There and elsehere
South/South, founded in 2009 in Rio de Janeiro, has resided here as an open laboratory and a space to think.
In 2012 it transplanted to The New Inquiry. For about a year I double-posted both here and over there, but that has since winded down. All 2009-2012 posts will stay put here as open archives.
‘One night I got in jail for picking flowers’
‘And if any of the guards are still speaking to me, could I have a glass of water?’
Cinema Guantánamo
No-charge, first-run feature films screened on 35mm for Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base prison guards, troops, and their families (not detainees) by the Movie Program at GTMO (‘A phenomenal place to be, [where] one can enjoy great snacks from the concession stand during the movie. With GTMO’s exceptionally beautiful year round weather, movies are very rarely postponed’).
Films include Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (‘bounty hunters track and kill witches all
over the world’), Side Effects (‘a psychiatric-meds melodrama about an NYC woman whose husband’s in prison’), and Warm Bodies (a zombie love story ‘with much of the world’s population now an undead horde’).
As documented by Miami Herald journalist Carol Rosenberg.
Map-memory, 10 May 1948
Bayt Mahsir, 1932, photographed by Ukrainian immigrant Haim Berger (YNet).
Beit Meir, photographed by Daniel Ventura (Wikimedia Commons).
1948
8-9 May. As part of Operation Maccabi (launched by the Haganah) the Harel Brigade sets out to attack and conquer the village of Beit Mahsir.
10 May. The village of Beit Mahsir is occupied.
◊ ◊ ◊
Soon, those of us for whom the ‘place that has left its place’ is cause for heartache will also vanish, and the old landscape will be totally erased from the collective memory of those who already have succeeed in transforming it almost beyond recognition. One need only read Israeli textbooks or see the albums with ‘before and after’ photos—the Land before 1948 and today—to realize how close we are to the point when the vanished Arab landscape will be considered just a piece of Arab propaganda, a fabrication aimed at the destruction of Israel through incitment of ‘The Return.’
—Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948 (trans. Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta, UC Press, 2000) 4.
◊ ◊ ◊
The two books about the village of Bayt Mahsir are from refugees living in Jordan; one was written in calligraphic longhand and published in al-Baq’a refugee camp in 1988, the second was published in 2002. These books inform me that the villages have been largely destroyed, and replaced by two Israeli towns: Bayt Mahsir is now named Beit Meir and is a religious moshav (cooperative farm), and Suba has become Kibbutz Tzova.
I locate contemporary maps of the areas west of Jerusalem and discover that Kibbutz Tzova/Suba and Beit Meir/Bayt Mahsir are located in the Martyrs’ Forest (Ya’ar HaKdoshim). Established by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in 1951, the Martyrs’ Forest commemorates the six million European Jews who died in the Holocaust. The JNF map of the Martyrs’ Forest shows the commemorative locations, along with picnic areas, biking paths, archaeological sites, and the Israeli towns that have been built there. The geography is such that without knowledge of the Palestinian villages’ existence in the past it would be impossible to know that they were once here.
—Rochelle A. Davis, Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced (Stanford University Press, 2011) 1-2.
◊ ◊ ◊
Several village houses have been spared, and are for the most part interspersed among the houses of the settlement of Beyt Me’ir. Two large, rectangular-shaped, almost identical houses built of limestone rise above the Israeli settlement’s cabin-like residences. The remains of a flourmill, a metal machine with flywheels fitted over a stone structure, can still be seen. There is a wild forest of old trees on the eastern edge of the village site, on top of the mountain. The tomb of al-’Ajami, together with other graves, are among the trees.
—Walid Khalidi, Bayt Mahsir
This first appeared at The New Inquiry.
Cosmopolitican, or cosmetics as police regime
In an audio track layered over an image of Lee Miller (in the first volume of Histoire(s) du cinéma) Godard broods over the correlation between art and artifice: ‘Cinema is not part of the communication industry or the entertainment industry. It is part of cosmetics, the industry of masks. A minor branch of the industry of lies.”
If cinema is part of the industry of masks, then what industry does cosmetics (‘the industry of masks’) belong to? Etymology is not a zero-sum game but I am struck by the the alignment of cosmetics (from French cosmétique, derived from Greek kosmētikos, from kosmein ‘arrange or adorn’) and order. The friendliness between cosmetics (from kosmos, ‘order or adornment’) and aesthetics (from aisthēta ‘perceptible things’) only serves to embolden the corollated relationship to sensible distribution and arrangement.
There is another regime endowed with the power of ordering space and perceptible things (and also their synthesis, the spatial arrangement in which things appear). As I’ve written in the wake of Rancière’s work, that is the police regime. The police regime is a useful and generative category¹ and it goes without saying that it doesn’t always, though often does, require imagining actual uniformed cops. My larger point is that to read cosmetics as a police regime doesn’t necessarily require a poetic license, so in this regard I think I am coming out as a fundamentalist with regard to perception and space.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration defines cosmetics as ‘articles intended to be applied to the human body for cleansing, beautifying, promoting attractiveness, or altering the appearance without affecting the body’s structure or functions‘ (emphasis added). Couldn’t the operation of altering appearance without affecting structure and function be a foundational and concrete thesis on police?
Sometimes cosmetics and police regimes align literally. In Saudi Arabia the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice tried to force a woman out of the mall after they spotted her wearing nail polish.² The difference between this particular harassment by the volunteer vice squad and hundreds of others like it is because ‘Manicure Girl’ filmed the exchange and posted the video online; the CPVPV later filed a formal complaint against her for doing so.
Another confrontation involved a passenger and a flight attendant at a Las Vegas, Nevada airport.³ A woman painting her nails on the airplane was arrested after the Southwest Airlines flight landed:
All charges against the passenger for using ‘abusive profane language’ were eventually dismissed by the prosecutor, but not before Ms. Daniels was placed in a holding cell and detained for 10 hours.
The incident developed after the passenger was told by a flight attendant to stop painting her nails because the odor of her nail polish remover was bothering other passengers. Ms. Daniels complied, but later completed finishing her nails in an aircraft bathroom, believing that doing so in the privacy of the toilet would be less offensive to others.
Both the Riyadh and Las Vegas accounts ended with retaliation not for the nail varnish in question but the reaction of its wearers: the online posting of the video in the former and the ‘Stop bitching at me!’ remark in the latter. Policing regimes demand smoothness and unwrinkled surfaces instead of striae, ridges, or disruptions.
_____
¹ ‘Useful and generative’ because this reading atypically displaces the policing regime from the user of cosmetics herself.
² On a personal note I have yet to be interpellated by the cosmetics vice squads in Iran, though my nail beds were heavily surveilled in Catholic school.
³ Anyone impatiently waiting to utilize the phrase ‘the Saudi Arabia of ______’ would be ingratiated by this straight-from-the-papers comparison between the Kingdom and U.S. flight proceedings, so go right ahead.
This first appeared at The New Inquiry.
Repeating faces
“I’ve just seen a face,
I can’t forget the time or place.”
—John Lennon and Paul McCartney,
“I’ve Just Seen a Face”
The physiognomy of the human face confers particularity and evidence of a singular self. In many societies the face reflects a gateway to interiority and humanity (suggesting so seems like stating the most obvious and commonsensical human notion, like air, water, or universal grammar). Even the elementary boundaries of the English language afford a grasp on how integral one’s face is to persona (putting one’s face on), character or reputation (saving face), conflict (wearing a game face), social exchange (talking face to face), or inhumanity (faceless bureaucrats).
As such, it is difficult to imagine how the sight of the covered face wouldn’t trigger suspicion in ‘Western’ societies. Yet the unavoidability of surveillance, microsurveillance, and dataveillance (and some cooperation from our part in them) is also a major source of anxiety. The quantifiable, qualifiable, and codifiable economies of the face that concern me, and form the basis of an ongoing research project, spring from this paradox.
These are some images culled from that project and shared here as an open text. I have coated each image in a similar tint so individual colors would appear less distracting and more seamless. The title refers to the simulacra effect of covered faces: because the obscured or masked face resists representation, it can only be repeated, a phenomenon that grants it what Jacques Derrida called a “terrible power.” The significance of that terrible power is what I will to continue to examine.
Dilma Rousseff facing a military court interrogation, November 1970
Extraordinary rendition under the secret CIA program
Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN)
Members of the KKK in the 1920s
Hussein Chalayan’s S/S Between show, 1998
Farmers in Yemen
Lara Stone on the cover of the 90th anniversary issue of Vogue
Princess Hijba’s street art/defacement in the Parisian subway
René Magritte’s Les Amants (The Lovers), 1928
Party masks of Prince William’s face at London’s Heathrow airport
Michael Jackson covering himself and his child with an abaya in Bahrain
First published on the Art Dubai blog, 6 March 2013.
A country torn: the Cicero March, 1966
From the Chicago Film Archives FilmGroup Collection, ‘Urban Crisis and the New Militants Series.’ First viewed in 16mm at Terror & the Inhuman: Magic Lantern Cinema, curated by Beth Capper. Description: ‘Cicero March details a civil rights march on September 4, 1966. Robert Lucas led activists through Cicero to protest restrictions in housing laws. White residents of Cicero respond with vitriolic jeers as the police struggle to prevent a riot.’
Elsewhere:
Rashad Shabazz, ‘Black Militancy: Notes From the Underground‘
For a generation of young activists, the reality of war, imperialism, racism and the growing fragility of democratic liberalism was too much to handle. Force became a means to wrestle with this tension. As the discourse of a “country torn” finds its way into mainstream political analyses (for many the deep divisions in this country are not a new political reality), we should reflect on the writings of political dissidents and radicals. We should recognize the diversity of political analysis that is very much alive. The histories of armed struggle, if taken seriously, provide us with a means to think more critically about the center, and complicate its claims of moral and political right.
David Manning, ‘A Tale of Two (or Three) Marches‘
Unlike 1968, this [2003] march was overtly patriotic. These people were not marching in opposition to the United States, and certainly no one among the quarter million or so marchers was marching in support of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden. There were flags and signs that read “Patriots for Peace.”
Towards a ‘moral’ assassination model
The University of Chicago’s Center for International Studies has scheduled an upcoming talk by University of Utah law professor Amos Guiora titled ‘Legitimate Target: A Criteria Based Approach to Targeted Killing.’
Billed as an oration on the criteria of targeted killing, Guiora highlights the ‘moral’ frou-frou of state assassination:
Targeted killings represent both the contemporary weapon of choice and, and likely, the weapon of the future. From the perspective of the nation-state, the benefits of targeted killing are clear: aggressive measures against identified targets can be carried out with minimal, if any, risk to soldiers. But while the threat to soldiers is minimal, there are other risks that must be considered. Particularly, there is a high possibility of collateral damage as well as legitimate concerns regarding how a target is defined. Clearly broad legal, moral, and operational issues are at stake when considering targeted killing.
Amos Guiora will discuss why targeted killing decisions must reflect consideration of four distinct elements: law, policy, morality, and operational details, thus ensuring that it complies with principles of domestic and international laws. Based on personal experience and an academic perspective, Guiora will offer important criticism and insight into the policy as presently implemented, highlighting the need for a criteria based decision making process in defining and identifying a legitimate target. [emphasis added]
The word ‘drone’ never appears anywhere on the event announcement even though Guiora, a 19-year veteran of the Israel Defense Forces as lieutenant colonel, military law school commander, and legal adviser on Gaza, is ‘an expert on drone attacks.’
Neither will Guiora ever mention that Israel Aerospace Industries, what the Washington Post called the ‘cradle of the modern drone,’ operates 30 miles north of Gaza.
Guiora has kept busy since Israel unleashed on Operation Pillar of Cloud on Gaza in November 2012, striking at least 1,500 sites in Gaza, killing upwards of 158 Palestinians, and injuring at least 1,000. During that onslaught, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon pointed out that ‘most of the people that were hit in Gaza deserved it.’ Chemical weapons are believed to have been used in the attack as they were during Operation Cast Lead; further, Reporters Without Borders called Israeli attacks on journalists in Gaza ‘deliberate.’ As recently as February 2013 a child survivor of 2009’s Operation Cast Lead, in which 21 members of the al-Samouni family were killed in a single airstrike, was denied medical treatment by Israel.
Guiora has a distinguished career as a spokesman for Brand Israel in higher education. In a November 2012 talk at Western University (oo:14:09; Guiora’s lecture was interrupted at 45:50.) Guiora cracked sarcastic jokes about the alleged Israeli bombing of the Yarmouk factory in Sudan (last checked, a sovereign country).
A bomb-making factory in Sudan went up in smoke and that’s a good thing, whoever did it, good for them. I assume it wasn’t the government of Canada.’
That attack was at least the third semi-secretive Israeli scheme enacted in Sudan. Curiously, each one bookended a military operation against Gaza, making Guiora a winsome mouthpiece for Netanyahu, from whom he appears to have borrowed his speech about the triumvirate of threats against Israel nearly word-for-word:
Israeli media has reported that the Israeli air force carried out at least two secret operations in Sudan in January and February 2009. The first involved the bombing of a convoy carrying arms through Sudan to Gaza, in which 119 people were killed. And a ship at a Sudanese port was bombed from the air. Sudan accused the US of carrying out these attacks. In June that year Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, told US officials there was ‘a steady flow of Iranian weapons to Gaza through Sudan or Syria and then by sea.’
In December 2012, Guiora gave an interview on ‘cyber terrorism’ to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, completely devoid of any reference to the obvious.
Interviewer: If a cyberattack were to happen, where might it come from and who might the attackers be?
Guiora: First of all those who are engaged in cyber terrorism are seriously are seriously smart, sophisticated people.
The greatest moment in Guiora’s Greatest Hits PR blitz came in February 2013, when he claimed that the U.S. could be doing a much better job of extra-judicial killing, if only it followed Israel’s model.
In Israel because of the High Court of Justice, which is a branch of the Supreme Court, there is very engaged and robust judicial review of the executive decision-making process. That’s in direct contrast to here in the United States, where frankly there really is, in context of something like the drone policy there is no robust judicial review.
Guiora’s call for judicial oversight citing the Israeli example is rich given the Court’s ignominious history. In 1987, for example, the Israeli judicial system had the distinction of becoming the first state in the world to officially and publicly ‘legalize’ torture by ‘endorsing the use of “moderate physical pressure” in the interrogation of Palestinians as a “necessary” and thus legitimate means of combating “hostile terrorist activity”’ (see ‘On Torture,’ report produced by Adalah, Physicians for Human Rights, and Al Mezan Center for Human Rights).
Beyond Michael Oren, who is at the very least an official ambassador to Israel, Guiora will remind observers of Gabriella Blum, another former IDF legal adviser/booster club member (now tenured at Harvard Law School). Her ‘Invisible Threats‘ essay for Stanford’s Hoover Institution, featuring an ‘drone assassin spider’ is not to be missed.
But to those who do wish to conceal their involvement, microrobots, like cyber attacks, offer invisibility. Being near-impossible to regulate, monitor, or detect, they empower perpetrators not only to strike with impunity, but in some cases, to cover up the very occurrence of the attack. Absent the ability to attribute an attack to its source, human violence becomes no different from natural disasters—a harmful event for which the only effective remedy is preparedness, recovery, and prayer.
In nearly 20 pages of writing Blum mentions ‘Israel’ exactly once, commenting dryly that the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai was ‘caught on tape almost from beginning to end, probably affecting the planning and execution of future operations of this sort.’ In the ‘fight against terror’ by the Most Moral Army in the World, the un/official legal and academic enforcer’s of the the Israeli army’s ‘ethical code’ are indispensable salespeople.
Meanwhile on the western homefront, President Obama continues to recycle the ‘most transparent administration in history‘ line, this time in a ‘fireside hangout’ hosted by Google: ‘[W]hat I tried to do coming into the office was to create a legal and policy framework that respected our traditions and rule of law.’ Previously I pointed out the managed technophilia characteristic of his administration, such as virtual chats on drone policy, and ‘showing off this with-it-ness in the middle of the most shrouded and large-scale assassination racket in memory’ (the first time the President acknowledged the use of U.S. drones in Afghanistan was in a 2012 Google+ Hangout).
At a February 2013 White House press briefing, Press Secretary Jay Carney was asked repeatedly about judicial review in so-called targeted assassination.
Question: I mean, you’re taking away a U.S. citizen’s due process. And nobody is questioning particularly this President’s good intentions, but you’re establishing a precedent which will last beyond this administration. You’re pointing to various legal decisions to back it up, but doesn’t it deserve a broader debate and a broader court hearing?
Mr. Carney: Well, I don’t know about a specific suggestion like that. I can tell you that the administration has—and I think this is demonstrated by the public comments of senior administration officials on this matter—reviewed these issues—I think that’s demonstrated by the so-called white paper that was published today—and is continually reviewing these matters. How that process moves forward from here I’m not going to speculate.
This blanket non-answer is what Guiora pointed to when he questioned the ‘extremely broad definition by the Administration through the DOJ memo.’ The accompanying question, however, is whether moral arbitration about state assassination is Israel’s to give.
This first appeared at The New Inquiry.
Above: Funeral inside Gaza City Mosque following an Israeli drone attack that killed three people, including a
five-year old child, during Operation Pillar of Cloud. Image by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images.
Five questions with Jerome Rothenberg
Five Questions with __________ is an experiment with flash interviews. The series on poets continues with poet, translator, anthologist, editor, and educator Jerome Rothenberg. I first read Rothenberg’s celebrated collections rather blindly, long before I knew enough to know about him: first, in a linguistics class, the seminal compilation Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania (UC Press, 1968) and much later on his blog Poems and Poetics, conceived as ‘a free circulation of works (poems and poetics in the present instance) outside of any commercial or academic nexus.’
Samizdat devoted an entire issue to exploring Rothenberg and Pierre Joris‘ poetics after they jointly edited the anthology Poems for the Millennium, Volumes One and Two (1995). Robert Archambeau commented in the editorial note:
In our own time the discourse about poetry, if not poetry itself, seems to have suffered through a taming and truncation of possibilities similar to the one Rothenberg and Joris saw in the years after World War II. I don’t think we’re about to see anyone offering as narrow a version of poetry as Winters offered in his little anthology. But the easy division of poetry into mainstream and otherstream, into Iowa school and Buffalo school, into confession and langpo, has become stifling. The two party version of poetry is about as satisfying and representative as the two party version of politics.
Poets of any language and place should beware the ‘taming and truncation of possibilities’ but arguably none more so than poets writing in English in the United States of America. Rothenberg’s efforts trump the limits of geopolitics without discarding cartographies of power, rooting poetry across/beyond location and historical time (if ‘trans-millennial’ does not exist, can we coin it?).
When the consequence of such a project reverberates as widely as it has, it is doubtful whether stated intention matters. But he has claimed that intention as an intensely personal one, connecting his enthusiasm about the poetry of North American Indians—‘a high poetry and art, which only a colonialist ideology could have blinded us into labeling “primitive” or “savage”’—with his own ancestral lineage ‘in the world of Jewish mystics, thieves and madmen.’
What has most surprised you about the primordial questions that have concerned poetry, or poetry’s primordiality itself?
The surprise came early & only grew stronger during those years when I myself was coming into poetry. What had preceded it was the idea of poetry as a late & culturally exclusive process, confined to the developed world & absent or defective in the rest. The turnabout, as it came to me & others, was that poetry in fact was everywhere & was probably coterminous with our earliest emergence as “knowing humans,” strongest often where we least expected it. For that Technicians of the Sacred in 1968 marked my final turning point & allowed me to declare, right from the start, that “primitive means complex” & maybe more so than so much of what we took for granted as our own.
If maps are drawn by those who happen to be in power what happens to those without it?
Maps mean the legislated or regulated reality that the powerful create & enforce against the powerless. The results for those ground down by them are devastating, excluding them, if left unchallenged, not only from any viable political geography but from any mental or spiritual terrain of their own devising. Against this one can think of many forms of resistance, for myself & others a part of what we mean when we speak, as we often do, of a poetics or an ethnopoetics as a remapping of what was foisted on us as the only true tradition. I don’t know what kind of power comes with that kind of mapping, only to say that mapping as a process is at the heart of what we do . . . or should be.
What are the forgotten or underrated virtues of domesticity?
A question like that has my head reeling, the more I think of it. While it hasn’t often come into the writing, for me at least there has been an incredible domesticity, a friendship & love at the center of my life, & its duration over time has gone beyond the boundaries of what I ever thought was possible. At the end of the pre-face to Technicians of the Sacred—some forty years ago by now—I recognized “the-woman” & “the-child” as central both to my own life & “to the ‘oldest’ cultures that we know.” Where it works (& more often than not it probably doesn’t) there is a precarious stability that comes with it & a kind of love more agape than eros—if we mean to set the two apart. I remember that I shared that concept too with Robert Duncan in his declaration of himself as “householder” & life-long companion in his love for Jess, like mine for Diane. And if my poetry is mostly pointing elsewhere, on its softer side I sometimes open up to that domesticity or think I do—as in this poem in A Book of Concealments (“for Diane’s birthday” 2002):
THE TIMES ARE NEVER RIGHT
Warm days are hanging
over San Diego,
where streets
slide into murky
canyons. What
is this but
home & what
is home
but a misnomer?
Pisces has shifted
into Aries.
Aggravated
bumps shadowing
the server’s
arms are no
concern to anyone
yet called to our
attention show
a strain, a fearsomeness
hard to conceal.
The times are never right.
A skin of air is over
everything. The sun
flows like a liquid,
all the universe we see
has never happened.
There is no truth to time
except for birthdays.
In a city under siege
a ceremony
gathers, scattering
the birds.
We live forever
in the instant,
in the house we share.
A groom & bride
are figures,
smaller than a thumb
& little reckoning
how short
the passage between
death & life.
What was your strangest archive experience?
Maybe not “strange” but the most personal one came in 1988, when I went to the small town in Poland, Ostrow Mazowieck, which my parents had left in 1920. I had gone there for the first time the year before, but this time we were accompanied by a young Polish interpreter, who led us to the Town Hall, where I was looking to find any record I could of the family that my parents had left behind them. Those who were alive at the time of the Second World War had all been killed, as far as we knew, at the death camp in Treblinka, thirty miles away, which we had visited the year before. The woman in charge of birth & death records was suspicious at first—wary I think of people searching there for reparations or lost possessions—but as we talked with her that seemed to fade away. The very large ledgers she brought out for us were written, earlier in Russian & later in Polish, & what we were able to track down in the short time we had was the official record of my grandfather’s death in 1920. I had been named for him, but his name as it appeared in Polish was different from what I knew—Juszek Dawid rather than Yosef or Yosl—& his occupation was listed curiously as student or scholar, with some reference I thought to his absorption in talmudic studies as a follower of the (hasidic) Radzyminer rebbe. I also found his father’s name, Szmul, & his mother’s, Marjem Fejga, which I hadn’t known before. For the rest the town remained a mystery to me. I located the street on which my grandparents had lived & where they had a bakery, but the house itself was gone, as was the Jewish cemetery where they might have been buried, now turned into an outdoor market place & parking lot. So the copy of the death certificate that the Town Hall people made for me was the only sure connection I had to that place & time, but more than I had counted on.
Since Lorca’s real burial place is still a mystery, what real or imaginary location might we imagine instead?
Maybe the mystery is better to keep than the bones or ashes of the burial place, & the imagination, whenever I call on it, keeps flashing back to the still living Lorca, which is what I really want to conjure up. As an actual gravesite I think of him among so many other unnamed victims that I can’t start to count or figure out which bones are his. The French word tombeau, if I remember right, is both a tomb & a kind of poem or musical composition, an elegy, to house the spirit not the body of the dead. (Mallarmé, say, has tombeaux for Poe & Baudelaire, as also for his own dead son.) For myself it’s the Lorca Variations that would be my tombeau for Lorca, his words fusing with mine, as long as I can keep him living. So:
CODA: THE FINAL LORCA VARIATION
The end for Lorca comes
only when we let it helpless
with insomnia
we hear him stir we see him
reach for Saturn
rising overhead.
No homage can repay what we have lost
our false beginnings naked crystals
bathed in the imagination
needles that sting us, rubber
that brings us down
a rooster who cries against his shadow.
Where it still smells of almonds
dogs are howling
at the moon eclipses in the water
olive trees for Spain
& castanets
our homages stuffed into yellow baskets
offered to Lorca’s Spain.
This first appeared at The New Inquiry.
Above: Europe Today, an anthropomorphic map by Verlag von Caesar Schmidt, 1887.
Image from Big Map Blog.
Previously: Five Questions with Elaine Equi
Flash
For Jaime A. Salazar
White morning, full of praise.
Before every thing wakes from sleep
I wake first, thinking some
Whatever thing.
Clumsily I pull back the blinds:
Blare of wondrous light!
Anticipatory sky!
It’s all there in cashmere,
Milky Way,
Eastman Kodak white,
Enveloping the brushes and stop signs.
This blanket covers them all. Even my
Interior lake is frosted in the blast of its
Whiteness. In the accumulation of life,
In things and places outside the window,
In our little igloo,
Chaos makes a metamorphosis into quietude.
No miraculous sounds: geese, car mufflers, couples walking:
None are heard.
And I stop breathing so that nothing
Sound while you’re asleep, so that
No thing dare break
The oceanic mystery of the antemeridian.
First published in Amerarcana: A Bird & Beckett Review, 2010, p. 68.
Mr. Kristof and his hugs
Still image from Adam Curtis’ ‘Learning to Hug,’ BBC Blogs.
Pontificating on solutions to poverty (best read in all-caps: SOLUTIONS TO POVERTY) is a familiar topic of the New York Times mélange of millionaire columnists. Perhaps none are as keen on seeing it alleviated through rigorous familial oversight than Nicholas Kristof. Kristof’s ideal unit is the nuclear, middle-to-upper class, two active-duty parental household. It is indirectly projected as a panacea, and families (specifically, poor mothers) that fall short of this utopian arrangement have to answer for it.
If the Fed is endowed with the ambiguous power of enacting national monetary policy, the low-income, low-resources family is tasked with issuing hugs. Lots of them, and over many years of effusive columns. For all his prescriptions downplaying, or more accurately, ignoring the structural and historic legacy of American poverty, the blithe repetition of those prescriptions can still surprise.
‘For Obama’s New Term, Start Here‘ – January 2013
Maybe that’s why some of the most cost-effective antipoverty programs are aimed at the earliest years. For example, the Nurse-Family Partnership has a home-visitation program that encourages new parents of at-risk children to amp up the hugging, talking and reading. It ends at age 2, yet randomized trials show that those children are less likely to be arrested as teenagers and the families require much less government assistance. [emphasis not in original]
If that reference seemed uncannily familiar it’s because it was employed exactly a year earlier.
‘A Poverty Solution That Starts With A Hug‘ – January 2012
One successful example of early intervention is home visitation by childcare experts, like those from the Nurse-Family Partnership. This organization sends nurses to visit poor, vulnerable women who are pregnant for the first time. The nurse warns against smoking and alcohol and drug abuse, and later encourages breast-feeding and good nutrition, while coaxing mothers to cuddle their children and read to them. This program continues until the child is 2. [emphasis not in original]
I don’t know much about that particular organization, though I know nurses and they rival saints in sainthood. What is at stake is where the mishap of poverty is affixed, over and over. The argument is not the efficacy of an organization—this particular one serves a constituency of reportedly 85 percent single mothers—in alleviating suffering: committed, skilled people (typically women) do under-recognized, grueling care work daily. As Elliott Prasse-Freeman has written, the issue is that the ‘political context into which this solution is placed actually—as with all Kristof “solutions”—militates against fixing the structural problems.’ Capitalism can piss off. I like the turn of phrase about a robust ‘anti-politics.’ In the case of the lives of the underclass, this is an anti-politics with hidden teeth, mixing the sentimental cue of feminine/maternal labor with a steely managerial approach to cost-cutting measures. (For more on Kristof’s ‘dubious schemes for advancing women’s rights—like arresting sex workers in order to “rescue” them from prostitution, or enthusiastically supporting the creation of “sweatshops” to accommodate sex workers and other women in the global south’ see Anne Elizabeth Moore and Melissa Gira Grant’s ‘Nick Kristof: Half the Sky, All the Credit.’)
Prasse-Freeman has noted Kristof’s explicit interventionism in this excerpt, and here I gloss its barely hidden gendered dimension: ‘Yet the cycle can be broken, and the implication is that the most cost-effective way to address poverty isn’t necessarily housing vouchers or welfare initiatives or prison-building. Rather, it may be early childhood education and parenting programs’ (emphasis not in original). His anti-politics is informed by a dismissal of pervasive structural obstacles, but the valence of the solutions he proposes are never neutral. The disciplinary wasteland of prison is a hardened, masculine world that may or may not reform the grown-up impoverished child caught up in a ‘cycle’ while the healing heart of childhood programs may move children ‘up the escalator of life’ (see the last line in ‘Chipping Away at Poverty—An Exchange‘).
If there is one motif of the ‘big heart/cost-effective solutions’ that has become the Kristof signature it is the hug. Aside from the instances referenced earlier here is a short catalog of hugging as political or economic intervention.
‘Profiting From A Child’s Illiteracy‘ – December 2012
I followed Courtney Trent, 22, one of these early childhood coordinators, as she visited a series of houses. She encourages the mothers (and the fathers, if they’re around) to read to the children, tell stories, talk to them, hug them. If the parents can’t read, then Ms. Trent encourages them to flip the pages on picture books and talk about what they see. [emphasis not in original]
‘Cuddle Your Kid!’ – October 2012
So, could the human version of licking and grooming — hugging and kissing babies, and reading to them — fortify our offspring and even our society as well? [emphasis not in original]
‘The New Haven Experiment‘ – February 2012
The New Haven model still doesn’t go as far as I would like, but it does represent enormous progress. And it’s a glimpse of a world in which ‘school reform’ is an agenda and not just a term that sets off a brawl.
If the American Federation of Teachers continues down this path, I’ll revisit my criticisms of teachers’ unions. Maybe even give them a hug for daring to become part of the solution. [emphasis not in original]
Hugging framed at least two stories about foreign attitudes toward the United States. The tender feelings of unnamed non-Americans in each case are directed to an imagined America or American, nearly always figurable as Kristof himself.
In the case of Iran, the unnamed former military operator doesn’t blame the U.S. for U.S. sanctions, and may even intend to hug the author in a demonstrative appreciation for his Americanness.
‘Hugs From Iran‘ – June 2012
‘We love America!’ gushed a former military commando, now a clothing seller, my first evening in the spiritual center of Mashhad. He was so carried away that I thought he might hug me, and although he acknowledged that his business was suffering greatly from Western sanctions, he said he blamed his own leaders. [emphasis not in original]
In Libya villagers show their profuse admiration for American bombing by embracing a fallen American airman.
‘Hugs From Libyans‘ – March 2011
This may be a first for the Arab world: An American airman who bailed out over Libya was rescued from his hiding place in a sheep pen by villagers who hugged him, served him juice and thanked him effusively for bombing their country. [emphasis not in original]
There is no word-specific cuddling in this column’s content, but it deserves a mention for the call to settle deep ideological differences with hugs.
‘Hug An Evangelical‘ – April 2004
I’ve argued often that gay marriage should be legal and that conservative Christians should show a tad more divine love for homosexuals.
But there’s a corollary. If liberals demand that the Christian right show more tolerance for gays and lesbians, then liberals need to be more respectful of conservative Christians.
While Kristof’s affective procedure seems unique it is part of a wider tradition of American sentiment that reaches at least as far back as Harriet Beecher Stowe. Stowe was the daughter of Lyman Beecher, an influential evangelical minister, and attributed her novel to the power of godly visions. Louis Masur writes, ‘Rich with sentimentality and emotion, as well as with romantic ideals about racial harmony, Uncle Tom’s Cabin reached out to Northern, middle-class, evangelical, female readers. It called for the immediate renunciation of sin, made salvation a reality, the Bible a guide, and spoke to mothers by making home and the unbreakable love of child the benchmark of a Christian life’ (emphasis not in original). Later, Masur appreciatively divulges that Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn were awarded the first Harriet Beecher Stowe Prize for Excellence in Writing to Advance Social Justice for their book Half the Sky.
Divergent from the representational, TV hug dissected by Adam Curtis in ‘Learning to Hug‘ Kristof’s hugs are affective substitutes for Stowe’s prayers. In the concluding remarks to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe addresses the reader directly on the question of ending slavery:
But what can an individual do? There is one thing that every individual can do – they can see to it that they feel right. Christian men and women of the North! still further, you have another power; you can pray! Do you believe in prayer? or has it become an indistinct apostolic tradition? You pray for the heathen abroad; pray also for the heathen at home. [emphasis not in original]
Glenn Hendler writes of these lines in his introduction to Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature,
To ‘feel right’ here is to have proper sentiments, an appropriate response to the scenes of suffering and redemption that the reader has witnessed in the course of the novel. Stowe thus tries, as she has throughout the book, to shape the reader’s affective response, to structure the forms of identification that the novel evokes.’
Nick Kristof, too, structures the forms of identification that his work evokes. And the figure with whom the reader is called to identify is Nick Kristof himself. His progress narrative, and one glimpsed in the New York Times widely, is to assume that capitalism either needs improving or does not exist, and to attribute economic inequity to sullied or off-course parenting.
Prayer now passé, Kristof wants you to hug the pain away. His hugging corpus considered together gives the farcical impression that he would administer them as psychotropic drugs if he could do so, but only on persons of a certain class or national origin, remembering Stowe’s call to extend sympathy to the heathen abroad and the heathen at home. (Alternatively he would open the Nicholas D. Kristof Center For Kids Who Can’t Hug Good And Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too.) What is most in need of parsing is his promotion of physical hugs on the one hand (the power of elevated oxytocin!) and the figural hug that cushions the technocratic, ultra-condescending domestic/foreign policy adages he recycles. That aspiration is comically muddled yet still chugging along.
This first appeared at The New Inquiry.
Previously: Mr. Kristof and His Others.
Gills, gills, gills
‘Their predatory skill fascinates and frightens humans, even though their
survival is threatened by human-related activities.’ [shark]
[From top to bottom: poster for Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975); gallery image for The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (Damien Hirst, 1991); hoaxed image of the flooded streets of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Irene (2011); hoaxed image purporting to show a flooded Scientific Center or mall in Kuwait (2012); verified image of a research exercise (Thomas Peschak, 2003); screen grab from Shanghai shark tank bursting open (2012).]
A 33-ton shark tank in a Shanghai mall exploded, injuring up to 16 people and leaving three sharks and dozens of turtles and fish dead. It was a ghastly event that makes for an ecologically apocalyptic moving image. Going beyond the real-life scenario of such a thing happening—and ‘such a thing’ has actually happened—I’ve been grappling with its symbolic power, that is, some way to answer for the fact that I watched it on loop a dozen or more times. (That’s more times than Open Water and Open Water 2: Adrift, but not much more.) The what of the image is clear: what is the how of what it’s doing?
It is a truthful moving image not only because it is real (in contrast to the Spielberg and Hirst works that are framed as fiction or art, or the variety of viral hoaxes) but because it delivers on the dystopia of a false ambient environment. You wanted a giant decorative aquarium? Here’s your giant decorative aquarium. The post-flood images from 2011 and 2012 were digital manipulations, true. But the scenario they created was very different. In those distortions, ‘nature’ invaded urbanized terrains. The city-world’s sudden amphibiousness bestowed a cold creepiness. They may have been startling images before they were debunked but their creators were concerned with a 1:1 causality (chaotic climate futures promise blowback—here’s the blowback).
It’s worth noting that Peschak, the marine biologist and nature photographer who took the 2003 photo duplicated in the viral hoaxes, said he was searching for a single photograph that could narrate his team’s efforts to track white sharks on kayaks. Yet even that photo belies the experiment, since it casts the shark as chasing the humans. Even the attempt to good-faith effort to study sharks masked the disruptions the researchers’ boat engines caused on their behavior. Peschak is more forthcoming about the limitations than most, and takes prudence in noting: ‘White sharks, despite their bad reputation are much more cautious and inquisitive in nature than aggressive and unpredictable. At no time did any shark show any agression towards our little yum yum yellow craft.’
Both humans and sharks are apex predators, but the Shanghai mall disaster footage upends that equalizing categorization in a way nothing else has. The average number of fatalities between 2001 and 2006 from unprovoked shark attacks was 4.3; that means in a period of around six years, there were less than five unprovoked attacks on humans. This one incident alone could never account for the human-related activity that is leading sharks toward extinction (yes, that is really happening). But the scene of three lemon sharks flailing around on the floor of a mall next to a dilapidated Clarins boutique visualizes the depths of human uncare in an unexpected and ugh, excuse me for using this word, but postmodern way. It’s a man-bites-dog story and it’s got me feeling blue.
Theoretical timeline (proceeding from the visualizations above):
(1) the simulated shark as a post-Jaws ideology of fear,
(2) the encased shark as a post-Hirst ideology of art,
(3) the virtual-meme sharks as a climate ideology, and finally,
(4) the cracked shark tank in the mall as a consummation of fear and ideology.
__________
nota bene. I’ve focused on major visualized occurrences, though several volumes could be filled with the dregs of Sea World. Nevertheless, some of the criticisms the Shanghai accident incurred were charged with sentiments that erased the global reach of the problem, e.g. ‘This what you get for buying stuff made in China cause it’s a little cheaper.’
Gotta have a code
This first appeared at The New Inquiry.
Donnie Andrews and Michael K. Williams in ‘React Quotes’ (The Wire, Season 5, Episode 5).
Episode epigraph: ‘Just ’cause they’re in the street doesn’t mean that they lack opinions.’
Screen grab by author.
Larry Donnell Andrews was in prison serving a murder sentence (for which he turned himself in) when The Wire, featuring the character Omar Little based on his life, first aired. Donnie died after an aortic dissection last week. Few who only knew about his life from its fictional depiction would have guessed that the ‘real’ Omar Little would live twice as long as the fictional one.
Magazine and newspaper profiles flatten the life of their subject, speeding up certain parts and slowing down others in order to fit a manicured narrative. Despite that tendency, Donnie Andrews’ life—in print and onscreen fictionalization—reads like a composite of several different lives, enlarged and textured by seeming extremes. Redemption and mercy play supporting roles.
Donnie’s childhood beginnings in North Carolina formed the background to the first dead body he saw at age four. It was a black man lynched and hanging from a tree. At age nine he and his brother witnessed a man murdered in a laundromat over fifteen cents. He has addressed the question of black vulnerability in the United States with full recognition of historic unjustness, exploitation, and inequity. Of his life in Baltimore he said, ‘You don’t count money, you count time. Everyone out there is a walking dead man. We can’t rely on the police when we need ‘em. They just come to take the bodies away.’ David Simon, whatever one’s opinion of his editorializing of his show, told The Baltimore Sun: ‘On paper, he’s a murderer. We’ve constructed a criminal justice system that doesn’t allow for the idea of redemption, and Donnie puts a lie to that.’
I met Donnie two years ago when he joined the cast of The Wire highlighting Charles Ogletree’s law school course on systemic inequality. He was the least impressed with the show, which he half-soberly, half-playfully called ‘watered down.’ On Omar leaping out from the fifth-story ledge of a building (Donnie jumped from the balcony of the Murphy Homes public housing project in West Baltimore), he told The Independent: ‘That really happened to me, but I had to jump out of the sixth floor. It was either lead poisoning or take my chances, so I took my chances. I did it without thinking. If I’d thought about it, I might have taken the lead poisoning.’
Around the time we met I had been researching fictional criminals in Brazilian cinema, particularly during the military regime when the visualizing of redemptive violence (in distinction to the racialized depictions that accompanied electoral democracy) was a powerful force in film. Rogério Sganzerla’s The Red-Light Bandit (1968) was based on the real-life João Acácio Pereira da Costa who robbed the homes of the rich with a red lantern. Though Sganzerla’s film took great liberties with fictionalizing that life, the bandit code of ‘civilians’ or ‘citizens’ being left unharmed applied as much to fiction as real-life. Pereira da Costa’s larger-than-life biography made for a riotous film (which didn’t show him serving 30 years in prison) but left open the possibility for atonement and redemption despite the choices made under nearly insurmountable odds.
If I can be allowed the indulgence of crossing the boundary of Donnie’s real life similarly, The Wire‘s most illustrative segments on honor codes came across in exchanges between Omar and police detective Bunk Moreland. In the first season of the show (‘One Arrest,’ 1.7), Omar acknowledges there is one.
Bunk Moreland: So, you’re my eyeball witness, huh? [Omar nods] So, why’d you step up on this?
Omar: Bird triflin’, basically. Kill an everyday workin’ man and all. I mean, I do some dirt, too, but I ain’t never put my gun on nobody that wasn’t in the game.
Bunk: A man must have a code.
Omar: Oh, no doubt.
Three seasons later (‘Unto Others,’ 4.7), Omar repeats Bunk’s summation of him: ‘A man gotta have a code.’ As in the image of Michael K. Williams (playing Donnie) sitting with Donnie himself in the still above above, Donnie was always in the presence of many mirrors of himself. (‘Why did I kill a man that looked just like me?’)
Omar Little, an outlying thief who robbed drug dealers, was endowed with a moral complexity seldom seen on television (and The Wire was not just television: it is to this day one of the few series set in a predominantly black city without drawing sensationalized attention to that fact). If Omar was ‘one of TV’s greatest characters’ it was because of Donnie. The show distinguished itself by laying out a palimpsest of failed American institutions but even within that decentralized narrative Omar was singular because the outcome of his life, before, during, and after incarceration was so unusual. He harnessed his dwindling resources to transform his own and others’ lives. This country’s prison-industrial complex is so brutal and efficient at marginalizing black men that his survival and gift of sharing that survival are truly extraordinary. Simon: ‘The prison system in America isn’t structured for rehabilitation. It’s structured for warehousing. I believe in the individual’s capacity to change their own future. Systemically, though, we sure make it hard. It’s a pretty lonesome journey.’
Donnie was married to Fran Boyd, a remarkable person in her own right (and a protagonist in Ed Burns’ The Corner). The New York Times profiled Donnie and Fran’s four-year courtship, mainly comprised of conversation and letters as Donnie was behind bars. They met in person several years later. (Simon called her his only hero: ‘Woody Guthrie and Fran, I guess—and I’m not so sure about Woody.’) Donnie and Fran raised at least four children together, his stepson and three of his Fran Boyd’s nieces and nephews. (It appears to have been quite the year for Boyd, who lost her son DeAndre McCullough (also featured in The Corner) a few months ago to a drug overdose.) In our brief conversation about his life and its televised depiction, Donnie brought Fran up several times. Before he parted he gave me his phone number for a follow-up interview (which I didn’t follow up on—it just seemed at the time that Donnie would live forever). When I asked for his email, he quickly replied, ‘It’s donnell loves fran at […] dot com.’ Real recognizes real, as he used to say.
Mr. Kristof and his others
The mission continues.
Five questions with Elaine Equi
Five Questions with __________ is an experiment with flash interviews. The series continues with poet Elaine Equi. At the risk of bordering on superlatives, which this project has taken care to avoid, her renderings of material life are among the most exquisitely witty and awake in contemporary American poetry. She herself has characterized her writing as ‘willfully direct in a minimalist sort of way,’ though she could have said, without a trace of immodesty, that it is a kick in the gut followed by an equally unexpected, wry smile. Her decades-long work submerges itself in a capacious range of topical matter. What genuinely makes one its frequent visitor, however, is the will to adopt a decentered style as a style of its own.
Many have discarded the unit of a stable or cohesive poetic ‘self,’ yet that stance has seldom been followed by a poetics of transformation. Michel Foucault’s self-described imperative in life and work was ‘to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.’ One can’t help but read that M.O. in Equi (this line is oft-quoted but I quote it again: ‘All writing is a form / of transvestism… / Nothing can stop this / endless, transformative / flow of selves / into other, opposite’). Her theses on rearrangement, change, and mutation are highly persuasive, especially as they are guided by a concern greater than the sum of one person’s metamorphosis. In ‘Role Reversal,’ she compares art in the age of Stendahl and Flaubert with art in the age of the hyperreal: ‘Once reality was dumb and brutish— / in need of art for elevation. / But it’s changed— / grown baroque and multifaceted. / Today we no longer take reality for granted. / Now art is the simpleton.’
Of course, with the ubiquity of advertising and market capitalism manifesting human interaction as primarily transactional, there is a particularly modern danger about transformation. Equi’s poetry—baroque and multifaceted—is a sign of heightened possibility, a shield facing that oncoming peril.
Why or for whom does the myth of a ‘muse’ endure?
I’m not sure the myth of the muse does endure. I’ve never been much for courting muses, but if I were in the market for one, I’d want to go old school and have a genuine deity. The problem is for that to work, you need the necessary faith. The Greeks had it. They had intense personal relationships with their gods, so that they didn’t just ask for favors, they actually seemed to channel them. When Sappho calls on Aphrodite, the goddess is quick to respond: “Sappho, who does you wrong?”
The idea of a flesh and blood muse that is the embodiment of some ideal is problematic for me. It sounds more like an obsessive love affair where so much depends upon sublimation. I know Dante had Beatrice and he did okay, Breton had Nadja, Martin Scorsese had Robert De Niro before he switched to Leonardo DiCaprio. I make no judgments, I just think I’d feel more ensnared than inspired under those conditions.
Recently, while walking around the East Village, I saw a young woman with long, blue-black hair, smoking a cigarette. She was wearing a low-cut tee shirt that showed off the word “Muse” tattooed across her collarbones like a necklace. Being a literalist, I took her at her word. It was rather exciting like spotting a rare butterfly, but also perhaps a sad comment on our times when even Muses have to advertise their services. For a moment, I toyed with the idea of introducing myself, but in the end didn’t. Exploring my own idiosyncratic interests, however trivial, seems preferable to creating great art in the name of someone else.
If offered a cosmic opportunity for redress after enslavement, sorrow, and resource deprivation, what would the animals say?
What would animals want? Not money—where would they spend it? And I don’t think they’d forbid hunting, since they themselves enjoy the pleasure of the chase. They might even let us keep our leather boots and fur coats for similar reasons, though some sort of arrangement would have to be made to limit those interests.
My biggest hope if animals had a voice in our affairs can be summed up in two words: gun control. With their constituency firmly behind it, maybe we could finally pass a bill outlawing firearms.
Does the fact that language is a genetic and biological fact for 100% of human beings make writing the hardest of the arts?
No, I think it makes it easier. Since most people have to write for school, their jobs, letters to friends—they’re more sympathetic to the problems writers face and better able to evaluate a literary work.
Music has always seemed infinitely more difficult to me, but that’s probably because no one in my family played an instrument or sang.
When is it more important to seek one’s inner adult than one’s inner child?
My inner adult is petty and childish and my inner child never really learned how to play. They sort of cancel each other out. Besides, I agree with Gertrude Stein that in our own minds we are only one age—neither too young or too old. Anything else, as she puts it, “must be a horrid feeling.”
What is to be done with the misspent drive, lost urgency, or inertia that accompanies revision?
If I’ve exhausted a number of approaches and still am not satisfied with a poem, I throw it away. In general, I like throwing things away. It makes me feel happy and unburdened. If the original idea had any merit, I feel it will make its way back to me in another incarnation—and often it does. Of course, this method wouldn’t be good if I wrote novels or even long essays, but for poems, it’s perfect.
That said, while I’m working on a poem, I’m very good at playing the waiting game. I can spend weeks or even months on a couple of lines. If I don’t know how a poem ends, I don’t continually rewrite it. I just keep rereading what I have, then put it aside and do something else. The method is kind of like the story about the shoemaker and the elves. You lay out the pieces and when you’re not paying attention, they somehow assemble themselves. You wouldn’t think it would work, but it does.
This first appeared at The New Inquiry.
Above: Me and the Spotted Elephant by Maryam Iranpanah (Artanian).
Previously: Five Questions with Michael Davidson
Killing the angel in the house
‘Moon Face,’ from a Victorian children’s magazine.
Three speeds of life: animal, vegetable, mineral.¹ It is the last two that shape time in childhood.
You stare at a photograph of yourself as a child and whistle that familiar whistle, When was anyone ever so young.
Time ever slow.
Slower than molasses, slower than raw honey: turbinated sugar-time.
Devoid of speed, life moved at the pace of number of books devoured, Japanese cartoon series and American teen comedies allowed, maneuvers in sibling spats, apartment bombings dodged, carton boxes and crates filled up for the next move.
Friends were everything.
Tell me when this stratospheric dash began. I am caught without shelter in its advancing armies of minutes, tripping over the seconds hand on the clock face (one revolution per minute.)
There’s a relay race and time is wearing my team’s uniform but it stretches the baton always a step-foot out of reach: Keep up, bitch.
See? We can’t even talk about it except through metaphor. It is laughing at us in our pathetic little language worlds as it trundles ahead on wagon wheel and V6 engine. It screams with laughter from the launchpad of its private helicopter while we watch down below, getting robbed at stoplights.
Time heals all things, Father Time. ‘O how I love clocks / their roundness / Mother Time— / a drop of bright blood / enclosed in quartz / (cameo-like).’²
Supposedly time progresses at the same speed at a White House Correspondents’ dinner as in a ransacked Baghdad museum.
Do you remember the first film you ever saw? And is that when sentience fully begins? It’s there within you like a secret (an open secret).
The first film I saw was in a movie theater in Tehran. It was about a giant black cat who terrorizes a small community of little children with his enormous paws, his piercing green gaze, and the intimidating presence of his gigantic figure. It was so terrifying that my younger brother had to be escorted out of the cinema by our grandmother. I remained, alone and lip trembling, but willing myself to train my eyes to look back at this creature who was awakening an escalating (but maybe healthy) fear inside the bony frame of a five-year old left alone in a darkened room with a beast.
The next film I saw was on a television screen. It was Sleeping Beauty. That film scared the shit out of me as a kid, and still does. People point out the relative disadvantage of being a passive and encased woman, pricked with a spindle, just laying there for a century. But the true privilege of the princess’ position—sleeping through a wretched and macabre 100 years—is less remarked on.
‘Not in death but just in sleep / the fateful prophecy you’ll keep’
Sleep is king (النوم سلطان) goes an Arab proverb.
Which 100 years would you choose to sleep through?
As for me, I approach sleep as a refugee, not so much for rest and pleasure as a submission to obscurity, pitch-blackness, the marionette’s curtains closing.
One particular night when I couldn’t sleep I found instructions online for how to care for a donkey. Donkeys are supremely underrated. They are life’s best companion. (From the handbook: ‘Donkeys will mother almost any animal.’) How to care for a noble ungulate: Water, shelter, treats, winter shedding, teeth check-ups. Everything except hoof care is the same as human upkeep.
Don’t let anyone mishandle a donkey.
Donkeys are gentle creatures;
Never pull their ears or try to hurt them in any way.
If you have a rescue donkey, you will need to put a lot of time and effort to restore its trust;
Often such donkeys have been mistreated and are nervous, shy and afraid.
As this is not their normal nature, it is really pitiful to see and should you take up this challenge,
Seek assistance from a local donkey organization.
When the world ends, when everything burns, let there be one thing standing: your local donkey organization.
Finale:
Remember S.? We’ve pooled together a childcare schedule to stay with her kid while she performs in a play. The play has won a Pulitzer and had a run on Broadway, but she still can’t quite believe she was chosen for it, says it’s only because they needed someone who spoke Arabic. She is going through a separation after two decades of marriage. Divorcing woman, mother, artist—triple threat. A prominent director in the West Bank sought her out for a new movie to be shot there in January. It has taken everything to convince her to audition. She doesn’t really believe how good she is. She blames it on lack of dramatic training, etc. etc. etc.
After these conversations, and in the clench of a feeling of ever-shortening time, I remember that line by Virginia Woolf about the need for every woman to kill the angel in the house.³
You will never cultivate a state of grace until you off her.
You will never take your art seriously (even if you don’t take yourself seriously) until this angel is dead.
____
To Evan Calder Williams. This first appeared at The New Inquiry.
¹Line adapted from Elaine Equi’s ‘A Bowl of Snow.’
²Line borrowed from Elaine Equi, ‘The Origami of Time.’
³’Whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard.’
Landscape of the bleeding crowd
A letter by Federico García Lorca to his friend Regino Sainz de la Maza, guitarist and compatriot in Spain’s ‘Generación del ’27.’ The United States, where Lorca enrolled at Columbia University in 1929-1930, was his first trip abroad before he traveled south to Cuba. Lorca was on Wall Street on the day of the stock market crash. Any resemblance to real people is purely intentional. This first appeared at The New Inquiry.
Untitled by Samira Abbassy, from the Urban Jealousy
series at the International Roaming Biennial of Tehran.
October 30, 1929
Esteemed friend:
When this letter reaches you I would not blame you if you found it part-bourgeois, part-Nietszche. It is Wednesday and I am sitting in a warm apartment in Harlem. Yesterday was Black Tuesday: an open gallery to the multitude of death. Other people’s deaths, actual and real, happen in plural numbers, whereas one’s own, abstract and invisible, is perceived to be utterly unique. Singularly special! This is our sickness.
The signs I saw around the necks of many young men yesterday said: ‘WANTED, A Decent Job,’ followed by a self-description (‘Family Man,’ ‘Three Young Children’) and age. It is hard for a man to be a man like it is hard for a dog to be a dog.
Sometimes I want to remain asleep but I am expulsed into the street like a braying sheep, a no-nothing wrapped in sopoforic wool, eager to know what all the fuss is about. I remain that way until I see the butcher shining his knife in a fresh white apron. Then I know.
Yesterday was the first time since arriving some months ago that I felt frightened, and the grid-jungle appeared as a death trap. The port, rather than looking outward to Atlantis, became the mote around a strange and awful castle where the candlelights were suddenly blown out. Darkness set in amidst the confusion of automobiles and skyscrapers.
Remember when you wrote that South America is the Andalucía de América? And what of North America? Where is its what?
No one looked at another with enmity yesterday. Only fear—the anguished fear that violently pierces the hearts of men and women and even children when faced with their closing fate. I am pushing this pen against the page in order to delay telling you the inevitable, that I witnessed not one, not two, but six suicides yesterday, and I dread you asking what expression I saw on their faces as they each fell to earth. In truth their faces wore nothing, not even the specter of fear. I watched as one watches a skeleton. My despair rose to my temples and my hands shook. Contemplation stopped! It was a VEIN-OPENING and I scarcely knew who held the dagger.
There was a woman among them and she threw her hat down before stepping onto the ledge. We watched that gray furry hat float down with the excruciatingly slow speed of an indifferent feather. Below her Babylon shook. There were shouts in more languages than all of Paris or London contain.
Since alcohol is still prohibited, what poison will they (will we?) drink to counteract the venom of this world? There is no sherry or Fundador brandy strong enough as the strychnine this demands.
I wrote ‘Ruina’ and dedicated it to you today, it will soon be published. Do you want to know how it came to me? Predictably the germ was planted in a dream. ‘You alone and I remain. I alone and you remain. One must look quickly, love, quickly, for our profile without sleep.’
Prepare your skeleton, friend!
I want to mock all the things and scream at all the things. That dinner party at Mildred Adams’—that Spanish-speaking journalist in Granada, you remember?—is far away. My ears are bereft of the music of Albéniz and Falla and your own. The sensual warmth of the polymaths gathered around a dining table seems a century-and-a-half away even though it was only months ago when the Spanish colonies of New York and red-wearing hispanophiles befriended me. I will soon visit Philip Cummings, the writer and Spanish teacher in Vermont. I am ashamed of the departure from New York, ashamed like a half-tourist reluctantly escaping the scene of a famine. This is not a metaphor.
It is only five o’clock in the evening but already it is pitch black outside, as black as the cement on this shaken earth. This is the world, friend, a bushel of coal. Meanwhile, meanwhile, meanwhile. Yesterday’s dead decompose below the clocks of this city.
Since you are full of inquietude and melancholy you will understand the melancholic’s desire to fly.
An enormous and tight embrace,
Federico
Clamor and roar
Gaza is not the most beautiful city.
Its shore is not bluer than the shores of Arab cities.
Its oranges are not the most beautiful in the Mediterranean basin.
Because it is more ugly, impoverished, miserable, and vicious in the eyes of enemies.
Because it is the most capable, among us, of disturbing the enemy’s mood and his comfort,
Because it is his nightmare,
Because it is mined oranges, children without a childhood, old men without old age,
And women without desires,
Because of all this it is the most beautiful, the purest and richest among us
And the one most worthy of love…
Technicolor Tehran
Beyond purely instinctual attraction, at least two things draw me to street art. The first is that despite international crossings of artists, motifs, and even movements since at least the early 1980s, graphic representations still retain cultural specificity. The all-purpose term visual culture can flatten the differences between what pixacão on buildings in São Paulo signifies versus the constant overlay of work on a single, ever-changing wall in Central Square. Street art inherently demands a comparative perspective.
The second is the unfixed, non-predetermined, and non-universalist meanings attached to that activity. Your predispositions are unmoored in a serious way. To give an example of what I mean: when street art in Tehran was taken up as a topic here before, it was in a personal/familial (even anguished) way: graffiti deployed in opposition (and later, punishment) rather than beautification. My uncle’s prison sentence after spraying anti-IRI graffiti as a teenager was an entryway to thinking about the openly ideological nature of drawing on walls, which is different than the Euro-American notion of that activity as mere vandalism or destruction. (For a recent take on street art and American ideologies, see ‘Little Boy Giant, Terrorist.’)
Maybe there is a third draw. I was born and raised (for more than a quarter of my life) in Tehran. I have yet to write at length about the experience of growing up under the shower of bombings and air raids during the Iran-Iraq War and the collective underground shelters that housed some of my earliest memories. Perhaps someday I will, but the significance is greater than the sum of one person’s memory. Tehran is a city (in no particular order) of gray concrete slabs, extreme pollution, class inequity, gender segregation, gridlocked traffic, perpetual car horns, and other unsparing ills. Despite the power that urbanization holds over every district and neighborhood it can be a surprisingly tender and merciful city. It weathers crisis well. Its visual registers are proof of this. (For an important, condensed discussion of the history of urban art in Iran see Shahrzad Ghadjar and Rustin Zarkar’s ‘Taking Back the Streets: Iranian Graffiti Artists Negotiating Public Space.’)
Recently, a friend sent a series of images of public art that reminded me of its terrifically complicated status. Some of the work was commissioned by the government but much of it consists of unaffiliated and autonomous expression. The decisions each muralist took in his or her piece bear thinking about in those contexts.
There is a more urgent need brought to bear on the task of looking at these images (especially outside of Iran), however. It is what every news feed item and broadcast want you to forget about the life and activity teeming there. Euro-America largely knows Iran through the prism of repression, embargoes, war, isolation. No surprise in that. The reelected American President, wasting no time, made his first foreign policy act the enacting of even more sanctions against quite possibly the most sanctioned country in history. (How uncanny that the embargoes cite concerns about internet suppression and other forms of public expression when U.S. sanctions are responsible for a serious shortage in baby formula—Iranian children must bear the brunt of hegemonic interests under the cover of selective ‘human rights’ criteria about free speech.)
The material these artists use—paint, tiles, metal scraps, spray paint, and acrylics—can never take the place of embargoed baby formula. They are not yet on the U.S.’ banned items list (after all, Iran is not yet Gaza). But they are being put to use with impressive variability and imagination.
With thanks to Alireza Doostdar, whose images are used with permission. This first appeared at The New Inquiry.
Near Vanak Circle, this writing on the wall reads, ‘Culture-less one: don’t throw trash.’ It appears to be a modern variation on a traditional caution, ‘Damn the father and mother of whoever throws trash in this place’ «لعنت بر پدر و مادر کسی که در این مکان آشغال بریزد».
The Mona Lisa’s raised middle finger is inscrutable. Is it raised at potential litterers? The anti-litterers who painted her? The world at large? Or perhaps the U.S. Treasury Department?
Paint is not the only material used. Artists use colorful tiles in intricate geometric patters along walls, often incorporating the design within naturally occurring rock structures.
From mid-sized neighborhood parks to large-scale walkthroughs, parks are prevalent in Tehran. People of every stripe take advantage of them, sometimes on a daily basis. The parenting motif in this mural notably depicts two men caring for young children (even though they appear to be walking toward, well, nowhere).
In the background to this miniature-style mural, the Prophet Mohammad rides Buraq to the heavens. In the foreground, an advertisement for pickled olives.
The muralists removed the Prophet’s facial features, which were included in the original Mi’rajnama or Book of Ascension (1436-7 C.E.) that the artists copied.
A man painted in the same miniature style extends a bouquet of blossoms to a contemporary man painted in a realist style.
Planted and painted shrubbery share the same palette in a three-dimensional trompe-l’œil.
Even the refuse space of a highway underpass—usually considered a ‘non-place’—is beautified.
This woman’s appearance, colorful and touched by traditional peasant patterns, contrasts with the drab that surrounds her. Also notable is the decision to extend a private indoor space to the outside world.
The vastness of the self unpeopled in exile
A letter by Henry James to his mother, five months before ending his European travels and moving back to the United States. Any resemblance to real people is purely intentional. This first appeared at The New Inquiry.
Man Proposes, God Disposes, Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, 1864.
From University of London’s Royal Holloway collection.
Siena, Villa Scacciapensieri
November 23rd, 1869
My darling Mother,
You last heard from me from Firenze and tho’ I had not mentioned it at the time I was keen on submitting myself to another train, another town, ripe with Italian memories for the picking. Here I am. The scent of yellow roses wafting around to my small table, carefully ensconced behind a walled garden of ivy, is auspicious.
The villa’s owners have hired a gardener to sculpt a large-sized topiary. They asked me—I should only guess they asked me because scarcely any other guests leave their rooms for breakfast—what animal shape it might take. It was a very good thing to be asked, not because I have a stake in this green animal one way or the other, but because hardly anyone speaks to me in Italy (as you know imposed silence during travel does not bother me, but it has been nearly a year). To my surprise I liked being asked to talk in the midst of my not talking. So I heard myself say ‘how about a dog’ in Italian, and I heard their excellent locution of thanks back to me. Perhaps they had the impression that I took inspiration from the coffee-colored Alsatian that buries its head in its paws beneath the garden canopy at the inception of the midday sun. Quite the contrary—I found that creature to be melancholic in the way one never expects of well-bred dogs.
Might you remember Ruskin’s essay on ‘vital beauty’? I mustn’t be counted on to recite what I remember of it by heart. Yet what he describes as Landseer’s clear execution of the features of the dog, the way the crimson and jade dance off each other’s tonality to give a crisp texture to the overall expression—what does he say about expression ‘in the highest degree’? That vitality is what I remembered when I suggested the topiary be shaped like a dog, but I fear this gardener is doomed. The little I remember of Boston landscaping and its capacious strokes of genius does not dilute the fact that nothing can touch the diabolical enchantment of painting. Landseer’s was sealed with thoughts, with thinking. This guesthouse topiary will be beautiful but struck mortally dumb and lucklessly fixed. Pity.
That tea with Mrs. Huntington and her daughters I last described left me full to the brim with the anxiety of returning to Boston society. To be sure, I had locked that feeling away with the letter I sent and disallowed myself from remembering Cambridge altogether until I was on the railway edging toward Siena’s cavernous walls. Anyone staring at my face framed in the little window at that moment would have glimpsed a man filled (quite literally!) with shadows of an absent presence. Amidst old Europe one is awash in the idea of America as a new fatherland. I would never willingly shirk my loyalty to the latter, except on account of the nation’s insistence on dull manners and language. Perhaps not even then. But should I find America agreeing with my senses again I will know it is owed to a squelched desire to visit Italy again.
I do at least look forward to the belated winter of Cambridge’s late spring—that winter that elongates over exactly two seasons. That the cold takes ‘going out’ out of one’s hands and storming oneself in is as much a social custom there as the little huddled walks along a pebbled strada here gives me great relief. The low, quiet moan of a New England winter is reassuring.
I should never want to give the impression that I have embraced the wry American value of assigning Europe aesthetic supremacy. Far be it from me to signal a nostalgia that may or may not exist. I am never more unsettled about my own allegiance (or inclination) as I am during happy travel. The question of where and how to live, tho’…
While I enjoy America (a sense of bewilderment always accompanies this enjoyment) it behoves me to sharpen my skills of observation like an Englishman. A more shallow national orientation than the former it would be difficult to believe. How odd that intellect, movement and esprit de corps mark the same nation that boasts a thin veneer of what it calls culture. From this perch in Italy it appears even more lacking. The American’s fears of financial indisposition, compromised hygiene and loneliness make even less sense.
I feel as though I allow myself a great deal of deception about Cambridge and Boston when I am there but I have begun to accept this disposition toward overlooking one’s joy as part of my American inheritance. Funny I should speak to almost no one in all of Italy and still feel vibrant but be surrounded by savants there and hurled toward social vulgarity.
24th, Wednesday. As is my custom I kept the envelope open so that I might enfold a rounded response but the silence coming from your direction has me caught in a trapdoor. I know you crave more news and I regret the scarcity.
Mammy, my dearest, bestow my embraces on Willy and my father but firstly and heavily upon yourself.
Faithfully yours, as ever
THY HENRY jr.
SOUTH / SOUTH 
