Diane Lefer's Blog, page 10

Playing Telephone in Senegal

Our ten-day residency in the fishing village of Toubab Dialaw was a collaborative project by Hector Aristizábal’s nonprofit ImaginAction and the Senegalese theater company Kaddu Yaraax, under the direction of Mohamadou Diol. Eight “internationals” from the US and Europe lived with Senegalese colleagues from different regions of the country, all of us engaged with using theater–especially Theater of the Oppressed (“TO”)–to promote positive social change and community health. None of this would have been possible without the help of Angelo Miramonti, an experienced TO practitioner who lives in Dakar while managing UNICEF projects in West Africa. Here’s Angelo talking to Marie, a wonderful visual artist who lives in Dakar. After she joined the group, we took full advantage of her as a Wolof-French interpreter. (And there will be better photos of her–she’s beautiful–in the next installment.)

I say we were playing telephone because in addition to potential misunderstandings due to cultural context, our communications went through three languages, translations from Wolof to French to English and back and what I think I understood…well…you remember the game of telephone. Senegalese documentarian Moustapha Seck (who is also the author of a forthcoming book on Malcolm X–known in Senegal as el Hajj Malick) and I are going to try to parse some of this out in a collaborative bilingual essay. For now, I will give just a more touristy account of the trip as so many people have asked about it.

Much of the group assembled in Dakar on May 16 for the minibus trip to Toubab Dialaw, about 50 km south of the capital. Here are Hector and Carmen.

Tiel looks out the window as we travel.

I saw many more horse-drawn carts than private automobiles.

Here’s Dior whose name is pronounced more like the Portuguese name João than like Christian Dior.

Mornings, we came to life hearing her song.

Arriving.

We shared a house–basically a hostel devoted to our group alone. Basic rooms with a mattress. Four bathrooms which were wonderful when there was water. Looking down into the patio from the second floor, you can see the sandy area to the right. Getting acquainted.

You often find this, like a big sandbox that serves as a gathering place. It’s where we played theater games, exercises, did improvisations, created a play and rehearsed it.

And where we had circles for checking in and discussion. In the Senegalese tradition, such circles are called pinch (in Wolof, spelling unknown by me). We did quite a bit of pinching.

People draw diagrams in the sand or just, as you see with this boy, make designs with shells and stones.

Mornings we had bread and coffee prepared and served by Adama and Dame. Here is Fax. Pronounced Fox. I forgot he didn’t speak English and so didn’t understand why I kept calling him Monsieur le Renard.

Exercise on the beach led by Marianne.

Day by day, more and more people got curious about us. Children peeked over the wall.

People came in the door.

Here comes lunch.

Oilcloths get spread on the floor, we sit around sharing large platters of thiébou dienne, usually a short grain Thai rice that’s almost more like risotto or couscous topped with stewed vegetables, mostly squash and cabbage, topped with a fish and sautéed onions, flavored with some sort of spice. Eat with a spoon or with hand.

The very pregnant cat who lived in the house loved us most at mealtimes. We left before the kittens came.

A pipe broke and the village was without running water for three days. The second day we headed out with containers to the public well. We were turned away.

Here’s Anta.

Her relatives invited us into their home

and let us draw as much as we wanted from their own well.

Marianne joins the procession of women carrying water.

She lives in the South of France and did a valiant job as French-English interpreter. Marianne was concerned about how she would be seen as a Frenchwoman. There’s resentment toward the colonial power and, in addition, in Toubab Dialaw for example, many French nationals are seasonal residents, escaping the winter, and spending months but never socializing with the Senegalese. Marianne shattered that stereotype.

Some members of our group who did speak French preferred not to. Babacar called Wolof the happy language, as opposed to French which was imposed.

Moi? It was a trip to recover some of my high school French. I thought it was perfect. I could usually make myself understood but I spoke it so poorly no one could conceivably mistake me for a French person.

We returned able to flush the toilets. And even the cat was happy.

Evening on the beach. The sun goes down and children play soccer, men exercise, come out for a walk by the water.

Next installment I’ll write more about people, developing our play and performing it in the village.

Solitary Confinement Is Torture

I met Ernest Shepard III at a demonstration calling for an end to solitary confinement in California prisons. He was carrying a sign from NRCAT, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.

We started talking and I learned he’d spent more than 45 years inside California prisons, including three years on Death Row (where, incidentally, he was interviewed by Truman Capote who gave him a carton of cigarettes and a case of Coca-Cola).

We met a few more times so I could hear his story because as many of you know, I’ve been posting stories of torture survivors from around the world at the Second Chances LA website. But torture doesn’t happen only “over there”. And when Americans torture, it’s not just at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo. I couldn’t continue with the website without including a look inside US prisons.

Ernest Shepard III now works for the Fair Chance Project, a movement led by liberated lifers (formerly incarcerated men and women), prisoners and loved ones organized around the demand for just sentencing laws and fair parole practices. Additionally, the group integrates formerly incarcerated men and women back into society enabling them to “give back and to help build strong, self-sustaining communities.”

You can find his narrative at the Second Chances LA website or go directly to his page here.

LitReactor review of Confessions of a Carnivore

Bookshots: ���Confessions of a Carnivore��� by Diane Lefer

REVIEW BY DEAN FETZER APRIL 27, 2015

IN: BABOONS BOOKSHOTS DIANE LEFER REVIEW

Bookshots: ���Confessions of a Carnivore��� by Diane Lefer

Bookshots: Pumping new life into the corpse of the book review

Title: Confessions of a Carnivore

Who wrote it?

Diane Lefer, a playwright, activist and author of ���Nobody Wakes Up Pretty��� and ���California Transit��� (awarded the Mary McCarthy Prize, Sarabande Books, 2007).

Plot in a Box:

In the lead up to the second Iraq war, retired high school teacher Rae, now a volunteer at the LA Zoo, spends hours observing baboons, chimpanzees, gibbons and various other primates, but spends her free time driving around with her best friend Jennie, drinking margaritas from a flask. Feeling she���s closest to her cat, Molly, Rae drifts, not feeling anything. After a near miss on the freeway, she and Jennie join a theatrical activist group protesting the treatment of animals. In the paranoia of the period after 9/11, a pregnant Jennie disappears, presumably taken by the authorities for possible terrorist activity. Meanwhile the only person who can possibly clear Jennie has become involved in a religious cult fixated on clean colons.

The only person who can clear her friend has become involved in a religious cult fixated on clean colons.

Invent a new title for this book: I would call it: The Mating Rituals of Drill Baboons Humans [Fetzer has a strikethrough over Drill Baboons. I couldn’t make that come out in this post]

Read this if you liked:

I had trouble deciding on one book. It���s sort of The World According to Garp crossed with Vonnegut���s Hocus Pocus.

Meet the book���s lead: Rae is a 50 year old retired teacher with suppressed feelings toward anything but her cat. Like many at a mid-life point, she seems to be drifting, falling into situations and wondering how she got there ��� and always looking for some focus, be it a lover, purpose, or job. Her ex-husband���s an alcoholic and in jail, her best friend has disappeared and she���s not sure how to find her again.

Said lead would be portrayed in a movie by: Kristen Wiig

Setting: would you want to live there? LA in the heat and smog ��� not my idea of a good time.

What was your favorite sentence? I was arrested once, in 1968. I waited for Des the first time he went to jail. But now? Getting busted was, to use Devon���s turn of phrase, so over.

The Verdict: To start with, I wasn���t sure how this was going to pan out: the narrative feels like a series of snapshots and reminiscences told in no particular order and was confusing at first. That said, I soon had a handle on the characters and there is a thread tying the various vignettes together, mainly through the person of Rae, a retired teacher now observing the sexual behavior of primates at the zoo.

It soon becomes apparent after she joins Gorilla Theater with her best friend Jennie that the observations of primate sex parallels the relationships of the humans she comes into contact with. Through the theater group, she and Jennie meet new people and Rae meets the father of Devon from the group; David works at a lab with primates, but not observing, doing experiments on them to better understand how they relate to us. Between protest performances, marches, visits to a cult called the ���Neo-proctologists��� and a local Native American reservation, the book covers a lot of ground, both physically and metaphorically, and spends a lot of time talking about George W. Bush and the actions of the US ��� and within the US ��� in the wake of the attacks on the Twin Towers.

This book walks a fine line between preaching/informing the reader about how scary things are in the US for average citizens and telling a story; but it must have worked for me, as I wanted to know what happens at the end. The adventures of Rae and the descriptions of how the various primates behave made for a compelling read and I will be looking for her back catalog.

Animal Rites, an essay review from Talented Reader

Wow! George Ovitt of my favorite litblog, Talented Reader, reviews Confessions of a Carnivore along with The Bleeding of the Stone by Ibrahim al-Koni. Really an essay review in which he has a lot to stay about animal consciousness and our relations with animals–while citing Kant, Hume, Montesquieu and more. The New York Review of Books should hire him. Now.

The blog usually covers literature in translation that I wouldn’t know about at all if not for Ovitt and fellow blogger Peter Adam Nash. So click and read about my book, and then subscribe if you care about literature.

If you’re as tired of looking at my cover as I am, here, instead, is a photo of Ibrahim al-Koni.

First review of Confessions of a Carnivore

When you admire someone’s fiction and his politics, it can be nerve-wracking to know he’s going to review your novel. So I can only breathe a sigh of grateful relief and say thank you to JJ Amaworo Wilson.

Confessions of a Carnivore ��� by Diane Lefer

Posted on April 16, 2015 by JJ Wilson

Wow. Diane Lefer���s new novel is one wild ride. With all the animals involved, I mean that literally. She somehow mixes activism, alcoholism, protest theater, cat-love, animal observation in L.A. Zoo, and race politics in one story and comes out the other end smelling of roses.

This novel is about all of those things and about none of them. It���s all about the voice. The narrator talks directly to us and it soon becomes clear she���s not all there. She���s half-dead with grief, reeling from the fallout of a failed marriage to an alcoholic and now unable to love anything or anyone beyond her cat. She gets mixed up in a protest theater group (based on Augusto Boal���s Theater of the Oppressed) and then involved in a series of increasingly bizarre incidents.

The novel is by turns hilarious and tragic. A lobotomized woman lives, barely, among hundreds of cats; the theater group lurches from daft stunt to even dafter stunt; and the ���baddie���, it turns out, is just a naive fool on the wrong side of the political tracks.

To try to summarize the plot would be a fool���s errand, but I found this book terrifically entertaining in an absurd, where���s-she-going-to-take-us-next? kind of way. And just when we���re waiting for the next laugh, the novel surprises us by becoming something altogether more moving.

As a follow-up to the shimmering, award-winning California Transit, Confessions of a Carnivore doesn���t disappoint. It���s full of wild ideas and crazy conceits, and still manages to warm the heart.

* * *

More info and to order.

Survivors of Torture, Rebuilding Lives in Los Angeles

It’s been an overwhelming experience to be working again with Hector Aristiz��bal, collecting oral histories from survivors and from their families.

We’ve been very interested not only in the experiences of the asylum-seekers themselves but also in what happens to the second generation, the people who are also affected by exile and trauma but who are too often overlooked.

We’ve met some extraordinary people but fears for safety–their own and their families’–has meant that many of these stories can’t be told.

A small brave group will open up onstage on March 23 and 24, and I am just beginning to post the narratives that have been approved.

You can find information about the free performances and read survivor stories as they go up at our website. More to come over the next year so please keep checking in.

We are grateful to all the participants, to the Program for Torture Victims for their help. For the support that makes this project possible, our gratitude to the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and to CalHumanities, a partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

KNOW JUSTICE, KNOW PEACE

The Millions March LA this afternoon was everything I’ve been hoping to see for a long time and I almost didn’t go. Certainly I wanted to stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, with the call for justice and an end to violence, but I hesitate when I don’t know who’s involved. On the invitation I didn’t see any of the usual names or any of the usual progressive organizations. That turned out to be perhaps the best part of the day.

After decades of protests starting in the Sixties, I have to say I’ve become sick and tired of showing up. (Except for the extraordinary outpouring in 2006 when half a million people marched peacefully for immigrant rights in downtown Los Angeles.) Usually? It’s the same (old) faces, the interminable speeches, the long adulatory introductions as though no one would actually bother to work for social justice without incessant ego-strokes, the tired and predictable rhetoric, the rival organizations with their varied but usual agendas.

Considering how I feel, I wonder what made me attend the pre-march conversation. I am still exhilarated. What I found at noon in the amphitheater at Pan Pacific Park was an entirely youth-led movement. “A social movement led by the young, guided by elders,” said one speaker. Of the 500 or so people assembled, the vast majority were under the age of 35. A significant number had never before been part of a protest.

There were to be no outside organizations leafletting or selling materials. The message was not to be muddied or diluted. Instead of rhetoric, political speech came in the form of spoken word and poetry, including a poem by a nine-year-old girl, with the repeated line We want equality. She got a standing ovation.

We practiced chants and were reminded all chants should be peaceful. If we were to hear anyone being aggressive, we should gently encourage them to chant one of our chants instead.

The organizers had the proper permits and had communicated the peaceful nature of the protest march to the LAPD. A small number of police officers on bicycle rode alongside the march. There was no sign of riot gear, not a hint of aggressive attitude.

I can’t say more without saluting those police officers who do their best to serve with fairness, honor, and compassion within a flawed criminal justice system they did not create. My belief is that change would benefit them as well as the community they serve. I’ve known some great cops and this is entirely sincere that I grieve with the NYPD and all who are horrified by the premeditated and coldblooded killing of Officers Ramos and Wenjian Liu by a deranged individual. I can only hope that the experience of grief, shared in common, will bring people together rather than cause more polarization. I believe we can’t find a way forward–an end to violence–alone.

At the park, we heard the day had three goals:

1. Raise awareness and issue a call to action so that here in LA we can join in solidarity with the Movement across the nation. The march was only Phase One. Organizing for effective action comes next.

2. Bring unity among people who’ve already been involved with people just getting involved in seeking change.

3. Promote healing, peace, and love in order to process pain and anger and turn it into effective action.

By the time the march began, the crowd had doubled in size and more people kept joining along the route.

How did the organizers do it? Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. There was some outreach. A woman I walked with for a while was visiting LA from North Carolina and heard about the march that morning when she went to church. The word primarily reached the youthful Black community, but throughout the crowd were signs of solidarity.

So often, marches in LA on weekends take place in neighborhoods where everything is shut down and there’s no one to see the action. For a change, we had a route that passed through a park, past outdoor cafes and museums. How did the organizers get to be so smart? They did say their names, but I never quite got any of them. I am in awe of this Movement which is about justice, not personalities.

There was a moment when we stopped short. High above the street, a billboard for Selma.

Hands up! Don’t shoot! we chanted.

I did feel some regret that the written page with chants showed NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE transitioning to KNOW JUSTICE, KNOW PEACE. Of course said aloud, the message I wholeheartedly endorse is lost.

I used to imagine people marching in silence. Something very different from the usual bullhorns and shouting. Yes, we want to raise our voices and be heard. But I always thought if you could get a mob of people to stay silent, that would be an extraordinary show of discipline and power. That would send a message of serious, unwavering intent. I never thought I’d see it.

During the march, we stopped and observed 4-1/2 minutes of silence to mark the 4-1/2 hours that Michael Brown’s body was left in the street. At the end of the almost 3-hour march, we stood together, no chants, no shouts, no drums, no bullhorns, no words. We stood together sharing a powerful silence.

The Black youth of America have started something and with or without allies they will see it through.

A Family at Christmas!

I am so happy! The website I created after the workshop I facilitated for men in transitional housing included their work, their names, their photos. Today I heard from the daughter of one of the men who’d made the deepest impression on me. She had been searching for her father for decades. They are now in touch, stunned, thrilled. I’d say that’s some of the best work I’ve ever done.

Children with Incarcerated Parents: Just Collateral Damage?

On Tuesday I attended a remarkable summit meeting in Long Beach: Children with Incarcerated Parents: Trauma, Toxic Stress & Protection. This article just published in LA Progressive offers only a taste of the powerful presentations and discussions.

Feasting or Fasting?

I don’t like this holiday but later today I will of course go up the hill for dinner with family.

What are we celebrating? Indians fed us. Then we killed them.

Instead of stuffing ourselves we should be fasting.

The last Thursday of November should be a national day of atonement.