Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 447

The “Global Novel” Debate

It has been a few weeks since the literary journal N+1’s diss of the global novel, “World Lite,” landed on our screens. The rebuttals on social media and academic blogs were swift, as was the rebuttal of the rebuttals from the N+1 editors on their Letters page. A particularly thoughtful response more recently appeared in the Financial Times from academic Pankaj Mishra.

But let’s rewind a bit. N+1 is transparent enough to print the behind-the-scenes editorial decision-making exchanges that accompany some of their columns. And so we learn that some of the titles thrown around for the article were “World Republic of Successful and Well-Intentioned Novelists in whom we are Ultimately Disappointed” and “World Republic of Losers”. Say what? OK, we get it. Funny!

I grew up in just done gone post-colonial Zimbabwe. This was back in the 80’s where our version of the dollar still meant something and Robert Mugabe was still considered by most a general-all-around-stand-up-kinda-guy. The education system had been very elaborately constructed to mimic the “best of British” 1950’s public schools, from the starched uniforms with regulation underwear right through to the rigid curriculum taught by Oxbridge exiles.

I bring this up because despite growing up a prolific reader, I had read just a handful of American novelists by the time I entered graduate school in the US in my early twenties. And though the Americans numbered few, even fewer were the African writers I had read (or Indian, Asian, …). No Faulkner, no Kerouac, no Updike nor Roth. Amongst The Shakespeares and The Chaucers and occasional Achebes that consumed whole semesters of my youth, my insufficiently educated mind had been fed a steady and, I’ll admit, sustaining diet of Lawrence, Hardy, Forster, Austen, Dickens and Dame Vera Britain. The applicability of these authors to young scholars in the far corners of the midnight of the British Empire was not only not questioned. The universality of these texts was assumed.

Circling back, what ‘World Lite’ seemed to put forth is that what presents itself as world literature (in and of itself a straw man), is watered-down and apolitical drivel delivered by a transnational elite afraid of offending the milquetoast western sensibilities of their target audience. ‘World literature’ written in the English language has been leveled into a Dakota plain by the fact that the writers tend to live in their metropole, have teaching positions at universities in the West and generally strive for a global audience. This somehow discredits their efforts. What counts is internationalist literature defined by–it would seem–any radical, fictional work whose author determinedly sits outside the global mainstream and refuses to commune with the very elites she criticizes.

What this misses (and Mishra gets right) is that what such transnational ‘elites’ such as Cole, Lahiri, Bulawayo et al create is intensely political–sometimes unconsciously so, more often overtly so. How can it not be? This status is accorded to this work by virtue of these writers completing the creative task in the ghetto of ‘other’. The fact that the global novel has emerged from the world of the global literary economy (international book festivals, book prizes, world class universities, and corporate publishing houses) and addresses an audience of citizens in any country and not a compatriot, does not render it ‘lite’. This merely conflates the writer and the product of his labor. The exposure to a view that is not only not your own but exists in a different body, geographically or phenotypically is important and profound. The so-called ‘bland consensus’ this type of global novel produces is often the only doorway into a world that one doesn’t inhabit if one is raised on a diet of the kind of novels that form the vast swathe of the western canon.

From where I sit, the essence of a good novel in addition to its transformative power, is its universality. Whether one writes of revolution or fomenting revolution or quotidian matters (the family struggle in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s seminal Nervous Conditions) is just as valid and important as the ‘uncompromising’ work of Marie Ndiaye or Elena Ferrante, cited as internationalist exemplars in ‘World Lite’. It just depends, I guess, on where one sits.

We, as readers, bring ourselves to the novel. Our birthplace, our hometowns, our interests, our language and understanding of the English language, our politics and ideology, our lives. We read to expand our world in literature. In the end it’s just us, the text and this experience of this world and our place in it.

Mozambican Occupations: The Work of Photographer Felipe Branquinho

Photographer Felipe Branquinho’s work is an impressive recent contribution to efforts to move away from clichés of rural Africa and reminds us of the dynamic urban landscapes of African cities. Branquinho focuses on the majority of these cities’ inhabitants, the working class, and portrays workers in their urban surroundings in Mozambique, in the capital Maputo and elsewhere.

Occupations, the photographer’s ongoing documentary project, seeks to show how workers communicate with the spaces they occupy while they are exercising their profession. The pictures portray fishermen, security guards, domestic workers, barbers, bakers, and many more. Branquinho’s aim is to demonstrate “how people work, where they work, and show that they work with a lot of dignity.” The photos are carefully composed. Workers are placed in the center of the picture, look directly into the camera, and the symmetry of their surroundings create a certain depth that invites onlookers to interact with the worker portrayed.

Born in Maputo, Branquinho grew up as son of a photojournalist who was well connected in the art community. Thus the artist was early on confronted with the work of such famous Mozambican photographers as Ricardo Rangel, Kok Nam, and José Cabral. Branquinho studied architecture in Brazil but was always interested in photography, and pursued that passion when returning to Mozambique.

The photographer finds his subjects on strolls through the city. He started the project by photographing urban public employees, but then quickly moved on to also taking pictures of workers in other professions—athletes, firemen, domestic workers—and homeless people and kids. “Occupations” turned into a study of how people spend their time in the urban environment.

The artist does not only portray but also interacts with his subjects. During the show Temporary Occupations in 2011, Branquinho projected his photos in a large window of the Mozambican Association of Photography located on Julius Nyerere Avenue in Maputo. The avenue is a busy street that the working class—among businessmen, tourists, and street vendors—uses to go to work. In that way, the photographer made his work accessible to the protagonists of his work.

Branquinho’s current work includes the cinematography for short films under the title Journey to the Center of Capricorn, directed by the Mozambican artist Rui Tenreiro. The short films point to the power and complexity of urban structures in constant degradation: “At the top of the gray anthill, in the center and at the zenith of this structure is the imperial cabinet, symbol of revolution and national power.” Here’s an example:

More photos and an interview with the photographer can be found here. Another short film here. H/T African Digital Art.

Is the Nobel Peace Prize totally irrelevant?

Today, at 11am Norwegian local time, we’ll know who’s won the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize–an award known for its growing irrelevance. Everyone predicts the winner will be Malala Yousafzai. It’s worth going through some of the dodgiest choices made by the Nobel committee in the 93 times they’ve awarded the prize since 1901.

* Theodore Roosevelt, then-President of the United States, was awarded the prize in 1906, for negotiating a peace in the Russo-Japanese war in 1904-5–a war that he contributed to by encouraging Japan’s colonial ambitions in Korea. That and expanding American colonialism in the Philippines (yes, the US was a colonial power). Peace-loving soul that he was he then put on his pith helmet and celebrated his prize by going round East Africa on a killing spree with a ridiculously large entourage and butchering over 10,000 wild animals. Of course, he is also a renowned “conservationist.”

* Elihu Root, a US diplomat and winner in 1912. He won for promoting the idea that “conflicts between states must be resolved by arbitration.” This while as Theodore Roosevelt’s Secretary of War, Root “helped to bring Pacific and Latin American territories under US control. The Philippines, Cuba and Panama were occupied. Both Roosevelt and Root believed that the US was entitled to lead and govern people whom they believed to be uncivilized.”

* In 1919 Woodrow Wilson won for his role in founding the League of Nations (the United Nations’s colonial forerunner), while being an out and out white supremacist at the same time. He segregated the federal civil service and opposed anti-lynching laws.

* After they had not awarded the prize from 1939 to 1943 and gave it to the Red Cross in 1944, they decided in 1945, for some inexplicable reason, in favor of Cordell Hull, who as President Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of State had rejected reports of the Holocaust, sending Jewish refugees back to Europe and in most cases certain death.

* Yes, Henry Kissinger was awarded the Peace Prize in 1973 while he was supposedly negotiating the end of the US’s colonial war in Vietnam but secretly ordering the bombing of Laos. Le Duc Tho, a Vietnamese general, who was to be the co-recipient, declined the award. Kissinger never impressed Christopher Hitchens, who called for the Nobel laureate to be prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and claimed Kissinger had written early in his career that the problem with nuclear weapons was that they were so hard to use.

* In 1979 to Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, also known as Mother Theresa. No comment.

* In general, the Nobel committee are always very late to the moral party. For example, they should have awarded it to Mandela when he was still considered a terrorist by South Africa’s regime, Britain and the USA and much else of the “Western” world. When they finally awarded it to Mandela, in 1993, they forced him to share it with FW de Klerk, who is accused of ordering a death squad hit–5 innocent children were murdered–while on his way to the ceremony in Norway. As we know, as recent as 2012 de Klerk was still defending Apartheid.

* In 2009 Barack Obama won it “… for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples” Huh? Like Theodore Roosevelt before him, he celebrated his award by going on a killing spree. Unlike Theodore Roosevelt his victims have been people rather than animals.

* Finally, Ellen Sirleaf Johnson won in 2011 (she was joint winner with  more deserving countrywomen Leymah Gbowee and Yemeni Tawakkol Karman). Ask Liberians about that.

Actually come to think of it they’ll probably give it to Tony Blair this year.

Tom Hanks, Captain Phillips and the “True Story” of Somali Piracy

Abduwali Abdukhad Muse sits anxiously in a federal prison in Indiana, while his Hollywood-constructed doppelganger prepares to leap onto a silver screen near you this weekend. Muse, a young man from Somalia, was sentenced in 2011 to nearly 34 years for his role in the hijacking of an American cargo ship, the Maersk Alabama. The case was historic as it marked the first time in more than 100 years that someone had been charged with piracy by the US judicial system.

During the 2009 hijacking, the captain of the vessel, Richard Phillips was taken captive by Muse and three other hijackers while his crew took refuge on the ship. In a dramatic assault by the US Navy, Muse’s colleagues were all fatally shot, Captain Phillips was freed and Muse himself was taken into custody.

Western media outlets looking for a hero framed Captain Phillips as an altruistic leader who had given himself up to save his crew from the marauding pirates. He was encouraged to publish a book about his experiences, A Captain’s Duty, which more recently has been transformed by Sony Pictures into a major motion picture starring Tom Hanks.

It mattered not that members of Phillips’ own crew contradicted the hero’s tale by sharing how the Captain’s ineptitude led to hijacking in the first place and far from selflessly giving himself up, he was actually captured by failing to secure the ship’s bridge. The complexity surrounding the social and economic drivers of piracy off the Horn of Africa was lost in the media-friendly version of the story as well as  any detail about the personal backgrounds of  Muse and the other hijackers. Hollywood however, can’t be bothered by such narrative inconveniences and so Sony Pictures sailed full steam into the production of their film, “Captain Phillips”, transposing Muse from the box of his prison cell to the box of the movie screen. Here’s the film’s trailer:

Enter Canada-based Mosotho filmmaker Kaizer Matsumunyane. Not content to allow the mainstream media to construct a lopsided perspective of piracy in Somalia, Matsumunyane set out to make a documentary film representing the Maersk Alabama hijacking and its aftermath from Muse’s perspective. Matusumunyane’s film, “The Smiling Pirate,” poses a direct challenge to the problematic representation of the Somali Pirates in the film Captain Phillips and aims to do something Hollywood has thus far been afraid to do: give a Muse and others in Somalia a genuine voice to tell their side of the story.

Africa is a Country spoke to Kaizer Matsumunyane about his film and why when Hollywood producers say, “based on a true story”, they really mean, “based on grossly perverse and unabashedly biased interpretation of true events.” For in Captain Phillips, more than anything else, it is the truth that has been hijacked.

As a filmmaker, why did you decide to make this film?

Matsumunyane: I think there must be something to the adage that we don’t choose stories, they choose us. I know it sounds cliché but I think there is truth to it. I remember I was watching news on TV and there was some excitement about how Somali pirates who had captured an American ship had been shot dead and the surviving pirate was being brought to the U.S to face charges of piracy. All of a sudden, they showed the surviving pirate arriving in the U.S flanked by federal agents. The pirate was a young boy handcuffed and chained, but he was smiling! I couldn’t understand who would be smiling in that position. That smile intrigued me. Commentators on the news were angry about the smile, but I wanted to find out about the person smiling in this situation and know why is was smiling. The more I discovered about the Somali teenager, the more I knew his story had to be told.

No one ever talks about why there are so many guns in Somalia and where they come from. No one ever talks about the illegal foreign ships on the Somali coast. For me, the story of Somalia is a story of how the powerful shape the reality for everyone. I also felt that since 9/11 people are labeled terrorists, Islamists, fundamentalists, pirates and many other things and we lose people behind those labels.

Your parents are from Lesotho, a country that is often simplistically represented by outsiders in terms of poverty and AIDS. Does that make you particularly keen to address issues of misrepresentation?

Being from Africa and being black, one is born misrepresented. Being from Lesotho adds another layer to the misrepresentation. Somehow Lesotho means HIV/AIDS. The thing is that the misrepresentations work well for others, especially governments and international donor agencies. I think that the moment one is conscious of misrepresentations in whatever form, they spend their whole life either fighting or fleeing them. I am reminded of the story from Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man. Being black, I think we have been so misrepresented that our true self is never seen, we are only the image bearers and anyone can throw anything on us and it sticks. I sometimes wonder what it is like to be white. I guess there is a different kind of burden and misrepresentation to being white. I think it is important to challenge narratives that try to make anyone “the other”. I always try to challenge that in my work. It’s true that until the lion tells its stories, the stories of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

The socio-economic conditions that lead some Somalis to engage in piracy are not often incorporated into Western media narratives. How will your film reframe the issue of piracy off the horn of Africa?

There are reasons why the socio-economic conditions and other factors that have led to piracy in Somalia are not incorporated into the Western media narratives. For one, it serves to justify the unfettered actions of European powers on less powerful countries. No one asks why Somalia has so many guns when Somalis don’t make guns. No one talks about what the U.S and Russia have done to make Somalia what it is. No one asks how Somalia became three countries. No one asks what some of the ships hijacked by Somali pirates were doing on the Somali coast. There are many questions not being asked. No one can dispute that toxic waste containers washed ashore on the Somali coast and nothing was done about it. I tell you, if toxic containers washed up on the shores of the U.S, the world would stop. It’s the same with what Shell is doing in on the Niger Delta. The lives of the less powerful are just collateral damage, that’s all. Some animals are more important that others. What I want to do with the documentary, “The Smiling Pirate”, is to challenge the narrative that has been told about piracy and the people behind it. I think by giving piracy a human face, one breaks down the walls created to divide.

The first trailer (above) for the film “Captain Phillips” employs the narrative of good vs. evil to portray Muse and his three colleagues as skuzzy, sinister characters hijacking an honorable American captain and his crew. Tom Hanks in PR for the film has described his character meeting his hijackers as “the skinniest, scariest-looking human beings on the planet” and as “really scary-looking guys who almost resemble spiders with AK-47s.” He also told the Hollywood Reporter: “ What was your reaction when you first saw the trailer?

I was not surprised by the trailer of “Captain Phillips”. In a way, I was expecting they would do a good vs. evil kind of film and the pirates would be one-dimensional and savage while the captain would be the white knight. Americans love their heroes. They get them or they create them. That is the Hollywood formula. The list of bad guys keeps growing and they have more to choose from. First it was the Russians, then the Arabs and now Somalis. What disturbs me is that people don’t see through that. It’s very disturbing and makes me afraid of what else people are swallowing.

Is an actor like Tom Hanks, who plays Captain Phillips in the Sony Pictures film, simply doing his job as an actor in this role or is he complicit in perpetuating a-historical misrepresentations?

I am both disappointed and not disappointed in Tom Hank’s participation in the film. I am not disappointed because his work is to act and he is just doing what he is paid for. I can’t knock that. It’s his hustle. What I am disappointed in is someone who knows better and is conscious of the implications of the role and story he is doing, but closes their eyes. I believe Tom Hanks is intelligent enough to have done his research on the story and to have known that the crew of the ship that was hijacked despite the version of the story as told by the Captain. Captain Phillips himself came on CNN saying he did not give himself up for the crew, but claimed the media made it up. The crew even blamed the captain for the hijacking as he had been warned multiple times by a maritime organization to be more than 600 nautical miles off the Somali coast, but he did not heed the warnings as the ship was hijacked about 300 miles off the Somali coast. All these truths were swept under the carpet so that a hero story could be made. The truth always gets in the way so it becomes a casualty. The Sony Pictures film is based on very false premises and they know it.

The real Captain Richard Phillips published a book about his own heroism during the hijacking of the ship. Have you had a chance to read the book?

I have read the book by Captain Phillips and that is the book the [Hollywood] film will be based on. The crew of the ship contradict the version of the events as written in the book and place the blame for the hijacking on the Captain. Captain Phillips said in a CNN interview that he never said he gave himself up for his crew. Interesting thing is that the book is called A Captains Duty and the title says it all. For him to deny that he said he gave himself up and blame the media is very disingenuous. He also received at least seven emails warning him to stay clear from the Somali coast, but he did not.

Muse was sentenced to 33 years and 9 months in federal prison for hijacking, kidnapping and hostage taking, what were the peculiarities of his trial?

There were many peculiarities with Muse’s trial. First was the question of Muse’s age. When Muse was first arrested, Muse’s parents had said he was 16 years old. This created a problem because a 16 year old cannot be charged as an adult. Muse’s case kept being postponed while this aspect was being investigated.

While the situation of Muse’s age was still being looked at, Muse was kept in solitary confinement under what the U.S calls SAM’s (Special Administrative Measures) and this is mostly used for terrorism suspects. Muse said under SAM he had no access to radio, newspapers, television or anything, but was kept in solitary confinement all day for more than a year. He said he was starting to lose his mind. While in SAM, Muse tried twice to commit suicide. A doctor who was seeing him recommended that he be moved from SAM as he was starting to exhibit signs of PTSD. Muse says they kept in SAM to make him confess to being 18 years old and they said they would only release him if he confessed to that age. Suddenly an American agent said Muse confessed to being 18 years old and that led to Muse being charged as an adult. The word of the agent was never questioned. How the agent got the confession was never questioned. Muse denies ever saying he was 18 years old to anyone. Muse says that in court he wanted to talk about his age, but he was advised that if he challenged his age the government would make sure that his family never visit him or if they tried to visit him they would be made accomplices. Muse said that he stopped wanting to talk about his age because he feared for his mother after receiving this advice.

The State alleged that Muse was the mastermind of the hijacking and the leader of the group. Muse denies this and also says that pirates are foot soldiers, they just get orders. Anyone who knows anything about piracy will tell you that pirates are just hired hands and that the real people behind piracy are never on the boats, but on land giving orders. It is like saying that child soldiers are leaders and financiers of their units.

In Muse’s trial, the Judge repeatedly kept crying and talking about how Muse ruined the lives of the men who made up the crew and their families. I could not understand how a judge can be impartial whilst crying. After sentencing Muse to 33 years and 9 months, the judge said that she hopes that Muse’s sentencing sends a message to pirates that America will not tolerate piracy and will punish it to the full extent of the law. I think Muse’s case was just to send a message and nothing more. It was not about justice.

You’ve spoken to Muse directly since he began serving his sentence, what has he been able to share with you?

I speak to Muse as much as I am allowed to. All my requests to meet Muse have thus far been denied even when Muse has approved my visitation. I keep making the requests even though I know I will get the same answer. Muse says that Sony Pictures had requested to meet him countless times, but he declined their requests because he knew that they were making a film about him and were just going to make him a bad guy. At the present moment, Muse’s calls to me have been blocked. Even some of my emails to him or emails he sends me have not gone through. It seems like everything is being done to silence him. Muse has been talking about the glaring issues with his trial and says his trial was a sham. He says he did not understand English and what was happening [during the trial]. Muse says that he read the book by the Captain and many of the things in the book are made up. He even told me that the other three pirates with him were shot dead after he had made a deal with the American authorities to let them drop their guns in exchange for safe passage to Somalia. He said that just after dropping their guns and walking out of the boat there was gunfire and he watched his friends being shot dead. Muse is on suicide watch again and was recently on hunger strike. He is desperate and wants to have his case looked at again.

Did Muse ever tell you why he was smiling after his capture?

Muse says that he was kept hooded and shackled on the Navy boat after being captured. When he arrived in the U.S he says the hood was taken off. He suddenly saw people with cameras all taking photos and he was confused as to what was happening and he looked around to see what they were taking photos of until he realized that those people were taking photos of him. He says it was funny seeing all those people interested in him and he smiled.

African Writers and the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature

As the Nobel Committee for Literature announces their chosen awardee tomorrow (1pm Swedish time), the past several weeks has been littered by quite a few notable predictions, arguments, and dream-lists. Even sports betting company Ladbrokes weighed in. Ladbrokes, btw, has Assia Djebar from Algeria at 12/1 odds, Ngugi wa Thiong’o at 20/1 and Nuruddin Farrah at 40/1. (Some people are also betting on Ben Okri and Chimamanda Adichie–both at 100/1.) For committed readers and scholars of African literature, the announcement brings hope, or among the more cynical of us—doubt—that one of the continent’s literary geniuses might claim the prestigious prize. Only five African writers have been awarded the prize since its inception: Wole Soyinka (1986), Naguib Mahfouz (1988), Nadine Gordimer (1991), J.M. Coetzee (2003) and Doris Lessing (2007).

Since 1974 the Nobel Committee has disallowed the awarding of the prize posthumously, but with the passing of Chinua Achebe earlier this year, the demand that he be awarded the prize rekindled a furious debate in his home country. Anyone from Nigerian politicians in search of a cause to everyday readers of Achebe, felt he had been done by while still alive. Wole Soyinka was, however, not convinced, insisting that the call for awarding a Nobel to the late Achebe was “obscene,” “hypocritical,” and a “gross disservice to Achebe.” Nigerian politicians in search of a cause to everyday readers of Achebe all felt an African genius had been unacceptably overlooked. Indeed, in the eyes of many, the work of Achebe – from his seminal novel Things Fall Apart, stories of Biafra collected in Girls at War, and essays such as “English and the African Writer,” published in 1965 — deserved and still deserves, the Swedish award, especially given his impact on the English literary canon, global literature, and postcolonial studies.

That said, if the Swedish Academy were to reverse its stance on posthumous awards in the future, Zimbabwe’s Yvonne Vera, whose death at 40 in 2005 was a devastating loss for the African literary community, deserves a mention on this dream-list. Primarily a writer of fiction, Vera’s novels and short stories make legible the often-silenced narratives of Black urban life in colonial Rhodesia and postcolonial Zimbabwe. Her piercingly lyrical novels such as Nehanda, Butterfly Burning, and The Stone Virgins describe the paradoxes inherent to nationalism, modernity, and revolution, especially as experienced by African women. Her work has encouraged not only a fierce following by literary scholars, but has inspired a new cadre of exceptionally talented female writers from Zimbabwe such as Petina Gappah and NoViolet Bulawayo.

But this is unlikely to happen soon.

Thus, turning our sights to the living, Ngugi wa Thiong’o is perhaps the most realistic contender for the prize. From Weep Not, Child, his semi-autobiographical novel about the Mau Mau struggle in settler-colonized Kenya to his more recent epic satire The Wizard and the Crow, essays in Decolonizing the Mind and his controversial drama Ngaahika Ndeenda Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) and as well as many other works across genres, the work of wa Thiong’o represents the heft, depth, and breadth that should mark a Nobel laureate’s output.

While he was imprisoned for his socialist-inflected writing, he infamously turned from writing in English to Gikuyu. Despite or because of this, wa Thiong’o has garnered a worldwide readership, even as he continues to challenge the hegemony of the English language. His unabashed commitment to writing an African-centered vision of social transformation for Kenyans, Africans, and all people who have contended with physical and cultural forms of violence, domination, and marginalization, makes him an especially relevant choice for the prize in the aftermath of the Westgate attack.

It is ironic that the other East African writer who could be announced as the Nobel awardee tomorrow also reminds us of the recent violence and loss of life in Kenya, via his vantage point on the other side of the border. Still, the work of Somalian writer, Nurrudin Farah, should not be said to only give context to what political analysts have described as state collapse, civil war, and the rise of piracy in Somalia. Instead, Farah’s highly-acclaimed fiction, which includes three sets of trilogies, (the most well-known being the one of which includes the novels Maps, Secrets, and Gifts) tells how the fragility and power of the nation is affirmed and challenged by the stories of cities, communities, and individual people. Indeed, his masterful and complex renditions of coming-of-age, exile, and return narratives captures in colorful detail the failures, triumphs, impossibilities, and dreams which make up everyday life in the horn of Africa. It would be well-deserved good news for both Kenya and Somalia, and all of Africa, if perhaps tomorrow, we hear his name.

Lastly, and, certainly not of the least, is Algerian feminist writer Assia Djebar, whose name has often floated around the Nobel for the last several years. Djebar, a prolific writer of the French language, was inducted into the elite Académie Française in 2005 and awarded, like Nurrudin Farah, the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature. As a very strong contender for the Nobel prize, Djebar’s work unsettles the Anglophile, Sub-Saharan, and masculinist preoccupations within the African literary reading public. Her work topples singular geographic, political, and formal borders as it can be read as Islamic, secular, feminist, anti-colonial, Arab, French, (North) African and covers multiple forms including poetry, fiction, drama, essay, as well as, film screen plays. Author of over ten novels, including Vaste est la prison (So Vast the Prison), this may very well be her year to pluck the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Egyptian director Mohamed Diab talks about his film on sexual harassment

Over the last few years, the waves of sexual assault and harassment on the streets of Egypt have been in the news perpetually: Initially as a disheartening stain on the euphoria generated from the promise of political change, then as a component of the violence and oppression that has emerged in recent months. Despite being released in 2010, Cairo 678, written and directed by Mohamed Diab, gained broader recognition in the early stages of Egypt’s transition, as international outrage grew over attacks on foreigners and Egyptians alike. Now, well over two years since the revolution began, Diab’s film and the issue of sexual harassment are as pertinent as ever, as new, increasingly violent, and premeditated attacks have continued to take place. Mohamed Diab is currently the San Francisco Film Society’s Fall 2013 Artist in Residence. I recently spoke with him about the film, harassment, and his thoughts on Egypt’s future, two years on. But first, the trailer:

Cairo 678 is Diab’s first foray into directing, following a successful run as a screenwriter. The film documents the lives of three women from diverse backgrounds who have all been victims of sexual harassment and assault, and who work together to combat the problem. The women include Fayza, a mother from a low-income background who dreads taking the bus to work, anticipating the almost inevitable groping, Seba, a wealthy artist who is attacked by a gang of men at a football rally and responds by setting up a self-defense class for women, and Nelly, a stand-up comedian who files Egypt’s first sexual harassment lawsuit.

It was the story of Noha Roshdy, the first woman to file a sexual harassment case in Egypt, and the inspiration behind the character Nelly, that initially made Diab aware of the scope of the problem. When he heard of the case, he decided to attend the trial. Describing an interaction he witnessed, Diab explained: “I remember two reporters who were covering the story for news channels, they were making fun of the girl. One was saying to the other: ‘This guy deserves 15 years.’ The other turned to him and asked why, he replied ‘because he could have harassed a much better looking girl.’ I was sitting next to them and thinking, what if I were the brother of the girl?”

Diab says that after gaining insight into the extent of the problem, he felt obligated to show, particularly to men, the impact of harassment on women in Egypt. He references the police detective in his film as a representation of a portion of the target audience: an everyday man who is misinformed, or takes the issue too lightly, until it hits close to home. Diab explained that in a way the film is an apology: “As a man I really felt that we should apologize, not because all Egyptian males are harassers – the number of harassers is very low (because they’re not caught, perpetrators attack repeatedly). The majority of the rest of men in Egypt know nothing about this, because in their circles, the women who get harassed never tell them.”

The need for the issue to be better exposed became clear when the film was released. Diab described the buzz it generated, as men denied the harassment, and women confirmed its prevalence. The film was accused of exaggerating the problem, and Diab had three lawsuits filed against him: One attempting to prevent the film from going to festivals as it would tarnish Egypt’s reputation, one claiming Diab was encouraging women to stab men in the groin (character Fayza’s choice tactic to fight back against aggressors), and one filed by Egyptian pop star Tamer Hosny. The latter was Hosny’s response to one of his songs being used in the film’s trailer, the background music for an attack on a crowded bus. The song’s inclusion was no mistake. Diab explained that several of Hosny’s songs insinuate, even promote, harassment and worse. The song in question and the music video that accompanies it, includes Hosny pursuing a woman who continuously rejects his advances, he keeps following her until he ends up in her apartment. The song ends with him cornering her, grabbing her scarf and caressing her. Under the resulting pressure, Hosny has since made a song talking about harassment. Diab expressed: “I have nothing against him, I have something against what he was doing in those songs.”

On the other side of the spectrum, Cairo 678 also prompted a public response from the Salafi Al-Nour party’s co-founder and spokesperson Nader Bakkar. After sending him the film, Diab received a phone call. “He saw the film and he called me, and told me he had cried.” Shortly after their conversation, Bakkar delivered a speech during the celebration of Eid, talking about sexual harassment.

Three weeks after the film’s release, harassment, an offense previously unmentioned in Egyptian law, was made into a crime. Diab hopes his film helped secure this outcome, but credits Roshdy and the revolution for the dialogue that has emerged. Roshdy has since had to leave Egypt because of the pressure and harassment resulting from her case.

The developments since have been a mixed bag. “Even though people have been acknowledging it more and more, the attacks have become more brutal.” Referencing some of the horrific events of this year, Diab expresses his concern about the increasingly premeditated crimes. “The gang sexual harassment that I described in my film, and that I witnessed with my own eyes was something that was not organized. [In these cases] someone breaks the wall and touches a girl and everyone jumps in without knowing each other. Now they’re organized, there is more and more hunger for blood. Some of the latest attacks have been brutal.”

But Diab is quick to clarify that this is not exclusively an Egyptian problem. Everywhere he has shown the film, he says, women have approached him and told him how common it is in their communities. This has happened from the US, to Switzerland, to Mexico, to France, to India. “What I learned by showing the film is that it has nothing to do with race, religion, or any culture.” He qualifies that in other regions, “you may find fewer numbers because there is law, there is no stigma, and it is acceptable to have premarital sex, but if there was no law, you would find increased numbers of harassers.” The question for Diab is not culturally specific. Instead, he asks: “Why is there a desire to sexually harass women in the first place?”

The focus on Egypt and Islam was something that he found frustrating when the film was initially released. “The first couple of times I had interviews with large newspapers, I would read all the comments and they were accusing the culture and religion. I am a practicing Muslim, and one of the reasons I made this film was because I really felt, as a Muslim (or any other religious male in the world), you could not want to see anyone living through this injustice.” Diab made the film to help expose a problem, but has since become well acquainted with the dangers and frustrations of misrepresentation. Pointing to his decision to make a film on this subject, he expresses his hope that more Arabic women will make Arabic films to represent issues they face, but also show that they are not as mistreated as people may think.

Cairo 678 will be screened this Thursday, October 10 at 7:00 pm at New People Cinema in San Francisco. For complete Artist in Residence information visit sffs.org/Education/Artist-in-Residence.  

The Westgate Mall photographs

It has been about two weeks since the attacks at Westgate Mall in Nairobi, and as the news reports about it and its aftermath quiet, the presence of its photographs are still strong. They appear on as varied a website The Telegraph and TotallyCoolPix.com.

I first learned of the attacks through these photographs, scrolling through photographs that photojournalists had taken, mainly from inside the mall, largely alongside plain-clothes policemen. The webpages all begin with a warning of graphic or disturbing images. The warnings’ deeper implication is that the political voyeurism of photography is to be amplified so that it is unclear if we should be looking at these photographs at all.

But we do. At least I did. The photographs depicted what I can only, banally, sum-up as an ordinary day for people at the mall gone terribly wrong. Most of the police, even, are in plain-clothes. Amidst the overturned expectations of time spent at Westgate, however, the mall itself remains constant in these early photographs. There are a few which differ, mainly outdoor photographs, which show parts of the mall in disarray.

These exceptions accentuate how little of Westgate’s infrastructure was initially damaged. Preserved through these photographs, the mall appears somehow stable. In several photographs, mannequins stay upright, even though the window they are behind has been shattered by a bullet. Others show people using the stores to hide, but the coffee-shop counter behind which they are lying down still offers lids for coffee cups. The stairwell in a much-republished photograph remains a back-space that few patrons will ever go. Nakumatt’s slogan, “You need it, We’ve got it” sits unperturbed, slightly hidden behind a kneeling plain-clothed policeman. Though a person lies dead and their blood is on the floor, most of the tiles remain clean.

None of these (the tiles, slogan, stairs or mannequins) are the focal point of the photographs, and few will look at Westgate Mall the same way again. Yet the mall, as a bastion of urban capitalism, does not change. The photographs’ strong compositions replicate and prolong this constancy.

By the end of the siege, this changes. Photographs are published of collapsed floors, burnt stores, knocked-over mannequins and men inside wearing respiratory masks. These replace the initial panicked tone with something else. There is a hint of irony in the bright sunlight which illuminates a comfortable café seating area, now abandoned and largely destroyed in the aftermath of the siege.

The photographs do not, however, tell us what it all means. The disjuncture between a soldier, ready to shoot, and the pharmacy aisle down which he is walking is not entirely reconciled by the name Al-Shabaab, which is given in the photograph’s caption. Nor is the irony of photographs after the siege convincing. It hinges on a worn narrative of Africa’s precarious modernity nicely summed in one Wall Street Journal Online headline, Kenya Siege Damages African Success Story.

The fact that the brute violence of dead bodies, blood, soldiers, guns and debris lies in juxtaposition against its surroundings should lead us to question where we consider violence to belong. It was not, after all, the violence itself that was nauseating– we are inundated with such imagery all the time. It is perhaps all too obvious to point out that it was the mall that grabbed international media’s attention.

Yet discussion of the setting has been muted, perhaps for fear of falling into victim-blaming. That, however, has not stopped most media from describing the patrons as wealthy and ex-pats, and pointing to foreign ownership, in order to explain the mall as a target. It is an explanation which caricatures all involved and quickly turns into a for/against “debate” about Islam (look at the comments section here, for example). It is a simplified narrative (which is not altogether accurate) and a poor substitute for (or good distraction from) a deeper understanding of the ways that terrorism, capitalism and security are bound together in complex systems I don’t pretend to fully understand.

Westgate Mall, and what it might stand for, has become the elephant in the room. In the photographs, the mall has an overwhelming presence, but no role. Rather, the photographs capture a parallel of violences – terrorist, state, corporate (in other words, the violences of modernity) – existing side-by-side but not connecting as a mutually-constructed event. But perhaps that is not the task of these photographs. It is possible that their affect, and our powers of interpretation, lies in their incoherence.

How we tell stories about cities

A few weeks ago, Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole was the guest of the Troyeville Hotel book club in Johannesburg. Observing that the one constant in cities is that they change, Cole commented: “Cities are built on people’s bones. How, then, do we tell stories about cities so that those who have died, do not die a double death through forgetting? Below us, on street corners, are people’s dreams.”

This question is particularly worth asking in South Africa, where apartheid urban planning ripped up, dispersed, and transplanted whole communities, fragmenting families, and shattering ways of living. As we struggle – still – to decide how to remember this displacement, and what to do with the tracts of, often, semi-occupied left behind after forced removals (District Six being the obvious example), we must not forget, as Cole notes, the everyday lived realities and struggles in vanished neighbourhoods.

One response to Cole’s question can be found in the newly-opened Fietas Museum in Johannesburg. Fietas – or Pageview – is a suburb to the west of the city centre. Established in 1893 as one of the three ‘locations’ for black people in Johannesburg, Fietas became progressively more racially mixed, as Indian, African, Chinese, and ‘coloured’ people moved there, in search of an area where they could live legally near the CBD.

Like Sophiatown and District Six, Fietas developed a distinct urban character, focussed around Fourteenth Street. Shops, owned largely by Indian families, schools, mosques, temples, cinemas, and cafes drew people from both the surrounding suburb and other areas into this small, tightly packed, and intensely busy community. Nat Nakasa wrote (and this quote appears on either side of the museum’s entrance):

Well-known Nationalists come all the way from the platteland to buy in Fourteenth Street. It is possible to find members of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange or a City Councillor’s wife waiting to be served after an African labourer in Fourteenth Street.

Then what Nakasa calls the ‘bungling’ happened: under the Group Areas Act, Fietas was rezoned white. From 1957 onwards, the suburb was gradually emptied of its racially mixed population. A group of 67 families formed the Save Pageview Association in 1977 to contest forced removal, and mainly through the courts. However, the majority of traders made to relocate to the Oriental Plaza, and homes and businesses were bulldozed. What does remain of the original Fietas is because of the efforts of the Association.

Today, Fourteenth Street is a quiet suburban street in a litter-strewn, declining suburb.

But with its bright blue and red façade, the Fietas Museum is an attempt if not to breathe life back into this street, then to remind Pageview of a complicated, angry past which it – and Johannesburg – is at risk of forgetting.

The Museum was conceptualised and set up, and is now run and partly owned by Salma Patel, a former media researcher and lifelong activist, whose family has a long history not only in Fietas, but also in the building in which the museum is housed. Number 25 Fourteenth Street was one of the few buildings to survive the destruction of Fietas. Until 1977, it was owned by the Surtee family, and Surtee’s, a men’s clothing business, and Kay’s Fashion occupied the ground floor of the building.

Patel’s parents – who were both related to the Surtees – were married in the family’s living quarters above the shop, where Patel herself has lived since 1987. Surtee’s Silk Store acted as a kind of hub for the community: a place for Salma to play as a child, but also a meeting space, and a site of opposition to the apartheid state. The funeral of Suleiman M. Nana, Secretary of the Transvaal Indian Congress, took place at Surtee’s too – and was attended by 13,000 people, who crowded into Fourteenth Street and surrounds.

The museum does three things. Firstly, it remembers the multiracial history of Fietas and, more specifically, the forced removals in the late 1970s. It is a record of the urban culture and, indeed, the architecture – the city planning – destroyed by the Group Areas Act. Occupying the ground floor of the former shop, one room is dedicated to a powerful exhibition of photographs by David Goldblatt and Paul Weinberg, who documented the beginning of the area’s decline.

Secondly, the museum charts residents’ – and former residents’ – memories of Fietas. As Patel explained, it is a ‘living museum’: it needs to be filled in by the people of Fietas themselves. Its second room has along one wall, a map of Fietas where visitors are encouraged to pin photographs, letters, and other records of their experiences of the suburb. It is, in one way, an evolving, deeply personal timeline which records ordinary lives in Pageview.

As Surtee’s used to be a focal point for social and political life in Fietas, so this museum is, slowly, positioning itself to be, again, a place where residents can gather, partly to remember, but also to think about the suburb’s future.

The museum’s third aim is to force a conversation about what is happening – or not happening – to Fietas at the moment. The museum presents no narrative of triumphant overcoming of past injustices. It is, according to Patel, a record of people’s disempowerment. As several of Goldblatt’s photographs show, residents marked their rage against forced removals by writing the slogan ‘Fietas Died Today’ on houses and buildings. The museum does not suggest that there is any chance of reviving the vibrancy of Fourteenth Street: that Fietas is dead and gone. The question that it asks, though, is what to do with Pageview as it is now? Will it be allowed to slide into further decay, or will it be remade?

But rather like Fietas itself, the museum’s future is a precarious one. The Wits History Workshop provided assistance in researching aspects of the suburb’s past, and the museum has received some funding (the Johannesburg Heritage Trust funded the opening exhibition, and the Directorate of Community Development and the Directorate of Arts and Culture paid for the Museum’s launch), but the museum building is funded entirely by the Patel family. This is despite the fact that the Department of Arts and Culture’s decided to recognize Surtee’s as a heritage site in 2007. Local schools have displayed some interest in visiting, and the Museum has received positive coverage in local media.

This is not, though, enough. The museum is important not only because it is an attempt to ward off the ‘double death’ referred to by Cole, but because it addresses uncomfortable questions about Johannesburg’s present – and future.

* If you’re in or visiting Johannesburg, the museum is open Sunday-Friday, 10:00-16:00. It is closed 12:00-14:00 on Fridays. The entrance free is R50 (about US$5). Contact Salma Patel for more information: salmapatel@global.co.za

 

A Hot Mess

In the latest episode of “Black Fascination”, fashion designer Rick Owens brought a thick-boned crew of black (mostly) steppers from the US to Paris Fashion Week to stomp down the runway wearing his latest collection. Fashion critics raved, calling it amongst many accolades, “powerful”, “provocative”, and “transformative”. I called it a ‘hot mess’ and immediately got charged with the crime of being a typical never satisfied black woman, because of course, I have to catch any bone thrown my way, even if that bone comes in ill-fitted clothing, disastrous hair, and “grit face”. To be honest, what I’m really being told is that I don’t have the power to demarcate where fascination becomes mistaken for revolution. And to be discomfortingly honest, the real message is that black women have no say in what is pretty considering it is the job of non-white women to dispel the standards of beauty, and white women to reinvent it.

If anything, Owens’ fashion show allows for some great practice in mastering the art of decoding the language of the purveyors of pretty. The designer explained how the idea blossomed from step shows he found surfing YouTube. He stated, “I was attracted to how gritty it was, It was such a fuck-you to conventional beauty. They were saying, ‘We’re beautiful in our own way.’” Pause. Rewind. Decode. In other words, black women don’t care about beauty the way that normal-or rather, white- people do. Not at all Owens, we just dominate the hair weave market because we’re really concerned with configuring our own brand of pretty. While I wish there was some truth to this, the real truth is that black women are as concerned with beauty as much as any woman across this globe. By removing us from this demographic we become exceptional. We become unlike most women, making us more susceptible to the patronization of well-meaning, but uninformed, do-gooders.

Speaking of uninformed; Owens is dreadfully off when it comes to step culture. Most telling is his focus on having his performers “mean-mug”, or “grit face”. He explains it as a standard aesthetic of stepping. False! For sororities especially, this screwing of the face is rare, for it is considered not pretty. Actually, we (I was initiated into a Black sorority years ago and was on our step team) often stepped in heels, because we thought of ourselves as ladies. This still holds true. So I would like to know why when I surf YouTube videos of women stepping I mostly encounter a concern with daintiness and the performance of sexiness but Owens seemed to only find growling women? This focus on ugly perplexed even some of Owens’ performers, who were forcefully instructed by him to make the grit-face though it made them uncomfortable.

This idea that the show was a tour-de-force in the battle to bring more diversity to the fashion industry is naïve. The women were not models, they were performers. More than likely they will not grace another runway and there are no modeling agents ringing their phones to book them for Fashion Week 2014. They will not challenge the lack of diversity in the fashion industry any more than white models shot against African landscapes.  Perhaps most informing is the curious silence of black supermodels Naomi Campbell and Iman who are part of “Diversity Coalition” an advocacy group that penned a letter shortly before Paris Fashion Week calling for more color on the runway. Perhaps, like me, the never satisfied Black woman, they had something else in mind.

Palestine scores

UEFA may not have realized, but Palestine have already scored several goals in this season’s Champions League.

Africa’s best striker was widely hailed as the outstanding player on the pitch in the Champions League game at Stamford Bridge a couple of weeks ago — and no, it wasn’t Samuel Eto’o. Egyptian forward Mohamed Salah has arrived on the global stage with Swiss club FC Basel, and he’s so talented that everyone is just going to have to put up with him regardless of what they think of his politics. You see in the past year Salah scored plenty of goals for Egypt (six in World Cup qualifying so far) and it turns out he also scores goals for another nation — Palestine.

When Salah curled in Basel’s equalizer vs Jose Mourinho’s lackluster Chelsea earlier in the month  (the Swiss side went on to win) it will have been uncomfortable viewing for his many critics.

Here’s the  from last month when Basel played Maccabi Tel Aviv in the qualifying round:

[Salah] played an important part in [Basel’s] qualification for the Champions League, but it was not without controversy. At their home fixture against Israeli club Maccabi Tel Aviv, he refused to shake the opposition players’ hands for political reasons, busying himself with his shoelaces instead. Then he indicated he did not want to play the return fixture at all.

Basel management insisted on Salah’s turning out, and he gave in, albeit grudgingly so. “Football is more important than politics, and it is my job. In my thoughts, I am going to play in Palestine and not Israel, and I am going to score and win there,” he said at the time. “The Zionist flag will not be shown in the Champions League.”

His prediction came true when he scored Basel’s second goal in a 3-3 draw. Maccabi Tel Aviv were beaten 4-3 on aggregate. And about those handshakes? Salah fist-bumped instead.

Unsurprisingly, Salah’s protest drew plenty of criticism from different parts of the Israeli press, as well as from 101GreatGoals, a hugely popular website that we like for their relentless and often witty coverage of the game around the world (and their ability to mine the internet for videos of goals), but which seems to get it all wrong when it comes to politics (they’ve also dabbled in pubescent-style misogyny now and again). They ranted:

Will UEFA investigate this shocking lack of sportsmanship from the Egyptian?

After the first game, in which Salah had tied his laces to avoid shaking the hands of the Maccabi players, 101GreatGoals called it an “unsavory incident” and again called for UEFA to investigate. Investigate what exactly?

Predictably, there were those who criticized Salah for bringing politics into football, which is supposedly non-political. Those people need to go read Laurent Dubois’s recent blockbuster piece on the history of the World Cup and have a serious rethink. The sportsmanship and mutual understanding supposedly expressed through the ritual of pre-match handshakes is just one of the many circumstances in and around a football match where the sport takes on a political significance. (Remember when both Patrice Evra and Anton Ferdinand, in separate incidents, refused to shake the hands of opponents who had racially abused them?)

Of course Salah was accused of pettiness, and he certainly risked appearing juvenile with the two schemes — tying his shoelaces and fist bumping. All this shows is how narrow the opportunity for political protest was for him, and how well he used it — those fist bumps come to look almost like a series of black power salutes (check the replay).

Nowadays everybody loves Tommie Smith and John Carlos even though in 1968 the IOC kicked them out of the games and the white American establishment treated them as unsporting pariahs. Like Salah, Smith and Carlos chose a ritual moment outside of the contest itself to make their protest, and it’s worth remembering that Tommie Smith regarded his salute principally as a “human rights salute”. Salah wasn’t at the Olympics, but his courage and conviction shouldn’t be dismissed.

Clearly the fact that he scored a crucial goal definitely helped — they say you should do your talking on the pitch rather than off it, but fortunately Salah can do both.

We applaud Salah, who at the young age of 21 has realized that not only can there be no neat separation between football and politics, but also that football can provide the venue for meaningful moments of political dissent. Salah joins other leading African players like Mohamed Aboutrika and the Malian forward Frederic Kanoute who have shown their solidarity with the Palestinian people while on the football field.

Egypt’s coach Bob Bradley says Salah is “the future of Egyptian football”. Bright future.