BREAKING POEMS: Suheir Hammad in New Orleans
Featuring Suheir Hammad, Kalamu Ya Salaam and Sunni Patterson
Type:
Date: Time: Location: Street: City/Town: Description
Tony Award-Winning Palestinian Actor and Def Jam Poet Suheir Hammad Is Coming to New Orleans! Please Spread The Word!Suheir Hammad will be performing on Saturday, March 13, as part of a evening of poetry with world famous poets Kalamu Ya Salaam and Sunni Patterson, as well as musician Michaela Harrison. She will also be introducing the film Salt of This Sea on Friday, March 19. More info on both events is below.
For full details of this and other exciting programming at the PATOIS film festival, see: http://patoisfilmfest.org.
Breaking Poems
Saturday, March 13, 7:00pm
Warren Easton Senior High School
3019 Canal Street (at Gayoso St, between Broad and Jeff Davis in Mid City)
An evening of poetry and music with Tony Award-winning Actor and Def Jam poet Suheir Hammad, Def Jam poet Sunni Patterson, legendary poet, filmmaker and author Kalamu Ya Salaam, and singer Michaela Harrison.Salt of this Sea
Friday, March 19, 7:00pm
Zeitgeist Multi-Disciplinary Arts Center
1618 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd (By Terpsichore St, in Central City)
Film Screening, Introduced by the film's star, Tony Award-winning actor and Def Jam poet Suheir HammadFilm Description: In Annemarie Jacir’s stunning debut feature, two young Palestinians steal a taste of freedom on the run from the law. Reviewers have called it, "A film that dares to imagine the impossible...Attractive, seductive, compelling, characters which claim a piece of your heart within minutes. Bonnie and Clyde meets Ghassan Kanafani - just what we needed to dream again." The film was an official selection at the 2009 CANNES Film Festival.
Soraya (played by Suheir Hammad), born in Brooklyn in a working class community of Palestinian refugees, discovers that her grandfather’s savings were frozen in a bank account in Jaffa when he was exiled in 1948. Stubborn, passionate and determined to reclaim what is hers, she fulfills her life-long dream of “returning” to Palestine. Slowly she is taken apart by the reality around her and is forced to confront her own internal anger. She meets Emad, a young Palestinian whose ambition, contrary to hers, is to leave forever. Tired of the constraints that dictate their lives, they know in order to be free, they must take things into their own hands, even if it’s illegal. 108 minutes, fiction. Directed by Annemarie Jacir. Regional Premiere.
Film Trailer:
Artist Websites:
Kalamu Ya Salaam: http://kalamu.com/
Sunni Patterson: http://www.sunnipatterson.com/
Suheir Hammad: http://www.suheirhammad.com/
Michaela Harrison: http://www.myspace.com/michaelaanaya
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PATOIS: State Violence and Community Response
featuring the World Premiere of Operation Small Axe
Date: Time: Location: Street: City/Town: Description
Screening of Daggit Gaza and the World Premiere of Operation Small Axe, followed by a panel and discussion about state violence in New Orleans and Oakland, and violent and nonviolent community responses. The legacies of violence against whole populations like the people of Gaza and members of Black communities like Oscar Grant, Adolph Grimes, and the Danziger Bridge families. Nonviolent and Violent community responses, including Lovelle Mixon and Mark Essex. With filmmaker Adimu Madyun, Prisoners of Conscience Committee Minister of Information JR Valrey, and activists and community members from Oakland and New Orleans.Operation Small Axe Description (*WORLD PREMIERE*)
Operation Small Axe is a documentary centered on Prisoners of Conscience Committee Minister of Information JR and, Block Report Radio show. This film gives an in-depth account of police terrorism and occupation in Oakland, California.On New Years Day 2009, Oscar Grant was murdered by the police in front of dozens of people at the Fruitvale BART (subway) station in Oakland. Three months later, Lovelle Mixon was murdered after allegedly killing four members of the Oakland Police Department. Two more cases of police unjustifiably murdering citizens were documented in the following weeks. This time instead of the Gaza Strip in the Middle East we’re talking about the MacArthur strip in East Oakland, California. Instead of the occupation force of the Israelis in Palestine or the Americans in Iraq & Afghanistan, the low income Black communities in America are dealing with the police, CIA, FBI, ATF and DEA to name a few. 71m. Directed by Adimu Madyun.
Operation Small Axe expresses the sentiments of the people regarding government-sanctioned terrorism. Showing the diversity in the resistance, the choice weapon of the operation is citizen journalism. In the words of the internationally renowned artist Bob Marley, ‘If you are a big tree, we are the small axe, sharpened to cut you down.’
Daggit Gaza Description
Daggah is a spicy tomato salad made in Gaza that is traditionally pounded in a mortar and pestle. This short, personal film juxtaposes the making of the salad with a phone conversation with the director’s uncle in Gaza. Literally translated, “Daggit Gazza” means “the pounding of Gaza.” 8m. Directed by Hadeel Assali and Iman Saqr.
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The popularity of our Overtime series has surprised us. For 2010, we are going to publish six issues a year. Hour 12 is now available for your reading pleasure.
By the way, for all you good little boys and girls who received electronic readers for the holidays, you can now subscribe to an electronic version of WW!.
NEWS FLASH: Tyler McMahon's "A Pocket Guide to Male Prostitution" (Hour 4) was named a Notable Western Story of the Year by Best of the West: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri. Congrats, Tyler!
You requested it, and we complied: Issue seven of Workers Write! will be Tales from the Courtroom and will contain stories and poems from the legal worker's point of view (lawyers, judges, court reporters, bailiffs, and so on). Your story should be set anywhere legal work is performed, but we are not looking for stories about court cases or whodunits. Drop us a line if you have a question.
The deadline for submissions is
Sept. 1, 2010 (or until the issue is full).Submit your stories via e-mail to: courtroom@workerswritejournal.com, or send a hard copy to:
Blue Cubicle Press
P.O. Box 250382
Plano, TX 75025-0382Word count: 500 to 5000 words
Payment: Between $5 and $50 (depending on length and rights requested). We will consider previously published material.
We need your stories about the workplace from our Overtime series.
Every two months, we'll release a chapbook containing one story that centers on work. Click here for more information.
Hour 12, "This Is How We Do Things at the Post Office" by Patrick Cook, is on sale now.
You can also purchase past copies of Overtime at the store.
Sign up for our newsletter:
Each spring, Lake Forest College, in conjunction with the &NOW Festival, sponsors emerging writers under forty years old—with no major book publication—to spend two months in residence at our campus in Chicago's northern suburbs on the shore of Lake Michigan.
There are no formal teaching duties attached to the residency. Time is to be spent completing a manuscript, participating in the annual Lake Forest Literary Festival, and offering a series of public presentations.
The completed manuscript will be published (upon approval) by &NOW Books imprint, with distribution by Northwestern University Press.
The stipend is $10,000, with a housing suite and campus meals provided by the college.
2009 Winner (Poetry): Jessica Savitz
2010 Winner (Prose): Gretchen Henderson
2011 Guidelines (Deadline April 1, 2010):
We invite applications for an emerging poet under forty years old, with no major book publication, to spend two months (February-March or March-April 2011) in residence at Lake Forest College.
Send:
1) Curriculum vita
2) No more than 30 pages of manuscript in progress
3) A one-page statement of plans for completion to:Plonsker Residency
Department of English
Lake Forest College
Box A16
555 N. Sheridan Road
Lake Forest, IL 60045.Submissions must be postmarked by April 1, 2010 for consideration by judges Robert Archambeau, Davis Schneiderman, and Joshua Corey.
Direct inquiries to andnow@lakeforest.edu with the subject line: Plonsker Prize.
E.M. Koeppel $1,100 Short Fiction Award
Annual Awards for Unpublished Fiction in Any Style, Any ThemeGuidelines:
- First Place Award: $1,100.
- Editors' Choices: $100 each.
- Maximum Length: 3,000 WORDS. Stories must be unpublished.
- Annual Submission Period: Between Oct. 1 and April 30. (Postmark Deadline, April 30)
- Award winning fiction writers are the judges.
- No limit on number of stories entered by any one writer.
- The winning short story and editors' choices will be published on www.writecorner.com and are eligible for inclusion in the permanent website writecorner.com anthology. (By submitting work to this contest, authors give permission to Writecorner Press to publish the award winning stories and editors' choices on the writecorner.com website. Authors retain all other rights to their works.)
How to Submit:
- Send one (1) typed copy of the story with two (2) typed title pages. Only the title may appear on the first title page. No other kinds of identification may appear on this title page or on the manuscript which will used in judging. (Keep a copy. No manuscripts will be returned.)
- On the second title page, list:
- Title of the Story
- Author's name, address, phone number
- E-mail address optional
- Short bio - about 4 lines
- Entry Fee: $15 for a single story and $10 for each additional story.
- No e-mail entries accepted.
- Mail submission with check (no cash). If outside the USA, send a money order in US funds (no cash or foreign funds) to:
Koeppel Contest
P.O. Box 140310
Gainesville, FL 32614
P.L. Titus Scholarship:
If the winning story is by anyone attending college, university, or school when the story is submitted, the winner will receive, in addition to the $1,100 award, the $500 P.L. Titus Scholarship. (Proof of attendance is required.)
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4th ANNUAL LIAM RECTOR FIRST BOOK PRIZE FOR POETRY
Reading: February 1 - March 30, 2010
No mss postmarked after March 30, 2010 will be considered.
Reading fee: $20.00
Final Judge: Tom Sleigh
Tom Sleigh was born in Mount Pleasant, Texas. He attended the California Institute of the Arts, Evergreen State College, and earned an M.A. from Johns Hopkins University. His most recent collections include Space Walk (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, and Far Side of the Earth (2003), named an Honor Book by the Massachusetts Society for the Book.
He is the author of After One, winner of the Houghton Mifflin New Poetry Series Prize, 1983; Waking (1990), a New York Times Book Review Notable Book, and a finalist for the Lamont Poetry Prize; The Chain (l996), nominated for the Lenore Marshall Prize; and The Dreamhouse (1999), a selection of the Academy of American Poet’s Poetry Book Club and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. He has also published a translation of Euripides's Herakles (Oxford University Press, 2000), and a book of essays, Interview With a Ghost (Graywolf Press, 2006).
Among his many awards are an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letter, the Shelley Award from the Poetry Society of America, an Individual Writer's Award from the Lila Wallace Fund, and grants from the Guggenheim and Ingram Merill Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown where he is a Writing Committee member. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Notification in June for Spring 2011 publication by Briery Creek Press.
Winner receives 50 books, a reading, $1000.00, and a letter-pressed broadside created by book-artist Kerri Cushman.
All entries receive a copy of the winning book.
Send between 48 and 60 pages of poetry, no more than one poem per page, no smaller than 12 point font, Arial, Courier, or Times. Do not include Table of Contents in page count. Entries will be judged blind, so include cover letter with ms title, poet’s name, and all contact information. Cover sheet on ms should include TITLE ONLY. Do NOT include Dedication, Acknowledgments or Credits page. Poet’s name should NOT appear anywhere in the ms. Number all ms pages. Entries should include a #10 SASE for winner notification. Send disposable mss only; no manuscripts will be returned.
No restriction on content or style; we’re simply looking for excellent poetry.
Simultaneous submission okay for contest, although we ask that poets please contact us immediately if the ms is accepted elsewhere. Reading fees not returned upon such withdrawal. Current students and employees of Longwood University and authors published by The Dos Passos Review are not eligible for this competition.
Make checks payable to DPR/BRIERY CREEK, Department of English, Longwood University, 201 High Street, Farmville, VA 23909
On Languages of Power and Powerlessness
Sunday 07 March 2010
by: Zygmunt Bauman, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
(Image: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: XiXiDu, duncan)Zygmunt Bauman is arguably the most important living sociologist in the world. And yet his work has not been given the recognition it deserves in North America. Bauman is one of those rare intellectuals who not only addresses many of the major theoretical insights and paradigms of our time, but also uses them as a resource to examine, critically engage and respond to many of the social problems facing the globe today. Unlike so many other academics, he functions as a kind of border crosser, moving beyond disciplinary boundaries, forcing theory to take a detour through everyday life, and crafting his discourse in ways that are accessible, but never at the expense of theoretical rigor. Many of his works on the Holocaust, modernity, postmodernism, liquid modernity and the politics of responsibility have attained the status of classics.
In all of Bauman’s work there is a passion for the promise of democracy, and the willingness to struggle for economic, racial and social justice; there is a complex rendering of the historical narratives of those who are often marginalized and excluded by dominant powers; and there is a deep commitment to connect theory to material relations of power as they inform and structure everyday life. There is also an ongoing attempt to translate and bridge private troubles and public issues through an affirmation of struggles that are historically specific, contextual, collective and fiercely resistant in the face of varied forms of oppression, exclusion and injustice. But even more, there is a poetry, a sense of cautious hope and a deep commitment to the unfolding of individual and collective agency as part of the project of emancipation, unfinished but ongoing. Reading Bauman is to be in the world, a call to understand our presence as part of an ongoing task and challenge that connects us all at the deepest levels of compassion and responsibility.
- Henry A. Giroux
The Disempowering
The disciplining force of society is at its most effective when its human origins are denied or covered up. The admission that society - with all its prescriptions and proscriptions, rewards for obedience and punishments for veering off the line - rests ultimately on man-made choices and decisions invites critical scrutiny, dissent and resistance: What has been done by humans can be undone by humans. No wonder that throughout the modern era, attempts were made and continue to be made to represent the grounds for the demands of power-holders as beyond human capacity.
Charismatic leaders claimed to have received, in recognition of their unique qualities and attainments, the equivalent of the anointment that dynastic monarchs inherited through their pedigree. The public image of Stalin contained a suggestion that he possessed direct access to the sources of wisdom that remain stubbornly off bounds for ordinary mortals - the quality of omniscience earlier presumed to be the privilege of gods, thus rendering decisions valid and legitimate despite ordinary mortals' incomprehension or resentment.
In Tchiaureli's film "The Oath," the central character - Russian Mother, the epitome of the whole gallantly fighting, hard-working and always Stalin-loving and loved-by-Stalin Russian nation, visits Stalin one day and asks him to end the war. The Russian people have suffered so much, she says - they bore such horrible sacrifices, so many wives lost their husbands, so many children lost their fathers - there must be an end to all that pain. Stalin answers, "Yes, Mother, the time has arrived to end the war." And he ends the war.... After the unexpected success of the re-militarization of the Ruhr Basin, Hitler spoke of himself as a sleepwalker treading the path laid for him by providence….
But, whether they are endowed with charisma or not, democratically elected political rulers tend all too often to surrender to the same temptation and resort to similar stratagems. One of the most popular expedients they use is the TINA (There Is No Alternative) formula, suggesting that in no way have their policies been selected arbitrarily; that they are not in fact a result of choice at all, since no other effective policies existed.
Another more widespread stratagem is disguising political choices as expert solutions. President Obama’s advisers said they had found in the campaign that using experts, even those not widely known, rather than employing familiar political faces, was far more effective in engaging grassroots supporters. The lines of expert reasoning, like those of God, are by definition impenetrable and incomprehensible for ordinary minds (neither divine nor risen by training to divine level) - and so, in practice, immune to lay criticism. The data that the experts invoke in support of their recommendations are unavailable to people with no access to laboratories, observatories and whatever other sites they have been derived from.
A few years ago, the British public was treated to the sight of its then-prime minister, Tony Blair, brandishing a booklet … which, he said, supplied all the expertly gathered and collated proofs that Saddam Hussein was in possession of the weapons of mass destruction which would be launched against Britain unless he was stopped by force.
Paradoxically, though perhaps not as paradoxically as it may seem, even democratically elected politicians have a vested interest in presenting society, and so by proxy their own decision-making procedure, as heteronomous. Rather than precede their announcements, as Athenians did, with "in my view" or "in my opinion," they prefer to preface them with "it is the fact that" or "it is absolutely necessary and unavoidable to…"
The Agora
The autonomous citizen and the autonomous polity are entangled in a chicken-and-egg relationship. They may only exist and survive together - which makes irresolvable the question of where to start to bring (both!) of them about. The genuine question of practical import is where to find the public site fit for their encounter and likely to become a new (or restored) meeting point.
Here, the problem starts: we are accustomed to the line between "the private" and "the public" being drawn and policed by the nation-state - which also bears responsibility for the design and equipment of the agora, a space neither private nor public, but at the same time private and public. But those tasks call for a volume of power and degree of sovereignty which nation-states might have possessed or claimed to possess before, though apparently not in, the present time….
The capacity of the state for effective political action has been severely limited. As a result, quite a few of the modern-orthodox state functions have escaped or have been shifted sideways to the markets, increasingly emancipated from political supervision (let alone direction), or have fallen or been dropped to the area of individually conducted "life politics" - by definition the sacrosanct realm of privacy. Both sites that have taken over and absorbed those functions address problem-solving men and women as individuals: that is, actors concerned with the gratification of private needs and desires while using privately available and privately deployed resources and skills.
While socially produced problems are expected and hoped to be confronted and resolved individually through markets and life politics, the sole polities presently available, those of nation-states, are neither capable (because of the deficit of power) nor pressed (because of the deficit of citizens’ expectations) to serve as the arena for the formulation of "public issues" - except endorsing the market-oriented privatization and radical individualization of interests. While remaining a marketplace, the contemporary "agora" loses its function as the site where private interests are translated into public issues while public interests are translated back into individual rights and duties.
The current government-initiated and governmentally conducted bustle about the "re-capitalizing" of banks and credit companies, proclaimed by many observers as the sign of the revival of the state’s role in the management of society, is in fact aimed at resuscitating the individualization of society and privatization of socially produced problems - with an explicitly proclaimed or tacit expectation that if the one-off salvaging operation succeeds (itself a moot question), then the two power-assisted tendencies will be once more able to proceed undisturbed without state assistance and interference.
Just as the modern era lifted the agora from its Aristotelian city-state level and reconstituted it at the level of the nation-state, the only prospect of its reconstitution under the increasingly globalized human condition is at the level of humanity - the "cosmopolitan" level, to use the term persuasively argued and promoted with great force by Ulrich Beck. Admittedly, this is a daunting task - though perhaps, in an era equipped with information highways, not much more daunting than was the task of lifting [it] from the local to the nation-state level in the times preceding the installation of telecommunication networks…. Daunting or not, the task has to be sooner or later performed, if the present-day ambient uncertainty and ubiquitous fears, those un-detachable attributes of liquid modernity, are to stand a chance of mitigation, let alone a prospect of cure.
Ulrich Beck suggests that the hope for building an agora re-fashioned to match the demands and the potential of the globalized world could be invested in "sub-politics" - politics "decoupled" from nation-state governments - as well as in the "cosmopolitan doctrine of government," in which domestic and foreign policy overlap. Beck writes, "With the appearance of ecological discourse, the end of 'foreign policy,' the end of 'domestic affairs of another country,' the end of a national state is becoming an everyday experience."
He concludes in words that I would whole-heartedly endorse: sociology, he writes,
would no longer be sociology if it tried to interpret the boundary-transcending anticipations of the world risk society in accordance with the inappropriate maxims of methodological nationalism. This holds even if, in the light of the ever newer, more unfathomable risks that are haunting the global village, ever more people are withdrawing and barricading themselves inside the national fortresses with prophylactic trembling and gnashing the teeth.[1]
The Overpowered
A few months ago, I was asked by the Bavarian State Opera to write an essay for the prospectus of the new Munich production of Alan Berg’s Wozzeck opera.… As the essay has been published only in its German version, I reprint here some fragments of the original (English) version:
"Fate" is the name we give to the kind of happenings that we can neither predict nor prevent: events we neither desired nor caused. To something that "occurred to us," but not of our intention, let alone our making; to turns of fortune that descend on us like the proverbial bolt from the blue. "Fate" frightens us precisely for being unpredictable and unpreventable. It reminds us that there are limits to what we ourselves can do to shape our lives as we would like them to be shaped; limits which we can’t cross, things which we can’t control - however earnestly we try. "Fate" is the very epitome of the Unknown, of something we can neither explain nor understand - and this is why it is so frightening. To quote Wittgenstein one more time, "to understand" means "to know how to go on"; by the same token, if something happens that we don’t understand, we do not know what to do; we feel then hapless and helpless, impotent. Being hapless is humiliating at all times; but never as much as when the "fate" strikes individually: when it was me who has been hit, while others around me were bypassed by the disaster and went on as if nothing happened. Other people seem to have managed to emerge unharmed and intact - but I’ve failed, abominably…. There must be therefore something wrong with me personally - something that has invited the catastrophe, that has drawn the disaster in my direction while omitting other folks, obviously more clever, insightful, industrious than me….
The feeling of humiliation always erodes the self-esteem and self-confidence of the humiliated, but never more severely than when humiliation is suffered alone. It is in such cases that an insult is added to the injury: an intimate connection between harsh fate and the victim’s own, individual failings is surmised. This is why Wozzeck desperately tries to "de-individualize" both his misery and his ineptitude, and recast them as but one case of suffering common to the multitude of arme Leute. Those who castigate and deride him attempt, on the contrary, to "individualize" his indolence. They would not hear of arme Leute and the fate they share. As desperately as Wozzeck seeks to de-individualize his misfortune, they seek to place responsibility on Wozzeck’s individual shoulders. By doing so, they will perhaps manage to chase away (or at least stifle for a time) that awful premonition that emanates from the sight of Wozzeck’s misfortune (premonition that something like this may happen to them, if they stumble…).
Wozzeck, they loudly insist - hoping to silence their own anxiety - brought his bad luck upon himself. Through his actions or inaction he have chosen his own fate.
We, however, his critics, choose a different kind of life, and so Wozzeck’s misery cannot be visited on us - just as a London millionaire tried recently to convince two inquisitive journalists that the disparity between his wealth and the poverty of others is due entirely to moral causes: "Quite a lot of people have done well who want to achieve, and quite a lot of people haven’t done well because they don’t want to achieve."[2] Just like that: who wants do well, does - who doesn’t, doesn’t. Doubts, premonitions, pangs of anxiety, all of them, of whatever kind, are placated, at least for a time (they would need to be put to rest again tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow…). Just as the failures of the failed are due entirely to their own volitional shortcomings, my achievements are due entirely to my own will and determination. Just as Wozzeck must hide behind the fate of arme Leute to salvage whatever has remained of his self-esteem, so the Captain and the Doctor must strip Wozzeck’s fate down to the bare bones of individual failings to salvage whatever has remained of their self-confidence….
It strikes individuals, all too often bypassing their next-door neighbours. Its itinerary is no less irregular than ever before, but the frequency of delivered blows look regular (monotonous, even routine) as never before. Just like in "Big Brother," officially described as, and commonly believed to be, a "reality show," in which, come what may, one of the protagonists, just one, must, just must, be excluded (voted out) from the team every week – and the only unknown thing is who it will be this week and whose turn comes a week later. Exclusion is in the nature of things, an un-detachable aspect of being-in-the-world, a "law of nature," so to speak - and so to rebel against it makes no sense. The only issue worth thinking about, and intensely, is staving off the prospect of myself being excluded in next week's round of exclusions. No one can claim to be immune to the meanderings of Fate. No one can really feel insured against the threat of being excluded. Most of us have either already tasted the bitterness of exclusion, or suspect that they might have to, in some undisclosed future. It seems that but few of us can swear that they are immune to Fate, and we are allowed to suspect that eventually most of those few will be proved wrong. Few only may hope that they’ll never learn how it feels going through Wozzeck’s kind of experience. One aspect of his experience in particular: How does it feel to be snubbed and to suffer humiliation?
Today, the stake of the cutthroat individual competition, including the exclusion lottery, is no longer the physical survival (at least in the affluent part of the planet, and at least currently and "until further notice") - not the satisfaction of primary biological needs which the survival instinct demands. Neither is it the right to self-assert, to set one’s own objectives and to decide what kind of life one would prefer to live, since to exercise such rights is, on the contrary, assumed to be every individual’s duty. Moreover, it is now an axiom that whatever happens to the individual cannot but be the consequence of exercising such rights or of abominable failure or sinful refusal to exercise them. Whatever happened to the individual would be retrospectively interpreted as another confirmation of the individuals’ sole and inalienable responsibility for their individual plights: adversities as much as successes.
Cast as individuals by decree of history, we are now encouraged to actively seek "social recognition"’ for what have been already pre-interpreted as our individual choices: namely, for the forms of life which we, the individuals, are practicing (whether by deliberate choice or by default). "Social recognition" means acceptance, by "others who matter," that a form of life practiced by a particular individual is worthy and decent, and that on this ground the individual in question deserves respect owed and normally offered to all deserving, worthy and decent people.
The alternative to social recognition is the denial of dignity: humiliation. In Dennis Smith’s recent definition,[3] "the act is humiliating if it forcefully overrides or contradicts the claim that particular individuals … are making about who they are and where and how they fit in." In other words - if the individual is, explicitly or implicitly, denied the recognition that s/he expected for the person s/he is and/or the kind of life s/he lives, and if s/he is refused the entitlements that would have been made available or continued to be available following such recognition. People feel humiliated when they are brutally shown, by words, actions or events, that they cannot be what they think they are…. Humiliation is the experience of being unfairly, unreasonably and unwillingly pushed down, held down, held back or pushed out.[4]
That feeling breeds resentment. In the society of individuals like ours, the pain, peeve and rancor of having been humiliated are arguably the most venomous and implacable varieties of resentment that a person may feel, and the most common and prolific causes of conflict, dissent, rebellion and thirst of revenge. Denial of recognition, refusal of respect and the threat of exclusion have replaced exploitation and discrimination as the formulae most commonly used to explain and justify the grudge individuals might bear towards society, or to the sections or aspects of society to which they are directly exposed (personally or through the media) and which they thereby experience (whether firsthand or secondhand).
The shame of humiliation breeds self-contempt and self-hatred, which tend to overwhelm us once we realize how weak, indeed impotent, we are when we attempt to hold fast to the identity of our choice, to our place in the community we respect and cherish, and to the kind of life we would dearly wish to be ours and remain ours for a long time to come; once we find out how frail our identity is, how vulnerable and unsteady are our past achievements, and how uncertain must be our future in view of the magnitude of challenges we face daily. That shame, and so also self-hatred, rise as the proofs of our impotence accumulate - and the sense of humiliation deepens as a result.
Self-hatred is, however, an unbearably harrowing, unendurable state to be and stay in: self-hatred needs, and desperately seeks, an outlet - it must be channeled away from our inner self, which it may otherwise seriously damage or even destroy. The chain leading from uncertainty, through feeling of impotence, of shame and humiliation, to self-disgust, self-loathing and self-hatred, ends up therefore in a search for the culprit "out there, in the world"; of that someone, as yet unknown and unnamed, invisible or disguised, who conspires against my (our) dignity and well-being, and makes me (us) suffer that excruciating pain of humiliation. The discovery and unmasking of that someone is badly needed, as we need a target on which the pent-up anger might be unloaded… Pain must be avenged, though it is far from clear on whom… Exploding, self-hatred hits targets, just as Wozzeck did, at random - mostly those closest to hand, though not necessarily those most responsible for one’s fall, humiliation and misery….
We need someone to hate because we need someone to blame for our abominable and unendurable condition and the defeats we suffer when trying to improve it and make it more secure. We need that someone in order to unload (and so hopefully mitigate) the devastating sense of our own unworthiness. For that unloading to be successful, the whole operation needs however to thoroughly cover up all traces of a personal vendetta. The intimate link between the perception of the loathsomeness and hatefulness of the chosen target, and our frustration seeking an outlet, must be kept secret. In whatever way hatred was conceived, we would rather tend to explain its presence, to the others around and to ourselves, by our will to defend good and noble things which they, those malicious and despicable people, denigrate and conspire against; we would struggle to prove that the reason to hate them, and our determination to get rid of them, have been caused (and justified) by our wish to make sure that an orderly, civilized society survives. We would insist that we hate because we want the world to be free of hatred.
It does not agree perhaps with the logic of things, but it chimes well with the logic of emotions, that the "underclass" and others like them - homeless refugees, the uprooted, the "not belonging," the asylum-seekers-but-not-finders, the sans papiers - tend to attract our resentment and aversion. Si non è vero è ben trovato….
All those people have been as if made to the measure of our fears. They are walking illustrations to which our nightmares wrote the captions. They are living traces (sediments, signs, embodiments) of all those mysterious forces, commonly called "globalization," that we hold responsible for the threat of being forcefully torn away from the place we love (in the country or in society) and pushed onto a road with few if any signposts and no known destination. They represent admittedly formidable forces, but are themselves weak, and can be defeated with the weapons we have. Summa summarum, they are ideally suited for the role of an effigy in which those forces, indomitable and beyond our reach, may be burned, even if only by proxy.
The leitmotif, composed by Alan Berg, introduced by Wozzeck to the words "Wir arme Leute," scripted by Georg Büchner, signals the inability of the opera's characters to transcend their situation; an inability which the characters on stage share with the audience. Romantic artists wished to see the universe in a grain of sand. Wozzeck’s detractors - as much as Wozzeck himself - might be but grains of sand, but if we try we will see in them, if not the universe, then surely our Lebenswelt…
This piece was compiled from excerpts of an interview by Italian author Giuliano Battiston with Zygmunt Bauman, originally published in Battiston's book, "Modernita e Globalizzazione."
NOTES
[1] Ulrich Beck, World at Risk, trans. by Ciaran Cronin, Polity Press 2008, ppp.95, 91, 177.
[2] Polly Toynbee and David Walker, "Meet the Rich", The Guardian of 4 August 2008.
[3] See Dennis Smith, Globalization: the hidden agenda, Polity 2006, p.38.
[4] Ibid., p.37.
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Two Books on the Black Revolution
Safiya Bukhari's The War Before & James Yaki Sayles' Meditations on Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth
Type:
Date: Time: Location: Street: City/Town: Description
Montreal - The Certain Days Calendar Committee and Kersplebedeb Publishing are holding a Black Revolution Double Book Launch on March 19th 2010, starting at 6pm. The book launch will be co-sponsored andhosted by the Concordia Co-op Bookstore - 2150 Bishop Street, Guy-Concordia Metro. The books being launched are Safiya Buhkari’s The War Before, and James Yaki Sayles' Meditations on Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. Following readings from each book, there will be a discussion of local efforts around U.S. political prisoners and prisoners of war. Erica Meiners, Associate Professor of Education and Women's Studies at Northeastern Illinois University and a longterm anti-prison activist, will speak on the ongoing ravages of the prison-industrial complex, and its relevance in Canada. Light refreshments from the People's Potato will be served.
- Two books about the Black Revolution -
The decades after the Second World War witnessed successful revolutions against colonial rule around the world. Struggles against national oppression took place on every continent – including within the borders of the United States, in what Che Guevara described as “belly of the beast.” Millions of people worked in a variety of ways against the ongoing destruction of their communities and societies by a racist and colonialist white power structure.
It was within this context that the Black Freedom Struggle engaged in its definitive 20th century confrontation with racialized capitalism in the U.S.A. Hidden from popular histories of the Sixties and the Civil Rights movement, the reality on the ground was that there was a war. Hundreds upon hundreds were killed, tens of thousands spent time in prison – and some still languish behind those bars. More than that, communities were destroyed, entire cities emptied, as white America and its government set about murdering the Black Liberation Movement.
Safiya Bukhari and James Yaki Sayles were two revolutionaries who participated in those fateful clashes, who found their calling in the struggle, and who would devote the rest of their lives to the liberation of their people – and of all people. After decades of struggle, Safiya Bukhari died in 2003 at the age of 53. James Yaki Sayles spent almost his entire adult life in prison; he had just been released a few years earlier when he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died in 2008 at the age of 59.
In February, two posthumous volumes were published, making the words of these fallen freedom fighters available for the first time to a wide audience. Published by The Feminist Press at CUNY The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther Keeping the Faith in Prison, Fighting for Those Left Behind, traces Bukhari’s lifelong commitment as an advocate for the rights of the oppressed. Following her journey from middle-class student to Black Panther to political prisoner, these writings provide an intimate view of a woman wrestling with the issues of her time—the troubled legacy of the Panthers, misogyny in the movement, her decision to convert to Islam, the incarceration of out spoken radicals, and the families left behind. Her account unfolds with immediacy and passion, showing how the struggles of social justice movements have paved the way for the progress of today.
Co-published by Spear and Shield Publications and Kersplebedeb Publishing, Meditations on Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth: New Afrikan Revolutionary Writings by James Yaki Sayles is not a legal case history or a personal memoir, but a series of historical writings spanning a thirty year period, and culminating in Sayles' unfinished examination of Fanon's work, and its relevance to revolutionaries confronting post-neocolonialism today.
At a time when we are instructed to keep our eye on the man in the White House and others who have “made it” and been integrated into the “American Dream,” Bukhari and Sayles’ words speak for and to those for whom the world’s only superpower remains an “American Nightmare.” In an age where there are more Black men in U.S. prisons than in U.S. colleges, where years after Katrina New Orleans has been rebuilt as a tourist attraction for the middle classes, and the U.S. continues to wage war on peoples around the world, these are two volumes to detox your mind, to help you keep your eye on the prize.
- BIOS -
James Yaki Sayles spent almost his entire adult life in prison. In the 1970s he was a leading figure in the New Afrikan Prisoners Organization, he would serve as Minister of Information for the Republic of New Afrika, and also worked in other, less public, groups. He was also an important theoretician of the continuing need for New Afrikan Revolution and the realities of New Afrikan Nationhood, writing under a variety on names, including Owusu Yaki Yakubu and Atiba Shanna. He died of lung cancer in 2008.
Safiya Bukhari joined the Black Panther Party in 1969. Imprisoned for nine years, for charges related to the Black Liberation Army, Bukhari was released in 1983 and went on to co-found the New York Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition and other organizations advocating for the release of political prisoners. She died in 2003 at the age of 53 years of age.
For more information about The War Before, please visit http://safiyabukhari.com.
For more information about Meditations on Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, please visit http://www.kersplebedeb.com/meditations
For more information about the Certain Days Calendar Committee, please visit http://www.certaindays.org/
For more information about the Concordia Co-op Bookstore, please visit http://www.co-opbookstore.ca/
When: Friday, March 19th 2010; 6pm
Where: Concordia Co-op Bookstore, 2150 Bishop St. • metro Guy-Concordia
Tel-: 514-848-7445
For more information regarding the event, please email info@kersplebedeb.com
- END -
==============================
Volume 61, Number 9
We place these articles at no charge on our website to serve all the people who cannot afford Monthly Review, or who cannot get access to it where they live. Many of our most devoted readers are outside of the United States. If you read our articles online and you can afford a subscription to our print edition, we would very much appreciate it if you would consider purchasing one. Please click here to subscribe. Thank you very much. —The Editors
February 2010
An Untold Chapter in Black History
Safiya Bukhari
Safiya Bukhari, who died in 2003 at age 53, was a leader in the black liberation movement from 1969, when she joined the Harlem chapter of the Black Panther Party. She later co-founded the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition, the Jericho Movement, and other organizations advocating for the release of U.S. political prisoners. The War Before is available from The Feminist Press (feministpress.org).
ESSAYS ON:
February is “Black History Month” and, coincidentally or not, the shortest month of the year. Every February, we admire the approved panorama of admittedly phenomenal African-American leaders, martyrs, and icons—yet the stories of the vast majority of black people in this country, living and dead, remain untold. This is especially true of the lives of militant black leftists, the people who came to realize—because they had no other choice—that the founding principle of this country, “liberty and justice for all,” was a lie, premised on centuries of slavery, capitalism, and the supremacy of white “culture” over their lives. And once they saw this lie for what it was, they dedicated their lives to calling it out and opposing it.
One such person was Safiya Bukhari, a pre-med student with a middle-class background, who, in 1969, decided to join the Black Panther Party. She later joined the Black Liberation Army and spent nearly nine years in prison. The remainder of her life, after her release in 1985, was dedicated to other political prisoners, mostly black and mostly forgotten, many incarcerated since the years following the demise of the Party. Safiya wasn’t primarily a writer; she was an organizer who consistently examined and occasionally wrote about her work. In this 1991 essay, excerpted fromThe War Before—a collection of her writings, which I edited and is published by the Feminist Press (2010) with a foreword by Angela Davis, afterword by Mumia Abu-Jamal, and preface by Safiya’s daughter Wonda Jones—Safiya examines another little-known aspect of black history: the psychological damage inflicted on black militant activists by the U.S. government and its counterintelligence programs.
—Laura Whitehorn
I was nineteen when I joined the Black Panther Party and was introduced to the realities of life in inner-city Black America.
From the security of the college campus and the cocoon of the great American Dream Machine, I was suddenly stripped of my rose-colored glasses by a foray into Harlem and indecent housing, police brutality, hungry children needing to be fed, elderly people eating out of garbage cans, and hopelessness and despair everywhere. If I hadn’t seen it for myself, I would never have believed that this was America. It looked and sounded like one of those undeveloped Third World countries.
Between 1966 and 1975, eager to be part of the fight for the freedom and liberation of black people in America from their oppressive conditions, thousands of young black men and women from all walks of life and backgrounds joined the ranks of the Black Panther Party. They were met with all the counterforce and might of the United States war machine.
Not unlike the young men who went off to fight in the Vietnam War, believing they were going to save the Vietnamese from the ravages of “communism,” the brothers and sisters who joined the ranks of the Black Panther Party, with all the romanticism of youth, believed that the rightness and justness of their cause guaranteed victory. We were learning the contradiction between what America said and what it did. We were shown examples of the government’s duplicity, and we became victims of its Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), an all out, multiphasic war designed to stifle dissent in America in general, and in the black community in particular.
We came into the struggle believing that we would prevail. Because our struggle was right and just, we said, “We shall win without a doubt!” All we had to do was present an organized and disciplined united front and be determined to gain our freedom by any means necessary, and our victory would be assured.
We theorized about what we were up against. We marched, sang, and rhetoricized about the implications of being “in the belly of the beast.” We dissociated ourselves from anything or anyone that had been close to us and regurgitated the bravado about the struggle being primary—that, in order to win, we must be willing to sacrifice mother, father, sister, or brother. We embraced all of this in much the same manner that the drill sergeant in the Marine Corps psyched up the recruits to fight in Vietnam.
Veterans of the War in Vietnam
In 1967 my brother came home from Vietnam. He looked good. There were no scars or missing limbs. We were ecstatic. His bedroom was next to mine on the second floor of our duplex apartment in the Bronx. In the middle of the night I heard agonized screams coming from his room. Not knowing any better, I went to him and touched him to soothe him. He instantly went on the attack. He grabbed me with one hand, his other like a claw. I don’t know what saved me; whether it was my screaming his name or throwing myself on him, but he came to himself before he harmed me.
That night, he told me about watching his entire platoon get wiped out; about gouging eyes out with his bare hands; about not knowing who the enemy was, and what direction they would come from the next time; and about some of the other nightmares of Vietnam. After that, we never talked about it again.
Before going to Vietnam, my brother had wanted to become a doctor. After returning from Vietnam, he could not stand the sight of blood. He drank straight gin continuously, like ice water, without getting drunk.
My brother made the horror of Vietnam real to me in 1967. I wasn’t to experience anything remotely close to that again until I joined the Black Panther Party and came to realize that you didn’t have to travel around the world to experience the ravages of war. The physical conditions of the Vietnam War were not present here. But, for those of us who had been raised to believe that America was the land of the free and the home of the brave, and who were now involved in a struggle for liberation and human rights for black people, the psychological conditions were just as intense.
We, Too, Are Veterans
We joined the Black Panther Party (and therefore the black liberation struggle) with a lot of hope and faith. We believed that the struggle would end for us only with our death or the freedom of all oppressed people. With the destruction of the Black Panther Party our freedom was still not assured, and we were left with no sense of direction or purpose—no one to tell us what to do next—and the knowledge that the job was not done. We hadn’t just mouthed the words “revolution in our lifetime”; we had believed them. We sincerely believed that the Black Panther Party would lead us to victory.
We had experienced the death and/or imprisonment of countless brothers and sisters who had struggled right beside us, slept in the beds with us, eaten at the same table with us. (As I write this, the picture of Twymon Myers’s bullet-riddled body flashes before my eyes. Shot [by New York City police] so many times that his legs were almost shot off. Then the desecration of his funeral when the FBI jumped from behind tombstones and out of trees at the cemetery, with sawed off shotguns and machine guns pointed toward the mourners. “This is your FBI! Get out of the cars with your hands in the air and line up in a single file with enough distance between each of you so we can see you clearly.”) Pictures pop in and out of our minds with no prompting.
Then there were the murders of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, Bunchy Carter and John Huggins, Sandra Pratt and Little Bobby Hutton, not to mention Fred Bennett,* the countless shootouts, the infiltrations and setups that left you leery of strangers or of anyone getting too close or acting too friendly. This left you constantly on guard and under the pressure of not knowing who your friends were and from which direction the next threat was coming.
Still, I think I’m one of the lucky ones. In 1983, after serving eight years and eight months of a forty-year sentence, I was released on parole. While in prison I maintained my commitment to the struggle for the liberation of black and oppressed people. What kept me going was knowing that the reason they were killing and locking up Panthers was to break them and therefore to break the back of the struggle. I was determined that I would survive and, one way or the other, live to fight another day. We languished in the prisons and watched the growing lack of activity on the streets and promised ourselves that things would be different when we came home.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as “an anxiety disorder caused by the exposure to a psychologically distressing event that is outside the range of usual human experiences.” Such events might include watching a friend die violently or unexpectedly; experiencing serious threats to home or family; or living under constant or prolonged fear or threat.
As I looked over the list of PTSD symptoms, I recognized myself. And it wasn’t just me. More and more, there seemed to be some kind of pattern developing in the behavior of my other comrades who had survived the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army.
Our intense belief in the rightness and justness of our cause, and that things would be different when we returned to the streets; our awareness that we are still alive while our people’s conditions have grown worse despite all our sacrifices—all this produces a traumatic shock to our system. This is the ultimate shock. We survived while others died. Despite all their intents and purposes, their deaths were in vain. The struggle hasn’t been won. I contend that these elements have caused us to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder. We, too, are veterans.
* All of these members of the Black Panther Party were killed by police or in inter-organizational battles provoked by COINTELPRO, the FBI’s counterintelligence program. See, for example, The Assassination of Fred Hampton by Jeffrey Haas (Lawrence Hill Books).All material © copyright 1949–2010 Monthly Review
Meditations on Frantz Fanon's
Wretched of the Earth:
New Afrikan Revolutionary Writings
by James Yaki Sayles
“This exercise is about more than our desire to read and understand Wretched (as if it were about some abstract world, and not our own); it’s about more than our need to understand (the failures of) the anti-colonial struggles on the African continent. This exercise is also about us, and about some of the things that We need to understand and to change in ourselves and our world.”
James Yaki Sayles
Like the revs that he most considered his teachers—Malcolm X and George Jackson—James Yaki Sayles grew up poor and found his maturity in prison, the place that Malcolm called “the Black man’s university.” A child of Chicago’s South Side streets, Yaki always just thought of himself as a blood, “just another nigger doing a bit” (to borrow the laconic words of one of the Pontiac state prison revolt defendants). And it was in the prison movement that he found his place in the battlefield. Although he made revolutionary theory his work, his life was rooted in a time of urban guerrillas and the armed struggle. Which makes his writing much more difficult to read, but with a warning of danger and commitment that is so often missing in these neo-colonized times between the storms...
Yaki soon became a leading activist in the small prison collectives in his state. First in the Stateville Prisoners Organization, which quickly grew into the New Afrikan Prisoners Organization. There were groups in Stateville, Pontiac, and Menard prisons, as well as individual members in other prisons outside Illinois and rads on the street. Yaki also became an influence in less public organizations.
One thing he never became was well-known. There were definite reasons for this. In part, because Yaki was a very private person who rarely talked about his inner life or childhood, and who never wanted to write about his own past to a curious public. Becoming a radical celebrity was not anywhere in his plans.
Yaki was also unknown because of the role he chose for himself. Much of his writings were not for the public, or even the community as a whole. Most of them were cadre teachings. Typically, Yaki wrote and spoke as a teacher for those already New Afrikan revolutionaries who were cadre. Those who had accepted the responsibility of being organizers and local teachers themselves. Although he was often repeating or underscoring basic political lessons, sometimes these were almost technical discussions. Craft discussions. In the same way that young Five-percenters proudly talk about, “i can do the math,” “i know the numbers.” And as such his words weren’t meant to be entertaining, and rads often complained of finding them as hard to read as some textbook. Far from easy reading. But it’s like, if you wanted to be able to design the flow of water through a hydoelectric plant or do brain surgery on an infant, at the very start you’d be cracking the books late into the night and studying for all you were worth. Yaki didn’t think that trying to transform society was any easier...
When Yaki started out in prison, he had amassed a real library of political and history books, together with magazines and files of documents and correspondence. And he spent hours and hours studying and writing. This gradually became more and more choked off by prison authorities. As he put it: “Inside it only grows worse, not better. Because they keep changing wardens, and every warden has to prove that they’ve made some change or new shit they can point to. Which is only more restrictions.”
By the start of the 21st century, he was limited to one thin cardboard case, only a few inches high, which had to hold any books, magazines, newspapers, notebooks, files, letters, blank paper, pencil and pens he had in his cell. And he had to work mandatory eight-hour shifts every day at the usual makework prison jobs (such as counting out and counting in the checkers pieces in the day room), which cut down on his intellectual hours. All this led him to decide to center himself on one major project which only required two books, a reappraisal and explanation of Frantz Fanon’s great revolutionary writing, Wretched of the Earth...
Here, Yaki is on a mission. To make up for the misunderstanding of Fanon’s politics that he and so many of his young rebel comrades once had. To help guide the study by newer rebels of this complex and difficult reading.
“i got out of Folsom & one of the first things i got was a kalishnikov ak-47, 7.62x39 … Needless to say, without the requisite consciousness, the gun & i soon parted company. The gun fell into the hands of invading pigs & i fell in the same hands. Was sent back to a cell … That’s when i got at the ’rad Atiba Shanna [aka James Yaki Sayles] & told him i’d been captured and why. He said, ‘i’d rather have one cadre free than 100 ak-47’s.’ It took me years to overstand & appreciate that one sentence. For this comrad has done more to de-criminalize and de-colonize my mind than any one person, book or event in my life.”
Sanyika Shakur, author of the best-selling book,
Monster: Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member
Monster: Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member
“Here is an authentic voice of the Black Revolution from the times of violent ghetto uprisings, re-learning the lessons of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. Uncut, undiluted.”
J. Sakai, author of Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat
Product Details
paperback
399 pages
published by Kersplebedeb and Spear & Shield Publications in 2010
ISBN 978-1-894946-32-2
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