Rembrandt, Vermeer jusqu’à Hokusai, mais aussi John Ford, Federico Fellini et Akira Kurosawa, ou également Tex Avery et Walt Disney.

AB : Vous avez toujours privilégié le savoir‑faire tactile de l’artiste, c’est-à-dire le travail à la main. Seriez-vous un jour apte à vous lancer dans la création numérique, aussi ? Pour vous, relève-t-elle davantage des courants « matérialistes » ou « conceptuels » ?

HM : J’ai toujours eu du mal à accepter l’opposition entre « art conceptuel » et art autre qui serait « fait main », d’une part parce que je crois que la catégorie « art conceptuel » (« Art as idea as idea ») n’est possible que par opposition/comparaison avec cet art « fait main », « matérialiste », « concret » ou « tactile », d’autre part parce que l’art, par définition n’est possible qu’en tant que pratique conceptuelle.

Cependant, je vois votre interrogation comme une réflexion sur la question du médium. La présence du médium appartient au domaine du « non verbal », ou de ce qui échappe à la portée des mots, sans que cela se limite aux objets concrets. Je pense que ce qui est non-verbal constitue le sens profond de mon travail plastique. Ce que j’entends par « non-verbal » vient de la dimension visuelle qu’imposent au regard la matière visible concrète et la matière imaginable (le hors-champ).

L’œuvre plastique est un objet donné à voir. La présence d’objets sonores dans certaines créations contemporaines me gêne car j’y vois comme une aberration méthodologique, un supplément sans nécessité. Cela vient peut-être de mon expérience de la peinture dite « moderniste ». Dans mon apprentissage de la peinture, j’appréciais la rigueur méthodologique de la peinture « pure (?) » selon les principes de Clement Greenberg. Mais cette peinture « pure », qui assure une continuité sans faille dans l’histoire de la peinture européenne (de Monet à Pollock), n’est qu’une utopie de « la purification esthétique » (si vous me pardonnez cette expression). Une utopie faussée par le regard qui, selon la qualité du « regardeur », entraîne le doute et la suspicion, voire même le rejet de la proposition initiale.

Bien entendu, je pourrais faire ces images autrement que par la peinture (montage photo, ordinateur…), mais, si je favorise l’emploi de la peinture, c’est peut-être parce que la peinture, pour moi, ne se limite pas à un médium parmi d’autres, mais c’est Le Médium que je connais mieux que les autres. C’est aussi le médium qui me permet ce « plaisir » particulier qui consiste à exercer un contrôle sur la totalité du processus qui mène à l’œuvre. J’ai une grande admiration envers ces artistes des 16^e et 17^e siècles qui, dans leurs ateliers, préparaient leurs pigments, leurs supports et fabriquaient leurs images tel un cuisinier qui fait pousser ses légumes dans son jardin avant de les préparer. La « main » du peintre n’est pas seulement un outil qui fait les traits, mais également « la manière » qui garantit la singularité de la création. C’est une identité.

La peinture me fascine par sa simplicité apparente et par sa complexité cachée. Le fait de penser que, dans le champ de la peinture mille fois ratissé, tout a été fait et qu’il n’y a plus rien à glaner, représente un défi stimulant. Un peintre d’aujourd’hui est, par définition, un glaneur têtu qui prétend que non, il y a peut-être encore quelques trésors cachés que les autres n’ont pas découverts.[3] La figure de glaneur qui fouille dans la poussière me fait suivre les pistes les plus diverses et faire les rencontres les plus surprenantes.

Je pense que mon travail actuel avec les tissus assemblés et cousus à la machine à coudre est une évolution naturelle de mes recherches sur la peinture. Les couleurs et les textures des tissus (imprimés, monochromes, transparents, opaques, brillants…) m’ouvrent des pistes inattendues sur le terrain de la réflexion plastique et me permettent de créer des images nouvelles. Ainsi, je vois mes images composées de tissus assemblés plus comme des variantes de mes peintures que comme une exploration d’un nouveau médium.

AB : Comment envisagez-vous l’avenir de la calligraphie et des arts du livre face à l’hypertexte ?

HM : J’espère que la technologie aidera les gens à se libérer du poids du modèle de la belle écriture officielle qui se dit « calligraphie » et qui est monopolisée par une élite d’artisans qui se disent « calligraphes », afin que chacun revienne vers l’écriture en tant que création graphique libre.

AB : Lors d’un entretien en août 2005, vous avez dit : « Je marque toujours le titre en grand, pour qu’on ne s’y trompe pas. [...] Quelque part, faire figurer le texte, c’est un geste complètement désespéré par rapport aux images ![4] » Cela dit, vos titres, situés à mi‑chemin entre le slogan commercial ou politique, la citation ironique et le vers lyrique, ont souvent une valeur poétique qui dépasse la simple transmission du message. Citons par exemple L’origine du Tiers-Monde (1997), Confusion de part (2003), ou I laugh you with my Ford… (2011). Quelle est votre conception du rapport global entre le texte et l’image, y compris les autres mots inscrits sur la toile ?

HM : Je pense que les titres de mes images sont une recherche d’efficacité, car les images sont naturellement ambivalentes. La nature du regard qui se pose sur une image pourrait altérer sa portée morale, car le regard n’est pas neutre. Il est miné par les intérêts idéologiques divers. Lorsqu’on regarde le monde qui nous entoure, on est conditionné à ne voir que la part du monde qui nous intéresse. C’est là où l’orientation du regard devient un enjeu du pouvoir. Si j’arrive à vous faire voir ce que je vois, j’organise les priorités de votre regard et je vous empêche, peut-être, d’aller voir ailleurs les choses que je ne veux pas que vous voyez.

J’ai toujours trouvé suspecte cette sagesse chinoise qui dit : « Lorsque le sage montre la lune, l’idiot regarde le doigt ». Je pense que, dans un monde où l’interaction est constante, il est plus que nécessaire de regarder à la fois la lune, le doigt et le sage lui-même. Pour répondre à votre question sur la présence des mots sur mes images, je pense qu’au départ, je les ajoutais comme un élément littéraire supposé encadrer le regard du spectateur. Si le titre des œuvres est un genre littéraire à part, cette littérature particulière me permet des renvois esthétiques et des clins d’œil politiques qui donnent à mes images un certain humour. Puis, j’ai compris que les mots sur mes images ne peuvent pas échapper à la loi des images. Ces mots sont également des images et je les compose donc comme des images en relation avec d’autres images. Les peintres chinois traversent la frontière entre texte et image avec plus de spontanéité que les peintres européens. Peut-être que, dans l’esprit de la tradition chinoise, tout est texte.

Quand je dis que le titre d’une œuvre représente un genre littéraire méconnu, je pense à la poésie qu’on rencontre dans les noms des personnes ou les noms des lieux. Dans mes images intitulées : L’origine du Tiers-Monde (1997) et Confusion de part (2003), je cherchais à donner à voir la dimension politique contemporaine d’images importantes dans l’iconographie européenne. La misère du Tiers Monde est la partie sombre de la prospérité du monde industriel, tout comme les bateaux des naufragés africains à Lampedusa sont la version contemporaine du naufrage glorieux de « la Méduse ». Nous appartenons tous au même monde, nous avons tous la même origine et nous avons tous les mêmes désirs !

AB : À propos des traditions artistiques en Chine, comment êtes-vous venu à vous intéresser à l’aquarelle chinoise ? Comment votre voyage dans « le pays du milieu » a‑t‑il enrichi votre réflexion ou vos pratiques artistiques ?

HM : J’avais 12 ans. Je vivais dans une petite ville de l’ouest de Soudan, El‑Obeid. C’était l’époque de la Guerre Froide. Le Soudan, comme tous les pays du Tiers Monde, était inondé de matériel de propagande politique qui venait de l’Union Soviétique, de la Chine et des USA. Je me souviens d’un petit kiosque à journaux où nous allions acheter des revues illustrées et des bandes dessinées chinoises. C’étaient les publications les moins chères. Je collectionnais « La Chine Illustrée », un beau magazine rempli d’images qui vantaient la Révolution, la lutte anti‑impérialiste et la solidarité entre les peuples. J’y trouvais de belles reproductions des œuvres des grands maîtres de l’aquarelle chinoise. C’était mon école.

Je me souviens encore des difficultés insurmontables pour copier des aquarelles en utilisant des gouaches désobéissantes qui me donnaient une version bourbeuse de ces magnifiques paysages qui intègrent écriture et image de manière surprenante. À cette époque, j’ai appris que la pratique de l’aquarelle traditionnelle est une sorte d’écriture artisanale bien codée où des éléments picturaux (arbres, rochets, cascades) se répètent à l’identique d’une image à l’autre. Quand je suis allé en Chine pour la première fois en 2009, j’étais déjà assez informé sur les méthodes et les finalités de la pratique graphique chinoise. Cependant, la Chine reste un continent artistique à découvrir.

AB : Aujourd’hui, on note de plus en plus souvent l’essor des liens économiques entre la Chine et l’Afrique. Certains estiment même que ces rapports sino‑africains l’emportent de nos jours sur la vieille histoire de la Françafrique. Comment situez-vous donc votre production artistique vis‑à‑vis des rapports actuels entre « le tigre » et « l’autruche » ?

HM : La société chinoise vit une grande mutation qui affecte la politique, l’économie et la vie culturelle. La Chine est en train de devenir un membre dans le club des Puissants. Ce statut représente une grande responsabilité morale devant cette société chinoise qui doit choisir entre dévorer les faibles au festin du libéralisme, ou sauver le monde en restaurant les liens humains avec les autres. Je pense que la version globale de la lutte des classes se joue en Chine comme elle se joue entre la Chine et le monde euro-américain. Les Africains attendent donc les Chinois au tournant de leur humanité.

AB : Les inégalités économiques ne cessent de croître partout dans le monde depuis une cinquantaine d’années. Que peut l’art face à l’écart grandissant entre les riches et pauvres ?

HM : Si nous prenons la pratique artistique dominante comme modèle, l’art ne peut rien face à l’écart grandissant entre les riches et pauvres, parce que cet art‑là est l’art de la classe dominante. Pourquoi attendons‑nous des riches qu’ils acceptent une pratique artistique qui pourrait menacer leurs privilèges ?

Les pauvres du monde sont en train d’inventer une nouvelle forme d’expression artistique, basée sur le principe de la contestation de l’ordre établi. La contestation qui a démarré dans certains pays du Proche Orient a effrayé les riches du monde entier, car c’est une contestation de l’ordre du monde qui ne répond pas à la forme traditionnelle de la contestation (actions pacifistes, sans structure de leadership conventionnel, connectée, spontanée, structurée autour des principes de l’égalité, des droits de l’homme, de la démocratie…).

Aujourd’hui les médias des pays industriels continuent à parler du « Printemps Arabe » de manière à oblitérer les disparités entre des mouvements de contestations populaires de pays différents, car l’amalgame entre les révoltes en Tunisie, en Égypte, au Yémen ou au Bahreïn fausse les singularités de chaque révolte et, par la même occasion, isole la contestation dans les pays arabes du phénomène de la contestation générale contre les méfaits de la libéralisation globale de l’économie. Je pense que les « Indignados » de l’Espagne, les « Occupy Wall Street » des États-Unis, les « Révolutionnaires » de la Place Tahrir au Caire et les manifestants du Bahreïn, veulent tous la même chose : «Bread and Roses» (James Oppenheim).

La fin de la Guerre Froide a ouvert un espace de contestation globale où les luttes des classes s’expriment de manière inédite. Depuis le 11 Septembre, les Musulmans du monde sont redéfinis, par la propagande des puissances industrielles (y compris la Chine), comme la nouvelle icône du mal. Cette stigmatisation ajoute une dimension religieuse « islamique » au clivage social global. Lorsqu’on réalise que les Musulmans représentent plus d’un milliard de la population mondiale, on peut se rendre compte de la gravité d’une telle stigmatisation. Imaginez une force du mal qui s’étendrait sur une superficie allant du Sénégal à la Chine et de l’Ouzbékistan à la Somalie !

Le « monde musulman », dans la bouche des responsable de l’OTAN, est un terme qui renvoie à une intention déclarée de partage du monde entre les grandes puissances industrielles. Dans cette analyse, les Musulmans qui ne sont pas définis comme « modérés » sont une cible à éliminer car, dans une perspective à long terme, ils gênent l’intégration de leurs populations à l’ordre global du capital et, dans une perspective à court terme, ils entravent le pillage des ressources de leurs pays par les puissances industrielles.

Dans cette vision géopolitique, l’art pourrait devenir un enjeu de taille. Cependant, lorsque l’on observe la réaction du monde de l’art, dans les sociétés industrielles, on est surpris par le manque de perspective globale par rapport aux nouveaux horizons qui s’ouvrent devant les créateurs contemporains. Le monde de l’art n’a proposé, jusqu’à maintenant, que des perspectives ethniques qui renvoient à l’état du monde au 19^e siècle. Un artiste contemporain qui vient du monde extra-européen ne dispose que d’une contre-catégorie qui le renvoie à sa condition ethnique comme Chinois, Africain ou Musulman.

Une exposition comme Les Magiciens de la Terre (Jean-Hubert Martin, 1989) tentait une réparation morale en proposant une « égalité des cultures » dans laquelle « toute culture est exotique pour l’autre ». Ainsi, la culture des Européens semblait perdre sa position centrale et devenir une des composantes d’un ensemble global. Le problème avec ce concept est qu’il ne vient pas comme le résultat d’une délibération démocratique entre tous, mais comme une proposition des dominants : les Euro‑américains. Que peut un artiste contre les mécènes trop puissants capables de tout, ou presque, sinon contester les fondements moraux de l’ordre de marché ?

Photo Source: hassanmusa.com

AB : Vous critiquez le « regard exoticisant » des Euro‑américains dans le tableau Great American Nude (2002), qui a provoqué de vives réactions lors de l’exposition Africa Remix, car vous y avez « féminisé » Osama Ben Laden en le couchant comme une odalisque. Presque une décennie plus tard, vous êtes revenu à la figure de Ben Laden dans I Love you with my Iphone (2011), ironisant sur La mort de Marat de Jacques‑Louis David. À votre avis, l’image populaire et médiatique de cet homme a‑t‑elle changée suite à sa mort ? Si oui, comment est-ce que vous avez voulu exprimer cette évolution par le glissement de l’odalisque à l’homme politique assassiné ?

HM : Ben Laden n’a jamais été autre chose qu’une image. C’est l’image que les Américains ont choisie, après le 11 septembre, pour incarner les Musulmans. Pendant la Guerre Froide, Al Qaida était l’allié des Américains et Ben Laden avait alors l’image du combattant pour la liberté. Les hommes réels meurent normalement et se font enterrer, mais les icônes peuvent ressusciter si leurs fabricants le décident. Ben Laden, en tant qu’image, ne mourra jamais parce que c’est, désormais, un levier médiatique fabriqué par la machine politique américaine, tout comme Marilyn Monroe, Che Guevara ou le drapeau américain. En fonction de l’attention qu’elle polarise, une image dégage une énergie politique relative à son poids médiatique. J’ai tenté de profiter de l’énergie de l’icône Ben Laden. À chaque fois que la machine américaine des images réactive l’icône Ben Laden, cela m’offre une nouvelle opportunité de jouer avec ce raccourci extraordinaire de la géopolitique des images.

AB : La femme occupe une place de choix dans votre œuvre, que ce soit à travers la légende biblique et littéraire (Suzanne, Shéhérazade, ou même Saint Sébastien Femina), les icônes célèbres comme Joséphine Baker et Saartjes Baartman, ou votre propre grand‑mère, qui figure dans votre texte « i comme identité[5] » décrivant la situation postcoloniale. Dans chaque cas, vous illustrez la détermination de la femme face aux discriminations. Quel est votre positionnement vis‑à‑vis du féminisme ? Êtes‑vous féministe ?

HM : Je suis l’enfant de ma mère, le frère de mes sœurs, le mari de ma femme et le père de ma fille. Toutes ces figures féminines tiennent une place centrale dans mon existence. J’ai conscience qu’il m’est impossible de prendre une distance de neutralité rationnelle pour définir une position critique de cette catégorie politique que nous appelons « le féminisme ». Cependant, quand je regarde mon implication personnelle dans la situation sociale, je ne peux pas dire que je ne suis pas féministe.

AB : Qui serait votre public « idéal » ?

HM : Je pense que la nature du public est une question de classe sociale et de références morales partagées entre l’artiste et le public. L’humoriste français Pierre Desproges disait : « On peut rire de tout mais pas avec tout le monde ». Je pense que tout public est « idéal » du moment que le créateur sait à qui il a à faire. Quand j’enseignais l’art à des adolescents au collège, j’avais souvent un public hostile et sans complexe à l’égard de la culture artistique contemporaine. Cependant, ma connaissance de ce public m’aidait à mieux organiser la « négociation » pour faire saisir la portée d’une œuvre « difficile » à mes jeunes élèves.

AB : Autrefois, vous étiez fasciné par le « blanchissement » progressif de Michael Jackson. Que pensez-vous de sa disparition prématurée ? Marque-t-elle la fin d’une ère ? Sinon, qu’est-ce que ce triste événement représente pour vous en tant qu’artiste ?

HM : Je regrette beaucoup la disparition de Michael Jackson, d’abord parce qu’il fait partie des souvenirs de mon adolescence (The Jackson Five). Ensuite, au‑delà de son immense talent de musicien, je pense que c’est un grand créateur d’images. C’est une image qui se confond avec son créateur. Notre mémoire des images est marquée par l’empreinte de la civilisation judéo‑chrétienne de telle façon qu’aujourd’hui on ne peut rien comprendre à l’histoire de l’art si on n’a pas lu la Bible. Mais une lecture de la Bible est-elle possible sans l’appui des images du sacré, inventées par les artistes chrétiens ? Depuis Michel‑Ange, Dieu siège sur le plafond de la Chapelle Sixtine au Vatican, David est à l’Académie de Florence, tandis que Moïse est à l’église Saint-Pierre aux Liens, à Rome.

L’art a hérité de la tradition des « images pieuses », qui tiennent fonction d’objet de dévotion et de support à la foi. Aujourd’hui, l’enseignement religieux se fait dans les écoles d’éducation artistique tout comme, autrefois, le catéchisme s’enseignait dans les écoles religieuses. Les images de l’art sont devenues des images sacrées. Les pèlerins de toutes confessions, ou sans confession, voyagent aux quatre coins du monde pour rendre hommage aux icones de l’art. Ces images semblent être le dernier refuge du sacré dans un monde moderne qui ne croit plus à rien, ou presque. Aujourd’hui, les musées sont plus peuplés que les églises. Dans ce contexte, Michael Jackson est arrivé comme une sorte de prophète des temps modernes. Son temple ? C’est le lieu des concerts. Son message ? C’est le show. Son miracle ? C’est la métamorphose de son image. Ce prophète caméléon s’adressait à une nation américaine malade d’une ségrégation stupide qui oppose les gens en fonction de la couleur de la peau. Il disait : la loi de la ségrégation est nulle. La frontière de la couleur est une illusion, même si cela est écrit dans la Bible !

En traversant la frontière de la couleur, Michael Jackson perturbe un ordre symbolique bien établi. Cet ordre symbolique est le socle sur lequel l’ordre politique nord‑américain est construit. Michael Jackson est un nouveau Moïse qui frappe la mer des préjugés et sépare les eaux afin que les Américains puissent choisir un Barack Obama comme Président !

AB : Dans un entretien avec Jeune Afrique en 2012, vous avez soutenu que « la lutte sociale n’est pas envisageable en dehors d’une vision religieuse, comme en témoigne l’efficacité des icônes anti‑impérialistes. C’est malheureux, mais le discours de la complexité est rarement audible.[6] » Est‑ce que tout discours simpliste comporte donc un élément religieux à vos yeux ?

HM : La pensée religieuse est efficace parce qu’elle est construite selon la logique du pictogramme : le bien et le mal, rien d’autre ! L’efficacité d’un pictogramme tient à son extrême simplicité. L’argument religieux qui oppose le mal et le bien s’appuie sur la logique de l’impossibilité de choisir le mal.

L’homme est obligatoirement bon. Il ne peut que choisir le bien. Et même quand il s’égare du bon chemin, il pourra laver sa faute par le repentir. Le problème avec les croyants engagés dans un conflit politique, c’est qu’ils sont capables d’entraîner tous les autres dans une destruction totale parce qu’ils ont l’intime conviction que Dieu est avec eux.

AB : En parallèle, vous dénoncez tout aussi fermement le « culte » du marché de l’art qui fait grimper les prix en fonction de la célébrité. Il faut pourtant que l’artiste puisse vivre. Que doit‑on substituer à cette logique mercantile ?

HM : En tant qu’utopiste désespéré, je souhaite que l’art, comme l’éducation, la santé et la justice, ne soit pas dans le marché. Un jour où : « Le loup résidera avec le mouton, le léopard s’accroupira avec le chevreau; le veau, le lionceau, le buffle, ensemble, un petit adolescent les conduira » (Isaïe 11:6). En attendant ce jour, je ne peux que continuer à opposer, aux images du marché, mes images qui portent ma critique face aux aberrations de la société marchande. Je sais que, dans une seule vie, je ne peux pas changer le monde, mais je ne laisserai pas le monde changer ma vie sans rien faire.

The post Poétique du tableau offert : Entretien avec Hassan Musa appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

[A]n image, deep down, is like a bottle thrown into the sea.  I write a message that I put into a bottle, that I throw to the sea. It may reach someone who cannot read my writing or someone who reads me but cannot understand a thing that I’m saying to people.

- Hassan Musa[1]

World-renowned thanks to his participation in prestigious international exhibits, such as Africa Remix or the Venice Bienniale, Hassan Musa practices numerous art forms, from performance, calligraphy, painting and tapestry, to illustration and watercolors, while always remaining true to his style and principles. Born in El Nuhud (Sudan) in 1951, this transnational artist reworks the great “classics” of Western art history by layering them with the contemporary vision that they may inspire in those from postcolonial countries. The figures in these images adopt essentially two postures: some struggle, standing, against invisible forces—namely, the imposition of monolithic ideologies from the West and the objectification of marketing—while others lie beneath words that transform stereotypes and conventional beliefs about those forces into mirrors reflecting an incisive critique.

Never does Musa lose sight of the necessity of artistic engagement in a world undermined by the greed of unbridled international capitalism, as well as the violence that it prompts through multi-faceted manifestations of faith—not only religious faith, but also the naiveté of certain political convictions, the cult of the art market, and the rule of conformism. Indeed, he often borrows in quotation the famous sentence from Kateb Yacine, “the French language is war bounty,[2]” yet he adds that the wealth gleaned from cultural domination also encompasses, for him, the entirety of the Western tradition, including symbolic markers and historical references in the visual arts. Art is therefore violent for Musa because it inevitably inherits a violent past.

This keen practitioner of objets détournés first studied at the Khartoum School of Fine Arts from 1970 to 1974 before obtaining his doctorate in 1989 from the University of Montpellier. After having worked for a Sudanese television station and the Khartoum University Presses, he taught Arabic and the visual arts in France. Up to the present day, he continues occasionally to offer calligraphy workshops for youth and adults.

Alongside Chéri Samba, Rachid Koraïchi and Ousmane Sow, Hassan Musa is today among the most well-known contemporary artists in the Francophone world. If art is first and foremost a form of action for him, it never stops him from wielding words with rare literary and philosophical finesse. In his extended metaphor cited in the epigraph above, the image, like a bottle at sea, progressively becomes a text, a message, and speech. The questions that follow therefore take Musa’s penchant for visual texts as an inroad to understanding his artistic practices.

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Alisa Belanger: You describe yourself as an ‘image creator’ or, sometimes, an ‘image maker.’ Obviously these two descriptors are better able to convey the range of your many artistic practices than more specific terms, such as ‘painter’ or ‘calligrapher,’ but why not simply call yourself an ‘artist,’ and leave it at that?

Hassan Musa: In the expression ‘image maker,’ there is the principle of making which anchors artistic (read: spiritual) reflection in the dimensions of reality. When I designate myself as an image maker, I place myself in a long line of ‘makers’ who manage relationships with concrete space (volume, emptiness, color, textures…). They are the ones who reflect on matter in order to see the invisible.

I find that ‘image maker’ has a more precise quality than ‘Artist.’ To my mind, artists are novelistic characters. They are those extraordinary beings (read: prophets or shamans!) who populate European Literature. Joseph Beuys, Che Guevara, Antonin Artaud, Vincent Van Gogh, are prophets. Me, I see myself alongside Antonio Tapies, Cy Twombly, Francis Bacon, Henri Matisse, Paul Klee, Edward Manet, C. Monet, Rembrandt, Vermeer up through Hokusai, but also John Ford, Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa, or, yet again, Tex Avery and Walt Disney.

AB: You have always favored the tactile knowledge of the artist, meaning hands-on work with materials. Would you one day be likely to try out digital arts, as well? For you, are they more closely related to ‘materialist’ or ‘conceptual’ art trends?

HM: I have always had a hard time accepting the opposition between ‘conceptual art’ and other art that is ‘hand-made,’ because, on the one hand, I believe that the category of ‘conceptual art’ (“Art as idea as idea”) is only possible in opposition/comparison with ‘hand-made,’ ‘materialist,’ ‘concrete’ or ‘tactile’ art; and because, on the other hand, art is by definition only possible as a conceptual practice.

However, I see your question as a thought about the notion of the medium. The presence of the medium belongs to the domain of the ‘non-verbal’ and what escapes the grasp of words, without being itself limited to concrete objects. I think that what is non-verbal constitutes the profound meaning of my artwork. What I mean by ‘non-verbal’ comes from the visual dimension that the concrete, visible matter and the imaginable matter (the hors-champ) impose upon observation.

The physical work of art is an object offered for observation. The presence of sound objects in certain contemporary creative works bothers me because I see a methodological peculiarity in it, a needless supplement. It comes perhaps from my so-called ‘modernist’ experience with painting. In my studies of painting, I appreciated the methodological rigor of ‘pure (?)’ painting according to Clement Greenberg’s principles. But this ‘pure’ painting that assures the flawless continuity in the history of European painting (from Monet to Pollock) is just a utopia of ‘aesthetic purification’ (if you will pardon me the expression). A utopia distorted by the gaze that, depending on the quality of the ‘onlooker,’ leads to doubt and suspicion, perhaps even the rejection of the initial idea.

Of course, I could make these images another way than by painting (photo-montage, computer…), but, if I prefer to employ painting, it’s perhaps because painting, for me, is not limited, as one medium among others; rather, it’s The Medium that I know better than the others. It’s also the medium that allows me this specific ‘pleasure’ that consists of exercising control over the entirety of the process that leads to the work. I hold a great admiration towards those artists from the 16^th and 17^th centuries who, in their workshops, prepared their pigments, their canvases, and produced their images like a chefs who grow their vegetables in their garden before cooking them. The ‘hand’ of the painter is not just a tool that makes brushstrokes, but also ‘the manner’ that guarantees the uniqueness of the creative work. It’s an identity.

Painting fascinates me by its apparent simplicity and hidden complexity. The fact of thinking that, in the field of painting, combed through a thousand times over, everything has been done and that there is nothing more to glean, represents a stimulating challenge. A painter today is, by definition, a stubborn gleaner who asserts that, no, there are maybe still some hidden treasures that the others have not discovered.[3]  This figure of the gleaner rummaging through the dust makes me follow the most various paths and makes for the most surprising finds.

I think that my current work with assembled and machine-sewn fabric is a natural evolution of my research in painting. The colors and textures of the fabrics (prints, solids, transparent, opaque, or shiny fabrics…) open unexpected avenues to me in the field of material thought and allow me to create new images. Thus, I see my images composed of assembled fabrics more like variations on my paintings than as the exploration of a new medium.

AB: How do you envision the future of calligraphy and the book arts in light of cyber-texts?

HM: I hope that technology will help people to liberate themselves from the weight of the model of the exquisite writing that officially considers itself ‘calligraphy’ and that is monopolized by a group of elite artisans who identify themselves as ‘calligraphers,’ so that each person may return to writing as a free form of graphic creativity

AB: In an August 2005 interview, you said: “I always mark the title in big letters so that there is no mistake [...] In some way, putting the text is a completely desperate gesture in relationship to the images![4]” That said, your titles, which combine commercial or political slogans, ironic citations and lyric verses, often carry a poetic value that exceeds the simple transmission of a message. For example: L’origine du Tiers-Monde (1997), Confusion de part (2003), or I laugh you with my Ford… (2011). How do you broadly conceive of the text-image relationship, including additional words inscribed on the canvas?  

HM: I think that the titles of my images seek efficiency, because the images are naturally ambivalent. The nature of the observing gaze that falls on an image could alter its moral meaning, since the gaze is not neutral. It is infiltrated by diverse ideological interests. When we look at the world that surrounds us, we are conditioned to see only the part of the world that interests us. That’s why orienting the gaze becomes an issue of power. If I manage to make you see what I see, I organize the priorities of your gaze and I prevent you, perhaps, from going to see things elsewhere that I prefer you not to see.

I’ve always been suspicious of the Chinese proverb that says: “When a wise man points to the moon, an idiot looks at his finger.” I think that, in a world where interaction is constant, it is more than necessary to look at both the moon, the finger, and the wise man himself. To respond to your question concerning the presence of words in my image, I think that, originally, I added them as a literary element intended to frame the gaze of the viewer. If the title of artworks is a literary genre in its own right, this distinctive literature allows me to create aesthetic ties and political winks that give my images a certain sense of humor. Then, I understood that words on my images cannot escape the law of images. These words are also images, and I therefore compose them in relationship to other images. Chinese painters cross the threshold between the text and image with more spontaneity than European painters. Perhaps, in the spirit of Chinese tradition, everything is text.

When I say that the title of a work represents a little known literary genre, I am thinking of the poetry that we come across in the names of people and places. In my images entitled L’origine du Tiers-Monde (1997) et Confusion de part (2003), I was seeking to present for viewing the contemporary political dimension of important images in European iconography. The misery of the Third World is the dark zone of the prosperity in the industrial world, just as the boats of shipwrecked Africans in Lampedusa are the contemporary version of the glorious shipwreck of “The Medusa.” We all belong to the same world, we all have the same origin, and we all have the same desires!

AB: Returning to artistic traditions in China, how did you come to take interest in Chinese watercolor? How did your travels to ‘the Middle Country’ enrich your artistic thought-process and practices?

HM: I was twelve. I lived in a small city in the West of Sudan, El-Obeid. It was the Cold War era. Sudan, like all of the countries in the Third World, was inundated with propaganda materials that came from the Soviet Union, China and the U.S.A. I remember a little newspaper kiosk where we used to buy Chinese illustrated magazines and comics. They were the least expensive publications. I collected “China Illustrated,” a beautiful magazine filled with images that sang the praises of the Revolution, anti-imperialist struggles and solidarity among peoples. I found stunning reproductions in them of the great masters of Chinese watercolor. It was my school.

I still remember the insurmountable difficulties of copying the watercolors with rebellious gouaches that gave me a murky version of the magnificent landscapes that integrate writing and images in a remarkable way. At that time, I learned that the practice of traditional watercolor is a sort of well-coded artisanal writing where pictorial elements (trees, boulders, waterfalls) were identically reproduced from one image to the next. When I went to China for the first time in 2009, I was already rather informed about the goals and methods of Chinese graphic techniques. However, China remains an artistic continent to discover.

AB: Today, the rise of economic ties between China and Africa are increasingly drawing attention. Some even claim that these Sino-African links have lately overtaken the longstanding history of ‘la Françafrique’ [France-Africa]. How do you see your artistic production in light of these current relationships between the ‘Tiger’ and the ‘Ostrich’?

HM: Chinese society is now undergoing a great change that affects politics, the economy and cultural life. China is in the process of becoming a member of the Superpowers Club. This status represents a great moral responsibility placed before Chinese society, which must choose between devouring the week at the feast of Liberalism, or saving the world by restoring human ties with others. I think that the global version of class struggle is playing out in China as it is playing out between China and the Euro-American world. Africans therefore await the Chinese at a turning point in their humanity.

AB: Economic inequalities have continued to grow incessantly throughout the world in the last half of a century. What power does art exert against the increasing gap between the rich and the poor?

HM: If we take dominant artistic practices as a model, art can do nothing against the growing gap between the rich and poor, because that art is the art of the dominant class. Why would we expect the rich to accept an artistic practice that could threaten their privileges?

The poor of the world are in the midst of inventing a new form of artistic expression based upon the principle of contesting the established order. The protests that began in certain countries in the Near Orient frightened the rich of the entire world because they are protests of the world order that don’t correspond to tradition forms of protest (pacifist actions, without conventional leadership structures, connected, spontaneous, structured around principles of equality, Human Rights, democracy…).

Today, the media in industrialized nations continues to speak of the “Arab Spring” in a way that obliterates the disparities between popular protest movements in different countries, because the amalgamation of the revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain misrepresents the specificities of each revolt and, in so doing, isolates protest in the Arab countries from the phenomenon of  generalized protest against the wrongs of global liberalization of the economy. I think that the “Indignados” in Spain, the “Occupy Wall Street” in the United States, the “Revolutionaries” in Tahrir Square in Cairo and the protesters in Bahrain all desire the same thing: “Bread and Roses” (James Oppenheim).

The end of the Cold War opened a space for global protest where class struggles find previously unseen expression. Since September 11, the Muslims of the world have been redefined, by the propaganda of industrial powers (including China), as the new icon of evil. This stigmatization adds a religious “Islamic” dimension to the global social divide. When we realize that Muslims represent more than a billion of the worldwide population, we can comprehend the gravity of such a stigmatization. Imagine a force of evil that would extend across an area from Senegal to China, and from Uzbekistan to Somalia!

The “Islamic world,” in the mouths of the leaders of NATO, is a term that refers to the declared intention of the carving-up of the world between the large industrial powers. By this analysis, Muslims not defined as “moderates” are a target to eliminate, because, in a long-term perspective, they disrupt the integration of their populations into the order of global capital and, in a short-term perspective, they hinder the pillaging of the resources in their countries by industrial powers.

Within this geopolitical vision, art could become a substantial concern.  However, when we observe the reaction of the art world in industrial societies, we are surprised by the lack of global perspective in relationship to the new horizons that are opening up before contemporary artists. The art world has up until now proposed only ethnic perspectives that are throwbacks to the state of the world in the 19^th century. A contemporary artist who comes from the extra-European world only possesses a counter-category that expels him back to his ethnic condition as Chinese, African or Muslim.

An exhibit like Les Magiciens de la Terre (Jean Hubert Martin, 1989) attempted to enact a moral reparation by proposing an “equality of cultures” in which “every culture is exotic for another.” Thus, the culture of Europeans seemed to lose its central position and become one of the components of a worldwide whole. The problem with this concept is that it arises not from the result of a democratic deliberation among all, but rather as a suggestion from the dominant: the Euro-Americans. What can an artist do against the overly powerful sponsors capable of anything or almost, if not contest the moral grounds of the market organization?

Photo Source: hassanmusa.com

AB: You criticize the “exoticizing gaze” of Euro-Americans in the painting Great American Nude (2002) which provoked strong reactions during the Africa Remix exhibit, since it “feminized” Osama Bin Laden by laying him down like an odalisque. Almost a decade later, you returned to the figure of Bin Laden in I Love you with my Iphone (2011), an ironic take on The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David. In your opinion, did his image change in popular culture and media after his death? If so, how did you want to express this evolution through the shift from an odalisque to an assassinated political figure? 

HM: Bin Laden was never anything other than an image. He’s the image that the Americans chose, after September 11, to incarnate Muslims. During the Cold War, Al Qaida was allied with the Americans and Bin Laden was then the image of the combatant for freedom. Real men die normally and get buried, but icons can resuscitate if their producers decide so. Bin Laden, as an image that will never die, because he will be, forever hereafter, a media lever, fabricated by the American political machine, just like Marilyn Monroe, Che Guevara or the American Flag. By nature of the attention that it polarizes, an image emits a political energy proportional to its media weight. I tried to take advantage of the energy of the Bin Laden icon. Each time that the American political image machine reactivates the Bin Laden icon, it offers me a new opportunity to play with this extraordinary short-cut in the geopolitics of images.

AB: Women occupy a key position in your career work, whether as biblical and literary legends (Suzanne, Scheherazade, or even Saint Sébastien Femina), famous icons like Josephine Baker and Saartje Baartman, or your grandmother, who appears in your text “i like identity[5] ” describing the postcolonial situation. In each case, you illustrate the resilience of women in the face of discrimination. What is your position in regards to feminism? Are you a feminist?  

HM: I am a son to my mother, a brother to my sisters, a husband to my wife and father to my daughter. All of these female figures hold a place at the center of my existence. I am aware that it is impossible for me to adopt the rational neutrality of distance in order to define a critical position towards this political category that we call “Feminism.” However, when I consider my personal commitment within the social situation, I cannot say that I am not feminist.  

AB: Who would constitute your “ideal” public?

HM: I think that the nature of the public is a question of social class and of shared moral references between the artist and the public. The French comedian Pierre Desproges used to say “You can laugh about everything but not with everyone.” I think that every public is “ideal” as long as the artist knows who he’s dealing with. When I taught art to middle school adolescents, I often had a hostile public without any complexes about contemporary artistic culture. However, my knowledge of this public helped me to organize the “negotiation” better in order to make my young students understand the impact of each “difficult” work. 

AB: In the past, you were fascinated with the gradual “whitening” of Michael Jackson. What are your thoughts on his premature death? Does it mark the end of an era? If not, then what does this sad event represent for you as an artist? 

HM: I am much saddened by the passing of Michael Jackson, firstly because he was part of my memories of adolescence (The Jackson Five). In addition, beyond his immense talent as a musician, I think that he was a great image creator. He’s an image that merges with its creator. Our memory of images is marked by the imprint of Judeo-Christian civilization such that we can no longer understand anything today in art history if we haven’t read the Bible. But is reading the Bible possible without the support of images of the sacred invented by Christian artists? Since Michael Angelo, God has ruled from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, David is at the Accademia Gallery, while Moses is at Saint Peter in Chains Church, in Rome.

Art inherited the tradition of “pious images” which carries the function of the devotional object and sign of faith. Today, religious teaching happens in schools of art education, just as, long ago, catechism was taught in religious schools. The images of art have become sacred images. Pilgrims of all faiths, or faithless, travel to the four corners of the world to pay homage to the icons of art. These images seem to be the last refuge of the sacred in a modern world that no longer believes in anything, or almost. Today, museums are better populated than churches. In this context, Michael Jackson arrived like a sort of prophet of modern times. His temple? The concert venues. His message? The show. His miracle? The metamorphosis of his image. This chameleon prophet spoke to an American nation sick from a stupid segregation that puts people in opposition according to the color of their skin. He said: The law of segregation is nonsense. The color line is an illusion, even if it is written in the Bible!

By crossing the color boundary, Michael Jackson upsets a well-established symbolic order. This symbolic order is the pedestal on which the North American political order is constructed. Michael Jackson is a new Moses who strikes the sea of prejudice and parts the waters so that Americans may choose a Barack Obama as President!

AB: In an interview with Jeune Afrique in 2012, you maintained: “social struggle isn’t feasible outside of a religious vision, as demonstrates the effectiveness of anti-imperialist icons. It’s unfortunate, but the discourse of nuance is rarely audible.[6]” In your opinion, does every simplistic discourse therefore contain a religious element?

HM: Religious thought is efficient because it is constructed according to the logic of a pictogram: good and evil, nothing else! The effectiveness of a pictogram lies in its extreme simplicity. The religious argument that opposes evil and good rests upon the reasoning that it would be impossible to choose evil.

Man is necessarily good. He cannot but choose good. And even when he strays from the straight and narrow path, he will be able to cleanse himself through repentance. The problem with believers engaged in a political conflict is that they are capable of dragging all others into total destruction because they hold the firm conviction that God is with them.

AB: In parallel, you denounce just as firmly the “cult” of the art world that increases prices as a function of fame. And yet, artists need to live. What can therefore be substituted for this mercantile logic? 

HM: As a desperate utopian, I hope that art, like education, health and justice, not be on the market. A day when: “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the goat, the calf, the lion and the yearlingtogether, and a little child shall lead them” (Isaïe 11:6). In awaiting that day, I can only continue to contradict the images of the market with my own, which bear my criticism of the aberrations of commercial society. I know that, in a single life, I cannot change the world, but I will not let the world change my life without doing anything.

The post Poetics of the Visual Text: Interview with Hassan Musa appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

An earlier, abbreviated version of this piece appeared previously on Al Jazeera: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/12/when-revolution-comes-israel-2013121112851708923.html

The Hunger Games franchise has been hailed for spreading a new hopeful message of revolution to millennials around the world. Actor Donald Sutherland, who played President Snow in the filmic adaptations of the novels, believes the franchise has the potential to spur a global millennial revolution. He even reminisced in one interview about the “revolutionary” energy he felt as a young man in Toronto in 1954, as he left a theater outraged by the representation of social inequality and injustice in the double-feature Federico Fellini’s La Strada and Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory. He was so moved that he felt compelled to throw stones or gravels at the presumably empty street in protest of all the injustice and oppression in the world.

Completing a Fulbright fellowship at Bir Zeit University in Palestine this year, I could not suppress another image that kept playing and replaying in my imagination: the image of young Palestinian children, some of whom could not be older than four or five years old, who are arrested by the Israeli occupation army on a daily basis for throwing pebbles and stones on similarly empty streets. Theaters for many of these children remain a luxury they cannot afford even if there were theaters in Ramallah. These children also need special permits from the occupation authorities to exit the Occupied Territories to watch the film across the green line.

In light of the particularly bleak context of radical postcolonial politics especially and the unfinished project of the Arab Spring, we have to ask ourselves not only what kind of revolution this franchise envisions, but for what (total transformation or reform) and more importantly, which youth they have in mind and where in the world exactly they are.

Sutherland is well known for his celebrated leftist activism and support for fringe radical groups such as the Black Panthers, and his opposition to the Vietnam War. Nonetheless, his remarks could be dismissed as either a nostalgic throwback to his student activism days (“We did it in ’68,” he was reported saying); a hyperbolic representation of youthful disobedience and rebelliousness (is this not Katniss’ main virtue?) that can be easily confused for the hard work required for a social revolution or, as a purely shameless PR campaign to promote the film. It could also be brushed aside as presumptuous and racist. To assume such a Hollywood fantasy, smacks of the colonial ideology of the “white man’s burden” and its capacity to foment world revolution. It might be ridiculous to deny the power of the imagination to elicit sympathy for the victims of oppression, but it is absurd to think that a single book or film series can spur a world revolution.

These twin questions of sympathy for victims of oppression and the revolutionary potential of the film franchise weighed on my mind as I watched the second installment of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire in Haifa a few weeks ago. Two things caught my attention during the film screening: first, the presence of several young Israeli soldiers in uniform in the row in front of me among the many young Israeli movie-goers, and second, the two rounds of applause that interrupted the movie. The first was a spontaneous, intense and prolonged round of applause in response to the kiss that the two contestants-lovers, Katniss and Peeta, shared. The second was a more localized and weak round after Katniss shoots an arrow into the center of the dome that short-circuited its hologramatic field, leading to its collapse and the rescue of the heroine.

The first round of applause foretold that any messages of compassion for the victims and revolutionary content that might have been, presumably, encoded in the film had already been sapped and sacked. In Hollywood’s ideological universe, as the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek points out a film’s romantic storyline usually adds an “ideological surplus-enjoyment” that diverts the spectators’ attention from its underlying coded messages of compassion and revolution, if they are there in the first place.

On the surface, there may be no apparent parallels between the fictional dystopian world of Panem and Israel’s apartheid policies and settler-colonialism in Palestine. The structural realities, however, are not that much different. But how did these young Israeli spectators, both civilian and military, decode the images on the screen? Could they have related Panem’s fragmentation into districts to the excruciating realities of the Palestinian cantons and bantustans, or the brutalization of the masses in the fictional and real world for that matter? On whom did they project these images as they witnessed these fictional realities? Witnessing up close the escalating levels of youth racism and violence against Palestinians, African immigrants and other asylum seekers in Israel, the question of the spectators’ sympathy for the victims of oppression and the potential of images of oppression and injustice to spur a revolution, must be tethered to the historical context of production and consumption.

The involuntary public display of affection that the young lovers were forced to perform re-invests the spectators’ emotional and libidinal energies in the love triangle, making it possible for them not only to draw their pleasure form it, but also to endure the boring details and machinations of the spectacle of mutual annihilation called the Quarter Quell. After all, the whole ordeal has nothing to do with the falling of Katniss into revolutionary subjectivity or with her training and formation as a revolutionary leader. She was simply manipulated by both the leader of the totalitarian regime in Panem to save her family, as well as by the vague revolutionary leadership as a revolutionary symbol for her iconic celebrity status.

The second round of applause, as weak it was, could indicate that some people genuinely believe in the revolution and that such Hollywood franchises can, in fact, usher the world revolution to come. Not so fast. In this so-called post-ideological age, as Žižek surmises, people enjoy large doses of ideological cynicism, in that they know very well that, in this case, these revolutionary messages and symbols that emerge out of Hollywood are mere ideological illusions. They know that these cultural commodities are nothing more than pop-culture escapist fantasies or “popcorn agitprops,” but they still believe in them.

This ideological cynicism is carried out on one condition: that people still continue to believe in these revolutionary messages in so far as someone else, an ‘other,’ really believes for them, thus allowing them to feel free to do whatever they want. Belief, for Žižek , is always belief through the other. It contains a minimum of reflectivity in so far as belief (trust) in something is tantamount to asserting that there are others who also hold those beliefs. As he states, “From the very outset, the speaking subject displaces his belief onto the big other qua the order of pure semblance, so that the subject never “really believed in it”.

From the very beginning, the subject refers to some decentered other to whom he imputes this belief” (Žižek 1997, 144-48). For example, in Israel, debunking the founding Zionist mythologies , especially the ones that draw on unsubstantiated biblical myths, is very common among academics and the public, but people continue to believe in them because there is an enormous population of Christian Zionists in the West who continue to believe in these myths for them.

It is important to remember that for Žižek, no ideological system can fully integrate or absorb the subject, because there is always some irrational surplus or residue adhering to an ideology that refuses to be integrated. That is, the subjects of ideology remain to a certain extent anxious about a certain level of meaninglessness and irrationality in ideology—that it does not all make complete sense the way it is represented to them.

Paradoxically, then, the very condition of freedom is the “awareness that the Other regulates the process in which I participate . . . since I know I am not involved. ” Hollywood today, I claim, is that stand-in for the symbolic other that believes for us so that we can avoid being involved and continue the detachment of our daily lives. Indeed, one might say that we are willing to pay increasingly exorbitant admission fees at the theater not simply to be entertained but to be relieved of the act of believing. In many ways, we hire an other, Hollywood to be precise, to believe for us.

Hollywood can thus go on believing for us in the social revolution, trivializing and mystifying it, while neoliberal global capitalism turns revolutionary theory and practice into profitable commodities and marketable brands in a culture that not only defines citizenship and civic engagement by our purchasing power and consumption practices, but that also uses these same revolutionary ideas as vehicles for legitimizing exploitation. The fact is that capitalist commodification of identities, as Rosemary Hennessey maintains, entails the separation of the organization of identity from the complex historical ways capitalism shapes the human relations of exploitation based on these identities (Hennessey 2000, 110). As such, they render invisible the relationship between identity and capitalist exploitation, refusing to address the ways in which these identities are entangled in changes in capitalist consumption and growth in the middle class (Hennessey 2000, 66). Thus, Hollywood believes for us in order to sell us back a commodified version of the revolution, so that we can feel better about supporting social change and bringing an end to oppression, without stopping our shopping sprees. Just wait for the next line of Mockingjay logo on all sorts of merchandise and expect the new Disney-fied Quarter Quell theme park adventure in the near future.

That neoliberal global capitalism has absorbed and coopted the major symbols and iconic figures of revolutionary theory and practice through Hollywood is nothing new. More importantly, it ends up not only rationalizing exploitation but also inadvertently erasing the name of the problem today: capitalism itself. Indeed, as Žižek claims, ideology is most effective when it conceals “the logic of the legitimation of the relations of domination” (Žižek 2012, 15; emphasis on the original). While some commentators have noted the absence of any reasonable Marxist critique of capitalism in the Hunger Games franchise, no one seems to have noticed the deliberate choice of Francis Lawrence as a director for the second installment of the film.

The same concealment operation in the second film of the franchise characterizes Lawrence’s film, I Am Legend, which substitutes the multicultural politics of identity and difference for the importance of class struggle. Nowhere in the film does Lawrence make present the absent system of neoliberal global capitalism or the ultimate capitalist fantasy of living in a world of abundant free commodities and surplus enjoyment, which for the last man on earth can indeed be considered infinite. He would have to live many more lives to be able to exhaust all these resources that sustain it (Khader 2013).

Unfortunately, in both films Lawrence naturalizes and normalizes capitalism and its social relations, by disavowing the need for recognizing the horrific dimension of the class struggle underpinning the fictional narrative world in both films. These films deny the specific conflicts that embody the capitalist conditions of its production: what the power of the hegemonic capitalist ideology does not disclose, in short, is the presence of capitalism itself.

When James Cameron’s Avatar came out, Reuters circulated a photograph of Palestinian children painted blue, brandishing arrows like the Navi tribe in that film, and wearing a kuffiyah around their waists, protesting the Israeli apartheid separation wall at Bilin. Many Mondoweiss readers on the merits and faults of such images for the Palestinian liberation struggle, but one issue remained absent in the discussion: global capitalism itself and how it delinks the commodification of such revolutionary images from the exploitation of the Palestinian struggle and identity to conceal the logic of Israel’s apartheid policies and Zionist settler-colonialism.

The post Mockingjay Delusions: The Hunger Games and the Postcolonial Revolution to Come 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.

Oscar López Rivera is a freedom fighter for the independence of Puerto Rico. He has the unenviable distinction of being the longest-held Puerto Rican political prisoner in the United States. He was charged with seditious conspiracy, that is, to conspire to end the United States government’s control over Puerto Rico through force, via membership in the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN). Initially, he was sentenced to 55 years in prison in 1981; later, in 1987, 15 more years were added to his sentence due to an alleged conspiracy to escape, a charge that according to his defense attorney, Jan Susler, was fabricated by the government.[1] In total, Oscar’s prison sentence amounts to 70 years. Thus far, he has completed 32 of those years. Susler, in an interview for the online newspaper Noticel, said:

Cuando lo acusan a él y los demás [nacionalistas puertorriqueños] de conspiración básicamente es porque el gobierno no sabía quién había hecho qué, ni qué específicamente habían hecho. Conspiración no es haber hecho algo. Es una acusación de haberse puesto de acuerdo para terminar con el control colonial de los Estados Unidos en Puerto Rico. Si el gobierno estadounidense supiera que estas personas hubieran cometido algo específico, los hubiesen acusado de otros delitos, pero no fue así. Ante la falta de evidencia, sólo los acusaron de conspiración sediciosa.[2]

[When he and the others [Puerto Rican nationalists] are charged with conspiracy, it’s basically because the government didn’t know who had done what, or what exactly they had done. Conspiracy is not having done something. It is a charge of having agreed to put an end to colonial control of the United States in Puerto Rico. If the U. S. government had known that they had done something specific, they would have charged them with other crimes, but that was not the case. Given the lack of evidence, they charged them only with seditious conspiracy.[3]]

When they were arrested, López Rivera and his compatriots refused to recognize U. S. jurisdiction over them, pleading that U. S. control over Puerto Rico is illegitimate and a crime against humanity, and that they should therefore be considered prisoners of war and tried before an international court. In spite of the fact that this is a valid legal argument recognized by various international judicial bodies, the U. S. government refused to accept it and tried them as common criminals.[4]

Historical background

In order to understand López Rivera’s case, it is necessary to know a little about Puerto Rican history. The territory has a century-long political status problem that dates back to the United States’ invasion of the island in 1898, during the Spanish-American War, from which the United States emerged as a world power. Until that time, the island had been one of the last colonies (along with Cuba and the Philippines) that were still left to the Spanish Empire after the wars of independence in the rest of Latin America. Since then, the island has become an overseas possession of the United States, subject to the will of Congress, which has the final word over all matters concerning Puerto Rico. With the change of sovereignty, a military government was imposed that lasted until 1900, the year Congress passed the Foraker Act, which provided for the creation of a civilian government, and English was decreed the official language of public instruction, remaining as such until 1948.

That same year, Puerto Ricans were allowed for the first time to elect their own governor. Prior to that, the President of the United States designated the governor. The current status of Puerto Rico was established in 1952, known as the Estado Libre Asociado (ELA) in Spanish and translated into English as “Commonwealth” in official documents. In practice, the ELA didn’t bring about real change in the relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States, since the territory’s sovereignty still lies in the hands of Congress and any change in the Constitution of Puerto Rico has to be approved by it. Puerto Rico doesn’t have representation before the federal government either, save for a non-voting representative in Congress known as the Resident Commissioner, nor do Puerto Ricans have the right to vote for President. The island is also obligated by law to only use U. S. ships, which are among the most expensive in the world, when transporting goods by sea.

From the time of the invasion, many struggles were fought to free Puerto Rico from U. S. domination through various means within and outside the electoral system, including armed struggle. One of the most dramatic examples of armed struggle was the nationalist uprising in 1950. José “Che” Paraliticci, states in his book Cien años tras las rejas: Historia de los presos independentistas puertorriqueños bajo el regimen de los Estados Unidos (One Hundred Years Behind Bars: The History of Pro-Independence Prisoners under the United States Regime) that, “Since the United States invaded Puerto Rico in 1898 and took possession of the country both militarily and politically, there has not been a single decade in which a supporter of independence hasn’t gone to jail, with the exception, perhaps, of the twenties.”[5] Persecution of the independence movement increased during the forties and fifties, becoming one of the most violently repressive times in its history.

The campaign to release Oscar López Rivera

Oscar López Rivera’s case is noteworthy for several reasons. Firstly, his sentence is disproportionately long, considering that he was not found guilty of any violent acts. Indeed, when he was sentenced in 1981, the average prison sentence for murder was 10.3 years, which makes his sentence over five times longer than the average sentence for murder.[6] Another noteworthy aspect is that in 1999 Bill Clinton, then President of the United States, offered him and other political prisoners a pardon if they would serve ten more years. López Rivera rejected the offer because two of his compatriots in prison, José Alberto Torres and Haydée Beltrán, were not included in it at that time. Torres and Beltrán have since been released, while López Rivera remains in prison.[7] Lastly, his case has received much international attention during the past year, with an ever-growing multitude of people advocating for his release. Supporters include examples as diverse as Ricky Martin, the musical group Calle 13, the South African Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the indigenous Guatemalan leader Rigoberta Menchú, Northern Irish peace activist Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Argentinian human rights activist Arturo Pérez Esquivel, and people from across the political spectrum in Puerto Rico, the United States, and the rest of the world.

The campaign to release López Rivera has gained momentum since 2012, which marked López Rivera’s thirtieth year in prison. There are currently several efforts and initiatives to create awareness of his case, both locally and internationally, and to pressure President Barack Obama to grant him a pardon. Some notable examples are the simultaneous protests held in the cities of San Juan (the capital of Puerto Rico), New York, Chicago, and Washington, D. C., on November 23, 2013, and the protest held every last Sunday of the month by the group 32 x Oscar. Additionally, every week El Nuevo Día, one of the main Puerto Rican newspapers, publishes the letters that López Rivera sends his granddaughter. It is very likely that the momentum and the certain urgency with which the campaign has been moving this past year is due to the fact that President Obama is in his second term in office. Since the Constitution forbids him to run for office again in 2016, there is a greater chance that the elections will be won by the candidate of the GOP, reducing considerably López Rivera’s chances of getting a pardon.

Oscar López Rivera and Nelson Mandela: Avatars of a same spirit

López Rivera’s case highlights the tensions between Puerto Rico and the United States as a result of their colonial relationship; it is an obvious example of how Puerto Ricans do not have the power to decide the fate of one of their own citizens, a fact that is instinctively felt and resented in the Puerto Rican psyche, regardless of what political affiliation one might have.[8] The case also reveals the contradictions inherent to colonialism. Recently, the world suffered the loss of Nelson Mandela, who was, like López Rivera, a political prisoner because of his struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Among the multiple tributes offered to the memory of Mandela, including from President Obama, it is easy to forget that Mandela was on the list of the United States’ most wanted terrorists until not very long ago and that his incarceration in South Africa was achieved thanks to the cooperation of the U. S. government. An event honoring Mandela was organized in New York in 1990, on occasion of his first visit to the United States after having been released from prison a few months earlier. At the time, David Dinkins was mayor of New York, the first black person to hold that office and whose campaign received the support of the Puerto Rican community. Among the organizers of the event were several Puerto Ricans that played a key role in the election of Dinkins. They proposed to invite as guests of honor Puerto Rican nationalists Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, and Oscar Collazo, who had also been political prisoners. When the Secret Service found out, they proceeded to warn Dinkins, who made public statements calling the Puerto Rican nationalists “murderers.” The irony of this episode is that at the time, Mandela was still on the same list of wanted terrorists as López Rivera.[9] Later, Mandela publicly stated that it would have been an honor for him to have shared the floor with the Puerto Rican nationalists, who, like him, fought for the liberation of their people.[10]

The similarities between Mandela and López Rivera are many. Both men share the experience of being political prisoners, both were charged with seditious conspiracy, both embraced armed struggle as a mechanism to achieve self-government, both appeared on the United States’ list of wanted terrorists, and both had the overwhelming support of their respective peoples for their release from prison. As Howard Jordan wrote in an article for the Institute of the Black World:

While Oscar López Rivera’s name does not have the international immediate name recognition of Mandela’s, the parallels are striking. Both Mandela and now Oscar López were jailed for “seditious conspiracy” for trying to overthrow a colonial government that was violating international law and committing “crimes against humanity.” Also in their respective eras Mandela and Oscar were the longest held political prisoners, receiving disproportionate sentences though having never engaged in any act of violence. Both men were also tortured, held in solitary confinement, and had barbaric acts committed against their persons in prison.

Both freedom fighters garnered calls for their release from religious leaders, Members of Congress, elected officials and celebrities. Nobel Prize Laureate and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu stated that López’s only crime was “conspiring to free his people from the shackles of imperial injustice.”[11]

It is necessary to add that both men’s ideas about armed struggle are complex and nuanced. Both López Rivera and Mandela embraced armed struggle as a way to achieve their purposes in the belief that it is the right of all peoples to resort to it when they suffer oppression and are denied the right to self-determination. However, neither one would rejoice whenever violence was resorted to in the name of national liberation,[12] a very different attitude from that of the fanatic extremist who indiscriminately and blindly is willing to commit atrocities for the sake of an ideal, whatever it may be.

Oscar López Rivera is a political prisoner in a country that categorically denies the existence of them in its jails. But exist they do. In spite of the U. S. government’s efforts to draw attention away from that fact, and from the case of López Rivera in particular, calls for his release have been too strong to ignore. It remains to be seen whether President Obama will improve his poor record when it comes to granting pardons (the lowest of all the presidents in recent history)[13] and finally understand the enormous contradiction of being a Nobel Peace Prize winner and a warden of political prisoners at the same time.

The post Oscar López Rivera, Nelson Mandela, and U. S. Colonialism (English) appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

(Article in English)

Oscar López Rivera es un luchador por la independencia de Puerto Rico. Tiene la distinción nada envidiable de ser el prisionero político puertorriqueño en los Estados Unidos que más tiempo lleva encarcelado. El cargo que se le imputó fue conspiración sediciosa, es decir, conspirar para acabar con el dominio del gobierno estadounidense en Puerto Rico mediante la fuerza, vía membresía en las Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN). Inicialmente, fue condenado a 55 años de prisión en 1981; luego en 1987, se le añaden 15 años adicionales a su sentencia por un alegado intento de escaparse de prisión, un cargo que según su abogada, Jan Susler, fue fabricado por el gobierno estadounidense.[1] En total, la sentencia de López Rivera suma 70 años de prisión. Hasta la fecha, ha cumplido 32 de esos años. Susler, en una entrevista con el periódico digital Noticel, dijo:

Cuando lo acusan a él y los demás [nacionalistas puertorriqueños] de conspiración básicamente es porque el gobierno no sabía quién había hecho qué, ni qué específicamente habían hecho. Conspiración no es haber hecho algo. Es una acusación de haberse puesto de acuerdo para terminar con el control colonial de los Estados Unidos en Puerto Rico. Si el gobierno estadounidense supiera que estas personas hubieran cometido algo específico, los hubiesen acusado de otros delitos, pero no fue así. Ante la falta de evidencia, sólo los acusaron de conspiración sediciosa.[2]

Al ser arrestados, López Rivera y sus compatriotas se negaron a reconocer la jurisdicción de los Estados Unidos, amparándose en que el control de Estados Unidos sobre Puerto Rico es ilegítimo y un crimen contra la humanidad, y que por lo tanto, son prisioneros de guerra y sus respectivos casos deben ventilarse ante un tribunal internacional. A pesar de ser esta una posición reconocida por diversos organismos de derecho internacional, el gobierno estadounidense se negó a reconocerla y los juzgó como criminales comunes.[3]

Antecedentes históricos

Para entender el caso de López Rivera, es necesario saber un poco acerca de la historia de Puerto Rico. El país sufre un problema centenario de estatus político desde que fue invadido por los Estados Unidos en 1898, a raíz de la Guerra Hispano-Estadounidense (conocida también como la Guerra Hispanoamericana), de donde Estados Unidos emergió como una potencia mundial. Hasta ese momento, la isla había sido una de las últimas colonias (junto con Cuba y las Filipinas) que le quedaban al Imperio Español luego de las guerras de independencia del resto de Latinoamérica. Desde entonces, la isla se convirtió en posesión de ultramar de los Estados Unidos, sujeta a la voluntad del Congreso estadounidense, el cual tiene la última palabra sobre los asuntos concernientes a Puerto Rico. Con el cambio de soberanía, se impuso un gobierno militar que duró hasta 1900, año en que el Congreso aprobó la Ley Foraker, que proveyó para la creación de un gobierno civil, y se decretó el inglés como idioma oficial de enseñanza pública, el cual se mantuvo hasta 1948.

En este mismo año se le permitió a los puertorriqueños elegir mediante el voto a su propio gobernador. Hasta la fecha, el gobernador era designado por el Presidente de los Estados Unidos. En 1952 se estableció el estatus actual de Puerto Rico, conocido como el Estado Libre Asociado (ELA), traducido al inglés en documentos oficiales como Commonwealth. En la práctica, el ELA no trajo un cambio real en las relaciones entre Puerto Rico y Estados Unidos, ya que la soberanía del país sigue en manos del Congreso y cualquier cambio a la Constitución de Puerto Rico tiene que contar con su visto bueno. Puerto Rico tampoco cuenta con representación ante el gobierno federal, salvo por un Comisionado Residente que no tiene derecho al voto en el Congreso. Los habitantes de Puerto Rico tampoco tienen derecho al voto presidencial. La isla está obligada por ley, además, a utilizar exclusivamente la marina mercante estadounidense, la cual se encuentra entre las más caras del mundo.

Desde el momento de la invasión, se luchó para librar a Puerto Rico del dominio estadounidense por distintos medios dentro y fuera del sistema electoral, incluyendo la lucha armada. Uno de los ejemplos más dramáticos de lucha armada fue la insurrección nacionalista ocurrida en 1950. José “Che” Paraliticci, en su libro Cien años tras las rejas: Historia de los presos independentistas puertorriqueños bajo el régimen de los Estados Unidos, escribió: “Desde que Estados Unidos invadió a Puerto Rico en 1898 y comenzó a regir política y militarmente sobre el país, no ha habido una sola década en que algún independentista no haya ido a la cárcel, tal vez con la excepción de la década del veinte.”[4] La persecución del independentismo se agudizó durante las décadas del cuarenta y cincuenta, convirtiéndose en uno de los momentos en que más violentamente se reprimió.

La campaña para excarcelar a Oscar López Rivera

El caso de López Rivera llama la atención por distintas razones. Primeramente, su sentencia es desproporcionalmente excesiva, considerando que no se le halló culpable de ningún acto violento. De hecho, cuando fue sentenciado en 1981, el promedio de años impuesto como sentencia por asesinato era de 10.3, lo que hace su sentencia sobre cinco veces más larga que el promedio por asesinato.[5] Otro aspecto que llama la atención es que en 1999 el entonces Presidente de los Estados Unidos, Bill Clinton, le ofreció a él y a otros prisioneros políticos un indulto si cumplían diez años más. López Rivera lo rechazó porque no se le extendió a dos de sus compatriotas en prisión, José Alberto Torres y Haydée Beltrán. Actualmente, Torres y Beltrán ya han sido excarcelados, mientras López Rivera sigue en prisión.[6] Por último, se destaca la atención internacional que su caso ha recibido en el último año, con un coro de voces abogando por su excarcelación entre las cuales se pueden contar ejemplos tan diversos como el cantante Ricky Martin, el grupo musical Calle 13, el arzobispo anglicano sudafricano Desmond Tutu, la líder indígena guatemalteca Rigoberta Menchú, la activista por la paz norirlandesa Mairead Corrigan Maguire, el activista argentino por los derechos humanos Arturo Pérez Esquivel y personas de todos los sectores políticos en Puerto Rico, en Estados Unidos y el resto del mundo.

La campaña para excarcelar a López Rivera ha cobrado ímpetu desde el 2012, al cumplirse 30 años de su encarcelación. Actualmente existen varios esfuerzos e iniciativas para crear conciencia del caso, tanto a nivel local como internacional, y para presionar al Presidente Barack Obama a que le conceda un indulto. Algunos ejemplos notables son las marchas simultáneas celebradas en las ciudades de San Juan, Nueva York, Chicago y Washington, D. C. el 23 de noviembre de 2013 y la manifestación realizada el último domingo de cada mes por el grupo 32 x Oscar. Adicionalmente, cada semana el periódico El Nuevo Día publica las cartas que López Rivera le envía a su nieta. Es muy probable que el ímpetu y la cierta urgencia con que se ha llevado a cabo la campaña en el último año para la excarcelación de López Rivera tenga que ver con el hecho de que el Presidente Obama esté en su segundo término. Al no poder postularse nuevamente en las elecciones de 2016 por disposición constitucional, es más probable que salga electo un candidato del GOP, aminorando considerablemente las probabilidades de conseguir un indulto para López Rivera.

Oscar López Rivera y Nelson Mandela: Avatares del mismo espíritu

El caso de López Rivera expone las tensiones entre Puerto Rico y los Estados Unidos, producto de su relación colonial al ser un ejemplo obvio de cómo los puertorriqueños no tienen poder para decidir el destino de uno de sus ciudadanos, algo que instintivamente se (re)siente en la psiquis puertorriqueña, independientemente de las afiliaciones o simpatías políticas de cada cual.[7] El caso también revela las contradicciones inherentes al coloniaje. Recientemente, el mundo sufrió la pérdida de Nelson Mandela, quien fue, al igual que López Rivera, prisionero político por su lucha contra el apartheid en Sudáfrica. En medio de los múltiples honores ofrecidos a la memoria de Mandela, incluyendo de parte del Presidente Obama, es fácil olvidar que Mandela figuró en la lista de los terroristas más buscados de los Estados Unidos hasta hace poco y que su encarcelación en Sudáfrica se dio gracias a la cooperación del gobierno estadounidense. En 1990 se le organizó un homenaje a Mandela en la ciudad de Nueva York, en ocasión de su visita a los Estados Unidos a los pocos meses de haber sido excarcelado. Para aquel entonces, el alcalde era David Dinkins, el primer alcalde negro que había tenido Nueva York y cuya campaña recibió el apoyo de la comunidad puertorriqueña. Entre los organizadores del homenaje había varios puertorriqueños que jugaron un papel clave en la elección de Dinkins. Estos propusieron que se invitaran a compartir tarima con Mandela a los nacionalistas puertorriqueños Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda y Oscar Collazo, quienes también habían sido prisioneros políticos. Al enterarse el Servicio Secreto de la intención de los organizadores, se comunicaron con Dinkins, quien hizo declaraciones públicas tildando a los nacionalistas puertorriqueños de “asesinos”. Lo irónico de este episodio es que para ese entonces Mandela todavía aparecía en la misma lista de terroristas que López Rivera.[8] Más adelante, Mandela declaró públicamente que hubiera sido un honor para él compartir tarima con los nacionalistas puertorriqueños, que al igual que él, luchaban por la liberación de su pueblo.[9]

Las similitudes entre Mandela y López Rivera son varias. Ambos hombres comparten la experiencia de ser prisioneros políticos, ambos fueron acusados de conspiración sediciosa, ambos abrazaron la lucha armada como mecanismo para alcanzar el autogobierno, ambos figuraron en la lista de terroristas de los Estados Unidos y ambos contaron con el apoyo abrumador de sus respectivos pueblos para su excarcelación. Como escribió Howard Jordan en un artículo para el Institute of the Black World:

While Oscar López Rivera’s name does not have the international immediate name recognition of Mandela’s, the parallels are striking. Both Mandela and now Oscar López were jailed for “seditious conspiracy” for trying to overthrow a colonial government that was violating international law and committing “crimes against humanity.” Also in their respective eras Mandela and Oscar were the longest held political prisoners, receiving disproportionate sentences though having never engaged in any act of violence. Both men were also tortured, held in solitary confinement, and had barbaric acts committed against their persons in prison.

Both freedom fighters garnered calls for their release from religious leaders, Members of Congress, elected officials and celebrities. Nobel Prize Laureate and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu stated that López’s only crime was “conspiring to free his people from the shackles of imperial injustice.”[10]

Sobre la lucha armada es necesario añadir que las visiones de ambos hombres sobre la violencia son complejas. Tanto López Rivera como Mandela abogaron por la lucha armada para lograr sus objetivos en el sentido de que es el derecho de todo pueblo recurrir a ella cuando se le oprime y se le niega su derecho a la autodeterminación. Sin embargo, ninguno se regocijaba cuando se recurría a la violencia en nombre de la liberación nacional,[11] una actitud muy diferente del extremista fanático que indiscriminada y ciegamente está dispuesto a cometer atrocidades en nombre de su ideal, sea el que sea.

Oscar López Rivera es un prisionero político en un país que niega categóricamente la existencia de ellos en sus cárceles. Sin embargo, efectivamente los tiene. A pesar del esfuerzo llevado a cabo por el gobierno estadounidense para invisibilizar esta realidad, y en particular el caso de Oscar, el reclamo para su excarcelación ha sido demasiado fuerte como para ignorarse. Queda por ver si el Presidente Obama mejorará su pobre récord de conceder indultos (el más bajo de todos los presidentes en historia reciente)[12] y entenderá la profunda contradicción de ser ganador de un Premio Nobel de la Paz, y a la vez, carcelero de prisioneros políticos.

The post Oscar López Rivera, Nelson Mandela y el colonialismo de los Estados Unidos (Español) appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

J’ai rencontré Jilali Hamham à Angers quelques mois après la parution de son premier roman, MachiAdam chez Rivages/Noir. Il m’a fait visiter sa ville, il m’a montré la bibliothèque où, petit garçon, il a sorti autant de livres qu’il le pouvait, ainsi que l’université où il a fait ses études et les lieux du centre-ville qui lui sont chers. J’ai également discuté avec une gérante de café à Monplaisir qui a vu Hamham grandir, et avec la libraire qui a soutenu et suivi son projet de roman. À la fin de cette journée, nous nous sommes assis le temps d’un entretien. Au cours de celui-ci, il a parlé de son premier texte, La souffrance (2006), écrit quand il était étudiant en lettres étrangères appliquées à l’Université d’Angers, et de la passion qu’il a toujours eue pour la lecture et la littérature. Lorsque nous avons commencé à parler de MachiAdam, c’est le calvaire à travers lequel Hamham est passé avant de trouver un éditeur qui m’a frappée avant tout. J’ai donc gardé cette histoire, un genre de thriller en soi, entière. Hamham a le don du verbe; il calcule et pèse chaque mot. Comme son écriture parsemée de points d’exclamation le laisse entrevoir, il s’enthousiasme dans et pour la vie.

Dans MachiAdam, le lecteur fait la connaissance d’un jeune homme talentueux, étudiant en langues et épris de la douce Marie-Anne. Toutefois, il se lasse des fois, se demande où mèneront ses études, et donc ne voit pas l’intérêt de persister. Il arrive un moment où il doit choisir entre suivre le chemin des études ou s’allier à des copains de la grande délinquance, qui lui proposent d’aller chercher de la drogue au Maroc. Attiré par l’intensité et l’argent de l’univers de la drogue, Adam décide d’embarquer Marie-Anne dans son affaire de trafic, se servant de sa naїveté et de sa confiance. Avec elle, il peut se présenter en amoureux afin de plus facilement passer la frontière. Une fois au Maroc, Adam est vite dépassé par la manigance réfléchie et l’intelligence cruelle de cet univers.

Avec Adam, Hamham a créé un protagoniste inoubliable qui entame une descente aux enfers. Adam saura-t-il s’en sortir ? Trouvera-t-il l’antidote au mal ? L’histoire de cette descente aux enfers, c’est l’histoire de MachiAdam, un roman palpitant d’un rythme à perdre haleine.

******

Laura Reeck : Combien de temps avez-vous mis pour écrire MachiAdam, un roman tout de même copieux ?

Jilali Hamham : La première partie du roman j’ai dû mettre un an, un an et demi même. Et la deuxième partie du roman, comme j’avais déjà le contact avec François Guérif [éditeur], je l’ai faite en quatre mois. Même moi, j’ai été surpris, j’ai vraiment plié ça en quatre mois. J’étais vraiment boosté. Vous savez, le meilleur carburant, c’est la confiance. Quand il y a quelqu’un qui te dit « j’ai confiance en toi, tu vas y arriver »…

LR : Donc vous n’avez pas présenté tout le roman en manuscrit…

JH : J’avais que la première partie !

LR : Est-ce que vous pouvez décrire en quelques mots comment vous avez trouvé votre éditeur, Rivages/Noir ?

JH : Faut savoir que le milieu de la littérature est un milieu un peu fermé. J’aime pas beaucoup faire la victime, mais il y a quand même des réalités qu’il nous faut vraiment mettre au jour. C’est comme une caste incestueuse, un cercle très fermé. C’est souvent les « fils de » et les « filles de » qui ont accès à l’édition. Moi, j’avais déjà une petite expérience de par mon essai qui était paru chez un éditeur à compte d’auteur, donc j’avais investi mes propres deniers, etc., je l’ai porté moi-même dans les conférences. Partout où j’allais, je portais mes livres, j’ai fait des campagnes d’affichages à Paris, j’ai même reçu des amendes et tout… J’avais compris que pour aller plus loin, il fallait vraiment être dans une grosse équipe, une grosse machine. J’ai un peu analysé le milieu, et j’avais reçu déjà des réponses négatives. Mais les mecs, je pense pas qu’ils avaient pris le temps de lire…

J’ai un peu prolongé ma réflexion, et je me suis dit : « Comment je fais pour y arriver ? ». Je croyais vraiment en moi et dans mon texte, mon choix s’est tout naturellement porté vers la collection Rivages/Noir, avec un éditeur qui s’appelait François Guérif. J’ai analysé toutes ses interviews, j’ai regardé ses vidéos, je mettais sur papier toutes les accroches, les choses qui étaient susceptibles d’attirer son attention. Ensuite, j’ai cherché à le rencontrer, mais pas sous n’importe quel prétexte; en fait, je me suis fait passer pour un journaliste qui venait de créer un fanzine, etc., qui voulait faire ma première avec lui… Comme je n’avais pas son mail, je me suis entraîné sur une autre maison d’édition pour voir un peu le système, comment on passait les étages pour arriver to the last, au dernier étage, là où il y a le boss. Suite à ça, j’ai réussi à avoir le mail. Ensuite, en répercutant l’expérience que j’avais acquise par rapport à cette tentative, j’ai appelé Rivages. Au bout de deux-trois personnes différentes que j’ai dribblées un petit peu par la parole, j’ai réussi à avoir le mail de François Guérif. J’ai rédigé un mail où je me présentais comme le journaliste, etc. J’avais même soumis dix points que nous allions vraiment discuter, j’avais prévu quarante minutes, etc.

Donc j’envoie le mail, je ne reçois pas tout de suite de réponse parce que James Ellroy [écrivain américain de polars] était en pleine promo en France donc il n’avait pas trop le temps. Au bout d’une quinzaine de jours, il me répond. Après quelques relances, il me dit « Oui, appelez-moi tel jour ». Le jour en question, j’étais parti à la fac, il y avait deux salles mitoyennes condamnées pour être sûr que personne ne m’entende au cas où ça ne passe pas… C’était le conseil de guerre : j’avais deux ordinateurs avec les phrases en caractère 48 devant moi – les phrases à ne pas louper –, des notes à droite à gauche, un paquet de stress aussi dans le ventre, et je prends le téléphone et j’appelle à l’heure indiquée. Là je tombe sur la secrétaire qui me dit de rappeler dans cinq minutes. Mon stress est parti dans ce premier appel, ce qui fait que j’étais opérationnel pour le deuxième appel. Au bout du deuxième appel, je tombe sur François Guérif. Je lui laisse même pas le temps d’en placer une, je lui dis « Je vous remercie d’accepter ma démarche » pour pas qu’il rentre dans les questions etc., et donc là il me demande choisir entre deux dates, il me précise que la dernière date, il part en vacances après, donc moi je me suis dit « Mieux vaut prendre le dernier rendez-vous pour ensuite que ce soit frais pendant qu’il est en vacances ».

Voilà, je raccroche ensuite, avant même qu’on puisse parler de quoi que ce soit. Suite à ça je commence à préparer mon manuscrit : dans une interview, j’avais vu qu’il prêtait une attention définitive sur les dix premières lignes. Pour lui, dix lignes suffisaient à juger de la qualité d’un auteur. Donc j’ai dû remodeler mon texte… J’étais vraiment dans l’hésitation à cette période entre une partie que je voulais vraiment… J’avais en fait une tendance trop balzacienne à amener mon sujet lentement, et j’ai vu par la force des choses qu’il fallait vraiment faire un découpage. Donc j’ai reconfiguré mon texte, je l’ai corrigé, je l’ai imprimé et, par inadvertance, le texte est sorti en format paysage, et donc quand je classais mes feuilles, j’étais vraiment très énervé d’avoir à tout réimprimer, et en fait je me suis dit « Non. Je vais le faire en format paysage, comme ça quand je vais lui apporter là-bas, il va aller en vacances dans l’avion avec ! ». Ça fait partie des petits signes – je suis un petit peu mystique, j’ai une petite mystique qui m’accompagne souvent, je fais beaucoup attention aux signes, et j’ai pris ça pour un signe.

Je précise au fait que tout a été fait sous une fausse identité – faux mail, faux nom, faux prénom, tout, la totale. Donc ensuite, je prends un rendez-vous à Paris, je pars d’Angers à la gare, je prépare mes textes, j’arrive à Paris, j’ai une amie qui m’attendait là-bas, on part dans un café, je révise mes fiches. J’arrive au rendez-vous, je rentre chez Rivages, j’ai croisé quatre ou cinq pontes du showbusiness… Je voyais déjà qu’il y avait beaucoup de pâleur, c’était blanc… Je suis rentré, je me suis présenté. La secrétaire m’a regardé, elle a appelé la secrétaire personnelle de François. Au dernier moment, avant de raccrocher, on lui a dit que oui, en effet, il y avait bien un rendez-vous. Donc elle m’a indiqué le bureau. Je suis arrivé, il y avait François Guérif en face de moi, imposant, dans son fauteuil en cuir, affalé. Il y avait une jeune femme derrière lui qui était en train de farfouiller un petit peu la bibliothèque. Je regarde François Guérif, qui m’avait déjà fait une forte impression, parce que j’avais tellement l’habitude de le voir… En fait c’était comme un parrain : je le voyais dans les vidéos, à force de les revoir, de lire tous ses autres articles, je le connaissais. L’avoir face à moi, c’était autre chose. Je lui dis « Je vous remercie de me recevoir, ça prouve que… ». Et il me dit « Ça prouve que quoi ? » et là j’ai un blanc, je sais plus quoi dire et après je dis « Ça prouve que vous avez su rester humble malgré le succès », il m’a dit « J’espère » en rigolant. Après, je me maudis d’avoir eu cette idée « Mais qu’est-ce que je raconte »… Après je pose mon cartable devant lui, et je ne voulais pas parler devant la secrétaire, donc je faisais en sorte de perdre mon temps pour récupérer mes feuilles, et les secondes s’égrenaient lentement, mais d’une lenteur ! d’une lenteur, vous n’avez même pas idée ! Suite à ça, la secrétaire part, je me retrouve face à lui, mais je voyais qu’il y avait aussi beaucoup d’allées et venues dans le couloir… donc là je me retourne vers lui, je lui dis « Excusez-moi, est-ce qu’il serait possible de fermer la porte ? ». Il me dit « Oui, je vous en prie ». Je ferme la porte, je me retrouve seul à seul face à lui. C’était le money time comme disent les Américains. C’est là que tout se jouait.

Je lui dis « Écoutez je vais me présenter, ça vous permettra de savoir qui je suis et où on va ».  Et je pense que lui, là, il a dû se demander « Mais qu’est-ce qu’il me raconte ce gars ? Pourquoi il me parle de le connaître ? ». Et donc j’ai commencé comme ça : « Cher monsieur, en préparant cette entrevue, j’ai consulté un certain nombre d’interviews vous concernant. L’une d’entre elles a particulièrement attiré mon attention, vous faisiez référence à la notion du risque. Vous reprochiez à vos collègues de ne pas prendre assez de risques, ce qui peut être surprenant quand on dirige une collection portant sur les gangsters… Et si cet article m’a interpellé plus qu’un autre, c’est parce que moi, j’ai pris un très gros risque ce matin ». Et là il s’affale sur son siège, et il a été très joueur, il m’a dit « Ah bon ? Vous avez pris un gros risque ce matin ? Mais quel est ce risqué ? ». Et là je le regarde : « Voilà, j’ai pris le risque de me présenter à vous sous une fausse identité pour vous donner ceci ». Et je plonge la main dans mon sac, je récupère le manuscrit, et comme je disais j’aurais pu sortir un flingue, c’aurait été la même chose, et je sors le manuscrit, je le tends. Et alors là, il a été grand seigneur, il s’affale encore plus sur son siège et il me dit « Je vous tire mon chapeau, je vous tire mon chapeau ». Après il s’avance, il tend la main, il récupère le manuscrit, il me regarde, il me dit « Mais je vais vous dire une chose : vous avez pris un très gros risque en effet. Par contre je ne jugerai que sur ça ». Il a agité son livre en me faisant comprendre qu’il ne jugerait que sur les écrits. Il m’a expliqué ensuite – il a été très intelligent et très psychologue. Il a voulu me préparer un refus, en m’expliquant que Rivages recevait jusqu’à mille manuscrits par an, que c’était très rare quand ils en publiaient un, etc. J’ai essayé de lui dire que je voulais repartir de là-bas seulement avec sa parole. Et il m’a donné sa parole. Je lui dis « Écoutez, si vous me donnez votre parole, je repars avec ».

Donc il a pris le manuscrit, je lui ai donné un autre pour son fils qui travaille avec lui (Benjamin). Je suis parti, j’étais satisfait mais… voilà, on peut pas savoir comment les gens réagissent après coup. Dans l’échange, je lui avais quand même précisé que j’avais déjà sorti un essai, je lui avais ramené la couverture de l’essai en question pour ne pas qu’il se dise que je sortais de nulle part et voilà… tout simplement. J’ai reçu une réponse au bout de quinze jours, un mail. Et je vous assure que le quinzième jour, j’y croyais plus. Pour moi, au bout de 24h ou 48h en général on avait une réponse. Quinze jours j’y croyais plus, donc j’étais vraiment très négatif. Et puis, j’ai fait un rêve en fait – pas un rêve prémonitoire : je me voyais dans leur bureau, ils me tendaient une feuille où il y avait écrit – c’est bizarre – mais il y avait écrit « L’arabe » avec deux +. Et il me dit « Ouais, c’est juste que j’étais en vacances ». Et le lendemain, à mon réveil, je vais sur ma boîte mail, mais il n’y avait rien. Par contre, en fin de journée, j’y retourne, et là je suis tombé sur le mail où il m’expliquait que le style et le ton étaient surprenants – mot pour mot – et qu’il fallait absolument connaître la suite parce qu’il était au milieu.

Donc après, ils m’ont donné rendez-vous, là j’ai eu rendez-vous avec le fils… et voilà.

LR : Dans ce roman qui est classé souvent comme un polar ou un roman noir, le lecteur ne connaît pas le plan en cours. C’est-à-dire qu’on ne sait pas ce qui va se passer parce que même le personnage principal, Adam, ne sait pas ce qui va se passer. Tout se passe de rendez-vous en rendez-vous en rendez-vous, c’est-à-dire qu’il n’y a pas vraiment d’intrigue qu’on arrive à suivre…

JH : Alors, j’ai tenu à avoir une séparation entre le livre un et le livre deux. Le livre un me permet de distribuer les clés de compréhension au lecteur. Je lui donne tous les codes. Parce que souvent, il faut vraiment aller au fond des choses pour mieux les analyser. Je voulais donner la personnalité du personnage, son origine sociale, toute l’analyse psychologique, toutes les blessures d’enfance, et montrer un petit peu l’environnement où il a grandi. C’était vraiment comme un puzzle : je mets en place les choses, mais d’une manière très très précise. Ensuite, le déroulement commence vraiment dans le deuxième livre. Avec les clés de compréhension, on redécouvre des personnages dans le deuxième livre à partir du premier. Et ensuite, une sorte de va et vient s’installe, il y a vraiment une césure qui était indispensable à mes yeux. Pour résumer, le premier tome, c’est un puzzle où je mets en place, et le deuxième c’est l’action, c’est là où ça commence.

LR : Par rapport à l’utilisation des italiques et notes en bas de page. C’est quelque chose que vous teniez à faire, ou est-ce que c’est l’éditeur qui vous a demandé de le faire ? Et pourquoi avez-vous fait ce choix d’expliquer, de traduire ?

JH : Mon livre, je le rends un petit peu comme une captation, une captation du pouls de la France. C’est-à-dire capter la France par son langage. Et je sais que la France aujourd’hui, c’est un pays qui s’enrichit de jour en jour grâce à l’immigration, et l’immigration a apporté son lot de mots, etc. Il y a vraiment un vocabulaire qui s’est enrichi, et j’ai voulu faire apparaître ce côté français – la langue manouche, le parler… Ça rejoint un peu le prénom Adam El Qalam. El Qalam, c’est le crayon, c’est le parler. J’ai voulu un personnage qui avait, de par sa particularité, un pied dans tous les milieux, et qui pouvait adapter son vocabulaire en fonction de l’interlocuteur. Il y a un très grand auteur qui disait « La richesse, ce n’est pas de connaître le maximum de mots, mais la richesse, c’est de savoir adapter son discours en fonction de l’interlocuteur ». Et Adam est comme ça. Adam, pour moi, c’est le moyen de faire découvrir la France, les différentes strates du pays. Les notes de bas de page, c’était vraiment pour coller à la crédibilité. J’attache une importance extrême à la crédibilité. Ce matin, on a croisé un pote à moi qui a baigné un petit peu dans ce milieu, que j’ai connu un petit peu plus jeune. C’était pour ces mecs-là. Je veux que quand ce mec-là, il lise le livre, il se dise « Le gars, il blague pas. C’est vraiment comme ça que ça s’est passé ». Et j’ai mis la traduction pour que les gens qui n’ont pas accès à ça puissent comprendre, puissent avoir un petit peu la signification. Et vraiment, je veux que ce soit crédible.

LR : Maintenant, une citation de Sun Tzu : « Tout l’art de la guerre est fondé sur la duperie ». S’il y a une guerre dans le roman, de quelle guerre s’agit-il ?

JH : D’une guerre identitaire. La guerre identitaire qui divise Adam en deux. On a le côté bien et le côté mal. On a ce côté, comme je l’expliquais tout à l’heure, Adam vient d’un milieu bétonné. En hébreu, « Adam » signifie « la glaise façonnée par Dieu », donc il veut modeler son avenir lui-même. Donc, il est en rébellion par rapport à son milieu, et la guerre qu’il mène, c’est une guerre inconsciente – entre le bien et le mal : une partie qui aime Marie-Anne et la partie française, et sa partie qui ne se sent pas inclue en France, qui veut la rébellion et qui n’a pour cause que l’argent. Un soldat, c’est un soldat de fortune qui n’a pour cause que celle de l’argent. Et le machiavélisme, c’est pour montrer que c’est un individu réfléchi. Pour lui, la révolte, ce n’est pas d’aller brûler des voitures, mais c’est prendre de l’argent.

LR : Le personnage de Hadj Hakim, l’oncle d’Adam, représente une rupture entre les générations, au sein de la même famille. Est-ce que vous pourriez commenter un peu son rôle dans le roman ?

JH : C’est quelqu’un qui, malgré lui, a une certaine sagesse, qui a une puissance, qui impose un respect lorsqu’on le voit, et qui, malheureusement est complètement dépassé. Lui, c’est quelqu’un qui attache beaucoup d’importance aux rapports humains, à la sincérité, à la spiritualité, et lorsqu’il voit des jeunes qui passent leur temps dans la rue, il leur explique que passer du temps dans la rue, forcément, vous n’en retiendrez pas des choses positives. Il essaye, malgré lui, de donner quand même les gages. Il n’est pas écouté, parce que les gens ont une seule religion : l’euro, ou le dollar. Pour eux, la seule manière d’exister, c’est avoir pour être. On n’a pas le temps de s’embrigader l’esprit. « Hakim », ça vient du mot sagesse. Donc il tend à Adam le panier avec la pomme. C’est une symbolique, pour lui expliquer « Tiens, t’as ta vie entre tes mains. À toi d’en faire bon usage ». Et malheureusement, on apprend par la suite ce qui va se passer. Mais oui, il y a une vraie rupture, et cette rupture fait que le dialogue n’est pas possible. On le prend pour un fou, on le prend pour quelqu’un qui est complètement d’un autre âge et qui est en complète déconnection.

LR : Dans le roman, il y a deux parties. Et on pourrait dire qu’il y a même deux jungles : une en France, une au Maroc. Donc je voulais savoir si ces deux mondes là, dans le roman, fonctionnent selon à peu près les mêmes règles. C’est-à-dire, rien n’est sacré, dans ces deux univers parallèles, ou bien est-ce que vous pensez qu’il y a de nouvelles valeurs sacrées ? Ce sont des univers sans valeur, ou est-ce qu’il y a quand même de nouvelles valeurs ? Même si elles sont négatives…

JH : J’ai envie de dire des valeurs utopiques. Pour prendre le cas particulier de la France, si l’on s’en réfère aux textes – que ce soit la Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen, etc. – il n’y a pas de souci. Il n’y a aucune différence entre les citoyens. Les citoyens naissent et demeurent libres et égaux en droits. Maintenant, c’est la réalité du texte, seulement du texte. Si l’on se réfère à la réalité du terrain, y a une hypocrisie. La particularité des personnes d’origines étrangères, c’est qu’elles portent leurs origines sur leur front. Donc il y a une hypocrisie parce que ces gens-là portent une espèce de plafond de verre au-dessus d’eux, à une époque où ne leur permettait de s’émanciper que dans les travaux manuels. Ensuite, petit à petit, on a réussi à repousser le plafond de verre aux métiers de la vente. Malheureusement, ce n’est pas encore assez. Je trouve qu’on a une élite qui est blanche, et à majorité masculine. Lorsqu’on la compare à la majorité de la population, il y a vraiment un fossé, une distance abyssale. Je pense qu’il y a une mentalité en France… C’est une France qui est un peu sclérosée, qui se replie sur elle-même, qui a peur de la différence, qui a peur de l’autre, et ça bloque un peu le pays. C’est la différence justement avec la mentalité anglo-saxonne, où là on juge la personne selon ses capacités avant sa couleur. C’est pas étonnant qu’il y ait des énormes entreprises comme Google, Yahoo, Facebook etc. qui émergent chez vous, parce qu’on va chercher le talent là où il est. En France, on a des talents, et malheureusement il y a des mecs qui sont obligés de ramer… Moi, je suis obligé de me faire passer pour un journaliste… Vous voyez ce que je veux dire ? On doit faire les choses dix fois plus que les autres. Et c’est fatigant.

LR : Est-ce que la valeur sacrée dans le roman, ce n’est pas l’argent ? C’est-à-dire qu’on est prêt à tout faire pour l’argent dans ces deux univers parallèles, français et marocain.

JH : Pour moi, c’est plus une lutte de pouvoir. À un moment, j’explique, quand Adam rentre dans son quartier, il est avec des jeunes, et Moustafa l’Africain essaye de le raisonner, et lui explique « Écoute, aujourd’hui c’est le business. Même les hommes politiques font du business. Ce sont eux les exemples ». Aujourd’hui, les vrais délinquants ont une cravate, et ils asphyxient, pas avec un flingue, mais avec une signature. Et ce n’est pas comparable avec le mec qui va voler un auto-radio. Et malheureusement, quand tu vas au tribunal, les mecs qui ont volé des autos-radios se retrouvent avec des peines de prison ferme, et les mecs qui ont volé le bien de l’État, qui ont confondu leur poche avec le portefeuille de l’État se retrouvent avec des peines de sursis. Donc c’est pas possible.

Après, pour parler du Maroc, c’était un autre truc : montrer l’hypocrisie des gens, c’est-à-dire que bon, il y a une croyance qui est mise en avant, etc., mais dans la pratique, c’est l’argent qui domine, c’est vraiment le sésame qui ouvre les portes. C’était important pour moi dire aussi qu’en France…

LR : Donc vous vouliez exploiter deux formes d’hypocrisie dans ces deux univers.

JH : Exactement. Autour des valeurs de pouvoir et d’argent.

LR : La fin du roman essouffle le lecteur, c’est impressionnant. Est-ce qu’Adam retrouve son honneur à la fin du roman ? Est-ce qu’il est reparti sur des bases morales ? Est-ce qu’il y a, à la fin du roman, rédemption pour lui ?

JH : Oui et non. Parce qu’il est trop tard. Et malheureusement, il va payer. Comme il est constamment partagé entre deux mondes, il ne réussit pas à trouver sa place. Son geste final est beau, et c’était important pour moi de terminer comme ça. C’est un geste chevaleresque, et c’était métaphorique aussi.

LR : Mais c’était trop tard.

JH : C’était trop tard. C’était métaphorique dans le sens où, pour moi, la scène finale – parce que j’attache beaucoup d’importance aux symboles – a lieu à la frontière, il se fait poignarder à la frontière entre l’Europe et l’Afrique. Donc, par rapport à sa philosophie de vie, entre le bien et le mal. Le bien, l’amour qu’il porte pour Marie-Anne, et le mal, c’est-à-dire le plan machiavélique qu’il a essayé de mettre en place. Donc il est partagé entre ces deux eaux. Et le fait qu’il n’a pas réussi à trancher avant, c’est fatal pour lui. Parce qu’à un moment ou un autre, il faut trancher, et il n’a pas réussi à trancher, donc il en va de sa perte. La métaphore derrière, c’est que quand t’es d’origine étrangère, tu peux dire que t’es Sénégalais alors que t’es d’origine sénégalaise, mais la vérité, c’est que t’es attaché à ton pays, et ton pays, que tu le veuilles ou non, c’est la France, parce que t’as grandi ici. Au pays, tu passes tes vacances, au bout de quinze jours, trois semaines, t’as déjà envie de rentrer… Après, c’est vrai que c’est pas facile, parce qu’ici, t’es pas forcément accepté, mais la différence, elle est dans le regard de l’autre. C’est le regard de l’autre qui te pousse à ressentir ta différence. Parce que de toi-même, tu ne peux pas la ressentir.

En termes de stylistique, il y a le rêve prémonitoire et les phrases qui reviennent à la fin. J’aimais bien, en termes d’écriture.

LR : En ce moment, la presse française parle énormément de trafic de drogues, clans, nouveaux mafiosos, les caïds des banlieues qui remplacent les Corses, etc. Avez-vous perçu à quel point le sujet de ce livre allait être percutant au moment même où tout le monde était en train de parler de ces sujets-là ?

JH : Ça ne m’a pas choqué, dans le sens où on en parle toujours en vérité. Ça revient constamment. Malheureusement, les vrais gangsters aujourd’hui portent des costumes. On peut pas reprocher à quelqu’un aujourd’hui qui est enfermé – je ne dis pas que je légitime ce genre de comportement, mais je peux l’expliquer – quelqu’un qui est enfermé dans un quartier – tout à l’heure, vous avez vu, on a visité un peu le quartier de Monplaisir, vous avez vu comment c’était. Dans mon livre, j’explique que le quartier aspire ses habitants comme un lavabo qui se vide. C’est-à-dire qu’il y a une mairie annexe, le centre commercial… tout est fait pour que la personne ne sorte pas. Donc à un moment, il y a une rupture avec l’autre frange de la population, il y a un autre code qui se met en place, donc on va chercher l’argent parce qu’on veut exister. Moi-même aujourd’hui j’ai du mal à raisonner les petits jeunes pour leur dire « Allez faire des études », ils vont me dire « Pourquoi j’irais m’embrigader à faire cinq années d’études ? »

LR : Dans le roman, les deux monde de l’école et de la rue se confondent, parce qu’Adam a fait des études, il a été dans le milieu universitaire…

JH : Adam a un parcours universitaire remarquable. Et malheureusement, il n’a pas réussi à mettre en exergue ses compétences. Il n’a pas pu s’épanouir dans le travail par rapport à son niveau, parce que quand on a bac+5, il n’est pas tolérable qu’on vous propose des travaux manuels, c’est complètement fou. Donc tenir un discours aux jeunes pour leur dire de faire en sorte de bien travailler à l’école pour avoir des diplômes… ils vous rient au nez aujourd’hui. Ils vous disent « Mais pourquoi je me casserais la tête, untel il a bac+5, il travaille dans une pizzeria. Laisse-moi tranquille, je vais aller chercher l’argent là où il est, et voilà, je ne veux pas perdre de temps ». C’est une vision un peu nihiliste. On en parlait tout à l’heure, je vous montrais le bâtiment qui cimentait l’horizon, c’est vraiment l’image à retenir : un horizon cimenté.

LR : C’est aussi l’image qui commence le roman…

JH : Exactement. Le ciment des premières pages.

LR : Est-ce que vous craigniez que votre livre soit vu et lu comme une apologie du crime et du criminel ?

JH : Je vois ce que vous voulez dire. Pour moi, il n’y avait pas de noir ou blanc. Pour moi, tout est gris. Parce que quelqu’un de bon a forcément une partie mauvaise, quelqu’un de mauvais a quand même un bon fond.

LR : La maîtrise du dialogue, ainsi que la maîtrise du rythme de l’histoire font de MachiAdam un roman profondément filmique pour moi. Et je trouve que la bande-sonore y est déjà. Avez-vous un projet pour adapter ce roman à l’écran ?

JH : Comme je vous disais, j’ai fait quelques rencontres ces derniers temps, dans différentes manifestations liées à la promotion du livre, et j’ai rencontré en effet des gens qui m’en ont parlé. J’ai eu un contact aussi avec quelqu’un qui travaille un petit peu avec différentes chaînes de télévision et qui aimerait me rencontrer pour discuter. Après, pour le moment, je suis vraiment dans l’écriture, j’ai envie de m’y consacrer pleinement. Maintenant, j’aimerais aussi beaucoup adapter, écrire des scénarios pourquoi pas plus tard. On verra en temps voulu. Pour l’instant, le truc, il vient de sortir, mais c’est vrai qu’il y a des scènes qui sont plus cinématographiques.

LR : Avec le succès critique de MachiAdam, est-ce que vous pouvez maintenant viser une carrière d’écrivain ? Est-ce que vous parlez de carrière? Qu’est-ce qui vient après ?

JH : J’aime beaucoup cela mais… Là, mon éditeur va me tuer, parce qu’il me dit « Tu parles toujours de Nelson Mandela », mais ce n’est pas grave. J’adore Nelson Mandela, j’ai lu sa biographie, comme je disais, je suis en train de m’imbiber de beaucoup de ces mouvements révolutionnaires pour mon prochain roman 93 Panthers. Et à la fin de sa biographie, il explique qu’il est arrivé à la fin de son combat. Une fois sorti de prison, il a eu la sensation de s’être hissé au sommet d’une montagne. Il pensait avoir terminé. Et ensuite il a tourné la tête, et il a vu qu’il y avait un paquet de montagnes qui l’attendaient encore. Je me situe là en fait. Je n’ai pas pris MachiAdam pour une finalité. Pour moi c’est juste une étape.

Je pense que je vais être attendu pour le deuxième roman. Après, j’aime aussi l’image du boxeur : quand tu as un titre, tu as combattu… Là je te dis, j’ai qu’une idée, c’est d’y retourner, de terminer… Oui, j’ai vraiment envie de faire une carrière.

LR : Est-ce que vous voulez rester dans le roman noir ?

JH : Vous savez, je le dis franchement, même moi, je ne me considérais pas comme faisant du roman noir. Après, le roman noir, c’est ce qui colle plus, c’est la définition de Machette qui disait « Le roman noir est une histoire de critique sociale qui prend pour anecdote une histoire de crime ». Pour moi, je n’écris pas de thriller. Pour moi, c’est la noirceur de l’âme humaine, le pouvoir, les notions de rapports humains et faire tomber les masques.

Jilali Hamham:  Aujourd’hui, alors que son livre vient de sortir, Jilali Hamham travaille d’arrache-pied sur ses prochains projets, l’ambitieux 93 Panthers (autrement dit, les Blacks Panthers du neuf trois). Il vient aussi de créer avec Karim Madani, édité chez Gallimard Noir, le binôme « CrackZeinberg Factory », dont l’objectif  c’est de « plancher sur différents projets de série TV ! ».

Interview with Jilali HamHam, writer of MachiAdam*

* Translated from original French by: Alisa Belanger

I met with Jilali Hamham in Angers some months after the publication of his first novel, MachiAdam by the editor Rivages/Noir. He gave me a tour of his city, showing me the library where, as a young boy, he checked out as many books as he could, as well as the university where he studied and the downtown places that he holds dear. I also spoke with a café manager at Monplaisir who watched Hamham grow up and with the bookseller who supported and followed his novel’s development. At the end of the day, we sat down long enough for an interview. During our chat, Hamham talked about his first text Suffering [La Souffrance] (2006), written while he was a student of Applied Foreign Languages at the University of Angers, and about his long-standing passion for reading and literature. When we began to discuss MachiAdam, I was above all struck by the ordeal that Hamham underwent before finding an editor. Hence, I retained that story, a type of thriller in itself, in its entirety. Hamham has a verbal gift: he weighs and calculates each word. Just as his writing interspersed with exclamation points suggests, he is zealous in and for life.

In MachiAdam, the reader meets a talented young man majoring in languages, madly in love with the charming Marie-Anne. Yet, he grows tired at times, wonders where his studies will lead, and thus fails to see the point in persisting. There comes a time when he must choose between following the path of his studies or siding instead with quite delinquent friends who ask him to join in a drug run to Morocco. Attracted by the cash and excitement of drugs, Adam decides to enlist Marie-Anne in his trafficking scheme, abusing her naivety and trust. Thanks to her, he can look like he’s traveling for romance, so as to cross the border more easily. Yet, once in Morocco, Adam is quickly surpassed by the cruel intelligence and premeditated plotting of this drug world.

With Adam, Hamham created an unforgettable protagonist who plunges into an underworld. Will Adam know how to survive? Will he find the antidote to evil? The story of this descent into hell is the story of MachiAman, a novel that pulsates to a breathtaking rhythm.

******

Laura Reeck : How long did it take you to write MachiAdam, a rather long novel?

Jilali Hamham : The first part of the novel must have taken me a year, maybe a year and a half. I wrote the second part of the novel in four months, since I had already been in contact with François Guérif. Even I was surprised that I finished it off really in four months. I was really boosted. You know, the best fuel is confidence. When there is someone who says “I believe in you, you’re going to do it…”

LR : So you didn’t submit the entire manuscript…

JH : I only had the first part!

LR : Could you describe in a few words how you found your editor, Rivages/Noir ?

JH : Truth be told, the literary milieu is a rather exclusive milieu. I don’t really like to play the victim, but there are still some realities that must be pointed out. It’s like an incestuous sect, a very closed circle. It’s often the “sons of” or the “daughters of” who have access to publishing. I already had a little experience through my essay that had been printed by an editor with self-publishing, so I had invested my own funds, etc. I had brought it myself to conferences. Everywhere I went, I brought my books, I put up poster campaigns in Paris, I even received some fines and everything… I had understood that, in order to move ahead, it was really necessary to be part of a large group, a big machine. I analyzed the milieu a bit, and I had already received some negative replies. But I don’t think those guys had taken the time to read…

I pursued my thoughts a bit, and I said to myself: “What do I have to do to make it?” I really believed in myself and in my text, my inclination naturally bent towards the collection Rivages/Noir, with an editor named François Guérif. I analyzed all of his interviews, I watched his videos, I listed all of the hooks on paper, the ideas that were likely to attract his attention. Next, I sought to meet him, but not under just any pretext; in fact, I pretended to be a journalist who had just created a fanzine, etc., who wanted to do my release with him… Since I didn’t have his email, I practiced on another publishing house to see the system a little, how you went from one floor to another to arrive at le dernier, the last floor, where the boss sits. Afterwards, I managed to get the email. Then, ricocheting off the experience that I had acquired from that attempt, I called Rivages. After two or three different people that I dribbled a little bit with words, I managed to get a hold of François Guérif’s email. I wrote a message where I presented myself like the journalist, etc. I had even submitted ten points that we were really going to discuss, I had planned on forty minutes, etc.

So I send the message, I don’t hear back right away because James Ellroy [an American crime novelist] was in the middle of a promotional tour in France, so he didn’t have a lot of time. After about fifteen days, he replies. After a few exchanges, he says to me : “Yes, call me on such-and-such a day.” The day in question, I had left for university, there were two closed-off common rooms to be sure that no one would hear me in case it went badly… It was a war council: I had two computers with sentences in 48-point font in front of me—the sentences not to forget—, notes to my right and left, a ball of stress, too, in my stomach, and I take the phone and I call at the foreseen time. There, I fall on the secretary who tells me to call back in five minutes. My stress left me in that first call, which means that I was operational for the second call. On the second call, I fall on François Guérif. I don’t even give him the time to say a word, I say to him: “Thank you for accepting my method” so that he won’t start in on questions, etc. and so, there, he asks me to choose between two dates, he specifies that the last date, he’s leaving on vacation afterwards, so I told myself, “Better to take the last meeting so that it’s fresh later while he’s on vacation.”

That’s it. I hang up after, even before we talked about anything. Afterwards, I begin to prepare my manuscript: in an interview, I had seen that he paid definitive attention to the ten first lines. For him, ten lines were enough to judge the quality of an author. So I had to rework my text… I really hesitated at that time about one part that I really wanted… I actually had too much of a Balzacian tendency to ease slowly into my subject, and I saw by necessity that cutting was absolutely required. So I reconfigured my text, I corrected it, I printed it and, accidentally, the text came out in landscape format, so when I was putting away my sheets, I was really very annoyed to have to reprint everything and, actually, I said to myself “No, I’m going to do it in landscape format. This way, when I bring it to him over there, he’ll take it with him on vacation in the plane!” It was one of those little signs—I’m a tad mystic, I have a little mystic who often escorts me, I pay a lot of attention to signs, and I took that to be a sign.

I should in fact explain that all of this was done under a false identity—false email, false last name, false first name, everything, all of it. So, later, I make a meeting in Paris, I leave from the train station in Angers, I prepare my texts, I disembark in Paris, I have a friend who was waiting for me other there, we head to a café, I review my notes. I turn up at the meeting, I gain entrance to Rivages, I ran into four or five head honchos of show business… I already saw that there was a lot of paleness, it was white… I went in, I introduced myself. The secretary took one glance at me, she called François’s personal secretary. At the last moment, before hanging up, she was told that, yes, indeed, there was a meeting. So she showed me the office. I entered, there was François Guérif in front of me, imposing, in his leather chair, lounging. There was a young woman behind him who was rummaging through the bookshelf a little bit. I look at François Guérif, who had already made a strong impression, because I was so used to seeing him… In fact, he was like a godfather: I saw him in videos, by virtue of re-watching them, reading all of his other articles, I knew him. Having him in front of me, it was another thing. I said to him: “I thank you for welcoming me, it proves that…”

And he says, “It proves what?” and, there, I draw a blank, I no longer know what to say and, then, I say, “It proves that you have known how to remain humble despite your success.” He said to me, “I hope,” laughing. Then, I curse myself of having had this idea, “But what am I saying” … Next, I put my briefcase down in front of him, and I didn’t want to speak in front of the secretary, so I made myself waste time to collect my sheets of paper, and the seconds dragged out slowly, ever so slowly! You have no idea how slowly! Next, the secretary leaves, I find myself facing him, but I saw that there were also a lot of comings and goings in the hallway… so, there, I turn towards him, I say to him, “Excuse me, would it be possible to close the door?” He says to me, “Sure, please feel free.” I close the door, there I am, one on one, facing him. It was the money time, as Americans say. That’s where it all played out.

I say to him, “Listen, I’m going to introduce myself, so that you know who I am and where we’re going.” And I think that, there, he must have asked himself, “But what is this guy talking about? Why is he talking to me about knowing him?” And so I started like this: “Dear sir, in preparing for this interview, I consulted a certain number of interviews conducted with you. One of them especially attracted my attention. You made reference to risks, which can be surprising when a person edits a collection about gangsters… And if this article spoke to me more than another, it’s because, me, I took a very big risk this morning.” And there he collapses on his seat, and he was all game, he said to me, “Oh yeah? You took a big risk this morning? But what was the risk?” And, there, I look at him: “Here goes, I took the risk of coming here under a false identity in order to give you this.” And I plunge my hand into my bag, I pull out the manuscript, and, like I was saying, I could’ve pulled out a pistol, it would’ve been the same thing, and I take out the manuscript, I hold it out. And, there, he was a great gentleman, he relaxes even more on his seat and says to me, “I’ve got to give it to you. I’ve got to give it to you.” Then he moves forward, he holds out his hand, he takes the manuscript, he looks at me, he says to me, “I’m going to tell you something, though. You took a very big risk, indeed. But I will judge only by this.” He waved his book, intimating to me that he would only judge by the words written. He then explained to me—he was very smart and psychological. He wanted to prepare me for a rejection, explaining to me that Rivages received as many as a thousand manuscripts a year, that it was very rare that they published one, etc. I tried to tell him that I wanted to leave from there just with his word. And he gave me his word. I said to him, “Listen, if you give me your word, I’ll leave with it.”

So he took the manuscript, I gave him another one for his son who works with him (Benjamin). I left, I was satisfied but… well, you can never know how people react after the fact. In the exchange, I had still specified that I had already put out an essay, I had brought the cover of the essay in question to him so that he wouldn’t say to himself that I came out of nowhere and that’s it… quite simply. I received a response after fifteen days, an email. And I assure you that the fifteenth day, I no longer believed in it. For me, after 24 or 48 hours, in general, there was a response. Fifteen days, I didn’t believe in it anymore, so I was really very negative. And then, I actually had a dream—not a premonition: I saw myself in their office, they were handing me a sheet where there was written—it’s weird—but there was written “The Arab” with two +. And he says to me, “Yeah, it’s just that I was on vacation.” And the next day, upon awakening, I went to my inbox, but there was nothing. At the end of the day, though, I return, and there I come across the message where he explained to me that the tone and style were surprising—word for word—and that he absolutely needed to know the rest because he was in the middle.

So, then, they gave me a meeting, there, I had a meeting with the son… and, that’s it.

LR : In this novel which is often classified as a detective novel or noir fiction, the reader is unaware of the plan under way–meaning, we don’t know what is going to happen because even the main character, Adam, doesn’t know what is going to happen. Everything occurs from meeting to meeting to meeting, which means that there is no real plotline that may be followed… 

JH : Well, I insisted on having a separation between Book One and Book Two. The first allows me to pass along comprehension keys to the reader. I give him all of the codes, because, often, it is truly necessary to get to the bottom of things in order to analyze them better. I wanted to provide the personality of the character, his social origins, all of the psychological analysis, all of the wounds of childhood, and to show a little bit of the environment where he grew up. It was really like a puzzle: I put things in place, but in a very, very precise manner. Next, the events really begin in Book Two. With the comprehension keys, people rediscover the characters coming from the first book in the second one. Then, a sort of oscillation arises, there is truly a caesura, which was crucial, in my eyes. In sum, the first volume is a puzzle where I pan ahead, and the second is action, where it starts.

LR : In relationship to the use of italics and footnotes, were they something that you wanted to do, or was it your editor who asked you to add them? And why did you opt to explain, to translate?

JH : My book, I forge it a little bit like a recording, a recording of the pulse of France, meaning that the goal is to capture France through its language. And I know that France today is a country which grows richer from one day to the next thanks to immigration. It has brought its share of words, etc. There is truly a vocabulary that has been enriched, and I wanted to make this French side apparent—the manouche language, the speaking… This kind of relates to the first name Adam El Qalam. El Qalam stands for pencil, for speaking. I wanted a character who had, by way of his uniqueness, one foot in every setting, and who could adapt his vocabulary according to the person with whom he conversed. There is a very great author who said, “Richness is not about knowing the maximum number of words; instead, richness is about knowing how to adapt discourse to a listener.” And Adam is like that. For me, Adam is the way to make France discover the different layers of the country. The footnotes, they were really to stick to credibility. I consider it extremely important. This morning, we came across a friend of mine who was somewhat immersed in this setting, that I knew when we were a bit younger. It was for that type of guy. When that guy reads the book, I want him to say to himself, “This bloke, he’s not kidding. This is really how it happened.” And I added the translation so that the people who don’t have access to this slang will be able to understand, to get a touch of the meaning. And, really, I want it to be credible.

LR : Here is a quotation from Sun Tzu: “All warfare is based on deception.” If there is a war in this novel, what war is it?

JH : An identity war. The identity war that divides Adam in two. There’s the good side and the evil side. On the one side, as I was explaining earlier, Adam comes from a cement background. In Hebrew, “Adam” means “the clay sculpted by God,” so he wants to mould his future himself. Hence, he rebels against his surroundings and the war that he wages is a war of the unconscious—between good and evil: a part that loves Marie-Anne and the French part, and the part that feels excluded in France, that wants to rebel and whose only cause is money. A soldier, he’s a soldier of fortune whose sole motivation is money. And the Machiavellianism which shows that he’s a thoughtful individual. For him, revolt is not about burning cars, but taking money.

LR: The character of Hadj Hakim, Adam’s uncle, represents a gap between generations within the same family. Could you comment a bit on his role in the novel?

JH : He is someone who has a certain wisdom despite himself, who has a strength, who imposes respect on those who see him and who, unfortunately, is completely overwhelmed. Him, he’s a person who grants a lot of importance to human relationships, sincerity, spirituality, and when he sees young people who spend their time on the streets, he explains to them that, necessarily, you will not retain good things from spending time on the streets. Despite himself, he still tries to outline the risks. He isn’t listened to because people only have one religion: the euro, the dollar. For them, the only way to exist is to have in order to be. There’s no time for engaging the mind. “Hakim” comes from the word for wisdom. He therefore offers Adam the basket with the apple. It’s symbolic, explaining to him, “Take this, you have your life between your hands. It’s up to you to put it to good use.” And, sadly, what will happen is later shown. But, yeah, there is a true break, and this break makes it so that dialogue is impossible. Others think he’s crazy, others think that he’s someone from a completely different age and completely disconnected.

LR : In the novel, there are two parts. It could be said that there are even two jungles: one in France and one in Morocco. Hence, I would like to ask if these two worlds, in the novel, function according to more or less the same rules. Basically, nothing is sacred in these two parallel universes, or rather do you think that there are new sacred values? Are these worlds without values, or are there instead new values? Even if they’re negative…

JH : I would say utopian values. To take the specific case of France, if we refer to the texts—whether it be The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, etc.—there is no concern. There is no difference between citizens. They are born and remain free and equal in rights. Now, that’s the reality of the text, only the text. If we refer to reality on the ground, there’s hypocrisy. The uniqueness of people from foreign origins is that they wear their origins on their foreheads. So there is a degree of hypocrisy because those people carry a sort of glass ceiling above them. At one time, they were not allowed to emancipate themselves except by manual labor. Next, little by little, they managed to raise the glass ceiling up to the sales profession. Regrettably, it’s not yet enough. I find that there is a white elite, mostly masculine. When compared to the majority ofthe population, there is really a gap, an interminable distance. I think that there’s a mentality in France… It’s a France that is a bit fossilized, that folds in on itself, is afraid of difference, afraid of the other, which always kind of blocks the country. That’s precisely the difference with the Anglo-Saxon mentality, where individuals are judged by their abilities before their color. It’s not surprising that there are enormous businesses like Google, Yahoo, Facebook etc. which emerge among you, because they go to find talent where it lies. In France, we have talents but, unfortunately, there are those who have to strain… Me, I have to pretend to be a journalist… Do you see what I mean? We have to work ten times more than others. It’s tiring.

LR : It seems that the characters are willing to do anything for money in these two parallel French and Moroccan worlds. Is the sacred value in the novel not money?

JH : For me, it’s more of a struggle for power. Let me explain a moment when Adam returns to his neighborhood. He is with young people, Moustafa l’Africain tries to reason with him and explains to him, “Listen, today, everything is business. Even politicians do business. They’re the ones who are the models.” Today, the true delinquents have a tie, and they asphyxiate, not with an arm, but with a signature. And there’s no comparison with the guy who is going to steal a car radio. And, lamentably, when you go to court, the guys who stole car radios receive strict prison sentences, while the guys who stole the wealth of the State, who confused their pockets with the State wallet, receive probation. So it’s just hopeless.

Then, it was another issue concerning Morocco: to show the hypocrisy of people, meaning, well, there is a belief that is purported, etc., but in practice, money is what dominates, it’s really the password that opens doors. It was important for me to say that also in France…

LR : So you wanted to develop two forms of hypocrisy in these two worlds.  

JH : Exactly. Around the values of money and power.

LR : The end of the novel takes the reader’s breath away, it’s impressive. Does Adam regain his honor at the end of the novel? Does he start over with basic morals? At the end of the novel, does he find redemption? 

JH : Yes and no. Because it’s too late. And, unfortunately, he will pay. Since he is constantly torn between two worlds, he never manages to find his place. His final gesture is beautiful, and it was important to me to end that way. It’s a noble gesture, and it was metaphorical, too.

LR : But it was too late.

JH : It was too late. It was metaphorical, for me, to the extent that the final scene—because I consider symbols to be highly important—takes place at the border. He gets caught at the border between Europe and Africa. Hence, considering his philosophy of life, between good and evil. The good, his love for Marie-Anne, and the evil, the Machiavellian plan that he tried to carry out. So he is split between these two waters. And the fact that he didn’t succeed in choosing earlier is fatal to him. Because, at one moment or another, a choice must be made, and he didn’t manage to choose, so he is condemned to his downfall. The underlying metaphor is that when you’re from an immigrant background, you can say that you’re Senegalese even though you’re of Senegalese descent, but the truth is that you’re attached to your country, and your country, whether you want it to be so or not, is France, because you grew up here. You spend your vacation in the old country, after fifteen days, three weeks, you already want to return home… Then again, it’s true that it’s not easy, because, here, you’re not necessary accepted, but the difference resides in the gaze of the other. It’s the gaze of the other that pushes you to feel your dissimilarity. Because you cannot feel it yourself.

In terms of stylistics, there is the foreboding dream and the sentences repeated at the end. I liked them from a literary standpoint.

LR : Currently, the French press is focusing on drug trafficking, clans, new mafiosos, the caids replacing Corsians in underprivileged suburbs [banlieues], etc. To what extent did you perceive that the subject of this book was going to be compelling at the very moment when everyone was addressing such topics?

JH : It didn’t shock me, considering that people actually always talk about it. It comes up constantly. Unfortunately, the real gangsters wear suits today. No one can reproach anyone locked up today—I’m not saying that I condone that type of behavior, but I can explain it—anyone who is locked up in a neighborhood jail. Earlier, you saw, we visited the neighborhood of Monplaisir, you saw how it was. In my book, I explain that the neighborhood swallows up its inhabitants like a bathroom sink emptying down the drain. In other words, there’s a branch of the town hall, a shopping mall… everything is constructed so that the person never leaves. Hence, at some point, there is a break with the other portions of the population, there is another code put into place. As a result, people seek out money because they want to exist. I myself have a hard time arguing today with little youths, telling them “Go to college.” They’re going to ask me, “Why would I bother to go enroll for five years of studies?”

LR : In the novel, the two worlds of the school and the street merge, because Adam went to college, he was part of the university system…

JH : Adam has a remarkable university career. And, sadly, he failed to showcase his skills. He was unable to thrive on the job despite his level, because when you have a Master’s degree, it’s intolerable that you be offered work in manual labor, it’s completely insane. Therefore, giving young people speeches to tell them to work hard in school to earn diplomas… They laugh in your face today. They tell you, “But why would I hit my head against a wall, So-and-so has a Master’s degree, he works in a pizzeria. Leave me alone, I’m going to get the money where it can be had and that’s it. I don’t want to waste my time.” Theirs is a slightly nihilistic vision. We were discussing it before, I was showing you the building that  blocks the horizon. That’s really the image to retain: a blocked horizon.

LR: It’s also the image that opens the novel…

JH: Exactly. The cement in the first pages.

LR : Do you fear that your book be seen and read as a defense of crime and criminal activity?

JH: I see what you mean. In my opinion, there was no black and white. For me, everything is grey. Because a good person necessarily has a bad side, a bad person still has a good core.

LR: The mastery of the dialogue and rhythm of the story make MachiAdam a profoundly cinematic novel for me. And I think that the soundtrack is already there. Do you have a plan for adapting this novel to the screen?  

JH: Like I was telling you, I’ve had several meetings lately in different events related to the promotion of the book, and I indeed met some people who talked to me about it. I also had contact with someone who works a little bit with various television stations and who would like to meet with me to discuss it. Yet, for the moment, I’m really into writing, I want to dedicate myself to it entirely. That said, I would also really like to write adaptations or screenplays someday, why not? We’ll see in good time. For the moment, the thing is that the novel just came out, but it’s true that there are some rather cinematographic scenes.

LR: Given the critical success of MachiAdam, can you now envision a career as a writer? Do you think of it in terms of a career? What’s next?

JH : I really like that but… Here, my editor is going to kill me because he always says, “You talk about Nelson Mandela all the time,” but it’s fine. I love Nelson Mandela, I read his biography, as I was saying, I am immersing myself now in a lot of those revolutionary movements for my next novel 93 Panthers. At the end of his biography, he explains that he reached the end of his struggle. Once freed from prison, he felt like he had hoisted himself to the peak of a mountain. He thought he had finished. Then, he turned his head and saw that there were a pack of mountains still waiting for him. I actually find myself in that position. I didn’t consider MachiAdam to be an endpoint. For me, it’s just a step.

I think that the second novel will be expected from me. Then, I also like the image of a boxer: when you have a title, you’ve fought… Well, let me tell you, I have only one goal: to return there and to finish… Yes, I really want to build a career.

LR: Do you hope to continue writing noir fiction? 

JH: You know, I’m saying this frankly, even me, I didn’t think of myself as a crime novelist. It turns out that noir fiction is what fits the best, based on Machette’s definition that “The noir novel is a socio-critical story built upon the anecdote of a crime story.” In my view, I’m not writing a thriller. For me, it’s the darkness of the human soul, power, notions of human relationships, and making masks fall.

About Jilali Hamham: Although his book was just recently released, Jilali Hamham is now working non-stop on his next projects, the ambitious 93 Panthers (meaning, the Blacks Panthers from Seine Saint-Denis). He also recently created with Karim Madani, published by Gallimard Noir, the collaborative pair “CrackZeinberg Factory,” which aims to “check out different TV series projects.”

The post Entretien avec Jilali Hamham, écrivain de MachiAdam (with English translation) appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

[L]’idée même de classer les écrivains par langue est déjà pour moi une idée assez provinciale. Je ne suis pas un écrivain de langue française, ni francophone, je suis un écrivain.

      – Dany Laferrière, entrevue accordée à Pénélope Cormier, The Postcolonialist, 10 octobre 2013

De grands bouleversements pointaient à l’horizon. C’était fin mars 1789. Les États-Généraux ayant été convoqués par le roi Louis XVI, la quarantaine d’« Immortels » de l’Académie française se réunirent en « séance extraordinaire et secrète » afin de déterminer quelle démarche adopter face à l’assemblée historique qui devait bientôt s’ouvrir. Aux yeux du secrétaire perpétuel Jean-François Marmontel (1723-1799), il y allait de leur honneur d’académiciens, car le silence gardé jusque-là avait été pris « pour une insouciance coupable, ou pour une humiliante incapacité[1] ». Convaincu du rôle que devait jouer l’institution fondée par le cardinal de Richelieu un siècle et demi auparavant, Marmontel lançait à ses confrères un défi de taille : « Dépositaires du génie, du bel-esprit, du goût, des lumières, des talents, Citoyens littéraires, nous devons à la Nation de l’éclairer, de lui tracer la route qui la conduira le plus sûrement à une régénération complète. »

Au terme d’un débat houleux, au cours duquel se manifestait par moments un fort sentiment d’impuissance – « [R]ésignons-nous à notre future obscurité », soupira l’un d’entre eux –, une résolution fut néanmoins prise : députer aux États-Généraux un représentant doté de « tous les pouvoirs nécessaires pour la restauration de la Littérature et du Goût ». La mesure fut assortie d’une déclaration préconisant le renouvellement de l’Académie, avec des pouvoirs accrus. Les dispositions de ce texte sont moins significatives, pour nous, que son présupposé majeur qui était le caractère foncièrement national de l’institution, avec les responsabilités y afférentes. En d’autres mots, la mission linguistique de l’Académie, consistant « à donner des règles certaines à notre langue et à la rendre pure, éloquente et capable de traiter les arts et les sciences[2] », se confondait avec la destinée de la France.

Il y a quelques semaines, nous apprenions l’élection de Dany Laferrière à l’Académie française. C’est la première fois qu’un écrivain né en Haïti est admis au nombre de ceux et celles (mais surtout « ceux ») qui siègent sous la Coupole de l’Institut de France ; c’est aussi la première fois qu’un Québécois reçoit cet honneur. Face à cinq rivaux, dont l’adolescent prodige Arthur Pauly, Laferrière l’aura emporté haut la main, par 13 voix sur 23. Aussi aura-t-il réussi l’exploit dès sa première tentative, devenant ainsi, a-t-on dit par allusion badine à son tout premier roman, Comment faire l’amour à un nègre sans se fatiguer (1985), « académicien sans se fatiguer[3] ». Comme celle de sa candidature plusieurs semaines auparavant, la nouvelle a été annoncée avec éclat. Décidément, il y a du nouveau Quai de Conti. Est-ce une révolution ?

Laissant à d’autres le soin d’interpréter cet événement, je me propose ici de le situer. Tâche bien plus modeste mais qui ne va pas de soi dans la mesure où Dany Laferrière s’est toujours voulu insituable.

Parti d’Haïti en 1976 sous les menaces du régime Duvalier, il a connu les affres de l’exil politique aussi bien que l’ivresse de l’Amérique qu’il a sillonnée depuis son Québec adoptif jusqu’à Miami, où il a résidé pendant plusieurs années. La trajectoire tracée et retracée dans son « autobiographie américaine », cycle d’une douzaine de romans, enregistre, avec un humour fracassant joint à une indéfectible tendresse auxquels se mêle une lucidité parfois très dure, le cumul, voire le brouillage des identités chez celui qui se qualifie volontiers « d’écrivain américain », au sens continental du mot, et même d’écrivain japonais, comme le proclame son livre de 2008. Bien qu’Haïti, et plus précisément son enfance passée à Petit-Goâve, chez sa grand-mère Da, constitue le cœur battant de son œuvre, le refus des étiquettes a été le signe de sa liberté d’écrivain, sans cesse revendiquée[4]. Et le déplacement en a été une condition première. Même lorsqu’il tente de résoudre L’Énigme du retour (2009), il en est toujours à affirmer l’impératif du départ : « Seul le voyage sans billet de retour peut nous sauver de la famille, du sang et de l’esprit de clocher » (39). Être et écrire, activités indissociables pour Dany Laferrière, c’est bouger. Et voilà qu’il bouge une fois de plus.

À tous les points de vue, l’écrivain réunit toutes les qualités requises pour se glisser sur le fauteuil numéro deux, précédemment chauffé par Hector Bianciotti, décédé l’an dernier. Le Figaro rappelait les critères formulés par l’historien Jacques Chastenet (1893-1978) : « Il faut avoir du talent, de la notoriété et être de bonne compagnie ». Qu’en est-il de Laferrière ? Son étoile littéraire n’a pas pâli depuis ses débuts, malgré le caractère inégal de certaines œuvres, ce qui ne peut manquer de se produire quand on écrit autant. Ses livres sont publiés au Québec et en France (chez Grasset) et L’Énigme du retour (2009) a remporté le Prix Médicis. Au Québec, Laferrière est une personnalité médiatique bien connue, chroniqueur à la télévision après avoir été journaliste en Haïti ; à l’échelle de la Francophonie, c’est une présence active et incontournable de l’univers littéraire. Après la grande séduction du lectorat, c’était au tour des membres de la Compagnie de tomber sous le charme Laferrière, lors des traditionnelles visites des candidats. Fort d’un parcours impressionnant, il présentait donc, toujours selon Le Figaro, « le bon profil académique ».

Or, se faire élire à l’Académie française n’est pas comme décrocher un prix littéraire, même des plus prestigieux. Cet honneur ne représente pas forcément une reconnaissance de l’importance d’un auteur : les cas de Balzac et de Zola, recalés deux et dix-neuf fois, respectivement, ont été assez cités. En principe, intégrer une académie savante confère le droit institutionnalisé d’agir sur un champ donné (culturel, scientifique, etc.) en contribuant à en fixer les valeurs. L’Académie française se prétend gardienne de l’essence même de la langue, de sa prétendue qualité. À ce titre, elle revêt un caractère sacré que ne possède pas, disons, l’Académie Goncourt, sa rivale d’il y a un siècle. (Sans oublier que la candidature de Laferrière a été appuyée par Bernard Pivot, président de l’Académie Goncourt.) Et, à l’instar du Dieu mort de Nietzsche, son sacré est vestige dans la mesure où l’Académie française constitue une survivance hautement cérémonieuse de « la reconnaissance d’État du Grand Siècle[5] ». (Dans l’après‑1789, c’est sans doute ce qui provoque sa suppression par la Convention en 1793, suivie de son intégration à l’Institut national en tant que société savante avant d’être entièrement rétablie par Bonaparte quelques années plus tard.) Y accéder, c’est inscrire son présent dans un passé qui perdure : c’est en cela que consiste l’immortalité des quarante Immortels.

Une immortalité sans doute fragile dans le contexte actuel. Faute de révolution, n’est-ce pas toutefois qu’une crise plus générale se dessine ? Bernard Descôteaux, du quotidien montréalais Le Devoir, avançait cette hypothèse dans un éditorial lucide : « Se pourrait-il [...] qu’en choisissant Dany Laferrière, les Immortels aient voulu signaler une préoccupation nouvelle pour l’immortalité de la langue française ? » Ce n’est un secret pour personne que sa prétention à l’autorité en matière d’usage fait sourire. À force de courir sus à des moulins à vent comme la féminisation des professions, elle s’est contentée de mener des combats d’arrière-garde, s’attirant des qualificatifs, comme « rétrograde », entachés du conservatisme politique qu’elle a souvent incarné. Pour Descôteaux, l’Académie française apparaît totalement déphasée par rapport à l’ensemble du monde francophone, tant son évolution démographique que ses réalités linguistiques. Le journaliste souhaite que l’iconoclaste Laferrière bouscule les habitudes au lieu de « rentrer dans le rang ».

Certains augurent un vrai tournant. Frankétienne, certainement le plus grand auteur haïtien vivant, faisait part de sa lecture de l’événement pendant la Foire internationale du livre d’Haïti : « Si yon ekriven kou Dany Laferrière, c’est-à-dire nègre haïtien, kapab eli nan Akademi fransèz, cela prouve vreman ke enstitisyon sa a, ke te yon bwat fèmen, kounye a li ouvè[6] ». Que cette « boîte fermée » se soit ouverte de la sorte, que le château-fort du purisme linguistique soit prêt à « aksepte yo tande lòt vwa[7] », pourrait dépasser le niveau symbolique, d’après Frankétienne, si Haïti peut en tirer bénéfice sur le plan de la promotion de la culture et de l’éducation. Ce que Laferrière doit souhaiter avec ardeur.

Soulignons bien que ce n’est pas la première fois qu’une personne d’origine « étrangère » revêt l’habit vert. Jusqu’ici, cependant, ces Académiciens d’ailleurs ont eu de solides attaches dans l’Hexagone, à commencer par le grand Senghor qui avait conservé sa nationalité française bien que père fondateur du Sénégal. Cependant, à la différence d’Assia Djebar, d’Amin Maalouf et du poète bilingue Michael Edwards, élu plus tôt cette année, Laferrière n’a jamais habité en France et, fidèle à sa vocation d’écrivain nomade, il a déclaré son intention de ne pas y déménager. Il sera donc le seul académicien véritablement non-français.

C’est ce qu’il a tenu à signaler en réagissant aux résultats de l’élection, s’étant rendu à Port-au-Prince pour en attendre l’annonce : « Cette entrée à l’Académie, je l’offre à Haïti et au Québec. Ces deux pays m’ont structuré. » Outre la volonté de décentrement exprimée par la projection discursive hors France de son triomphe académique, le choix du mot « pays » se révèle parlant. Le Québec n’est pas parvenu à se créer « pays », justement ; en même temps, les politiques destinées à asseoir sa spécificité nationale ont fait de son appareil d’aménagement linguistique un sérieux concurrent, d’ailleurs nettement plus progressiste, de l’Académie française. Quant à Haïti, la « République noire » existe bien sûr en tant que pays depuis l’indépendance gagnée de haute lutte en 1804, arrachée à la France redevenue esclavagiste sous Bonaparte. Aujourd’hui, la patrie de Toussaint et Dessalines se tord sous la tutelle onusienne imposée en 2004, à l’expulsion du président Aristide.

Historiquement, les mages de la Coupole ne sauraient être accusés d’ignorer la littérature et la production intellectuelle haïtiennes. Si le diplomate et écrivain Demesvar Delorme (1842‑-1901), francophile à outrance, ami de Lamartine, n’aura jamais réussi l’entrée qu’il avait rêvée, plusieurs Haïtiens ont été couronnés depuis le début du XX^e siècle, dont le dernier en date est Jean Métellus, récipiendaire du Grand Prix de la Francophonie de 2010, et qui vit en France. C’était déjà reconnaître qu’Haïti a produit de très grands écrivains de langue française, mais le geste de la récompense n’équivaut pas à celui d’accueillir un Haïtien en tant qu’égal au sein de l’institution qui l’accorde.

C’est là le grand coup de Dany Laferrière. Pourtant, comment conserver sa liberté totale d’écrivain en cours de métamorphose en académicien ? L’auteur a demandé à devenir membre de la Compagnie : c’est un vœu qu’il a dû formuler dans sa lettre de candidature, soumise à la Secrétaire perpétuelle Hélène Carrère d’Encausse. Pour ce faire, il devait se mouler dans un gabarit traditionnel sans pour autant perdre sa forme. Le scrutin passé, il lui est loisible de se prononcer sur la portée de élection. D’une infinie finesse, il se la joue fine : c’est-à-dire qu’il accepte le statut académique en faisant semblant d’en (re)définir les termes.

En plus de son refus de se fixer à Paris, il a aussi touché à la proverbiale « immortalité » conférée par l’état d’académicien. En Haïti, les auditeurs de l’émission d’Emmelie Prophète-Milcé à Radio Magik 9 ont entendu un rejet amusé du qualificatif d’« Immortel ». Le journal Le Nouvelliste a rapporté ses propos : « Si on greffe à mon nom l’immortalité, c’est peut-être pour la langue française, a-t-il précisé en ajoutant : Les membres de l’Académie française ne sont pas immortels, sinon, je n’y serais pas ici aujourd’hui ».

La feinte est habile. Le sobriquet d’« Immortels » provient de la devise : « À l’immortalité », instituée par Richelieu. Le site web de l’Académie rappelle qu’elle « se réfère à leur mission, porter la langue française. C’est celle-ci qui est immortelle ». Autant dire que le nouvel élu ne fait que répéter l’explication convenue, à ceci près qu’il y attache ce curieux « peut-être » qui sert à faire passer sa saillie pour une interprétation personnelle : l’immortalité appartiendrait « peut-être » à la langue plutôt qu’à un être humain ? ou est-ce sa pérennité même qui est (très subtilement) visée ? Puisqu’il s’agit d’une remarque orale, on aurait tort, peut-être, de trop insister sur ce point. Toujours est-il que le commentaire nous ramène au fait que Laferrière n’a jamais brandi l’étendard de la promotion du français. Pour lui, la langue, c’est un instrument ; s’il écrit en français, c’est par le simple hasard de son existence. Cet agnosticisme linguistique, il l’a professé maintes fois, y compris dans l’entretien j’ai cité en exergue. Dans la même entrevue, il nie de plus que « parce qu’on parle la même langue, on ait nécessairement des solidarités souterraines ». Voilà toute l’idéologie francophoniste qui est récusée.

Il n’y a point là matière à surprise. Après tout, Laferrière a été l’un des signataires du célèbre « Manifeste pour une “littérature-monde” en français », lequel « signe l’acte de décès de la francophonie », décrite comme la « lumière d’une étoile morte », lueur pâlissante d’une réminiscence coloniale caractérisée par la logique du centre et de ses marges périphériques[8]. Et dont l’Académie française apparaît comme l’un des ressorts.[9] En témoigne sa brochette de prix : d’un côté, son Grand prix de littérature et son Grand prix du roman, si peu (c’est-à-dire pratiquement jamais) attribué aux écrivains de la « Francophonie » ex-coloniale, avec, de l’autre côté, son Grand prix de la Francophonie, destiné à « couronner l’œuvre d’une personne physique francophone qui, dans son pays ou à l’échelle internationale, aura contribué de façon éminente au maintien et à l’illustration de la langue française ». L’étonnant, c’est donc que Laferrière puisse souscrire à une telle division de travail.

Peut-être faudrait-il revenir à la promesse d’immortalité, si peu que l’écrivain dise y tenir. Car la mort est un thème prépondérant dans son œuvre, à travers toutes ces œuvres. Le moment déclencheur de son écriture ne fut-il pas l’assassinat de son ami Gasner Raymond par les Tontons Macoutes ? En fuyant Haïti, Laferrière lui-même a échappé de peu au même sort. Plus tard, c’est le décès de son père, autre réfugié politique, qui le hantera. Suite au séisme de janvier 2010, Tout bouge autour de moi (2010) livrera un poignant témoignage d’un cataclysme qui a enlevé la vie à un nombre incalculable d’Haïtiens.

« Dans tout effort il y a naturellement une ignorance de la mort », prétendait Jacques Roumain (ou plutôt, le narrateur des Fantoches [1931]). Chez Laferrière, on croirait tout au contraire qu’une surconscience de la mortalité pousse sa plume toujours plus avant – comme si cesser d’écrire, c’était déjà mourir.

Quelques pages de L’Art presque perdu de ne rien faire (2011) sont consacrées à ce thème. « En faisant de quelqu’un un immortel, on le rend plus mort que jamais » en ce sens qu’il « vivrait davantage dans les médias que dans le cœur des gens ». La gloire littéraire que l’on pouvait espérer dans l’Antiquité, quand « [l]‘œuvre, seule, pouvait rendre son auteur immortel », a été supplantée par la consécration médiatique qui consiste à « créer l’événement au lieu de se contenter de le diffuser ».

Que dire alors de l’évènement médiatisé qu’est l’élection de Dany Laferrière à l’Académie française ? Remplacera-t-elle l’œuvre de l’écrivain ? Est-ce l’auteur qui avait besoin de l’institution, ou est-ce celle-ci qui avait besoin de celui-ci – si dédaigneux des schémas vieillis relatifs au français – pour garantir l’immortalité de la langue à l’ère de l’éclatement d’une francophonie franco-centrée ?

Toute tentative de réponse à ces questions doit tenir compte des conceptions relatives de la mort. Dans J‘écris comme je vis (2000), recueil d’entretiens avec Bernard Magnier, Laferrière explique la spécificité de « la mort haïtienne », caractérisée par une « absence de disparition » ou une « possibilité de vivre dans un autre espace-temps » ; même après le départ au « pays sans chapeau » ou le royaume des morts, les vivants continuent à évoquer le trépassé comme si la vie de ce dernier ne s’était jamais arrêtée. Cette immortalité-là, qui ne relève nullement de la langue française et encore moins de son Académie, l’écrivain y a droit en vertu de sa qualité d’Haïtien. Dans une perspective haïtienne, ces choses-là comptent pour beaucoup, vu l’extrême précarité à laquelle une bonne partie de la population est confrontée au jour le jour, situation qui se traduit par une espérance de vie nettement inférieure à celle des pays environnants.

Dany Laferrière n’a jamais perdu de vue ces réalités : le narrateur autofictionnel de Pays sans chapeau (1996) entend parler d’un village haïtien étudié par des scientifiques américains parce que ses habitants continuent à vivre après avoir été privés de nourriture. Triste immortalité.

En Haïti, de même qu’au Québec, le triomphe de l’écrivain a été vivement salué. Le Président Michel Martelly a étalé quelques poncifs de bon ton en souhaitant que l’œuvre de Laferrière demeure « éternelle dans la mémoire et le vécu de tous les Haïtiens ». L’enthousiasme d’Emmelie Prophète-Milcé devant son micro était autrement palpable : « Il y a longtemps que quelque chose d’aussi beau n’est arrivé en Haïti », sourit-elle. À l’approche du troisième anniversaire du goudougoudou, ce n’est pas rien. Pour Gary Victor, l’une des voix les plus originales de la littérature haïtienne contemporaine, « c’est un exemple pour prouver à nos jeunes, ici, en Haïti, que le travail, la volonté, l’intelligence payent », exprimait-il dans une chronique parue dans Le Nouvelliste.

Au milieu d’une explosion de fierté, quelques-uns s’interrogent. « Faut-il partir pour réussir pleinement ? », se demande Frantz Duval dans le même quotidien. Sur le fil de commentaires, plusieurs lecteurs abondent dans le même sens : « Partir c’est réussir… à partir », dit l’un d’eux.

À moins que ce ne soit pour mieux revenir – peut-être.

The post Dialectique de l’immortalité: Pour situer l’élection de Dany Laferrière à l’Académie française appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

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Egregio Sig. Presidente della Repubblica,

A seguito di nostre richieste alla presidenza della Repubblica per avere dei fondi con i quali finanziare la manifestazione culturale Lampedusainfestival, che si svolge dal 2009 a Lampedusa, abbiamo ricevuto, nel 2011 e nel 2012 due medaglie al valore, per la stessa manifestazione.

Dopo i drammatici eventi avvenuti a Lampedusa negli ultimi giorni sentiamo l’esigenza di inviarLe questa comunicazione. Era da tempo, in realtà, che molti di noi sentivano il bisogno di comunicarLe quanto segue; ma il dolore, la rabbia e lo strazio di questi giorni hanno fatto sì che non fosse più possibile indugiare oltre.

Rifiutiamo la spettacolarizzazione mediatica con cui il naufragio del 3 ottobre scorso è stato rappresentato e diffuso dall’industria dell’intrattenimento: dietro la morbosità con cui la fabbrica delle lacrime e del cordoglio del “lutto nazionale” provano a confezionare il format della rappresentazione della tragedia, dietro i riflettori, le conferenze stampa, le visite ufficiali, crediamo ci sia molto altro che vada denunciato.

Di fronte ad una strage come quella appena consumatasi, di fronte alle centinaia di corpi ancora ostaggio di un mare che certo non ha colpe pari a quelle della società umana, non accettiamo che ci sia chi venga sull’isola promettendo e assicurando. Non accettiamo più che ci si riempia la bocca di promesse, che si diano in pasto alle televisioni le lacrime di circostanza, le commozioni di rito, le figure degli “eroi” e dei salvatori, lasciando poi che le prime pagine si occupino d’altro, che i riflettori si spengano, che i giornalisti ripartano, lasciando tutto così come era prima.

A partire dalla legge 40/1998, legge che sicuramente Lei conoscerà bene dato che porta anche il Suo nome, l’Italia ha avviato una prassi di vero e proprio stato di eccezione, sancendo la detenzione ed il trattenimento di quanti non avevano commesso alcun reato. Con l’inasprirsi delle norme in materia di immigrazione la situazione è andata via via peggiorando. Il business dell’ “accoglienza” si articola oggi lungo una rete di strutture e di centri detentivi che, appaltati a strutture varie, rendono i migranti materia prima di un processo di produzione di profitto che ha luogo in una costante dinamica emergenziale. Come all’Aquila, come in Val di Susa: militarizzazione, gestione di emergenze alimentate ad arte, sospensione dei diritti e stato d’eccezione per creare laboratori di controllo sociale e di repressione.

L’ingerenza imperialista e neo-coloniale dei paesi cosiddetti occidentali destabilizza e rende subalterne intere aree geopolitiche, generando così fenomeni di emigrazione sempre più consistente. Una emigrazione necessaria al capitalismo finanziario dei nostri giorni, il cui conflitto con il lavoro vivo necessita che si impongano nuove forme di governo e di istituzioni e che il mercato stesso del lavoro delle società europee venga stravolto. Occorrono dunque gli immigrati, come manodopera di riserva, clandestina, sommersa, ricattabile, come marginalità sociale su cui far poggiare una riforma in senso neo-oligarchico delle società europee. Accanto alla marginalità migrante si colloca infatti il disagio sociale di quanti, italiani, vivono ormai processi espulsivi di subordinazione, di impoverimento, di negazione della dignità, di quanti lasciano il nostro paese vestendo ancora una volta, anche loro, i panni che in passato abbiamo dovuto troppo spesso vestire, quelli degli emigranti. E come ben saprà non si tratta solo della famigerata fuga dei cervelli: qui parliamo di migliaia che ogni anno lasciano il paese per poter anche solo avere la speranza di un lavoro che garantisca la sussistenza.

Così, sullo stesso scoglio di terra, nel canale di Sicilia, il migrante detenuto in un centro indegno, destinato a divenire un ingranaggio del motore del grande sfruttamento continentale, respira la stessa area della donna di Lampedusa che non può partorire sull’isola, perché non vi sono le strutture sanitarie adeguate, di chi rischierà di morire durante un disperato trasferimento in elicottero sulla terraferma per una emergenza che un ospedale avrebbe potuto benissimo affrontare, del bambino costretto in strutture scolastiche inadeguate, di un cittadino che è costretto a pagare i carburanti più cari d’Europa e che magari, essendo pescatore, è costretto a demolire la barca, perché il carburante è troppo caro.

La tragedia del 3 ottobre fa allora venire al pettine moltissimi nodi politici dei nostri tempi. Chi è che governa davvero questo paese? Quale quota di sovranità ancora mantengono le sue istituzioni? Assistiamo ad un continuo scarica barile tra i vari “rappresentanti delle istituzioni”. Quegli stessi che negli ultimi anni sono stati colpevolmente muti rispetto alla situazione di Lampedusa, che solo dopo il grande fatto di sangue è stata oggetto di una qualche grottesca attenzione, così come lo era stata esclusivamente in occasione delle emergenze più eclatanti come la vergogna accaduta nel 2011.

Riteniamo che la crisi politica delle società europee stia sempre più privando l’Italia della propria sovranità. Abbiamo perduto quella monetaria e siamo sempre più esposti ad un’erosione dell’autonomia e della capacità decisionale delle nostre istituzioni politiche. Una governance economico-politica, espressione delle élite tecnocratiche finanziarie e bancarie, impone ormai le proprie direttive e i propri selezionati referenti alle società europee ed alle loro istituzioni, senza che i loro cittadini siano in grado di opporvisi. Per di più l’Italia è succube ed asservita agli interessi militari e di ingerenza imperiale degli USA. Il nostro territorio, alla stregua di una colonia, è disseminato di istallazioni e basi militari e la vicenda del MUOS di Niscemi è solo l’ultima grottesca dimostrazione di uno svuotamento di senso dell’intero apparato politico-istituzionale del paese.

A cosa servono e che senso avrebbero queste medaglie, dopo aver sottoscritto un golpe costituzionale, voluto dai poteri economici e finanziari, quale quello del pareggio di bilancio, che strozzerà qualunque possibilità di un futuro per il paese intero? A cosa servirebbero dopo aver appoggiato la criminale aggressione della Libia, dopo aver condiviso e avallato un’operazione criminosa come la destabilizzazione della Siria, dopo aver sottoscritto il commissariamento da parte dell’oligarchia finanziaria di un intero paese che era un tempo la seconda forza manifatturiera del continente?

Quelle stesse istituzioni che vorrebbero appuntarci medaglie sul petto sono quelle che alimentano la macchina infame dei CIE, della militarizzazione della Val di Susa, della dislocazione coatta de L’Aquila, delle infinite emergenze dei rifiuti, dei legami organici e strutturali con le mafie, del pareggio di bilancio, della politica neo-coloniale che produce migrazioni, delle missioni di guerra spacciate per umanitarie e delle riforme del mercato del lavoro che generalizzano precarietà e marginalità.

Noi proseguiremo sul nostro cammino, convinti che la crisi epocale che stiamo vivendo può ospitare, in sé, i germi potenziali di un futuro altro e diverso, di una società rinnovata. Ma non abbiamo bisogno né vogliamo che siano queste medaglie a poter fungere da conferma e da riconoscimento di quanto da noi tentato. Perché se ad appuntarle è la stessa politica che, dopo una tragedia come quella di giovedì scorso, invoca rafforzamenti di Frontex, approfittando ancora una volta della questione migratoria per implementare la stretta militare sul Nord Africa, siamo convinti che la nostra strada vada in tutt’altra direzione.

Original Article available here

The post Lampedusa: Lettera al Presidente della Repubblica (Letter to the Italian President) appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

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Maja Milatovic: In your article “Strategies for Inclusivity: Indigenous Women and the Academy,” you highlight intersecting oppressions such as racism and sexism impacting Indigenous women in academia, which remains a “bastion of white male privilege.” What are some of the strategies for challenging colonising knowledge and institutionalised whiteness and obtaining recognition for Indigenous knowledge in academia?

Celeste Liddle: I think in the first instance it is important for people to be aware that the existing knowledges are indeed skewed toward certain ways of knowing, and that the act of colonisation has privileged these knowledges in the academy. As a result, no matter how open universities are to knowledge-exchange and contributing to knowledge pools, they can still exclude because Indigenous knowledges have been considered, over a vast number of years, to be second class, and the way Indigenous people acquire those knowledges – via community, family, experiences, etc. – are different to the teacher-and-student methods preferred by most Universities.

One of the simplest strategies is to lobby universities to employ more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The number of Indigenous staff has doubled in a 10 year period and that’s the same time the NTEU included an Indigenous mandatory claim in the bargaining round. By having Indigenous people engaged in a number of capacities across a university, the existing entrenched systems are challenged. Additionally, with more Indigenous staff come more Indigenous students and the numbers here are roughly proportional. With more Indigenous students comes the capacity for more research higher degree students, and therefore the opportunity for existing departments to supervise more Indigenous people doing research from their own perspectives; thus more opportunity for an active knowledge transfer. Indigenous academic staff are vital here as mentors. So in short, I’d say targeted employment strategies to get more people working in the sector, and more encouragement for students to go further with their studies with the aim of eventually becoming university staff themselves.

MM: One of the elements you address in your writing is “authenticity” or the notion of a “true” Indigenous heritage. In your piece, “An Open Letter to Bess Price MLA,” you state that “Culture is not a static entity and has never been pre- or post- colonisation,” highlighting your belief in “a shared historical experience which is as valid a cultural element as anything else.” Can you elaborate on this argument more, especially considering current Indigenous politics?

CL: There is a tendency to refer to Indigenous culture as “traditional” and “contemporary” in this country (Australia). I feel that whilst colonisation has obviously had a huge impact on Indigenous culture, to label things as such paints a static image of what it was like prior to colonisation whilst also reducing the authenticity of what we have today. There is an entire knowledge pool and a system of governance that was built up before colonisation. Those rules and knowledges came from experience: from experiencing environmental fluctuations; from people challenging systems; from trade with neighbouring countries. Additionally, kriol languages, traditional-style dances about contemporary experiences, sports carnivals, etc: all these have become a part of our shared cultural landscape and are important.

Following colonisation, there have been many experiences that Indigenous people have shared as a people. There were, for example, very few families that were not pulled apart by the policies that led to the Stolen Generations and have not been impacted by transgenerational trauma. Language revitalisation programmes nowadays are, in a lot of cases the direct result of language removal back in the 1930s. Struggling to reconnect is therefore a common experience for Indigenous people. We’ve also had a number of key political movements such as the Freedom Rides, the Tent Embassy, Land Rights. All of these experiences form our histories. We have family that took part in them or we were there ourselves, and because the stories of those struggles are relayed on, they become a part of our shared cultural landscape. A good many of the things we now celebrate annually started as Indigenous political movements and these events are part of our cultural landscape.

MM: In your article published in Daily Life entitled “A platform for the people who are not always heard,” you write that Indigenous events and conferences provide opportunities for “being heard,” create inclusive spaces where “Indigenous ways of knowing can dominate” and challenge hegemonic culture. In your view, how do these events offer transformational and collaborative potential amongst Indigenous people globally?

CL: I have now had the privilege of collaborating with Indigenous peoples from other countries on a number of occasions. One of the things that always strikes me are the similarities colonised peoples share. There are enough similarities recognised that we now have the UN Declaration on Indigenous Peoples! So the sharing of these similarities as Indigenous peoples globally helps break down the isolation we have within our own countries and we can then collaborate on how we address the issues we face on a global level.

There are, however, many differences as well. One such difference I can think of is the existences of treaties that many peoples have, but that we don’t have here in Australia. Hearing how the Maori, for example, have a set of principles and conditions that they can hold their government to and how this works for them inspires and drives us in Australia. Hearing where they feel their treaty has not served the people as well as it could have allows us to learn from their experiences and push for different inclusions.

I often say that attending one of these conferences in the first place is what radicalised my mind. As an Aboriginal woman I was so moved and so inspired by what I experienced talking with other indigenous peoples and sharing knowledge, but I also became so aware of how the situation in Australia compares. It was a wake-up call and since then I have not only become more active in a number of ways here, but I have also relished the opportunity to engage more internationally. At the next WIPC:E conference in Hawaii in 2014 we are hoping to run a panel session on Indigenous trade unionism with educational activists from Australia, New Zealand and Canada represented. Fingers crossed this comes into fruition and from this engagement, a regional Indigenous education union caucus begins to grow! Academia is one of the most mobile fields a person can work in so it makes sense, as Indigenous unionists, to organise globally.

MM: In recent years, social media and blogging in particular have become increasingly popular ways of breaking silences surrounding structural inequality and challenging exclusions as well as a means of networking, strategizing and making marginalised voices heard. You use Twitter and were involved with curating the IndigenousX Twitter account. You also write your own blog called Rantings of an Aboriginal Feminist. What is the potential of social media in connecting, constructing and empowering Indigenous people in Australia? Are there any risks involved with the use of social media?

CL: Had someone told me when I started my blog back in June 2012 that I would end up writing commissioned pieces for mainstream, and non-mainstream, media within 6 weeks, I would not have believed them. It happened though, and in one fell swoop I became aware of the potential of social media. From an Indigenous perspective, this is particularly powerful. Traditionally our issues, voices, opinions and so forth have been represented by non-Indigenous people in non-indigenous publications. We have had little control over how we are portrayed and the diversity of our opinion has been stunted by those the media sources deem are the “leaders” or at least the most palatable.

Social media throws that wide open. Aboriginal people are allowed to represent themselves, argue their opinions and engage in discussions in a way that we haven’t been able to do in traditional media. It’s no surprise that we’re seeing more diverse voices getting out there at this point in time from a number of political perspectives (and if you ask me, also no surprise that the Aboriginal left-wing have particularly embraced it). Additionally, Facebook became an invaluable tool to connect family and community over vast distances and from some incredibly remote communities. Because so many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people use Facebook regularly, it has become an even more important tool for us as a point of connection and information dissemination than it probably has for everyone else. Twitter is important as well, but personally I find that it’s more useful as a tool for Indigenous people to broadcast our works externally, and that Facebook allows a more in-depth engagement.

The main danger is that social media removes the filter. Back in the “old days” opinions were countered via “Letters to the Editor” pages. Nowadays, people contact you directly and want to argue the points. I particularly got annoyed when I had hoards of non-indigenous conservative men writing diatribes on my blog telling me what the “real issues” were. From that point, I took the stand of actively moderating the space and stating that black and female opinions took precedence in my space. People are also only a Google search away from someone’s email address or contact details nowadays. I had to block people from my site after some regular commentators received abusive emails. We are more likely to be attacked directly if we do put ourselves out there on social media and I feel that turns many people  off. Why would you put yourself out there to be abused virtually when you’ve been dealing with racism/sexism/etc your entire life?

MM: You self-identify as a black feminist. Are there any particular feminists or inspiring individuals who motivate your work and have influenced your feminist vision?

CL: I have been a bit of a magpie, to be honest: collecting shiny objects, or information that appeals anyway, and putting it all together. What I’ve found I’ve done more than anything is identified particularly with broader radical thought and adapted those thoughts into black feminist standpoints. I’ve also been one for analysing my own experiences and using these for the basis of broader analysis. So every time I am asked this question, I tend to fail it!

Therefore, my list of those that have inspired my thoughts may look a little random. Whilst a lot of them I would agree with, this is not a requirement and others I admire for their sheer capacity to analyse structural forms of oppression. The ability to engage, disagree and formulate an opposing argument is incredibly important particularly when investigating where systems of oppression intersect. Audre Lorde, Augusto Boal, Lisa Bellear, Catharine Mackinnon, Judith Butler, Dennis Altman, and William Cooper are a few names that spring to my mind. The book “The Bridge Called My Back” stands out as a key text. Former lecturers that challenged my view and expanded my horizons are Sheila Jeffreys, Geoffrey Milne, Peta Tait, Verity Burgmann and many others.

A lot of the people who inspired me the most though have been people within my own family: my mother, my grandmothers, a number of very politically-minded relations. Finally, because I have worked at universities and then at a union I have been lucky enough to have been continually surrounded by people who question everything. That environment has definitely encouraged my own views to grow.

MM: In her article “Australian feminists need to talk about race,” Aboriginal Australian feminist Kelly Briggs highlights the importance of intersectionality, writing that “Australian feminists must recognise and join the fight for racial diversity.” Taking this into account, what do you identify as current challenges in Australian feminisms, especially in the context of forming productive transcultural and transracial alliances?

CL: The main challenge I find right now is the focus on individualism rather than collectivism. With Indigenous politics, due to the fact that we make up such a small proportion of the population and because “choice” is something we were denied for many generations, a lot of our politics focuses on the collective, or at least needs to. A good deal of the dominant feminist theory at this point, however, seems to be more focused on individual agency. I honestly feel this is the point where Indigenous feminist voices can get lost. When Kelly states “I am uneasy about the narrow confines the term “equality” has taken in regards to feminism,” I strongly believe this is what she is highlighting too: Structures are not being questioned and challenged enough and black women are being left out because of this. When you’re engaging with more liberal narratives that highlight the rights of individuals and a group doesn’t have access to a great deal of choice in the first place due to structural oppression then clashes will occur. I think this is why I have found more synergy in radical thought. Indigenous women, at least in Australia, due to their intersecting sources of oppression, have much to share here and because they are not always actively engaged with, their voices get left out of feminist analysis.

On saying that though, I have run up against similar issues with leftist organisations. Because they argue that class is the foremost site of oppression, they can close off when issues of gender or race are brought to the table. I have had openly hostile responses when I have suggested that some patriarchal systems existed prior to colonisation and the installation of capitalism in this country. Recently I stated that I am not interested in a revolution that leaves the most vulnerable behind. Intersectionality is key for me.

MM: You frequently state that you are a socialist and a unionist. Your writing frequently underscores the importance of community and unionisation for Indigenous women. What drew you to getting involved with the trade union? What are some of the issues you encountered in the context of equality and diversity issues for women and Indigenous people, while working for the union?

CL: As mentioned earlier, I feel universities remain bastions of the white patriarchy, and when I worked within the university structure, I was working in Indigenous student equity. As a staff member though, I found that I, and other Indigenous staff in the sector, faced the exact same issues the students were facing. Universities remained somewhat hostile environments for Indigenous people. They excluded via preferred knowledges, via preferred life experiences to gain entry and remain in the institution, via their sheer elitism as places of educational excellence. In addition, as a woman I found continually that whilst we made up the majority of the university staff, we rarely held the top positions and therefore women were continually excluded from the highest level of decision making within the institution. Women’s and Gender Studies departments were continually under threat, and sadly, a good many of them ended up scaled down or even closed. The ability to cast a gender lens over existing subjects and topics was being continually diminished within the sector.

I was always a unionist and the opportunity to draw on the collectivism provided within an organised union structure to try and achieve equity for Indigenous people on campus was the main reason for me becoming more active. It is much easier to achieve equity when you have a collective of workers willing to stand alongside you. Becoming active at a branch level eventually led to me earning the job I am currently in. Since I started here three years ago, we have run Indigenous members surveys on their experiences of racism, discrimination, cultural respect and lateral violence in the academy. The results were shocking, although unfortunately not surprising, with a vast majority stating that they had experienced these issues within the sector. I am also a member of the Women’s Action Committee of the NTEU and our Indigenous membership just happens to be 70% female. I was able to cast a gender lens over the members’ survey data and I concluded that the intersecting forms of oppression – gender and race – were contributing to the high rates of racism and discrimination our members were facing. I also highlighted that lateral violence, a phenomenon initially highlighted within the women’s movement in the field of nursing, was even more prevalent in Indigenous communities due to intersecting forms of oppression. Essentially, our Indigenous female staff were at the coal face and therefore had much experience to draw on to benefit all working women.

I believe unions are important because they are the voice of the workers, and the more that women and Indigenous people get involved, the more that this voice reflects our needs within the sector and can therefore push for change.

MM: You are the National Indigenous Organiser for the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU). In an article published by Crikey focusing on Aboriginal Australians and their personal identity, you describe your experiences of working in an “identified role” and acknowledge the advantages that come with undertaking such a position.  You also identify issues which come with such roles such a patronising assumptions regarding Indigenous applicants’ competence. You write that “The Indigenisation of workplaces is still very much a work-in-progress.” In your experience, what is the transformative potential of identified roles in increasing community cohesion and improving Indigenous access to tertiary education?

CL: Identified roles acknowledge that there is a specific expertise and life experience that an Indigenous person will bring to that role. They acknowledge that this life experience leads to a better cultural understanding than most non-Indigenous people will have, and they also acknowledge that sometimes there is a need to have an Indigenous voice in an organisation in order to better communicate with broader Indigenous communities. More than anything, they make a statement that universities want to address disparities and see Indigenous employment as an important first step to achieving this.

As also mentioned earlier, one of the things I have continually found is that Indigenous student numbers are almost always directly proportionate to Indigenous staff numbers, so if universities wish to increase their student loads then it is in their interest to have proper Indigenous employment programmes in place. Indigenous people serving at many different levels, and in many different areas of a university means that existing structures get challenged. Universities have to become more inclusive to ensure that they are retaining those staff and students. In the past, a lot of this engagement has been tokenistic, where universities bring in guest lecturers for specific purposes. When there is an ongoing commitment by Universities to employ Indigenous people and recognise the unique skill sets they bring to a university, then this offensive tokenism is reduced and Indigenous knowledges can become core university business. Which is the way it should be in this country.

MM: In the panel discussion preceding the Australian federal elections published in The Guardian, you argue that “the Indigenous vote is of little importance to the major parties” and you identify a lack of diverse Indigenous policy and engagement. Considering Australia’s election results, the current political climate and discourses on minorities, what are some of the future challenges the country faces in terms of achieving equality?

CL: To start on a very cynical note, the new Prime Minister has already defunded an expert Indigenous educational panel, and has installed a new Indigenous Advisory Committee (IAC). This IAC is chaired by a person of the Prime Minister’s selection. So on one hand, we’ve lost yet another autonomous voice, and on the other, we’ve gained a committee that will be completely regulated by the government. Our Indigenous leadership has continually been chosen for us, particularly since the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) was dissolved, and this government looks to be taking this even further. We don’t have designated seats in parliament, we don’t have autonomous Indigenous elections for our political leaders and we don’t always get a say in what our important issues actually are.

What’s even scarier though is at this point the major parties seem to almost agree with each other on Indigenous issues. Indigenous people, whilst always political, are more disillusioned with a system where this agreement between major parties occurs. It means that our own debate is politically stunted. Take the recent push for Constitutional Recognition. There are many grassroots Indigenous groups opposed to this move because they fear that being written into the Australian Constitution will negate our claim as sovereign peoples of this land and therefore the ability to negotiate a treaty. Yet both major parties are stating that being recognised in the Constitution is important for Indigenous people and there is a huge campaign in full swing at this moment selling the idea to the public with the hope that when this question goes to referendum, it gets passed. How can voting Australians make an informed decision on this issue when many are not even aware that there is a debate occurring due to major party agreement?

So what I am most fearful of is that in 2013 we still have almost no autonomy. Our voting power is 2.5% of the population and we therefore don’t have the opportunity to use the current system as it stands to further our causes. We do not get to define our own issues in any comprehensive way politically, nor do we have much say in the policies that affect our lives and the lives of our families. We are still spoken for most of the time, and Australia will never be a place of true equality for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people whilst this continues.

The post Indigenous Feminism, Politics and the Importance of Intersectionality: A Conversation with Celeste Liddle appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Our nation’s mourning after his passing impacted the South African psyche in strange and unexpected ways. On the one hand the nation knew that Mandela’s death was imminent; on the other, when word was received of his passing, there was a tangible sense of loss. We as a people found a gap of unimaginable size in our consciousness, one that would probably never again be filled in our lifetime. Particularly for South Africans, Nelson Mandela represented the fiction that comprised the core foundation of our modern nation state. Who are we without our symbol of justice, dignity, equality, freedom, humanity?

Mourning Mandela has again united South Africans as they pay tribute to the father of our modern nation. However, unlike gatherings of a similar magnitude that occurred during the earlier years of democracy, Mandela’s passing coincides with the country ushering in almost 20 years of democratic rule. Gatherings during the Mandela era heralded signs of hope and a vision of creating a society built on the foundation of dignity. Yet, democracy has not brought with it the accompanying elements of justice and equality, as South Africa has quickly become the most unequal country in the world. We have become accustomed to the regular spurts of protest action, which appear to have increased with escalating violence over recent years. While these past days have been largely celebratory, there also seems to be a looming feeling in the air that this may well be the last occasion that South Africans unite in common humanity.

“Madiba magic” has allowed South Africans the privilege to overlook our inadequacies. Each faction of society can genuinely identify with some aspect of the man Mandela was. The visionary leadership and wisdom of the African National Congress (ANC) liberation movement, which cautiously strategised South Africa’s revolution, housed a leadership that listened to the heartbeat of the country’s oppressed people and was able to unite them in spite of the barriers that apartheid attempted to impose on them. This leadership responded quickly and effectively to the needs of its people. It pushed ideological boundaries and resorted to force where necessary, yet remained firm in its ideals. Most importantly, the ANC instilled in its members and followers the identity of global citizenship and an understanding that the struggle against apartheid was in solidarity with all of the world’s oppressed people. Through literature, music and art, dignity was reclaimed despite the apartheid regime’s every attempt to rip it away. The message transcended the distance that eventually separated the movement from its leadership.

Nelson Mandela was indeed a complex man. He was a patriarchal Xhosa chief, yet an ardent advocate for gender equality; a traditional family man who supported gay rights; and a commander in chief that understood the need for armed resistance in the quest for peace and justice. He was a rare example of the essence of human rights activism, a man who had the ability to separate the personal from the political in the fight for a unified and democratic South Africa.

However, as a young South African who grew up amid the country’s liberation movement, I am both saddened and angered that the complexities of Mandela as a fellow human being who was diverse in his identity, have been largely overlooked in order to appease a political agenda. The image of the awe-inspiring, all forgiving grandfather has also absolved those who previously benefitted from apartheid and continue to do so, as well as the elite few who gained substantially from the transition to democracy and who have avoided interrogating the depths of their privilege. The promise of wealth redistribution articulated in the Freedom Charter for which millions of South Africans sacrificed their lives has thus been halted in preference of maintaining power by all means possible. Part of Mandela’s purpose in forgiving his oppressors was to free them from the burden of guilt imposed by a system that effectively denied white people their dignity too. And yet, many have interpreted this act to mean that apartheid no longer bears any relevance to the development of modern day South Africa.

History has a tendency of being whitewashed as holders of authority pursue the maintenance of power. As the face of the ANC, both locally and abroad, the image of Nelson Mandela was always carefully crafted by the party leadership in order to achieve the specific objectives of the time. His identity became inseparable from that of the movement and from his vision for South Africa and the world – a remarkably selfless act that has escalated a mortal human being to super human status. It is the nature of this sacrifice that resonates deeply with me as an individual who is now able to forge my destiny on my own terms. Thanks to the sacrifices of others, I am completely in control of and responsible for the choices I make as I embark on my own journey towards my life’s purpose.

South Africa now moves into the post-Mandela phase. It presents an opportunity for the country to set its own path inspired by the teachings of Mandela, but without the accompanying pressure of having to live up to the world’s expectations. The structural fissures that have emerged and somewhat deepened as a legacy of apartheid now need to be unapologetically addressed. Mandela’s message of forgiveness cannot be mistaken as forgetting all of the horrors of the country’s past. Ironically, the pride that comes with being a product of the Mandela generation has also resulted in many South Africans assuming a position of arrogance, as Mandela’s legacy is manipulated to maintain the status quo. A rising prevalence of South African exceptionalism with regards to the rest of the African continent, in addition to entrenching the positions of an elite minority at the expense of the country’s millions who remain oppressed in poverty, are cause for concern.

There needs to be acknowledgment that without economic liberation and the attainment of basic rights for all, we cannot develop a society based on the foundation of human dignity. If the socio-economic barriers that currently prevent the majority of South Africans from living a dignified life are not adequately and effectively addressed, Mandela’s image, as well as his teachings, will sadly become irrelevant and ultimately forgotten.  At a recent interfaith memorial service hosted by the Nelson Mandela Foundation, ANC veteran Tokyo Sexwale stated:

“Now that the prophet’s lips are sealed and his body is about to enter the ground, which of his disciples will step forward and speak out for human rights, freedom, equality and social justice?”

South Africa, stand up.

The post Hamba Kahle Tata: A Tribute to Nelson Mandela 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.

The Postcolonialist : Notre revue s’intéresse aux productions artistiques qui transcendent de façon novatrice les frontières et les identités nationales. Votre parcours entre Haïti, Montréal et les États-Unis est exemplaire en ce sens. On a souvent tendance à catégoriser spatialement les auteurs; ainsi, vous avez tour à tour été décrit comme écrivain haïtien, québécois, exilé, de la diaspora, migrant, etc. Que pensez-vous de ces différentes étiquettes ? Ont-elles leur utilité ou cachent-elles l’essentiel ?

Dany Laferrière : Il est vrai que j’ai souvent à répondre à cette question. Parfois, je me la pose moi‑même. Mais j’avoue en avoir marre de toutes ces étiquettes, parce qu’elles ne servent à rien, c’est‑à‑dire qu’elles ne servent qu’à la personne qui les propose, et pour un temps seulement. Par exemple, l’université a un travail précis à faire et la catégorisation des auteurs lui permet de mieux les cerner, comme le papillon mort est plus facile à examiner. En réalité cependant, les étiquettes littéraires et politiques se contaminent facilement et brouillent les pistes ; c’est souvent le cas, en particulier, pour les littératures migrantes.

TP : Vous évoquez souvent, dans vos œuvres, l’ambiguïté de votre rapport avec Haïti, un rapport rempli à la fois d’une certaine forme de culpabilité, mais surtout de légèreté : « Je traverse le monde, en sifflotant, laissant derrière moi une île à la dérive. Sans jamais l’oublier, j’ai su dès le départ qu’il fallait m’en distancer pour qu’elle ne m’entraîne pas dans sa spirale. Pour aider quelqu’un à sortir d’un trou, il ne faut pas s’y trouver avec lui. Me voilà, avec pour toute fortune au fond de ma poche les vingt-six lettres de l’alphabet. » (Journal d’un écrivain en pyjama, p. 16-17) Cette légèreté, ou désinvolture, serait-elle représentative de votre rapport à toutes ces identités ?

DL : C’est une question très vaste, à laquelle j’ai consacré des livres entiers. Il y a des situations assez sanglantes en Haïti, qu’on ressent d’autant plus comme telles quand on vit dans une ville plutôt calme, comme Montréal. Mais la culpabilité, ce n’est pas mon genre. Je me souviens qu’après le séisme [ndlt : le tremblement de terre en Haïti, survenu le 12 janvier 2010], mes amis écrivains se demandaient si on ne devait pas se sentir coupable d’être vivant quand toutes ces personnes étaient décédées. Je tenais plutôt ce raisonnement : en aucun cas les gens qui sont morts voudraient qu’on soit morts avec eux. Personne ne souhaite de malheur aux autres parce qu’ils sont dans le malheur. Alors, je n’entretiens pas de rapport de culpabilité avec Haïti.

Ma relation avec Haïti peut sembler complexe si on mélange la vie personnelle et la littérature. Il ne faut pas confondre ce qui est dit dans mes œuvres avec ma réalité. Mon écriture ratisse large, essaie de rendre toutes sortes d’émotions de gens différents, également Haïtiens et exilés. Leurs expériences sont mises à contribution dans mes œuvres. Comme je sais qu’il y a des gens qui se sentent coupables d’être à l’extérieur d’Haïti, il arrive qu’il y ait des traces de cette culpabilité dans mes livres. Je donne toujours priorité au livre ; quand j’ai envie de réfléchir sérieusement à quelque chose, j’écris un livre. Cela me permet d’explorer plusieurs angles de la question, parce que la vie est un kaléidoscope.

TP : Est-ce que la consécration littéraire que vous avez obtenue au Québec se traduit par un sentiment d’appartenance?

DL : Encore une fois, je fais la distinction entre la vie personnelle et la littérature. Bien sûr, j’écris au Québec, je publie au Québec, tous mes livres ont paru d’abord dans les éditions québécoises avant de paraître ailleurs. Cependant, je me considère comme un écrivain international, sans formalité, dans le sens que, pour moi, la promesse de la littérature est l’universalité. J’écris pour comprendre ce que je vis et je partage mes sentiments, mais pour découvrir en même temps que c’est la situation de l’ensemble des gens qui vivent sur cette planète. En fait, je ne suis pas seul ; c’est ça, la promesse de la littérature. Vous n’êtes pas seul. Quand on gratte la petite couche folklorique des individus, on s’aperçoit que les sentiments humains sont pareils. Je ne cherche pas à me décrire par ma littérature, je cherche à écrire ce que je ressens.

Quant à cette intégration à l’espace québécois, il est vrai que je la fais au niveau citoyen. Je participe à ce qui se passe au Québec, je suis sensible aux événements qui nous arrivent, aux débats qui nous touchent, bref à la réalité quotidienne.

TP : Vous rassemblez une bonne part de votre œuvre, de votre premier roman, Comment faire l’amour à un Nègre sans se fatiguer (1985), au Cri des oiseaux fous (2000), dans ce que vous appelez une « autobiographie américaine ». Au-delà de l’espace continental, qui est arpenté dans ces œuvres, on peut les classer en récits de l’enfance (ou de la mémoire) et récits contemporains. Est-ce que les divers espaces continentaux ont changé de signification avec le passage du temps ?

DL : Je fais une  précision : cette histoire d’une « autobiographie américaine » en dix volumes vient de moi. J’en avais marre d’entendre les gens dire qu’il y avait dans mes romans, d’un côté, un personnage au cœur sensible et avec une affection sincère pour sa famille, qui se retrouvait dans les romans qui se passent en Haïti et, de l’autre, une sorte de prédateur international, un personnage urbain sensible à l’écriture nord-américaine, qui se trouve dans les romans qui se passent en Amérique du Nord (notamment Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer et Cette grenade dans la main du jeune Nègre est-elle une arme ou un fruit ?). Je voulais rassembler ces positions à première vue divergente, pour faire comprendre à mes lecteurs, et surtout aux étudiants qui analysent mes œuvres – je les en remercie par ailleurs –, qu’il s’agit en fait de la même personne, d’un même travail, de la même Amérique, que Port-au-Prince et Petit-Goâve sont aussi des villes de ce continent. « Autobiographie américaine » ne veut pas dire les États-Unis, mais ce continent-là, une traversée par une histoire singulière, comme par la politique, l’économie, le racisme et tous les éléments qui déterminent cette partie du monde. Je voulais dire tout cela de façon simple, pour empêcher qu’on coupe mon œuvre, qu’on en travaille la partie haïtienne et la partie nord-américaine séparément. Pensant que je n’écrirais peut-être pas d’autre livre, j’ai dit que mes dix romans formaient une « Autobiographie américaine » ; c’était simplement une petite stratégie du moment. Ensuite, j’ai continué à écrire, et mes livres continuent à se retrouver dans cette grande chaudière. Je ne vois pas pourquoi Pays sans chapeau (1996) y figurerait et pas L’énigme du retour (2009).

Ensuite, les analystes, les critiques, les gens qui étudient les livres sont bien sûr libres de tout, même de contester ce que je dis. Je ne suis pas du tout la référence pour mes livres. Je donne des précisions techniques, ce qui n’invalide pas les autres analyses. Je tiens cependant à dire de faire attention quand on emploie des mots comme « mémoire », de ne pas faire une histoire personnelle. Il n’y a pas d’écrivain qui ne soit un écrivain de la mémoire. Ça n’existe pas. On ne peut pas écrire autre chose que ce qui nous habite, et ce qui nous habite, c’est d’abord le temps qui passe. J’ai l’impression qu’on réserve « la mémoire » aux gens qui sont en exil, comme si la mémoire était seulement liée à l’espace, au déplacement. Comme si le temps n’existait pas, que l’espace était la seule chose à définir, à déterminer la mémoire, alors qu’on peut rester dans la même ville, le même quartier, la même maison et avoir une mémoire du temps qui passe, et la nostalgie du temps qu’on ne pourra pas rattraper. On écrit avec tant de choses.

TP : Dans Le cri des oiseaux fous, votre narrateur fait la distinction entre engagement politique et engagement culturel. Son action se situe principalement du côté de la culture, par l’affirmation de l’indépendance d’esprit comme forme de résistance au pouvoir, sans doute la meilleure possible puisque, justement, elle ne s’occupe pas de pouvoir. Pouvez-vous développer cette position?

DL : C’est le cas dans une dictature. Dans les villes complètement capitalistes d’Amérique du Nord, c’est plutôt le collectif qui est une forme de résistance. Le dictateur, lui, a volé le sens collectif, l’a pris en otage et naturellement voudrait qu’on se soumette à lui un à un. Il y a peu de choses pouvant soumettre les individus autant que la peur. La peur est une chose individuelle. Le rêve du dictateur est d’intégrer, dans chaque individu, cette peur. Dans ce contexte, il ne faut donc pas perdre de vue que le plus résistant, c’est encore l’individu. Il faut commencer par être résistant soi-même si l’on veut ensuite se regrouper dans la résistance. Ce que le dictateur veut faire, c’est d’abord nous annuler, nous humilier et faire en sorte que nous perdons toute individualité. C’est pour cela qu’il y a beaucoup de choses qui sont liées, que ce soit dans la colonisation ou la dictature, à l’humiliation personnelle. On veut vous humilier. Dans les pays plus industrialisés, on veut tout simplement voler votre énergie, pas forcément vous humilier individuellement. On veut vous réduire au suicide, ou à des ensembles collectifs pour capter votre énergie et la convertir en argent, en puissance. On ne cherche pas à vous humilier : votre position est déjà humiliante d’être dans cette collectivité qu’on fait travailler dans des conditions difficiles. Mais dans les dictatures, puisqu’on n’offre pas de travail, il n’y a pas de classe ouvrière. Il faut prendre les individus un à un. C’est ça la résistance, l’individu est le premier rempart. Si vous vous laissez occuper par la peur que le dictateur veut situer en vous, il n’y a aucune possibilité de résistance.

TP : La littérature peut-elle avoir une fonction similaire dans les pays « du Nord » et « du Sud » ? Comment les fonctions, ou les préoccupations, de la littérature, à Haïti et au Québec, peuvent-elles se rejoindre ?

DL : Pour ma part, je reste plongé dans la chose elle-même, la littérature. Quand on passe la plupart de son temps à ferrailler avec des adjectifs ou des adverbes, on n’a pas trop le temps de regarder les choses sous cet angle-là. C’est plutôt le rôle des universités de s’interroger sur ce qui est différent et ce qui est semblable. Bien sûr, il y a un aspect universel de la littérature. Les sentiments, les émotions, la résistance individuelle qu’on a vu depuis Antigone de Sophocle. Quand Antigone dit : « Je ne suis pas ici pour la haine, je suis ici pour l’amour », c’est un peu ce que je dis dans tous mes livres. Je n’ai pas de temps à perdre avec des choses qui ne donnent pas d’élan à mon enthousiasme. On passe beaucoup de temps à discuter avec l’autre sur son propre terrain, celui du dictateur, du chef ou du pouvoir. Je pense qu’on lui donne beaucoup trop de place, alors qu’on devrait plutôt parler de ce qui nous regarde et nous intéresse.

TP : Dans votre dernier ouvrage, Journal d’un écrivain en pyjama, vous semblez regretter l’importance que semble de plus en plus prendre la figure de l’écrivain (comme personnalité publique), au détriment peut-être de l’œuvre, de la littérature. Est-ce un défi particulier de la littérature contemporaine ? Êtes-vous d’accord avec ceux qui disent que la littérature n’a plus de fonction que spectaculaire, puisque c’est une activité qui se pratique dans l’indifférence généralisée ?

DL : Il est vrai que depuis une quarantaine d’années, il y a quelque chose de nouveau qui se passe. Bien sûr, le fait de l’écrivain célèbre n’est pas nouveau ; déjà, les philosophes grecs l’étaient à leur époque. Je suis sûr que Socrate était une sorte de rock star d’Athènes. Mais ce que je remarque de nouveau, c’est l’intrusion du lecteur, des lecteurs, sur ce terrain. C’est ce qui fait, d’ailleurs, que l’image de rock star devient absolument recevable. L’écrivain, après avoir publié un livre, fait une tournée, va voir les lecteurs. De plus en plus, le cercle s’élargit. Autrefois, ce n’étaient que les écrivains connus – américains, français, allemands… – qui faisaient des choses comme ça. Maintenant, même les écrivains de taille moyenne, c’est-à-dire dont les livres ont une petite diffusion, font des tournées aussi, sont invités dans les festivals, et rencontrent des lecteurs qui font signer les livres qu’ils vont lire. C’est au point où on se demande si les gens lisent les livres qui ne sont pas signés par l’auteur ! J’ai même entendu quelqu’un dire : moi, je ne lis un livre que si j’ai rencontré l’auteur et si je l’aime. Beaucoup d’auteurs ne passent pas ce test peut-être, même s’ils sont meilleurs que ceux qui sont gentils… Ajoutons à cela le fait que de plus en plus, en France et même au Québec, la plupart des villes de taille moyenne ont leur propre festival de littérature qui cherche à inviter des écrivains. Ce n’est certes pas une mauvaise chose pour la diffusion de la littérature, mais je me demande si cela n’aurait pas un impact sur l’écriture elle-même, du fait qu’on rencontre de plus en plus de gens qui nous lisent et nous donnent leur opinion sur ce que nous écrivons. Avant, l’écrivain ne rencontrait presque jamais son lecteur, de sorte que s’établissait une sorte de solitude parallèle entre celui qui est en train d’écrire et celui qui est en train de le lire à l’autre bout de la ville, tous les deux seuls, sans que ces deux êtres ne se croisent. C’est une situation nouvelle où ils se rencontrent et échangent leur point de vue chacun sur l’autre.

TP : Vous avez signé, en 2007, le manifeste Pour une littérature-monde en français, qui remet en question le rapport centre-périphérie entre la France et la francophonie. Depuis, cette expression a été utilisée à toutes les sauces. Pouvez-vous expliquer ce que la « littérature-monde en français » représente exactement pour vous?

DL : Je voulais qu’on précise la question de la francophonie, dans ses rapports à la fois à l’économie et à la culture. Il y avait un besoin, de la part de la France, de rassembler tout ceux qui parlent français sur la planète pour faire le poids à l’anglophonie qui, de plus en plus, s’affirmait comme puissance démographique. La littérature a une grande visibilité, d’autant plus que les écrivains peuvent venir de toutes les classes sociales, contrairement à l’économie, qui ne quantifie que les puissants et les riches. À l’inverse, les écrivains viennent de partout. J’avais compris qu’avec la francophonie, Paris est à part, et le reste est la province, que ce soit la province française ou les autres pays parlant français. Je ne pouvais accepter ce fait d’être un écrivain provincial, parce que j’écris précisément pour sortir de l’espace où je suis, pour aller dans un lieu à la fois intemporel et sans espace. J’écris à partir d’une grande rêverie, je n’écris donc pas pour me faire remettre à ma place après. C’est pour ça que j’étais d’accord avec cette idée d’une « littérature-monde », qui est le contraire de la mondialisation. L’idée est de faire en sorte que la marge devienne le centre ; on prend place au centre et comme centre. Il n’y a plus de francophonie qui ne soit pas la France, c’est-à-dire regroupant tous les pays parlant français sauf la France.

D’ailleurs, l’idée même de classer les écrivains par langue est déjà pour moi une idée assez provinciale. Je ne suis pas un écrivain de langue française, ni francophone, je suis un écrivain. J’écris avec un langage qui ne tient pas forcément compte de ce langage codé avec lequel on m’identifie. Peut-être que si on analyse ce que j’écris, on verra que je suis plus proche des Allemands, des Sud‑Africains, des Scandinaves, des Américains ou des Argentins. On enferme l’écrivain dans la langue dans laquelle il écrit, ce que je trouve assez limité. La bibliothèque de l’écrivain contient beaucoup d’écrivains de partout. Je lis Tolstoï ; je le lis en français, c’est vrai. Je lis Borges ; je le lis en français, c’est vrai. Je lis Günther Grass ; je le lis en français, c’est vrai. C’est ma langue de base, le français. Je lis tous ces écrivains-là, mais je sais que Günther Grass n’est pas Tolstoï, et que Tolstoï n’a pas la sensibilité de Diderot et que Diderot n’est pas Hemingway. Même si je lis Le vieil homme et la mer en français, je sais que c’est un écrivain américain que je suis en train de lire et qu’il n’a rien à voir avec Mauriac, par exemple. C’est pour ça que je me suis dit qu’il est peut-être mieux de dire « littérature‑monde » que de dire littérature francophone.

TP : On peut dire que vous êtes un écrivain de l’espace, et vous vous servez du traitement de l’espace pour, en quelque sorte, compenser l’asymétrie symbolique entre les centres littéraires et les périphéries : « Y a-t-il des sociétés plus littéraires que d’autres? Certaines ont donné de bonnes preuves qui nous font croire à leur aptitude, mais je doute que ce soit dans leur ADN. Il est vrai que Paris, Manhattan et Berlin se sont retrouvés plus souvent dans un livre que Petit-Goâve. Je me suis dit qu’il fallait réparer cette injustice. Le monde ne pouvait vivre plus longtemps sans connaître les gens de Petit-Goâve. » (p. 206) D’autres écrivains caribéens (je pense aux Martiniquais Patrick Chamoiseau et Raphaël Confiant) sont des écrivains de la langue. On pourrait transposer votre question : y a-t-il une langue plus littéraire que d’autres? Est-ce que le créole est trop « social », particularisant ou régional, pour qu’on puisse faire le même traitement à la langue que vous faites à l’espace?

DL : Je pense que personne n’est pris dans sa langue. Sinon, on ne devient pas écrivain. Chaque écrivain doit en quelque sorte en inventer une nouvelle. Par ailleurs, comme romancier on écrit beaucoup plus dans la musique, à l’inverse de l’essai ou du journalisme, qui disent exactement les choses. Je crois que c’est peut-être ça l’erreur, de croire qu’on écrit dans sa langue. Il faut arriver à atteindre la musique. C’est même tout le problème de la traduction, d’arriver à capter cette musique. Les mauvais traducteurs, ce sont les gens qui se réfèrent à la langue de l’écrivain qu’ils ont à traduire, alors que l’écrivain doit d’abord effectuer une rupture avec sa propre langue. Il doit déjà se façonner un langage, alors je ne me situe pas dans le fait de créer une langue encore plus locale en prenant des termes qui définissent la région, qui ont une saveur particulière. Je me méfie de toute saveur particulière. J’essaie plutôt de traduire les émotions et les sentiments.

TP : Est-ce que vous observez davantage de solidarité (ou de parenté) entre les écritures francophones (celles du Sud et celles du Nord), entre les écritures postcoloniales (peu importe la langue) ou entre des écritures « régionales » (comme la Caraïbe, ou l’Afrique, ou l’Amérique en son sens continental)?

DL : En fait, je ne suis pas du tout dans ce genre de regard, cela se voit quand on me lit. Dans mon dernier livre par exemple, je cite les écrivains comme ils me viennent. Je suis dans une grande bibliothèque, avec des livres qui sont les énergies individuelles de gens qui ont mis leurs angoisses, leurs nuits blanches, leurs émotions pour tenter précisément de nous faire voir que nous sommes universels. Alors, je ne sépare pas les histoires personnelles, et je n’établis pas de solidarité automatique entre pauvres.

Je pense qu’on peut trouver des amitiés, des affections un peu partout dans le monde. J’ai vécu sous la dictature Duvalier. Il n’était pas le seul à être dictateur, il était escorté d’un bon cinquième de la population. Je ne pense pas que les gens qui parlent la même langue sont nécessairement plus gentils entre eux. Les familles les plus proches se déchirent. La littérature nous a démontré, dans les romans qui parlent d’héritage, dans les romans du XIX^e siècle, qui parlaient de comment il suffit qu’un aïeul meure, chez les pauvres comme chez les riches, pour que les autres membres de la famille se disputent l’héritage. Si la famille ne peut pas constituer une identité, une sorte de cohésion, ce n’est pas la langue qui pourrait le faire, ni même la région. En arrivant au pouvoir, Duvalier avait dit, à peu près, qu’il vaut mieux un dictateur noir qu’un colon blanc. La réalité est qu’on ne veut ni de l’un, ni de l’autre. C’est toujours le même argument que les gens ont pour vous écraser. Ils vous disent qu’ils viennent de chez vous, qu’ils ont vécu ce que vous avez vécu, le genre d’argument « mes meilleurs amis sont des Noirs ». Ils font ça pour qu’on ne les soupçonne pas, mais on connaît bien la haine des semblables.

Cela dit, j’aurais pu aussi dire l’amour des semblables. Je ne fais pas de généralisation, je n’y crois simplement pas. Du moins, pas dans la littérature. Là n’est pas, pour moi, le projet de la littérature. Peut‑être en politique pourrait-on tenter de tels rapprochements, pour avoir un semblant de vie en commun. Mais en littérature, les écrivains tentent de dire « écoutez, je ne sais pas ce qu’on va faire avec cette réflexion, mais nous ne sommes pas si différents que cela ». Je ne crois pas que, parce qu’on parle la même langue, on ait nécessairement des solidarités souterraines.

TP : Est-ce donc plutôt que vous vous reconnaissez une solidarité en littérature et par la littérature, une sorte de bibliothèque universelle, qui transcenderait les espaces et remonterait dans le temps aussi ?

DL : Oui, c’est ça, c’est le don de soi, des angoisses, des nuits blanches, des joies secrètes, dans les fêtes intimes à travers le temps. Tous les écrivains, quels qu’ils soient, de quelque langue ils soient, de quelque époque ils soient, ont donné à notre culture. Quand je pense à Goethe, je ne pense pas que c’est un Allemand ; assurément, il vient d’Allemagne, avec une famille et des voisins, mais ce qu’il a donné et qui est parvenu jusqu’à moi, cette énergie est un don de soi qui fait partie de l’héritage humain. Qu’on vienne de Port-au-Prince, comme Jacques Roumain, ou de Martinique, comme Édouard Glissant, ou de Russie, comme Tchekhov, c’est toujours ce même don de soi qui est très émouvant. Nous donnons si peu, et là brusquement nous avons des gens qui se donnent entièrement. Leur énergie traverse les siècles pour nous rejoindre, nous permettre de passer un bon moment et de voir que nous sommes ni totalement perdus, ni totalement seuls. Nos intimités, nos cœurs sont à la fois différents et semblables. Qu’ils viennent nous dire cela, je pense que ça fait partie d’un héritage humain que je ne suis pas prêt à diviser en petites portions de lieu, de langue, de classe, de race, de quoi que ce soit. Pour une fois que nous avons la possibilité d’avoir un héritage commun!

Interview with Dany Laferrière

Translated from original French by: Alisa Belanger

The Postcolonialist : Our review is interested in artistic production that transcends national boundaries and identities in innovative ways. Your background between Haiti, Montreal and the United States is exemplary in this respect. Authors are often categorized by spaces; thus, you have alternately been described as a Haitian, Quebecois, Exiled, Diasporic, Migrant writer, etc. What do you think of these various labels? Are they useful or do they conceal the essential ?

Dany Laferrière: It’s true that I often need to respond to this question. Sometimes, I ask myself the same thing. But I must admit to having had enough of all of these labels, because they serve no purpose, meaning that they only serve the person who comes up with them, and only for a time. For example, the university has a specific task to carry out and the categorization of authors allows it to encompass them better, like a dead butterfly that is easy to examine. Yet, in reality, literary and political labels easily contaminate each other and blur clear-cut answers; this is often the case, in particular, for Migrant Literatures.

TP: In your works, you frequently evoke the ambiguity of your relationship to Haiti, a relationship abounding with a certain form of guilt, but also, and above all, lightheartedness : “I pass through the world, whistling, leaving behind me an island at drift. Without ever forgetting it, I knew from the beginning that I needed to take a distance from it so that it would not pull me into its spiral. To help someone out of a hole, you can’t fall into it with the person. That’s me, with the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, my only fortune, at the bottom of my pocket.” (Journal d’un écrivain en pyjama, p. 16-17) Is this lightheartedness, or flippancy, representative of your relationship to all of these identities ?

DL: This is a very vast question to which I’ve dedicated several entire books. There are some relatively violent situations in Haiti, which a person feels all the more strongly when living in a rather calm city, like Montreal. But guilt isn’t my style. I remember that after the earthquake [ed.: the earthquake in Haiti occurred on January 12, 2010], my writer friends asked themselves if they shouldn’t feel guilty to be alive when all of these people died. My reasoning went like this: by no means would those who died have wanted us to die with them. No one wishes misfortune on others because they are in misfortune. So, I maintain no relationship of guilt to Haiti.

My relationship with Haiti can seem complex if personal life is mixed with literature. What I say in my books shouldn’t be confused with my reality. My writing casts a wide net, tries to render all kinds of emotions from different people, both Haitians and the exiled. Their experiences contribute to my works. Since I know that there are some people who feel guilty to be outside Haiti, it happens that there are traces of that guilt in my books. I always give the book priority; when I want to think seriously about something, I write a book. It allows me to explore several angles of the question, because life is a kaleidoscope.

TP: Does the literary recognition that you’ve received in Quebec translate into a sense of belonging?

DL: Again, I distinguish between personal life and literature. Of course, I write in Quebec, I publish in Quebec, all of my books have first come out in Quebec editions before coming out elsewhere. However, I consider myself an international writer, without formalities, in the sense that, for me, the promise of literature is universality. I write to understand what I live, and I share my feelings, but, at the same time, to discover that it’s the situation for the all of those who live on this planet. In fact, I’m not alone; that’s it, the promise of literature. You’re not alone. When we scratch beneath the thin folkloric surface of individuals, we realize that human feelings are the same. I’m not trying to describe myself through my literature, I’m trying to write what I feel.

As for this integration into Quebec society, it’s true that I accomplish it in a civic way. I participate in what happens in Quebec, I’m sensitive to the events that happen to us, to the debates that impact us—in sum, daily reality.

TP: You bring together a good part of your work, from your first novel, Comment faire l’amour à un Nègre sans se fatiguer (1985) [How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired (1987)] to Le Cri des oiseaux fous (2000), in what you call your « American autobiography ». Beyond the continental space that is covered in these works, they could be classified as childhood (or memory) narratives and contemporary narratives. Have these various continental spaces changed meaning with the passing of time?

DL: I would like to add a comment: this account of an “American autobiography” in ten volumes is from me. I was fed up with hearing people say that, in my novels, there was, on the one hand, a character with a sensitive heart and sincere affection for his family, who was found in the novels that happen in Haiti, and, on the other hand, a sort of international predator, an urban character open to North American writing, who is found in my novels that happen in North America (notably Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer [How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired] et Cette grenade dans la main du jeune Nègre est-elle une arme ou un fruit ? [Why Must a Black Writer Write About Sex?]. I wanted to bring together these apparently divergent positions, to make my readers understand, and especially the students who analyze my works—by the way, I thank them for it—that it’s all in fact from one person, the same work, the same America, that Port-au-Prince and Petit-Goâve are also cities on this continent. “American autobiography” doesn’t mean the United States, but that continent, a passage through a unique story, like through politics, the economy, racism and all of the elements that define this part of the world. I wanted to say all of that in a simple way, to stop others from cutting up my career work, working separately on the Haitian part and North American part. Thinking that I might not write another book, I said that my ten books formed an “American autobiography”; it was simply a passing strategy at the time. Then, I continued to write, and my books continue to fall into this large pool. I don’t see why Pays sans chapeau (1996) [Down among the Dead Men (1997)] would be part of it and not L’énigme du retour (2009) [The Return (2011)].

Next, analysts, critics and people who study books are of course free in all respects, even to contest what I say. I am not the reference for my books. I give technical precisions, which doesn’t invalidate other analyses. I nonetheless insist on saying to be careful when using words like “memory,” not to make up a personal story. There is no writer who is not a writer of memory. No such thing exists. We cannot write anything other than what lives in us, and what lives in us is first and foremost time that passes. I have the impression that “memory” is reserved for those in exile, as though memory were only tied to space, movement. As though time didn’t exist, space were the only thing to define, to determine memory, whereas a person can stay in the same city, the same neighborhood, the same house and have a memory of time passing, and nostalgia for the time that cannot be grasped. We write with so many things.

TP: In Le cri des oiseaux fous, your narrator makes a distinction between political and cultural engagement. Its action takes place principally in the sector of culture, through the affirmation of independent spirit as a form of resistance to power—doubtless the best possible resistance, since, precisely, it takes no interest in power. Could you elaborate on this position?

DL: This is the case in a dictatorship. In the completely capitalist cities of North America, it’s the group that is a form of resistance, instead. As for the dictator, he stole collective meaning, took it hostage and, naturally, wants others to submit to him one after the other. There are few things as able to oppress individuals as effectively as fear. Fear is an individual thing. The dream of the dictator is to instill, into each individual, this fear. In this context, we should therefore not lose sight of the fact that the most resistant is still the individual. What the dictator wants to do is reduce us to nothing, humiliate us and make us lose all individuality. That’s why there are many points that are associated with personal humiliation, whether under colonization or a dictatorship. They want to humiliate you. In more industrialized countries, they simply want to steal your energy, not necessarily humiliate you individually. They want to reduce you to suicide, whereas institutions want to sap your energy to convert it into money, power. They don’t seek to humiliate you: your position is already humiliating to be in this group forced to work under difficult conditions. But in dictatorships, since no work is offered, there is no working class. Individuals must be taken one by one. That’s what resistance is, the individual is the first defense. If you allow yourself to be inhabited by the fear that the dictator wants to implant in you, there is no chance of resistance.

TP: Can literature have a similar function in nations that belong to the global « North » and « South » ? How can the functions and concerns of literature in Haiti and Quebec come together?

DL: As for me, I remain immersed in the object itself, literature. When you spend most of your time hammering out adjectives or adverbs, you don’t have much time to view issues from that angle. It’s up to universities to reflect on what is similar and different. Of course, there is a universal aspect to literature. The feelings, emotions, individual resistance that we have seen since Antigone by Sophocles.

When Antigone says: “I was born to join in love, not hate,” it’s a bit what I say in all of my books. I don’t have the time to waste on things that don’t give momentum to my enthusiasm. We spend a lot of time talking with the Other on his own terrain, that of the dictator, the leader or power. I think that we give him too much space, whereas we should speak instead about what concerns us and interests us.

TP: In your last work, Journal d’un écrivain en pyjama, you seem to regret the importance increasingly given to the writer as a figurehead (or public personality), perhaps to the detriment of the work, of literature. Is this a challenge specific to contemporary literature? Do you agree with those who say that literature merely serves the function of an onlooker, since it’s an activity practiced amid generalized indifference?

DL: It’s true that for the past forty years, there has been something new happening. Of course, the famous writer is not new; already, Greek philosophers were famous in their era. I am sure that Socrates was a sort of rock star in Athens. But what I notice that’s new is the intrusion of the reader in the landscape. Moreover, that’s what makes the image of the rock star completely permissible. The writer, after having published a book, goes on tour, goes to see the readers. More and more, the circle is widening. In the past, it was only well-known writers—American, French, German…. – who did those types of things. Now, even mid-range writers, meaning those whose books have a small distribution, go on tour, too; they’re invited to festivals; and, they meet readers who have books signed that they’re going to read. It’s to the point where you wonder if people read books that aren’t signed by the author. I even heard someone say: me, I don’t read a book unless I’ve met and I like the author. A lot of authors perhaps don’t pass this test, even if they’re better than those who are nice… Let’s add to this the fact that, more and more, in France and even in Quebec, the majority of mid-sized cities have their own literary festival which seeks to invite writers. This is certainly not a bad idea for the distribution of literature, but I wonder if it doesn’t have an impact on the writing itself, based on the fact that we are meeting more and more of those who read us and who give us their opinion on what we write. Before, the writer almost never met his reader, such that a sort of parallel solitude was established between the one who is writing and the one who is reading on the other end of town, both alone, without running into each other. This is a new situation where they meet and exchange their viewpoint on each other.

TP: In 2007, you signed the manifesto Pour une littérature-monde en français, which draws into question the center-periphery relationship between France and la Francophonie. Since then, this expression has been used far and wide. Can you explain exactly what “World Literature in French” represents for you?

DL: I would like us to be specific on the question of la Francophonie, in its ties to both the economy and culture. There was a need, on behalf of France, to bring together all of those who speak French on the planet in order to carry weight against the English-speaking world [anglophonie] which was affirming itself more and more as a demographic powerhouse. Literature has great visibility, all the more so that writers can come from all social classes, unlike the economy, which only quantifies the powerful and the rich. Inversely, writers come from everywhere. I had understood that with la Francophonie, Paris is a place unto itself, and the rest is provincial, whether the French provinces or other countries that speak French. I could not accept the idea of being a provincial writer, because I write precisely in order to leave the space where I am, to go to a point that is both atemporal and placeless. I write from a great daydream; hence, I don’t write in order to be put back in my place afterwards. That’s why I agreed with this idea of a “World Literature,” which is the opposite of globalization. The idea is to make it so the margins become the center; we take our place in the center and as a center. There is no longer a Francophonie that is not France, meaning that brings together all of the French-speaking countries except France.

Moreover, the idea itself of classifying writers by language is already for me a rather provincial idea. I’m not a French-language, nor a Francophone writer, I am a writer. I write with a language that doesn’t necessarily take into account this coded language with which I’m identified. Perhaps if others analyze what I write, they will see that I am closer to Germans, South Africans, Scandinavians, Americans or Argentineans. They imprison the writer in the language with which he writes, which I find rather limiting. The writer’s library contains a lot of writers from everywhere. I read Tolstoy; I read him in French, it’s true. I read Borges; I read him in French, it’s true. I read Günther Grass; I read him in French, it’s true. French is my foundational language. I read all of those writers, but I know that Günther Grass isn’t Tolstoy, and that Tolstoy doesn’t have the sensibility of Diderot and that Diderot isn’t Hemingway. Even if I read The Old Man and the Sea in French, I know that it’s an American writer that I am reading and that he has nothing to do with Mauriac, for example. That’s why I said to myself that it’s perhaps better to say “World Literature” than to say Francophone literature.

TP: It could be said that you are a writer of space, and you use the treatment of space in order to compensate, in a way, for the asymmetries between literary centers and peripheries: “Are there some societies more literary than others? Certain ones gave good evidence that make us believe in their aptitude, but I doubt that it’s in their DNA. It’s true that Paris, Manhattan and Berlin are more often found in a book than Petit-Goâve. I told myself that this injustice needed to be redeemed. The world could no longer live for much time without knowing the people of Petit-Goâve.” (p. 206) Other Caribbean writers (I’m thinking of Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant  from Martinique) are writers of language. Your question could be transposed: “Is there a language that is more literary than others? Is Creole too « social », making the regional too specific, for a writer to treat a language in the same way that you treat space?

DL: I think that no one is prisoner to his language. Otherwise, a person doesn’t become a writer. Each writer must invent a new one, in a way. Also, as a novelist, a person writes much more inside music, unlike essays or journalism, which say things precisely. That may be it, I believe, the error: to believe that we write in our language. We have to manage to reach music. That’s the entire problem of translation, too, managing to capture that music. Bad translators, they’re the ones who refer to the language of the writer that they have to translate, whereas the writer must first effectuate a break with his own language. He already has to devise a language for himself, so I don’t relate to the notion of creating an even more local language by using terms that define the region, that have a particular savor to them.  I am weary of any particular savor. I try instead to translate emotions and feelings.

TP: Do you observe more solidarity (or affiliation) between Francophone writings (those of the South and the North), between postcolonial writings (in any language) or between “regional” writings (like the Caribbean, or Africa, or America, as a continent)?

DL: Actually, I don’t look at it in this way at all, as people can see when they read me. In my last book, for example, I cite writers as they come to me. I’m in a vast library, with books that are the individual energy of people who have expressed their anxieties, their sleepless nights, their emotions precisely to try to make us see that we are universal. Therefore, I don’t separate personal stories, and I don’t establish an automatic solidarity between the poor.

I think that we can find friendships, affections almost anywhere in the world. I lived under the Duvalier dictatorship. He wasn’t the only one to be a dictator, he was attended to by a good fifth of the population. I don’t think that people who speak the same language are necessarily nicer among themselves. The closest families tear themselves apart. Literature has demonstrated to us, in the novels that speak of inheritance, in the novels of the 19^th century, that spoke of how it was enough that an ancestor die, among the poor as well as among the rich, for the other members of the family to fight over the inheritance. If the family cannot forge an identity, a sort of cohesion, then it’s not the language that might do so, nor even the region. When he arrived in power, Duvalier said, more or less, that it was better to have a black dictator than a white colonizer. The reality is that we want neither one nor the other. People always have the same argument to crush you. They tell you that they come from the same place as you, that they’ve lived what you’ve lived, the kind of argument “my best friends are Blacks.” They do it so that they aren’t suspected, but we really know the hate of kin.

That said, I also could have said the love of kin. I don’t generalize, I simply don’t believe in it. At least, not in literature. That’s not, for me, the goal of literature. Maybe in politics they could try those kinds of comparisons, to have an appearance of shared experience. But in literature, writers try to say “listen, I don’t know what anyone will do with these thoughts, but we’re not so different as all that.” I don’t think that, because we speak the same language, we necessarily have underground solidarities.

TP: Do you prefer to distinguish a solidarity in and through literature, a sort of universal library, which may go beyond spaces and turn back time, as well?

DL : Yes, that’s it, it’s the gift of the self, the anxieties, the fitful nights, the secret joys in the private celebrations across time. All writers, whomever they may be, in whatever language they write, in whatever era, have given to our culture. When I think about Goethe, I don’t think that he’s a German; of course, he comes from Germany, with a family and neighbors, but what he gave and what has been passed down to me, this energy, is a gift of the self that belongs to the heritage of humanity. Whether a writer comes from Port-au-Prince, like Jacques Roumain, or from Martinique, like Edouard Glissant, or from Russia, like Tchekhov, it always remains this same gift of the self which is very moving. We give so little, and, there, suddenly, we have people who give themselves entirely. Their energy endures across the centuries to meet us, allow us to have a good time and to see that we’re not totally lost, nor totally alone. Our private thoughts, our hearts are both different and akin. That they come to us to tell us so, I think that it’s part of a human heritage that I am not ready to divide in little segments by location, language, class, race, or whatever else. Not when we have the chance for once to have a common heritage!

The post Entrevue avec Dany Laferrière, récemment élu à l’Académie française (Interview with Dany Laferrière, recently elected to the Académie française) appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

What if we declared ourselves perpetual refugees in solidarity with all refugees needing safe human harbor from violence and domination and injustice and inequality? …We are all refugees horribly displaced from a benign and welcoming community. And the question is: Can we soon enough create the asylum our lives will certainly wither without?

—June Jordan, “We Are All Refugees”

At the height of the Second Intifada (also known as the Al-Aqsa Intifada) which began in September 2000, a 23 year-old white American student from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, arrived in Gaza to initiate a sister-cities project between Olympia and Rafah, a city in southern Gaza where the vast majority of the population is comprised of Palestinian refugees. As an active volunteer for the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a nonviolent organization dedicated to the Palestinian cause, she was particularly engaged in protests against the demolition of Palestinian homes by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). It was during one of these protests, on March 16, 2003, less than two months after her arrival, that Rachel Corrie was murdered—run over twice, crushed to death by an IDF armored bulldozer on its way to demolish another Palestinian home.[1]

Three days after Rachel Corrie’s murder, Palestinian American social activist Suheir Hammad’s poem “On the Brink of…” was circulated on the internet. Frustrated by the violence against Palestinians in general, and against Rachel Corrie in particular, Hammad writes, “the murder of this white/girl from Olympia Washington has/my heart breaking and my blood faint./Something like ten Palestinians have been killed since/yesterday, when a Caterpillar bulldozer driven/by a man demolished the home that was her body.”[2] While the conflation of home and body is a significant motif that appears throughout Hammad’s work, that conflation becomes especially complicated in the case of Rachel Corrie who, despite the “privilege” (to use Corrie’s own words) of her race and nationality, was considered Palestinian in the weeks leading up to, and the months and years following, the tragedy. Not only did Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat proclaim her a “daughter of Palestine,” even naming a street in the West Bank city of Ramallah after her, but in her journals Corrie had professed her love for the Palestinian people and had identified herself with them, as did the people of Rafah who spray-painted “Rachel has Palestinian blood” across city walls after her murder.[3] And, in response to the vehement criticism of Corrie’s active solidarity with the Palestinian people, Evergreen professor Therese Saliba remembers her futile attempt to comfort a troubled colleague by explaining that Corrie had “‘become Palestinian, and she will be attacked in the same way the Palestinians have always been attacked and their struggle discredited. She will be called a terrorist or a terrorist sympathizer.’”[4]

Saliba’s sentiment that Corrie had “become Palestinian” borrows from the Caribbean American poet June Jordan’s “Moving Towards Home,” published in 1985 in response to the 1982 massacres at Sabra and Shatila, in which Jordan proclaims: “I was born a Black woman/and now/I am become Palestinian/against the relentless laughter of evil/…/It is time to make our way home.”[5]^,[6] This concept that Jordan lyrically explores—of being “born” a certain identity and “becoming” another by way of establishing solidarities built on an inclusive morality, shared social ethics, mutual respect, and shared experiences with (or shared understandings of) human struggle—was exemplified and embodied by Rachel Corrie, whose “born” identity as a white American woman was complicated and expanded, even transformed, by her love for the Palestinian people and her fight for justice on their behalf (both of which would ultimately cost her her life).[7] It is Jordan’s powerful declaration of being (re)born a Black Palestinian woman that would not only inspire Hammad’s debut poetry collection, Born Palestinian, Born Black (first published in 1996, expanded and reissued in 2010), but would also become both a persistent concern and a consistent theme throughout much if not all of Hammad’s works. In her poetry, Hammad negates and negotiates varying identities in order to engage with and connect the various struggles of (primarily, though not exclusively, colored) peoples across the world. For Hammad, such identification is facilitated through a global (and globalized) sense of self coupled with collective self-love, in which we identify ourselves within others (and them within us) in order to form a global alliance based on shared affective love. Thus, by resituating her own difference within that of various marginalized communities in the U.S. and abroad, Hammad’s poetry redefines individual identity as a cultural collective built upon a solidarity of shared marginalization in the face of global oppressions, through which “patriotism” transcends nation, and the love of self is (re)located in—and conflated with—a universal love for others.

Universal patriotism (particularly in Hammad’s poetry) is synonymous with what Kwame Anthony Appiah interchangeably calls “global citizenship” or “cosmopolitan patriotism.”[8] This way of seeing, living, and being in the world is founded on the sentiment that if the whole universe is our “home,” then as “citizens” we have a responsibility to nurture it—to concern ourselves with the cultures and politics of all parts of our “home,” which just so happens to be the “home” of others as well. For Appiah, difference does not undermine, threaten, nor conflict with this all-embracing conception of home; rather, difference is a part of “home” and is precisely what makes “home” both tangible and malleable. And because home is figured (as it most often is) within kinship and country, cosmopolitan patriots can be considered “true patriots” because they “hold the state and the community within which they live to certain [moral] standards,” understanding that while “it is all very well to argue for, fight for, liberalism in one country—your own,” it is even more imperative to extend that fight to include those outside of our countries and selves, since our very own rights “matter as human rights … only if the rights of foreign humans matter, too.”[9] Thus Appiah not only reconciles traditional views of patriotism with his philosophy of cosmopolitanism, but also expands the definition of patriotism beyond national borders, thereby enabling it to accommodate a changing world and worldview. Although the essence of patriotism has long been argued to consist of “the responsibilities as well as the privileges of citizenship,” Appiah argues that patriotism is more importantly a feeling of connection:

Patriotism is about what the nineteenth-century Liberian scholar-diplomat Edward Blyden once so memorably called “the poetry of politics,” which is the feeling of “people with whom we are connected.” It is the connection and the sentiment that matter, and there is no reason to suppose that everybody in this complex, ever-mutating world will find their affinities and their passions focused on a single place.[10]

Since we are all connected, so to speak, and especially since that connection is not a single, mutually exclusive stream flowing to and from a single place, then there is no reason that cosmopolitanism and patriotism cannot be merged into a collective vision for the betterment of humanity: “We cosmopolitans can be patriots, loving our homelands (not only the states where we were born but the states where we grew up and the states where we live); our loyalty to humankind—so vast, so abstract, a unity—does not deprive us of the capacity to care for lives nearer by.”[11] Rather than conflict, these loyalties to “lives nearer by” and to all of humankind appear to be interrelated, mirroring the interrelatedness of peoples across the world while working towards bridging the gaps between “here” and “there,” “us” and “them,” “our” struggles and dreams and “their” struggles and dreams.[12]

The construction of such bridges among peoples and across cultures is precisely what concerns Hammad, and to which her poetry is intensely committed. Her literary gesturing towards universal self-identification is often connected with an affirmation of collective marginalization, demonstrated here for instance by her contemplation of the “many usages of the word ‘Black’”:

• Black   like the coal diamonds are birthed from
• like the dark matter of the universe
• like the Black September massacre of Palestinians
• the Arabic expression “to blacken your face”
• meaning to shame.

• Black   like the opposite of white
• the other
• Indians in England, Africans in America,
• Algerians in France and Palestinians in Israel
• the shvartza labor of cleaning toilets and
• picking garbage

• Black   like the genius of Stevie, Zora and Abdel-Haleem
• relative purity
• like the face of God
• the face of your grandmother[13]

The first group of usages signifies the negative connotations of “blackness”: the blackness of coal that “births” precious gems but is not a precious gem itself; the all-encompassing, sublime blackness of the unknown or the unfamiliar (“dark matter of the universe”); the blackness of death (“Black September,” which refers to the events of September 1970, in which King Hussein of Jordan unleashed a brutal military campaign against the Palestine Liberation Organization based in Amman, resulting in the slaughter of thousands of Palestinians); and the idiomatic blackness of shame. The second group places blackness within a racial context and furthermore connects “blacks” (here a metonym for marginalized peoples) and black struggles across the world, from the U.S., to Europe, to Israel. It is not until the final category that Hammad reclaims blackness, and posits it in an alternative way that is righteous and sacred (the “relative purity” of blackness); constructive and inspiring, associated with creation instead of death (referring not only to the face of the Creator, but also to the artistic “genius” of black “creators,” such as Stevie Wonder, Zora Neale Hurston, and the influential Egyptian singer from the 1950’s and 60’s, Abdel-Haleem Hafez); and deeply personal and relational (the black “face of your grandmother”). Hammad’s second and third definitions of blackness as both connective and empowering are a significant theme in her writings, and lay the groundwork for much of her poetry.

Collectively, Hammad’s poems explore the concepts (or, rather, the acts) of both self-definition and the continual redefinition of that self. As the poet herself makes clear, “we need to own our definitions and live by them. We need not be afraid to adapt or change them when necessary. Borders are manmade, and I refuse to respect them unless I have a say in their formation.”[14] These manmade borders—between persons, peoples, nations, cultures, movements—are precisely what Hammad undermines and transcends with the formal and thematic diversity of her poetic voice, as Siréne Harb notes:

Hammad exploits the flexible potential of borders and stresses the significance of discovering embryonic entities. Such entities allow her to reorganize cultural practices so as to creatively juggle/redefine cultural, linguistic, and stylistic norms. For this poet, thus, the construction of identity depends on acts of adaptation and appropriation … shaping ways in which she situates herself in discursive spaces and negotiates the heterogeneousness of narrative, social and historical borders.[15]

Hammad’s “acts of adaptation and appropriation” and the “heterogeneousness of narrative, social and historical borders” are readily apparent in the poem “taxi,” in which Hammad connects the plight of the people in the Palestinian Territories with that of African Americans in the U.S. Separated into three sections, the first section, addressed to the self-proclaimed “urban warrior” and “street soldier,” trivializes and scolds the ghetto mentality for which Salman Rushdie offers one of the better, more succinct definitions: “The adoption of a ghetto mentality [is] to forget that there is world beyond the community to which we belong, to confine ourselves within narrowly defined cultural frontiers.”[16] Hammad’s criticism of those in the African American community whose understanding of struggle is limited to “not gettin taxis and little white ladies/claspin purses” necessitates a definitional expansion of “struggle” in all its forms and faces, and what it means for marginalized peoples in other parts of world, particularly in the Territories.[17]

This is precisely the subject of the second section, in which Hammad recounts the nightmarish reality of “refugee camps that make you long for/the projects …/this aint no/boy scout trip this is the real deal hell/on earth what it’s about.”[18] It is not until the third section that Hammad connects both worlds, both realities, in her call for a more all-encompassing understanding of struggle from which transnational solidarity can be built:

• conscious comrade
• there’s a place uglier than uptown’s slum
• where the people are just as beautiful
• strugglin sister
• there’s a debke[19] beat funky as p.e.’s riff
• signalin revolution liberation and freedom

• so when we’re vibin on the pale
• evil of welfare and crack          know i’m
• across the street and across the sea      so when
• we’re combatin cops and prisons          know there are prisons
• like ansar iii[20]   nazis wouldn’t touch     pigs wouldn’t visit
• so when we read baraka and listen to malcolm
• let’s read darwish and keep on
• listenin to malcolm

• so when you call me sista
• ask after our family
• this shit is about more
• …
• it’s bigger than
• our hoods and our heads
• it aint all about this poem
• and it aint all about
• taxis
• and little white women[21]

Here, the urban warrior/street soldier has been replaced by “conscious comrade” and “strugglin sister” as Hammad urges the African American community to extend its own struggle to include that of Palestinians on the other side of the world, who similarly struggle against poverty and crimes of the State, denoted by the “pale evil of welfare” and “cops and prisons.” She associates Palestinian Debke with one of the most influential American hip-hop groups, Public Enemy, to bridge the gap between one black pride revolution and another. Hammad’s imperative, that “when you call me sista/ask after our family” serves to remind us, as Michelle Hartman notes, that “merely local or parochial concerns of one community cannot be the main or only focus of social change. Developing an expanded sense of community must be more than simply calling someone ‘sister’ but show a deeper level of respect by asking about the larger family and community to which this person is tied.”[22] Thus, when Hammad proposes that “when we read baraka and listen to malcolm/let’s read darwish and keep on/listenin to malcolm,” she is gesturing towards and broadening a collective sense of responsibility, for “closed universities and open prisons/curfews and house demolitions/…/…the faces of mournin mothers/losin more sons to american tax dollars” that fund the Israeli military (directly) responsible for such destruction of human life and livelihood.[23] In this way, the references to Amiri Baraka, Malcolm X, and Mahmoud Darwish, like those to Debke and Public Enemy, serve “to bridge, through the juggling of a number of cultural notions, different types of struggle for social justice.”[24] As Carol Fadda-Conrey explains, the positioning of diverse cultural and creative icons in Hammad’s work, evidenced by poems like “taxi,” is a reflection of the poet’s own diverse origins:

[Hammad’s] poetry mirrors the intermixture of influences in Hammad’s life, including Palestinian displacement, connections to African American and Puerto Rican cultures that Hammad was exposed to while growing up in Brooklyn, and the various forms of violence she has experienced and been a witness to, manifested, for example, through the Arab-Israeli conflict, as well as through the harsh circumstances surrounding urban youth culture in New York and the disenfranchisement of peoples of color all around the world.[25]

Hammad’s linking of peoples across the world via their struggles against oppression and marginalization foreground what Chela Sandoval and Keith Feldman call, respectively, “oppositional consciousness” and “interracial insurgency,” both of which are explicitly at work in Hammad’s poetry in general and in “taxi” in particular, where Hammad actively attempts to instill a camaraderie—a global patriotism—constructed from a fragmented sense of self that is located in multiple places, at multiple times, amongst multiple peoples.

It is precisely this collective sense of self that will enable both the individual and the group(s) to which she belongs to transcend nationality and reach beyond skin color in order to combat social injustices and sufferings from one end of the globe to the other, as Feldman similarly argues:

If one is to incorporate the multiple fractures of identity politics into the composition of self, then one must also address the political concerns of those individuals living beyond the political borders of the United States from whence the cultural elements have originated, the multiple heritages that have imbued the urban site with its complex of cultural forms. In this way, [Hammad] links ghetto with ghetto and forwards a political act both across the street of the urban metropolis and across the sea in the material locale of her national heritage.[26]

Because the “self” is composed of multiple fragments both within and without, to identify the “self” with others (or as “other”) necessarily aligns the concerns of that self with those outside of it. For Hammad, it is (and paradoxically so) human difference which connects and empowers us, as Trinh Minh-ha had profoundly asserted in her seminal essay exploring the interlocking identities of postcolonial women: “Otherness becomes empowerment, critical difference when it is not given but recreated.”[27] Embodying otherness as a way of being and employing difference as a means of realizing that “political and social commitment to justice depends on a broader vision of home/self” comprises Hammad’s poetic vision of the universal patriot, enlisted in a collective battle against various injustices and oppressions that, despite specificity (of geographic location, of oppressive authority, of victimization) affects us all.[28] As Hammad reminds us, “to find ourselves we hold up a mirror to the worlds we all inhabit,” and it is these worlds with which we relate and for which we fight.[29]

The poem “manifest destiny” not only exemplifies the broader (re)vision of home/self, but also the connective potential of multiplying identities and the power of difference that unifies diversity. In an interview by Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman, Hammad speaks of her multiple identities and identifications, shaped by her immigrant experience and her father’s insistence on her “difference”:

“I didn’t grow up Arab American—what the fuck is Arab American? I grew up Palestinian and Brooklyn, really specifically. And my father’s like you’re not this, you’re not that. And then I’d meet other Palestinians and he’d be like, yeah, but you’re not like them either. You know, because it was a very specific immigrant experience at a very specific time, and I didn’t relate to the problems that were being written about. I didn’t have a half-white parent or a white parent. I didn’t have the sense of cultural clash in my body. I had it outside of my body. In my body I felt like, I look like everyone else I grew up with—whether they were Puerto Rican or Italian or light-skinned black people.”[30]

The self-described similarity of Hammad’s physical appearance to the “Puerto Rican or Italian or light-skinned black people” with whom she grew up complicates notions of race as it relates to Arab and Arab Americans.[31] But rather than pose an obstacle, for Hammad this complication provides the perfect site for negotiating, adapting, and appropriating both individual and socio-cultural identities. This is especially evident in “manifest destiny,” in which an intimate dinner scene with a group of friends sets the stage for Hammad’s exploration of interior and exteriors, as they relate to questions of identity, cultural expectation, and poetry. The poem begins with a collective “we four/sitting nursing/plates of rice and beans in a Cuban diner/we all should have been other people/with other people.”[32] The imperative “should” suggests that such a gathering, at least from the outside, is far from typical, and it is this unlikely friendship among a diverse group of people sharing a meal which undermines the alleged tension between outer and inner, between what should be and what is. The individual descriptions of each person begin with who she may appear to be, and who she actually is: “one/who should’ve been a neo-nazi aryan baby breeder/a machete wielding man-hating dyke/was a lover of both men and women girl of riot and a poet” while “another/who should’ve been a witness of jehovah knocking down doors/or a gyrating video hoochie/was a scholar of african glory lover of knowledge and a poet.”[33] The repetition of “and a poet” ending each description functions to reinforce not only the common ground uniting them all, despite (or, perhaps, because of) their differences, but also the power of poetry to unite people across borders and barriers.

Hammad ends the poem with an affirmation of not only how outer appearances run counter to inner selves (which, in turn, run counter to cultural expectations), but also of how feelings of loss can be a connective force, on a level that is personal and intimate: “missing my family/who couldn’t understand/we four all missing family who wouldn’t understand/creating a family/we struggling to understand/we were where we needed to be/we are who we have to be.”[34] As Feldman notes:

The family unit is renarrated here to contend with the notion of family as the social receptacle of an identity based on genetic descent; rather, it is reconceived in the scene of cultural and political exchange. Heritage is a component of identity here that becomes malleable and contingent on the social construction of wider community, a community situated, in this case, within a transnational urban setting.[35]

For Hammad, this type of unity and community is essential—foundational—to establishing a collective self-identity based on her configuration of home and self, and the conflation of that home/self with other homes/selves, from which a “transnational mobilization of diasporic communities in ghettoized spaces” is made possible.[36] Hammad’s transnational autobiographical identification, which “plac[es] the autobiographical self in solidarity with a network of diasporic populations,” becomes a sociopolitical outlet through which traditional, essentialist, or isolationist understandings of identity are undermined and replaced by a more inclusive, transnational, trans-racial redefinition of home/self.[37] To return to Feldman’s reading of Hammad’s poem:

Hammad locates home in the production of a future through manifold resources of a culture forged in a transnational context and through transnational solidarities. As a community surviving displacement, exile, and diaspora, as Palestinian, as Arab, as Arab American, as a community forged through material, political, and cultural connections with others who survive the material effects of the diaspora, Hammad locates the potentiality for the building of a new home in which members of those ‘othered’ communities—like herself—might speak their own life experiences….[38]

Similarly, Harb argues that Hammad’s relocation of home and her re-situation of self within that home, in all its multiple locations, move towards a “universalism which acknowledges the importance of gendered and ethnic specificities, while at the same time stressing the commonalities and zones of intersection among different groups. As such, the universal is redefined as a form of political awareness of the workings of power and systems.”[39] From this redefined universalism—and re-imagined universe—comes the formation of a collective self, comprised of multiple (and multiplying) identities, and the practice of love towards that self and the others in which it is located, enacted through (and even synonymous with) responsibility.

The association of love (of self and others) with personal and social responsibility is at the heart of Hammad’s (seemingly) romantic “we spent the fourth of july in bed.” Here, the act of lovemaking is interrupted by images of violence and thoughts of suffering—realities that invade and pervade even the most intimate moments, and that continuously haunt the poet/lover and pollute her memory. After an extensive and intensely morbid chronicle of various gruesome sufferings in the world, from the “exploding legs” of Iraqi girls and “ants crawl[ing] out of somali eyes” to the “puerto rican women” and “young philipinas” who “go blind constructing computer discs/poems like this are saved on,” the troubled poet/lover pauses for a moment as she returns to the lusty scene of the erotic encounter: “yeah the smell of suffer/lingers even now/lover as we lay/in amazement and/if baby as you say/my skin is the color of sun/warmed sand then you’re/my moonless night/and we the beach/wet and tidal all that/good shhhh wet.”[40] This sensual serenity is then interrupted, once again, by images of violence, as the poet/lover’s mind returns to the global scenes of the crime:

• yet
• as we lay
• shrapnel awakens pain on
• an island of paraplegics
• courtesy of the 80s gun craze
• to our generation violence
• isn’t a phase it’s the day to day

• and though my head is filled
• with your sweetness now
• this same head knows
• nagasaki girls picked maggots out of stomach sores with chopsticks
• and hiroshima mothers rocked headless babies to sleep
• this head knows
• phalestini[41] youth maimed absorbing rubber bullets
• homes demolished        trees uprooted     roots dispersed[42]

The shift to and from the bedroom and the world outside, between the dreamlike sensuality of post-coital bliss and the nightmarish reality of human suffering, serves to bridge the spatial gaps between the “here” and the “there,” lending a sense of urgency to the poet/lover’s need to end these sufferings. Like in “first writing since,” written in the days following 9/11, Hammad urgently reminds us that the “there” is right here.[43] Her internalization of the “outside world” connects the lovers to the world that is outside of them (at least physically, anyway) and for which they are responsible. Though at the heart of “first writing since,” the collapsing of spatio-temporal binaries and the active refusal to subscribe to the political (meaning imperial) binary of life or death—of “with us” or “against us”—through personal and social responsibility indeed has its roots in this haunting love poem. “‘It’s this idea that we are not responsible for those we push aside,’” that Hammad’s poetry contests, as the poet herself explains, “‘I do believe in accountability on an individual level, but that can only exist legitimately within societies where we hold each other accountable as well.’”[44] Thus, the role of accountability not only bridges the gap between “here” and “there,” inside and outside, but also between self and other—between the individual and the social.

If human suffering is foreground by human intimacy, then individual and social accountability are foreground by human suffering. In “we spent the fourth of july in bed,” eroticism is offset by horror while the illusion of privacy, of the inner self / outer world binary, is shattered:

• this same head with
• all them love songs
• and husky whispers knows
• our moans come with a history
• deeper than our groins     our
• groans marry a story older
• than this lust

• as we lay          and love
• our touch is not free it comes with memories
• and the reality that even now
• food is a luxury
• viruses free
• …
• we baby
• look into our brownness to
• see those who’ve gone without
• knowing this     comfort of entangled legs
• foreheads of sweat     heart beats of love and sex

• our sighs indeed heavy with
• history     destiny     cum     and responsibility
• even now         in this heat
• on this futon
• we are not alone[45]

Here, love is not confined to romance, between a pair of lovers, in a room. Rather, the concept of love is broadened to include the whole world, all of humanity:

The boundaries of the marginalized collective are extended to encompass third world, predominantly female, victims of racial and imperial oppression. Here again, the connecting “we” supersedes the collective Arab American identity, linking the plights of Iraqi, Malaysian, Filipina, Puerto Rican, Yemeni, and Palestinian girls, women, and youth, as well as women from Nagasaki and Hiroshima, thus creating a solid unity out of their suffering, [that] unifies diversity.[46]

If the self is a collective formation, then it necessarily follows that the love of self, and the responsibility that love entails, exceeds the individual and extends to the community and, even further, to the world. In this way, the intimate “sighs” of the lovers are “indeed heavy with/history…and responsibility” for that which is “outside” of them. Thus, Hammad revisits the inside(r) / outside(r) binary she began exploring in “manifest destiny,” as well as the here / there binary she had begun to challenge in “taxi,” and incorporates collective responsibility as the driving force behind Sandoval’s oppositional consciousness and Feldman’s interracial insurgency. It is useful here to return to Minh-ha’s essay about interlocking identities among marginalized peoples, particularly women, in which she also addresses difference and spatial binaries, arguing that “differences do not only exist between outsider and insider—two entities. They are also at work within the outsider herself or the insider, herself—a single entity. She who knows she cannot speak of them without speaking of herself, of history without involving her story, also knows that she cannot make a gesture without activating the to and fro movement of life.”[47] As Hammad demonstrates in this poem, there can be no peace, not even in the privacy of one’s bedroom or home (or “self”), when the world is at war, with poverty, disease, injustice, violence, and other residual effects of imperialism: “even as we lay in/all this good feeling/people lay in dirt vomit shit and blood/and I gotta tell you/that my sincere love for real/is for my peeps my family humanity/love for real for real freedom/well fed human dignity for sisters and their lovers/…/there aint enough good feeling/to push the pain and awareness out.”[48] It is fitting, then, that on the day of American Independence, the poet/lover realizes and asserts that the most patriotic thing to do is to celebrate interdependence, by setting out to correct the troubles of the world for which she is personally and socially responsible: “we gotta get up soon/come on now baby/we got work to do.”[49]

Hammad demonstrates that universal patriotism, facilitated by universal love, begins with an awareness of pain as universal—a recognition that can link people to people, struggle to struggle, and “over here” to “over there.” This recalls Appiah’s imperative that it is also patriotic—cosmopolitically patriotic, that is—to concern ourselves with and defend the rights of others “over there” in addition to our own “right here”:

We should, in short, as cosmopolitans, defend the rights of others to live in democratic states, with rich possibilities of association within and across their borders; states of which they can be patriotic citizens. And, as cosmopolitans, we can claim that right for ourselves. … [T]he freedom to create oneself—the freedom that liberalism celebrates—requires a range of socially transmitted options from which to invent what we have come to call our identities … giv[ing] us a language in which to think about these identities and with which we may shape new ones.[50]

Through the construction and contemplation of a multitude of identities, Hammad is able to subsequently engage in the linking of global struggles as reenacted in “letter to anthony (critical resistance),” in which Hammad connects the issue of prison reform in the United States to both the Palestinian struggle for legitimacy and justice and the global sex trade. In doing so, the poem lends itself to a contemplation of the concept of criminality as a residual effect of imperialism’s oppressive agendas, executed through economic exploitation of the poor (and often colored), the subjugation of women, and the suppression of “minority” voices. In the second section of the poem Hammad issues a confession, an admission of her own guilt: “i have always loved criminals/i tell people who try to shame/me into silence.”[51] As the poem continues, the poet conflates the criminal with “10/years to go nowhere how much deeper/you going to get until a system based/on money deems you rehabilitated” with the Palestinians, deemed “criminals” by a system (Israel) built on their forced absence and perpetual incarceration in refugee camps:

• i have always loved
• criminals and not only the thugged
• out bravado of rap videos and champagne
• popping hustlers but my father
• born an arab boy
• on the forced way out
• of his homeland his mother exiled
• and pregnant gave birth in a camp

• the world pointed and said
• palestinians do not exist palestinians
• are roaches palestinians are two legged dogs
• and israel built jails and weapons and
• a history based on the absence of a people
• israel made itself holy and chosen
• and my existence a crime.

• so i have always loved criminals
• it is a love of self
• and i will not cut off any part of
• me and place it behind fences and bars
• and the fake ass belief
• that there is a difference between
• the inside and the outside

• there is no outside anywhere
• anymore just where we are and
• what we do while we are here[52]

In “letter to anthony,” prison becomes a symbol of forced separation, the embodiment of the inside / outside, here / there binary erected and enforced by hegemonic power structures and their exclusionary politics. Hammad associates Anthony, the “criminal” sitting in an American prison and to whom she is writing, with her father and, by extension, her people: Palestinians whose very existence has been criminalized by Zionism’s agendas. Furthermore, she equates her love of criminals with a love of self—that is, her own “criminality,” namely her Palestinian heritage. Her refusal to abide by the “fake ass belief/that there is a difference between the inside and the outside,” and her conclusion that “there is no outside anywhere/anymore,” recalls her internalization of the external that was at the heart of the poem, “we spent the fourth of july in bed.” The poem’s ending is indeed a powerful affirmation of humanity—and the global patriot’s promise to continue to defend the rights of others everywhere—as well as a reassurance to Anthony in the American prison and to Nazim in the Palestinian refugee camp that there are people, like the poet herself, who erase the lines between inside and outside, bridge the gap between the here and the there.

This is essentially how Hammad connects struggle to struggle across the world and resists on behalf of those who are withheld and withdrawn by structures more powerful than they:

• and there
• are people anthony who make a connection
• between you puerto rican rhyme slayer beautiful man and
• young girls twisted into sex work and these
• people nazim they are working to stop prisons
• from being economically beneficial to depressed
• communities and these people
• bronx bomber they imagine a world
• where money can’t be made off the hurt
• of the young the poor the colored the
• sexualized the different
• …
• they believe human
• beings can never be reduced
• to numbers not in concentration
• camps or reservations not in
• refugee camps not in schools
• and not in jails
• …
• stay well
• and safe
• resist
• and love
• suheir[53]

In “letter to anthony,” Hammad attributes incarceration to invisibility, and invisibility to the hegemonic campaign against the coalitions of difference—like the ones Hammad is constructing in her poetry—that threaten that hegemony. As Minh-ha reminds us:

Difference remains within the boundary of that which distinguishes one identity from another. This means that at the heart X must be X, Y must be Y and X cannot be Y. Those running around yelling X is not Y and X can be Y, usually land in a hospital, a rehabilitation center, a concentration camp, or a reservation.[54]

For Hammad, love, and the alliances born of love, serves not only to bridge disparate struggles and identities across many fronts, but also to connect the traumatic experiences that can otherwise isolate the individual and jeopardize the collective self-love meant to empower them. Collective self-love and the interracial insurgency it motivates (or necessitates, rather) is at the center of “open poem to those who rather we not read…or breathe.” Again, Hammad begins with a collective “we” and an affirmation of a shared interracial, presumably (though not exclusively) third world alliance: “we children of children exiled from homelands/descendants of immigrants denied jobs and toilets/carry continents in our eyes/survivors of the middle passage/we stand/and demand recognition of our humanity.”[55] The opening of “open poem” testifies to “a collective past fraught with subjugation and discrimination (extending to the present)” and reaffirms that Hammad’s “own Palestinian history of exile cannot be disengaged from the larger history of imperialism and colonialism that scatter peoples across the world and sever them from their homelands, whether they are exiles, immigrants, or descendents of slave-trade victims.”[56]

Thus Hammad reconceptualizes “third world,” broadening its scope to include the plights of those who are marginalized in the first world, corresponding to Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s de-limiting description of “third world” as being “defined through geographical location as well as particular sociohistorical conjectures … thus incorporat[ing] so-called minority peoples or people of color in [first world nations like] the U.S.A.”[57] Such a revision of the “third world” as an “imagined community of … oppositional struggles … is useful because it leads us away from essentialist notions of third world feminist struggles, suggesting political rather than biological or cultural bases for alliance.”[58] This movement away from essentialism and exclusion in an effort to unify and mobilize diversity against hegemonic and hierarchical power structures is precisely what is at work in “open poem,” where Hammad “locates her individuality within communal concerns and struggles, thus explicitly situating the poetic ‘I’ within a ‘we’ … represent[ing] a united but multiple-colored voice denouncing American white hegemony,” and in doing so redraws the maps of struggles.[59] As Harb similarly notes, “Hammad accomplishes a critique of power through the rearrangement of traditional geographies and seemingly unrelated spaces. In this process, she uses historical experience rather than geographic location as the frame of reference for the redrawing of maps of struggle against a number of oppressive practices.”[60] This is evident in the poem’s powerful reclamation of humanity through a declaration of resistance, in which “brown-eyed girls clash with governments of war” in their determination to “think, analyze, fight back, and be human beings”:

•              we
• witness and demand a return to humanity

• we        braid resistance through our hair
•              pierce justice through our ears
•              tattoo freedom onto our breasts

• the bluesy souls of brown-eyed girls
• clash with blood on the pale hands of
• governments of war
• … sent on a mission to set back
• our strength     power     love

• we be political prisoners walking round semi-free
• our very breath is a threat
• to those who rather we not read
• and think         analyze                        watch out         and fight back
• and be human beings the way we need to be[61]

Thus, the transnational poetic geographies that Hammad establishes set the stage for a collective resistance against the structures of power intent on “setting back,” meaning marginalizing, various “semi-free” peoples determined to claim full freedom through solidarities built on the power of love. In this way, the cartographies of struggle are themselves composites, much like identity and the “self” it projects, to which Marco Villalobos attests:

Hammad has drawn a map full of dots we still take pleasure in connecting. …[She] reminds us the distance between millenary African Cities and a Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the distance between Cairo and Jerusalem, is only 265 miles—closer than Los Angeles to San Francisco; closer than Manhattan to Washington, D.C.; that Jordan is only set apart from the African continent by the Sinai Peninsula; that the Red Sea doesn’t make so much of a difference in this respect, since it is crossed by the dust of footprints and the wet of tears, since without the wind’s help ululation reaches from one side of the Suez to the other.[62]

This linking of struggles—and securing one’s own link to a variety of peoples through shared concern for and participation in those struggles—is reenacted throughout Hammad’s poetry, and it is through her poetry that she revisits the sites of struggle to engage with the multicolored voices and multiple narratives of oppression, on all levels and at all distances.

By envisioning identity as flexible, relational, and polycentric, Hammad is able to transcend distance and employ disparity as a battle tactic in the fight against hegemonic structures of power and their oppressive practices. Such intercommunalism, or multicultural polycentrism, according to Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, is not only “a more substantive and reciprocal approach” but also a “profound restructuring and reconceptualization of the power relations between cultural communities” which produces “informed affiliation on the basis of shared social desires and identification.”[63] This is very much the basis of Hammad’s universal (or cosmopolitan) patriotism, designed to counter what Steven Salaita calls, “U.S. imperative patriotism,” which “assumes (or demands) that dissent in matters of governance and foreign affairs is unpatriotic and therefore unsavory. It is drawn from a longstanding sensibility that unconformity to whatever at the time is considered to be ‘the national interest’ is unpatriotic.”[64] Hammad’s poetry not only confronts this notion, but proposes an alternate form of “patriotism” that aligns itself with Appiah’s emphases on multilocal connections amidst an increasingly global “feeling” of interconnectedness. It is this redefinition of patriotism that links tragedies across disparate geographical locations so that struggle is no longer figured in terms of binaries, such as “them” and “us.” And as such, each individual becomes responsible for the struggles of others and, by extension, all communities become subject to answer for the ills of the world.

This belief in both a collective responsibility and in a more global(ized) form of patriotism are unsurprisingly at odds with governing bodies intent on maintaining, militarizing, and exploiting borders and boundaries. This tension is most evident in Hammad’s poem “Beyond Words,” written between 2003 and 2004 as chaos was unfolding around—engulfing—the world: “the axis of evil” was cemented into American political rhetoric; Saddam Hussein had fallen; the United States was in the midst of war with both Iraq and Afghanistan; sexual violence in the Congo was the most rampant in the world; and just as news broke about the horrors at Abu Ghraib, the town of Rafah on the Gaza Strip (where Rachel Corrie had been killed) was nearly destroyed by the IDF, determined to quell the Second Intifada. The poet, who had found—or created, rather—a “home” in poetry, who sought refuge in language, was now at a loss for words:[65] “Where has my language gone?/The poet searches for words to wrap around these times/Make them sense Make them pretty Make them useful/…/Desperate for words I can write/…/Language has failed me.”[66] Although Hammad had constructed entire bodies of work upon the premise of a collective struggle against various forms of global oppression, that premise was now under threaten, once again, of being delegitimized by the vocabulary of separation, the mentality of isolation, and the politics of exclusion: “I am told over and over/Iraq is not Palestine/Kabul is not New York/…/Haiti is not Chechnya/Chiapas is not East L.A./Iraq is not Palestine/Over and over I am told/…/No connections here/No illuminated parallels/Two different histories and two different peoples/Make no links/Do not confuse the issues/Only confuse the people.”[67] Hammad finds herself in limbo, and though her sense of responsibility is immense, it is, ironically, the interconnectedness of conflict that leaves her struggling with paradoxical decisions: “How fucked up is it that I have to choose between ending/One occupation or another?/Partition my time and portion my information/…/[I] am taking too much on Too much in/I find nowhere to rest this responsibility/If I say nothing I am complicit/If I say something I am isolated as extreme.”[68]

Hammad’s sense of hopelessness gives way to a series of negations:

• This is about light and dark
• There is no black and white in humanity

• I am told
• Venezuela is not Cuba
• Rwanda is not Kurdistan

• I am not the woman kneeling
• In front of soldiers and their cameras and their weapons
• I am not the child shot in the head by the Israel Defense Forces
• I am not the starving AIDS inflicted mother
• Praying I live longer than my children
• So they will not be orphaned and sick and have to bury me
• I am not the child who watched
• Her family chopped to death in Lebanon in Sudan in Nicaragua
• I am not the father who leaves his children so as not to hear their
• empty Bellies call out Baba, where is the bread?[69]

Followed by a series of affirmations:

• I am the woman whose taxes outfitted this tragedy
• The American the Authority does not speak for
• The Arab the Arab leaders do not speak for
• The woman whose shouts of Not in My Name
• Were spit back at me as a slogan of the misguided at best
• I am the girl from Brooklyn told to mind her business
• I am the poet in search of new words
• And a new world Not Mars[70]

By demonstrating how all that separates us can threaten any attempt at collective empathy and struggle, and also how authorities and leaders exploit those boundaries and manipulate (in addition to perpetrating, of course) human suffering so as to maintain those boundaries, Hammad struggles to regain common ground and reconnect the dots across a world on fire. In the end however the poet remains hopeful, reaffirming the power of love despite love’s vulnerability in times of chaos:

• There is still love in us
• …
• There is still enough resistance in us
• To create a world where there is no
• Your people or my people
• But our people
• Our people who kill Our people who are killed

• I somehow know love will save us
• …
• I know somehow love will save us
• Though I can’t find the passion or desire in my body to make it

• There is still a source for peace deeply embedded in this chaos

• I know love will save us
• Though words fail to point out how

• Amazingly I still pray
• To a god I envision to be larger than any nation Any religion

• And I still hunt for language to gather into a poem
• That I pray will feed those like me
• In need of proof they are not alone[71]

The repeated affirmations of love’s power to save and unite that end “Beyond Words” can be found elsewhere in Hammad’s poetry, such as in “some of my best friends,” in which she proclaims “love is larger than our details/these are my people.”[72] The poet’s—and, by extension, the universal patriot’s—determination to stay connected, to continue to assert that “over there is over here” and therefore “their” concerns should also be “ours,” brings to mind another profound conclusion drawn by Minh-ha:

The moment the insider steps out from the inside she’s no longer a mere insider. She necessarily looks in from the outside while also looking out from the inside. Not quite the same, not quite the other, she stands in that undetermined threshold place where she continually drifts in and out. Undercutting the inside/outside opposition, her intervention is necessarily that of both not quite an insider and not quite an outsider. She is, in other words, this inappropriate other or same who moves about with always at least two gestures: that of affirming “I am like you” while persisting in her difference and that of reminding “I am different” while unsettling every definition of otherness arrived at.[73]

Such is the nature—the mission, the dream—of the universal patriot, neither inside nor outside, here nor there, nowhere but everywhere. In this schema, the world becomes the site of multiple engagements, with home, with self, and with struggle.

In December 2010, American Quarterly featured the forum, “From La Frontera to Gaza: Chicano-Palestinian Connections” in which the aim was to “ask important questions about the connections between pursuits of justice and the organization of bodies and nations.”[74] I could not help but to draw connections between this particular issue of AQ and Hammad’s poetry, which essentially strives to accomplish the same ends. Thankfully, it seems that Hammad’s poetry is part of an ongoing project in which nations, especially “America,” are deconstructed and rearticulated as a series of connections within and without its borders. Such a re-articulation necessitates a revision—that is, an expansion—of a term closely associated with nationhood: patriotism. Curiously (though not surprisingly), while nations extend their borders and expand their frontiers, the same does not follow for the concept of patriotism. In her provocative essay “Intifada, USA,” June Jordan, tormented by the onset of the Gulf War and haunted by images of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, endeavors to link struggle to struggle in the very same fashion as Hammad and contemplates the fate of us all:

• Clearly, a barrel of oil is worth more than any number of Palestinian lives. Clearly, a barrel of oil is worth more than 250,000 young African-American and Mexican-American and Latino and poor white men and women now sweltering on the Arabian desert while they await God-knows-what horrible and untimely death.

• I say we need a rising up, an Intifada, USA.
• …
• We need to rise up. We need to stand against the “standoff” in the Persian Gulf. We need an Intifada, USA.

• At night, I go to bed afraid to close my eyes, or sleep: I ask my soul these questions aching on my conscience: What will happen to that little girl, that child of Palestine? What is happening to you and me?[75]

Those haunting questions Jordan poses at the conclusion of her essay rhetorically close the distance and bridge the gap between “them” and “us” by premising that what is happening to “that child of Palestine” is what is happening to “you and me.” The work of Jordan and Hammad, the activism of Rachel Corrie, and the “project of reimagination” at the heart of scholarly publications like AQ are continuing to make these connections, and in the process are redefining what it means to love one’s country, one’s people, and oneself in a world that is anything but singular. As Gloria Anzaldúa wrote, from the borders:

Through the act of writing you call … the scattered pieces of your soul back to your body. You commence the arduous task of rebuilding yourself, composing a story that more accurately expresses your new identity. You seek out allies and, together, begin building spiritual/political communities that struggle for personal growth and social justice … [and] forge bonds across race, gender and other lines, thus creating a new tribalism. … [I]nternal work coupled with commitment to struggle for social transformation—changes your relationship to your body, and, in turn, to other bodies and to the world. And when that happens, you change the world.[76]

Unfortunately, however, the obstacles are still there, even growing: given the prevalence of violent conflict all over the world, the comfort of hierarchy and the rhetoric of separation seem only to be disseminating instead of dwindling. Thus, the quintessential challenge facing any project of social justice is to invent new ways of drawing out and prioritizing the “we” in “I” in order to be a successful, at least possible, global force for change.

The post “Woman Walking Heavy/Brown Worlds in her Face”: Global(ized) Identities and Universal Patriotism in the poetry of Suheir Hammad appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

La más reciente edición de los Premios Goya organizada por la Academia de las Artes y las Ciencias Cinematográficas de España vuelve a poner al cine caribeño en la mirilla. El filme Juan de los muertos (2012, Alberto Brugués) se hizo en la noche del 17 de febrero de 2013 con el Goya a la mejor película iberoamericana. La historia se sitúa en La Habana, poco más de cincuenta años después de la Revolución, específicamente durante “la cosa ésta que vino después” del Período Especial, como explica el protagonista, Juan (Alexis Díaz de Villegas). La imposibilidad de definir el momento actual en la sociedad y la política cubana pronto encuentra su equivalente en la aparición de seres extraños que pululan por mar y tierra. Son los zombis que han tomado el control del país y que, como el contexto sociopolítico cubano, no se pueden definir: ¿muertos o vivos?, ¿disidentes o compañeros? La explicación es doble: mientras que para los habaneros se trata de una verdadera arma de destrucción masiva que impide la convivencia en la ciudad, para el gobierno cubano, en cambio, son un nuevo intento de los anarquistas, apoyados por el gobierno yanqui, de derrocar al otro gran muerto-vivo que es el gobierno castrista.

Juan, acompañado de su amigo apropiadamente llamado Lázaro (Jorge Molina), pronto descubre en esta situación una nueva oportunidad para comprobar que es un sobreviviente. Si sobrevivió “a Mariel, a Angola, al Período Especial, y a ésta cosa que vino después,” entonces también es capaz de sobrevivir y hasta de combatir la plaga infecciosa de los zombis. Es así que nace el negocio de asesinar por encargo a los “seres queridos” que se han transformado ahora en, literalmente, portadores de “gusanos”. Irónicamente, el paisaje a partir de ese momento se hace más homogéneo: si los edificios de la ciudad muestran constantemente su cara deteriorada que resiste como puede los embistes del tiempo y la falta de restauración, ahora la ruina se hace visible en los propios habitantes, aun cuando, en principio, todos parecen tener el mismo aspecto monótono de siempre, como observa una futura víctima ante la horda de zombis marchando por las calles: “Yo los veo igual que siempre”.

Juan de los muertos es una combinación de humor con elementos del cine de horror, algo que ya se había visto en 1985 con Vampiros en La Habana, película de animación del cubano Juan Padrón. En el filme de Padrón, sin embargo, la invasión proviene del exterior cuando los vampiros de Europa del Este descubren que un científico cubano posee la fórmula que les permite soportar la exposición al sol sin peligro de muerte. No obstante, a pesar del precedente de Padrón, no es hasta estos últimos dos años que el cine del Caribe hace su incursión de modo más sistemático y formal en el oscuro mundo del horror y del terror.

El horror visceral, no obstante, aparece ya desde el 2005 con el estreno de Andrea del dominicano Rogert Bencosme. El filme es la historia de Andrea (Any Ferreiras), una adolescente que inocentemente roba una cruz de un sepulcro para colocarla en la tumba de su reciente fallecida madre. Este hecho provoca la ira del espíritu que se libera y reclama lo que le ha sido arrebatado. Andrea es poseída por el espíritu que en vida había sido amigo de la infancia de Flora (Elvira Grullón), abuela de Andrea. En el pasado, cuando la joven Flora rechaza la propuesta amorosa de su amigo, éste se suicida y permanece encerrado en la tumba durante años hasta que es liberado en el presente de la narración por la joven protagonista. El padre de Andrea, Manuel (Hensy Pichardo), quien al comienzo de la película regresa del extranjero después de un largo período ausente, debe salvar a su hija por lo cual recurre a la ayuda de espiritistas. Aun a pesar del bajo presupuesto de la película, la misma recibió el Premio del Público del New York International Independent Film and Video Festival. La historia, alegan sus creadores, está basada en hechos reales ocurridos en Moca al norte de la República Dominicana.

Poco después del estreno de Juan de los muertos, aparecen dos filmes puertorriqueños que se valen de elementos propios del gótico clásico y que, podría decirse, contribuyen, junto con el filme de Brugués, a una nueva tradición cinematográfica: Los condenados (2012) de Roberto Busó-García y Under My Nails (2012) de Arí Maniel Cruz. El primero hace eco del más clásico cine de terror y suspenso: un pueblo remoto, una familia que guarda secretos, una casa presuntamente embrujada. Ana Puttnam (Cristina Rodlo), junto con su padre, vuelve desde México al ficticio pueblo de Rosales para reivindicar la imagen de éste, un médico estadounidense altruista que se encuentra, como si de un personaje de Poe se tratase, en estado catatónico. Ana planea convertir la casona familiar en un gran museo en el cual se pueda preservar el legado científico de su padre. Sin embargo, una vez en Rosales, la protagonista tendrá que descubrir los terribles secretos que oculta su familia y el pueblo. La clásica relación entre ciencia y horror que aparece en el siglo XIX vuelve en la película de Busó-García para presentar los crímenes cometidos contra la inocencia, la de los niños y la de un pueblo sometido al escalofriante y destructivo progreso científico.

Under My Nails, por su parte, es un thriller que presenta la figura del asesino perverso y de las mujeres que están a su merced. Filmada en Nueva York, la película sigue el día a día de Solimar (Kisha Tikina Burgos), una mujer puertorriqueña en el Bronx cuyo pasado está marcado por el abandono de su madre y el suicidio de su padre, y su vecino, Roberto (Iván Camilo), un dominicano que vive con su madre y que mantiene una violenta y masoquista relación con Perpetue (Dolores Pedro), una dominico-haitiana. La curiosidad que Solimar siente hacia Roberto y Perpetue la lleva a espiar (siempre a través de rendijas, agujeros mínimos o espacios reducidos) a Roberto y Perpetue y, finalmente, a presenciar el crimen violento de ésta. Solimar también desarrolla una morbosa obsesión sexual con el presunto asesino de quien parece enamorarse. Como en Los condenados, en Under My Nails la vivienda también es personaje porque es la que esconde amenazas, misterios y, posiblemente, cadáveres. Pero el terror en Under My Nails no sólo es el que genera la violencia y el crimen, sino también el que nace del abandono y la soledad. Solimar es un personaje solitario y apagado y su única relación es la que mantiene con Amalia (Antonio Pantojas), su amigo homosexual que actúa como una especie de madre y cuya pareja, además, tampoco habla porque se encuentra en estado vegetativo. Under My Nails, por lo tanto, es la historia de los “desplazados e inclasificables” –los emigrantes caribeños, los nuyoricans, los dominico-haitianos, los homosexuales, los enfermos. El terror de la ciudad y en la ciudad engulle a los más desprotegidos.

Si la película Andrea se estructura como un viaje que va de la realidad a la ficción, es decir, el hecho “real” adaptado al cine, en la película Desconocidos (2012, Andrés Ramírez), los personajes principales –un grupo de actores desconocidos contratados para realizar una película dentro de la película– hacen el recorrido inverso dentro de la trama. Sin saberlo, los actores son contratados para protagonizar una película “snuff”; los hechos que creen estar actuando, realmente ocurren; la ficción se convierte en realidad. Dos caras del terror, de esa forma, van desde Andrea hasta Desconocidos: la representación ficticia de algo que pudo haber ocurrido en el pasado y la representación de algo que podría llegar a ocurrir en el futuro. El terror se vuelve ineludible y omnipresente.

Finalmente, este año se estrenó Se vende del cubano Jorge Perugorría. El contexto de la película es el de la Cuba más reciente, durante el proceso de apertura iniciado por Raúl Castro. Los personajes tienen celulares, hay internet –aun cuando limitado–, y los cubanos de Miami vuelven para comprar antiguas propiedades (¿casas embrujadas?) de la Habana Vieja. Nácar (Dailenys Fuentes), la protagonista, aconsejada por el espíritu de su madre (Mirtha Ibarra), decide vender la bóveda familiar del cementerio para poder conseguir un poco de dinero. Cuando su compañera de trabajo la convence de que también venda los huesos de los difuntos, Nácar le pide ayuda a Noel (Jorge Perugorría) a quien había conocido poco antes y con quien inicia un romance. La película, como aclara el propio Perugorría, es un homenaje a los directores Tomás Gutiérrez Alea y Juan Carlos Tabío a quien considera sus maestros del cine (Cubadebate). Las alusiones a Muerte de un burócrata (1966, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea) o a Fresa y chocolate (1993, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea y Juan Carlos Tabío) no son escasas. Entre ellas, la mezcla de humor con ironía que en Se vende pasa por una puesta en escena de momentos propios del cine de terror, como la exhumación de una tumba o el entierro en vida de uno de los personajes. En una Cuba más abierta al mercado exterior, el terror también se vende y se compra; se vuelve mercancía. El aura misteriosa que cubre a la muerte como idea pasa a ser el aura del arte, la singularidad del objeto artístico, hacia el final de la película cuando el cadáver momificado del padre es exhibido como una escultura en un museo de la ciudad. Si durante el Período Especial, toda la infraestructura cubana –carros antiguos y casas destruidas– se fue tornando en museo abierto, en Se vende, el arte vuelve al interior del museo y junto con éste, entra también lo macabro. Tanto Juan de los muertos como Se vende presentan, entonces, la posibilidad de lucrarse con los cuerpos de los seres queridos y ese lucro es el que ambas películas transforman en arte a través del género de terror.

Zombis, vampiros, casas siniestras, asesinos psicópatas, espíritus… todos pertenecen al género gótico. Como el personaje de Solimar que se encuentra entre dos polos –deseo y rechazo; sol y mar– el gótico muestra una actitud ambivalente ante los cambios acaecidos en la sociedad europea del siglo XVIII como el paso del feudalismo a la industrialización, la migración del campo a la ciudad, la sustitución de la religión por la ciencia, de lo primitivo por lo moderno (Punter). Todo lo residual del pasado se expresa como una presencia monstruosa o fantasmal que se cuela en el interior de la vida doméstica y civilizada del presente pero que, a pesar de amenazar con destruir todo a su paso, no deja de generar fascinación y morbo en quien lo percibe. De ahí que la literatura gótica, desde sus inicios, y el cine de horror y terror, ya en el siglo XX, hayan sido y permanezcan siendo géneros muy populares. Era de esperarse, entonces, que el Caribe terminara por sumarse con fuerza a la lista de geografías amenazadas por los muertos-vivos, los fantasmas, los monstruos y los zombis. El paraíso tropical de las Antillas esconde secretos oscuros que su cine comienza ahora a develar.

The post Terror y horror en el cine contemporáneo del Caribe appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

“Religion can contribute to a post-patriarchal world.” [1]

The silence around feminism and religion is a profound one, and its roots lie in the metanarrative of secularising[2] that influences knowledge production in the field of feminism (and more broadly the social sciences). The silence functions to highlight not only a difficulty in approaching the subject of female autonomy in relation to religion, but also indicates a negativity towards religion on the part of feminist scholars.[3] Although there has been a significant amount of work on religion and patriarchy as well as on agency, autonomy, and gender; there has been little on the specific subject of women, religion and autonomy.

In an article by Elina Vuola, it is argued a shallow or condescending view of religion in the part of feminist scholars has meant that they do not see the full picture:

“On the one hand, there is a kind of feminist ‘blindness’ of, or resistance to, the importance of religion for women. On the other hand, there is a ‘religious paradigm’ type of feminist studies in which women are seen mainly through the lens of religion, especially in research done by Western scholars on Muslim countries.”[4]

This reflects the tension within the literature: while there is a focus on women and religion, this focus is problematic as it reproduces religion as inherently patriarchal and women as lacking autonomy in relation to said religion. This has especially been the case in studies on “women and Islam,” a genre that has grown exponentially since the attacks on September 11, 2001. In this paper I want to focus on the feminist ‘blindness’ Vuola mentions, and try to unpack the various reasons why mainstream Western feminism has largely neglected the area of religious women.

Delineating the contours of feminism

“The limitations of feminism are evident in the construction of the (implicitly consensual) priority of issues around which apparently all women are expected to organize.”[5]

An important underlying point about mainstream Western feminism is that of secularism.[6] This is due to its genealogy, which links back to the European Enlightenment. Rationalism and a focus on civil rights have thus been central.[7] Critical theory has moved past secular humanism (also a product of the Enlightenment) through focusing on the tragedy of colonialism (Edward Said), critiquing European humanism (Michel Foucault) and deconstructing the center (Jacques Derrida). These theories served to de-center Europe and critically question the Enlightenment and the centrality of secular discourse. Importantly, scholars have pointed to the “Judeo-Christian” (itself a problematic construct) heritage of secularism emphasizing that the negation of religion is still a mode of relation.[8] This also served to construct Islam (as opposed to Judeo-Christianity) as outside of modernity. Within feminism, postcolonial and black feminists have never been overtly secular, and in fact religion and in particular spirituality has long been central to their worldviews and work[9], in stark contrast to mainstream feminism.[10]

Mainstream Western feminism today has evolved mainly from the early 20^th century first and second wave feminist movements in Europe and America. While it has come to incorporate a wider variety of experiences and analytical lenses since then, there is little doubt that many of its assumptions have changed little over time. Moreover, as an academic discipline it continues to be heavily influenced by both modernism generally and positivism in particular, thus inevitably reproducing problematic notions of objectivity in research and universal truths. Its inheritance of first wave feminist ideals also ensures an essentialized notion of women that are on the margins of their own experiences, including religious women.

Chandra Mohanty has written extensively on the production of the “Third World Woman” discursively, documenting how scholarship about women in the third world has been formed through categories of feminist analysis that are Western. The term Western feminism is broad and to some extent homogenizes the various movements that comprise it. Nevertheless, there is a certain body of knowledge with certain underlying assumptions that together distinguish a general approach that can be termed Western feminism. As Mohanty writes,

“Clearly Western feminist discourse and political practice is neither singular nor homogenous in its goals, interests or analyses. However, it is possible to trace a coherence of effects resulting from the implicit assumption of “the West” (in all its complexities and contradictions as the primary referent in theory and praxis. My reference to “Western feminism” is by no means intended to imply that it is a monolith. Rather, I am attempting to draw attention to the similar effects of various textual strategies used by particular writers that codify Others as non-Western and hence themselves as (implicitly) Western.”[11]

Underlying assumptions that distinguish what can be called “Western feminism” include: the theorization of “women” as an unproblematic category of analysis that assumes women have homogenous or similar experiences and needs, which serves to construct a “universal” womanhood that erases power relations between women; the subsequent use of academic research to prove the universality of women’s experiences; and the construction of third world women as the opposite of Western women: in other words, constrained, victimized, poor, ignorant as opposed to Western women who are educated, modern, and free to make their own choices.[12] “Women are characterized as a singular group on the basis of shared oppression.”[13]

Importantly, Mohanty points out that feminist scholarly practices are inscribed within relations of power, since there can be no apolitical scholarship.[14] The knowledge production on the part of Western feminists colonizes discursively the “material and historical heterogeneities” of the lives of third women, thus resulting in the production of a singular “Third World Woman.”[15] This knowledge production occurs within a global system that is made up of specific relations of power, as Anouar Abdel-Malek points out:

“Contemporary imperialism is a hegemonic imperialism, exercising to a maximum degree a rationalized violence through the fire and the sword but also through hearts and minds. For its content is defined by the combined action of the military-industrial complex and the hegemonic cultural centers of the West, all of them founded on the advanced levels of development attained by monopoly and finance capital.”[16]

Western feminists, therefore, are situated within a global system. In other words, the way the “third world” has been constructed[17] forms the context of any scholarship on women in said third world. The lack of awareness of this, as well as the lack of self-reflexivity has meant that scholars within the field have often reproduced imperial notions in their work on women in non-Western contexts or marginalized women with Western contexts themselves.

Black American feminists were the first to argue that mainstream feminism did not, and could not, represent their experiences by only taking gender into account as the most important variable and thus constituting “woman” as a singular category apriori. They insisted that their realities were far more complex than this: they were women; but they were also black, poor/rich, urban/rural, educated/uneducated, and so on.[18] All of these different aspects of their identities combined in order to create their realities. At first, the “triple oppression” notion was created, which argued that Black women suffer from three different oppressions: class, race, and gender.[19] This later became the holy triad of feminist studies: race-gender-class. Intersectionality was later to add other identities such as sexuality, disability, and so on. This was to take apart the notion of a universal woman, and bring to the forefront the idea that “woman” is a contested notion with vastly different experiences and subjectivities.[20] For this reason, it is problematic to speak of a “universal feminism” or a “universal woman.”

Intersectionality would later become widespread among feminist scholars who were working from a post-modernist or post-structuralist perspective. What Black, lesbian (and later queer), and Marxist feminists did was to address the “most central theoretical and normative concern within feminist scholarship: namely, the acknowledgment of differences among women. This is because it touches on the most pressing problem facing contemporary feminism: the long and painful legacy of its exclusions. This legacy of exclusion has been articulated particularly well by scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw, who pointed out that feminist theory remains white, and therefore its potential to include non-privileged women remains unrealized.[21]

The discursive construction of third world women as homogenous and disempowered is similar to the construction of religious women as uniformly and automatically oppressed or suffering from false consciousness. Religious women are thus produced as a homogenous bloc who cannot or will not see the inherent patriarchy in religion. When it comes to Muslim women, this is amplified due to the already-prevalent construction of third world women (of which Muslim women are assumed to belong to) as oppressed and victimized. This construction serves to hide the specificities of each woman’s lived reality and instead centers the debate on false consciousness.

Agency, autonomy, and subjectivity

Framing the debate around religion in terms of “choices” made by women or forced on women already reveals a liberal ontology where agency—the free exercise of behaviour—becomes the signifier of female emancipation. Similarly, framing the debate around “rights” granted to women by religion or “rights” taken away from women by religion also reveals a liberal ontology. In other words, arguing whether religions are patriarchal based on the types of “rights” women have reproduces an approach to feminism that assumes an individualistic premise, which is a key part of the secular metanarrative that informs feminist scholarship today, which I will discuss below. The idea of a higher being that transcends the individual is already a transgression of the secular and liberal worldview in which individual autonomy is central.

Related to the question of agency is that of autonomy, defined as exercising choice, satisfying individual preferences, and the capacity for rational self-government.[22] Agency and autonomy are defined in relation to external powers that attempt to stifle individualism and create relationships of dependency. As pointed out by Phyllis Mack, feminism has spent a lot of time discussing agency while taking certain assumptions embedded within the concept for granted.

This focus on agency and autonomy stems from the metanarrative of secularisation.[23] According to this narrative, religious women are seen as possessing no agency, in contradistinction to secular society, “which locates religious authority and practice outside the spheres of politics or the marketplace, allows for domains of free, autonomous behaviour.” [24]

Related to this is the problematic creation of a binary between what is secular and what is spiritual. This has emerged in particular due to assumptions about modernity and progress, which state that individuals move from a state of religiosity towards a state of secularity, thus evoking a linear progression of time. Not only does this create a binary between the secular and the spiritual, it neglects the fact that many religious movements are profoundly modern.

A key tension within these debates over agency and religion is the blanket depiction of religion as oppressive, which raises the pertinent issue of subjectivity. Scholars have pointed out that many women choose to submit themselves to a higher power, and do not interpret this as a form of oppression. In Mack’s study of Quaker women, she reflects that attempts by women to displace social norms were done from a position of obedience rather than a position of will. This has been echoed by Saba Mahmood in her study of Islamist women in Cairo, who effectively challenged social norms as an act of obedience to God. This obedience, however, was to a transcendental power, not men or patriarchal systems. Moreover, this obedience is conceptualized as voluntary: disciplinary practices of religious people can often show both how one becomes subjected to relations of power but also creates space within those relations for the exercise of agency,[25] a concept Foucault discussed by stating that the same conditions that damage can also lead to resistance or transcendence.[26]

Other authors have worked on the agency and autonomy of Muslim women by centering processes of re-interpretation and contextualization of the Islamic texts. Asma Barlas discusses questions of religious knowledge and religious authority to show how patriarchy has been read into the Qur’an and argues that the Qur’an supports complete gender equality.[27] Judith Tucker’s work has tried to understand how Islamic scholars have interpreted issues related to women and gender roles over time. Tucker argues that Islamic law has been more fluid and flexible than is often assumed, and that women’s concerns and needs often influenced fatwas given by scholars.[28] Kecia Ali’s book, Sexual Ethics in Islam, explores what makes an act or belief ethical in the eyes of God. Ali touches on very sensitive topics and uses the Qur’an, Hadith and jurisprudence to answer questions that have long been the purveyor of men.[29] Although not all of these authors consider themselves Islamic feminists, their work has been central to challenging male authority and interpretative privilege in Islam, and re-centering women’s autonomy. Tucker demonstrates that women’s needs and concerns often shaped Islamic law; Barlas argues that patriarchy has been read into the Qur’an and thus distorted the text itself; and Ali shows that a more complex reading of the Islamic sources reveals very different interpretations of key verses. Thus they all contribute to scholarship that has female agency at its core, as have numerous other scholars working on gender and Islam.[30]

Gender within Islamist movements has also been studied. Nilufer Göle and Barbara Pusch have both written about the phenomenon of feminism being articulated by women within the Islamist movement in Turkey, and argues that the structures within Islamism that reproduce gender inequality are making these women question issues of gender in Islam (as opposed to leaving Islam).[31] Göle argues that we can speak of a post-Islamist stage where Islamism is losing its relevance but at the same time permeating social and cultural life; and it is this space within which Islamic feminism is growing.[32]

Despite this, women working from within Islamic movements or interpretations often have the effect of further reproducing patriarchal norms. Mahmood has pointed out that the women she worked with in Cairo—part of the “Islamic revival movement”—chose to be part of structures that view women as unequal to men. This raises important questions about choice feminism, which has come to dominate critiques of mainstream Western feminism. Portraying feminism as the “freedom to choose” not only (again) reproduces notions of agency as central to feminism, but also raises questions about what to do when women choose to be part of structures that view men as superior and thus reproduce forms of gender inequality. More importantly, such an argument assumes that “choices” exist and can be made outside of power relations. Choices are never “free” in the sense that they are never made outside of power structures or hegemonic systems and ideals. Nevertheless, it is clear that certain “choices” have been designated as feminist of emancipatory while others have been designated as oppressive. Following this, women who make “choices” that are seen as oppressive are suffering from false consciousness and thus have not reached the stage of liberation other women have reached—again reproducing the linear view of time where progress is measured as a continuum, with Western women at the top. Moreover, although beyond the scope of this article, it is pertinent to note that the way certain choices have been designated as emancipatory and others as oppressive is itself enmeshed within power relations stemming from both (various forms of) patriarchy and Western mainstream feminism.

One way to reconcile[33] agency with religion is to reconceptualize the concept of agency itself. Women who use religion to displace social norms reflect a capacity for action, and demonstrate a concept of agency used by Judith Butler among others.[34] In this perspective, agency and autonomy can be found where there are challenges to power. Thus an attempt by religious women to challenge social norms reflects an act of agency, not insubordination. However, a reconceptualization of agency such as this one still reproduces agency as central to these debates, and agency remains a strongly liberal concept. Mahmood has attempted to move past both emancipation and agency as they continue to produce a teleology of emancipation that portrays women as either struggling, resisting, or subverting—but never active.

Choice, the homogenization of religion, and the re-interpretation of texts

A key issue that emerges from the debates outlined above is that of choice: put simply, who defines which choices fall within the parameters of feminism and which do not? However, once one accepts the premise that socialization constructs the choices that are available and acceptable, as well as ideas of what is emancipatory and what is oppressive, then it follows that these can be deconstructed, particularly in terms of unpacking the power relations they are linked to. This complicates the question of choice as well as of definition.

Defining the contours of what is feminist and what is not (or what is patriarchal and what is not), a process of essentialization and homogenization often takes place. These processes of representing entire cultures as homogenous, static, and essentialized is a classic feature of Orientalism, and has been reproduced in much Western mainstream feminist literature on religion, especially with regards to Islam. The implicit or explicit assumption that “Islam is patriarchal” not only assumes that there is an “Islam” but that patriarchy has already been pre-defined—but by whom? Many discussions that revolve around patriarchy and religion assume an essentialized version of Islam that simply does not exist in the lived realities of Muslim women. As soon as a text interacts with its reader or listener, the outcome is an interpretation that will differ from other interpretations. While the boundaries of interpretation may be somewhat defined by scholarly consensus—among other sources of authority—the content itself cannot be said to constitute a homogenous “Islam” that can then be labelled as patriarchal.

While academia is only part of the problem in portraying Muslim women as oppressed by religion (feminist activism often does the same), it is notable that feminist academics have also had problems approaching the religious women from a perspective that does not minimize their agency. Saba Mahmood has commented on how various feminist historians, for example, treat women within religious institutions as needing to be reformed or modernized.[35] Dipesh Chakrabarty proposes that there needs to be a form of history that abandons its secular epistemology by

“Rendering the claims to divine agency visible and plausible. This allows an academic historian to both engage the hegemonic terms of the discipline of secular history constructively and to expose the violence this narrative commits against life world and imaginaries that are not encompassable within a secular framework.”[36]

Islam has long played a central role in feminist debates, and has consistently been defined as being outside of the parameters set by Western mainstream feminism and thus as intrinsically patriarchal. This does not negate the fact, however, that to many women Islam forms a central aspect of their lives and their lived experiences. While religion itself is a highly contested term, there is little doubt that to many it provides a spiritual framework with which to view and experience the world. This spirituality serves as a counter-point in a world in which rationality is valued above all other systems of meaning—another expression of the metanarrative of secularising.

Islamic feminism constitutes a field that can be broadly defined as an attempt to exercise power over knowledge production and meaning making within Islam. This movement has flourished in several places, particularly Iran,[37] Morocco,[38] and the United States[39]. Scholars within this field are attempting to dismantle misogynist interpretations of Islam through different interpretative methodologies. Fatima Mernissi in particular has been important in this process, as she has argued that many popular Hadith which have been used to support gender inequality in Islam are actually false. Importantly, she makes this argument using traditional Islamic methodology—the same methodology used by men who have consistently propagated these same Hadith.[40]

Religious texts constitute the main battleground on which many of these debates take place, whereby these texts are constituted as either inherently patriarchal or are conceptualized as needing re-interpretation that would allow for feminist readings. The focus on patriarchal interpretations of the Qur’an and Hadith tend to center men as interpretative authorities and ignore movements that call for more inclusive or feminist readings of these texts. The argument is that religion is patriarchal regardless of interpretation, even though every act of understanding is an act of interpretation. Muslim women who write about feminism and Islam have raised questions about the monopoly on interpretation. Riffat Hassan writes:

“Men have taken on the task of defining the ontological, theoretical, sociological and eschatological status of Muslim women.”[41]

Hassan raises the important point that as long as women are defined as theologically inferior, the battle for sociological, political or economic rights will not go very far. For believers, the theological definition of human equality and the equality of men and women’s souls is as important as other aspects of gender equality.[42] Hassan argues that a return to the Qur’an would allow for the theological equality of Muslim men and women to emerge. Thus we see that even Islamic feminists use the religious texts as the grounds for their argument about patriarchy and Islam. In other words, the Qur’an is post-patriarchal and thus a return to it would render Islam post-patriarchal, but only if this return is predicated on different interpretative practices. It is useful to note that this is not necessarily about women re-interpreting the texts, since women are just as capable of reproducing patriarchal interpretations as men. Rather it is a question of the approaches women and men use in interpretation. Many scholars who focus on feminism and Islam favour historicizing as a key approach in re-interpretation, as it contextualizes certain practices and thus renders them as inapplicable today.

While some scholars within feminism engage with these re-interpretations and then reject them as insufficient in creating a new framework of understanding,[43] other scholars simply refrain from engagement at all. This lack of engagement is what is problematic, and it frames the attempts to re-interpret Islam by Muslims as further proof of false consciousness. This stance is contradictory coming from movements that claim to take women and their experiences seriously.

There are two assumptions at play here. The first is that women are always passive, and in rare instances when they are not, they are resisting. Thus attempts to re-interpret religious texts will always fall into one of these narratives. This creates a binary view of action that is difficult to overcome. It situates women within two separate realms of action that go on to define any action taken by these women. In effect, if they are passive and accepting, they are oppressed; whereas if they are resisting—although it is seen as a more ‘autonomous’ act—they are still responding or reacting to a specific audience and narrative. In other words, it is reactionary. Who are they resisting? Who are they proving a point to? It is simply another relation of power, whereby women are constituting the system they are said to be resisting by resisting it.

The second assumption is that religion and religious texts are seen as the domains of men: thus in effect much of mainstream feminist discourse reifies the precise point many Islamic feminists are trying to disprove: that religious texts belong to men.

To conclude this section, I want to reiterate that the focus of my critique is on the decision on the part of many feminists to not engage with scholars who attempt to represent religion as more than simply inherently patriarchal. The Islamic feminist project can be seen as an important attempt to challenge knowledge production and meaning making within a confined space. Traditional male interpretations have dominated for centuries, thus managing to construct “Islamic ideals” that have delineated the borders of what Muslim femininity is. Simply the act of re-interpretation is a challenge to this, and constitutes an attempt to imagine and construct a different reality, which is already an exercise of power.

“A feminist critique of religion stresses the dismantling of religious legitimization for certain political and cultural practices; it critically analyses the power structures of religious communities; it reminds us that there is no Christianity or Islam but different forms and interpretations; and that the determinant role of religion in society should be questioned.”[44]

In the next section I want to suggest that a way out of these predicaments is by focusing less on essentialized notions of feminism and religion, and more on the lived realities of women who are religious. By centering experience, feminism can move away from the problematic of definition (which by extension is always a process of exclusion) and try to explore the option of multiple feminisms. Intersectionality is one way of theorizing such a move.

Intersectionality and its limits

The theory of intersectionality is a relatively new theoretical approach to doing research in the social sciences. First conceptualized by feminists of colour, it has now been adopted by other disciplines such as sociology, race studies and ethnography. The context in which intersectionality arose is extremely important in trying to understand the theory itself. Soon after the spread of first wave feminism in America & Europe, critiques began to surface from women who felt excluded by the discourse being used by first wave feminists. Above all, the claim to represent women universally was problematized by women who felt that their experiences were very different from the average white Western middle-class woman whom the first wave feminist movement was largely comprised of.

Epistemologically, intersectionality falls within post-modernism and post-structuralism, which both constitute powerful critiques of modernism and positivism. Modernism is seen as an “arrogant metanarrative, a universal story that claims to be superior to other stories of what it means to be human—a story capable of evaluating all other stories.”[45] Post-modernism argues that grand narratives are to be rejected, and multiple perspectives should form part of any research project. As mentioned previously, grand narratives, universalizing tendencies and the assumption that a researcher can be objective have all been important aspects of Western mainstream feminism. Post-structuralism values judgement from below, as opposed to the structures that disguise the exercise of power from above.[46]

Intersectionality arose as a direct response to the exclusionary nature of much of mainstream feminism. Thus its main accomplishment has been to be more inclusive of varying experiences, realities and identities, as well as to become more aware of the way power functions in order to exclude/include. Intersectionality functioned as a more complex methodology where different sources of oppression were looked at simultaneously, and understood as influencing one another in very complex ways.

Aside from Black feminists, other groups of feminists such as Marxist, lesbian, and post-colonial feminists were also analysing the relationships between various systems of oppression (such as capitalism, sexuality, nationalism) and gender. European and post-colonial feminists, for example, were doing so by developing feminist standpoint theory.[47] Standpoint theory emphasized that research should be done from the perspective of the marginalized, as their view of society is more comprehensive. Women’s experiences should therefore lay the grounds for feminist knowledge.[48]  The term intersectionality itself was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, an African-American legal scholar who was part of the discipline of critical race studies in the 1980s, which aimed at unpacking the supposed neutrality and objectivity of the law.[49] Crenshaw wanted to show how the single-axis framework often used by feminists should be replaced by intersectionality, which could better demonstrate the ways in which race and gender interact.[50] In effect, intersectionality represents a means of looking at multiple layers of identities in order to analyse how they interact with one another. The issue of power is a recurrent one, as is the critique of the idea that gender should have primacy in feminist analyses.

Intersectionality thus allows for a complex analysis of people’s lived experiences that takes into consideration not only various marginalizations but analyses how these marginalizations and positionalities intersect in order to create unique situations. It is a process of complicating research through addressing the way multiple positionalities intersect with one another. Importantly, it represents fluid, constantly expanding theoretical notions. As more scholars engage with it, more intersectionalities emerge. The example of masculinities is illustrative of how intersectionality has moved past the classic race/gender/class configuration and has adopted many other positionalities that are often neglected such as masculinity, disability, age, sexuality, transnationality and so on.

While there has been much intersectional research since Crenshaw’s ground-breaking article, little has been done on the topic of religion and feminism from an intersectional perspective. On the one hand, there is the risk that intersectional approaches could still reproduce the assumptions present in much of mainstream feminism. On the other hand, I argue that intersectionality as an approach has the ability to overcome this bias. The aim of intersectionality is to listen to the voices of women and men on their own terms, in order to piece together narratives and unpack experiences that can help in understanding social life. The emphasis is thus on the voices of those being listened to, not on pre-set categories of research or pre-set assumptions. This provides space within which religious women can speak and not be confined to certain narratives. Intersectional research would allow religious experiences to be part of the narrative, because those speaking are setting the narrative. In other words, personal narratives are central, and this makes the subject central to the story. This is not to say that researchers employing an intersectional approach will not have pre-set assumptions—we all do. But intersectionality forces researchers to confront, rather than disguise or explain away, these assumptions.

While intersectionality has been ground breaking for feminist research, there are numerous points of critique that need to be highlighted. Critiques towards intersectionality have highlighted several issues, ranging from the fact that highlighting the “marginalized” seems to reproduce knowledge that claims to know and represent the “Other” and that becomes part of the industry of knowledge-production; to Judith Butler’s point that the ‘etc.’ that follows at the end of lists of social categories signals an “embarrassed admission of exhaustion” as well as an “illimitable process of signification.”[51] This can be somewhat avoided by using the concept of “master categories” and the recognition that in specific situations, certain social divisions are more important than others.[52] However in doing this it is important to understand that different positionalities have different logics and operate at different levels.[53]Another critique that has been levelled against intersectionality is that it does not problematize the use of categories, thus viewing humans are made up of various categorical and “innate” aspects that, when studied together using an intersectional approach, can expose the human being in question.

“A critique of intersectionality that takes the category as ontologically problematic or certain is the stage for the entrance of a transcendent subject or subjects.”[54]

The reliance on categories can even lead to intersectionality being portrayed as positivist, as the category is supposed to lead to “authentic” knowledge about the experiences of marginalized women.[55] Scholars such as Wolf have argued that instead of taking categories as names of things, we should instead understand them as “bundles of relationships and place them back into the filed from which they were abstracted.”[56] Others have argued that floating categories can be replaced by signifiers that are grounded in the lives of specific women, and that representations should never be seen as showing us the “essence” of a person.[57] Crenshaw has responded to these critiques by pointing out that categories can sometimes be empowering, and by arguing that even if categories are socially constructed, it does not negate the real effects they have on the lives of people.[58]

Conclusion

The metanarrative of secularising constitutes the assumptions underlying much of mainstream Western feminism, and explains the difficulties the field has had engaging women who are religious, as well as addressing the agency of religious women in non-simplistic terms. While critiques have moved the feminism discipline forward, it remains largely Western and secular. This means that when movements such as Islamic feminism emerge, the response has been to either label them as further proof of false consciousness, or to not engage with them at all. The key tension remains the unwillingness to engage with religious women on their own terms, instead of the apriori assumptions of religious patriarchy that rely on the homogenization of religions.

In order to address the complexity of feminist research, a focus on the lived experiences of women themselves may provide a way forward. Focusing on lived experiences makes intersectionality a useful approach in the study of women and religion. Conceptualizing religion as a positionality may prove a useful way of doing research that does not apriori reject the experiences of religious women as patriarchal. The use of narratives is one methodological approach that can be used to achieve an intersectional analysis. Personal narratives aim to situate the subject within the full network of relationships that define their social locations, but some have pointed out that usually it is only possible to situate them from the partial perspective of the specific social group being studied.[59]

A critical intersectionality-based assessment of the feminist field in general can help in decolonizing the continued Eurocentrism that plagues the field. Until assumptions of what constitutes patriarchy are thoroughly decolonized, feminism will continue to reproduce dynamics and analysis that excludes women who live different realities.

The post Feminist critique and Islamic feminism: the question of intersectionality appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

A última década, situada em um contexto internacional favorável, de protagonismo do capital financeiro, de alta demanda por recursos naturais e commodities agrícolas (das quais o país é grande produtor), foi um período de expansão da base primário-exportadora na economia brasileira. É um período que reforça o agronegócio na economia nacional.

O ajuste econômico do país em função dos efeitos da crise financeira mundial reforçou a inserção no mercado externo de certos produtos agrícolas, e a renda fundiária se posicionou como filão da acumulação de capital no conjunto do sistema econômico nacional, e não mais somente do setor agrário (delgado, 2012).

Em síntese, a condição da expansão da economia brasileira está vinculada à inserção externa dependente do mercado de commodities, que, segundo delgado (2010, p. 124),

Caracterizam um estilo típico do subdesenvolvimento, que se repõe em pleno século xxi e do qual o pacto do agronegócio é parte integrante de peso. Mas a caracterização dessa questão agrária é mais geral e mais profunda. Integra a essência do projeto nacional de e requer um enfrentamento dentro e fora do modelo agrícola hegemônico.

No presente ensaio, pretende-se expor que a sujeição passiva ao agronegócio[1] ratifica o problema agrário nacional. Nestes termos, faz-se primeiro um percurso sobre a especialização externa primário-exportadora do agronegócio para, em seguida, tecer o eixo cognitivo da estrutura agrária. A síntese foi realizada a partir da revisão bibliográfica de parte da produção acadêmica sobre os temas; como também utilizou os dados empíricos, estatísticos e as informações disponibilizadas por instituições oficiais e de pesquisa acadêmica.

Especialização exportadora do agronegócio e seus reflexos

Em 2012, o mapa/sri[2] (ministério da agricultura, pecuária e abastecimento/ secretaria de relações internacionais do agronegócio) informava que as exportações brasileiras do agronegócio atingiram o montante recorde da série histórica anual com us$ 95,81 bilhões, tendo uma expansão de 0,9% (+ us$ 846 milhões) em relação a 2011, quando as exportações foram de us$ 94,97 bilhões. As importações, por sua vez, atingiram us$ 16,41 bilhões, 6,2% inferior a 2011; portanto, o saldo da balança comercial do agronegócio foi de us$ 79,41 bilhões.

Dos produtos agrícolas exportados, sete deles contribuíram fortemente em termos de incremento do valor absoluto. Foram eles: milho, soja em grãos, farelo de soja, álcool, algodão, carne bovina e fumo. Estes produtos, em conjunto, tiveram incremento de venda de us$ 6,56 bilhões, tendo, no geral, forte expansão do quantum exportado enquanto o preço médio de exportação recuou significativamente.

A ásia merece destaque como a região que teve maior aumento nas compras (+11,7%) e, em consequência, maior elevação de participação, passando de 32,3% para 35,7% no total adquirido, uma elevação de 3,4 pontos percentuais. A soma da participação da ásia com a da união europeia, os dois principais importadores, ficou em 59,1%, demonstrando uma elevação da concentração nas vendas, uma vez que no ano de 2011 os dois principais mercados tiveram participação conjunta de 57,4%.

Em 2011, o produto interno bruto (pib) do agronegócio brasileiro estimado pelo centro de estudos avançados em economia aplicada (cepea)[3], da esalq/usp, avançou 5,73% (a preços reais), totalizando r$ 942 bilhões (em reais de 2011, ou seja, descontada a inflação), e a economia como um todo se expandiu 2,7%, indo para r$ 4,143 trilhões, segundo o ibge. Com isso, a participação do agronegócio no pib nacional aumentou de 21,78% em 2010 para 22,74% em 2011[4].

Graças ao agronegócio, a balança comercial total do brasil manteve-se superavitária em 2011, em us$ 30 bilhões. Com isso, o país acumulou reservas internacionais acima de us$ 300 bilhões nesse período. Os preços em dólares recebidos pelos exportadores do agronegócio brasileiro têm crescido continuamente desde o ano 2000 e apresentou pico de valorização em 2012, com valor 125,8% superior ao de 2000. Com superávit comercial de us$ 20,8 bilhões de janeiro a abril (2012) e us$ 77,95 bilhões em 12 meses, o agronegócio continuou a ser o principal fator de segurança do setor externo[5].

Para o presidente do bndes (banco nacional de desenvolvimento econômico e social), sr. Luciano coutinho[6], o agronegócio representa 22% do pib e tem sido o grande esteio da estabilidade econômica brasileira. Para coutinho, é o agronegócio que tem garantido um superávit comercial, assegurando um nível de reservas internacionais, as quais vêm ajudando a blindar nossa economia contra as crises internacionais.

Os dados acima mostram que, na última década, a opção primário-exportadora via agronegócio trouxe resultados relevantes para a economia nacional.

Esta expansão de exportação de produtos primários na economia suscita aspectos relevantes e preocupações sobre a tendência de queda da participação da indústria no pib e o impacto sobre a produção de alimentos, consequentemente, no preço desses.

O brasil, apesar de ter um setor industrial importante, vem experimentando redução deste na composição do pib.

Para delgado (2012), essa especialização primária no comércio internacional se dá com paralela e evidente perda de participação da maioria dos ramos manufatureiros e, como em geral a economia dos serviços pouco exporta, recai todo o peso do ajuste das transações externas sobre o setor primário.

Em síntese, significa que a terra está sendo convertida em commodities, com o fomento de políticas públicas, a custos sociais elevadíssimos que são socializados economicamente entre todos, enquanto benefícios apropriados pelos proprietários da riqueza.

Na economia alimentar, o curso dessa forma de especulação do capital financeiro global incursiona, conforme preconiza vandana shiva[7], assim:

Depois da crise americana do subprime e a quebra de wall street, investidores fugiram para o mercado de commodities, especialmente petróleo e commodities agrícolas. Enquanto a produção real não aumentou entre 2005-2007, a especulação em commodities cresceu 160%. Especulação esta que aumentou preços, que por sua vez somaram mais 100 milhões de pessoas ao grupo da fome (shiva, 2010).

Commodities agrícolas são agora “ativos financeiros” e atraem a atenção cada vez maior de especuladores, o que resulta num movimento capaz de impactar sobre as cotações de dos produtos agrícolas. A crescente conjunção entre o mercado de commodities e o capital financeiro tem sido um fator que contribui para elevação dos preços agrícolas. Quando a ciranda financeira das commodities dirige os preços dos alimentos, os investidores ricos só enriquecem ainda mais, e os pobres passam cada vez mais fome.

Em termos de disponibilidade produtiva, a tabela 1 mostra as posições do país no mercado mundial, tanto na condição de produtor como de exportador de commodities, e ainda aponta o percentual da produção exportada e, consequentemente, pode-se intuir o que é absorvido desta produção pelo mercado interno do país.

tabela1 – posição do brasil no mercado mundial

Fonte: dados do mapa/SRI

Nesta tabela, fica claro que o brasil se destaca como maior produtor de açúcar, café e suco de laranja, sendo deles também o principal exportador, bem como de soja em grãos e de carne de frango. No caso do milho, da carne bovina e suína, menos de 20% da produção é exportada, seguido pelo óleo de soja e carne frango com menos de 30% para o mercado externo, enquanto quase a totalidade da produção de suco de laranja é exportada.

Por outro lado, o país absorve em seu mercado interno em média 42% de tudo o que produz na agricultura exportadora. Tal amplitude percentual demarca e ressalta o papel do mercado interno na renda do agronegócio.

Entende-se que ocorre uma dupla tensão sobre a produção nacional: o crescimento do mercado externo e a demanda por alimento.

A produção de grãos se concentra na soja (45%) e no milho (38%), representando 83% na safra passada de grãos. A expansão da área ocupada com essas duas lavouras foi de 2,8 milhões de hectares, entre as safras 2005/06 e 2011/12, suplantando com folga a expansão das áreas destinadas à produção das demais commodities. Os outros grãos, principalmente arroz e feijão, base da nossa alimentação, tiveram redução de área passando de 12 milhões para 11 milhões de hectares no mesmo período. Nas lavouras de feijão e arroz, houve inflexão, passando no período de 12% para 9% da produção total de grãos. Deve-se salientar que a lavoura de cana-de-açúcar ampliou sua área em 30%, ocupando 8 milhões de hectares na safra 2011/12. Isto correspondeu a 16% da área de grãos.

A produção brasileira de grãos entre as safras 2005/2006 e 2010/2011 aumentou em 33%, saindo de 122,5 milhões para 163 milhões de toneladas. Nesse período, a área plantada cresceu 4,3% enquanto a produtividade média aumentou de 2,6 para 3,3 toneladas por hectare (+27,5%).

Tal situação produtiva e de produtividade não se refletiu nos preços, que mantiveram no período uma tendência de alta, proporcionando um incremento de 43,6% do valor bruto de produção, cujo valor passou de r$ 144,3 bilhões para 207,5 bilhões.

Quanto aos preços dos alimentos ao consumidor, estes fecharam o ano de 2012 com níveis muito acima do resto dos produtos de consumo no país. De fato, a inflação de alimentos do brasil foi 70% mais alta que a inflação geral, no encerramento do ano.

O índice nacional de preços ao consumidor amplo (ipca) de janeiro de 2011 mostrou que os preços dos alimentos continuaram subindo e atingiram 1,99 %, superando o resultado de 1,03% de dezembro. Constituiu-se na maior alta de grupo, detendo 0,48 pontos percentuais do índice. Dessa forma, o grupo de alimentação e bebidas respondeu por 56% do ipca[8].

Portanto, a dinâmica dos preços não é somente uma questão de especulação, mas também alimentar. Isto posto, resgatam-se alguns temas recorrentes da situação alimentar rural, dados os seus reflexos na questão agrária.

A pesquisa de orçamentos familiares – pof 2008/09 (ibge – instituto brasileiro de geografia e estatística) mostra que a quantidade de alimentos consumidos era habitualmente ou eventualmente insuficiente para 35,5% dos entrevistados ou um terço dos brasileiros. No ambiente rural essa percepção sobe para 45,6%, e nas áreas urbanas esse porcentual registra 33,6%.

No padrão rural de distribuição de renda domiciliar per capita, a pesquisa nacional por amostra de domicílio – pnad/2011[9] apresentou o seguinte: 55,5% dos domicílios rurais obtiveram renda de até dois salários mínimos, e 38,8% foi de até um salário mínimo. Grosso modo, pode-se observar que a maioria dos estabelecimentos rurais encontra-se num extrato de renda familiar até 2 salários mínimos. Cerca de 13 milhões de domicílios, em que se inclui grande parte da população rural, inclusive da agricultura familiar, se situam em economia de subsistência (na qual a renda dos trabalhadores está aquém das suas necessidades de sobrevivência).

Na pnad/2011, entre a distribuição das pessoas ocupadas, 15,8% estava na atividade agrícola. Das pessoas ocupadas, eram 28,4% empregados, 29,6% por conta própria, 25,6% trabalhadores na produção para próprio consumo e 14% não remunerados. O rendimento mensal médio foi de r$ 452,00 (menos que um salário mínimo vigente[10]).

O cenário agrário atual se configura numa agricultura moderna e industrial convivendo com um setor não conjugado ao moderno (trabalhadores rurais sem terra, posseiros, quilombolas, índios, etc), resultantes da imutável questão agrária (desde o período colonial): concentração de riqueza (terra); desemprego ou não trabalho.

Essas condições adversas foram (e ainda são) fatores de exclusão social, o êxodo rural de trabalhadores e produtores em economia familiar, constituindo o cerne da questão agrária pretérita e atual, conforme assertiva de rangel (2000, p. 144-145):

Um descompasso entre os dois processos – de liberação de mão de obra pelo complexo rural ou autarcia familiar e de integração dessa mão de obra no quadro da economia social (de mercado ou socialista) – é precisamente o traço dominante do fenômeno estudado como crise agrária.

O êxodo crescente de grandes contingentes de trabalhadores e habitantes rurais e as suas deletérias consequências são conhecidas por todos, e estão a amalgamar nas periferias urbanas numa complexa teia de ausências e exclusões socioeconômicas.

A estrutura fundiária permanece com distribuição desigual da terra e alto grau de concentração fundiária presente no território nacional, o que configura um índice de gini (2012) de 0,843[11].

Entre os anos de 1975 a 2006 o grau de concentração fundiária no território brasileiro permaneceu praticamente inalterado; o índice de gini, para desigualdade de terra, registrado para 2006 foi de 0,856; não muito diferente do mesmo índice para os anos 1995, 1985 e 1975 que foram, respectivamente, 0,857; 0,858 e 0,855 (hoffmann et al., 2010).

O sistema nacional de cadastro rural (sncr) do incra (instituto nacional de colonização e reforma agrária) registrou em abril de 2012 que havia 605,4 milhões de hectares em poder de 5,4 milhões de imóveis, distribuídos conforme a tabela 1. Ao se observar atentamente os dados, destacam-se dois extremos: os imóveis com menos de 10 ha, que são 34,1% do total ocupando somente 1,5% da área total – em média de 4,7 ha –, enquanto os com mais 100.000 ha (menos de 1%) ocupando 13% da área total, com área média de 379.204,39 ha.

Ainda segundo o scn, os imóveis de proprietários são 3,8 milhões ocupando 464,3 milhões de ha, enquanto os de posseiros são 1,6 milhões ocupando 136,1 milhões de hectares; os restantes estão com situações jurídicas não informadas. Os proprietários com imóveis com menos de 100 ha (84,6%) ocupam 16,2% da área total de propriedades, enquanto os com mais de 1000 (2%) detém 52,3%. Os imóveis com posse com menos de 100 ha (90,0%) ocupam 21,6% da área total de posse, enquanto os com mais de 1000 ha (1,1%) têm em poder 53,4%.

tabela 2 – estrutura fundiária brasil (2012)

fonte: incra. Sistema nacional de cadastro rural (2012). 

O censo agropecuário de 2006 apontou que, dos 5,17 milhões de estabelecimentos existentes, 84,4 % (4,36 milhões) eram da agricultura familiar. Este contingente de produtores ocupava uma área de 80,25 milhões de hectares, que representava 24,3% da área ocupada pelos empreendimentos agropecuários. Por conseguinte, os estabelecimentos não familiares, apesar de representarem somente 15,6% dos estabelecimentos, ocupavam 75,7% da área (gráfico 1). A agricultura familiar ocupava somente um quarto, enquanto a patronal três quartos da área total dos estabelecimentos, confirmando que o predomínio fundiário da economia patronal contrasta com predomínio demográfico da economia familiar. Apesar da defasagem temporal dos dados do censo agropecuário de 2006, esse quadro fundiário rural permanece atual.

fonte: ibge – censo agropecuário (2006).

Esse contorno da estrutura fundiária, segundo o censo demográfico de 2010, abriga em torno de 16 % do total de habitantes do país (190.756). Essa proporção se diferencia por região: nas regiões nordeste e norte, essa proporção é maior, 26,47% e 26,87%, respectivamente. Na região mais urbanizada (sudeste), apenas 7,05% reside na zona rural. Paradoxalmente, é no sudeste que se encontra a segunda maior concentração de população rural (19%), perdendo a primeira posição apenas para a região nordeste que concentra 47,8%.

Essa realidade agrária acontece porque houve (e há) um pacto agrário. A terra concentrada por força dos interesses da oligarquia rural, articulada com os do capital, converte o estado num verdadeiro lócus de conciliação dos interesses convergentes e divergentes das classes possuidoras e dirigentes do país; e tudo mais, principalmente, as inquietações e implicações sociais, fundiárias e ambientais, ficam à margem (silva, 2012).

A professora maria da conceição tavares (2000, p. 137) enuncia esse pacto de dominação ao incursionar sobre as raízes do subdesenvolvimento (dicotomia atraso/modernização) e ao reavaliar o que retardou a construção de uma nação democrática em nosso país:

(…) A nossa peculiar “revolução burguesa”, começada há pelo menos 150 anos, em vez de permitir a passagem a uma “ordem competitiva”, manteve um pacto de dominação social férreo entre os donos da terra, o estado e os donos do dinheiro, que se caracterizou, do ponto de vista político, por uma oscilação permanente entre uma ordem liberal oligárquica e um estado interventor autoritário.

Ainda de acordo com conceição tavares, a permanência deste pacto de dominação envolve três ordens de fatores estruturais: a apropriação privada e a concentração da terra; relações patrimonialistas entre as oligarquias regionais e o poder central por intermédio de sua representação política; e o caráter dependente ou associado da burguesia nacional com capitalismo financeiro internacional. Portanto, a ocupação mercantil e o domínio político do território tornam os “donos da terra” indispensáveis ao pacto de dominação. Sobre esse caráter oligárquico rural, a professora argumenta (2000, p. 139):

O caráter oligárquico fundamental do pacto de dominação burguesa não foi alterado pelas crises sucessivas, mudando apenas a hegemonia política das oligarquias regionais e o peso relativo das frações de classe dominante, mas preservando – em qualquer tipo de regime de governo – as relações de domínio fortemente autoritário e politicamente excludente das classes subordinadas. Nossas modernizações conservadoras tampouco suprimiram o caráter rentista e patrimonialista de nossas oligarquias no processo de acumulação de capital e poder. Este caráter, embora modificado, mantém-se tanto na dinâmica da expansão mercantil-agrária como no processo de acumulação urbano-industrial, marcando como característica fundamental os empreendimentos do nosso patronato nacional.

Diante dos argumentos de tavares, é possível ressaltar que, na última década, o modelo de acumulação de capital da tríade do pacto agrário se fortaleceu. Por um lado, no mercado externo com a expansão das commodities e, por outro, no mercado interno com uso privado dos recursos da terra. Consequentemente, tal arranjo implica a apropriação da renda e da terra decorrente da alta dos preços agrícolas e dos preços de terra e da retomada virtuosa do crédito rural.

A tabela 2 mostra a inflexão simultânea do preço de terra e do crédito. Mostra que, no período, houve um incremento significativo no preço de terras, de cinco a sete vezes para todos os tipos de terra. Essa tendência de alta dos preços de terra foi unânime em todos os estados. A política fundiária recente também vem estimulando o mercado de terras com a discriminação e titulação de terras públicas; certificação de imóveis on-line, entre outras.

Tabela 3 – expansão do crédito rural e do preço de terras, 2000/12

fonte: anuário estatístico do crédito rural – banco central do brasil[12] evalor da terra nua – instituto de economia agrícola, saa/sp[13].

Esta tabela também aponta a tendência de crescimento dos recursos do crédito rural (176%). O crédito rural veio associado a uma série de políticas públicas de fomento e apoio como o seguro rural; instrumentos de apoio à comercialização como aquisição do governo federal (agf) e política de garantia de preços mínimos (pgpm); financiamentos de garantia de preços aos produtos, como empréstimos do governo federal (egf); entre outras. Os recursos disponibilizados para incremento creditício foram:

1. do tesouro nacional;
2. os recursos obrigatórios;
3. da poupança rural;
4. os recursos livres;
5. dos fundos constitucionais;
6. do fundo de amparo ao trabalhador (fat);
7. do fundo de commodities;
8. banco da terra;
9. governos estaduais;
10. funcafé; e
11. recursos externos.

Esta sistemática financeira se se complementa com as equalizações (diferença da taxa selic e as taxas subvencionadas do sncr – sistema nacional de crédito rural), realizados com recursos do tesouro.

Segundo delgado (2010), a repartição do excedente, no plano interno, na fase expansiva da demanda externa por commodities, se caracteriza basicamente como modelo de rendas de monopólio. Estas refletem, primeiramente, a propriedade da terra e a forma concentrada de sua distribuição; em segundo lugar, sua localização e a qualidade intrínseca dos recursos naturais explorados; em terceiro lugar, o acesso a fundos públicos subvencionados, propiciadas pelas vantagens conferidas a emissão da dívida agrícola, sob respaldo de hipotecas, e finalmente as patentes tecnológicas envolvidas na difusão do pacote tecnológico.

Assim, o ajuste externo da economia nacional torna viável um peculiar projeto de acumulação de capital, para o qual é essencial a captura da renda da terra, juntamente com a lucratividade do conjunto dos capitais consorciados no agronegócio (delgado, 2010).

Em síntese, o modelo de inserção externa primário-exportador de commodities agrícolas apropriou-se da renda terra e da produtividade do ambiente rural, aportando um desenvolvimento subordinado e associado, mantendo-se dentro dos marcos da dependência e do subdesenvolvimento. E o governo, ao incentivar esse processo de especulação externa pelo agronegócio em sua política econômica, desconsidera a concentrada distribuição da estrutura fundiária vigente e, consequentemente, o uso privado da terra, cujo agronegócio captura a renda da terra (mercado de terras com preços elevados) e modela a extração do excedente econômico por meio dos ativos financeiros, creditícios e hipotecários.

Comentários finais

A política pública de fomento voltada preferencialmente ao agronegócio tem destinado a parte mais substantiva do crédito e do financiamento além dos melhores esforços da pesquisa e desenvolvimento ao segmento que, voltado à exportação, contribui decisivamente para os resultados do pib brasileiro, compensando as consequências do estiolamento do setor industrial. Dentre as consequências dessa opção, a mais preocupante segue sendo o risco que o desestímulo à produção de alimentos relacionados à cultura gastronômica e à história alimentar brasileiras poderá representar para a soberania alimentar.

A concentração fundiária e as novas formas de controle e de usos do território rural pelos agentes envolvidos com a produção de commodities têm liberado segmentos importantes da população antes envolvida com a produção diversificada daquilo que genericamente tratamos, no cotidiano, por comida[14]. Os efeitos desse movimento começam ser identificados quer seja pela presença cada vez mais relevante de produtos elaborados, processados, congelados e que têm na suas bases um estreito conjunto de espécies com franco domínio daquelas que compõe a pauta de exportação, quer seja pelos efeitos que essa transição alimentar exerce sobre os agravos de saúde.

Portanto, o governo, ao imprimir e manter uma políticas de estímulo e apoio à expansão das commodities com forte patrocínio do capital financeiro, promove um arranjo resignado, mas consciente, do deslocamento da acumulação de capital para setores com o controle da terra e portadores da renda fundiária. Assim, sob essas diretrizes que reforçam a (re)primarização da nossa economia como estratégia de desenvolvimento, o governo brasileiro não só mantém intocadas as contradições que conformam a nossa questão agrária como, também, avança em direção contrária ao seu discurso de emular o desenvolvimento autônomo e socialmente referenciado do país, garantir a consecução dos direitos sociais, em especial a do direito humano à alimentação, sustentados por condições de segurança alimentar que contemplem a justiça no campo e a soberania alimentar. Mais uma vez, a atitude que permite superar a distância entre as intenções e os gestos sucumbe ao discurso.

The post A balança comercial do agronegócio brasileiro e a questão fundiária appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Na tarde de 26 de setembro de  2011 Nita chegou sorridente e afetuosa à Universidade de Sorocaba, juntamente com meu orientando no doutorado Mauricio Massari, para inaugurar a  Exposição Biobibliográfica 90 anos de Paulo Freire.

Se deixou fotografar com as bibliotecárias que organizaram a exposição, comentou alguns dos livros expostos e os recortes de jornais, nacionais e locais, que as bibliotecárias pacientemente organizam desde a chegada de Paulo Freire ao Brasil, depois de seu longo exílio.

Ela leu atentamente e comentou o texto que escrevi para a apresentação dessa exposição, no qual observo a influência de Paulo Freire na constituição da Universidade de Sorocaba. Foi na antiga Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras de Sorocaba, que Paulo Freire  ministrou um dos seus primeiros seminários, logo após o retorno do exílio, que originaram o livro Paulo Freire ao Vivo ( FREIRE; VANNUCCHI; SANTOS, 1983 ).  A relação inicial  de Paulo Freire com a Universidade de Sorocaba (Uniso) se deu através de um dos seus fundadores e ex- reitor Aldo Vannucchi que com ele trabalhou em Genebra (GERMANO;REIGOTA ,2007 a,  SERBIN, 2000).

Após termos inaugurado a exposição fomos à Faculdade de Educação Física (onde Mauricio Massari é professor) para a conferência que Nita faria pelos 90 anos de Paulo Freire. Quando chegamos lá o clima era de festa entre os estudantes. Havia música e grande movimento no auditório. Antes do inicio da conferência de Nita, Marta Catunda, doutoranda em educação na Uniso, apresentou três de suas composições musicais denominadas “Freireanas”.

O movimento intenso dos jovens foi dando lugar à atenção ao que Nita falava, com humor e contundência. Aqueles jovens estudantes e futuros professores de educação física, estavam diante de um testemunho afetuoso e histórico sobre o Brasil de algumas décadas passadas  e sobre  o tempo presente marcado pela violência, pela falta de ética, pelos  oportunismos e autoritarismos que ainda imperam  e que Paulo Freire tanto combateu.

A conferência de Nita para os estudantes e professores de várias disciplinas, jornalistas, bibliotecárias, esportistas, pesquisadores, mestrandos e doutorandos  se estendeu por mais de duas horas. Ela parecia incansável e nenhum ruído parecia lhe incomodar.

Uma jovem lhe perguntou em qual contexto Paulo Freire escreveu  Pedagogia do oprimido e Nita não poupou detalhes, enfatizando o problema que Paulo Freire teve no Chile ao ser acusado de ter escrito um livro contra o governo democrata-cristão de Eduardo Frei.

Uma professora lhe perguntou sobre a relação de Paulo Freire com a Teologia da Libertação e Nita falou de sua intenção de publicar as cartas que Paulo Freire trocou com alguns dos principais expoentes desse movimento e as dificuldades que tem encontrado para isso. Mas deixou claro que Paulo Freire participou da  dimensão pedagógica da Teologia da Libertação.

Outra professora lhe perguntou sobre o exílio de Paulo Freire, por onde ele esteve e como viveu nesses lugares. Nita novamente não poupou detalhes sobre a crueldade e violação dos direitos humanos que os militares foram capazes de fazer com ele, com a família dele e com muitos  outros e outras que ousaram desafiá-los. Apesar do tom de conversa informal entre pessoas de diferentes gerações e formações acadêmicas, Nita não deixou  de recorrer à historia,  filosofia,  arte e ciências políticas relacionando sempre esses conhecimentos específicos com a vida cotidiana.

Ela foi ali, na Faculdade de Educação Física de Sorocaba, como sempre tem sido:  professora atenciosa e  pesquisadora rigorosa   que  como  interlocutora de Paulo Freire, teve marcante influência  no pensamento político e pedagógico  dele, principalmente na ultima década da vida dele quando estiveram casados. Nita também  deixou claro  o seu papel de mulher e cidadã militante e firme contra as injustiças e preconceitos, alertando principalmente aos jovens ali presentes que a cidadania é uma prática cotidiana.

Um mês depois Nita voltou a Sorocaba, para uma conferência na Universidade Paulista, para os estudantes do curso noturno de letras, pedagogia e psicologia, organizada pelos doutorandos em educação na Uniso, Maria Aparecida Crisostomo e Ricardo José Orsi de Sanctis, ambos professores na Universidade Paulista.

Nita retomou alguns temas abordados na conferência anterior, comentou vários dos livros de Paulo Freire, relatou passagens da infância, adolescência e juventude dele em Recife e Jaboatão, a relação de Paulo Freire  com a família dela e a generosidade do pai dela ao disponibilizar uma bolsa de estudos para  Paulo Freire estudar atendendo a solicitação da mãe dele.

Voltou a enfatizar o quanto Paulo Freire se dedicou a explicitar a dimensão política das práticas pedagógicas e  sociais cotidianas e  que a pedagogia freireana  não se limita a um método. Trata-se, disse ela, de uma teoria filosófica e política da educação pautada na superação das injustiças sociais.

Enfatizou ainda que os oprimidos de outrora não desaparecerem e outros oprimidos vieram à cena e reivindicam cidadania, justiça e respeito, como as mulheres, os gays e lésbicas, os/as indígenas, os/as negros, os/as Sem Terra.

Quando ela terminou a conferência os e as estudantes  a aplaudiram  de pé manifestando que não queriam  que  terminasse. Nita ainda respondeu a mais  uma pergunta  relacionada com o exílio de Paulo Freire e  foi novamente aplaudida de pé por todas as pessoas ali presentes. Os e as estudantes, queriam fotos com ela  e dedicatórias nos exemplares do livro Pedagogia da autonomia (FREIRE, 1997).

A sua presença em Sorocaba, atendendo  meus  alunos e alunas do doutorado em educação e a atenção e o afeto dela com os alunos e alunas dos meus alunos  e alunas foi um  momento marcante do processo de ressignificação do livro Pedagogia do oprimido (FREIRE, 2009)  que com eles e  elas  busco realizar nos nossos seminários na Universidade de Sorocaba.

As experiências recentes acima relatadas são também reflexos da  pertinência e contemporaneidade da pedagogia freireana e de seu impacto  em diferentes grupos sociais e com interesses diversos.

Refletem também a necessidade e o anseio de se repensar o Brasil e o mundo, com as gerações nascidas após o fim dos regimes totalitários e que  com muita dificuldade  chegam ao ensino superior privado e dele saem para, em grande parte, se tornarem  professores nas escolas públicas onde se encontram as camadas mais pobres e marginalizadas da população.

É esse o desafio que enfrentamos e é com essas pessoas e nesses lugares que a pedagogia freireana  tem mostrado o quanto é pertinente e pode ser  recriada. Ela nos afetou em outros momentos históricos e nos  afeta  atualmente de outra maneira, em outros contextos culturais, ecológicos, sociais e políticos e em companhia de outras pessoas.

No final  dos anos 1970 o Brasil estava  ainda sob a ditadura militar  iniciada em 1964 e antes  de concluir a universidade, eu encontrei um trabalho eventual de  professor substituto  no curso noturno de um tradicional colégio público de São Paulo. Esse era mais um dos trabalhos eventuais que  eu tinha. Não pretendia ser professor e pensava ingressar na pós-graduação em paleontologia para pesquisar os Trilobitoidea.

Alguns dos professores efetivos, nesse mesmo colégio, eram militantes contrários à ditadura militar e adeptos da pedagogia freireana. Minha atuação política se dava no movimento estudantil e no iniciante  movimento ecologista.  Eu também estava  muito próximo do ativo  movimento de  contracultura.

As experiências de professor com  alunos e alunas  (que tinham mais ou menos a minha idade) e com os e as  colegas  contestadores do regime ditatorial e leitores de Paulo Freire me fizeram desistir dos Trilobitoidea e me levaram à educação ambiental.

Em 1983 eu estava inscrito no mestrado em Filosofia da Educação na Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUCSP) e matriculado na disciplina  Alternativas em Educação Popular ministrada por Paulo Freire.

A minha expectativa em estudar com ele era enorme. A sala de aula estava lotada. A possibilidade de estudar com Paulo Freire na universidade que se caracterizou por ser um espaço de resistência e por congregar os mais conhecidos professores perseguidos pela ditadura, entre eles, Mauricio Tragtenberg, Octávio Ianni e Florestan  Fernandes, muito me estimulou.

A PUCSP era também lugar obrigatório na passagem de professores brasileiros de outras universidades e estrangeiros  que combatiam a ditadura militar e pesquisavam sobre autores como  Marx, Nietzsche, Trotsky, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Gramsci, Benjamim, Arendt,  Bourdieu, Basaglia, etc.

Entre os estrangeiros, a constante presença  de Félix Guattari  entre nós foi a que mais marcou a atuação  de um grupo de estudantes do qual eu participava. Discutíamos intensamente as micropolíticas e as revoluções moleculares cotidianas (DOSE, 2007, p.574-576).

A ditadura agonizava, os movimentos sociais estavam no  auge, a contracultura paulistana produzia música, poesia, literatura, teatro e artes plásticas que marcariam a época.  As biólogas Nicea Wendel de Magalhães e Salete Abrahão aglutinavam jovens interessados em educação ambiental e ativistas como o anarquista  Miguel Abellá , artista catalão residente em São Paulo, davam o tom contestatório.  Os exilados e exiladas  estavam voltando ao país e entre eles e elas estava Kazue Matsushima que havia feito o mestrado na Universidade Livre Bruxelas onde defendeu uma dissertação sobre educação ambiental e fazia conferências e seminários sobre o tema. O movimento ecologista ganhava expressão nacional com os textos e intervenções de Cacilda Lanuza, Augusto Ruschi, José Lutzenberger, Frans Krajceberg e Fernando Gabeira.

Ainda guardo o caderno com as anotações das aulas de Paulo Freire e alguns registros desse movimento todo que eu presenciava e participava. A primeira das aulas com ele na PUCSP ocorreu em 15 de março de 1983, na qual  discorreu sobre as expectativas dos intelectuais e seus equívocos em relação às camadas populares. Falou do autoritarismo e das mentiras que rondam e se fazem presentes no cotidiano escolar.

Como trabalho final de sua disciplina Paulo Freire disse que deveríamos escrever um texto a partir da fala de um camponês maranhense quanto se encontrou com um grupo de intelectuais. O camponês  lhes disse  “ enquanto  vocês aí, estão interessados no sal, nós aqui estamos interessados no tempero. E o sal é apenas um componente do tempero”. A expressão e  encontro do camponês com os intelectuais parece ter marcado muito Paulo Freire, já que  ele se refere a isso em diferentes momentos e textos, como por exemplo no livro Política e Educação (FREIRE, 1993, p.57).

Na segunda aula, em 22 de março ele disse e eu anotei “Para que haja igualdade é necessário que haja diferença”. Essa frase viria ser o mote central do meu trabalho desde então, a pedagogia das diferenças voltada para os grupos marginalizados.

Nas primeiras aulas com Paulo Freire eu estava empolgado e procurava ler os textos  indicados, mas estava se iniciando um desconforto com as insistentes  intervenções dos meus colegas, cujas expectativas foram se distanciando das minhas. Havia neles um tom messiânico, de  intelectuais condutores das massas, que me incomodava e  me parecia que eles buscavam o endosso de Paulo Freire . O assédio dos meus colegas a Paulo Freire era intenso e eu só pude falar diretamente com ele no primeiro dia de aula, quando todos nós nos apresentamos rapidamente.

O desconforto está registrado no meu caderno, ou melhor na ausência de registro da terceira aula. A página do caderno está  praticamente em branco e se encontra apenas a frase, certamente de minha autoria, “ Já faz um tempo…oh baby, não!” ao lado da data 12 de abril.

Mas não desisti e entre as notas das aulas posteriores em que se encontram comentários de Paulo Freire sobre suas obras, como  A importância do ato de ler e Cartas de Guiné Bissau  encontram-se  também registros e  comentários, que não estavam relacionados com os temas da aula e sim  sobre momentos experimentados da cultura alternativa em São Paulo naquele penúltimo ano da ditadura militar.

Entre esses comentários, um se refere ao  primeiro show de Arnaldo Dias Baptista (ex-  Os Mutantes) realizado no teatro da PUCSP, após o acidente que quase lhe tirou a vida.

A música era e é muito importante na minha práxis pedagógica e isso se manifesta no trabalho de conclusão da disciplina que apresentei ao professor Paulo Freire. Pensei e escrevi musicalmente sobre a frase dita pelo camponês maranhense ao grupo de intelectuais utilizando as letras das canções “A sede de peixe (para o que não tem solução)” de Milton Nascimento e Márcio Borges e “ O sal da terra’ de Beto Guedes e Ronaldo Bastos, procurando, com as canções, refletir sobre o encontro  e desencontro de pessoas com grandes diferenças e defasagens de expectativas um do outro. O professor Paulo Freire me deu nota 9 (REIGOTA, 1983).

A primeira vez que vi Nita foi na sala reservada aos participantes  de uma mesa redonda da Conferência das Nações Unidas para o Meio Ambiente e Desenvolvimento realizada no Rio de Janeiro em 1992.

Organizada por Márcio D’Olne Campos, a mesa redonda reunia Paulo Freire, o poeta Patativa do Assaré, o histórico ecologista José Lutzenberger e eu como coordenador nacional do projeto internacional Voice of the Children.

Era motivo de grande orgulho,  participar de uma mesa redonda com pessoas que eu tanto admirava e que tinham grande influência no meu trabalho e militância.

O público era bem pequeno no amplo teatro e em certo momento, pouco antes de minha fala, uma pessoa do público interveio, protestando sobre alguma coisa, iniciando pequena confusão. Não tive oportunidade de conversar com Nita, nem a ela ser apresentado .

A segunda vez que a vi foi no lançamento do livro Pedagogia da Autonomia em São Paulo. Eu acompanhava Vera Regina Rodrigues que organizava o livro Muda o Mundo Raimundo! A educação ambiental no ensino básico do Brasil (RODRIGUES, 1998) e esperávamos contar com o prefácio de Paulo Freire.

Ele foi muito gentil e atencioso e nos disse que estava de viagem marcada para os próximos dias para os EUA onde lecionaria na Harvard University, mas se não fosse muito urgente, ele poderia nos enviar o prefácio. Infelizmente Paulo Freire faleceu poucos dias depois e a ele o livro foi dedicado. Nessa ocasião também não conversei com Nita nem a ela fui apresentado.

Nosso primeiro encontro se deu em 1998 num dos seminários organizados por Vera Regina Rodrigues, no Rio de Janeiro, para a equipe que havia participado da elaboração do livro Muda o Mundo Raimundo! Comentei com Nita, que apesar de termos vários colegas e alguns amigos e amigas em comum, era a primeira vez que estava tendo a oportunidade de conversar com ela.

Disse que gostaria de ouvir dela os motivos pelos quais Paulo Freire havia deixado a Secretaria Municipal de Educação de São Paulo. Ela respondeu que ele estava querendo muito ter mais tempo para escrever  e o trabalho de secretário o estava dificultando. Ela citou os livros e textos que Paulo Freire havia escrito desde que havia deixado a Secretaria e entre eles o livro Pedagogia da autonomia.

Sempre enfatizo aos meus alunos e alunas  a influência de  Nita nesse  livro. Enfatizo também a inestimável contribuição desse livro e os póstumos organizados por ela (FREIRE A.M.A, 1999, FREIRE, 2000,2001,2005) ao aprofundamento  da pedagogia das diferenças e da educação ambiental definida como educação política.

Nossos encontros tiveram maior frequência. Um afeto mútuo nos une e em várias ocasiões ela me presenteou com um novo livro ou uma nova edição de um dos seus livros ou de Paulo Freire com dedicatórias em que nossa amizade é lembrada e enfatizada.

Meus alunos e alunas também são afetados por essa relação e como testemunho destaco a longa entrevista que Nita nos concedeu quando uma de minhas orientandas concluía sua dissertação de mestrado sobre o projeto de alfabetização de adultos “Sorocaba sem analfabetos” (GERMANO, 2006).

A entrevista foi traduzida para o inglês por Vera Regina Rodrigues e disponibilizada no site do The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy da Mcgill University.  Foi  traduzida em espanhol pelo educador ambiental Edgar González-Gaudiano e publicada no México. Em português foi publicada na Revista de Estudos Universitários da Universidade de Sorocaba. (GERMANO; REIGOTA, 2006, 2007b, 2009)).

Após sua saída da Secretaria de Educação de São Paulo, Paulo Freire publicou Educação na cidade. Quando esse livro foi publicado em francês,  escrevi uma resenha que foi publicada na Revue Française de Pédagogie (REIGOTA, 1994).  O famoso professor Georges Snyders a leu e me enviou pelo correio um pacote com seus livros mais recentes e um bilhete dizendo de sua admiração por Paulo Freire.

Fiquei muito surpreso e feliz em receber essa gentileza do professor Snyders e o registro aqui se faz necessário, pois quando eu estudava na PUCSP os professores marxistas ortodoxos, que se opunham à pedagogia freireana, nos obrigavam a ler e usavam  os textos de Georges Snyders como argumentos  para combatê-la.

Alguns anos depois os livros que recebi de Snyders foram publicados no Brasil com o respaldo de Paulo Freire. Sobre isso ele assim se refere:

Veja o Snyders, por exemplo, um pedagogo de formação marxista que se tem entregue a vida inteira a uma pedagogia critica geradora de riso! Não uma pedagogia irresponsável, mas uma pedagogia crítica, que propõe  porém uma experiência de contentamento no processo  de conhecer, de estudar e de ensinar. Agorinha, enquanto  trabalhávamos, eu recebi um pacote da Paz e Terra, com o último texto de Snyders, traduzido para o português, para que eu escreva um prefácio. O Snyders me mandou esse texto dele em francês, e eu então o encaminhei à Paz e Terra, sugerindo que fosse publicado. O titulo do livro  é  Alunos felizes; reflexões sobre a alegria na escola, a partir de textos literários. O Snyders é um campeão da alegria, e nem por isso a sua proposta pedagógica é frouxa e espontaneísta. (FREIRE; GUIMARÃES, 2000, p.42).

Quando estive na Universidade de Huelva na Espanha tive a grata surpresa de ver que um dos seus  modernos edifícios leva o nome de Paulo Freire. Quis ser fotografado diante dele. Enviei as fotos para Nita que publicou uma delas no  livro  Paulo Freire: Uma História de vida. Sou eu a pessoa sentada no banco diante do edifício Paulo Freire na Universidade de Huelva (FREIRE A. M. A., 2006, p.500). Logo depois, Nita esteve nessa universidade para a inauguração oficial do edifício e descerrou a placa com os seguintes dizeres: la educación necessita tanto de formación técnica, cientifica y profesional como de sueños y utopia. (Paulo Freire). Visita de Ana Maria (Nita) Araújo Freire  (FREIRE A. M. A., 2006, p. 510)

Nos últimos anos tem me interessado pesquisar e discutir com meus alunos e alunas do mestrado e doutorado em educação da Universidade de Sorocaba os contextos em que Pedagogia do Oprimido foi escrito e o seu impacto e pertinência nos tempos atuais.

Assim, a abordagem histórica, cultural, ecológica, social e política da América Latina nas últimas décadas é incontornável. Nesse sentido estou interessado em pesquisar e trazer a público aspectos  privados, pessoais e singulares, ou seja as  “ambiências cotidianas” que produziram, possibilitaram e testemunharam  acontecimentos de intensos  impactos coletivos e planetários, como é o caso, por exemplo, do livro Pedagogia do oprimido.

A presença de Paulo Freire no Chile está bem documentada e estudada e pouco de original resta a acrescentar. No entanto em recentes visitas a Santiago procurei fotografar a possível cartografia dele naquela cidade, dispondo dos endereços de onde viveu e das instituições onde ele e tantos outros brasileiros exilados atuaram antes do golpe de Pinochet.

Nesse movimento cartográfico fui visitar com um amigo chileno o  Museo de la Memória y los Derechos Humanos. Quando já terminávamos a visita, silenciosos e afetados por tudo aquilo que tínhamos experimentado ali, vi uma foto  de Paulo Freire, sem legenda, vestido com um poncho, num grupo de pessoas. Reconheci-o imediatamente e num repente disse ao meu amigo: “Mário, esse homem mudou minha vida”.

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Yet, the local outrage about the carnage is only a fraction of what it was in the early days of the Arab Spring, which led to the end of the three-decade-long presidency of Hosni Mubarak and the subsequent political and ideological confusion that have permeated the subsequent two years.  Facing the overwhelming popular support of the army’s actions are rare voices of protest from some of the young activists at the heart of the 2011 revolution. Now as then, their struggle appears like a lost cause.

Certainly there are realities that are seldom reported outside of Egypt and that should be illuminated. The Muslim Brotherhood – the shadow organization that governed Egypt from 2012 to 2013 with Mohamed Morsi at the helm – is far from the victim it claims to be. The twelve-month Islamist presidency saw  unprecedented division among the population, a catastrophic state of the economy, and a frightening lack of political vision, crisis management and simple communicative aplomb. Egypt has experienced a steep rise in crime, a scandalous alliance with convicted terrorists who boast about their crimes on national television (exemplified by Jama’a Islamiya member Assem Abdel Maged’s lack of remorse when confronted with his attack on a local police station that left 118 fatalities in 1981), and the militarization of the civilian populace through an undetermined number of smuggled weapons trafficked across the borders supposedly guarded by the army. The consequences of continued instability reach beyond Egypt as the Sinai Peninsula has become a welcome hotbed for terrorists who found it easier to operate there than in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. As one Egyptian protester once put it in the latter days of Morsi’s presidency, “After the revolution, we Egyptians had so many dreams. But the Muslim Brotherhood destroyed all of them.”

The army-supported ouster of Morsi reflected the undercurrent of tension cutting through all segments of society. With the streets packed and the number of protesters exceeding the masses of the 2011 revolution, the only viable result short of Morsi’s resignation, which was not forthcoming, was the intervention of the military. But because most Western countries seemed to have found solace in the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood had won the elections ‘fair and square’ and had begun adapting their policies to the collaborative Brotherhood, the ouster was immediately deemed a coup, and armed vigilantes became “peaceful demonstrators”. There was rarely a mention of scorched churches, attacks on civilians, and daily hate speeches from Brotherhood figures Beltay, Hegazy and Badie (all now imprisoned) on the stage of the infamous protest camp at Rabaa Adaweya Mosque during the forty days between Morsi’s fall on July 3^,  2013 and the dispersal of the sit-ins.

While bloodshed is always lamentable, the Muslim Brotherhood’s response to Morsi’s removal deviates greatly from the narrative of peaceful protest they frequently claim in interviews. The protesters killed by Brotherhood members under Morsi notwithstanding, the two pro-Morsi sit-in camps in Cairo were heavily armed and resulted in dozens of casualties among police, the Armed Forces and civilians.

Yet, the actions of the Muslim Brotherhood do not justify the counter-response that left an estimated one thousand dead bodies on Egypt’s streets. When Islamists won an overwhelming majority in the parliamentary elections in late 2011, I was aware of the lack of experience, education and vision of virtually all of its members. I could only laugh at the absence of eloquence and public relations ability. But it was gallows humor. In reality, I resented those who use religion to influence the politically inexperienced public, which is nearly 40 percent illiterate.

Nevertheless, when these dubious representatives entered the parliament, which has never been free of corruption in my lifetime, I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. After all, most of them had also experienced years of repression under Mubarak and hoped for a positive surprise from new leadership.

I am not an activist. I am not part of a political group or party. When the revolution of January 25th started, I supported it because there were basic human values that were being addressed: freedom of speech and social equality. While I previously thought that it would be easier to wait until the old man atop the Egyptian throne died, I realized that I had been wrong—only a revolution could bring those changes to the morass of corruption into which Egypt had descended. In 2011, I flew back to Cairo (from New York, where I was studying) a total of six times, almost depleting my financial resources and putting my degree in jeopardy, because I felt I needed to “be there and take part”; that I had wasted most of my youth in apathy and I now had the chance – no, the obligation – to aid my country in its struggle for democracy. As the politics became more sophisticated, however, I stopped coming back. I realized that the power play of opportunism between parties, fractions, religions and classes was not my fight.  I did not vote in the runoff presidential election between Mohamed Morsi (a religious charlatan) and Ahmed Shafik (a stand-in for the just-dethroned old regime); it was not my fight. I was ecstatic when Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood were removed from power as a result of protests on June 30th, but I did not follow the call of Egypt’s current de facto leader army general Abdelfattah al-Sisy when he asked Egyptians to show their support in the streets and give him a blank check to deal with the ’terrorists.’ This was definitely not my fight, because history has shown me otherwise.

I grew up during the 1990s, a period remembered in Egypt as the era of “terrorism” and “iron fists”. I remember standing in traffic for hours on my way home from school because terrorists had attacked a hotel in Haram Street, or thrown a bomb into the Giza tunnel. But I also remember seeing police cargos filled to the brim with civilians, their hands reaching out the barred windows holding Korans, barely able to breathe. I was only a child, but years later I understood that the crimes of most of these people were having a beard or visiting the mosque too often, or simply being at the wrong place at the wrong time. The iron fist of the police state was in full effect.

The arbitrary nature of how this policy was implemented two decades ago is eerily reminiscent of the events of today. When al-Sisy asked for the people’s support, it brought back not only memories from my childhood, but also the most damaging political quote in recent history, the day George W. Bush declared: ”The world has to decide: either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Nothing is that black and white.

Today, the Bush-like talk of “getting rid of the terrorists,” “leveling Sinai to the ground‚” and “smoking them out of their caves,” has become common language on the streets of Cairo. But one important lesson from recent history is forgotten: after twelve years, even the most optimistic pundits say that the West’s ”War on Terror” has failed. The reason is simple: you cannot fight something you cannot define. For the West, a terrorist is a bearded man in a nightgown who lives in a cave and “hates our freedoms”. The reverse narrative is that a terrorist is a man in a suit who sends soldiers and drones to bomb a village, killing women and children. The truth gets lost somewhere in the middle.

Another forgotten lesson is this: the “terrorist” will always come back. Just as with the Yemeni boy who lost his family in a drone strike, or the Afghan teenager who saw his village destroyed, the children of Egypt’s murdered Islamists will come back to haunt us. After all, what did we show them of the humanistic values we claim to have, the social equality, compassion, the Western model of democracy?

Of course, the argument can be made, “But they are armed! They refuse democracy! They are willing to kill us for their belief!” Absolutely. But we are the “good ones”, aren’t we? We claim to be the role models, the ones who should show them how governance is done right. Instead, we fought them with their own weapons. We descended to their level.

Where will Islamists go after we are “done” with them? If Egypt’s census can be trusted, those who voted for an Islamist incumbent in the first round of presidential elections number more than five million. If we naively assume that only ten percent of them maintain their beliefs after our own “war on terror” is over, that would still leave us with half a million ideological opponents. Will the police kill them too? Will they emigrate? Will they all turn into liberals? Or will they simply vanish into thin air?

One solution has never failed, one that has been reiterated over and over again by the more reasonable minds such as the deliberately defamed Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei:  The key is education. A look at the history of any dictatorship will show it as an element purposely neglected time and again. It is because people who cannot read and write, who do not care about politics, who only struggle to make it through the day and make a living for their children, are easy to control. There is no short-term solution and no quick fix. Educating the coming generation will give the security of a stable democracy, not the thin ice upon which Egypt now stands. In an interview for the Washington Post, then-Vice President ElBaradei attempted to persuade the leadership into accepting a more long term and inclusive solution, stating that, “People are very angry with me because I am saying, ‘Let’s take time, let’s talk to them.’” The mood right now is one that crushes the opposition, and eschews communication. Pragmatically, we need to foster a long-range view based on restoring order and supportive of national consensus and reconciliation.

Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote ‚”There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes. As a result, there are various truths. And as a result, there is no truth.” Given intersecting and conflicting realities, there is no absolute “truth.” In Egypt, everyone is right, but everyone is wrong. The clash of ideologies has become so complex that, in light of the chaos, there is no truth. Only hope for a fresh beginning.

Note: This article was written in the days after the dispersal of the Muslim Brotherhood’s two protest camps in Cairo in August 2013. 

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