This was an interesting project for me for five reasons. First, it was my second attempt at a creative project — I apologize that you have to be subjected to a writer’s early work. Having lived in the realm of academic and journalistic non-fiction through my entire writing career it was nice to venture into “creative” writing land.
Secondly, for me this project brought two separate classes, two separate areas of study, together into one thought and that thought became my short story “Comings and Goings.” When asked to think about race and autobiography, as we had all semester in ENGL 233: African-American Literature, and apply those ideas to ourselves I immediately thought of a single moment that crystallized, for me, my understanding of my racial and cultural heritage. When asked to think about partition and postcolonialism in ENGL 351: Postcolonial Studies the same series of events came to my mind and I found that the two were inseparable. I could not write a racial autobiography without also thinking about the violence of partition, borderlands and people as borderlands, and most especially hybridity. Thus, the first half of “Comings and Goings” (whose title I appropriated from Salman Rushdie’s novel Shadow Lines because, completely by coincidence, all the experiences I shared had to do with coming from or going to some place) echoes most heavily the themes of postcolonialism I mentioned above and the second half examines my feelings about race and culture.
In addition to being only my second creative work, as well as a mesh of ideas across disciplines, “Comings and Goings” was also a difficult, (even painful), self-examination that coalesced into a public presentation of the private self. It thus, felt fitting to approach the project from an Edward Said-type perspective, with a scholarly and removed approach. Since this work was an academically constructed self-reflection it seemed fitting to acknowledge this fact by allowing my adult voice to dominate my 8-year-old self who experienced this story. However, this had not been my original intention. I had wanted a more Reading in the Dark type narrator, but when I started committing words to the page the more removed, older, scholarly voice came out and it seemed right. And though this story is autobiographical, this reflection was carefully constructed. Just as Said deliberately chose the specific experiences that make up “Out of Place” I carefully selected the moments of my life that I would share.
The public component of this work was also a new and interesting experience for me, which might seem strange for a journalist who sees her name in local papers several times a week. As a journalist my audience remains nameless and faceless. They are simply the 80,000 or so people who read at an 11th grade level or above and still get some of their news from that old-fashioned thing called a newspaper. But posting “Comings and Goings” up on the ENGL 351 class blog felt somehow different. For starters, this was not some game story on some team I enjoyed watching but had little connection to. This was a story about me and people who I knew and respected were going to read it. I also had to share my story with both of my English classes as part of the prewriting and postwriting process, which was even more frightening than posting it on the blog because I had to look my colleagues in the eyes as I shared it. However, I am glad I dared to take that Jacobs- and Douglass- and Wright- and Said-like step because I think it will embolden me and encourage me to dare more in the future.
Completing this project also revealed something to me about the creative writing process — it is not like journalism or academic writing. You cannot force it as you might an essay or newspaper article and just follow a well-known formula for success. The creative writing process does not heed the urgent call of deadlines. Now I understand why James Joyce was happy when he wrote three sentences in a day. As my work on “Comings and Goings” came to a close I had an epiphany. I realized that I tend to take a J.R.R. Tolkien/Mark Twain approach to terminating a project. I never want to stop working on a piece. I want to hold on to it forever and continue to come back to it over and over again until its perfect. I have had editors delete stories from my workspace so that I couldn’t keep revising them. However, once I have released a story out into cyberspace I have released it forever. Like Twain, I do not believe in revision. Twain rarely looked at his stories in print and never took advantage of reprintings to tweak or touch up a finished product. I too almost never look at my newspaper articles in print, for which editors and colleagues alike have often chided me. As far as I am concerned, it is what it is and there’s no sense dwelling on it.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Comings and Goings
By Vanessa D. Overbeck
In 1988 I spent seven months in the most dangerous place in America. I was just 8 years old.
“Something has happened at your Uncle’s place,” my father said. Lying on the floor, head in my hands watching afternoon cartoons on my first day of summer break, I barely glanced up at him in response, but that was long enough to see that he had his stern Indian face on. I reluctantly switched to a more attentive posture.
“Something bad and your cousin Jonathon must come away before something worse happens.”
Jonathon? I remembered the tall, brooding boy much older than me who only smiled when others were not around. I remembered my father described him as playing the silent Indian too much. Still not seeing what this had to do with me my eyes flicked back to the antics of Tom and Jerry.
“Vanessa Dawn, this is serious. I need you to do something for the Family.”
Oh, no. We only invoked the FAMILY when death or disaster struck. I froze in my crossed-legged position and waited for the bomb to drop. My father picked me up off the floor and I marveled, as I always did, at how easily he swept my little self up so high. He sat me on his lap and wrapped his arms around me. Skin to skin we looked like coffee and cream and I wondered again if mixed together if we would taste like comfort on a cold day.
“Your cousin has gotten into some trouble and Uncle Red Cloud asked if Jonathon could come here to get away for awhile. He offered to have you and your sister stay for the summer in exchange and go to the school’s summer Lakota culture camp with your cousins.”
I knew there was no way my mother was going to let my baby sister go anywhere without her, so this was really about me going to the reservation to protect my uncle’s pride. This transaction had to look like a fair trade and not a request for charity. Seeing my skeptical look my father smiled.
“You know your sister doesn’t do change well, she has too much of the Indian in her,” he laughed tweaking my freckled nose, “but I know you’ll see this as an adventure. And who knows, maybe being around all your cousins for awhile some of that Indian may rub off on you.”
I looked down at my lightly tanned legs and hoped.
So there I was, not 15 years after the Wounded Knee Incident, on my way to the Pine Ridge Reservation which boasted the highest murder per capita rate any where in the nation. My Great Uncle Red Cloud, the patriarch of the South Dakota branch of the Overbeck family met me at the airport in Rapid City with my cousin Jonathon in tow.
I was excited to see him despite the fact that he was the reason I had to leave my lazy summer vacation plans behind in California. I remembered how much he’d babied me when last we visited the family ranch. He had carried me high on his shoulders everywhere we went. I hardly walked a step. And when it was just us he never seemed to stop singing and laughing. But when we returned from one of our adventures his eyes would become dark and cold and he seemed to retreat away from the world. I remember being confused when my aunt complained that her little songbird never laughed or sang anymore. He always sang with me. He told her that at 17 he was too old to play the entertaining Indian. But when no one was around I could always convince him to tell me a story. He never seemed to run out of tales about the crafty but foolish Iktomi and I loved the way the Lakota words rolled off his tongue, sounding both familiar and foreign. He called me his little porcelain doll and I loved it. It was a nice change from being expected to be the son my father would never have.
When I saw him walking a few steps behind the ramrod-straight bearing of my ancient uncle I rushed away from the stewardess loosely holding my hand at the boarding gate. My uncle’s big smile cracked his wizened, wrinkled face and he bent down to scoop me up, but it wasn’t to him that I was running. I started to brush past him headed to the Jonathon I remembered when I saw his heavily bandaged arm hanging limply in a sling. I slowed, catching a glimpse of his face under the hood of his sweatshirt I stopped and retreated behind my uncle. This was not the Jonathon I remembered.
His right eye was completely swollen shut and angry, dark, purple bruises covered his entire face. His lips were split and puffy and I knew that it would be a long time before music would come from his mouth again. He had six staples along his hairline and it was then I noticed that all his beautiful black hair was gone. I started crying. I couldn’t help myself. My uncle picked me up and I burrowed into his jacket, breathing deep the comforting smell of tobacco, sage and naturally cured leather.
“Grab your bags Jon and let’s go get your cousin’s things. It’s time to get you out of here.”
After we put Jonathon on the plane we climbed into my uncle’s infamous ancient white truck. It was the only thing on the ranch that looked older than my great uncle who had served as a tribal leader for more than 35 years and as an AIM activist for nearly 20 years. The front fender of the 1950 Ford had more dents than smooth silver curves and it was tied to the car with a tattered piece of heavy rawhide. There were so many layers of dirt and grime covering the grill I couldn’t tell where the layers of earth ended and the chrome began. Patches of rust spread out like Rorschach blotches all over the body of the truck and one headlight was completely smashed. I looked at my uncle quizzically and noticed his glasses had gotten thicker since I’d seen him last, too.
“Still a doubter I see Chikala Apawi,” my uncle said, using the pet name the Family had given me — a term of endearment for Dawn, meaning Little Sun. “Don’t worry this truck has plenty of miles to go before its last rest. We’ll get you home.”
I reluctantly climbed in. What I really wanted to do was run back to the airport to the last phone I would see for weeks and call my father and tell him I didn’t want to be a brave little Indian, that I wanted to go back to the home I knew. But I didn’t. I thought of the emptiness I’d seen in my battered cousin’s eyes and I thought of those staples holding his head together and I climbed into the truck.
The truck sputtered and complained to itself as we began the 120-mile drive to the ranch, located some distance north of Martin. I tried to not let my uncle see me crying and to protect my pride he let the silence drag. After awhile, captivated by the rolling plains my tears stopped. Even browned by the summer sun the plains were as beautiful as I remembered. The land seemed to stretch away forever until earth and cloud met. I said as much to my uncle.
“Actually all of this land was lost to us long ago. Our home used to stretch from sunrise to sunset, but now we hold such a small part.”
We turned off highway 90 (the only highway running east to west through South Dakota) and headed south down a deeply rutted dirt road towards the heart of southern South Dakota. Over the next hour my uncle pointed out the tracts of land that belonged to local ranchers and farmers versus the land held in trust by tribal members like him. He said the ranch was actually recovered land he had bought up piece by piece over the years and would be ranched by the Family as long as they were interested in doing so. Then it would be returned to the Sioux nation. I remembering telling him I didn’t understand how something so big could ever be lost. He said he didn’t understand it either.
“I have a map in the glove box I’ve kept up to date over the years that shows Shannon, Todd and Bennett counties. That’s where Pine Ridge, Rosebud and the ranch are. Pull it out and see for yourself.”
It was a ragtag thing and an ample use of scotch tape was barely holding it together. I was careful to open it slowly so as not to tear the yellowed pages. To the east and west red pencil clearly delineated the borders of the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations, then something happens in between them. In Bennett County, where the ranch lay, the map was covered with dark red splotches, signifying lands held in tribal trusts. Dozens of oddly shaped red splotches dotted northern Bennett County. They lied everywhere and anywhere with no rhyme or reason. Some of the lines on the map had been drawn, erased and redrawn many times over so that the eraser marks were embedded in the paper. That made it difficult to tell whether the red spots were connected to others, or if they stood alone, surrounded by tracts of land owned by white farmers and ranchers or the U.S. government. My uncle’s ranch was one of those.
“You will need to stay on the ranch. People have been restless around here. It happens when the wind takes a holiday. People complain of it blowing them around all the time, but when it’s gone they’re irritated by its absence. Just keep your cousins in sight and do as they tell you,” my uncle said as we turned onto the long drive leading past the schoolhouse to the ranch house about another ½ mile down.
I remembered feeling confused and scared. How was I suppose to tell what was and wasn’t the ranch? Maps are supposed to be so clear and concise with their neat boxes and straight lines, but holding one I felt nothing but uncertainty.
We pulled up to the schoolhouse and I was greeted by the sound of children loudly singing, “You put your whole self in, you put your whole self out, you put your whole self in and you shake it all about …” then some of the younger children broke off laughing as they came running to the truck having seen my ancient uncle who always brought them sweets after a trip into town. They swarmed him greedily while my older cousins Michael Hot Feet, 14, and Jacob Chayton, 16 sauntered over more slowly. I hung back shyly by the truck. I wasn’t sure how they would remember me.
“Hey pale face, so you came back,” Michael joked pinching my cheek.
“So is our little California Sioux happy to be back in the homeland,” Jacob said shooting a challenging look at my uncle who shot a warning look back. I tried to ignore the tension even an 8-year-old could feel and I told him I was glad he remembered me.
“We’re happy you’re here cousin,” Jacob said giving me a reassuring hug. “And since I’ve been charged with your protection and entertainment we’re going to do all the fishing and swimming you can stand.” I smiled. I did so love my cousins.
The next day my cousin was true to his word. As it was Sunday, after morning chores the children on the ranch had a free day so we headed to the creek that meandered its way through Buffalo Ranch, home of a large tribal band of Oglala and Sicangu Sioux that tend one of the largest privately owned herds of bison in the country. My cousins Jacob and Hot Feet, and his friends, the twins Samuel Little Elk, 14, and Aaron Storm Cloud, came with us. We lugged our poles and picnic lunch, burgeoning with treats carefully packed by my Great Aunt Kat, down to a place Jacob said the creek widened and formed a deep pool where we could fish and swim. It was a walk of several miles and by the time we got there I was out of breath and my little legs were aching with trying to keep up with the loping strides of my tall cousins and their friends.
They quickly stripped off their shirts and shoes and ran into the water. I marveled at their dark skin and embarrassed by my whiteness I just took off my socks and shoes and stuck my feet in the water. I didn’t want them to laugh at the white daughter of their proud Lakota uncle. But with the hot summer sun beating down my hesitation only lasted a few minutes. I stripped down to my swimsuit as surreptitiously as I could and slipped into the water while they were busy dunking each other. But teenagers miss nothing and my embarrassment did not go unnoticed.
“Don’t worry cousin. After a summer in the South Dakota sun you’ll look just like us,” Hot Feet said laughing at my discomfort.
“And why would she want that Hot Feet,” Jacob said. “As it is she can go to school, maybe even college, get a job and have a life that doesn’t have anything to do with mending fence posts or shoveling shit and she doesn’t have to join the military to get it. This gets to be a summer adventure on a ranch at Lakota camp for her.”
My cousin’s words stung me deeply. They hung in the air above us, pressing down with a muggy heaviness that left me struggling to breath. I was hot and dizzy with embarrassment and for a moment no one moved. Then Jacob’s scowl cracked and his embarrassment matched mine.
“Cate Sice, Chikala Apawi,” Jacob said switching to formal Lakota to apologize. Shoulders slumped and head hung low Jacob got out of the water and sat on the rocky shore looking away from us over the rolling plains towards the life he wanted.
Hot Feet put his arm around me and pulled me towards the now splashing twins who had more quickly shrugged off Jacob’s gloom. Hot Feet whispered in my ear that Jacob wanted to go to school at St. Francis on Rosebud so he could get his GED and enlist in the marines. That morning Uncle Red Cloud had given Jacob the Family’s decision. He said that with the brucellosis scare reducing the market for buffalo meat there was no money to board him and pay for another man to work in his place. And tensions with the surrounding white cattle ranchers were running too high to consent to regular travel between the ranch and the nearest city with a high school, Martin, which sat 45 miles away.
Despite the bright sun the rest of the day’s pleasantries were dampened by Jacob’s disappointment. He tried to snap out of it, sitting close to me and telling me the story of the time Iktomi tried to catch a fish. I wiggled excitedly hoping a great grandfather fish would grab my line too and drag me down to the bottom of the pond and show me what life as a water creature was like. Instead Jacob swooped me up and jumped into the water pulling me down till we touched the cold rocky bottom and then we shot up towards the hot summer sun. As we broke through the surface together I didn’t feel like a blonde, green-eyed girl who slept under city lights and knew neighborhoods and schoolyards and movie houses and shopping malls. I felt like Jacob’s family — sad to see him hurting, sad to see him longing for something I couldn’t give him.
When the picnic basket had been empty for some time and my teenage companion’s stomachs had begun to rumble we packed up our things and began the long hike back to Aunt Kat’s cooking. Now in a hurry my cousins took turns carrying me on their shoulders as they raced back to the ranch house down the narrow hunting path that led through the tall grasses. We had just crested the top of a slight rise when Jacob suddenly stopped and started scanning the horizon.
“Do you smell that?” Jacob asked turning to Hot Feet.
“Buffalo,” Little Elk and Storm Cloud said together as they dropped down to hide in the high grass.
I caught a glimpse of several dark brown masses off in the distance as Jacob dropped me down off his shoulders. He pulled me down alongside the others and we peered through the grass at the shaggy shapes moving steadily towards the trail that led to the watering hole.
“We’re down wind so we’ll just have to take the long way around them,” Jacob said as he turned west away from the trail, pulling Hot Feet and I along with him.
As we moved away I kept my eyes on the behemoths that used to rule the plains. At one point the small group of buffalo passed within just 30 yards of us and I was enthralled by their lumbering power. It was then Jacob noticed that Little Elk and Storm Cloud were not with us. They had dropped back and were lying on their bellies in the tall grass just off the side of the trail. The buffalo would pass them by mere inches, which was exactly what the quietly snickering twins seemed to intend. Frozen in horror we watched as the buffalo moved past the twins seemingly unaware of their presence. Just as the last of the great beasts passed by Storm Cloud slowly stood and reached out to touch her. Then there was a flurry of dust and movement, screaming and pounding of hooves as the buffalo raced away towards the creek.
Too frightened to move I huddled where I was with Hot Feet as Jacob ran to Little Elk who was bent over his writhing brother. Jacob kneeled over Storm Cloud for a moment then turned to Hot Feet and yelled, “Run.” Hot Feet who had earned his name for the speed his feet gave him dropped my hand and took off for the ranch house lying less than a mile away. Jacob took off his shirt and pressed it to Storm Cloud’s right side where the horn of the buffalo had grazed him before bolting away. Red quickly soaked through Jacob’s shirt, so Little Elk and I gave him ours. There was so much red. It spilled onto the dirt, caked the grass and covered Jacob’s hands. By the time Hot Feet returned with help the bleeding had slowed but Storm Cloud’s face was the color of ash. My uncles William and Thunder Spirit quickly lifted him into the back of my Great Uncle’s truck.
“Take Little Elk and Dawn back to the house,” Uncle Red Cloud instructed Jacob sternly, disappointment already coloring his words. “We’re going to take Storm Cloud to the emergency clinic on Pine Ridge.”
Little Elk fought to get into the truck with his brother, but Jacob roughly pushed him back. “They’ll have to go through Marshall’s property to get to the clinic. It’s the fastest way. You know what happened to Jonathon the last time they caught us on their land,” Jacob said holding Little Elk tightly. It was then I noticed the gun in the cab with Uncle Red Cloud and the loaded shotguns in the truck bed. Little Elk looked scared before but now he too was gray with fear and I began to cry.
It was a full day before my great uncle returned with word about Storm Cloud. They had traveled through neighboring rancher Scott Marshall’s land unmolested. Storm Cloud had needed 17 stitches to close the wound and nearly 3 pints of blood, but he was stabilized and on his way to the regional hospital in Rapid City. My Great Aunt Kat nearly fainted with relief. After making his report my uncle pulled Jacob aside. When my cousin returned he was red with anger and his fists were balled up tightly at his sides. Later Jacob told me that Uncle said he was disappointed in him as he was responsible for us when Storm Cloud was hurt.
Jacob spent the rest of the week in a sullen and angry mood. He went about his work with a military efficiency that I admired given my awkward and bumbling attempts at assistance. By the end of my first week on the ranch I had begun to figure out how to be of some use and my comical mishaps with mucking stalls, feeding chickens and milking cows had created enough cracks in Jacob’s cool reserve that he became himself again.
After the incident at the watering hole Jacob had kept me pretty close to the ranch house, but that Sunday he was charged with driving me to Martin so that he could pick up a handful of supplies and so that I could use the phone at the market to check in with my family. When Aunt Kat recommended the excursion I could tell she thought she had delayed me from telling my father all about my exciting first day as long as she could.
It was assumed Hot Feet, ever his older cousin’s shadow, would tag along but Little Elk joined us as well, also hoping to use the only phone for 60 miles to reach out to his brother. The two had never been apart and the weeklong separation had made him listless and distracted, which only further angered my uncle who had been hard on him, as well. Little Elk and Storm Cloud’s foolishness had not gone unnoticed.
As my uncle handed over the truck keys to Jacob he hesitated, giving him a stern look. The wrinkled crevices around his eyes deepened and his mouth tightened into a paper-thin line before he reluctantly dropped the keys into Jacob’s waiting hand. My 16-year-old cousin was nearly wriggling with excitement. A brief smile cracked my ancient uncle’s stern expression as Jacob happily ushered us into the truck, quick to get away before my uncle changed his mind. The truck sputtered to life and off we went to run a few simple errands that for me would become a defining moment in my life.
The trip into town was uneventful. We passed the hour-long drive telling stories, but this time it was my turn. Jacob and Hot Feet asked me about the movies I’d seen, the school I went to on the Chumash Reservation where I lived, what the ocean smelled like and how often I got to go to a mall. At first I was reluctant and embarrassed, but they were relentless, thirsty as they were for contact with a world not made of earth and sky and wind.
Before I knew it the dirt road had ended and we turned down a narrow paved two-lane street that marked the edge of Martin. Jacob turned in to the Martin Market less than a ¼ mile down the street and I grabbed Aunt Kay’s grocery list from the glove box. The market was housed in a small converted barn and from the outside looked like any rural market with produce filling wooden bins lining the covered porch. The middle-aged woman at the counter near the door immediately lifted her eyes to a man sweeping at the back of the small store as we entered. He came up to the counter and stood beside her as we filed down the short aisles looking for the things on Aunt Kat’s list. The couple’s eyes were cold and hard and they bore down on us mercilessly. Jacob, Hot Feet and Storm Cloud grew quiet and I could feel their tension rising as they moved quickly to grab what we needed.
We laid the dozen or so items Aunt Kat had requested on the counter and the couple glared at the three boys.
“We also need 10 pounds of flour,” Jacob said and I was surprised his voice didn’t shake under the weight of their leaden gaze.
They didn’t move. They didn’t say anything. They simply stood there and looked at Jacob with disdain. Hot Feet and Storm Cloud shifted uncomfortably. Jacob turned and quietly whispered to them to go back to the truck. Then he bent down and put the money Aunt Kat had given him for the groceries in my hand and asked me to make sure I got the flour. Then with all the pride he could muster he turned and walked out the door, leaving me standing there at the counter.
Shaking and unsure of what exactly was going on I stood there staring at the glaring couple. They seemed to tower over me, and their red-hot anger made me shake with fear. I remember how desperate I was to get out of that frightening and confusing place, so desperate that somehow I managed to shakily ask for the 10 pounds of flour. She slowly grabbed a bag and scooped the flour into it all the while looking at me with a puzzled expression on her face. She loaded the rest of the groceries into another bag took the money I handed her and gave me the change all with that pained questioning look on her face. I grabbed the bags anxious to leave, but as I turned to go she grabbed my arm and asked, “What are you doing with those people?”
Shocked and scared I stared at her trying to make sense of her words. Then it dawned on me that she didn’t see me as the little Lakota girl that I saw inside myself. She couldn’t see that proud Sicangu girl I wanted to be. All she saw was the white skin that matched the hand painfully gripping my arm.
I pulled away and replied, “Those are my people.”
The ride home was again quiet and strained. My proud Lakota cousins were fuming and they sat on either side of me in an uncomfortable silence. It was then I realized that I was something different from them. Something not completely of the world where sky touched earth but also not totally of the world of city lights and malls and movie theaters. I lived somewhere in the middle and flowed between the two separate spaces. I snuggled up next to my cousins, content to be between them, but also happy that for me there was another world to which I could return.
In 1988 I spent seven months in the most dangerous place in America. I was just 8 years old.
“Something has happened at your Uncle’s place,” my father said. Lying on the floor, head in my hands watching afternoon cartoons on my first day of summer break, I barely glanced up at him in response, but that was long enough to see that he had his stern Indian face on. I reluctantly switched to a more attentive posture.
“Something bad and your cousin Jonathon must come away before something worse happens.”
Jonathon? I remembered the tall, brooding boy much older than me who only smiled when others were not around. I remembered my father described him as playing the silent Indian too much. Still not seeing what this had to do with me my eyes flicked back to the antics of Tom and Jerry.
“Vanessa Dawn, this is serious. I need you to do something for the Family.”
Oh, no. We only invoked the FAMILY when death or disaster struck. I froze in my crossed-legged position and waited for the bomb to drop. My father picked me up off the floor and I marveled, as I always did, at how easily he swept my little self up so high. He sat me on his lap and wrapped his arms around me. Skin to skin we looked like coffee and cream and I wondered again if mixed together if we would taste like comfort on a cold day.
“Your cousin has gotten into some trouble and Uncle Red Cloud asked if Jonathon could come here to get away for awhile. He offered to have you and your sister stay for the summer in exchange and go to the school’s summer Lakota culture camp with your cousins.”
I knew there was no way my mother was going to let my baby sister go anywhere without her, so this was really about me going to the reservation to protect my uncle’s pride. This transaction had to look like a fair trade and not a request for charity. Seeing my skeptical look my father smiled.
“You know your sister doesn’t do change well, she has too much of the Indian in her,” he laughed tweaking my freckled nose, “but I know you’ll see this as an adventure. And who knows, maybe being around all your cousins for awhile some of that Indian may rub off on you.”
I looked down at my lightly tanned legs and hoped.
So there I was, not 15 years after the Wounded Knee Incident, on my way to the Pine Ridge Reservation which boasted the highest murder per capita rate any where in the nation. My Great Uncle Red Cloud, the patriarch of the South Dakota branch of the Overbeck family met me at the airport in Rapid City with my cousin Jonathon in tow.
I was excited to see him despite the fact that he was the reason I had to leave my lazy summer vacation plans behind in California. I remembered how much he’d babied me when last we visited the family ranch. He had carried me high on his shoulders everywhere we went. I hardly walked a step. And when it was just us he never seemed to stop singing and laughing. But when we returned from one of our adventures his eyes would become dark and cold and he seemed to retreat away from the world. I remember being confused when my aunt complained that her little songbird never laughed or sang anymore. He always sang with me. He told her that at 17 he was too old to play the entertaining Indian. But when no one was around I could always convince him to tell me a story. He never seemed to run out of tales about the crafty but foolish Iktomi and I loved the way the Lakota words rolled off his tongue, sounding both familiar and foreign. He called me his little porcelain doll and I loved it. It was a nice change from being expected to be the son my father would never have.
When I saw him walking a few steps behind the ramrod-straight bearing of my ancient uncle I rushed away from the stewardess loosely holding my hand at the boarding gate. My uncle’s big smile cracked his wizened, wrinkled face and he bent down to scoop me up, but it wasn’t to him that I was running. I started to brush past him headed to the Jonathon I remembered when I saw his heavily bandaged arm hanging limply in a sling. I slowed, catching a glimpse of his face under the hood of his sweatshirt I stopped and retreated behind my uncle. This was not the Jonathon I remembered.
His right eye was completely swollen shut and angry, dark, purple bruises covered his entire face. His lips were split and puffy and I knew that it would be a long time before music would come from his mouth again. He had six staples along his hairline and it was then I noticed that all his beautiful black hair was gone. I started crying. I couldn’t help myself. My uncle picked me up and I burrowed into his jacket, breathing deep the comforting smell of tobacco, sage and naturally cured leather.
“Grab your bags Jon and let’s go get your cousin’s things. It’s time to get you out of here.”
After we put Jonathon on the plane we climbed into my uncle’s infamous ancient white truck. It was the only thing on the ranch that looked older than my great uncle who had served as a tribal leader for more than 35 years and as an AIM activist for nearly 20 years. The front fender of the 1950 Ford had more dents than smooth silver curves and it was tied to the car with a tattered piece of heavy rawhide. There were so many layers of dirt and grime covering the grill I couldn’t tell where the layers of earth ended and the chrome began. Patches of rust spread out like Rorschach blotches all over the body of the truck and one headlight was completely smashed. I looked at my uncle quizzically and noticed his glasses had gotten thicker since I’d seen him last, too.
“Still a doubter I see Chikala Apawi,” my uncle said, using the pet name the Family had given me — a term of endearment for Dawn, meaning Little Sun. “Don’t worry this truck has plenty of miles to go before its last rest. We’ll get you home.”
I reluctantly climbed in. What I really wanted to do was run back to the airport to the last phone I would see for weeks and call my father and tell him I didn’t want to be a brave little Indian, that I wanted to go back to the home I knew. But I didn’t. I thought of the emptiness I’d seen in my battered cousin’s eyes and I thought of those staples holding his head together and I climbed into the truck.
The truck sputtered and complained to itself as we began the 120-mile drive to the ranch, located some distance north of Martin. I tried to not let my uncle see me crying and to protect my pride he let the silence drag. After awhile, captivated by the rolling plains my tears stopped. Even browned by the summer sun the plains were as beautiful as I remembered. The land seemed to stretch away forever until earth and cloud met. I said as much to my uncle.
“Actually all of this land was lost to us long ago. Our home used to stretch from sunrise to sunset, but now we hold such a small part.”
We turned off highway 90 (the only highway running east to west through South Dakota) and headed south down a deeply rutted dirt road towards the heart of southern South Dakota. Over the next hour my uncle pointed out the tracts of land that belonged to local ranchers and farmers versus the land held in trust by tribal members like him. He said the ranch was actually recovered land he had bought up piece by piece over the years and would be ranched by the Family as long as they were interested in doing so. Then it would be returned to the Sioux nation. I remembering telling him I didn’t understand how something so big could ever be lost. He said he didn’t understand it either.
“I have a map in the glove box I’ve kept up to date over the years that shows Shannon, Todd and Bennett counties. That’s where Pine Ridge, Rosebud and the ranch are. Pull it out and see for yourself.”
It was a ragtag thing and an ample use of scotch tape was barely holding it together. I was careful to open it slowly so as not to tear the yellowed pages. To the east and west red pencil clearly delineated the borders of the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations, then something happens in between them. In Bennett County, where the ranch lay, the map was covered with dark red splotches, signifying lands held in tribal trusts. Dozens of oddly shaped red splotches dotted northern Bennett County. They lied everywhere and anywhere with no rhyme or reason. Some of the lines on the map had been drawn, erased and redrawn many times over so that the eraser marks were embedded in the paper. That made it difficult to tell whether the red spots were connected to others, or if they stood alone, surrounded by tracts of land owned by white farmers and ranchers or the U.S. government. My uncle’s ranch was one of those.
“You will need to stay on the ranch. People have been restless around here. It happens when the wind takes a holiday. People complain of it blowing them around all the time, but when it’s gone they’re irritated by its absence. Just keep your cousins in sight and do as they tell you,” my uncle said as we turned onto the long drive leading past the schoolhouse to the ranch house about another ½ mile down.
I remembered feeling confused and scared. How was I suppose to tell what was and wasn’t the ranch? Maps are supposed to be so clear and concise with their neat boxes and straight lines, but holding one I felt nothing but uncertainty.
We pulled up to the schoolhouse and I was greeted by the sound of children loudly singing, “You put your whole self in, you put your whole self out, you put your whole self in and you shake it all about …” then some of the younger children broke off laughing as they came running to the truck having seen my ancient uncle who always brought them sweets after a trip into town. They swarmed him greedily while my older cousins Michael Hot Feet, 14, and Jacob Chayton, 16 sauntered over more slowly. I hung back shyly by the truck. I wasn’t sure how they would remember me.
“Hey pale face, so you came back,” Michael joked pinching my cheek.
“So is our little California Sioux happy to be back in the homeland,” Jacob said shooting a challenging look at my uncle who shot a warning look back. I tried to ignore the tension even an 8-year-old could feel and I told him I was glad he remembered me.
“We’re happy you’re here cousin,” Jacob said giving me a reassuring hug. “And since I’ve been charged with your protection and entertainment we’re going to do all the fishing and swimming you can stand.” I smiled. I did so love my cousins.
The next day my cousin was true to his word. As it was Sunday, after morning chores the children on the ranch had a free day so we headed to the creek that meandered its way through Buffalo Ranch, home of a large tribal band of Oglala and Sicangu Sioux that tend one of the largest privately owned herds of bison in the country. My cousins Jacob and Hot Feet, and his friends, the twins Samuel Little Elk, 14, and Aaron Storm Cloud, came with us. We lugged our poles and picnic lunch, burgeoning with treats carefully packed by my Great Aunt Kat, down to a place Jacob said the creek widened and formed a deep pool where we could fish and swim. It was a walk of several miles and by the time we got there I was out of breath and my little legs were aching with trying to keep up with the loping strides of my tall cousins and their friends.
They quickly stripped off their shirts and shoes and ran into the water. I marveled at their dark skin and embarrassed by my whiteness I just took off my socks and shoes and stuck my feet in the water. I didn’t want them to laugh at the white daughter of their proud Lakota uncle. But with the hot summer sun beating down my hesitation only lasted a few minutes. I stripped down to my swimsuit as surreptitiously as I could and slipped into the water while they were busy dunking each other. But teenagers miss nothing and my embarrassment did not go unnoticed.
“Don’t worry cousin. After a summer in the South Dakota sun you’ll look just like us,” Hot Feet said laughing at my discomfort.
“And why would she want that Hot Feet,” Jacob said. “As it is she can go to school, maybe even college, get a job and have a life that doesn’t have anything to do with mending fence posts or shoveling shit and she doesn’t have to join the military to get it. This gets to be a summer adventure on a ranch at Lakota camp for her.”
My cousin’s words stung me deeply. They hung in the air above us, pressing down with a muggy heaviness that left me struggling to breath. I was hot and dizzy with embarrassment and for a moment no one moved. Then Jacob’s scowl cracked and his embarrassment matched mine.
“Cate Sice, Chikala Apawi,” Jacob said switching to formal Lakota to apologize. Shoulders slumped and head hung low Jacob got out of the water and sat on the rocky shore looking away from us over the rolling plains towards the life he wanted.
Hot Feet put his arm around me and pulled me towards the now splashing twins who had more quickly shrugged off Jacob’s gloom. Hot Feet whispered in my ear that Jacob wanted to go to school at St. Francis on Rosebud so he could get his GED and enlist in the marines. That morning Uncle Red Cloud had given Jacob the Family’s decision. He said that with the brucellosis scare reducing the market for buffalo meat there was no money to board him and pay for another man to work in his place. And tensions with the surrounding white cattle ranchers were running too high to consent to regular travel between the ranch and the nearest city with a high school, Martin, which sat 45 miles away.
Despite the bright sun the rest of the day’s pleasantries were dampened by Jacob’s disappointment. He tried to snap out of it, sitting close to me and telling me the story of the time Iktomi tried to catch a fish. I wiggled excitedly hoping a great grandfather fish would grab my line too and drag me down to the bottom of the pond and show me what life as a water creature was like. Instead Jacob swooped me up and jumped into the water pulling me down till we touched the cold rocky bottom and then we shot up towards the hot summer sun. As we broke through the surface together I didn’t feel like a blonde, green-eyed girl who slept under city lights and knew neighborhoods and schoolyards and movie houses and shopping malls. I felt like Jacob’s family — sad to see him hurting, sad to see him longing for something I couldn’t give him.
When the picnic basket had been empty for some time and my teenage companion’s stomachs had begun to rumble we packed up our things and began the long hike back to Aunt Kat’s cooking. Now in a hurry my cousins took turns carrying me on their shoulders as they raced back to the ranch house down the narrow hunting path that led through the tall grasses. We had just crested the top of a slight rise when Jacob suddenly stopped and started scanning the horizon.
“Do you smell that?” Jacob asked turning to Hot Feet.
“Buffalo,” Little Elk and Storm Cloud said together as they dropped down to hide in the high grass.
I caught a glimpse of several dark brown masses off in the distance as Jacob dropped me down off his shoulders. He pulled me down alongside the others and we peered through the grass at the shaggy shapes moving steadily towards the trail that led to the watering hole.
“We’re down wind so we’ll just have to take the long way around them,” Jacob said as he turned west away from the trail, pulling Hot Feet and I along with him.
As we moved away I kept my eyes on the behemoths that used to rule the plains. At one point the small group of buffalo passed within just 30 yards of us and I was enthralled by their lumbering power. It was then Jacob noticed that Little Elk and Storm Cloud were not with us. They had dropped back and were lying on their bellies in the tall grass just off the side of the trail. The buffalo would pass them by mere inches, which was exactly what the quietly snickering twins seemed to intend. Frozen in horror we watched as the buffalo moved past the twins seemingly unaware of their presence. Just as the last of the great beasts passed by Storm Cloud slowly stood and reached out to touch her. Then there was a flurry of dust and movement, screaming and pounding of hooves as the buffalo raced away towards the creek.
Too frightened to move I huddled where I was with Hot Feet as Jacob ran to Little Elk who was bent over his writhing brother. Jacob kneeled over Storm Cloud for a moment then turned to Hot Feet and yelled, “Run.” Hot Feet who had earned his name for the speed his feet gave him dropped my hand and took off for the ranch house lying less than a mile away. Jacob took off his shirt and pressed it to Storm Cloud’s right side where the horn of the buffalo had grazed him before bolting away. Red quickly soaked through Jacob’s shirt, so Little Elk and I gave him ours. There was so much red. It spilled onto the dirt, caked the grass and covered Jacob’s hands. By the time Hot Feet returned with help the bleeding had slowed but Storm Cloud’s face was the color of ash. My uncles William and Thunder Spirit quickly lifted him into the back of my Great Uncle’s truck.
“Take Little Elk and Dawn back to the house,” Uncle Red Cloud instructed Jacob sternly, disappointment already coloring his words. “We’re going to take Storm Cloud to the emergency clinic on Pine Ridge.”
Little Elk fought to get into the truck with his brother, but Jacob roughly pushed him back. “They’ll have to go through Marshall’s property to get to the clinic. It’s the fastest way. You know what happened to Jonathon the last time they caught us on their land,” Jacob said holding Little Elk tightly. It was then I noticed the gun in the cab with Uncle Red Cloud and the loaded shotguns in the truck bed. Little Elk looked scared before but now he too was gray with fear and I began to cry.
It was a full day before my great uncle returned with word about Storm Cloud. They had traveled through neighboring rancher Scott Marshall’s land unmolested. Storm Cloud had needed 17 stitches to close the wound and nearly 3 pints of blood, but he was stabilized and on his way to the regional hospital in Rapid City. My Great Aunt Kat nearly fainted with relief. After making his report my uncle pulled Jacob aside. When my cousin returned he was red with anger and his fists were balled up tightly at his sides. Later Jacob told me that Uncle said he was disappointed in him as he was responsible for us when Storm Cloud was hurt.
Jacob spent the rest of the week in a sullen and angry mood. He went about his work with a military efficiency that I admired given my awkward and bumbling attempts at assistance. By the end of my first week on the ranch I had begun to figure out how to be of some use and my comical mishaps with mucking stalls, feeding chickens and milking cows had created enough cracks in Jacob’s cool reserve that he became himself again.
After the incident at the watering hole Jacob had kept me pretty close to the ranch house, but that Sunday he was charged with driving me to Martin so that he could pick up a handful of supplies and so that I could use the phone at the market to check in with my family. When Aunt Kat recommended the excursion I could tell she thought she had delayed me from telling my father all about my exciting first day as long as she could.
It was assumed Hot Feet, ever his older cousin’s shadow, would tag along but Little Elk joined us as well, also hoping to use the only phone for 60 miles to reach out to his brother. The two had never been apart and the weeklong separation had made him listless and distracted, which only further angered my uncle who had been hard on him, as well. Little Elk and Storm Cloud’s foolishness had not gone unnoticed.
As my uncle handed over the truck keys to Jacob he hesitated, giving him a stern look. The wrinkled crevices around his eyes deepened and his mouth tightened into a paper-thin line before he reluctantly dropped the keys into Jacob’s waiting hand. My 16-year-old cousin was nearly wriggling with excitement. A brief smile cracked my ancient uncle’s stern expression as Jacob happily ushered us into the truck, quick to get away before my uncle changed his mind. The truck sputtered to life and off we went to run a few simple errands that for me would become a defining moment in my life.
The trip into town was uneventful. We passed the hour-long drive telling stories, but this time it was my turn. Jacob and Hot Feet asked me about the movies I’d seen, the school I went to on the Chumash Reservation where I lived, what the ocean smelled like and how often I got to go to a mall. At first I was reluctant and embarrassed, but they were relentless, thirsty as they were for contact with a world not made of earth and sky and wind.
Before I knew it the dirt road had ended and we turned down a narrow paved two-lane street that marked the edge of Martin. Jacob turned in to the Martin Market less than a ¼ mile down the street and I grabbed Aunt Kay’s grocery list from the glove box. The market was housed in a small converted barn and from the outside looked like any rural market with produce filling wooden bins lining the covered porch. The middle-aged woman at the counter near the door immediately lifted her eyes to a man sweeping at the back of the small store as we entered. He came up to the counter and stood beside her as we filed down the short aisles looking for the things on Aunt Kat’s list. The couple’s eyes were cold and hard and they bore down on us mercilessly. Jacob, Hot Feet and Storm Cloud grew quiet and I could feel their tension rising as they moved quickly to grab what we needed.
We laid the dozen or so items Aunt Kat had requested on the counter and the couple glared at the three boys.
“We also need 10 pounds of flour,” Jacob said and I was surprised his voice didn’t shake under the weight of their leaden gaze.
They didn’t move. They didn’t say anything. They simply stood there and looked at Jacob with disdain. Hot Feet and Storm Cloud shifted uncomfortably. Jacob turned and quietly whispered to them to go back to the truck. Then he bent down and put the money Aunt Kat had given him for the groceries in my hand and asked me to make sure I got the flour. Then with all the pride he could muster he turned and walked out the door, leaving me standing there at the counter.
Shaking and unsure of what exactly was going on I stood there staring at the glaring couple. They seemed to tower over me, and their red-hot anger made me shake with fear. I remember how desperate I was to get out of that frightening and confusing place, so desperate that somehow I managed to shakily ask for the 10 pounds of flour. She slowly grabbed a bag and scooped the flour into it all the while looking at me with a puzzled expression on her face. She loaded the rest of the groceries into another bag took the money I handed her and gave me the change all with that pained questioning look on her face. I grabbed the bags anxious to leave, but as I turned to go she grabbed my arm and asked, “What are you doing with those people?”
Shocked and scared I stared at her trying to make sense of her words. Then it dawned on me that she didn’t see me as the little Lakota girl that I saw inside myself. She couldn’t see that proud Sicangu girl I wanted to be. All she saw was the white skin that matched the hand painfully gripping my arm.
I pulled away and replied, “Those are my people.”
The ride home was again quiet and strained. My proud Lakota cousins were fuming and they sat on either side of me in an uncomfortable silence. It was then I realized that I was something different from them. Something not completely of the world where sky touched earth but also not totally of the world of city lights and malls and movie theaters. I lived somewhere in the middle and flowed between the two separate spaces. I snuggled up next to my cousins, content to be between them, but also happy that for me there was another world to which I could return.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Article about Trial over Rachel Corrie's Death
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-israel-corrie-20101022,0,1110771.story
Truth and the Price of Onions
Truth becomes a scary word in the film Silent Waters. One must be a “true Muslim” in order to serve Pakistan, and Allah. Pakistan is the “true Islamic nation,” and Muslims the “true keepers of the soil.” True is a word loaded with such religious and political significance. From the mouths of those who believe in their own truth (a truth they themselves have defined), a black-and-white border extends. But what is true? The borderland that results from the ambiguity created by terms like “true” and “false” is cavernous and dangerous. Because, in the borderland, dwell the uncompromising leaders and the victimized. Hardly any in between.
I think we mistrust people who seem too certain of “Truth.” At least I do. The two Muslims from Lahore, in the movie, are callous and single-minded, certain that Islam is the only way (although, in the beginning, one of them does want to go about converting people more subtly-- get to know them first) and we know they bring trouble from the start. I think as outside observers, too, we are frightened by how quickly sheep find their shepherd. Crowds and groups of people will gravitate to anyone who sells something convincingly. The strongest, loudest voice ends up speaking the “Truth.”
Memories are influenced by this idea of Truth too. The stronger something is advocated, the more likely people are to remember it. The more convincingly something is delivered, the more people will CHOOSE to believe it. I think memory essentially becomes choice. Saleem chose his path, and how to remember/forget his mother. He will choose which part of her to remember- Veero or Ayesha? (I really liked what Dawn said about this in her post…) He chose to abandon what he knew of his mother’s past, to preserve nothing of her family’s memory. Yet that memory lives on with Zubeida (even though what exactly she knows is unclear) because she chose to keep Ayesha’s necklace. Who knows what will become truth when looking back? The “Truth” depends on the stories Zubeida and Saleem choose to tell.
Ayesha was stuck in a borderland, between places and times, between the past and the future. She chose not to tell Saleem about her past, to keep her Sikh identity hidden. That identity is hidden in her old name and possessions, and somewhere in her memory, and yet she chose not to tell her son until the very end of the movie. That choice affected the way Saleem’s whole life played out. New knowledge found out so late in his life couldn’t become “Truth” for him after being so indoctrinated in something else.
Silent Waters definitely builds on questions of memory and identity that we’ve raised with almost book we’ve read. Said’s memoir, in particular, raised the question of memory v. fiction. His story, and how we remember him, depends on his own memories, how he chooses to remember them, and how he chooses to include them in his book. Memory is story, story is memory, and both are choice.
Zubeida’s quote at the end of the movie sticks with me: “I remember Ayesha very well. But what’s the point of remembering her? Does it change the price of onions?” Truth and memory sometimes have little bearing on reality.
I think we mistrust people who seem too certain of “Truth.” At least I do. The two Muslims from Lahore, in the movie, are callous and single-minded, certain that Islam is the only way (although, in the beginning, one of them does want to go about converting people more subtly-- get to know them first) and we know they bring trouble from the start. I think as outside observers, too, we are frightened by how quickly sheep find their shepherd. Crowds and groups of people will gravitate to anyone who sells something convincingly. The strongest, loudest voice ends up speaking the “Truth.”
Memories are influenced by this idea of Truth too. The stronger something is advocated, the more likely people are to remember it. The more convincingly something is delivered, the more people will CHOOSE to believe it. I think memory essentially becomes choice. Saleem chose his path, and how to remember/forget his mother. He will choose which part of her to remember- Veero or Ayesha? (I really liked what Dawn said about this in her post…) He chose to abandon what he knew of his mother’s past, to preserve nothing of her family’s memory. Yet that memory lives on with Zubeida (even though what exactly she knows is unclear) because she chose to keep Ayesha’s necklace. Who knows what will become truth when looking back? The “Truth” depends on the stories Zubeida and Saleem choose to tell.
Ayesha was stuck in a borderland, between places and times, between the past and the future. She chose not to tell Saleem about her past, to keep her Sikh identity hidden. That identity is hidden in her old name and possessions, and somewhere in her memory, and yet she chose not to tell her son until the very end of the movie. That choice affected the way Saleem’s whole life played out. New knowledge found out so late in his life couldn’t become “Truth” for him after being so indoctrinated in something else.
Silent Waters definitely builds on questions of memory and identity that we’ve raised with almost book we’ve read. Said’s memoir, in particular, raised the question of memory v. fiction. His story, and how we remember him, depends on his own memories, how he chooses to remember them, and how he chooses to include them in his book. Memory is story, story is memory, and both are choice.
Zubeida’s quote at the end of the movie sticks with me: “I remember Ayesha very well. But what’s the point of remembering her? Does it change the price of onions?” Truth and memory sometimes have little bearing on reality.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Silent Waters
So where to begin with Silent Waters? As far as films go, this is a solid film. The well-drawn characters motivate the audience to take an interest in the coming of age stories of two Pakistani youths one generation after partition. Shot on location in a Pakistani village we get a “real” look at day-to-day Pakistani life 40 years after the nation’s creation. Although, most critics heaviest criticisms were applied to this section of the film, its meanderings through the daily life and customs of the people gave me time to invest in this “other” culture, so that when the film took a darker turn I was in it for the long haul.
And this film was bound to take a dark turn as it wasn’t really about Zubeida and Saleem’s young love affair. It was really about the pitfalls of religious fundamentalism and nationalism. This story was really about Ayesha.
We’ve seen this character before, only last time we were in India. And this, for me was where the movie fell short. If I made this connection than others surely did too, and given the message of the film — religious fundamentalism and nationalism is bad for society, and especially for women — then this film is a political statement. There is evidence to support this as it appears Silent Waters has only been shown in Pakistan through the will and means of the director herself. Thus, the film must be addressed to an international audience. However, for this to be a successful political statement (in my book) it must inspire at least feelings of wanting to take action in the viewer. The message is certainly pretty clear in this well crafted film and audiences will leave viewings feeling pretty negatively about Islamic nationalism, but that’s it. Where the book (not the movie) Cracking India succeeds as a political statement, Silent Waters fails. It offers no political prescription.
Cracking India delivered essentially the same message as Silent Waters, but it didn’t end there. In a “think globally, act locally” kind of a movement readers saw women banding together to provide aid to those victimized by partition. But in Silent Waters, there is none of that. In fact, we get the opposite. In order to cope with the particulars of his nation’s birth, Saleem becomes a leader of the oppressive Islamic nationalist movement and Zubeida goes on with her oppressive Islamic life. And what of the Sikh (or other minority) women living out their lives in Pakistan: there is no place for you in this idealized Muslim world and you will eventually be crushed by the weight of the façade.
And it is, after all, a façade. In Silent Waters Ayesha’s tragic fates shows that extremism requires that you ignore the reality of things. And the reality is that Pakistanis carry a muddled past into a confused present, but ignoring that fact does not make it go away. Distorting the truth to fit some idealized picture of what you are serves no one. But what is the audience suppose to do with that? Apparently nothing, because that’s exactly what Zubeida and Saleem do: nothing. Thus, the audience is left enlightened, but unaffected by the film as it affects no action.
It is interesting that the films we’ve watched have, overall, been extremely pessimistic about the present state and possible future of things, while the books we’ve read have, overall, been less so. The films Cracking India, Silent Waters, and The Wind that Shakes the Barley have portrayed a dismal and tragic state of affairs with little hope for peace. However, books such as Cracking India, Out of Place, and even The Shadow Lines may present a dismal view of the past they have an ounce of hope for the future with their ideas of acting locally, hybridity, and truth.
One thing I have taken from all the works we’ve discussed is how a few extremists can sway the many to violence and equally, how just a few with peaceful intent can help a nation heal.
And this film was bound to take a dark turn as it wasn’t really about Zubeida and Saleem’s young love affair. It was really about the pitfalls of religious fundamentalism and nationalism. This story was really about Ayesha.
We’ve seen this character before, only last time we were in India. And this, for me was where the movie fell short. If I made this connection than others surely did too, and given the message of the film — religious fundamentalism and nationalism is bad for society, and especially for women — then this film is a political statement. There is evidence to support this as it appears Silent Waters has only been shown in Pakistan through the will and means of the director herself. Thus, the film must be addressed to an international audience. However, for this to be a successful political statement (in my book) it must inspire at least feelings of wanting to take action in the viewer. The message is certainly pretty clear in this well crafted film and audiences will leave viewings feeling pretty negatively about Islamic nationalism, but that’s it. Where the book (not the movie) Cracking India succeeds as a political statement, Silent Waters fails. It offers no political prescription.
Cracking India delivered essentially the same message as Silent Waters, but it didn’t end there. In a “think globally, act locally” kind of a movement readers saw women banding together to provide aid to those victimized by partition. But in Silent Waters, there is none of that. In fact, we get the opposite. In order to cope with the particulars of his nation’s birth, Saleem becomes a leader of the oppressive Islamic nationalist movement and Zubeida goes on with her oppressive Islamic life. And what of the Sikh (or other minority) women living out their lives in Pakistan: there is no place for you in this idealized Muslim world and you will eventually be crushed by the weight of the façade.
And it is, after all, a façade. In Silent Waters Ayesha’s tragic fates shows that extremism requires that you ignore the reality of things. And the reality is that Pakistanis carry a muddled past into a confused present, but ignoring that fact does not make it go away. Distorting the truth to fit some idealized picture of what you are serves no one. But what is the audience suppose to do with that? Apparently nothing, because that’s exactly what Zubeida and Saleem do: nothing. Thus, the audience is left enlightened, but unaffected by the film as it affects no action.
It is interesting that the films we’ve watched have, overall, been extremely pessimistic about the present state and possible future of things, while the books we’ve read have, overall, been less so. The films Cracking India, Silent Waters, and The Wind that Shakes the Barley have portrayed a dismal and tragic state of affairs with little hope for peace. However, books such as Cracking India, Out of Place, and even The Shadow Lines may present a dismal view of the past they have an ounce of hope for the future with their ideas of acting locally, hybridity, and truth.
One thing I have taken from all the works we’ve discussed is how a few extremists can sway the many to violence and equally, how just a few with peaceful intent can help a nation heal.
Recurring post-colonial themes in Silent Waters
In Silent Waters we encountered some of the same themes we’ve seen in other partition literature, such borders, boundaries, and divisions. In the film’s opening, we get a look at normal life in Pakistan in the 1980s, including a traditional Muslim wedding. This scene alone is packed with boundaries and divisions, of people crossing those boundaries and even of borderlands.
In one clip a man leaves the group of married and unmarried men and crosses the red curtain to dance with his wife who is on the other side with the bride to be, married and other unmarried women. This seems to be an example of an acceptable form of border crossing, which will contrast with unacceptable crossings later.
Furthermore, one might even consider the sight of theses marital festivities as a borderland as the bride and bridegroom are not single, but not yet married, either. And borders are crossed on the men’s side of the curtain as a man rises to dance with the paid female entertainer.
In another example of borderlands, the two young lovers, Zubeida and Saleem, arrange a clandestine meeting while walking from school to home. They move from this borderland between their academic and their domestic lives to a graveyard, a borderland between life and death. This is where the young lovers meet to talk about their future together, so not only does the graveyard serve as a borderland, but it also foreshadows the fate of their romance, as Ayesha and Zubeida form an unspoken pact neither is able to uphold under the weight of Islamic nationalism.
And as far as divisions go we see that after the British divided up India, then Pakistan set about dividing up itself. Consider the raising of the wall around the girls’ school. Even time itself fell under the sway of partition. I was reading Wikipedia’s entry on partition and it said even partitioned time was partitioned in 1947. Pakistan adopted “New Standard Time,” which put the country 30 minutes behind India. Weird, to think that the two countries even divided time when they split. This is like a bad divorce on crack.
They even split up Heaven. When Ayesha is teaching the Koran to the little school girls both Sikhs and Muslims get a Heaven, but its not the same one. And finally, we get the division of Ayesha and Veero — one dies while the other lives on in the memory of Zubeida and Saleem: which one depends on your interpretation of the film.
In one clip a man leaves the group of married and unmarried men and crosses the red curtain to dance with his wife who is on the other side with the bride to be, married and other unmarried women. This seems to be an example of an acceptable form of border crossing, which will contrast with unacceptable crossings later.
Furthermore, one might even consider the sight of theses marital festivities as a borderland as the bride and bridegroom are not single, but not yet married, either. And borders are crossed on the men’s side of the curtain as a man rises to dance with the paid female entertainer.
In another example of borderlands, the two young lovers, Zubeida and Saleem, arrange a clandestine meeting while walking from school to home. They move from this borderland between their academic and their domestic lives to a graveyard, a borderland between life and death. This is where the young lovers meet to talk about their future together, so not only does the graveyard serve as a borderland, but it also foreshadows the fate of their romance, as Ayesha and Zubeida form an unspoken pact neither is able to uphold under the weight of Islamic nationalism.
And as far as divisions go we see that after the British divided up India, then Pakistan set about dividing up itself. Consider the raising of the wall around the girls’ school. Even time itself fell under the sway of partition. I was reading Wikipedia’s entry on partition and it said even partitioned time was partitioned in 1947. Pakistan adopted “New Standard Time,” which put the country 30 minutes behind India. Weird, to think that the two countries even divided time when they split. This is like a bad divorce on crack.
They even split up Heaven. When Ayesha is teaching the Koran to the little school girls both Sikhs and Muslims get a Heaven, but its not the same one. And finally, we get the division of Ayesha and Veero — one dies while the other lives on in the memory of Zubeida and Saleem: which one depends on your interpretation of the film.
Rachel Corrie and Said
Today’s readings made me reflect upon some of the themes we’ve encountered in our exploration of partition literature. My focus rested largely on this idea of an imagined space vs. the reality of a space, as it was presented in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines. Reading Rachel Corrie’s e-mails and Said’s essay forced me to confront how Americans imagine Arabs and how they actually are. It is important to remember in this hyper-mediaized age that everything we see and here does not reality make. We have to remember to hang onto our doubts and value our skeptical natures. We have to question those who deem “Arabs an underdeveloped, incompetent and doomed people, and that with all the failures in democracy and development, Arabs are alone in this world for being retarded, behind the times, unmodernized, and deeply reactionary” (Said). Everything we have read contradicts this racist idea, and in fact, portrays a portion of humanity caught in the political machinations of the world. Said strikes at the heart of matters when he asks that “dignity and critical historical thinking must be mobilized to see what is what and to disentangle truth from propaganda.”
That is what makes Corrie’s e-mails so provocative and powerful. An average, modern American is able to see through the convoluted political web to the families and communities being ripped apart over questions of borders and boundaries. One of the most powerful moments for me is when Corrie wrote, “just want to write to my Mom and tell her that I’m witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide and I’m really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature. This has to stop” (56). Corrie wrote this from one woman to another, from one potential mother to another mother. I found myself tearing up at the thought. I would never want my daughter to come to know these things about the world we live in. And Corrie as much as said that exact thing when she wrote, “This is not at all what I asked for when I came into this world. This is not at all what the people here asked for when they came into this world. This is not the world you and Dad wanted me to come into when you decided to have me” (56). But unfortunately that is exactly what we need to have happen — the average American has to wise up to the world.
That is what makes Corrie’s e-mails so provocative and powerful. An average, modern American is able to see through the convoluted political web to the families and communities being ripped apart over questions of borders and boundaries. One of the most powerful moments for me is when Corrie wrote, “just want to write to my Mom and tell her that I’m witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide and I’m really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature. This has to stop” (56). Corrie wrote this from one woman to another, from one potential mother to another mother. I found myself tearing up at the thought. I would never want my daughter to come to know these things about the world we live in. And Corrie as much as said that exact thing when she wrote, “This is not at all what I asked for when I came into this world. This is not at all what the people here asked for when they came into this world. This is not the world you and Dad wanted me to come into when you decided to have me” (56). But unfortunately that is exactly what we need to have happen — the average American has to wise up to the world.
Relics, Tangles, Partition
In "The Shadow Lines," the house the grandmother grew up in serves as an obvious metaphor: The house is partitioned between the two families with a wooden wall to the extent that the toilet is even split in half. (121) To me this sounded like a fable, and was intended to make partition look impractical and silly in its wishful thinking. The grandmother would then tell her younger sister stories about their mysterious aunts, uncles, and cousins and how they did everything upside down. I want to read this as a innocent child-like xenophobia, if this is possible. But the metaphor gets more complicated.
As a result of the partition of India, the house has become a home for several refugee families. The uncle, and I'm not sure if we should believe this, is still concerned that the other half of the family will come take it from him. How do we decipher this as a metaphor? I think the answer lies in the riots that surrounded Tridib's death and the disappearance of a relic in Kashmir. The disappearance caused both multi-national solidarity, but also was seen as an attack on Muslims.
Relics are influential in the novel. Tridib is an archeologist, and in one of the most memorable parts of the novel for me, was when the narrator recognizes Nick's uncle's house as both past and present: its existence articulated by both its missing staircase and the current travel agency.
The grandmother talks about living in the past, and doesn't seem to understand the result of partition in relation to visible borders. The reason I bring this up is because this novel best describes the lingering problems of partition (Reading in the Dark as well). The problems with partition extend beyond practicality and ethnic cleansing, in time and spectrum. I liked that I was taught to view a place as both its history and its contemporary.
When the narrator himself starts to figure some of this out he claims that previously, "I believed in the reality of space; I believed that distance separates, that it is a corporeal substance; I believed in the reality of nations and borders; I believed that across the border existed a different reality." (214)
This novel, in all its tangles between countries and continents, past and present, articulates through its form this idea: the world is connected--invented space, nationality, is...invented. Something to be believed in--mystic but not fact.
As a result of the partition of India, the house has become a home for several refugee families. The uncle, and I'm not sure if we should believe this, is still concerned that the other half of the family will come take it from him. How do we decipher this as a metaphor? I think the answer lies in the riots that surrounded Tridib's death and the disappearance of a relic in Kashmir. The disappearance caused both multi-national solidarity, but also was seen as an attack on Muslims.
Relics are influential in the novel. Tridib is an archeologist, and in one of the most memorable parts of the novel for me, was when the narrator recognizes Nick's uncle's house as both past and present: its existence articulated by both its missing staircase and the current travel agency.
The grandmother talks about living in the past, and doesn't seem to understand the result of partition in relation to visible borders. The reason I bring this up is because this novel best describes the lingering problems of partition (Reading in the Dark as well). The problems with partition extend beyond practicality and ethnic cleansing, in time and spectrum. I liked that I was taught to view a place as both its history and its contemporary.
When the narrator himself starts to figure some of this out he claims that previously, "I believed in the reality of space; I believed that distance separates, that it is a corporeal substance; I believed in the reality of nations and borders; I believed that across the border existed a different reality." (214)
This novel, in all its tangles between countries and continents, past and present, articulates through its form this idea: the world is connected--invented space, nationality, is...invented. Something to be believed in--mystic but not fact.
Great Expectations and The Shadow Lines
The question of the “Great Expectationesque” romance between Ila and the narrator In Amitav Ghosh’s Shadow Lines has plagued me and I have not been able to let it go. So central to the narrator’s story and so smacking of the famous British novel that I have to believe the connotations of this unrequited love affair were central to the writer’s intent and purpose. Ghosh must be deliberately subverting this idol of the English canon to his own purposes.
First off, there are strong similarities between the main characters. Pip and the narrator both see the world for what it is, good and bad. They absorb multiple perspectives and are able to see the truth in people and life and thus come to rest in equilibrium, in a borderland. Pip recognized the arbitrariness of class, which thus cannot predict the quality of a man and the narrator certainly perceived the illusory nature of nations. Furthermore, Ila, who rejects India, ends up in a troubled marriage and Estella, who embraced the culture of the British elite, also suffers severe marital discord. Perhaps the message is the same in both texts: the more we run from our pasts the more it comes back to haunt us.
In order to heal from such oppression as the class system and partition people must face the horror and then create from the ashes an improved breed of humanity that transcends such illusory categories as race, class, religion, and creed. We are not low or upper class, not Indian or Pakistani, not Hindu, Muslim or Sikh, we are “other” and that is all the classification we need.
First off, there are strong similarities between the main characters. Pip and the narrator both see the world for what it is, good and bad. They absorb multiple perspectives and are able to see the truth in people and life and thus come to rest in equilibrium, in a borderland. Pip recognized the arbitrariness of class, which thus cannot predict the quality of a man and the narrator certainly perceived the illusory nature of nations. Furthermore, Ila, who rejects India, ends up in a troubled marriage and Estella, who embraced the culture of the British elite, also suffers severe marital discord. Perhaps the message is the same in both texts: the more we run from our pasts the more it comes back to haunt us.
In order to heal from such oppression as the class system and partition people must face the horror and then create from the ashes an improved breed of humanity that transcends such illusory categories as race, class, religion, and creed. We are not low or upper class, not Indian or Pakistani, not Hindu, Muslim or Sikh, we are “other” and that is all the classification we need.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
India, Censorhip, and Free Speech
I read this article today and it does correlate to our class. It's also a story about India we don't get to hear all that often:
From The Daily Beast
India's Free-Speech Crisis
by Basharat Peer
November 5, 2010 | 9:24pm
In incident after incident, Indian writers and activists have confronted violence and intimidation whenever they criticize the state or major political groups. Basharat Peer on the issue that won't be on Obama's summit agenda.
President Obama might not have a nuclear deal or a membership of the United Nations Security Council to offer India, but an important stop on his itinerary in India’s financial capital, Mumbai, is high on symbolism. On his first morning in India, he will spend time at a modest house where Mahatama Gandhi used to stay in the city. His other hero, Martin Luther King, stayed there in 1959 with his wife Corretta King, who wrote in a visitor’s book that staying there “has been almost like living with Gandhiji.” But Gandhian ideals seem to have been forgotten, rendered irrelevant as India positions itself as a great power. Along with India’s international clout and economy, intolerance for dissent in both Indian society and polity seem to be growing.
It was an illiberal India that an American academic encountered this week on his arrival in the country. On Monday morning, San Francisco-based academic couple Angana Chatterjee and Richard Shapiro arrived at the New Delhi airport. Chatterjee, an Indian citizen, was visiting India for work and to see her family. Her partner Shapiro, who does not work on India, was accompanying her on a tourist visa. The immigration authorities checked Shapiro’s passport and honored his visa. Suddenly, on realizing that he was Chatterjee’s partner, the immigration authorities recalled him, canceled his entry, and forced him to return to the U.S. by the afternoon. No charges were filed against Shapiro, but the reasons were clear to most of us who follow subcontinental politics.
For the past few years, Shapiro’s partner Chatterjee has been working on the contentious question of Kashmir. She is part of a group of human-rights lawyers, activists, and researchers who published a report that documented the presence of hundreds of unidentified graves across the Kashmiri countryside. Most people in Kashmir suspect the graves to be of many of the around 10,000 men who were disappeared after being taken into custody by Indian troops and police. Barring Shapiro from entering India was an effort at intimidating Chatterjee.
Arundhati Roy
One an early July day, news came that three young men, who were buried as unidentified Pakistani militants killed in a gun battle with Indian troops on the disputed border (in a graveyard named by Chatterjee and her colleagues in their report), turned out to be Kashmiri civilians who were lured by the military with the promise of jobs, taken to the border, and killed. Protests against their killings followed across Kashmir. Police attempting to disperse one such crowd of protesters in Srinagar killed a 17-year-old student, Tufail Mattoo. His death filled Kashmir with grief and rage. Echoing the Palestinian intifada, teenagers and young Kashmiris armed with stones battled heavily armed Indian troops, who responded with bullets. An intense military curfew was imposed and newspapers were forced to stop publication across Kashmir. Throughout July, August, and September, the Kashmir intifada raged on: 110 young Kashmiris had been killed by the Indian troops; a conservative estimate puts those injured by police bullets at around 1,500. Kashmir repeated its old slogan: aazadi, or independence from Indian rule.
The Indian state can't afford to choose silencing or intimidating the writers and intellectuals who are critical of its policies.
The question of Kashmir was being debated on every television channel, in every newspaper, at every possible venue in India. The Indian government responded with sending a team of parliamentarians to Kashmir, who met some key separatist leaders and later announced monetary compensation for the families of the slain protesters. The deadlock continued and around mid-October, the Indian government appointed a three-member panel of interlocutors to speak to Kashmiri separatists, politicians, and civil society leaders. Although the mediators were well-regarded people in their own professions—a former newspaper editor, a senior academic, and a top bureaucrat, their mandate was limited to talking and submitting a report at the end of their tour, which left out the crucial question of demilitarizing Kashmir and repealing laws that provide Indian troops stationed there a veritable license to kill without impunity.
It was against this tense backdrop that, at a seminar in New Delhi, novelist and essayist Arundhati Roy reiterated her support for Kashmir’s independence and said, "Kashmir has never been an integral part of India." Kashmir is an international dispute and what Roy said was something that hundreds of thousands of Kashmiris have been saying since 1947. Intense outrage followed Roy’s comments. The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party called upon the government to arrest her and file charges of sedition against her. The ruling Congress Party seemed to be in agreement. India’s home ministry advised the Delhi police that it could proceed to file charges of sedition against Roy and other speakers, under which they could be sentenced to five years of rigorous imprisonment.
Roy was unbowed and responded, “Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds.” Faced with the prospect of worldwide bad press weeks before the Obama visit and a mounting division of opinion for and against Roy, the Indian government relented and decided not to press charges. Last week, a mob from the BJP’s women’s wing broke through the gate of Roy’s Delhi house and vandalized property.
Forcing Shapiro to return to the U.S., threatening Roy with sedition, and the Hindu right activists storming Roy’s house illustrate two dangers to India as an open society: growing intolerance of dissent and critique by the government and the propensity of various political, ethnic, and religious parties to threaten with violence anyone they disagree with. A strange and vile example of this trend of punishing freedom of expression, occurred this month, when a Mumbai-based ethnic chauvinistic group, Shiv Sena, infamous for using and threatening to use violence against non-natives and minority groups, bullied the Mumbai university to remove from its curriculum Indian-born Canadian novelist Rohinton Mistry’s novel, Such a Long Journey.
Mistry, who was born in Bombay in 1952, published the novel in 1991. Twenty years after its publication, the student wing of Shiva Sena burned copies of Such a Long Journey to protest what its leaders described as obscene and vulgar language and derogatory remarks about Shiva Sena and its leader Bal Thackeray. While Sena’s behavior came as no surprise, concerns about competititve politics seem to have motivated the ruling Congress Party’s chief minister of the Maharashtra state, who hadn’t read Mistry’s novel in its entirety, to describe some of its sections as "highly objectionable." This year, Shiv Sena threatened to stop the release of Bollywood superstar Shahrukh Khan’s movie My Name Is Khan, about the post-9/11 travails of an autistic Indian-American Muslim man, because the actor Shahrukh Khan had supported the idea of Pakistani cricketers playing in India.
Last year in a lecture on freedom of speech in New Delhi, Salman Rushdie described this worrying trend as a “culture of complaint.” Tragically, the long journey of banning The Satanic Verses and the fatwa on Rushdie began in India itself, as after reports in Indian press some Indian Muslims protested the novel and the Indian government became the first government to ban it. And six years later, when Rushdie had a laugh at the Shiva Sena leader Bal Thackeray in The Moor’s Last Sigh, along with naming a bulldog Jawaharlal Nehru (after India’s first prime minister), the novel was burnt by both the activists of Hindu right wing Shiva Sena and the officially secular Congress Party.
In Rushdie's speech about artistic freedom, he was clearly moved as he spoke about the great Indian painter 94-year-old Maqbool Fida Hussain, who had to leave India after the Hindu right attacked him for drawing several Hindu goddesses in the nude. “Can it be that India, at this high moment in its history, is forgetting its own narrative of openness and beginning to bring down the shutters?” Rushdie asked. After living in exile in London and Dubai, Hussain this year gave up his Indian citizenship and became a citizen of Qatar. Indian government had done little to provide Hussain a sense of security.
Letting hooligans get away without punishment encourages lunatics of all hues in India. At times, threatening well-regarded people in the name of religion or caste or region becomes a passage to notoriety, even a fleeting moment under the bright television lights. In the summer of 2006, an obscure mullah in Calcutta seemed desperate for some media attention. He issued a fatwa describing tennis star Sania Mirza’s short skirts as anti-Islamic and urged her to follow the example of Iranian women who wore long tunics and headscarves in various international championships. Soon after that, Yaqoob Qureshi, a minister in India’s biggest state, Uttar Pradesh, offered $11 million to anyone who would “chop off the head” of the Danish cartoonists who had drawn the Prophet Mohammed. And the government responded by saying that the comment was made against a “person living in a distant country.”
The litany of such incidents is a long one. To shoulder the burden of its vaunted democracy, the Indian state can’t afford to choose silencing or intimidating the writers and intellectuals who are critical of its policies. At the same time, it has to ignore competitive, partisan politics and move against those who decide to curb the freedom of others.
Basharat Peer is the author of Curfewed Night, an account of the Kashmir conflict.
Get a head start with the Morning Scoop email. It's your Cheat Sheet with must reads from across the Web. Get it.
For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.
URL: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-11-05/indias-censorship-and-free-speech-crisis/p/
From The Daily Beast
India's Free-Speech Crisis
by Basharat Peer
November 5, 2010 | 9:24pm
In incident after incident, Indian writers and activists have confronted violence and intimidation whenever they criticize the state or major political groups. Basharat Peer on the issue that won't be on Obama's summit agenda.
President Obama might not have a nuclear deal or a membership of the United Nations Security Council to offer India, but an important stop on his itinerary in India’s financial capital, Mumbai, is high on symbolism. On his first morning in India, he will spend time at a modest house where Mahatama Gandhi used to stay in the city. His other hero, Martin Luther King, stayed there in 1959 with his wife Corretta King, who wrote in a visitor’s book that staying there “has been almost like living with Gandhiji.” But Gandhian ideals seem to have been forgotten, rendered irrelevant as India positions itself as a great power. Along with India’s international clout and economy, intolerance for dissent in both Indian society and polity seem to be growing.
It was an illiberal India that an American academic encountered this week on his arrival in the country. On Monday morning, San Francisco-based academic couple Angana Chatterjee and Richard Shapiro arrived at the New Delhi airport. Chatterjee, an Indian citizen, was visiting India for work and to see her family. Her partner Shapiro, who does not work on India, was accompanying her on a tourist visa. The immigration authorities checked Shapiro’s passport and honored his visa. Suddenly, on realizing that he was Chatterjee’s partner, the immigration authorities recalled him, canceled his entry, and forced him to return to the U.S. by the afternoon. No charges were filed against Shapiro, but the reasons were clear to most of us who follow subcontinental politics.
For the past few years, Shapiro’s partner Chatterjee has been working on the contentious question of Kashmir. She is part of a group of human-rights lawyers, activists, and researchers who published a report that documented the presence of hundreds of unidentified graves across the Kashmiri countryside. Most people in Kashmir suspect the graves to be of many of the around 10,000 men who were disappeared after being taken into custody by Indian troops and police. Barring Shapiro from entering India was an effort at intimidating Chatterjee.
Arundhati Roy
One an early July day, news came that three young men, who were buried as unidentified Pakistani militants killed in a gun battle with Indian troops on the disputed border (in a graveyard named by Chatterjee and her colleagues in their report), turned out to be Kashmiri civilians who were lured by the military with the promise of jobs, taken to the border, and killed. Protests against their killings followed across Kashmir. Police attempting to disperse one such crowd of protesters in Srinagar killed a 17-year-old student, Tufail Mattoo. His death filled Kashmir with grief and rage. Echoing the Palestinian intifada, teenagers and young Kashmiris armed with stones battled heavily armed Indian troops, who responded with bullets. An intense military curfew was imposed and newspapers were forced to stop publication across Kashmir. Throughout July, August, and September, the Kashmir intifada raged on: 110 young Kashmiris had been killed by the Indian troops; a conservative estimate puts those injured by police bullets at around 1,500. Kashmir repeated its old slogan: aazadi, or independence from Indian rule.
The Indian state can't afford to choose silencing or intimidating the writers and intellectuals who are critical of its policies.
The question of Kashmir was being debated on every television channel, in every newspaper, at every possible venue in India. The Indian government responded with sending a team of parliamentarians to Kashmir, who met some key separatist leaders and later announced monetary compensation for the families of the slain protesters. The deadlock continued and around mid-October, the Indian government appointed a three-member panel of interlocutors to speak to Kashmiri separatists, politicians, and civil society leaders. Although the mediators were well-regarded people in their own professions—a former newspaper editor, a senior academic, and a top bureaucrat, their mandate was limited to talking and submitting a report at the end of their tour, which left out the crucial question of demilitarizing Kashmir and repealing laws that provide Indian troops stationed there a veritable license to kill without impunity.
It was against this tense backdrop that, at a seminar in New Delhi, novelist and essayist Arundhati Roy reiterated her support for Kashmir’s independence and said, "Kashmir has never been an integral part of India." Kashmir is an international dispute and what Roy said was something that hundreds of thousands of Kashmiris have been saying since 1947. Intense outrage followed Roy’s comments. The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party called upon the government to arrest her and file charges of sedition against her. The ruling Congress Party seemed to be in agreement. India’s home ministry advised the Delhi police that it could proceed to file charges of sedition against Roy and other speakers, under which they could be sentenced to five years of rigorous imprisonment.
Roy was unbowed and responded, “Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds.” Faced with the prospect of worldwide bad press weeks before the Obama visit and a mounting division of opinion for and against Roy, the Indian government relented and decided not to press charges. Last week, a mob from the BJP’s women’s wing broke through the gate of Roy’s Delhi house and vandalized property.
Forcing Shapiro to return to the U.S., threatening Roy with sedition, and the Hindu right activists storming Roy’s house illustrate two dangers to India as an open society: growing intolerance of dissent and critique by the government and the propensity of various political, ethnic, and religious parties to threaten with violence anyone they disagree with. A strange and vile example of this trend of punishing freedom of expression, occurred this month, when a Mumbai-based ethnic chauvinistic group, Shiv Sena, infamous for using and threatening to use violence against non-natives and minority groups, bullied the Mumbai university to remove from its curriculum Indian-born Canadian novelist Rohinton Mistry’s novel, Such a Long Journey.
Mistry, who was born in Bombay in 1952, published the novel in 1991. Twenty years after its publication, the student wing of Shiva Sena burned copies of Such a Long Journey to protest what its leaders described as obscene and vulgar language and derogatory remarks about Shiva Sena and its leader Bal Thackeray. While Sena’s behavior came as no surprise, concerns about competititve politics seem to have motivated the ruling Congress Party’s chief minister of the Maharashtra state, who hadn’t read Mistry’s novel in its entirety, to describe some of its sections as "highly objectionable." This year, Shiv Sena threatened to stop the release of Bollywood superstar Shahrukh Khan’s movie My Name Is Khan, about the post-9/11 travails of an autistic Indian-American Muslim man, because the actor Shahrukh Khan had supported the idea of Pakistani cricketers playing in India.
Last year in a lecture on freedom of speech in New Delhi, Salman Rushdie described this worrying trend as a “culture of complaint.” Tragically, the long journey of banning The Satanic Verses and the fatwa on Rushdie began in India itself, as after reports in Indian press some Indian Muslims protested the novel and the Indian government became the first government to ban it. And six years later, when Rushdie had a laugh at the Shiva Sena leader Bal Thackeray in The Moor’s Last Sigh, along with naming a bulldog Jawaharlal Nehru (after India’s first prime minister), the novel was burnt by both the activists of Hindu right wing Shiva Sena and the officially secular Congress Party.
In Rushdie's speech about artistic freedom, he was clearly moved as he spoke about the great Indian painter 94-year-old Maqbool Fida Hussain, who had to leave India after the Hindu right attacked him for drawing several Hindu goddesses in the nude. “Can it be that India, at this high moment in its history, is forgetting its own narrative of openness and beginning to bring down the shutters?” Rushdie asked. After living in exile in London and Dubai, Hussain this year gave up his Indian citizenship and became a citizen of Qatar. Indian government had done little to provide Hussain a sense of security.
Letting hooligans get away without punishment encourages lunatics of all hues in India. At times, threatening well-regarded people in the name of religion or caste or region becomes a passage to notoriety, even a fleeting moment under the bright television lights. In the summer of 2006, an obscure mullah in Calcutta seemed desperate for some media attention. He issued a fatwa describing tennis star Sania Mirza’s short skirts as anti-Islamic and urged her to follow the example of Iranian women who wore long tunics and headscarves in various international championships. Soon after that, Yaqoob Qureshi, a minister in India’s biggest state, Uttar Pradesh, offered $11 million to anyone who would “chop off the head” of the Danish cartoonists who had drawn the Prophet Mohammed. And the government responded by saying that the comment was made against a “person living in a distant country.”
The litany of such incidents is a long one. To shoulder the burden of its vaunted democracy, the Indian state can’t afford to choose silencing or intimidating the writers and intellectuals who are critical of its policies. At the same time, it has to ignore competitive, partisan politics and move against those who decide to curb the freedom of others.
Basharat Peer is the author of Curfewed Night, an account of the Kashmir conflict.
Get a head start with the Morning Scoop email. It's your Cheat Sheet with must reads from across the Web. Get it.
For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.
URL: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-11-05/indias-censorship-and-free-speech-crisis/p/
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
The Trends -- Reading in the Dark
Most of my observations on "Reading in the Dark" have been structural, how to read the novel. Here I will try to connect how I'm reading to partition, and maybe to partition literature in a general sense. (If there is such a thing?)
"So, I celebrated all the anniversaries; of all the deaths, all the betrayals-for both of them-in my head, year after year, until, to my pleasure and surprise, they began to become confused and muddled, and I wondered at times had I dreamed it all.
Hauntings are, in their way, very specific. Everything has to be exact, even the vaguenesses. My family's history was like that too. It came to me in bits, from people who rarely recognized all they had told." (236)
This quote from the novel described to me exactly how the novel felt. What happened with Eddie, and McIlhenny, and Buddy Mahon came in bits and pieces from different people in the family and community. Each story kept reworking itself, retelling its story recognizably, but differently. I was struck by the boy who gets run over by the wagon in the beginning of novel. The protagonist feels pity for the policeman, even though there is this history/presence of police brutality towards Catholics. A little while later, a schoolmate retells the story, but says the cop doesn't care, doesn't even look back at the child. The novel ends with the father feeling pity for the Englishman whose son was shot on their doorstep. "Even if his son was one of those," the father claims.(His son is a solider not a policeman though.) There are also multiple stories of the haunted Grenaghans and the curse of the man who had sex with the devil-woman. The novel repeats objects (for lack of a better word), in order to further conflate these multiplicities of story. Over and over again stairs, fires, roses, and ghosts are part of the scene. This retelling is also why the title is "Reading in the Dark" after the section of the same title. The narrator reimagines, retells, and arguably relives what he has seen on the page, and overheard about his family.
In the chapter "Political Education" the reading of the novel is taken to a new definition. At the school a British army chaplain speaks to the class about the threat of communism, begging British allegiance by brushing off Catholic/Protestant disputes by framing them as quarrels within the Christian family. "We were the of the West and must throw in our lot with it," is similar rhetoric the teacher spouts. The next day the class returns to their normal lesson on European history. This time the rhetoric is, "History was about trends, not people. We had to learn to see the trends." (209) One friend realizes the kind of shite this is. "Propaganda...That's all that is. First, it's the Germans. Then it's the Russians. Always, it's the IRA. British Propaganda."
I read this as a cue for the reader. See the trends! See the repetition! This is not just about these characters, it is the legacy of colonialism. People are belittled in colonial discourse, and we might also blur characters together when thinking about all we have read in conjunction. There is a reason "Reading in the Dark" includes multiple generations. It is the trends. It is building repression. This is also why it ends with the Troubles, instead of beginning there. This is the legacy and why informing is huge betrayal. The trends, the Bogside, the family, the shared otherness...memory.
"So, I celebrated all the anniversaries; of all the deaths, all the betrayals-for both of them-in my head, year after year, until, to my pleasure and surprise, they began to become confused and muddled, and I wondered at times had I dreamed it all.
Hauntings are, in their way, very specific. Everything has to be exact, even the vaguenesses. My family's history was like that too. It came to me in bits, from people who rarely recognized all they had told." (236)
This quote from the novel described to me exactly how the novel felt. What happened with Eddie, and McIlhenny, and Buddy Mahon came in bits and pieces from different people in the family and community. Each story kept reworking itself, retelling its story recognizably, but differently. I was struck by the boy who gets run over by the wagon in the beginning of novel. The protagonist feels pity for the policeman, even though there is this history/presence of police brutality towards Catholics. A little while later, a schoolmate retells the story, but says the cop doesn't care, doesn't even look back at the child. The novel ends with the father feeling pity for the Englishman whose son was shot on their doorstep. "Even if his son was one of those," the father claims.(His son is a solider not a policeman though.) There are also multiple stories of the haunted Grenaghans and the curse of the man who had sex with the devil-woman. The novel repeats objects (for lack of a better word), in order to further conflate these multiplicities of story. Over and over again stairs, fires, roses, and ghosts are part of the scene. This retelling is also why the title is "Reading in the Dark" after the section of the same title. The narrator reimagines, retells, and arguably relives what he has seen on the page, and overheard about his family.
In the chapter "Political Education" the reading of the novel is taken to a new definition. At the school a British army chaplain speaks to the class about the threat of communism, begging British allegiance by brushing off Catholic/Protestant disputes by framing them as quarrels within the Christian family. "We were the of the West and must throw in our lot with it," is similar rhetoric the teacher spouts. The next day the class returns to their normal lesson on European history. This time the rhetoric is, "History was about trends, not people. We had to learn to see the trends." (209) One friend realizes the kind of shite this is. "Propaganda...That's all that is. First, it's the Germans. Then it's the Russians. Always, it's the IRA. British Propaganda."
I read this as a cue for the reader. See the trends! See the repetition! This is not just about these characters, it is the legacy of colonialism. People are belittled in colonial discourse, and we might also blur characters together when thinking about all we have read in conjunction. There is a reason "Reading in the Dark" includes multiple generations. It is the trends. It is building repression. This is also why it ends with the Troubles, instead of beginning there. This is the legacy and why informing is huge betrayal. The trends, the Bogside, the family, the shared otherness...memory.
Reading in the Dark: Conclusions
Ok, Ive been sitting on this blog entry for a while because I wrote it and then forgot about it while I started working on my paper so I may be a bit late, but Ill post it anyways.
There's a few things that have been on my mind since I finished Reading in the Dark and this is the perfect place to hash them out.
1) Who the crap is Crazy Joe and why does he happen to know all of the family's secrets?! Maybe I overlooked something of just forgot about his significance to the family, but he doesn't seem to be of any importance to them at all. One thing did catch my eye though, on page 224 the narrator says he knows it all and his mother's last secret was with Joe. I think thats suggesting that he knows even more, but for a second there I thought it meant that they had been hooking up before Joe lost his marbles. A few other questions I have about Joe is why is creeping on our main character? Maybe it's something old people do, but the "vigorous knee rubbing" and the sliding in & out of his teeth made me sick to my stomach.
2) All the secrets & drama....*shakes head* while I was reading it sounded like the perfect story for to be taken to the big screen (which is interesting since we heard about this being made into a movie in class the other day).
There's a passage in the book where Sergeant Burke tells the mother that "People were better not knowing somrme things, especially the younger people, for all that bother dragged on them all their lives and what was the point?" Burke couldn't be more right in saying that given what the main character has gone through just because he knew all the secrets. It put him at odds with his parents and in wanting to tell them he knew everything was nearly eaten alive by the knowledge.
[Side note: we've briefly discussed the themes and ideas presented in these novels having connections to each our individual lives and this one has a thick chapter in the book of my life. Wanting to know what the grown ups were whispering about or finding out through other sources hasn't done anything but drag me down as a result.]
There's a few things that have been on my mind since I finished Reading in the Dark and this is the perfect place to hash them out.
1) Who the crap is Crazy Joe and why does he happen to know all of the family's secrets?! Maybe I overlooked something of just forgot about his significance to the family, but he doesn't seem to be of any importance to them at all. One thing did catch my eye though, on page 224 the narrator says he knows it all and his mother's last secret was with Joe. I think thats suggesting that he knows even more, but for a second there I thought it meant that they had been hooking up before Joe lost his marbles. A few other questions I have about Joe is why is creeping on our main character? Maybe it's something old people do, but the "vigorous knee rubbing" and the sliding in & out of his teeth made me sick to my stomach.
2) All the secrets & drama....*shakes head* while I was reading it sounded like the perfect story for to be taken to the big screen (which is interesting since we heard about this being made into a movie in class the other day).
There's a passage in the book where Sergeant Burke tells the mother that "People were better not knowing somrme things, especially the younger people, for all that bother dragged on them all their lives and what was the point?" Burke couldn't be more right in saying that given what the main character has gone through just because he knew all the secrets. It put him at odds with his parents and in wanting to tell them he knew everything was nearly eaten alive by the knowledge.
[Side note: we've briefly discussed the themes and ideas presented in these novels having connections to each our individual lives and this one has a thick chapter in the book of my life. Wanting to know what the grown ups were whispering about or finding out through other sources hasn't done anything but drag me down as a result.]
Friday, October 29, 2010
Media to Refresh Our Souls....
I wanted to interject some media into the blog, as I feel its somewhat relevant, and also because I want a break from writing at the moment….
First is an article that my friend Jessie posted up on Facebook a while back. She is currently in Hyderabad, India in a study abroad program offered by Occidental College in Pasadena. In the midst of all her status updates about how her malaria pills are making her sick and how she would probably prefer to risk her life to malaria than take the pills, or her adventurous ambulance ride to the hospital when she was very ill that also put her life at risk, or how she likes the Indian beer there, she put a link to the article up to share with everybody, which I will post in its entirety. I just wanted to post it because I thought it was completely ridiculous... Not because it's shocking (that is relative) but just because this is actually happening. I dont have a real point to include it other than that:
India’s richest man has moved into world’s biggest private residence
by Liz Goodwin
Source:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20101014/bs_yblog_upshot/indias-richest-man-has-moved-into-worlds-biggest-private-residence
Marking the end of seven years of construction work, India's richest man is planning a housewarming party for his 27-story palatial new home in Mumbai, replete with no fewer than three helipads and an air-traffic control station on its roof.
The 570-foot-tall glass tower, called Antilia, "features a swimming pool, a health club, a salon and a mini-theatre," reports the Times of India. "The first six levels comprise the garage where more than 160 cars can be parked. Atop the parking lot is Antilia's lobby, which has nine elevators." The house also has a garden that can accommodate trees, according to the Telegraph, and a separate ballroom. About 600 staffers will be required to run Antilia, named after the mythical island in the Atlantic.
The house belongs to Mukesh Ambani, who owns much of the oil and retail giant Reliance Industries. He is estimated to be worth about $27 billion. Experts told the Guardian that "there is no other private property of comparable size and prominence in the world." Ambani, the fourth-richest man in the world, co-ran Reliance with his brother before the two had a falling-out and split the company.
Some were surprised at the conspicuous show of wealth, since Ambani is known as a deeply private person not fond of hanging out with India's super-rich. "Perhaps he has been stung by his portrayal in the media as an introvert. Maybe he is making the point that he is a tycoon in his own right," Hamish McDonald, author of the book "Ambani and Sons," speculated in the Guardian.
In a 2008 New York Times profile, friends described the tycoon as something of a contradiction: a cold-blooded businessman whose heart also "bleeds for India." He wants to help pave the way for a better life for the country's poor, they said. A Reliance spokesman told the Times the house would cost about $70 million, but the Guardian says it's closer to $1 billion
Next, I would like to put some song lyrics up that I think sums up our class in regards to finding nationalist identity within a new nation.
“Strange Terrain” by Circa Survive, from album Blue Sky Noise, 2010
We read the signs completely backwards
No one could see if we ended up
Where we needed to be
To find out how it all works with so many partners
And nobody wants, nobody wants to sit
Behind the wheel, behind the wheel
Who’s the one pounding the gears
Avoiding the crowds
Keeping their ear to the ground?
Oh, I’ve made a mistake
I never learned how to get back to the place
Where have all the signs gone?
I don’t know where I am without them in our lives
We made designs completely backwards
And nobody knows if we’re even close
To where we need to go
To find out how it all works with
So many artists and nobody
Wants to sit behind the wheel, behind the wheel
(Get your own map)
Who’s the one pounding the gears
Avoiding the crowds, keeping your ear to the ground?
Oh, I’ve made a mistake
I never learned how to get back to the place
Where all our confidence kept us behind a shield
Only light could get through
Where all our confidence kept us behind a shield
Only light could get through
Where have all the signs gone?
I don’t know where I am without them in our lives
Here is a youtube web URL to the song performed acoustically:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIfcpgkQC7k
First is an article that my friend Jessie posted up on Facebook a while back. She is currently in Hyderabad, India in a study abroad program offered by Occidental College in Pasadena. In the midst of all her status updates about how her malaria pills are making her sick and how she would probably prefer to risk her life to malaria than take the pills, or her adventurous ambulance ride to the hospital when she was very ill that also put her life at risk, or how she likes the Indian beer there, she put a link to the article up to share with everybody, which I will post in its entirety. I just wanted to post it because I thought it was completely ridiculous... Not because it's shocking (that is relative) but just because this is actually happening. I dont have a real point to include it other than that:
India’s richest man has moved into world’s biggest private residence
by Liz Goodwin
Source:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20101014/bs_yblog_upshot/indias-richest-man-has-moved-into-worlds-biggest-private-residence
Marking the end of seven years of construction work, India's richest man is planning a housewarming party for his 27-story palatial new home in Mumbai, replete with no fewer than three helipads and an air-traffic control station on its roof.
The 570-foot-tall glass tower, called Antilia, "features a swimming pool, a health club, a salon and a mini-theatre," reports the Times of India. "The first six levels comprise the garage where more than 160 cars can be parked. Atop the parking lot is Antilia's lobby, which has nine elevators." The house also has a garden that can accommodate trees, according to the Telegraph, and a separate ballroom. About 600 staffers will be required to run Antilia, named after the mythical island in the Atlantic.
The house belongs to Mukesh Ambani, who owns much of the oil and retail giant Reliance Industries. He is estimated to be worth about $27 billion. Experts told the Guardian that "there is no other private property of comparable size and prominence in the world." Ambani, the fourth-richest man in the world, co-ran Reliance with his brother before the two had a falling-out and split the company.
Some were surprised at the conspicuous show of wealth, since Ambani is known as a deeply private person not fond of hanging out with India's super-rich. "Perhaps he has been stung by his portrayal in the media as an introvert. Maybe he is making the point that he is a tycoon in his own right," Hamish McDonald, author of the book "Ambani and Sons," speculated in the Guardian.
In a 2008 New York Times profile, friends described the tycoon as something of a contradiction: a cold-blooded businessman whose heart also "bleeds for India." He wants to help pave the way for a better life for the country's poor, they said. A Reliance spokesman told the Times the house would cost about $70 million, but the Guardian says it's closer to $1 billion
Next, I would like to put some song lyrics up that I think sums up our class in regards to finding nationalist identity within a new nation.
“Strange Terrain” by Circa Survive, from album Blue Sky Noise, 2010
We read the signs completely backwards
No one could see if we ended up
Where we needed to be
To find out how it all works with so many partners
And nobody wants, nobody wants to sit
Behind the wheel, behind the wheel
Who’s the one pounding the gears
Avoiding the crowds
Keeping their ear to the ground?
Oh, I’ve made a mistake
I never learned how to get back to the place
Where have all the signs gone?
I don’t know where I am without them in our lives
We made designs completely backwards
And nobody knows if we’re even close
To where we need to go
To find out how it all works with
So many artists and nobody
Wants to sit behind the wheel, behind the wheel
(Get your own map)
Who’s the one pounding the gears
Avoiding the crowds, keeping your ear to the ground?
Oh, I’ve made a mistake
I never learned how to get back to the place
Where all our confidence kept us behind a shield
Only light could get through
Where all our confidence kept us behind a shield
Only light could get through
Where have all the signs gone?
I don’t know where I am without them in our lives
Here is a youtube web URL to the song performed acoustically:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIfcpgkQC7k
Out of Simulacra: Said's Out of Place and Baudrillard's Theory of the Simulacra
Here is the blog entry I wanted to post last week on Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacra and its relationship to Edward Said’s Out of Place. It’s a pretty complicated concept, and so if it is difficult to understand it, never fear, I understand. I’ll start with the example Baudrillard gives to convey his theory:
“If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where the decline of the Empire sees this map become frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernable in the deserts—the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an ageing double ends up being confused with the real thing)—then this fable has come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discreet charm of second-order simulacra.
“Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality; a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory—THE PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA—it is the map that engenders the territory, and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map.” (Storey 389).
Okay, this is heavy, I know. But I’ll break it down as best I can to explain a relationship. Here, Baudrillard is explaining how originals are constantly under the scrutiny of change or replacement. By way of making a map of a territory, and how through the tests of time that territory depicted on the map undergoes change just as the map itself is frayed and rotted to the point of becoming a changed object. The map still exists as a moment in time, but is considered an obsolete representation of the current point in time in which it has survived. Aspects of the map are still concrete, such as the historical reverence it can bring, but it is only relatable to the territory if referred to initially. The map of the current territory is referred to after the territory in question is mentioned: that is, when I say India, a map of the current nation of India pops into mind, but not any other map of said nation is referred to. However, if a preceding map of the nation is referred to, it has to be identified as India as it is a faint simulation of the former boundaries of India. It is a matter of current perceptions and relationships between almost anything. It can be said for literature; a simple example would be the constant revised editions of encyclopedias, dictionaries, canons, etc. It can be said for popular culture; pop culture constantly takes bits and pieces of past culture (music, fashion, politics, ideals) and turns it into something that fits the current state of mind, sometimes completely disregarding the past culture entirely (remember when Vanilla Ice sampled David Bowie & Queen’s “Under Pressure” in his song “Ice Ice Baby”? And he said, “No, its completely different. My song has the ‘ting’ between the beat.” Umm, what?)
Got all that? I hope so. Now onto Edward Said’s memoir. I will use his sense of self to relate to the simulacra. He is displaced nationally in every place he has been to. He is American and yet is not. He is Palestinian, and yet he is not. He is “Edward” and yet he is Edward. He is a double, yet a single human being. He is the territory that Baudrillaird exemplifies. Every perception of his being is the map, constantly frayed and torn amongst other people’s view of him as a citizen of… well, where ever he wants. It is his search to fit in that ties himself to those perceptions of him to his actual self. He is aan abstract, and refers to himself as such in the midst of his familial relationships: the “Edward”/Edward complex. “Edward” is an abstraction of himself that he embodies in regards to his parents and family, and Edward is his true self, only occupied by his own perceptions of being Out of Place. Also, that feeling is a manifestation of an abstract, as he is concretely in a place, within a space on this planet. He exists, but his sense of divided self makes him feel like he is displaced. He himself is a territory upon a territory, undergoing such scrutiny from outside forces that makes an abstract idea form within that person, making them different and just as susceptible to change as any other thing on this planet. I know that is a broad statement, but in this day and age, what is not undergoing change in some way? Nothing is safe from preservation, and in a vain way we are trying to “preserve” certain aspects of ourselves, of outside things. This preservation that Edward/”Edward” is trying to engage in is just that what he does within his own name; putting it in quotes when he is amongst family and outside persons, and leaving the named unquoted when thinking within himself. It has an adverse affect as he does change himself, as his perceptions of himself are changed when he is met with other people.
Source: Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precession of Simulacra”. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader. Ed. John Storey. 3rd ed. Harlow-Pearson—Prentice Hall. 2006. 389. Print.
“If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where the decline of the Empire sees this map become frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernable in the deserts—the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an ageing double ends up being confused with the real thing)—then this fable has come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discreet charm of second-order simulacra.
“Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality; a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory—THE PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA—it is the map that engenders the territory, and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map.” (Storey 389).
Okay, this is heavy, I know. But I’ll break it down as best I can to explain a relationship. Here, Baudrillard is explaining how originals are constantly under the scrutiny of change or replacement. By way of making a map of a territory, and how through the tests of time that territory depicted on the map undergoes change just as the map itself is frayed and rotted to the point of becoming a changed object. The map still exists as a moment in time, but is considered an obsolete representation of the current point in time in which it has survived. Aspects of the map are still concrete, such as the historical reverence it can bring, but it is only relatable to the territory if referred to initially. The map of the current territory is referred to after the territory in question is mentioned: that is, when I say India, a map of the current nation of India pops into mind, but not any other map of said nation is referred to. However, if a preceding map of the nation is referred to, it has to be identified as India as it is a faint simulation of the former boundaries of India. It is a matter of current perceptions and relationships between almost anything. It can be said for literature; a simple example would be the constant revised editions of encyclopedias, dictionaries, canons, etc. It can be said for popular culture; pop culture constantly takes bits and pieces of past culture (music, fashion, politics, ideals) and turns it into something that fits the current state of mind, sometimes completely disregarding the past culture entirely (remember when Vanilla Ice sampled David Bowie & Queen’s “Under Pressure” in his song “Ice Ice Baby”? And he said, “No, its completely different. My song has the ‘ting’ between the beat.” Umm, what?)
Got all that? I hope so. Now onto Edward Said’s memoir. I will use his sense of self to relate to the simulacra. He is displaced nationally in every place he has been to. He is American and yet is not. He is Palestinian, and yet he is not. He is “Edward” and yet he is Edward. He is a double, yet a single human being. He is the territory that Baudrillaird exemplifies. Every perception of his being is the map, constantly frayed and torn amongst other people’s view of him as a citizen of… well, where ever he wants. It is his search to fit in that ties himself to those perceptions of him to his actual self. He is aan abstract, and refers to himself as such in the midst of his familial relationships: the “Edward”/Edward complex. “Edward” is an abstraction of himself that he embodies in regards to his parents and family, and Edward is his true self, only occupied by his own perceptions of being Out of Place. Also, that feeling is a manifestation of an abstract, as he is concretely in a place, within a space on this planet. He exists, but his sense of divided self makes him feel like he is displaced. He himself is a territory upon a territory, undergoing such scrutiny from outside forces that makes an abstract idea form within that person, making them different and just as susceptible to change as any other thing on this planet. I know that is a broad statement, but in this day and age, what is not undergoing change in some way? Nothing is safe from preservation, and in a vain way we are trying to “preserve” certain aspects of ourselves, of outside things. This preservation that Edward/”Edward” is trying to engage in is just that what he does within his own name; putting it in quotes when he is amongst family and outside persons, and leaving the named unquoted when thinking within himself. It has an adverse affect as he does change himself, as his perceptions of himself are changed when he is met with other people.
Source: Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precession of Simulacra”. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader. Ed. John Storey. 3rd ed. Harlow-Pearson—Prentice Hall. 2006. 389. Print.
Out of Simulacra: Said's Out of Place and Baudri++
Here is the blog entry I wanted to post last week on Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacra and its relationship to Edward Said’s Out of Place. It’s a pretty complicated concept, and so if it is difficult to understand it, never fear, I understand. I’ll start with the example Baudrillard gives to convey his theory:
“If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where the decline of the Empire sees this map become frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernable in the deserts—the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an ageing double ends up being confused with the real thing)—then this fable has come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discreet charm of second-order simulacra.
“Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality; a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory—THE PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA—it is the map that engenders the territory, and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map.” (Storey 389).
Okay, this is heavy, I know. But I’ll break it down as best I can to explain a relationship. Here, Baudrillard is explaining how originals are constantly under the scrutiny of change or replacement. By way of making a map of a territory, and how through the tests of time that territory depicted on the map undergoes change just as the map itself is frayed and rotted to the point of becoming a changed object. The map still exists as a moment in time, but is considered an obsolete representation of the current point in time in which it has survived. Aspects of the map are still concrete, such as the historical reverence it can bring, but it is only relatable to the territory if referred to initially. The map of the current territory is referred to after the territory in question is mentioned: that is, when I say India, a map of the current nation of India pops into mind, but not any other map of said nation is referred to. However, if a preceding map of the nation is referred to, it has to be identified as India as it is a faint simulation of the former boundaries of India. It is a matter of current perceptions and relationships between almost anything. It can be said for literature; a simple example would be the constant revised editions of encyclopedias, dictionaries, canons, etc. It can be said for popular culture; pop culture constantly takes bits and pieces of past culture (music, fashion, politics, ideals) and turns it into something that fits the current state of mind, sometimes completely disregarding the past culture entirely (remember when Vanilla Ice sampled David Bowie & Queen’s “Under Pressure” in his song “Ice Ice Baby”? And he said, “No, its completely different. My song has the ‘ting’ between the beat.” Umm, what?)
Got all that? I hope so. Now onto Edward Said’s memoir. I will use his sense of self to relate to the simulacra. He is displaced nationally in every place he has been to. He is American and yet is not. He is Palestinian, and yet he is not. He is “Edward” and yet he is Edward. He is a double, yet a single human being. He is the territory that Baudrillaird exemplifies. Every perception of his being is the map, constantly frayed and torn amongst other people’s view of him as a citizen of… well, where ever he wants. It is his search to fit in that ties himself to those perceptions of him to his actual self. He is aan abstract, and refers to himself as such in the midst of his familial relationships: the “Edward”/Edward complex. “Edward” is an abstraction of himself that he embodies in regards to his parents and family, and Edward is his true self, only occupied by his own perceptions of being Out of Place. Also, that feeling is a manifestation of an abstract, as he is concretely in a place, within a space on this planet. He exists, but his sense of divided self makes him feel like he is displaced. He himself is a territory upon a territory, undergoing such scrutiny from outside forces that makes an abstract idea form within that person, making them different and just as susceptible to change as any other thing on this planet. I know that is a broad statement, but in this day and age, what is not undergoing change in some way? Nothing is safe from preservation, and in a vain way we are trying to “preserve” certain aspects of ourselves, of outside things. This preservation that Edward/”Edward” is trying to engage in is just that what he does within his own name; putting it in quotes when he is amongst family and outside persons, and leaving the named unquoted when thinking within himself. It has an adverse affect as he does change himself, as his perceptions of himself are changed when he is met with other people.
Source: Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precession of Simulacra”. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader. Ed. John Storey. 3rd ed. Harlow-Pearson—Prentice Hall. 2006. 389. Print.
“If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where the decline of the Empire sees this map become frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernable in the deserts—the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an ageing double ends up being confused with the real thing)—then this fable has come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discreet charm of second-order simulacra.
“Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality; a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory—THE PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA—it is the map that engenders the territory, and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map.” (Storey 389).
Okay, this is heavy, I know. But I’ll break it down as best I can to explain a relationship. Here, Baudrillard is explaining how originals are constantly under the scrutiny of change or replacement. By way of making a map of a territory, and how through the tests of time that territory depicted on the map undergoes change just as the map itself is frayed and rotted to the point of becoming a changed object. The map still exists as a moment in time, but is considered an obsolete representation of the current point in time in which it has survived. Aspects of the map are still concrete, such as the historical reverence it can bring, but it is only relatable to the territory if referred to initially. The map of the current territory is referred to after the territory in question is mentioned: that is, when I say India, a map of the current nation of India pops into mind, but not any other map of said nation is referred to. However, if a preceding map of the nation is referred to, it has to be identified as India as it is a faint simulation of the former boundaries of India. It is a matter of current perceptions and relationships between almost anything. It can be said for literature; a simple example would be the constant revised editions of encyclopedias, dictionaries, canons, etc. It can be said for popular culture; pop culture constantly takes bits and pieces of past culture (music, fashion, politics, ideals) and turns it into something that fits the current state of mind, sometimes completely disregarding the past culture entirely (remember when Vanilla Ice sampled David Bowie & Queen’s “Under Pressure” in his song “Ice Ice Baby”? And he said, “No, its completely different. My song has the ‘ting’ between the beat.” Umm, what?)
Got all that? I hope so. Now onto Edward Said’s memoir. I will use his sense of self to relate to the simulacra. He is displaced nationally in every place he has been to. He is American and yet is not. He is Palestinian, and yet he is not. He is “Edward” and yet he is Edward. He is a double, yet a single human being. He is the territory that Baudrillaird exemplifies. Every perception of his being is the map, constantly frayed and torn amongst other people’s view of him as a citizen of… well, where ever he wants. It is his search to fit in that ties himself to those perceptions of him to his actual self. He is aan abstract, and refers to himself as such in the midst of his familial relationships: the “Edward”/Edward complex. “Edward” is an abstraction of himself that he embodies in regards to his parents and family, and Edward is his true self, only occupied by his own perceptions of being Out of Place. Also, that feeling is a manifestation of an abstract, as he is concretely in a place, within a space on this planet. He exists, but his sense of divided self makes him feel like he is displaced. He himself is a territory upon a territory, undergoing such scrutiny from outside forces that makes an abstract idea form within that person, making them different and just as susceptible to change as any other thing on this planet. I know that is a broad statement, but in this day and age, what is not undergoing change in some way? Nothing is safe from preservation, and in a vain way we are trying to “preserve” certain aspects of ourselves, of outside things. This preservation that Edward/”Edward” is trying to engage in is just that what he does within his own name; putting it in quotes when he is amongst family and outside persons, and leaving the named unquoted when thinking within himself. It has an adverse affect as he does change himself, as his perceptions of himself are changed when he is met with other people.
Source: Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precession of Simulacra”. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader. Ed. John Storey. 3rd ed. Harlow-Pearson—Prentice Hall. 2006. 389. Print.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Article from Granta Magazine
I don't how many of you, or any of you, knows about or reads Granta magazine. In terms of "world" literature, culture, and politics, it has been one of the guiding forces in my own life from college onwards. Every issue has a theme and writers, artists, poets, etc. from all over the world contribute to that theme. The most current theme is Pakistan. I'm posting some essays and stories available online from this issue:
Six Snapshots of Partition
Blog of a Traveler to Lahore
On the National Language
New translation of a short story by Manto: The Dog of Tetval
If you want to see a paper copy, I have the India issue which came out during the 50th anniversary of India's independence.
Six Snapshots of Partition
Blog of a Traveler to Lahore
On the National Language
New translation of a short story by Manto: The Dog of Tetval
If you want to see a paper copy, I have the India issue which came out during the 50th anniversary of India's independence.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Divine Intervention Article 3
Notes from the Palestinian Diaspora: an interview with Elia Suleiman.(Interview)
Article from:
Cineaste
Article date:
June 22, 2003
Author:
Porton, Richard
Invoking the work of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, Edward Said pays homage to "the need to reassemble an identity out of the refractions and discontinuities of exile." In recent years, the films of a much different representative of Palestinian culture, Elia Suleiman, have depicted life in contemporary Israel and the Occupied Territories with a wry detachment engendered by his years of "voluntary exile" in New York and Paris. Suleiman's detachment, however, does not preclude him from being angry and passionate. His stripped-down film esthetic, which is considerably indebted to European and Asian art cinema, coexists with a savvy political and social consciousness.
From his initial short films to his most recent feature (Divine Intervention--winner of the Jury Prize at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival), Suleiman has mingled quasiau to biographical ruminations with concerted efforts to make films that are both politically committed and nondidactic. Homage by Assassination (1992), for example, is a diary film that filters a critique of the 1991 Gulf War through multilayered personal anecdotes. For critics Ella Shohat and Robert Stain, the film's shifts in tone--gallows humor mixed with despair--personify Suleiman's lucid portrait of "cultural disembodiment"-a disembodiment that manifests itself in "multiple failures of communication," which reflect the inevitable contradictions and quandaries of living abroad as a "diasporic subject."
Suleiman's first feature, Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996), commemorates, with considerable self-irony, his return to Nazareth after years of living in New York. Despite the restrained optimism engendered by the Oslo accords, the characteristically deadpan humor is noticeably tinged with melancholy and frustration. Suleiman uses himself as the butt of more than a few self-deflating jokes--particularly a scene in which a faulty microphone prevents the returning filmmaker from introducing his work to a Palestinian audience. The little annoyances and peculiarities of daily life--a young Palestinian woman's futile attempts to rent an apartment in Jerusalem, the marketing of biblical souvenirs in a Nazareth gift shop-become barometers of a greater political malaise.
If the humor is more barbed and even more despondent in Divine Intervention, it is undoubtedly a result of how the Middle East political climate has worsened during the intervening years. Suleiman again appears as a thinly fictionalized version of himself (E.S.), a bemused observer of his compatriots' inner rage. Opening with the incongruous spectacle of Santa Claus staggering towards his death after being stabbed in Nazareth, the film proceeds to relish the comic dyspepsia of E.S.'s father, a man whose ire towards his neighbors sums up the internecine warfare and undiluted pessimism that plagues Palestinians during the Sharon era.
Several of Divine Intervention's signature sequences poke savage, quasiabsurdist fun at the media-generated images of Palestinians as nothing more than unapologetic terrorists. After E.S. casually throws a peach pit out of his car, an Israeli tank explodes. A helium-filled balloon emblazoned with Yasir Arafat's picture hovers over an ominous checkpoint and becomes as much of a threat to the Israeli military as a cache of bombs. And, most spectacularly--and controversially--E.S.'s beautiful girlfriend is magically transformed into a Palestinian Ninja warrior who battles Israeli soldiers with superhuman panache. Although it is evident to most viewers that these sequences function more like parodies of common Palestinian wish-fulfillment fantasies than endorsements of actual violence, critics with an axe to grind have viewed them as wholehearted paeans to the gory intransigence of suicide bombers.
Cineaste interviewed Suleiman on the eve of Divine Intervention's American premiere at the 2002 New York Film Festival, He proved eager to discuss everything from the nature of Palestinian identity and the history of the state of Israel to his "conceptually Jewish" humor and admiration for Primo Levi and Walter Benjamin.
Richard Porton
Cineaste: Your short films are quite different, at least stylistically, from your features, which highlight a string of interrelated comic vignettes.
Ella Suleiman: There's a consistent pattern of development in my films; it's part of a learning process. Maybe as you learn more and gain confidence, you stretch-and unleash-yourself further as you feel more comfortable with the camera. And you don't censor yourself as much. I've been asked to explain the difference between Divine Intervention and my previous feature, Chronicle of a Disappearance. The current film just takes the premise of Chronicle and adjusts it to the more intense ambiance of the contemporary situation. I might have censored myself a bit in Chronicle. Perhaps 'censor' is not precisely the right word, but in the current film I went further in finding a style to fit my feelings of otherness. But, in many respects, the approach is quite consistent with the short films such as Homage by Assassination.
Cineaste: It's true that Homage is a 'diary film' and your current work is still quite diaristic. From the beginning of your career, you chose to integrate your own persona into the films.
Suleiman: You really have to speak in the plural, about 'personas.' When I look at the screen and watch myself, I do not see anything else but myself. But it's a more of an extension of myself than my 'authentic' personality. The only reason that I don't get annoyed while watching myself has to do with the fact that I'm emptied out.
Cineaste: Could you talk about the evolution of the premise, and script, of Divine Intervention?
Suleiman: Talking with a number of journalists has made me more aware of how I proceed in a film. I work very much like a writer and usually start with a series of notebooks. Even here in New York, I'm constantly jotting things into notebooks. I have to be tickled by an idea--and if it doesn't come I know there's no film there. Sometimes, I'm a bit irritated that it's not there, because I would have loved to work on a particular project. If I'm motivated to write something, that provides me with a great deal of pleasure although I can never be sure of the result. Now I'm not in a great mood for writing and don't feel like solitude. Maybe this is a shift of some kind--perhaps I want to shoot instead of write. I'm a bit worried, because I have nothing to say at the moment. But I keep reading novels and try to think of ideas.
Cineaste: It might be a naive question to pose, but the title of your film, Divine Intervention, seems congruent with the sad reality of life in the Middle East today. Because the situation is now so dire, people can only desperately hope for 'divine intervention.'
Suleiman: Titles have a lot to do with poetic license. I also get my titles towards the end of the editing process. I make the images in a tableaux-like fashion and then add sound and pigment. And it's the same with the titles. The title might provide a summary of the film's content. Since the title is arrived at just before the film is ready for release, you can hit on some poetic resonance if you're lucky. When this poetic license is present in the title, it can extend itself to various corners of the film itself.
Cineaste: So the audience can provide its own interpretation.
Suleiman: Exactly. I think there's a certain irony and second degree humor. The title Divine intervention is a bit pompous. That's why I had to ground the film with the subtitle--"a chronicle of love and pain."
Cineaste: Did you always intend to open the film with the scene featuring Santa Claus being taunted in Nazareth.
Suleiman: Always. I absolutely wanted that scene. The first time I shot it, it didn't work. The producer even asked me if I could make the film without this scene. But, after thinking about it for twenty-four hours, I said, "No, this scene has to open the film and it's going to give you an idea of everything that will follow." It was originally a joke to list Michel Piccoli as playing Santa Claus, but he eventually agreed to dub the character's heaving breathing.
Cineaste: You've spoken of your childhood hatred for Santa Claus.
Suleiman: I hope that my hatred of Santa Claus will spread all over the world. I associate Santa with a nauseating sweetness. I enjoy the fact that people are a little shocked by this. Every year, Santa Claus comes with his jingle bells and the world is going to its doom. It's a good idea to rupture the sweetness associated with Santa.
Cineaste: And it's ironic, but not at all coincidental, that this assault on Santa Claus occurs in Nazareth.
Suleiman: Nazareth is the best place to stab Santa. When people know that I'm from Nazareth, they say, "Wow, that was where Jesus walked." But you should just go and see for yourself the kids who live in Nazareth today. They lost their innocence years ago and there's nothing left for them to do. So, fuck Santa! But this is just an anecdotal account. In fact, it's a great opening because you get a definite idea of the breakdown in communication that comes later in the film. It lets the audience unfasten their seat belts and helps them become attuned to the humor that comes later.
Cineaste: And perhaps their expectations are frustrated as well.
Suleiman: Well, it's really a question of achieving a flow and some harmony. It's similar to what happens with a symphonic piece. If you start with a bang, you can then proceed to all of the little variations on the main theme. The musicality of the film's structure is important.
Cineaste: To ask another naive question, many viewers probably wonder how autobiographical this film really is.
Suleiman: It's very autobiographical, but not in a literal-minded, exact way. That's why I refer to the film as a self-portrait. You can't be presumptuous about biographies anyway--they're all inventions. I'm inventing factual moments, and their truth value probably lies in the way that I'm telling (or retelling) them, not whether they actually happened or not. But I can tell you that most of the events actually happened in Palestine, except of course for Santa, (Actually Santa did get stabbed there once, but not in Nazareth.) All the stuff about my father and the woman are definitely taken from reality. It's not a realistic representation of my father, but it corresponds to some aspects of him. A lot of this stuff actually happened during my childhood.
Cineaste: Many of these incidents also illustrate the fact that people who feel oppressed frequently vent their anger among themselves and within their own communities.
Suleiman: Yes, and I'm sure what you see in the film is only one one-thousandth of what actually goes on. I recently heard about some gang shoot-outs; it's a true ghetto atmosphere. People are extremely angry and frustrated. They're not nice to each other and there's no tenderness whatsoever or hint of harmonious community.
People complain about the checkpoint scene being implicitly violent. Go and watch the true violence, if you like, and you'll see the sadism that's being exercised every day. But I am against portraying brutality, for moral reasons, within the film frame.
Cineaste: Is this because you don't want to reproduce cinematic cliches?
Suleiman: It's more a question of how can we in fact depict the extent of pain and violence within the frame. You can hint at the extent of pain and violence, but as soon as you contain it within the frame, there is the assumption that you know its extent. For example, if you were to portray an interrogator beating someone being interrogated, the audience wouldn't really understand what the victim was experiencing. Instead of doing that, it's up to the spectator to make the association between the events of the film and the true horror.
For example, I'd say that too much sensationalism concerning the Holocaust really obscured a lot of what the Holocaust really meant for those who lived through it. This kind of reductive history can reach an immoral level. I'm really repulsed by people opportunistically reproducing images of bodies being thrown into big holes and audiences consuming them. If you reduce the Holocaust to these images, you are banalizing it--as opposed to someone like Primo Levi, who is one of my favorite writers of all time. When I read Levi, I understood how I should shoulder moral responsibility for the stories I'm telling.
In The Writing of the Disaster, Maurice Blanchot talked about these issues in a much more complex way--the silence we must maintain if we really don't comprehend certain historical events. But Primo Levi poeticized the little events of daily life and left the horror for the reader to imagine. I've learned a lot from him, both morally and esthetically. It's funny; some people might question my identity.
Cineaste: It was quite amusing to overhear some conversations at the film festival press screening. A few uninformed critics were asking, "Is he Palestinian or Jewish?"
Suleiman: That's very funny. Factually, of course, I'm not Jewish. But I often refer to my humor as "conceptually Jewish." They just didn't get the humor again. Would it matter if I actually was Jewish? No, but certain cultural particularities would be different. Am I attracted to certain Jewish cultural and philosophical strands? Yes, of course.
Cineaste: Walter Benjamin, for example?
Suleiman: Yes. This is the sort of thing I was reflecting on in New York when I first started making films. I still don't know how to write a full sentence without ten grammatical mistakes. I still don't know how to tell you how I came to make films. When I read Walter Benjamin, I could relate to the way he wrote. He didn't make grammatical mistakes, but the way he broke and ruptured every single sentence he ever wrote gave me the space and freedom to express myself without any of the conventionalities that are imposed on all of us. Whenever I tried to write scripts and articles and showed them to people, they would always make the same comments, "This is not the way you write a script, this is not the way you write an article, this is not the way you write an Arabic sentence." I think it was only my stubbornness that made me continue. And this was true with films as well. Until this film, when I would show scripts to people, they'd usually say, "Well, I guess it's in your head." If you didn't have enough confidence, you'd think that was bad. But, as it turns out, scripts should be questioned.
Going back to more complex matters, I'd say that Walter Benjamin was a typically diasporic writer. You see it in the structure of his language, and I can see the same chaos, or the same order that I put to the chaos, or the same chaos I put to the order, in my films. I toy with it now. Maybe before, because of insecurity, I had some qualms about this. From the beginning, I threw myself into very modernist philosophical questions. After this self-searching, which I filtered through a lot of intellectual rhetoric, I'm becoming more interested in immediate experience. After all of this intellectualizing, I've come to a very simple realization: if you want to make a good image, be sincere. If I was a teacher and gave a lecture endorsing sincere images, the students would say, "Oh, my God, this guy is really full of himself." But, after a lot of convoluted thinking, I'm trying for once to achieve the essence of a poetic moment. I hope I'm getting better.
Cineaste: You seem to want to take viewers by surprise at some moments in the film and give them a jolt. You wouldn't necessarily think a fairly meditative film like this one would appropriate pop-culture imagery, as in the fantasy sequence that features a female Ninja warrior doing battle with Israeli soldiers.
Suleiman: Maybe that's also why I don't feel at all defensive concerning my own inner violence. I think I'm so clear about the fact that I'm utterly nonviolent.
Cineaste: Have people criticized this sequence for being violent? Since it's obviously a parody, this seems very literal-minded.
Suleiman: Yes, and it's a first-degree reading. But I heard the word violence only after some commentators had seen the film. I was constantly laughing while making this film.
Cineaste: They don't see it as playful.
Suleiman: No, some of them don't. I wanted to ask these people, "How could someone who, up to now, had been making such a subtle film, come to such a blunt, simplistic conclusion ?" As if this sequence constituted 'the solution'!
Cineaste: And, of course, just preceding this sequence, the episode featuring the Arafat balloon hovering over the checkpoint is more like something out of an Ionesco play than a bloody action film.
Suleiman: I was accused of making insinuations about kamikaze operations or suicide bombings. I found that completely ridiculous. But these accusations came from a very important French journalist with a Zionist background who has some connections to Israel. At some point, he mentioned something about the biblical right of the Jewish people to Israel, even if it meant the expulsion of the Palestinian people.
Cineaste: It seems like a case of projection on his part. Perhaps he actually yearns for Israeli Ninja warriors to take on Palestinians.
Suleiman: This is the rare film in which, within a genre sequence, you're not encouraged to totally identify with the heroine. When Clint Eastwood shoots the good, the bad, and the ugly, we're all with him. Or when John Wayne kills Indians, we're euphoric. The Ninja sequence is a bit like Sergio Leone, with some effects borrowed from The Matrix. It's totally artificial and the audience should be laughing. But certain people didn't laugh, and I think it has something to do with their political affiliations. But this represents about one percent of the critical reception.
Cineaste: As you observe in your notes on the film, you also had to confront the irony of casting Israelis as checkpoint soldiers, actors who had to demonstrate their hostility to Palestinians to get hired.
Suleiman: In a way, it's a pity that I didn't keep the audition tapes. But I didn't want to be on the same level of the people I was critiquing. It was interesting to write about this paradoxical, and quite perverse, situation--the fact that, being the director, I had a certain power over these guys who had exercised their own power over Palestinians a couple of years ago. They were all ex-soldiers; as you know, everyone in Israel has to do military service. And now they wanted to become actors. Most of them are actually 'half actors'--more than extras but less than full--fledged actors. The guy with the megaphone, however, is Menashe Noy--a very famous TV and theatrical actor in Israel. He's a very fine actor and I asked my line producer, Avi Kleinberger, to seek him out.
Cineaste: But you had to go to France to blow up a tank for the film.
Suleiman: Yes, that was really great. We tried to do it in Israel. It's possible to rent a tank there, although not from the Israeli army. But the Israelis wanted their tank back intact and the French army didn't mind if we blew up the whole tank. This was an experiment for them; they had infrared cameras and everything. One of their cameras was actually destroyed entirely and one of ours was hit in the tripod. If that didn't happen, I would have probably held the shot a bit longer.
Yesterday, someone was defending me for exploding the tank, by saying that it was all part of the gag. I played the devil's advocate and said that, yes, I actually do want to explode tanks. Maybe I don't want to explode them myself, but I don't want to see the presence of tanks and armies. Why be shy about saying that all armies, and all weapons, should be destroyed? Melt all the tanks and make something useful and artistic from them. I don't want to censor myself and conform to the White House's manipulative discourse. There are more checkpoints now than ever. Not only the checkpoints in Ramallah, but psychological checkpoints all over the world as well.
Cineaste: Your style is much less didactic than what you find in many Palestinian fiction films and documentaries. Does your almost minimalist flimmaking style have something to do with a distaste for mainstream Palestinian cinema? It's hard to find affinities between your work and other recent Palestinian films such as Ticket to Jerusalem or Rana's Wedding.
Suleiman: It has to do with my upbringing and the type of films I've consumed over the years. I don't want to put you off, but I don't identify with the kind of cinema you're referring to. My tastes don't really have much to do with mainstream Palestinian or Arab cinema. I'm saying this in an extremely objective manner-it's not that this type of cinema repulses me! It's just that I'm much more interested in this guy [points to Cineaste issue featuring Hou Hsiao-hsien]. Hou was one filmmaker who impressed me, in a totally self-reflexive way, when I started to see a lot of films. Before that, Ozu made a great impression on me and, of course, Bresson.
Cineaste: There also seems to be a tangible Jarmusch influence in both Chronicle and Divine Intervention.
Suleiman: It's funny, I didn't see Jarmusch's films when they came out and I was living in New York. But if his influence is in my films, it's probably not accidental. I like his films very much and think he's a great filmmaker. I absolutely adore the way he works-despite the ups and downs that all filmmakers have and not all of the films are equally good. But my main touchstones have been Asian cinema and self-reflexive directors like Antonioni. Critics mention Jacques Tati and Buster Keaton in reference to the humor in my current work, but I wasn't really that familiar with their films. But there's a lot of humor in Hou Hsiao-hisen and Tsai Ming-liang. Not to mention Bresson. Some people might not notice this, but I'm always tickled while watching his films.
Cineaste: I do recall you being quite critical of some Arab films by directors such as Youssef Chahine and Michel Khleifi.
Suleiman: I would say indifferent instead of critical. We don't exactly reside in the same world. I did, on the other hand, feel an affinity with Merzak Allouache's first film, but his later work doesn't interest me. I'm indifferent to the quite exotic form of representation you find in many of these films. There seems to be an unconscious deliberation of what the Occident wants from these filmmakers and these films. Or else, it's a kind of internal colonialism. This might be less true with Khleifi, although a film like Wedding in Galilee is totally bound up with a folkloric, Orientalist representation. On the other hand, I really liked his first film, Fertile Memory, which honestly tried to do something straightforward and intimate.
Cineaste: But even if you're not dogmatic, you've always identified yourself as a Palestinian filmmaker.
Suleiman: Yes, I don't want to be identified as an Arab-Israeli filmmaker. I totally embrace a Palestinian identity. Until they regain their occupied land, I will be strongly and intensely Palestinian. If, conceptually, Israel becomes very Palestinian and is still called Israel, I'll be Israeli. But, for the moment, I'll remain Palestinian. If I were an Israeli, I'd be so ashamed to hold on to that identity within the context of a fascistic state. But if tomorrow there emerges a democratic state without those religious and Zionist affiliations, who the hell cares if you're an Israeli or a Palestinian within such a situation? Eventually, the hope is that, when all the ideologies crumble and people return to their homes and there's no more racism, binationalism might not be such a bad idea.
Cineaste: Binationalism is a dream that goes back to a time before there was even an Israeli state.
Suleiman: Yes, but within the possibilities of modernity, I think we can definitely reconsider the term-redefine it and make it more nuanced. I don't see any other positive alternative to the notion of a secular, democratic state. What else can Israel become?
Cineaste: But what do you do when faced with Sharon on the one hand and Hamas on the other?
Suleiman: Personally, I wouldn't do anything. I'll continue to make films. But I hope that all of these religious ideologies, this kind of fanaticism, will eventually evaporate. Zionism will have to evaporate, because of its racist consequences. I read an article in The New York Times yesterday and was astounded to read that some people on campuses object to calling Zionism racist. It's apparently become something of a taboo. But, if you see it being practiced as I have, what else can you call it? It's also taboo to even discuss why people might become suicide bombers. And in Israel it's taboo to talk about the pre-1948 period. I had a wonderful assistant director, a really sweet Israeli guy. When we were denied permission to shoot in West Jerusalem, I realized that he didn't know what the term 'Arab houses' meant. He just thought the Hebrew words referred to an architectural style. I had to inform him that this referred to the fact that Arabs once lived in these houses.
Maybe the situation is confused in the United States; I understand that there are some right-wing Holocaust-deniers who employ anti-Zionist rhetoric. And it's true that some of the early Zionists had certain ideals that should be differentiated from contemporary consequences. There are obviously different branches of Zionism. Unfortunately, the ones who advocated expulsion of Palestinians and had a colonialist mentality were the winners.
I was talking to an interviewer yesterday, and after mentioning Palestinians over and over again, I suddenly said, "There's not only the Palestinians, but there are also the Kurdish." The guy was surprised, but the two people today who are suffering lack of recognition and humiliation are the Palestinians and the Kurdish people. The anecdotal and ironic part is that I said, "It's lucky that we have Israel." The Kurds don't have Israel and they're completely forgotten. Actually, I know that, several hundred years ago, on my father's side of the family, we had ties to Kurdistan. For a long time, because of Arab nationalism, Arab intellectuals didn't want to equate Palestine with Kurdistan-Arabism and all of that nonsense. I hope this is over now, because they really have to do away with the juntas that are ruling their countries.
Cineaste: After 9/Il, there were some contradictory developments. There was both a resurgence of jingoism and, on the other hand, the opportunity for Chomsky to reach a much wider public than he ever had in the past.
Suleiman: Perhaps there's some hope that a film like mine can be distributed in so many countries and have such success. Many people, just a few years ago, predicted that this kind of film would cease to be made and there would be only multimillion dollar blockbusters. A film like mine tries to transgress the boundaries between Hollywood and 'art cinema.' It seems to me that audiences are eager to see something done in a fresh mode. They want different types of pleasure and are not as shallow as many producers assume. It's certainly a hopeful development when Chomsky can become a best-selling author and films like Kiarostami's and mine, which are not blockbusters or shot in a classical Hollywood style, can become popular.
Divine Intervention is distributed by Avatar Films, 150 West 28th Street, Suite 1803, NYC 10001, phone (212) 675-0300, www.avatarfilrm.com.
Richard Porton is completing a new book on prostitution and the cinema to be published later this year by Cooper Square Press ...
P. "Notes from the Palestinian Diaspora: an interview with Elia Suleiman.(Interview)." Cineaste. Cineaste Publishers, Inc. 2003. HighBeam Research. 17 Dec. 2009.
Article from:
Cineaste
Article date:
June 22, 2003
Author:
Porton, Richard
Invoking the work of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, Edward Said pays homage to "the need to reassemble an identity out of the refractions and discontinuities of exile." In recent years, the films of a much different representative of Palestinian culture, Elia Suleiman, have depicted life in contemporary Israel and the Occupied Territories with a wry detachment engendered by his years of "voluntary exile" in New York and Paris. Suleiman's detachment, however, does not preclude him from being angry and passionate. His stripped-down film esthetic, which is considerably indebted to European and Asian art cinema, coexists with a savvy political and social consciousness.
From his initial short films to his most recent feature (Divine Intervention--winner of the Jury Prize at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival), Suleiman has mingled quasiau to biographical ruminations with concerted efforts to make films that are both politically committed and nondidactic. Homage by Assassination (1992), for example, is a diary film that filters a critique of the 1991 Gulf War through multilayered personal anecdotes. For critics Ella Shohat and Robert Stain, the film's shifts in tone--gallows humor mixed with despair--personify Suleiman's lucid portrait of "cultural disembodiment"-a disembodiment that manifests itself in "multiple failures of communication," which reflect the inevitable contradictions and quandaries of living abroad as a "diasporic subject."
Suleiman's first feature, Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996), commemorates, with considerable self-irony, his return to Nazareth after years of living in New York. Despite the restrained optimism engendered by the Oslo accords, the characteristically deadpan humor is noticeably tinged with melancholy and frustration. Suleiman uses himself as the butt of more than a few self-deflating jokes--particularly a scene in which a faulty microphone prevents the returning filmmaker from introducing his work to a Palestinian audience. The little annoyances and peculiarities of daily life--a young Palestinian woman's futile attempts to rent an apartment in Jerusalem, the marketing of biblical souvenirs in a Nazareth gift shop-become barometers of a greater political malaise.
If the humor is more barbed and even more despondent in Divine Intervention, it is undoubtedly a result of how the Middle East political climate has worsened during the intervening years. Suleiman again appears as a thinly fictionalized version of himself (E.S.), a bemused observer of his compatriots' inner rage. Opening with the incongruous spectacle of Santa Claus staggering towards his death after being stabbed in Nazareth, the film proceeds to relish the comic dyspepsia of E.S.'s father, a man whose ire towards his neighbors sums up the internecine warfare and undiluted pessimism that plagues Palestinians during the Sharon era.
Several of Divine Intervention's signature sequences poke savage, quasiabsurdist fun at the media-generated images of Palestinians as nothing more than unapologetic terrorists. After E.S. casually throws a peach pit out of his car, an Israeli tank explodes. A helium-filled balloon emblazoned with Yasir Arafat's picture hovers over an ominous checkpoint and becomes as much of a threat to the Israeli military as a cache of bombs. And, most spectacularly--and controversially--E.S.'s beautiful girlfriend is magically transformed into a Palestinian Ninja warrior who battles Israeli soldiers with superhuman panache. Although it is evident to most viewers that these sequences function more like parodies of common Palestinian wish-fulfillment fantasies than endorsements of actual violence, critics with an axe to grind have viewed them as wholehearted paeans to the gory intransigence of suicide bombers.
Cineaste interviewed Suleiman on the eve of Divine Intervention's American premiere at the 2002 New York Film Festival, He proved eager to discuss everything from the nature of Palestinian identity and the history of the state of Israel to his "conceptually Jewish" humor and admiration for Primo Levi and Walter Benjamin.
Richard Porton
Cineaste: Your short films are quite different, at least stylistically, from your features, which highlight a string of interrelated comic vignettes.
Ella Suleiman: There's a consistent pattern of development in my films; it's part of a learning process. Maybe as you learn more and gain confidence, you stretch-and unleash-yourself further as you feel more comfortable with the camera. And you don't censor yourself as much. I've been asked to explain the difference between Divine Intervention and my previous feature, Chronicle of a Disappearance. The current film just takes the premise of Chronicle and adjusts it to the more intense ambiance of the contemporary situation. I might have censored myself a bit in Chronicle. Perhaps 'censor' is not precisely the right word, but in the current film I went further in finding a style to fit my feelings of otherness. But, in many respects, the approach is quite consistent with the short films such as Homage by Assassination.
Cineaste: It's true that Homage is a 'diary film' and your current work is still quite diaristic. From the beginning of your career, you chose to integrate your own persona into the films.
Suleiman: You really have to speak in the plural, about 'personas.' When I look at the screen and watch myself, I do not see anything else but myself. But it's a more of an extension of myself than my 'authentic' personality. The only reason that I don't get annoyed while watching myself has to do with the fact that I'm emptied out.
Cineaste: Could you talk about the evolution of the premise, and script, of Divine Intervention?
Suleiman: Talking with a number of journalists has made me more aware of how I proceed in a film. I work very much like a writer and usually start with a series of notebooks. Even here in New York, I'm constantly jotting things into notebooks. I have to be tickled by an idea--and if it doesn't come I know there's no film there. Sometimes, I'm a bit irritated that it's not there, because I would have loved to work on a particular project. If I'm motivated to write something, that provides me with a great deal of pleasure although I can never be sure of the result. Now I'm not in a great mood for writing and don't feel like solitude. Maybe this is a shift of some kind--perhaps I want to shoot instead of write. I'm a bit worried, because I have nothing to say at the moment. But I keep reading novels and try to think of ideas.
Cineaste: It might be a naive question to pose, but the title of your film, Divine Intervention, seems congruent with the sad reality of life in the Middle East today. Because the situation is now so dire, people can only desperately hope for 'divine intervention.'
Suleiman: Titles have a lot to do with poetic license. I also get my titles towards the end of the editing process. I make the images in a tableaux-like fashion and then add sound and pigment. And it's the same with the titles. The title might provide a summary of the film's content. Since the title is arrived at just before the film is ready for release, you can hit on some poetic resonance if you're lucky. When this poetic license is present in the title, it can extend itself to various corners of the film itself.
Cineaste: So the audience can provide its own interpretation.
Suleiman: Exactly. I think there's a certain irony and second degree humor. The title Divine intervention is a bit pompous. That's why I had to ground the film with the subtitle--"a chronicle of love and pain."
Cineaste: Did you always intend to open the film with the scene featuring Santa Claus being taunted in Nazareth.
Suleiman: Always. I absolutely wanted that scene. The first time I shot it, it didn't work. The producer even asked me if I could make the film without this scene. But, after thinking about it for twenty-four hours, I said, "No, this scene has to open the film and it's going to give you an idea of everything that will follow." It was originally a joke to list Michel Piccoli as playing Santa Claus, but he eventually agreed to dub the character's heaving breathing.
Cineaste: You've spoken of your childhood hatred for Santa Claus.
Suleiman: I hope that my hatred of Santa Claus will spread all over the world. I associate Santa with a nauseating sweetness. I enjoy the fact that people are a little shocked by this. Every year, Santa Claus comes with his jingle bells and the world is going to its doom. It's a good idea to rupture the sweetness associated with Santa.
Cineaste: And it's ironic, but not at all coincidental, that this assault on Santa Claus occurs in Nazareth.
Suleiman: Nazareth is the best place to stab Santa. When people know that I'm from Nazareth, they say, "Wow, that was where Jesus walked." But you should just go and see for yourself the kids who live in Nazareth today. They lost their innocence years ago and there's nothing left for them to do. So, fuck Santa! But this is just an anecdotal account. In fact, it's a great opening because you get a definite idea of the breakdown in communication that comes later in the film. It lets the audience unfasten their seat belts and helps them become attuned to the humor that comes later.
Cineaste: And perhaps their expectations are frustrated as well.
Suleiman: Well, it's really a question of achieving a flow and some harmony. It's similar to what happens with a symphonic piece. If you start with a bang, you can then proceed to all of the little variations on the main theme. The musicality of the film's structure is important.
Cineaste: To ask another naive question, many viewers probably wonder how autobiographical this film really is.
Suleiman: It's very autobiographical, but not in a literal-minded, exact way. That's why I refer to the film as a self-portrait. You can't be presumptuous about biographies anyway--they're all inventions. I'm inventing factual moments, and their truth value probably lies in the way that I'm telling (or retelling) them, not whether they actually happened or not. But I can tell you that most of the events actually happened in Palestine, except of course for Santa, (Actually Santa did get stabbed there once, but not in Nazareth.) All the stuff about my father and the woman are definitely taken from reality. It's not a realistic representation of my father, but it corresponds to some aspects of him. A lot of this stuff actually happened during my childhood.
Cineaste: Many of these incidents also illustrate the fact that people who feel oppressed frequently vent their anger among themselves and within their own communities.
Suleiman: Yes, and I'm sure what you see in the film is only one one-thousandth of what actually goes on. I recently heard about some gang shoot-outs; it's a true ghetto atmosphere. People are extremely angry and frustrated. They're not nice to each other and there's no tenderness whatsoever or hint of harmonious community.
People complain about the checkpoint scene being implicitly violent. Go and watch the true violence, if you like, and you'll see the sadism that's being exercised every day. But I am against portraying brutality, for moral reasons, within the film frame.
Cineaste: Is this because you don't want to reproduce cinematic cliches?
Suleiman: It's more a question of how can we in fact depict the extent of pain and violence within the frame. You can hint at the extent of pain and violence, but as soon as you contain it within the frame, there is the assumption that you know its extent. For example, if you were to portray an interrogator beating someone being interrogated, the audience wouldn't really understand what the victim was experiencing. Instead of doing that, it's up to the spectator to make the association between the events of the film and the true horror.
For example, I'd say that too much sensationalism concerning the Holocaust really obscured a lot of what the Holocaust really meant for those who lived through it. This kind of reductive history can reach an immoral level. I'm really repulsed by people opportunistically reproducing images of bodies being thrown into big holes and audiences consuming them. If you reduce the Holocaust to these images, you are banalizing it--as opposed to someone like Primo Levi, who is one of my favorite writers of all time. When I read Levi, I understood how I should shoulder moral responsibility for the stories I'm telling.
In The Writing of the Disaster, Maurice Blanchot talked about these issues in a much more complex way--the silence we must maintain if we really don't comprehend certain historical events. But Primo Levi poeticized the little events of daily life and left the horror for the reader to imagine. I've learned a lot from him, both morally and esthetically. It's funny; some people might question my identity.
Cineaste: It was quite amusing to overhear some conversations at the film festival press screening. A few uninformed critics were asking, "Is he Palestinian or Jewish?"
Suleiman: That's very funny. Factually, of course, I'm not Jewish. But I often refer to my humor as "conceptually Jewish." They just didn't get the humor again. Would it matter if I actually was Jewish? No, but certain cultural particularities would be different. Am I attracted to certain Jewish cultural and philosophical strands? Yes, of course.
Cineaste: Walter Benjamin, for example?
Suleiman: Yes. This is the sort of thing I was reflecting on in New York when I first started making films. I still don't know how to write a full sentence without ten grammatical mistakes. I still don't know how to tell you how I came to make films. When I read Walter Benjamin, I could relate to the way he wrote. He didn't make grammatical mistakes, but the way he broke and ruptured every single sentence he ever wrote gave me the space and freedom to express myself without any of the conventionalities that are imposed on all of us. Whenever I tried to write scripts and articles and showed them to people, they would always make the same comments, "This is not the way you write a script, this is not the way you write an article, this is not the way you write an Arabic sentence." I think it was only my stubbornness that made me continue. And this was true with films as well. Until this film, when I would show scripts to people, they'd usually say, "Well, I guess it's in your head." If you didn't have enough confidence, you'd think that was bad. But, as it turns out, scripts should be questioned.
Going back to more complex matters, I'd say that Walter Benjamin was a typically diasporic writer. You see it in the structure of his language, and I can see the same chaos, or the same order that I put to the chaos, or the same chaos I put to the order, in my films. I toy with it now. Maybe before, because of insecurity, I had some qualms about this. From the beginning, I threw myself into very modernist philosophical questions. After this self-searching, which I filtered through a lot of intellectual rhetoric, I'm becoming more interested in immediate experience. After all of this intellectualizing, I've come to a very simple realization: if you want to make a good image, be sincere. If I was a teacher and gave a lecture endorsing sincere images, the students would say, "Oh, my God, this guy is really full of himself." But, after a lot of convoluted thinking, I'm trying for once to achieve the essence of a poetic moment. I hope I'm getting better.
Cineaste: You seem to want to take viewers by surprise at some moments in the film and give them a jolt. You wouldn't necessarily think a fairly meditative film like this one would appropriate pop-culture imagery, as in the fantasy sequence that features a female Ninja warrior doing battle with Israeli soldiers.
Suleiman: Maybe that's also why I don't feel at all defensive concerning my own inner violence. I think I'm so clear about the fact that I'm utterly nonviolent.
Cineaste: Have people criticized this sequence for being violent? Since it's obviously a parody, this seems very literal-minded.
Suleiman: Yes, and it's a first-degree reading. But I heard the word violence only after some commentators had seen the film. I was constantly laughing while making this film.
Cineaste: They don't see it as playful.
Suleiman: No, some of them don't. I wanted to ask these people, "How could someone who, up to now, had been making such a subtle film, come to such a blunt, simplistic conclusion ?" As if this sequence constituted 'the solution'!
Cineaste: And, of course, just preceding this sequence, the episode featuring the Arafat balloon hovering over the checkpoint is more like something out of an Ionesco play than a bloody action film.
Suleiman: I was accused of making insinuations about kamikaze operations or suicide bombings. I found that completely ridiculous. But these accusations came from a very important French journalist with a Zionist background who has some connections to Israel. At some point, he mentioned something about the biblical right of the Jewish people to Israel, even if it meant the expulsion of the Palestinian people.
Cineaste: It seems like a case of projection on his part. Perhaps he actually yearns for Israeli Ninja warriors to take on Palestinians.
Suleiman: This is the rare film in which, within a genre sequence, you're not encouraged to totally identify with the heroine. When Clint Eastwood shoots the good, the bad, and the ugly, we're all with him. Or when John Wayne kills Indians, we're euphoric. The Ninja sequence is a bit like Sergio Leone, with some effects borrowed from The Matrix. It's totally artificial and the audience should be laughing. But certain people didn't laugh, and I think it has something to do with their political affiliations. But this represents about one percent of the critical reception.
Cineaste: As you observe in your notes on the film, you also had to confront the irony of casting Israelis as checkpoint soldiers, actors who had to demonstrate their hostility to Palestinians to get hired.
Suleiman: In a way, it's a pity that I didn't keep the audition tapes. But I didn't want to be on the same level of the people I was critiquing. It was interesting to write about this paradoxical, and quite perverse, situation--the fact that, being the director, I had a certain power over these guys who had exercised their own power over Palestinians a couple of years ago. They were all ex-soldiers; as you know, everyone in Israel has to do military service. And now they wanted to become actors. Most of them are actually 'half actors'--more than extras but less than full--fledged actors. The guy with the megaphone, however, is Menashe Noy--a very famous TV and theatrical actor in Israel. He's a very fine actor and I asked my line producer, Avi Kleinberger, to seek him out.
Cineaste: But you had to go to France to blow up a tank for the film.
Suleiman: Yes, that was really great. We tried to do it in Israel. It's possible to rent a tank there, although not from the Israeli army. But the Israelis wanted their tank back intact and the French army didn't mind if we blew up the whole tank. This was an experiment for them; they had infrared cameras and everything. One of their cameras was actually destroyed entirely and one of ours was hit in the tripod. If that didn't happen, I would have probably held the shot a bit longer.
Yesterday, someone was defending me for exploding the tank, by saying that it was all part of the gag. I played the devil's advocate and said that, yes, I actually do want to explode tanks. Maybe I don't want to explode them myself, but I don't want to see the presence of tanks and armies. Why be shy about saying that all armies, and all weapons, should be destroyed? Melt all the tanks and make something useful and artistic from them. I don't want to censor myself and conform to the White House's manipulative discourse. There are more checkpoints now than ever. Not only the checkpoints in Ramallah, but psychological checkpoints all over the world as well.
Cineaste: Your style is much less didactic than what you find in many Palestinian fiction films and documentaries. Does your almost minimalist flimmaking style have something to do with a distaste for mainstream Palestinian cinema? It's hard to find affinities between your work and other recent Palestinian films such as Ticket to Jerusalem or Rana's Wedding.
Suleiman: It has to do with my upbringing and the type of films I've consumed over the years. I don't want to put you off, but I don't identify with the kind of cinema you're referring to. My tastes don't really have much to do with mainstream Palestinian or Arab cinema. I'm saying this in an extremely objective manner-it's not that this type of cinema repulses me! It's just that I'm much more interested in this guy [points to Cineaste issue featuring Hou Hsiao-hsien]. Hou was one filmmaker who impressed me, in a totally self-reflexive way, when I started to see a lot of films. Before that, Ozu made a great impression on me and, of course, Bresson.
Cineaste: There also seems to be a tangible Jarmusch influence in both Chronicle and Divine Intervention.
Suleiman: It's funny, I didn't see Jarmusch's films when they came out and I was living in New York. But if his influence is in my films, it's probably not accidental. I like his films very much and think he's a great filmmaker. I absolutely adore the way he works-despite the ups and downs that all filmmakers have and not all of the films are equally good. But my main touchstones have been Asian cinema and self-reflexive directors like Antonioni. Critics mention Jacques Tati and Buster Keaton in reference to the humor in my current work, but I wasn't really that familiar with their films. But there's a lot of humor in Hou Hsiao-hisen and Tsai Ming-liang. Not to mention Bresson. Some people might not notice this, but I'm always tickled while watching his films.
Cineaste: I do recall you being quite critical of some Arab films by directors such as Youssef Chahine and Michel Khleifi.
Suleiman: I would say indifferent instead of critical. We don't exactly reside in the same world. I did, on the other hand, feel an affinity with Merzak Allouache's first film, but his later work doesn't interest me. I'm indifferent to the quite exotic form of representation you find in many of these films. There seems to be an unconscious deliberation of what the Occident wants from these filmmakers and these films. Or else, it's a kind of internal colonialism. This might be less true with Khleifi, although a film like Wedding in Galilee is totally bound up with a folkloric, Orientalist representation. On the other hand, I really liked his first film, Fertile Memory, which honestly tried to do something straightforward and intimate.
Cineaste: But even if you're not dogmatic, you've always identified yourself as a Palestinian filmmaker.
Suleiman: Yes, I don't want to be identified as an Arab-Israeli filmmaker. I totally embrace a Palestinian identity. Until they regain their occupied land, I will be strongly and intensely Palestinian. If, conceptually, Israel becomes very Palestinian and is still called Israel, I'll be Israeli. But, for the moment, I'll remain Palestinian. If I were an Israeli, I'd be so ashamed to hold on to that identity within the context of a fascistic state. But if tomorrow there emerges a democratic state without those religious and Zionist affiliations, who the hell cares if you're an Israeli or a Palestinian within such a situation? Eventually, the hope is that, when all the ideologies crumble and people return to their homes and there's no more racism, binationalism might not be such a bad idea.
Cineaste: Binationalism is a dream that goes back to a time before there was even an Israeli state.
Suleiman: Yes, but within the possibilities of modernity, I think we can definitely reconsider the term-redefine it and make it more nuanced. I don't see any other positive alternative to the notion of a secular, democratic state. What else can Israel become?
Cineaste: But what do you do when faced with Sharon on the one hand and Hamas on the other?
Suleiman: Personally, I wouldn't do anything. I'll continue to make films. But I hope that all of these religious ideologies, this kind of fanaticism, will eventually evaporate. Zionism will have to evaporate, because of its racist consequences. I read an article in The New York Times yesterday and was astounded to read that some people on campuses object to calling Zionism racist. It's apparently become something of a taboo. But, if you see it being practiced as I have, what else can you call it? It's also taboo to even discuss why people might become suicide bombers. And in Israel it's taboo to talk about the pre-1948 period. I had a wonderful assistant director, a really sweet Israeli guy. When we were denied permission to shoot in West Jerusalem, I realized that he didn't know what the term 'Arab houses' meant. He just thought the Hebrew words referred to an architectural style. I had to inform him that this referred to the fact that Arabs once lived in these houses.
Maybe the situation is confused in the United States; I understand that there are some right-wing Holocaust-deniers who employ anti-Zionist rhetoric. And it's true that some of the early Zionists had certain ideals that should be differentiated from contemporary consequences. There are obviously different branches of Zionism. Unfortunately, the ones who advocated expulsion of Palestinians and had a colonialist mentality were the winners.
I was talking to an interviewer yesterday, and after mentioning Palestinians over and over again, I suddenly said, "There's not only the Palestinians, but there are also the Kurdish." The guy was surprised, but the two people today who are suffering lack of recognition and humiliation are the Palestinians and the Kurdish people. The anecdotal and ironic part is that I said, "It's lucky that we have Israel." The Kurds don't have Israel and they're completely forgotten. Actually, I know that, several hundred years ago, on my father's side of the family, we had ties to Kurdistan. For a long time, because of Arab nationalism, Arab intellectuals didn't want to equate Palestine with Kurdistan-Arabism and all of that nonsense. I hope this is over now, because they really have to do away with the juntas that are ruling their countries.
Cineaste: After 9/Il, there were some contradictory developments. There was both a resurgence of jingoism and, on the other hand, the opportunity for Chomsky to reach a much wider public than he ever had in the past.
Suleiman: Perhaps there's some hope that a film like mine can be distributed in so many countries and have such success. Many people, just a few years ago, predicted that this kind of film would cease to be made and there would be only multimillion dollar blockbusters. A film like mine tries to transgress the boundaries between Hollywood and 'art cinema.' It seems to me that audiences are eager to see something done in a fresh mode. They want different types of pleasure and are not as shallow as many producers assume. It's certainly a hopeful development when Chomsky can become a best-selling author and films like Kiarostami's and mine, which are not blockbusters or shot in a classical Hollywood style, can become popular.
Divine Intervention is distributed by Avatar Films, 150 West 28th Street, Suite 1803, NYC 10001, phone (212) 675-0300, www.avatarfilrm.com.
Richard Porton is completing a new book on prostitution and the cinema to be published later this year by Cooper Square Press ...
P. "Notes from the Palestinian Diaspora: an interview with Elia Suleiman.(Interview)." Cineaste. Cineaste Publishers, Inc. 2003. HighBeam Research. 17 Dec. 2009
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