Hubert Sauper’s 2004 documentary Darwin’s Nightmare is an astonishingly intimate and compassionate inquiry into one of the garbage heaps of our global consumer society, on the shores of Lake Victoria in Tanzania. It is also beautifully filmed, the colors of sky and water and shimmering of rotting fish, the smiles and gestures of the people, their obvious embarrassment at the strange and contradictory situation they're in, all make it hard to distance oneself from this complicated story or to deny our own complicity.
In Mwanza, giant Russian cargo jets swoop down to scoop up loads of frozen fish for the European market, while the greater part of the local population starves. The big planes sometimes arrive empty, but at other times bring cargos of tanks and other weapons to supply and enourage the region's many warlords. Sauper gets amazingly intimate interviews with those conflicted pilots, with Tanzanian prostitutes who serve them and other foreigners, a fish-factory owner, and a night watchman who hopes for war (because it would mean a better salary), and also shows us neatly-uniformed factory workers, crippled fishermen, street urchins squabbling over fish carcasses and intoxicating glue, Tanzanian government officials and European investors who want to look only at the "positive side" of the fish export business, and at the fish itself -- the Nile perch, a foreign species that has taken over the lake and grown almost as big as the Ilyushin cargo jets.
This whole complex story made me think again of a 2-year old lecture I just listened to last week, and that you may want to listen to on the web: A New American Empire? by Professor Stephen Rosen of Harvard. Rosen thinks the U.S. is not yet an empire, but that it has since Clinton been behaving like one -- disregarding the sovereignty of other states within its "imperium," or area of hegemony, and exercising overwhelming military force within that region. The disparity of power between the U.S. and every other potentially allied country is so great that this country has only three choices, Rosen thinks: to assume full imperial control in the regions of interest to it, to limit itself to intervening only in coalition with other military powers, or to withdraw from any interference overseas and just take care of our own North American territory. The second option is unrealistic, because there just isn't any other military power the U.S. needs to take seriously, at least not among our potential allies. The U.S. army spends more on R&D than France does on its entire military. The third option is also unlikely, though the Tom Delay wing of the Republican Party would probably favor it. But the first option implies more than invading and trying to police a foreign country whenever we are provoked. Rather, it implies assuming responsibilities of maintaining stability and some degree of prosperity in the regions that accept our imperial dominance. Rosen proposes the establishment of an "imperial civil service," similar to what the Romans, the Ottoman, the Chinese, and the British all had in their respective empires -- that Harvard and other institutions undertake to train people to serve in foreign regions.
OK, so how do I connect Sauper's film and Rosen's lecture? I see what is happening in Mwanza as a consequence of the breakup of an older imperial system, and the failure so far to consolidate a new one. But this note is already too long, and the connections you see between the film and the tectonic shifts in global imperial systems since, say, 1989 may be very different from the ones I see. But check out both the lecture and the film, if you can.
2005/08/07
2005/08/06
Saúl Yurkiévich
Yesterday we learned that our dear friend, poet and critic Saúl Yurkiévich, had died in an automobile accident near his and his wife Gladys's summer home in the south of France. Here's something I wrote about him the last time I saw him, a year and a half ago: In the homeland of language. (You have to scroll down to the third item on the page.)
On my Spanish-language blog, today 5 August 2005, I've posted one of his last poems, "Yo".
On my Spanish-language blog, today 5 August 2005, I've posted one of his last poems, "Yo".
2005/07/31
Northern Ireland: the Troubles continue
The IRA’s disarmament doesn’t mean the end of the Troubles, as the NYT’s Brian Lavery reports today. The “loyalist” paramilitaries continue murdering one another. It’s time to re-read a classic of the Irish struggles, Liam O’Flaherty’s 1925 novel The Informer, which made a profound impact on me when I read it in my adolescence. It is one of the works that has most helped me understand how the struggle for liberation can turn the combatants into monsters. It happens over and over. Somewhere, probably in the Svendborg poems, Bertolt Brecht remarks about the terrible personal cost, the distortion of one’s own capacity to love and be generous, that comes in long struggle, even when the objective of the struggle is to free mankind from something as horrible as Nazism.
“Lawrence of Arabia” & imperial follies
Speaking of Turks, the other night we rented David Lean’s 1962 movie “Lawrence of Arabia,” which neither of us had seen for, oh, maybe 40 years. It’s about how the Arabs got mobilized by the British to kill Turks during World War I, so that the British and French could divide up the Ottoman Empire for themselves – and how some of those Arabs got sick and tired of being used for other people’s empires and began to conceive of Arab nationalism. The young British Major T. E. Lawrence, as a catalyst for Arab raids and a deeply ambivalent and self-deceived promoter of Arab nationalism, was a useful tool of His Majesty’s government, and became an embarrassed hero after the war was over.
Well before the movie was released, I had already read T. E. Lawrence’s colorful memoirs, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, plus every book I could find about his life. (If you want to do this today, check out the T. E. Lawrence –Lawrence of Arabia website.) I found Peter O'Toole’s portrayal of the doubts, confusions, outrageous exhibitionism and rash impulsiveness of the man just about perfect – except that the actor was about a foot taller than the real Lawrence, whose physical puniness no doubt contributed to his compensatory compulsion to one-up the other English officers, often by playing barbaric practical jokes.
I had started researching him because the girl I was then madly in love with said that I reminded her of Lawrence, which I mistook for a compliment. I now think what she meant was that I was moody and unsure of my identity – but then, I was only 17. Lawrence, or T. E. Shaw as he took to calling himself after his Arabian adventures (he tried to get George Bernard Shaw to adopt him), was still trying out different identities when he suffered that fatal crack-up on his motorcycle at age 47.
Mostly the movie is useful today as a reminder of the unintended consequences of Great Powers’ meddling in other people’s cultures. We in the West are still paying the price of the shortsighted interventions of British, French and later U.S. for their various strategic purposes.
Except for the sadistic colonel and his minions who administer a frightful beating to the disguised Lawrence, the Turks in that movie are all faceless and brutish khaki-clad conscripts whose only function is to be slaughtered by Lawrence’s Arab cavalry. In reality, most of those extras were Spanish farmers and fisherman of Carboneras, the little village on the Mediterranean coast of Almería where key battle scenes were filmed. A fake city of Akaba was built on Algorrobico beach, which is why the morning after the battle Lawrence (in the movie) looks eastward over a great expanse of water to the sunrise (the real Akaba’s water-view is to the south, over the narrow gulf – here’s a map). We know the Algorrobico beach well, in fact we just came back from there. And that was really why we rented the movie, just to see a familiar setting in its movie guise.
Well before the movie was released, I had already read T. E. Lawrence’s colorful memoirs, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, plus every book I could find about his life. (If you want to do this today, check out the T. E. Lawrence –Lawrence of Arabia website.) I found Peter O'Toole’s portrayal of the doubts, confusions, outrageous exhibitionism and rash impulsiveness of the man just about perfect – except that the actor was about a foot taller than the real Lawrence, whose physical puniness no doubt contributed to his compensatory compulsion to one-up the other English officers, often by playing barbaric practical jokes.
I had started researching him because the girl I was then madly in love with said that I reminded her of Lawrence, which I mistook for a compliment. I now think what she meant was that I was moody and unsure of my identity – but then, I was only 17. Lawrence, or T. E. Shaw as he took to calling himself after his Arabian adventures (he tried to get George Bernard Shaw to adopt him), was still trying out different identities when he suffered that fatal crack-up on his motorcycle at age 47.
Mostly the movie is useful today as a reminder of the unintended consequences of Great Powers’ meddling in other people’s cultures. We in the West are still paying the price of the shortsighted interventions of British, French and later U.S. for their various strategic purposes.
Except for the sadistic colonel and his minions who administer a frightful beating to the disguised Lawrence, the Turks in that movie are all faceless and brutish khaki-clad conscripts whose only function is to be slaughtered by Lawrence’s Arab cavalry. In reality, most of those extras were Spanish farmers and fisherman of Carboneras, the little village on the Mediterranean coast of Almería where key battle scenes were filmed. A fake city of Akaba was built on Algorrobico beach, which is why the morning after the battle Lawrence (in the movie) looks eastward over a great expanse of water to the sunrise (the real Akaba’s water-view is to the south, over the narrow gulf – here’s a map). We know the Algorrobico beach well, in fact we just came back from there. And that was really why we rented the movie, just to see a familiar setting in its movie guise.
2005/07/28
Recent reading: Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul
Pamuk, Orhan. Istanbul: Memories and the City. Translated by Maureen Freely. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.
Pamuk projects his personal melancholy -- hüzün in Turkish -- onto this once-great city, interspersing reminiscences of a privileged but cloistered childhood with meditations on writers and artists who have portrayed the city.
Istanbul’s hüzün, he tells us, is different from the tristesse that Claude Lévi-Strauss found in tropical cities such as Delhi or São Paulo, because “in Istanbul the remains of a glorious past civilization are everywhere visible. … For the city’s more sensitive and attuned residents, these ruins are reminders that the present city is so poor and confused that it can never again dream of rising to its former heights of wealth, power, and culture.” (p. 101) Sensitive and attuned though he may be, he appears unaware that Delhi had “a glorious past civilization” of its own, even more ancient than Istanbul/Constantinople.
Flaubert, Gérard de Nerval, Théophile de Gautier and other foreign visitors help shape Pamuk’s vision of what the city was like before he knew it, and also, he argues, shaped the way of looking at it of later Turkish writers, particularly “the great fat poet, Yahya Kemal”; “the popular historian Reshat Ekrem Koçu”; the memoirist Abdülhuk Shinasi Hisar; and the novelist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar. (Spellings approximate; I don’t have a Turkish font.)
To me the most interesting chapter was “The Rich,” the class from which Pamuk’s family was descending (falling) throughout his childhood, which includes this acute observation:
“If Istanbul’s westernized bourgeoisie gave support to the military interventions of the past forty years, never strenuously objecting to military interference in politics, it was not because it feared a leftist uprising (the Turkish left in this country [sic] has never been strong enough to achieve such a feat); rather, the elite’s tolerance of the military was rooted in the fear that one day the lower classes would combine forces with the new rich pouring in from the provinces to abolish the westernized bourgeois way of life under the banner of religion.” (p. 183)
His personal story here goes up to about age 20, when, in the final sentence, he declares that he is going to be a writer. His reminiscences of childhood help explain some of the peculiarities of his fiction, for example his childhood fascination with an imaginary double (“the other Orhan”), which is the central theme of The White Castle, and his fascination with miniaturists and meticulous reproduction of familiar scenes, as in My Name is Red. And the many photographs and other illustrations, one or more on almost every page, all in black and white, seem to confirm his vision of his own and his city’s hüzün.
Pamuk projects his personal melancholy -- hüzün in Turkish -- onto this once-great city, interspersing reminiscences of a privileged but cloistered childhood with meditations on writers and artists who have portrayed the city.
Istanbul’s hüzün, he tells us, is different from the tristesse that Claude Lévi-Strauss found in tropical cities such as Delhi or São Paulo, because “in Istanbul the remains of a glorious past civilization are everywhere visible. … For the city’s more sensitive and attuned residents, these ruins are reminders that the present city is so poor and confused that it can never again dream of rising to its former heights of wealth, power, and culture.” (p. 101) Sensitive and attuned though he may be, he appears unaware that Delhi had “a glorious past civilization” of its own, even more ancient than Istanbul/Constantinople.
Flaubert, Gérard de Nerval, Théophile de Gautier and other foreign visitors help shape Pamuk’s vision of what the city was like before he knew it, and also, he argues, shaped the way of looking at it of later Turkish writers, particularly “the great fat poet, Yahya Kemal”; “the popular historian Reshat Ekrem Koçu”; the memoirist Abdülhuk Shinasi Hisar; and the novelist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar. (Spellings approximate; I don’t have a Turkish font.)
To me the most interesting chapter was “The Rich,” the class from which Pamuk’s family was descending (falling) throughout his childhood, which includes this acute observation:
“If Istanbul’s westernized bourgeoisie gave support to the military interventions of the past forty years, never strenuously objecting to military interference in politics, it was not because it feared a leftist uprising (the Turkish left in this country [sic] has never been strong enough to achieve such a feat); rather, the elite’s tolerance of the military was rooted in the fear that one day the lower classes would combine forces with the new rich pouring in from the provinces to abolish the westernized bourgeois way of life under the banner of religion.” (p. 183)
His personal story here goes up to about age 20, when, in the final sentence, he declares that he is going to be a writer. His reminiscences of childhood help explain some of the peculiarities of his fiction, for example his childhood fascination with an imaginary double (“the other Orhan”), which is the central theme of The White Castle, and his fascination with miniaturists and meticulous reproduction of familiar scenes, as in My Name is Red. And the many photographs and other illustrations, one or more on almost every page, all in black and white, seem to confirm his vision of his own and his city’s hüzün.
2005/07/15
Best wishes
I signed up for the Google ad service, whereby ads supposedly related to the content of the blog get placed in the box over to the side of this page. Suddenly, after I posted my reactions to the London bombings and the apparent desperation of some British Muslim youth, I see a bunch of ads for "Muslim dating". That's a happy result of Google's algorithms! Hey, guys. Feeling lonely and unappreciated? Don't get a bomb. Get a date!
2005/07/14
Fiction to grasp reality: British Muslim extremism
Yesterday I mentioned Zadie Smith and Salman Rushdie, and I regret having omitted Hanif Kureishi, as fiction writers who can help us understand what happened last Thursday in London. The BBC has published portraits of three of the suspected (almost certain) bombers. And this report from Leeds by Dominic Casciani suggests some of the powerful factors that drive some Muslim youth to such extremist actions. One "young man, wearing traditional Pakistani dress and a beard," describes one reason why the parents, first-generation immigrants who presumably want their kids to stay of trouble, can't control them. "There's a language barrier - the kids speaking English, the elders not - and then there are huge cultural barriers. Some of the kids won't talk to the elders, they think it's too difficult."
And as Thursday's events confirm, a huge cultural barrier can grow between these youth -- as assimilated as they appear -- and the white majority around them, despite the many shared experiences and common language. The people of Britain, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, cannot begin to control this desperate tendency among those young people until they can imagine what their inner lives are like. No doubt there are social workers and psychologists in those communities (such as Leeds) who are able to imagine. For the rest of us, we must rely on the fiction writers such as Smith, Rushdie, Kureishi and their successors to provide us the elements for our own imagining.
For historical background on the militancy of British Muslims, see today's article by Roger Hardy, BBC Islamic Affairs analyst, UK multiculturalism under spotlight.
And as Thursday's events confirm, a huge cultural barrier can grow between these youth -- as assimilated as they appear -- and the white majority around them, despite the many shared experiences and common language. The people of Britain, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, cannot begin to control this desperate tendency among those young people until they can imagine what their inner lives are like. No doubt there are social workers and psychologists in those communities (such as Leeds) who are able to imagine. For the rest of us, we must rely on the fiction writers such as Smith, Rushdie, Kureishi and their successors to provide us the elements for our own imagining.
For historical background on the militancy of British Muslims, see today's article by Roger Hardy, BBC Islamic Affairs analyst, UK multiculturalism under spotlight.
2005/07/13
Home-grown fanatics & Zadie Smith
The discovery that the London bombers were four British-born lads of Pakistani heritage, radicalized in their own North England community, made me think immediately of Zadie Smith's angry young British Bangladeshi in White Teeth. The most serious action he undertakes is joining in a mass burning of a novel that neither he nor anyone he knows has read, but that he has been told insults Islam (that other novel isn't named, but the reference is clearly to Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, a wonderfully complex and comic book about cultural displacement of South Asians in Britain). Smith's treatment, like Rushdie's, is comic, but the dynamic toward terror is evident.
2005/07/10
London bombings: a personal response
My apologies for the long silence while I was in Spain. Without a home computer (see earlier note on getting robbed in the Atocha train station on April 30) it just seemed too complicated to try to digitalize and post my thoughts, so I returned to my more ancient system, notebook and pen. If any of those handwritten notes from the past two months seem still worth sharing, I'll post them. Those that were on current events that are no longer current, I'll spare you.
I boarded the bus from Carboneras to Madrid last Tuesday evening at 8:30, and arrived at the Estación Sur in Madrid (a bus terminal connected to a metro stop) around 6: a.m. on Wednesday. There I got right onto the metro and, with one change of trains, got to the Barajas airport where I checked in and waited for a 3:25p.m. Iberia flight that got me to London Heathrow a little after 6 p.m. London time (7 p.m. Madrid time), and just barely caught the British Airways flight to JFK that got me in about 8:45 p.m., New York time. The next morning I learned about the London bombs on the tube and bus.
The images -- not of the blood, but of the setting -- were very familiar to me, and so were the accents of the people trying to comprehend what had happened. Usually on trips to Spain, we have used the London tube and a long bus ride to connect between Heathrow (for the NYC-London segment) and the smaller airport Stansted, clear across town and beyond, for cheap flights between London & Spain. And when we can, we like to walk around the center of the city itself. Also, over the past year we have made some dear friends among the English retirees and semi-retired living in and around Carboneras, but still strongly connected (through children and grandchildren and other associations) with the homeland. This massive attack thus seemed as close to me, almost, as the attack on the World Trade Center towers in 2001. (See my 5-day personal account, Attack on New York .)
Bravo to the brave Londoners, especially all the emergency medical and other personnel. We don't know precisely what the bombers had in mind (since we don't even know who they were), but it sure looks as though you Londoners are being made to pay a price for Tony Blair's mad-dog aggression in Iraq. Which, truth be told, has caused many times as many fatalities, mostly Iraqis, as the New York, Madrid and London attacks combined.
The New York 9/11 attack occurred long before Bush and Blair's attack on Iraq, proving that some Arab religious nuts had other grievances against our city. Still, I think the recent London bombing must be related to the images of destruction and death in Iraq, much of it caused by Arabs resisting the occupation but much more of it -- the destruction of Falluja, for example -- by the bombs and artillery of the U.S. and its allies. If, as seems almost certain, the London attack was organized in similar fashion to the attack on the Atocha train station in Madrid on 11 March 2004, the operatives were a pick-up team of local boys of Arab or other Muslim origin, knowledgeable of the local terrain and transport system and radicalized largely around the Iraq issue. (On the Madrid attack, see Casimiro García-Abadillo, 11-M. La venganza. Madrid, 2004; see also my op-ed column on the Spanish elections 3 days later, Historic Reversal: Bombs and Ballots in Spain).
Doesn't it seem odd that the people who bombed Baghdad and allowed its ancient treasures to be pillaged now claim to be defenders of civilization? Blair actually used that phrase right after the London attack.
I boarded the bus from Carboneras to Madrid last Tuesday evening at 8:30, and arrived at the Estación Sur in Madrid (a bus terminal connected to a metro stop) around 6: a.m. on Wednesday. There I got right onto the metro and, with one change of trains, got to the Barajas airport where I checked in and waited for a 3:25p.m. Iberia flight that got me to London Heathrow a little after 6 p.m. London time (7 p.m. Madrid time), and just barely caught the British Airways flight to JFK that got me in about 8:45 p.m., New York time. The next morning I learned about the London bombs on the tube and bus.
The images -- not of the blood, but of the setting -- were very familiar to me, and so were the accents of the people trying to comprehend what had happened. Usually on trips to Spain, we have used the London tube and a long bus ride to connect between Heathrow (for the NYC-London segment) and the smaller airport Stansted, clear across town and beyond, for cheap flights between London & Spain. And when we can, we like to walk around the center of the city itself. Also, over the past year we have made some dear friends among the English retirees and semi-retired living in and around Carboneras, but still strongly connected (through children and grandchildren and other associations) with the homeland. This massive attack thus seemed as close to me, almost, as the attack on the World Trade Center towers in 2001. (See my 5-day personal account, Attack on New York .)
Bravo to the brave Londoners, especially all the emergency medical and other personnel. We don't know precisely what the bombers had in mind (since we don't even know who they were), but it sure looks as though you Londoners are being made to pay a price for Tony Blair's mad-dog aggression in Iraq. Which, truth be told, has caused many times as many fatalities, mostly Iraqis, as the New York, Madrid and London attacks combined.
The New York 9/11 attack occurred long before Bush and Blair's attack on Iraq, proving that some Arab religious nuts had other grievances against our city. Still, I think the recent London bombing must be related to the images of destruction and death in Iraq, much of it caused by Arabs resisting the occupation but much more of it -- the destruction of Falluja, for example -- by the bombs and artillery of the U.S. and its allies. If, as seems almost certain, the London attack was organized in similar fashion to the attack on the Atocha train station in Madrid on 11 March 2004, the operatives were a pick-up team of local boys of Arab or other Muslim origin, knowledgeable of the local terrain and transport system and radicalized largely around the Iraq issue. (On the Madrid attack, see Casimiro García-Abadillo, 11-M. La venganza. Madrid, 2004; see also my op-ed column on the Spanish elections 3 days later, Historic Reversal: Bombs and Ballots in Spain).
Doesn't it seem odd that the people who bombed Baghdad and allowed its ancient treasures to be pillaged now claim to be defenders of civilization? Blair actually used that phrase right after the London attack.
2005/05/17
When in Spain...
... do as the Spaniards do. We'll be here in Almería until the end of June, & because it's hard to keep updating 2 blogs without a home computer (see note below for explanation of that problem), I'm pretty much limiting myself to notes in Spanish. Please see new entries in my Spanish-language blog, Lecturas y Lectores. I'll probably have more to say in English when we get back to New York. Thanks for your patience. I hope you can read Spanish, if not, just ask (drop me a line) & I'll try to make sense out of it.
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