reportage
>Egypt has much to teach the West
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Adam John Waterman recounts his journey in Egypt after the revolution @ Feminist Wire.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Everyone wants to talk about the camels. “Can you believe they brought camels to Tahrir?” I’ve been in Cairo less than two hours and I’ve already heard at least three stories about the day, February 2, when pro-Mubarak supporters swept through Tahrir Square, attacking demonstrators with makeshift clubs, astride camels and horses. Three days before, on January 30, Mubarak had ordered the Egyptian air force to fly its American-manufactured F-16s low over central Cairo, an obvious attempt at staunching the demonstrations through threat of military engagement. As we talk through the events of that first week, however, this is not what anyone wants to discuss. “The camels came from Giza,” one person volunteers, “because the revolution scared away all the tourists.” Another friend tells a slightly different tale. “Egyptian state TV was reporting that Tahrir was occupied by Afghan guerillas and that they were handing out Kalashnikovs. My brother rushed there to fight the Afghans because he’s a patriotic Egyptian. He didn’t know what was really happening until later. Then he joined the resistance.” Several people I speak with conflate the events of this day, February 2, with those of January 28, the “Friday for Martyrs and Political Prisoners.” January 28 began with the nation-wide Internet crackdown, saw police attacks on demonstrators following the Friday prayer, and ended with Mubarak’s National Democratic Party headquarters in flames. The camels didn’t show up for nearly a week. Nonetheless, at least one person recalled them making their first appearance on January 28, and—in his memory—it was decisive. “It was after they came with the camels that we attacked the police. It was after the camels that we knew that we were going to win.”
>Life is unfolding exactly the way it is meant to
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| Ronald Ceuppens @ Paper Darts/ |
Scott Tucker recounts the everyday encounters in Guinea, West Africa @ Etude.
The sound of the boys crying out in pain is new. The other sounds are the same. The bat wings, quick and rubbery, flitting overhead in a haze of mango leaves and wood smoke. The old counterfeiter, sitting outside his front door, talking quietly with visitors in threadbare suits.
The children sing a school song in French outside in the dark, then start up a game of “de donc/dernier,” Simon Says, jumping forward and backward over a circle drawn in the dirt. They cheer noisily out of habit when the electricity comes on, although they continue playing the same games electricity or not. There are no vehicles again tonight on the main road, due to a military curfew that’s been in place since the near-assassination of President Dadis Camara more than a month ago. A dundunba party carries on, however, past 11 p.m. in a neighbor’s yard, with drumming and dancing and excited announcements coming over a microphone. C’est normal. C’est Conakry.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )I have come to Guinea, West Africa, at a time when the U.S. embassy is closed and all Americans have been urged to leave the country. I have left the comforts of Seattle, Washington for this, to remind myself that there is power in ordinary people, even the world’s poorest people, going about living their daily lives. These people can save a nation. They can make a nation worth saving. They can turn around your thinking. I know only one person “on the ground,” Karim Koumbassa, my drum and dance teacher in Seattle, and a native of Guinea. He is, like most men in Conakry, strong and pliant from years of physical labor in the equatorial heat. He is 33 years old, best guess, although age is happily unimportant here. Dates of birth are routinely invented on official paperwork.
>Her long hair drifts like seaweed
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| Elizabeth Soule @ DeepSleep/ |
Chris Wiewiora on the tragedies of captured orcas @ Etude.
Dawn Brancheau will drown during a clear, sunny afternoon toward the end of the “Believe” orca show at SeaWorld in Orlando, Florida. It’s Wednesday, February 24, 2010, and the water is cold, even though the high for the day is 70 degrees. Some of the audience finishes a late lunch at Dine with Shamu—a buffet-style restaurant with a viewing window of the whale tank. The diners who have finished their meals are starting on the assorted cookie platter. In the stadium are children holding onto their parents while dripping orca-shaped, black and white, ice cream Shamu bars on their hands. The families have jackets with them, the sleeves tied around their waists if they are not under the awning’s shade.
The surface of the water is slightly choppy with 10 mph winds. A little before 2 p.m., Tilkium (nicknamed Tilly)—a bull and the largest captive whale at SeaWorld—will grab Dawn, a trainer for 14 years, in his mouth and pull her into and then under the water. The autopsy released the next day will report Dawn died from “multiple traumatic injuries and drowning.”
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Dawn is one of only a few trainers allowed to work with Tilly. During the show, she has been using ice cubes as markers for Tilly, so he knows where he is supposed to surface. On the stage’s poolside deck, Dawn has been shuffling side to side with Tilly mimicking her by doing a sort of dance, while the audience listens to factoids: “Did you know SeaWorld’s killer whales have their teeth brushed everyday? Why? Because dental problems are the single biggest cause of orca fatalities in the wild.”
>Immaculate repression zone
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| Adam Pretty @ Lens Culture |
Jules Boykoff on art, profits, and anti-Olympic activism @ New Left Review.
Walking along east Hastings Street in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver one crisp January morning in 2010, I came across a perplexing set of white panels on the outer flank of the refurbished Woodward’s building. The panels featured an explosion of repudiation: stark, black-lettered phrases like ‘HELL NO’, ‘I SAID NO’, ‘NO BLOODY WAY’, and ‘NO WAY JOSÉ’. Four placards simply read ‘NO’. Later I learned that this was a site-specific installation by Vancouver artist Ken Lum for Simon Fraser University’s Audain Gallery, challenging a ‘2010 Winter Games By-law’ passed by the City of Vancouver in the run-up to the Olympics. The by-law outlawed placards, posters and banners that did not ‘celebrate’ the 2010 Winter Games and ‘create or enhance a festive environment and atmosphere’. The ordinance criminalized anti-Olympic signs and gave Canadian authorities the right to remove them from both public and private property.
The following month I returned to Vancouver to see how anti-Olympic organizing was taking shape. Strolling near the Olympic Village in the days before the Games, one encountered a contradiction-laden mélange of genial sports enthusiasm and ostentatious surveillance state. The place was teeming with sprightly tourists, athletes, Olympics officials and journalists with cameras and press badges swinging from their necks; awash with teal, one of the perky, focus-group-tested colours of the 2010 Winter Games. At the same time, it felt like entering some sort of immaculate repression zone. Officers from the newly formed Vancouver Integrated Security Unit—headed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and comprising more than 20 policing agencies—hunkered together on every corner and patrolled the bustling footpaths around the False Creek inlet. Surveillance cameras were pegged to poles at regular intervals around the perimeter. Helicopters whirred overhead. CF-18 Hornet fighter jets zinged by. Ersatz Christo and Jeanne-Claude-style banners, also in Olympic teal, enveloped chain-link fences that channelled people into permissible zones while concealing chunks of so-called public space.
>Restored to reality all the world’s brutality
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| Radina Toeva @ F-Stop Magazine/ |
Ghania Mouffok on the absence of revolutionary optimism in Algeria @ Eurozine.
Ali Yahia is a lawyer and, at 90 years of age, both venerable and courageous. That all counts for nothing with the young recruits of the Algerian police, who don’t know his name and don’t recognize his face. They just brutally shove him out of the way. The “March for Change” on 12 February in Algiers turned out to be an opportunity for these police recruits to try out the new repressive techniques devised by a dictatorship that is henceforth going to have to look to its image. Obama is watching.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )
The demonstrators, numbering around two or three thousand, were treated to a veritable ballet by the boys in blue, a silent opera coordinated with near-perfect precision. For an overture, there was the arrest of the most determined or audacious of the demonstrators. Five or six bruisers, having picked out their victim, threw themselves on top of him, grabbed him and forced him to run, yelling “Run, run!” until they reached the paddy wagon parked a few yards away. All of this beneath the dumbfounded gaze of the demonstrators, who parted to let them through. Then it was the turn of the girls in blue, who, conscientious policewomen that they were, meted out the same treatment to the female demonstrators. Nothing had been left to chance. Around a hundred people were arrested in this way, at the speed of light, and although they were given a rough time, they were later released. No sooner had these lightning squads done their work than human dragnets of police officers began to advance, surrounding the rest of the demonstrators, kettling them and stopping them getting away. Each human dragnet was made up of about 100 members of the CNS, the Algerian riot police, with their transparent shields at the ready, wearing helmets and boots, armed with wooden clubs. In three rows, they advanced and withdrew, shoulder to shoulder, on every side, like the body of some giant, many-headed serpent, encircling the demonstration in a black hedge of robocops. Meanwhile, other police officers maintained a watching brief, using their short-wave radios to pass on intelligence about the slightest movement by demonstrators, so that the moment it was spotted they could be prevented from breaking out of this hellish circle. It was impossible to move. Despite this, what had been a march turned into a rally between the buildings in the 1 May Square and the bus stop.
>A foreigner on your own soil
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Farrah Merali explores the politics of Palestinian hip-hop @ Maisonnueve.
In Jesus’ hometown there’s an underground hip hop studio. It’s tiny, just the renovated basement of a house, with black eggshell foam glued to the ceiling as makeshift soundproofing. The only hint of the studio’s existence is the colourful graffiti collage on the front door. A pit bull with a pink snout—the studio’s unofficial mascot—is chained up on the veranda, standing guard over the city of Nazareth.
Inside, Adi Krayem is sunk low in his chair, his face illuminated by the glow of two side-by-side computer monitors. As a teenager, Krayem practised rhyming in front of the mirror and devoured Notorious B.I.G lyrics online. He was just sixteen when his group, We7, performed for the first time at a classmate’s birthday party. Now, with one hand on the keyboard and the other holding a freshly-lit Camel, Krayem is mixing We7’s new track. Like much of the group’s music, it’s dark and tragic, a mix of nineties rhythms and Arabic instrumentation. He runs a hand up and down his black baseball cap and bobs his head from side to side, cautiously, testing out the beat. “I think this is it,” he says, pointing at the screen. “Just like that.”
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Turning his head, Krayem yells for Anan Qssem, his tall, bulky bandmate, to come back inside. Soon, a small crowd develops as the band’s entourage hovers around the computer. Their eyes fix on the screen, following the moving sound waves. Then, just like Krayem, they start to bob their heads in an unspoken sign of approval.
>Their clothes stink of gasoline
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J. Malcolm Garcia reports on the women of Afghanistan who set themselves on fire @ Guernica.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )In Bed 19, a woman suffers from high blood pressure and burns to her feet from boiling water spilled from a pot; Bed 21 burned herself lighting an oil lamp; Bed 20 fell against a hot water heater.
Then there is the girl in Bed 18. She looks no older than fifteen. Stray wisps of black hair lie limply against her cheeks. Rank smelling blankets cover her bandaged-wrapped body, and she stares mutely at the ceiling, flakes of charred skin peeling off burns to her chin and neck. Beside her sits her pregnant sister-in-law who looks about the same age. They live in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province, a Taliban stronghold far south of Herat. They have never left their home before; have never been to their village bazaar and the cities beyond it. The girls won’t look at us. This is the first time they have not covered their faces in the presence of men outside their families.
Dr. Naeema Nikzad, a psychologist who counsels burn victims at Herat Regional Hospital, considers both girls while adjusting a blue-patterned scarf around her head. When they came to the hospital, Dr. Nikzad told the sister-in-law to remove her burqa. She gave her a smock, flip-flops, and a surgical cap and told her to put them on.
Dr. Nikzad then took the burned girl into surgery and told her, now I have to strip you. You cannot wear a burqa. No one will touch you. No one from your village will see you.
The girl felt Dr. Nikzad raise the burqa above her head. “I am exposed,” she said.
>The 49th parallel
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Grant Stoddard explores a cartographer’s error and a town somewhere between the US and Canada @ The Walrus.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )One of the most striking things separating the United States and Canada is the line that divides the United States from Canada. While oceans, lakes, rivers, drainage basins, deserts, mountain ranges, and valleys dictate the size and shape of many nations, the pin-straight border running from Lake of the Woods to the Pacific Ocean is nothing if not completely and utterly arbitrary.
The western half of the world’s longest land border was laid down in three stages: In 1783, an understandably cocksure Benjamin Franklin won British acceptance of a border extending from the “northwesternmost point” of Lake of the Woods to the Boundary Waters laid out in the Treaty of Paris, the denouement of the United States’ fight for independence. This border would have made much more sense if the source of the Mississippi River had been where both parties suspected, but then it was a botanist, not a professional cartographer, who had created the map negotiators were working from.
In the aftermath of the second, wholly less conclusive war with Britain (the War of 1812), the forty-ninth parallel was established in the Anglo-American Convention of 1818 as the border between Lake of the Woods and the Stony [Rocky] Mountains. In this agreement, the point identified by Franklin was linked to the slightly more southerly forty-ninth parallel by a north-south line that would later form the boundary between present-day Manitoba and Ontario.
A generation later, a potential third conflict with a Britain approaching the zenith of her imperial might was a risk US president James Polk was keen to avoid. Despite having run on an expansionist platform, and with hawks in his own party screaming “Fifty-four Forty or Fight!” (the slogan of an initiative to push US territory north to the Russian colony of Alaska), Polk compromised, and the forty-ninth parallel boundary was extended beyond the Rockies to the Strait of Georgia. The Oregon Treaty in 1846, then, seemed to be the last significant amendment to the matter of the US-Canada border — until “Grumpy” Gary Dietzler had his revolutionary idea in the spring of 1997.
>Murder music
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Ilan Greenberg explores the homophobia of Jamaican dancehall music @ Guernica.
On a breezy evening in mid-April a committee boasting some of Jamaica’s most venerable citizens convened an open-air meeting under the auspices of the department of government at the University of the West Indies. After almost a year and a half of sifting through charts and listening to old vinyl recordings, the committee co-chairmen, which included the president of Jamaica’s National Gallery and a former finance minister, presented to several hundred members of the public their list of the top one hundred Jamaican songs. Pandemonium ensued.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Audience members objected to the choice for number one song, “One Love,” Bob Marley’s sweet paean to togetherness, as being too saccharine. People jammed the open microphone to point out the under-representation of female artists. Others testily questioned why so few of the chosen top songs reflected reggae’s subversive, anti-establishment politics. Several people demanded a more transparent process. But the most passionate complaint from the crowd—which included members of the media, faculty in the university’s department of reggae studies, music industry figures, and ordinary music fans—was voiced over and over again from younger members of the audience: Where on this top one hundred list were the dancehall songs?
>The healthy butcher
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Merit Mitchell on the increasing consumption of ethically-produced meat in Canada @ MaisonNeuve.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )It all ends up in here. The bits and pieces, the undesirables. The trim. Kept cold in a fridge at minus twenty degrees Celsius, it moves through the silver grinder and squeezes out the front plate, like ribbons of mottled Play-Doh, into a blue Rubbermaid bin. In the basement of the Healthy Butcher on Toronto’s Eglinton Avenue, Ryan Klauke looks at the white board on the wall to see which recipes he’s following this morning. Three days a week he’s here, before most of us are out of bed, to get elbow-deep in these odds and ends. The boombox on the butcher block behind him plays Bach. From the shelf above the stainless steel countertop he selects herbs and spices and pours them into their respective containers: thyme, cayenne, pepper. In go garlic, chopped onions, white wine. He mixes by hand, forming fists and pummeling the meat, making sure the spices don’t clump. It’s surprisingly unyielding, and cold enough to be painful. But it beats the hell out of sitting at a desk nine to five, which he did for eight years, working in customer service for a major bank. When he left he took a picture of the stack of unfinished paperwork sitting on his desk. Klauke doesn’t like dealing with customers anymore, so he’s in the basement with his Philip Glass CDs and buckets of soaking intestines.
Klauke forms four little patties of sausage meat and heads upstairs to the kitchen. He heats a frying pan on the industrial gas range and slides the patties into the oil. This is quality control—ensuring the sausage fill is seasoned correctly before it’s packed into casings. Morning tastings are another job perk, and for an avowed carnivore like Klauke, “It’s never too early for meat.” Back downstairs, he packs the first batch of fill into R2, a metal cylinder that works like an upside-down trash compactor: inside the cylinder, the floor rises toward the lid, forcing the meat mix out a metal nozzle on the front. Klauke feeds a length of casing—pork intestines—onto the nozzle and it bunches up like slimy white panty hose. He leaves three or four inches of lead hanging off the tube, leans against a teal lever on R2’s side and out shoots the meat—a rope of flesh coiling up on the counter to his left. He makes about five feet of sausage before the intestine runs out and a column of loose mix shoots from the nozzle and splats on the wall. Later he pinches off the rope in eight-inch lengths and spins it to create individual sausages connected by links. Klauke twirls one sausage toward him, one away, one toward, one away, again and again. He pops air bubbles with a bamboo skewer. After this batch, he’ll load R2 with another and repeat. He does this all day.
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