Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 331

“Oh, don’t try me”: On style and salt and Serena Williams’s utterly astonishing breadth of utterance

This past summer I thought, again and again, about the rare range of things Serena Williams communicates on the tennis court. Never before has an athlete, or just about any other kind of performer, really, operating at that level—and, in a separate question: has anyone operated at this level?—included the audience in anything like the range and depth of process and pathos, the vulnerable dissonance that scurries about in the depths of what it takes to attain such an extreme level of craft. Like memory, craft at this level is never attained, can’t be kept, and so must be recreated again and anew in the moment.

If craft—as opposed to mechanical technique—bears some similarity to style—as opposed to the vanity of surfaces, of disguises—then, possibly, it, too, exists in an inverse relationship to “make believe.” We’ll come back to the “make believe” connection at the end. For now, let’s imagine that to develop a craft requires myriad confrontations with realities of world and self in order to become something alive and awake in the moments when it encounters its toughest tests. Style and craft can’t be borrowed or bought, they have to come out of the person, the real person doing the crafting and styling. Ergo the notion of “wood shedding” and the mythos of Thoreau at Walden, Charlie Parker in the Osarks and Robert Johnson off at the crossroads playing dice with Legba. Of course, according to the myth, this smelting of self and world into craft is done off by one’s self, in private, mostly in silence. In David Bradley’s lost classic, The Chaneysville Incident, John Washington refuses Judith’s early offer to help him think through what’s on his mind, “Struggling,” he informs, is “natural and necessary, but it’s vulgar and ought to be done in private.”

But, what if the wood shed is public? Where do you hide your rituals, your failures? Well, what if you don’t? What if you can’t?

Enter, Serena Williams, en route to play for a record-tying 22nd major championship at this year’s U.S. Open, marching her way, nearing 34 years old, toward tennis immortality. When has any athlete demonstrated the many-shaded vulnerabilities inherent in excellence in this way? No one ever has. Watching Serena Williams is the closest thing watching an athlete has ever been to reading Adrienne Rich’s “The Phenomenology of Anger.” Among the stages of a woman becoming conscious, which she had come to realize meant of women becoming conscious, Rich imagined burning the myth of silent seclusion, “Thoreau setting fire to the woods.” In this funeral for the secluded, individual genius, Serena adds the shed to the pyre.

It all depends upon something Serena is able to do with an invisible, but palpable, envelope of space complexly involved with and closely surrounding herself that figures something we rarely get to watch, something, though, I suspect, we all have a version of the need to do: to summon and craft an energy—maybe it’s simply (simply!) our presence in space, in the world—that we’re never in control of but that we need to steer and, finally, to ride inside of: our body as historical moment.

And, Serena accomplishes this in tennis, and women’s tennis, at that, that veritable reserved, country club table of “reserve,” a space reserved for the reserved. Here and there, sure, there are infractions against this reserve, a Golden Mean punctuated by post-McEnroe-ian, petulant, rebel-without-a-cause-isms.  At times, maybe there is a cause, take Nick Kyrgios, for instance, part of whose historical moment as a non-white (Greek-Malaysian) Australian was illuminated when his behavior at Wimbledon provoked super star swimmer Dawn Cash to opine that he should leave Australia and go back to the country of his father, Greece. No matter, Serena’s career provides an alternative to the myth of the reserved and clarifies something about for whom that myth has been reserved. 

In a very beautiful essay called “The Light of the South West,” Roland Barthes wrote: “I enter these regions of reality in my own way, that is, with my body; and my body is my childhood, as history created it.” If style is the way one travels in one’s embodied, inherited, historical moment, and craft, like style, relates directly to one’s ability to navigate those moments, then what of the politics of style? And, let’s allow that that classical reserve—ok, let’s just call it whiteness—means absent, means one stands in the empty space next to one’s self, maintaining what we hear called “composure,” which, paradoxically, is what allows a person to stand as themselves, an individual. That crucial space has been the perilous privilege, one whose costs we seem still unable to face, of white people, men most of all, and tennis has been but one of its many display cases.

Enter Serena, again, so radically present. She brings a dazzling, at times disturbingly intense, frayed and fissured depth of labor to the surface—no less than poet Elizabeth Bishop’s vaunted, stoical fish—and makes it articulate. She rips it at 123 mph within a Hawk Eye-measured centimeter of where she wants it to go, then turns a few steps and does it again and, often enough, again, in service games that barely take more than a minute. A historically strong array of talented professional women such as the great Maria Sharapova, who hasn’t beaten Serena in a decade, at times, watch in dejected disbelief. Serena wraps that up in style, beauty, a copiously black women’s beauty, and, when need be, adds salt—also a copiously black women’s salt—and we watch her win. And, also paradoxically, she damned near always wins; this is because the vast majority of her losses, such as her most recent loss in Toronto to Belinda Bencic, are examples—at times spectacular pageants—of self-defeat. Arguably as much as any soul singer, or poet, Serena’s presence carries these episodes to her audience with a sense of extreme proximity and availability. So it all becomes a story the audience (especially on TV) doesn’t merely observe but undergoes in a rare way. That’s often what a good poem or novel, or ballad, is supposed to do. In tennis, the sense is this isn’t supposed to happen. In tennis, an audience celebrates victory and victors—along with silent Swiss things like Rolexes—and, the rest, well, as with daylight drunkenness, the sense is it’s bad manners to act like we noticed. More than noticeable, in her tough wins as much as even in some of her more reserved self-defeats, Serena’s style makes that dissonance unavoidable. 

Michael Jordan is an athlete who mostly won, yes, and with extreme beauty and salt—more sweat than salt, actually. He converted a range of gestures on a basketball court, somehow, into movements that included the viewer (except maybe Knicks fans). But he was almost always a captivating vector of controlled purpose. The man. To “be like Mike” was to elevate above yourself and float there, “Air Jordan.” But, he never did the basketball equivalent of double faulting his way through a service game; he never missed both free throws in strings of three and four consecutive trips to the line. He almost never beat himself; shoot, when it counted, he almost never lost. He almost never seemed on display in ways beyond his control. He never had to stand there, bend neck-in-symmetry-with-wrist and talk his frayed self back from beyond the edge into a coherent spot to start again. And, basketball is a team game, and of course it’s a mostly black team game; so he was never alone in the game. Was he?  

My point here is: neither is Serena alone—which, I’ll submit, is the real thing that confounds the tennis world’s sense of what’s reserved, and for whom. This is why, for instance, the only two people in the tennis world who never really seem troubled about Venus playing Serena are Venus and Serena. Oh, and, their mother. Echo that rather evidentiary Sister Sledge line that states, and “for the record,” something about “giving love in a family dose.” And, that’s a black family dose. It’s true. In “Nikki Rosa,” Nikki Giovanni wrote that “Black love is Black wealth,” and that has a lot to do with this, but I first heard that line in a poem Sharan Strange read about a newly inaugurated President Barack Obama. This element of bringing a plurality with her into the frame of tennis excellence is part of her style, I’d say it’s the basic, maybe invisible but palpable, structure of her style. And, if one knows how to look, it’s not invisible at all.

Now, let’s say that a certain absent reserve—the paradox that to be one’s own, individual, self has required a person to separate themselves from their actually existing self, its body, and its historical moment—has been the perilous privilege of whiteness, especially for men, and tennis players par excellence. Then it becomes crucial to think about how black persons can’t make that move if they try, and black persons, at least in part of their lives, have and do try, pretty much all day every day, rational self-interest requires it. Style is part of that, too. But, it doesn’t work. When a black person tries to step aside from who they are in the eyes of the world, to an important degree, they simply step into another black person’s image. This trans-personal reality has been part and parcel of both black peril and black power and, often enough, in the moment, it’s unclear which is which.

Exceptions to this rule require massive amounts of energy and many very bright spotlights whereupon the peril—more often than the power—intensifies off the chart. In the 1966 film, A Man Called Adam, Sammy Davis Jnr. plays an early black-power-era musician who has become a “name” in his own image in exactly this way. After an argument over the (individual or trans-personal) structure of the quest with two younger black men who recognize him in a bar, of Adam, one concludes “forget him, man, he could have been white but he turned down the job,” a rude put down for sure but not for nothing either.

The language keeps track of the trans-personal rule quite precisely. It’s why one finds certain highly refined bourgeois black women referring to each other as “soror,” and others simply as “sister,” and, at the end of the day, it’s really what’s behind all the hub-bub about the term “nigger / nigga.” It’s also part of why, when another black man—or woman—is gunned down by police, every black man (and woman), anyone who loves a black man (or woman), and anyone who could possibly be mistaken for one, takes at least a moment of terrified notice. It’s also why white people, by and large, don’t have the phonemes to pronounce—and therefore to convey such an ambiguous and resonant depth of meaning in—words such as brother, sister, to say nothing of the spasmodic phantasm that becomes of the n-word, in these ways. Black wealth is also black speech, and style.

Black power and peril. Why power? Well, that’s largely the “soror” part; a collective purpose—black, and female, in radically disproportionate portions—that has been a life sustaining and democracy expanding force in American life. Why peril? Because in a democracy, we could call it “reserved,” which has bitterly and brutally attempted to stand aside from itself during every era of its history, being randomly—still less racially—mistaken for each other is something no rationally self-interested citizen thinks they can afford. The need to thwart that connection—which according to the American myth is essentially mistaken—between people affects what Americans consider to be rational and self-interested at every level. Hell, separating and distinguishing one’s self from others is damned near what we’re told it means to think. Separation, being, in the words of the brilliant critic James Snead, one of the “aboriginal obsessions,” “one of the founding paradigms of Western thought.” It has been one of the driving forces of American culture to efface this aboriginal desire under the guise of “reason” and then frame the natural origin of reason in the “individual.”

But, within the contending perils and powers at play in the substructure of American selves, black style conveys a very important and powerful sense of collective purpose, that human reality can be a mutual entity, and that any human entity is a mutual reality. The narrative of that is complex, conflicted, often tragic, but, in popular American terms, it’s essentially a black narrative. Our history of moments has made this so and has made selves and songs—and here and there even a poem or two—embodied to be so. This song has circled the globe.

So, like it or not, Serena’s style takes all this up. A book could parse moments over her career and therein account for how her compelling and nuanced commentary on this historical epic embodies its textures, its intensely vulnerable strength. Claudia Rankine’s sensational 2014 book, Citizen, actually does a few moment’s worth of this in a brilliant and timely style. For now, suffice it to say: it’s a lot. One result of this lot, in Serena’s style, is an unprecedentedly available, vulnerable, various, at times volatile, account of what the quest for excellence entails, a black woman’s quest for excellence in a white-dominated venue. Millions see her do it because she got there. She’s the best, the boss and paid—is paying—the cost. I mean you know you’re good when Drake shows up on your bandwagon (and in Toronto, he brought his mama!). But, we in the bell of the curve also recognize ourselves there, in all what it takes, say, to get three kids up, dressed, and on the bus to school every morning, without breaking dishes and causing visible bruises, and then get it together and make it to work ourselves. Try trying to talk to a teenager with ear buds surgically implanted in his ears? Can all that be done while standing in the empty space beside oneself? In the space reserved for the reserved individual?

A brief moment on salt, to wit: when the raucous, Centre Court home crowd at Wimbledon 2015’s third round threw themselves behind Heather Watson, at times, by calling Serena’s shots out before they bounced, and jeering at Serena when she appealed to the umpire, Serena, only partially in control of the tailspin she’d been in for half a set, down two breaks in the third, turned away from the umpire to face the 20,000-and-something mostly hostile fans in the stands, wagged her index finger and said, “Oh, don’t try me.” And then, somewhere in that fraught quadrant of embodied, historical space, and with many other hostile crowds—Indian Wells 2001, Miami 2015—collapsed into that afternoon just south of London, she turned again and ripped off six or seven straight games to take the match on the way to her 21st major tournament victory. Incredible. And, after that turn happened, for the rest of the match, the unfortunate Heather Watson—even, strictly speaking, the game of tennis itself—became somehow beside the point.

And, Serena wins, sure. But when I say she communicates, I say that because we—who, exactly?—who watch feel an expanded, clarified, and surfacing range of occurrence in our own lives, in our presence in the world, a renewed capacity for occurrence routed in our own strength and skill, yes, but also in the way we know all that depends upon frayed edges and nerve-fissures, the permeable borders of our body as historical moment. Those who covet the table reserved for the reserved—and that person is alive in all of us—won’t be comfortable with this; they (who, exactly?) might find it disturbing. This accounts for most of the commentators and many in her audience.

Others take a kind of strength from her unprecedentedly broad range and depth of utterance, her bouts with what it takes to summon one’s self into whatever power and peril resides in one’s failing-laced struggles and to keep on with it. And the power of this utterance comes both from Serena, herself, and from the way she embodies her historical, inherited moment, which is beyond her but also herself. Describing his part in exactly such a black, one’s-self-but-beyond-one’s-self dynamic, poet Chris Gilbert called it “a story that I become / avowal for.” And, therefore, Serena performs while apparently all alone but carries a copiously mutual and collective weight that gives what she does and how she does it a unique kind of force, a force of a structure alternate—maybe compatible with, maybe antagonistic—to the notion of the essentially individual nature of human endeavor and excellence. Unreserved, she’s performing something shared in our peril and our power.

One final note about black style, in 1963, James Baldwin said that one key to black style is the fact that, relative to white Americans, black people don’t have much room “for make believe.” The idea that a person is an “individual” (cue Simon and Garfunkle: “a rock, an island”) autonomous from one’s surroundings has been a—might be the—cornerstone in the American make believe. In the end, Serena’s unprecedented exposure of the basic intensities of her craft and style communicate a paradoxical reality: how an apparently single person conveys, nonetheless, the power and the peril of a collective. This sense of style and salt also carries with it how a living collective depends upon what Ralph Ellison called “the art of individual assertion within and against the group.” The question “are you with us” has also, always, meant: “are we within you”? And, from Wimbledon’s Centre Court to the morning breakfast table, that’s not make believe at all. It better not be make believe. Still, part of what a great artist—yeah, I said it, artist—like Serena Williams does is make us believe. That’s the crux of her brilliant sentence. It’s a sentence we’re all sentenced in, a story we’re all “avowal for,” too. So, tennis is the font, heretofore reserved, that Serena has embodied, enlivened and expanded into a historically resonant script for us all.  The next point is ours: in public and private, coax and confront the historical moment of our bodies, search for a way to make that articulate to whomever might be willing to stand there facing us, and return serve.

The dog days of summer

We’re taking our annual August break. We’ll be back after the American Labor Day holiday (they have some sort of May Day in September, not like the rest of the world). In the meantime, enjoy what’s left of your summer (or winter). The best thing to do in the meantime is catch up on all that great reading you’ve missed here or on Latin America is a Country or Football is a Country, watch all the films we’ve recommended, or replay all those episodes of Africa is a Radio or stare at the hair of the world’s best young player, Paul Pogba.  Meanwhile, we’ll check in occasionally at our Twitter accounts (here, here and here) and Facebook (here, and here).

The lions and the hunters

“Denys and Kanuthia pulled up their sleeves and while the sun rose they skinned the lions. When they took a rest we had a bottle of claret and raisins and almonds, from the car; I had brought them with us to eat on the road, because it was New Year’s Day. We sat on the short grass and ate and drank. The dead lions, close by, looked magnificent in their nakedness: there was not a particle of superfluous fat on them, each muscle was a bold controlled curve, they needed no cloak, they were, all through, what they ought to be.”

– Karen Blixen, Out of Africa

Karen Blixen can always be counted on to bring a certain sweetness to the grisly work of empire. Here we find her on the road to Narok, in colonial Kenya, with her paramour Denys Finch Hatton and his “boy” Kanuthia, drinking wine and having a nibble after a strenuous day of motoring through the bush and killing, first, a lioness who was feeding on a dead giraffe and, second, on the way home, a lion who happened on the scene of slaughter and had the misfortune of not putting two and two together. (I say they were drinking wine and having a nibble but of course we can assume that “they” did not include Kanuthia, the “native boy,” who is – like the car and the binoculars – part of the expedition’s machinery: the hand that holds your skinner’s knife, that passes you your gun, that wouldn’t even dream of sneaking some of your raisins.) The lions, dead and partially skinned, lie “close by” this domestic scene. They are – as Blixen so touchingly observes – unmasked in death. Dead, nothing about them is “superfluous;” dead, like a necrotic feline Adam and Eve, they are naked and unashamed; dead, they are “what they ought to be.”

Fast-forward ninety years. Last month, an American dentist named Walter J. Palmer shot a lion named Cecil outside Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe. It appears that Palmer, assisted by the Zimbabwean hunting party he contracted for £35,000, lured Cecil out of the national park with a carcass tied to a Jeep. When Cecil approached, Palmer shot him with a crossbow, wounding but not killing him. (Perhaps Palmer should have paid more heed to Karen Blixen’s insight, as she shot Lion No. 2 with the gun Denys Finch Hatton – read: Kanuthia – proffered her, that “the shot [is] a declaration of love, should the rifle not then be of the biggest caliber?”) The actual killing took place a day or two later, when Palmer and his party ran Cecil to ground and put a bullet in him. Palmer – read: his “native guides,” whom he would later blame for the cock-up – decapitated Cecil and skinned his body, leaving the rest to the vultures. It was only then that they discovered, and attempted to remove and destroy, a GPS tracking collar that Cecil was wearing as part of an Oxford University study. Unfortunately for Dr. Palmer, the lion he killed had friends.

The backlash has been swift and definitive. Palmer’s dental practice in Minnesota – the website boasts that the good dentist “has a unique talent for creating dazzling smiles” – has closed after a barrage of online and on-site protest. American comedian Jimmy Kimmel – in a segment on his late-night variety show in which he called the behavior of trophy hunters like Palmer “vomitous” and asked whether “it’s so difficult for…[him] to get an erection that…[he] has to kill things” – was moved nearly to tears by Cecil’s fate. This level of public opprobrium and grief, scarcely imaginable in Karen Blixen’s day, has in turn spawned its own meta-conversations about the work of mourning and the value of life. Mother Jones has lampooned U.S. Senator Marco Rubio for logging on to Twitter to ask why there was so much “outrage over a dead lion” but so little over embattled women’s healthcare provider Planned Parenthood and its “dead babies.” And – at the other end of the ideological spectrum – Black Lives Matter activists have taken the American public to task for mourning Cecil so much more publically and unequivocally than they have any of the black women and men who have died at the hands of the police. Brokely Carmichael and others on Black Twitter speculated as to what might have happened if Cecil were black; Roxanne Gay joked that she would “start wearing a lion costume” so that if someone shot her, “people will care.”

At their core, the criticisms that Carmichael and Gay – and, yes, Rubio too – are putting forward have to do with the relative grievability of different forms of life. The question why Cecil’s death might be more readily mournable than Sandra Bland’s or Samuel DuBose’s has special historical resonance, however, given the longstanding – and ongoing – struggle of black people the world over to be seen as fully human. Indeed, it is the assumption that black people are dangerous beasts that fuels the sort of grade-A paranoia that causes . Lions – which are, it cannot be denied, actual dangerous beasts – are presumed innocent while black children are not. No amount of well-meaning commentary about the majesty of the lion and the threats that hunting poses to its already precarious future can take the sting out of that.

But perhaps there is a way to think these two things together. Much of the outrage directed at Dr. Palmer is predicated on the idea that hunting for sport is a thing of the past, a “vomitous” activity that – like the pith helmet – has no place in contemporary life. All indications, however, point to the fact that big-game hunting – and the white cultural chauvinism that has always sustained it, from not giving Kanuthia raisins on down – is alive and well in Africa. (When I first heard something had happened to a lion named Cecil in Zimbabwe, I hoped it was another manifestation of the Rhodes Must Fall movement: a repudiation of that other Cecil, lion of the Empire, chief architect of British colonialism in Southern Africa. Alas.) The same can be said for other forms of white supremacy in the U.S. and elsewhere; apologists for our supposedly “post-racial” moment can deny it all they want, but racism is hard to kill. Our real task now is to see the big picture, to track the work of imperialism and white supremacy across its many sites, from a national park in Zimbabwe to a street corner in Ferguson or Cincinnati. This is not to say that lions and black people are the same or even that they are straightforwardly comparable. But it is true that something wants them both dead – or, better, that something looks upon their dead bodies and feels as though they are, finally, “all through, what they ought to be.”

Why Obama blundered by speaking out on LGBTQ rights in Kenya

Ahead of President Obama’s much-awaited visit to Kenya a storm started brewing over LGBTQ rights in that country. The President went to Kenya fresh off the US Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on same-sex marriage, and various political and social actors in Kenya warned him to stay clear of the question of LGBTQ rights. Warnings included an anti-gay march in Nairobi on July 6, the popular hashtag #KenyansMessageToObama, and public statements by Kenya’s Deputy President William Ruto and National Assembly Speaker Justin Muturi.

White House Press Secretary Josh Ernest responded that President Obama “will not hesitate” to address Kenya’s human rights record. In a BBC interview, on the eve of his departure for Kenya, the President reaffirmed his intent to address LGBTQ rights, which he did during his joint press conference with Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta. But hesitation – and pause, and probably silence — on the question of LGBTQ rights should have prevailed. The politics of homophobia in Kenya and many African nations means President Obama may have become a clueless pawn in Kenya’s political game.

What is at stake here is that President Obama stepped into a complex sociopolitical layout whose bearings on the LGBTQ issue has constantly eluded Western advocates of LGBTQ rights in Africa. This weak grasp of the issue often dooms their advocacy work to failure or worse, to homophobic appropriation.

The political character of homophobia on the continent has eluded most outside observers. This myopia stems from a culturalist approach that considers contemporary homophobia in Africa through the narrow prism of such talismanic utterances as “homosexuality is un-African” and extreme legislations in Uganda or Nigeria. There are conclusions to be drawn from the sobering reality that social media shaming campaigns, reprimands by the United Nations General Assembly, and withholdings of development assistance have not killed the beast. Homophobia has instead spiked, as shown by the spread of state-sponsored homophobia throughout the continent, the ubiquity of anti-gay vigilantism in places like Senegal (once known as “the gay capital of Francophone Africa”), and the uptick in homophobic pronouncements by Kenyan state actors in the past five years.

There is a lot of postcolonial emotional investment in the idea of a “purely” heterosexual (hence virile) Africa. Masculine anxiety pervades many homophobic discourses on the continent: the fear of  being perceived as an “impotent” nation, an effeminate nation. Interestingly the notion of an “impotent state” or metaphors of emasculation recur in the scholarship of African social scientists to describe the subservient position of African nation-states on the global stage. African homophobias are also in conversation with one another, often borrowing from and competing against each other. In Senegal for instance, the South African nation is seen, in popular discourses, as less African and effeminate because of its stance on gay rights (not because of its multiracial composition). I often think that some of Jacob Zuma’s homophobia rhetoric is an attempt to “control damages.” President Jammeh of the Gambia used to tell gays to go to Senegal because Gambia is a country of men. It therefore makes sense that whereas on all other counts Obama’s visit was celebrated uncritically as the “return” of a great African man, on the matter of LGBTQ rights his views were scrutinized intensively and marked out as distinctively “un-African.”

The circumstances of state-sponsored homophobia in Africa shed light on the politics of homophobia and, as Ugandan law professor and LGBTQ activist Sylvia Tamale notes, the function of homophobia as a political resource. State-sponsored homophobia has been on the rise since the mid-1990s. This is the period where the so-called “wind of democracy” on the continent emboldened African civil societies against dictatorial regimes. In the mid-1990s African governments also had to confront the social discontent of populations when African economies collapsed under the Structural Adjustment Programs of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Embattled leaders throughout the continent started using the figure of the homosexual as a scapegoat and an opportune diversion from the issues of high unemployment, rampant poverty, and bad governance. In other words, some Africans and their political representatives might genuinely fear and loathe gay people, but they also need them – or the idea of them – to bolster their political goals.

In Kenya, the government of President Uhuru Kenyatta is currently confronting social discontent over the widening gulf between rich and poor, failed electoral promises, rampant corruption, and the failure to foil the repeated terrorist massacres of civilians by the Islamist militant group Al-Shabaab. The embattled government of President Kenyatta is in dire need of a scapegoat. Hence it was a strategic mistake for President Obama to intervene on LGBTQ rights in Kenya during his visit. Obama’s statement creates an opportune diversion from the failings of Uhuru Kenyatta and his government. Obama thus facilitates the operations of political homophobia in Kenya by tapping right into the Kenyan “erotic paranoid nationalism” – as political scientist S. N. Nyeck calls it – that Deputy President Ruto has been firing up ahead of both Obama’s visit and the impending 2017 presidential race in Kenya. In Sexual Diversity in Africa, Nyeck writes that “erotic paranoid nationalism” creates sentiments of patriotism and national pride around the idea that homosexuality is un-African.

Ruto’s homophobic declarations were bait that Obama was best advised to ignore, lest he found himself a pawn in Kenyan politics. Ruto has presidential ambitions, and his homophobia may serve his electoral politics very well, especially as Obama’s intervention may now offer an historic platform for Ruto to position himself as guardian of the moral and cultural integrity of the nation. Obama’s unsuccessful defense of LGBTQ rights during his visit to Senegal in 2013 should have been a reminder to tread cautiously in Kenya. When Obama raised the question at a joint conference with Senegalese President Macky Sall, he unwittingly gave the poll-challenged President Sall an opportunity to redeem himself before his Senegalese constituencies by asserting the un-Africanness of homosexuality.

LGBTQ rights in Africa may be one of those situations where foreign intervention should be discouraged. A statement by Obama bolsters the argument that homosexuality is a Western-sponsored idea and undermines the headways that Kenyan LGTBQ communities have been making. On April 27, a landmark court ruling ordered the government to register gay rights groups. Unlike in Senegal, many LGBTQ organizations in Kenya operate publicly and LGBTQ activists intervene in the national media, and have even run for office.

African LGBTQ activists have consistently reminded their Western allies that LGBTQ rights on the continent are best spearheaded by Africans themselves. In addition to the inevitable backlash for gay Africans, Western intervention is sometimes at risk of slipping into the types of savior imperialism with which we are so familiar. LGBTQ rights in Kenya are a domestic issue, very much like same-sex marriage was our domestic issue.

#Free15Angolans: An update

You’d never know it from reading the US press, but those political prisoners in Angola are still in jail and Angolan citizens, activists, and clutch of folks from other places are making noise about it.

A group of folks have started a video campaign demanding Liberdade Aos Presos Políticos Angolanos Já! (Freedom for the Angolan Political Prisoners Now!). Here’s the first video, you can find the other two on the Youtube scroll.

Rede Angola, a new voice in the Angolan independent press, has repeatedly published critical pieces. Check out these pieces (all in Portuguese) by Aline Frazão, Ana Paula Tavares, Luisa Rogerio, Reginaldo Silva, Agualusa, and Kalaf Epalanga. And Sergio Picarra’s fab drawings… like this one.

Deutsche Welle has given the situation consistent coverage in their Portuguese edition. So has the Portuguese press (too many to link). Al Jazeera published this comprehensive piece. And the Brazilian press has published a bit, including this piece by internationally recognized writer José Eduardo Agualusa asking Brazilian democracy to be as forward looking as the Brazilian dictatorship was (as the first government to recognize independent Angola in 1975). A group of 17 academics published an open letter in Le Monde, The Guardian, and Público drawing attention to the human rights situation in Angola and calling on the French, English, and Portuguese governments and their allies to put principle before profit. Attempts to place the letter in the US press failed (navel-gazers).

And there has been more street action. July 29 witnessed coordinated protests in Luanda, Uige, Berlin, Brussels, and Lisbon. While the Lisbon protest seemed a boisterous affair (nearly 150 people gathered for 3 hours), full of signs, hugs, statements of solidarity, and good music, Luanda protestors met arrests, sequestration, violence, police dogs, an MPLA organized counter-protest, and ear-splitting volumes of kuduro music blaring from giant speakers.

Police picked up (the official word was ‘collected’) nine key activists before they even arrived at the protest. They were driven outside the city, beaten, and left in another province to find their way home the next day. Luanda’s Police Commissioner António Sita, when contacted by Makaangola, claimed that they had not disappeared but were hiding out in the home of a man in Viana (a satellite city of Luanda), not answering their cell phones, and attempting to create “political facts.” Another eleven were arrested, according to Makaangola, when they were preparing signs for the protest at a home before heading to the Largo da Independência, where the action was scheduled.

Roughly thirty protestors managed to make it to the Largo. They were met with police intimidation, a canine unit, and a counter-protest organized by the JMPLA (the party’s youth organization) in celebration of African Women’s Day. Strange since protestors were mostly greeted by shouts accusing them of being “enemies of peace” and “fomenters of confusion.” Stranger still since it was the JMPLA who had mounted huge speakers, blasted loud music, and handed out t-shirts to passersby, some of whom were paid 2500 kwanzas (roughly $20) to don them, this in a square bordering a number of schools. Now who’s creating confusion on a school day afternoon?

If the right to assembly was routed so too was the right to expression. In the morning police arrested radio journalist Gustavo Vieira from Radio Despertar (the reinvention of UNITA’s former radio Vorgan) and surrounded the station. In the afternoon they chased Rede Angola journalists from the Largo. State media offered a predictable fare of news paralysis. For news analysis and breaking news, Facebook and Twitter (@CaipLounge and @RafaelMdeMorais) were best.

As we settle in to the weekend and the political prisoners remain in prison and a number of protestors are recovering from serious injuries at the hands of police, Angolans are on FB are lamenting the lack of enforcement of their constitutional right to assembly (the protestors applied for a permit to protest, as required by law). As well as noting how the imprisonment of young activists and the most recent protest have provided spectacular distraction from pressing issues of national concern: the decline in oil prices, the consequent massive budget deficit, the President’s still secret negotiations with China in May over the debt and a possible new line of credit, not to mention the state of public sanitation, decline employment figures, and inflation.

Others are pointing to the ruling party’s medo (fear). Activist Pedrowski Teca, one of the organizers of Wednesday’s protest, said as much. And he called the event a success, despite the troubles protestors faced and the fact that their goal – freeing their activist brothers in prison – was not yet achieved: #LibertemOsNossosIrmãos (#LiberateOurBrothers). More folks showed up, power shook in its boots and put its roughest and toughest in the streets.

Political insiders are talking about an impending split in the MPLA. One journalist described the current protests as the result of differences generated from within the MPLA. So it’s not surprising to see party loyalists publicly expressing dismay. That is, they simultaneously announce their loyalty and launch into a critique. Others do so vocally but not publicly, or only elliptically.  Brave protestors in the streets have much wider and deeper support than their small numbers suggest.

For two great analyses of the current political situation one in English on Democracy in Africa, by Justin Pearce, and an interview in Portuguese with Jon Schubert by DW.

The Futuristic Lagos of Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon

There are some who might think that the very premise of Nnedi Okorafor’s novel Lagoon —aliens landing in Lagos — is a bit far reaching. After all, if the science fiction cannon is anything to go by, aliens, it would seem, prefer fancy cities in America and Japan. Not a grimy, over-populated third-world megalopolis in a continent thought of as stranded in the “waiting room” of modernity. Even when aliens landed in Johannesburg, Neil Blomkamp made this famously cosmopolitan city devoid of Africans from any other nation, except for Nigerians, who were portrayed as gun-totting, superstitious cannibals. But in Lagoon, Lagos stands up tall as iconic enough to be an irresistible lure to aliens.

The main story line of Lagoon hangs upon two encounters — the seemingly unlikely meeting of three strangers in Bar Beach, on the one hand, and their encounter with a mysterious woman. There is Adaora who is a marine biologist. Agu is a soldier. Anthony is a Ghanaian rapper. The very moment they stumble, quite literally, into each other is perfectly timed with the occurrence of a deafening blast, huge tidal waves, and the appearance of a “naked dark-skinned African woman with long black braids.” Adaora is the one who names the woman Ayodele. But she is no ordinary Lagosian; she is an alien, the emissary sent to present Nigerian leaders with the demands of the alien leadership or “elders from the stars,” as one character puts it. This motley group of four gets caught up in a series of bizarre events that threatens to throw Africa’s largest city into utter chaos.

Okorafor’s Lagos is an amalgam of worlds, both “real” and futuristic. There is the Lagos of everyday life — traffic gridlock, internet cafes, 419ers, questionable pastors, hustling university students, African Hip-hop, underground LGBT groups, and beach nightlife. This Lagos is portrayed in all its chaotic allure.

But, as the narrator remarks, there are “things inhabiting Lagos besides carbon-based creatures.” Okorafor captures this other Lagos by populating the novel with beings and creatures extracted from myth and folklore. One of the most striking is the Lagos-Benin Express Way, a dangerous stretch of motorway where thousands of fatal accidents have occurred. In Okorafor’s magical touch, the road wakes up from its asphalt slumber and becomes a “road monster” or Bone Collector, as it likes to call itself.

It would be perfectly legitimate to criticize Lagoon as being all fantasy and too little sci-fi. There are no gizmos, gadgets, flying cars, space suits, robots, and so on. Perhaps that is Okorafor’s way of cutting down on the clichés of the genre, as well as the overdependence on high-budget, technologically achieved mirages; instead, she lets the African space and archive of narrative forms generate a new set of iconography for science fiction. My favorite example of this is when one character sees the alien spaceship extended across the horizon at night and calls it “the devil’s danfo” (“danfo” being the often rickety and unwieldy shared taxi used in Lagos.)

Where Okorafor really pushes the boundaries of sci-fi is in her portrayal of the futuristic. The mysterious “dark-skinned” woman — who turns out to be an alien emissary — materializes out of the Atlantic. In doing so, she bears close resemblance to Mami Wata, that ocean demi-goddess of Nigerian urban folklore. Ayodele is a shape-shifting alien with the ability to communicate with humans by synthesizing data from their individual archive of experiences. The ability to shape-shift is made possible by some advanced alien metallurgy. Unlike human cells with fixed characteristics and protocols, Ayodele’s body is made up of microscopic metal beads. This metallic consistency of her alien body produces an extreme form of plasticity that enables her to take on any shape she desires. But shape-shifting is not the limit of her alien powers. Ayodele is able to broadcast herself simultaneously — or rather make images of herself go instantly viral — on any communication device whatsoever, as long as it has a screen: phones, TVs, computers, e-book readers, and so on.

The wonders of Ayodele’s alien powers are very much in keeping with the genre. Science fiction is just as interested in technology as it is in how technology intersects with the body. It is already interesting that Okorafor portrays the marvels of a technologically enhanced body with a feminine figure. What is even more remarkable is the fact that the particular conception of the feminine she uses is inspired by folklore and urban legend. Mami Wata and the shape-shifting witch of African folklore are given a technologized dimension, and in this updated form, help us imagine a new kind of body.

The idea of science fiction within an African context presents its own problems. African literature is a somewhat policed aesthetic regime. African writers — especially those who aren’t writing highbrow realist fiction — are always under pressure to justify their aesthetic choices. Going by Chinua Achebe’s fight with Ayi Kwei Armah in the ’70s, stories that experiment with non-realist forms stand a greater chance of being dismissed as imitative, inauthentic, and unserious. That is why in this day and age there are people who think it is perfectly legitimate to ask whether science fiction can adequately portray life in an African city-scape such as Lagos (although they may not question the possibility of that happening in Los Angeles or New York).

Okorafor’s novel is a brilliant response to these kinds of provocations. Through a host of outstanding formal innovations, Okorafor shows that science fiction is not some outlandish literary form that is then imposed on an African setting. The novel demonstrates that African imaginaries have always been science-fictional. And just in case a less discerning reader misses the point, she has a character spell it out: “If anyone gon’ be flying around, shootin’ lasers outta they eyes or jumping in the water and making shock waves because they can, it would be a bunch of Africans.”

Lagoon isn’t merely Sci-fi with an African flavor — a foreign literary form dolled up with some local color. It is a bold, new reinvention of science fiction as a bonafide African form. In a sense, Lagoons is that awkwardly awesome moment that sci-fi realizes it was African all along.

New South African feature ‘Endless River’ makes film history

South African film director and auteur Oliver Hermanus has made film history this week and his cell phone is blowing up. “Yesterday was a hard day for my phone,” he writes via email, “She’s taken a sick day today.” The reason is that his latest feature, Endless River, has become the first South African film to be nominated to compete for the top award at the Venice Film Festival, The Golden Lion. The award aims to reflect the pinnacle of cinematic achievement, and Oscar winner Birdman was in the running last year. No stranger to international acclaim, Hermanus’ previous film Skoonheid (Beauty) won the Queer Palm at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011. His first feature Shirley Adams was a hard hitting yet moving portrait of a Cape Flats mother taking care of her newly disabled son.

Endless River focuses on the growing relationship between a young woman whose husband returns from prison and a grieving widower, a French national, whose family is murdered on their farm. “I think that farm murders are such an interesting phenomenon – somewhat of a uniquely South African crime and something that, while researching this film, I found more and more frightening,” writes Hermanus. “I think violence in general is a massive aspect of our society and it seems to be showing up in all of our films.”

Not only is the film competing for the coveted Golden Lion but so is leading lady, Crystal-Donna Roberts, who will be in competition for best actress. She is the first South African to be nominated in this category. More often than not, “coloured” actors in South Africa are typecast, and this acknowledgment is a major breakthrough for local talent. This is not lost on Hermanus: “She is competing with Oscar winners, Cannes winners… She is showing others here that it can be done.” Relaying a story from the shoot, he reveals the grueling “fuck ton of hard work” of getting the right take: “I remember now that she got hyperthermia from 10 degree river water in Natures Valley. The crew hated me, but Crystal went back into that water take after take. She deserves her place in this competition as does Nicolas Duvauchelle, my other partner in crime. I love actors and when I see them shine, it makes the process worth it.”

*Read our 2011 Skoonheid interview with Oliver Hermanus here.

(Gay) Sexuality and African Writers: Adichie, Osman

On Barack Obama’s recent visit to Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta schooled him on what’s relevant to Kenyans. Despite Obama’s lecture on “bad things” happening “when people are treated differently under the law,” Kenyatta insisted that gay rights “is not really an issue on the foremost mind of Kenyans”. Kenyatta must have felt pretty smug about his response. But as Kari Mugo wrote yesterday in AIAC, “These proud proclamations of bigotry as a Kenyan way of being would be comical, except that they have real lived consequences for Kenyans like me”.

Policing sexuality and ensuring that heteronormativity is drilled into us has long been a part of post-colonial culture, and back in the day some prominent African writers jumped on that bandwagon. In fact, African novelists have always been intrigued by same-sex relationships, but Soyinka’s 1965 novel has become the critics’ go-to place for old-school representation of same-sex love. In The Interpreters, Soyinka’s treatment of homosexuality is cringe-worthy and extremely unsympathetic. Same-sex desire is caricatured and vilified through the figure of a mixed-race African-American gay man playing out the classic stereotype of the non-African homosexual outsider whom everyone treats with mild indifference or open revulsion. Soyinka was not alone in depicting the sexual other as a figure to be vilified: Yambo Ouloguem, Armah, and Aidoo have all written novels where same-sex desire is short hand for western or colonial perversion.

Thankfully, African writers have moved on from resorting to such ridiculous, caricatured depictions of gay people – who appear here and there only as props that aid in shoring up the masculinity and African-ness of the novels’ protagonists. Within the past five years, we’ve seen a sea change in attitudes towards homosexuality by writers, in part a response to virulent anti-homosexual legislation in key locations. Writers such as Chimamanda Adichie and Binyavanga Wainaina have been very open about their personal views on homosexuality and have gone on to challenge and chage how homosexuality and same-sex desire is represented in fiction.

We single out Adichie and the Somali-British writer Diriye Osman because of the subtlety and emotional complexity with which they handle same-sex desire, but also, and more importantly, because of their attempt to enact same-sex desire in the household — a space that has “traditionally” (we want to emphasize those scare quotes) been the location of heterosexual desire. Even more interesting is the fact that the figure of the male domestic laborer is employed by both writers to reconstitute the African household as a space where same-sex love can be imagined and even acted upon. In both stories, the laboring body of the “help,” the “houseboy,” or the “garden-boy” serves as the instrument through which the male protagonist awakens to his desire for another man. The houseboy is the embodiment of an intimate stranger: he comes from outside to inhabit and the share the intimate life of the household. And in so doing, he clears out a space where the male child can discover and experiment with desire.

We see this play out in Adichie’s recent New Yorker story titled “Apollo.” Raphael is little more than a houseboy to Okenwa, and would have remained so if not for Bruce Lee. One day, Raphael catches Okenwa trying to mime Bruce Lee, but doing it very badly, so her offers to give him lessons. During their practice sessions, 12 year-old Okenwa is captivated by Raphael’s “leaping,” “kicking,” “taut,” and graceful body. In the everyday space of the domestic, Raphael was the servant. But in the few moments during which they practiced, their roles are reversed. Raphael becomes the Kung Fu master and he the eager student. Okenwa’s homo-erotic desire for Raphael intensifies but remains largely unspoken. His admiration for Raphael’s body and his tortured longing for companionship betrays an underlying attraction that Adichie never openly terms as being homosexual. But Raphael’s body, associated with that of Bruce Lee, does go from being an object of admiration and awe to an object of a desire. Breaking the rules of the household, Okenwa pays Raphael, who is down with conjunctivitis, a visit in the boy’s quarters where he lives. Okenwa offers to apply the medication into Raphael’s eyes, and their bodies touch. It is a small, barely perceptible moment of intimacy, but Adichie expertly invests it with desire. But any chance for Okenwa to put a name to his feelings is cut short when Raphael is unjustly relieved of his employment and sent away from the house. Decades later, the adult Onkenwa is still not married, and it is made decidedly clear that “problematic” marital status has everything to do with what he felt for Raphael many years before.

Diriye’s Osman’s story, “Shoga”, in which a young boy similarly desires the male domestic labourer, is part of Fairytales for Lost Children, Osman’s first book-length collection of short stories. The story takes place in Nairobi, where Somali refugees arrive in numbers, hoping for a more peaceful life. “Shoga” ​begins with the narrator, Waryaa, getting his hair done by his grandmother, Ayeeyo. He wants to get braids but, his grandmother will not allow it. “And furthermore, this business of me braiding your hair has to stop! You’re a boy not a lady­boy!” she admonishes. Waryaa is aware that he does not fit in with how society might want for boys to be, but does not care. He is happy being gay. The story takes a turn when his grandmother, fearful about corrupt police, hires a Burundian refugee, Boniface, to be a general househelp, and to watch over Waryaa when he gets home from school. The narrator forms a quick bond with this beautiful man – after all, he is not only physically attractive, but nurturing and maternal, preparing Spanish omelettes and tea. Like Adichie’s characters, Waryaa and Boniface spar verbally and physically, and threaten each other playfully.

But in this story, Waryaa knows that all that he wants “is to feel [Boniface’s] body against mine and if it took a wrestling match to achieve this, I was game.” Waryaa and Boniface become intimate that night, the passage into sex smoothed over by weed, Papa Wemba and Koffi Olomide. Waryaa is already somewhat sexually experienced, and is a willing instigator-participant. And Osman does not make Boniface into a mere side character who’s relegated to the role of sexual awakener, solely present to build the main character’s agency. Boniface has his dreams and hopes, which are very much like those of Waryaa; Boniface, too, escaped war; he was studying engineering when he had to flee; he dreams of going to “Somewhere exotic like England” to complete his education and work. Waryaa and Boniface are, in fact, mirror image characters — but only one of them gets to live the “dream”, only it is a dream with a bitter and lonely edge.

Of course, a couple of nights after the boys’ first intimate night, his grandmother has proof for her suspicions, and the next day, whilst the narrator is at school, she fires Boniface. She and Waryaa confront each other. Waryaa screams at her, “Go on, Ayeeyo, you can say it, I will not become a khaniis? A shoga? A faggot? Well tough luck! My ass is a khaniis. I am shoga, a faggot.” Their relationship deteriorates, and when he goes to London, they barely communicate. When we meet Waryaa again, he is in England, and he confirms that his grandmother dies, as he predicted, a lonely and embittered old woman – she suffers that fate for having driven out his youthful sexuality; he, too suffers the unbearable loneliness of exile. England, too, is a location of terror, but not because of the fear of literal death. Waryaa finds out that the cities of England, and their immigrant enclaves, are the sites of social death: here, young second-generation women and men come out — albeit tentatively to a trusted sister, a much beloved mother — only to face rejection, and even threats to their lives. He does not fear for his life, but struggles to feel that he exists when there is no life-long love — a love with a long history that recognizes and remembers him — to confirm his existence or to accompany him in life.

In both Osman and Adichie’s stories, the protagonist is the young son of the family, left in the care of the domestic labourer. And in both cases, the body of the labourer is dispensable. He is summarily dismissed from the domestic sphere, once his work in awakening the protagonist’s awareness of his “other” sexuality is done, and is seen as a threat to the domesticity of heterosexuality that the elders of the family seek to protect. But this exclusion leaves behind a trauma, which continues to haunt the protagonist. For Adichie’s main character, the instrumental presence of the domestic labourer and the role this man played in his sexual awakening has been pushed to the recesses of memory; but for Osman’s character, the presence of his first sexual attraction and attachment is noisily palpable throughout his adult life as an orphaned exile in Britain.

Unlike Osman, Adichie stops at the moment of awakening. Her characters never get to the point of consummating their desire in a sexual act. In both Adichie’s and Osman’s stories, the protagonist does not arrive at sexuality outside the home — for example, the stereotypical boarding school scene (that location of both discipline and freedom where many coming-of-age sexual moments take place). But in both stories, though the moment of awakening happens within domestic, familiar spaces, technically, they actually take place in an extra-territorial, unfamiliar space — in the laborer’s quarters in the back, not in the protagonist’s home. When Okenwa enters that space, the narrator notes that moment by accentuating the uneasiness and the unbelonging that the protagonist feels in the foreignness of the domestic labourer’s quarters. Okenwa is “struck by how bare it was — the bed pushed against the wall, a spindly table, a gray metal box in the corner, which… contained all that [Raphael] owned.”

The allure of the “houseboy” as the bearer of sexual difference in the household resides in the contradictions inherent in the figure. He is a man who performs traditionally feminine roles, including that of an ersatz mother. Concurrently, he is also an avuncular figure who is portrayed as virile, muscled, and stereotypically masculine. The protagonist is both attached to this figure as a nurturer, and admires him as a man. Being from the outside, the domestic labourer is worldly and knows much, hence capable of dangerous sexuality that might disrupt the household order. Spatially, he belongs in the house where he works, but is excluded to that outpost called the “boys quarters” where he lives — a liminal space that is both inside and outside the perimeter of the household, where same-sex desire is awakened or where that love is actually consummated.

For Adichie and Osman, the point of bringing same-sex desire into the house isn’t to domesticate or normalize it. In “Apollo,” the desire continues unnamed even after it is awakened and forecloses the possibility of a heterosexual union. In “Shoga,” the consummation of the desire wrecks the household. Neither protagonist is blighted with trauma for trauma’s sake. The idea is not that we simply replace the traditional conception of household with a queer version of itself; rather, it is that we destabilize our conceptions of the domestic, the tame, and the socially acceptable so that something truly new can be imagined. However, that “new” thing remains unrealized and out of reach in both Okenwa’s and Waryaa’s adult lives.

If we accept that novels or short stories centred around the household are fundamentally political, the importance of this kinds of fiction becomes apparent against the backdrop of President Kenyatta’s statement. When he tells Obama that the conditions of progress for the Kenyan state excludes the rights of the LGBT community, he shows that he is subscribing to the good old historicist move whereby a certain group of people are banished to “the waiting room of history.” Their rights are put on hold, or sacrificed so that the nation can attain progress. When they re-imagine the household from the standpoint of same-sex desire, Adichie, Diriye, and a host of contemporary African writers invested in this question invite a us to imagine the nation as a different kind of home space — a home that needs to make room for those who were all too expediently excluded.

Prominent Sudanese asylum-seeker asks Israel’s president: “Why not let us stay and contribute to Israeli society?”

Netanyahu’s reelection this year, for his fourth term (third consecutive), leaves little hope for non-Jewish minorities in Israel. The newly-formed government is the most right-wing, conservative and outspokenly racist that Israel has seen in years. The new Minster of culture, Miri Regev (Likud), called Sudanese asylum seekers “a cancer in Israeli society” in 2012, and the new Minister of Justice, Ayelet Shaked (Jewish Home), seeks to limit the Supreme Court’s ability to throw out laws, especially when these laws protect the rights of minorities.

If I can think of a population other than Palestinians that is suffering greatly from the current political atmosphere in Israel, it is African asylum seekers.

In 2013, Israel’s Supreme Court of Justice struck down an amendment to Israel’s infamous anti-infiltration bill, which allowed the State to hold African asylum seekers in custody, without trial, for up to three years. In its decision the Court stated that individuals who filed their asylum claims should not wait for the interior ministry’s decision behind bars. he day that decision came out was filled with excitement from human rights activists, NGOs and the asylum population. It felt as if Israel might finally have to address the growing need to establish a refugee regime in the country. We were too early, or maybe naïve, to celebrate.

Instead of implementing the Court’s recommendations, the Knesset rapidly moved to forward a legislative amendment known as the Prevention of Infiltration Law, which transferred asylum seekers to ‘open detention centers’. The government managed to “work around the Court’s ruling” (the words of Netanyahu himself) and instead opened a “residence center” for asylum seekers, a prison in all but name.

The new “open prison,” Holot, is located in the Negev desert, just a few minutes from the old detention center the Court ordered the State to release asylum seekers from. And while Israel did not send asylum seekers back to Sudan and Eritrea, it deported them to other third countries in Africa, such as Rwanda and Uganda, against their will. While Rwandan president Paul Kagame confirmed that Rwanda was in the last phases of formulating an agreement with Israel “totaling millions of dollars,” in which his country would take individuals deported from Israel, senior officials in Uganda denied the existence of such an agreement. There are, however, testimonies of individuals who were deported to both countries. Today, asylum seekers are given two options: leave to a third country, or stay in detention, indefinitely. Behind all of Israel’s convoluted legal rules towards the asylum population lies a clear and unwelcoming message: leave or we will make your lives miserable.

Last month I visited Mutasim Ali, a prominent African activist and asylum seeker from Darfur, Sudan, and currently in detention at Holot. Since his arrival to the country in 2009, Mutasim has become something of the “star”, or leader, of the asylum seekers’ community. Mutasim worked for the African Refugee Development Center office in Tel Aviv as the center’s director, aiding the asylum community, before he was detained. I wanted to know what he thought was the best strategy for asylum seekers to promote their rights, how they framed their struggle and what he thought were the appropriate solutions to their problems.

There are currently about 1,900 people in detention, and approximately 45,000 asylum seekers in Israel, the vast majority of which are from Sudan and Eritrea. Mutasim explained that the government imprisons only the so-called “old-comers” (Sudanese that entered Israel before 2011, and Eritreans prior to 2009). According to Mutasim this is because Israel seeks to uproot the individuals who are most established in society. People like Mutasim, who speak fluent Hebrew, are well integrated in society and have Israeli friends, are the real threat to the government’s incitement. After all, how can the government’s manipulation against the African population sustain itself when there are people like Mutasim walking around?

According to Mutasim, the biggest problem asylum seekers face in Israel is the lack of a stable asylum mechanism, one that is separate from politics. Mutasim believes that the condition of asylum seekers in the country should not be determined by politicians elected recently, that Israel should establish a stable mechanism to register and fairly assess their claims.

The struggle of asylum seekers is politicized. The term “refugee” or “asylum seeker” is closely linked with being “left wing,” and in the current political atmosphere, this leaves little hope for a better and stable policy towards them. According to Mutasim, Israel should cultivate an asylum mechanism that is separate and protected from shifting political agendas.

After a few minutes of conversation, I noticed Mutasim was very anxious, constantly checking his phone. He later told me that he was waiting to hear about his asylum application, whether it had been approved or not. Mutasim’s case reached the Be’er Sheva District Court, both due to his dedicated lawyer but also because he is the leader of the community and his case was highly publicized. He was anxious that his case would become too politicized and that the Interior Minister would “make an example” out of his individual case and send a message to others.

Mutasim told his asylum story many times. He shared it at universities and political forums, as well as in community centers in South Tel Aviv while working with the the African Refugee Development Center (ARDC). Yet according to him, the success of such individual narratives is limited and temporary in Israel. “I can’t even count the times I told the story of how I became an asylum seeker, sometimes in large and prestigious forums. It doesn’t help and it’s degrading.” Mutasim held several meetings with the residents of South Tel Aviv, yet whenever he felt there was a break-through and that a dialogue had begun, some politician would come along and incite the population against Africans. He therefore no longer believes in the power of his personal asylum narrative in influencing public opinion, at least not without ending the ambiguous and unclear policies towards the asylum population.

Mutasim also attributes the tensions in South Tel Aviv to the lack of a clear policy towards asylum seekers: “I can understand the desperation of the residents of South Tel Aviv. I feel uncomfortable with the situation, they also have the right to a better life, but government negligence created a structural problem. We were abandoned by the government and placed in a neighborhood that already suffered from discrimination even before our arrival.”

“Israelis are scared of us. They go to South Tel Aviv and judge us without knowing who we are. They see criminals. It is not solely about being different; it is a certain difference that they are afraid of. If we were Norwegian or Swedish, I’m sure we would have been treated better.” According to Mutasim the reason asylum seekers are being mistreated in Israel is not only because they are not Jewish, it is racism against Africans. “Even African diplomats who visited Israel were attacked in South Tel Aviv, they see all of us, all of the black people, as enemies.”

“There are 90,000 non-Jewish immigrants in the country, why do they target us? There are Asian work migrants in Israel and nobody talks about them. It is not solely a Jewish/ non- Jewish issue – it is because we are African, we are simply not wanted.”

Mutasim is however grateful for all the help he received from Israeli activists, NGO’s and friends.

“You take a person who lived in Tel Aviv and put him here in detention, of course it is better than Darfur, but all we can do here is sleep and eat. What is the purpose of imprisoning us? They spend so much money in putting us away, but we could have contributed in so many ways to Israeli society.”

In a letter Mutasim recently addressed to the President of Israel, Reuven Rivlin, in the name of all the refugees in Israel, Mutaism wrote: “We do not have to be regarded as a ‘problem.’ We can be an asset. We can work and contribute to Israeli society. If only you would give us the chance to do so, if only you would grant us asylum.”

When asked about his strategy to promote the rights of asylum seekers, Mutasim said that it is a question Israelis should ask themselves. “We the asylum seekers do not have much left to do. The next protest should come from the Israeli public. It is not only about the African population. You [Israelis] should ask yourself what kind of society you want to live in.”

While implementation gaps exist in almost all countries party to the Refugee Convention, in Israel, there was never actually an attempt to establish a functioning asylum regime.  Instead, the state seeks to deport individuals to third countries and detain the ones who are well established in society.

What is most astonishing about the situation of asylum seekers in Israel is that today the country’s borders are essentially sealed to refugees. Since the Israeli government erected a surveillance fence along the Egyptian border as “a strategic decision to secure Israel’s Jewish and democratic character”, the fence has reduced the number of African asylum seekers entering the country to the point where Israeli officials expect the influx to eventually stop entirely. Israel’s Population, Immigration and Border Authority (PIBA) stated in a 2014 report that since the beginning of 2014 only 19 ‘infiltrators’ entered the country through the Egyptian border.

The fact that Israel is no longer physically open to refugees differentiates it from other countries receiving large influxes of people. It gives Israel a unique opportunity to check individual asylum claims without risking the so-called “pull factor” host countries are often afraid of. Yet Israel continues to perceive the presence of African refugees as a crisis that threatens its ethnic identity.

The question of asylum seekers in Israel, as Mutasim said, does not only concern the asylum population. At the heart of the issue is Israel’s exclusionary mentality. But how long can we sustain this logic in a globalized world?  How many walls and fences can we build? And most importantly, what would this turn us, Israelis, into? Israel could have been a million times richer, more interesting and diverse if we would only open ourselves up.

Mutasim was released from detention two days after our conversation, after a long legal battle. His asylum case, however, has yet to be decided upon, even though he filled his claim two and a half years ago.

And the situation continues to deteriorate for asylum seekers, on July 19th the Be’er Sheva District Court rejected rights groups’ appeal for interim order to prevent the deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda and Uganda and instead backed deporting them and arresting those who refuse to leave. This is Israel’s latest policy towards asylum seekers: a choice between prison and deportation, and we are all losing, Israelis and asylum seekers alike.

Latin America is a Country in the Afro-Latino Festival in NYC

The third edition of the wonderful Afro-Latino Festival was held in New York City between July 10th and July 12th.

The festival included amazing concerts from traditional musicians that carry on the legacy of African influence on the music of Latin America, such as the Colombian cumbia band Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto, but also featured shows by artists exploring more contemporary musical directions, such as Cuban rapper Danay Suárez.

It also featured various panels to discuss what exactly means to be Afro-Latino, and how Afro-Latinos are portrayed on their countries’ and on international media.

On the first day of the festival, we met in Madiba, in Harlem, with Mai-Elka Prado, the founder of the festival, and with Amilcar Priestley, its director, to talk about the purpose and the history of this event.

We also met with Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto and asked them about their music and their musical traditions.

We were also very lucky to get a good spot to catch Los Gaiteros’ concert in The Wick, in Buschwick, where we were able to record their performance of their Grammy Latino-winning hit “Un fuego de sangre pura.”

Look out for next year’s festival!

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