Amiri Baraka reads from his book 'Tales of the Out and Gone' at Tribes Gallery, LES, NYC.
via youtube.com
Christian Laviso
David Murray
Christian Laviso with David Murray at Martinique Jazz Festival
Crédits• Artistes : Christian Laviso (guitare) ; Sonny Troupé (batterie) ; Aldo Middleton (percussions) ; David Murray (saxophones) • Réalisateur : Samuel Thiebaut • Production : Oléo FilmsChristian Laviso invite David Murray au Martinique Jazz Festival (01:28:02)
via liveweb.arte.tv
Publications | Black Camera
Black Camera: Publication Announcement
In conjunction with Indiana University Press, the Black Film Center/Archive (BFC/A) at Indiana University, Bloomington is pleased to announce the publication of Black Camera, an academic and peer reviewed international journal.
Devoted to the study and documentation of the black cinematic experience, Black Camera will be published bi-annually and is the only scholarly film journal of its kind in the United States.
It will feature essays and interviews which engage film in social as well as political context and in relation to historical and economic forces that bear on the reception, distribution, and production of film in local, regional, national, and transnational settings and environments.
The journal also comprises research and archival notes, editorials, reports, and book and film reviews and addresses a wide range of genres - including documentary, experimental film and video, diasporic cinema, animation, musicals, comedy, etc.
Black Camera will provide a critical forum, challenging received and ensconced views and assumptions about the traditions and practices of filmmaking in the African diaspora, where new and longstanding cinematic formations are in play. And it will especially appeal to film scholar/researchers, media professionals, and more generally cineastes and others in the public and academy concerned with visual culture and cultural production.
While its scope is interdisciplinary and inclusive of all of the African diaspora, the journal will devote future issues or "special sections" of issues to national cinemas, as well as independent, marginal, and oppositional films and cinematic formations. Interviews with emerging and prominent filmmakers will also be regularly featured.
Dr. Michael Martin, Director of the Black Film Center/Archive, is the primary editor of this publication. The editor gratefully acknowledges the support of the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies and the College of Arts and Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington.
Direct questions and submissions to Mary K. Huelsbeck
Direct questions about subscriptions to Indiana University Press (1-800-842-6796) or IUP Order
via indiana.edu
Cliterature
Cliterature is an online magazine dedicated to expressions of
women's sexuality in writing. We publish both creative and
critical works quarterly.
Women's sexuality deserves a medium in the writing and
publishing worlds, two arenas where interest in male
sexuality has prevailed far too long.
Cliterature: We're bringing sexyback to online publishing.
Our next issue's theme is BLOOD
How much writing can I submit?
Up to 10 pages of your poetry, short stories, essays,book review, interview, memoir, etc as a Word attachment. Can I submit artwork?
Yes; jpeg and gif only, please.Where do I submit to?
cliteraturejournal@hotmail.com
Include your name, title(s) submitted, and e-mail address in the body of your email.Is previously published work OK?
Yes, as long as you notify us where the piece was published before.
DEADLINE FOR NEXT ISSUE: February 20. Be sure to include your name, title(s) submitted, and e-mail address in the body of the email. Previously published works are OK, just let us know where it was published before.
Calls for Submissions
ANTHOLOGY CALLS
Dark Mythology (Anthology)
Editor: Catherine Leary
Publisher: Freaky Fountain Press – www.freakyfountain.com
Compensation: Royalties are 25% on net revenue and will be divided equally among all contributors. All authors and artists will receive a free electronic copy of the anthology.
Deadline: April 1, 2011
Publication Date: August 1, 2011
All mythologies have them—dark, twisted, horrifying elements laced with the potential for Eros. Give us stories between 2000-10,000 words that reinterpret, reinvent, and re-imagine these themes. Tease the erotic out of the darkness and bring it to the fore. Make it irresistible.
Dark Mythology Guidelines
All mythologies are welcome. We are particularly interested in Norse, Celtic, Hindu, Egyptian, Sumerian, Native (North, Central, and South American as well as Australian), Chinese, Japanese, and Aztec/Mayan. No more than three of the selected stories will be based on Greco-Roman myth; if you’re inclined to use Greco-Roman myth as inspiration, make it exceptional. Stories based on Christian, Jewish, or Muslim texts should be submitted to our concurrent anthology Heavenly Bodies.
We welcome the erotic retelling of myths with edgy themes (bestiality, incest, cannibalism, etc. – please refer to our general guidelines).
Do your research, because we will.
Fictional mythologies are welcome as long as they aren’t invented by you and are in the public domain (such as Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos).
Literary styling, experimental formats, surrealism, and magic realism are strongly encouraged.
Heavenly Bodies (Anthology)
Editor: Robin Wolfe
Publisher: Freaky Fountain Press – www.freakyfountain.com
Compensation: Royalties are 25% on net revenue and will be divided equally among all contributors. All authors and artists will receive a free electronic copy of the anthology.
Deadline: April 1, 2011
Publication Date: August 1, 2011
Angels. Demons. Nephilim. Prophets. Messiahs. We’re looking for stories between 2000-10,000 words showcasing the erotic subtext of religious mythology. Re-imagine familiar stories from the Bible or Koran, or create original stories featuring characters from those books. All stories MUST feature at least one character from a holy book: Gabriel, Legion, Jesus, Mary Magdalene, Muhammad, Moses, Eve, or any other figure from the Bible, Koran, or other book from a Judeo-Christian tradition (the Book of Mormon, Gnostic texts, etc). Minor or background characters are both accepted and encouraged.
Heavenly Bodies Guidelines
If your story has Lucifer in it, it better be spectacular. No more than three Lucifer-centric stories will be selected for publication. Likewise, if you want to submit a story centered on the Islamic concept of houri (the eternal virgins in Paradise), it needs to be more than a self-insert harem fantasy.
Pairings may or may not involve humans. It’s perfectly acceptable for the story to involve only supernatural beings.
Creative and sexy re-imaginings of Christian or Islamic stories are part of what we’re seeking. Lucifer tempting Jesus in the desert, anyone? Maybe the Three Wise Men took some time for themselves on the way to Bethlehem?
We’re looking specifically for stories based on Christian, Jewish, and Muslim texts. Entities from other religions are appropriate for our concurrent anthology, Dark Mythology.
Remember: here at Freaky Fountain, almost nothing is too controversial. Incest, bestiality, murder, and dubious consent are by no means unusual in the Bible and other religious books. Please refer to our general submission guidelines.
Yes, we realize there is also a lot of sex with prepubescent and pubescent children in both the Bible and the Koran, but sex with minors is the one thing that Freaky Fountain will not, under any circumstances, publish. Keep your submissions about Muhammad and his nine-year-old wife to yourself.
We are also accepting submissions for cover art for both anthologies. See our artwork submission guidelines.
_______________________________
Calls for the anthologies Bad Romance and This Is The Way The World Ends are closed as of December 1, 2010.
_______________________________
FREAKY FOUNTAIN PRESS SHOWCASE (SHORT TERM ARCHIVE/ANTHOLOGY)
Not sure if what we’ve got here at Freaky Fountain is to your taste? Looking for a little sample of what we’re looking to publish?
We created the Freaky Fountain Press Showcase as a way for readers and writers like you to have a little taste of what we publish. A new Showcase story will be published on the site at the beginning of every month. Showcase stories remain in the archive, online and available to anyone who feels like stopping by, for six months. When twelve months have passed, the stories for that year will be combined and sold as an anthology. If an author doesn’t wish to have his or her story included in the anthology, the press retains exclusive rights for one year from the date of Showcase publication.
We want 1000 – 5000 words of the darkest, edgiest, hottest stuff you can come up with. Please refer to our general guidelines.
Editors: Catherine Leary and Robin Wolfe
Compensation: Upon publication of the story in our Showcase Archive, you will received a free e-copy of the anthology of your choice. Should you choose to include your story in the annual anthology, standard royalty rates apply.
Submissions for the Freaky Fountain Showcase are always open. Include contact information: your name, your pseudonym if applicable, address, phone number, and email address. Please include any publishing credits you may have as well. Send story submissions in the body of your email with SUBMISSION: SHOWCASE in the subject line to submissions@freakyfountain.com .
Rights: Press retains minimum exclusive rights for one year. If the author elects to publish in the annual anthology, the press will retain exclusive rights for five years following the date of the anthology’s publication.
Books will be offered in all major eBook formats and in print-on-demand.
13 January 2011 Last updated at 09:47 ETUS banks 'foreclosed on record 1m homes in 2010'
Foreclosure filings were up 1.67% from 2009, figures showBanks repossessed a record one million US homes in 2010, and could surpass that number this year, figures show.Foreclosure tracker RealtyTrac said about five million homeowners were at least two months behind on their mortgage payments.
Foreclosures are likely to remain numerous while unemployment remains stubbornly high, the group said.
Among the worst hit states were Nevada, Arizona, Florida and California, once at the heart of the housing boom.
Peak aheadNevada had the highest foreclosure rate for the fourth year in a row, with one in 11 housing units receiving a foreclosure notice, and RealtyTrac said more than half the nation's foreclosures occurred in Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois and Michigan.
RealtyTrac said 2.9 million US households were subject to a foreclosure filing last year, up 1.67% from 2009.
"2011 is going to be the peak," senior vice-president Rick Sharga told the Associated Press news agency.
Foreclosures slowed toward the end of 2010 amid revelations that banks had based the proceedings on improper documentation, but the pace is likely to rebound in the first quarter of 2011, Mr Sharga said.
via bbc.co.uk
Film review:
Battle for Haiti and We Must Kill the Bandits
January 14, 2011On Monday night at a Port-au-Prince hotel, a foreign media worker overseeing a bustling workspace for international journalists was called into the hallway by a Haitian hotelier.
He reemerged in the room and demanded everyone’s attention. The Haitian staff of the hotel were going straight home. Their families had called fearing violence would erupt in the streets, after a controversial speech by President Rene Preval in which he suggested he would stay on as head of state past for a few more months.
“If you don’t have private security with you, you should go back to where you’re spending the night right now,” he said gravely.
The foreign journalists exchanged nervous glances and some took their leave.
When I was ready, I left by bike to go home. The streets looked quiet, calm, normal. It seemed no such violence had broken out, not last night and not in the days after.
This is just to point out that fear of out-of-control violent Haitians is ever-present and often wholly disconnected from reality among the establishment foreign media and the privileged class of Haitians with which it mostly interacts.
The latest manifestation of that fear, in highly concentrated and sensationalized form, is Dan Reed’s new PBS Frontline documentary “The Battle for Haiti,” which lauds the United Nations peacekeeping mission and Haitian police chief Mario Andersol for waging a heroic but doomed battle against violent gangs. The film received an supportive, shallow review in the New York Times.
UN peacekeepers guarding Haiti's Electoral Council from rioting protesters in December
“We Must Kill the Bandits”, another new documentary, seemingly destined for obscurity but far more illuminating, examines the same so-called battle from a radically different angle. It’s the work of Kevin Pina, a Creole-speaking American journalist who has identified closely with Haiti’s political Lavalas movement for nearly twenty years. His is a tale of a grassroots struggle, with gang elements within it, straining to survive against an intense campaign of repression and assassination by the Haitian police and UN troops after the 2004 coup d’etat against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.Both documentaries have weaknesses, but only one acknowledges them. Early on, Pina says of Lavalas, “This is their story, seen through my eyes and the lens of my camera,” admitting his bias and limited view.
The Frontline film has no such humble self-awareness. The film opens with bum bum tchaaa Law and Order-style music set to dramatic shots of Haiti’s national penitentiary. For Reed, Haitian history begins on January 12, 2010, when 5,000 prisoners escaped. Inexplicably, one prisoner being interviewed is shown lying naked on his bed in the opening moments. The only imaginable reason is the filmmaker’s desire to be edgy and shocking, at the expense of the man’s dignity.
There is almost no reference to Haiti’s complex pre-quake history in the entire film, but for one absurd bit of narration. As the camera pans over Port-au-Prince’s slums and the music booms ominously, the distinctive Frontline narrator intones:
The escaped prisoners melted into the slums of the devastated capital. Among them, gangsters who once controlled much of Port-au-Prince. Now the earthquake gave them the chance to do so again.
The documentary is premised on this non-attributed false statement. When did gangsters control much of Port-au-Prince, a gigantic city of 10 million people, and who are they? I’m genuinely curious. Unfortunately for casual viewers who tuned in on the night before the one-year anniversary of the earthquake, it’s stated as unquestionable fact.
A bright spot is the way the film highlights the rape pandemic in the camps, interviewing several survivors. But it fails to explain much of anything about why the rapes continue unabated. Haitian women’s groups like KOFAVIV who say the UN’s humanitarian and peacekeeping branches have failed to address the rapes with camp lighting or competent nighttime patrols are not mentioned.
The rest of the Frontline film presents a predictable narrative of intrepid, under-equipped Haitian police and UN peacekeepers fighting against the tide of violent gangs. No camps are identified as having actually been taken over by gangs. No quantifiable rise in crime since the quake beyond vague alarm-raising by police (as they’ve been doing since the day of the quake about escaped prisoners) is described.
To its credit, Frontline publishes an interview on its website with the former head of MINUSTAH intelligence, who says the prison break has “not substantially, really” affected the crime rate. So why are they airing a documentary that hypes up the polar opposite claim without evidence?
Somehow there isn’t even a mention of an Oct. 17 breakout from the national penitentiary, which the UN peacekeeping mission knew was planned beforehand but failed to stop, according to a secret US Embassy report.
My jaw dropped when Edmond Mulet, the UN peacekeeping mission chief, says “Haiti is a nation that committed collective suicide a long time ago.” The “resilience” of Haitians amidst grinding poverty may be mentioned a little too often and approvingly in the foreign media, to the point that it borders on dehumanization, but Mulet’s offensive statement is too far gone in the opposite direction.
Haiti is after all the only country in modern history born of a slave uprising and has been resisting foreign influence ever since. With the UN’s apparent introduction of cholera into the country, along with dozens of alleged uses of reckless force (pepper spray and tear gassing earthquake survivors), calls for the UN troops to withdraw have only grown louder in the past year.
Inconvenient for Reed, Frontline, and Mulet, are recent comments by OAS diplomat Ricardo Seitenfus, along with a 2008 report in the Christian Science Monitor on Haiti’s reputation for violence:
“It’s a big myth,” says Fred Blaise, spokesman for the UN police force in Haiti. “Port-au-Prince is no more dangerous than any big city. You can go to New York and get pickpocketed and held at gunpoint. The same goes for cities in Mexico or Brazil.”
Pina’s film focuses on how decisions made in New York and Brazil, among other far-away power centers, to support a de facto regime with a heavily-armed peacekeeping mission after the 2004 coup impacted Lavalas supporters in Port-au-Prince. Large Lavalas demonstrations demanding Aristide’s return were met with targeted violence again and again from the Haitian police as UN peacekeepers looked on.
“We Must Kill the Bandits” stumbles at times when it shows dead men lying in the street and claims, without clear documentation, that they were victims of Haitian police – the Frontline film does the same thing, except it says gangs are responsible. I wonder if Pina could have corroborated more of his points with primary and secondary sources, which Reed completely fails to do. Of the supposed thousands of escaped gang members wreaking havoc on Port-au-Prince, Reed manages to interview only one who will admit to being one. Pina ignores accusations against pro-Lavalas gangs of violent crime directed at other Haitians.
The second half of Pina’s film, however, is excellent. The Brazilian commander of the UN condemns killings by Haitian police in the press, but when confronted face to face by another Lavalas demonstration, he angrily tells them to respect the police. “You are stealing our rights, commander!” the protesters yell back.
The film reaches a terrifying, graphic climax with the July 2005 UN-led assault on Cite Soleil, in which UN troops expended 22,000 rounds in just seven hours. Residents of Cite Soleil tell the camera in plain terms, over and over, that the UN troops are shooting up their churches and killing their families. Women let out blood-curdling screams as one cries over her husband’s body, “Let me die now, he was everything in my life!”
We learn as the credits roll that every major Lavalas leader, from the former Prime Minister to singer So Anne, has been released, with all charges dropped, after being jailed by the de facto regime.
If you’re looking for an entertaining, tense cops-and-robbers drama without regard for Haitian history or the truth, the Frontline documentary will do just fine. “The Battle for Haiti” is the work of a man who doesn’t speak the language, had never been to Haiti before the quake, with a mindset, common among journalists, that plays on long-held stereotypes exaggerating the violence of Haitian society. But like the rest of the establishment media, the film pretends to have no bias in its portrayal of Haiti.
Pina goes to the other side of the authorities’ guns and fragmentation bombs. It’s not perfect, but “We Must Kill the Bandits” convincingly conveys the struggle of Lavalas’ base against violent attempts to smother it after the coup, which itself was massively misreported as a popular rebellion. That Reed’s film airs on PBS and is promoted in the New York Times, while Pina’s sits on his website, is indication of how far the US media has to go in learning from its past mistakes.
“We Must Kill the Bandits” can be seen here, “Battle for Haiti” here. Two other recent Haiti documentaries I’d recommend are Poto Mitan and Filmat11′s five-part series.
My name is Ansel Herz. I’m a 22-year-old freelance journalist based in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. Why Haiti, since September 2009? Read here.
I lived and reported through the 7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, for Reuters Alertnet, Inter-Press Service, and Free Speech Radio News (FSRN).
My work has appeared on the websites of Mother Jones and Wired. I’ve been interviewed by CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera English, the New York Times, Sky News, Democracy Now!, and other outlets. Produced video for PBS Newshour.
via mediahacker.org
Haiti, One Year Later
It's been one year since the earth shook so violently below Port-au-Prince, Haiti, destroying and damaging hundreds of thousands of buildings and lives in mere moments. Twelve months of struggle and heartache have followed, with very little progress to show so far. Only five percent of the rubble has been cleared as crippling "indecision" has stalled reconstruction efforts, a recent report by humanitarian group Oxfam said. It's not clear when Haiti will be fully rebuilt, with five years needed just to rehouse the government, a top minister recently told an AFP reporter. On this somber anniversary, here are some photos of (and by) Haitians as they continue to cope with the aftermath of such a massive disaster. (45 photos total)_____________________
Haiti Suffers Year Of Crisis
With Nobody In Charge
Associated PressFILE - In this Jan. 17, 2010 file photo, people walk down a street amid earthquake rubble in Port-au-Prince, haiti. In 2010 crisis has piled upon crisis in Haiti. More than 230,000 are believed to have died in the quake, and more than a million remain homeless. A cholera epidemic broke out in the fall, and in its midst a dysfunctional election was held, its results still unclear.
Associated PressFILE - In this Jan. 15, 2010 file photo, a body is buried in the rubble of a hotel in the aftermath of an earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In 2010 crisis has piled upon crisis in Haiti. More than 230,000 are believed to have died in the quake, and more than a million remain homeless. A cholera epidemic broke out in the fall, and in its midst a dysfunctional election was held, its results still unclear.
Associated PressFILE - In this Jan. 28, 2010 file photo, a woman is crushed in a crowd of people waiting for food rations in the aftermath of the Jan. 12 earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In 2010 crisis has piled upon crisis in Haiti. More than 230,000 are believed to have died in the quake, and more than a million remain homeless. A cholera epidemic broke out in the fall, and in its midst a dysfunctional election was held, its results still unclear.
Associated PressFILE - In this Jan. 27, 2010 file photo, French search and rescue workers pull a girl from the rubble of College St. Gerard 15 days after the earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In 2010 crisis has piled upon crisis in Haiti. More than 230,000 are believed to have died in the quake, and more than a million remain homeless. A cholera epidemic broke out in the fall, and in its midst a dysfunctional election was held, its results still unclear.
Associated PressFILE - In this Jan. 17, 2010 file photo, scavengers walk over the burning rubble of quake-damaged buildings in downtown Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In 2010 crisis has piled upon crisis in Haiti. More than 230,000 are believed to have died in the quake, and more than a million remain homeless. A cholera epidemic broke out in the fall, and in its midst a dysfunctional election was held, its results still unclear.
Associated PressFILE - In this Jan. 14, 2010 file photo, a couple looks over hundreds of earthquake victims at the morgue in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In 2010 crisis has piled upon crisis in Haiti. More than 230,000 are believed to have died in the quake, and more than a million remain homeless. A cholera epidemic broke out in the fall, and in its midst a dysfunctional election was held, its results still unclear.
Associated PressFILE - In this Jan. 17, 2010 file photo, a police officer points his weapon at a youth who had taken goods from quake-damaged stores in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In 2010 crisis has piled upon crisis in Haiti. More than 230,000 are believed to have died in the quake, and more than a million remain homeless. A cholera epidemic broke out in the fall, and in its midst a dysfunctional election was held, its results still unclear.
Associated PressFILE - In this Jan. 19, 2010 file photo, a U.S. Navy helicopter takes off in front of the National Palace after members of the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne, front, landed days after the earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In 2010 crisis has piled upon crisis in Haiti. More than 230,000 are believed to have died in the quake, and more than a million remain homeless. A cholera epidemic broke out in the fall, and in its midst a dysfunctional election was held, its results still unclear.
Associated PressFILE - In this Jan. 20, 2010 file photo, people try to stay in line to get disaster relief supplies at U.S. 82nd Airborne Division's forward operating base in the aftermath of the earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In 2010 crisis has piled upon crisis in Haiti. More than 230,000 are believed to have died in the quake, and more than a million remain homeless. A cholera epidemic broke out in the fall, and in its midst a dysfunctional election was held, its results still unclear.
Associated PressFILE - In this Feb. 12, 2010 file photo, people gather on the national day of mourning outside the earthquake damaged National Palace in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In 2010 crisis has piled upon crisis in Haiti. More than 230,000 are believed to have died in the quake, and more than a million remain homeless. A cholera epidemic broke out in the fall, and in its midst a dysfunctional election was held, its results still unclear.
Associated PressFILE - In this Feb. 11, 2010 file photo, Dielisia Pierre stands with her children in a camp for earthquake survivors in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In 2010 crisis has piled upon crisis in Haiti. More than 230,000 are believed to have died in the quake, and more than a million remain homeless. A cholera epidemic broke out in the fall, and in its midst a dysfunctional election was held, its results still unclear.
Associated PressFILE - In this Feb. 5, 2010 file photo, earthquake survivors sit around a fire in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In 2010 crisis has piled upon crisis in Haiti. More than 230,000 are believed to have died in the quake, and more than a million remain homeless. A cholera epidemic broke out in the fall, and in its midst a dysfunctional election was held, its results still unclear.
Associated PressFILE - In this Nov. 22, 2010 file photo, UN peacekeepers from Brazil are seen through a window glass as they patrol on vehicles in Cap Haitian, Haiti.In 2010 crisis has piled upon crisis in Haiti. More than 230,000 are believed to have died in the quake, and more than a million remain homeless. A cholera epidemic broke out in the fall, and in its midst a dysfunctional election was held, its results still unclear. (AP photo/Emilio Morenatti, File)
Associated PressFILE - In this Nov. 29, 2010 file photo, a polling station sits in disarray after it was destroyed by demonstrators during elections in Grande Riu Du Nord village, Haiti. In 2010 crisis has piled upon crisis in Haiti. More than 230,000 are believed to have died in the quake, and more than a million remain homeless. A cholera epidemic broke out in the fall, and in its midst a dysfunctional election was held, its results still unclear.
Associated PressFILE - In this Nov. 25, 2010 file photo, a supporter of presidential candidate Michel Martelly, with his body painted, demonstrates during a campaign rally in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In 2010 crisis has piled upon crisis in Haiti. More than 230,000 are believed to have died in the quake, and more than a million remain homeless. A cholera epidemic broke out in the fall, and in its midst a dysfunctional election was held, its results still unclear.
Associated PressFILE- In this Nov. 23, 2010 file photo, a woman suffering cholera symptoms is carried to a local hospital in Limbe village near Cap Haitien, Haiti. In 2010 crisis has piled upon crisis in Haiti. More than 230,000 are believed to have died in the quake, and more than a million remain homeless. A cholera epidemic broke out in the fall, and in its midst a dysfunctional election was held, its results still unclear.
Associated PressFILE - In this Nov. 12, 2010 file photo, a girl suffering cholera symptoms receives treatment at the Doctors Without Borders temporary hospital in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In 2010 crisis has piled upon crisis in Haiti. More than 230,000 are believed to have died in the quake, and more than a million remain homeless. A cholera epidemic broke out in the fall, and in its midst a dysfunctional election was held, its results still unclear.
Associated PressFILE - In this Nov. 13, 2010 file photo, an ambulance worker prepares to remove the corpse of a man lying dead in a portable bathroom of a refugee camp in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In 2010 crisis has piled upon crisis in Haiti. More than 230,000 are believed to have died in the quake, and more than a million remain homeless. A cholera epidemic broke out in the fall, and in its midst a dysfunctional election was held, its results still unclear.
Associated PressFILE - In this Nov. 10, 2010 file photo, a medic ties with gauze the legs of two-year-old Clercilia Regis who according to doctors died of cholera a few minutes earlier at the hospital in Cite Soleil, Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In 2010 crisis has piled upon crisis in Haiti. More than 230,000 are believed to have died in the quake, and more than a million remain homeless. A cholera epidemic broke out in the fall, and in its midst a dysfunctional election was held, its results still unclear.
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti January 8, 2011, 12:00 pm ETThe silhouetted bodies moved in waves through the night, climbing out of crumbled homes and across mounds of rubble. Hundreds of thousands of people made their way to the center of the shattered city by the thin light of a waning crescent moon. There was hardly a sound.
It took a few moments to recognize the great white dome bowing forward into the night. Another had fallen onto itself, its peak barely visible over the iron gate. The white walls of the 90-year-old mansion were crushed, the portico collapsed. Haiti's national palace was destroyed.
It was clear from the first, terrible moments after the quake, when I ran out of my broken house to find the neighborhood behind it gone, that Haiti had suffered a catastrophe unique even in its long history of tragedy.
But it was not until reaching the Champ de Mars plaza at the center of the capital, more than six hours later, that I understood what it meant. Not just homes and churches had succumbed. Haiti's most important institutions, the symbols and substance of the nation itself, had collapsed atop the shuddering earth.
The people came to the palace in droves seeking strength and support. Some wondered if President Rene Preval might emerge — or his body. They were looking for a leader, a plan, some secret store of wealth and aid.
But there was no news, no plan, no help that night. The president was not there. Nobody was in charge.
In the year since, crisis has piled upon crisis. More than 230,000 are believed to have died in the quake, and more than a million remain homeless. A cholera epidemic broke out in the fall, and in its midst a dysfunctional election was held, its results still unclear.
There was hope that the quake would bring an opportunity to break the country's fatal cycle of struggle, catastrophe and indifference. But promises were not kept, and no leader emerged, within Haiti or outside.
What little center there had been simply disappeared, and the void was never filled.
———
Among those gazing at the collapsed palace that night was Aliodor Pierre, a 28-year-old church guitarist and father of two. Until that moment, he had lived in the slum of Martissant. His friends called him "Ti-Lunet," little glasses, for the wire-rimmed pair he wore.
He was drinking beer at a corner store when the earth began to move. He tried to walk into the street but the force knocked him down. A roar filled the air, like a thousand trucks crashing through a mountain forest. A friend tried to bolt but Aliodor shouted "No!" and held him back. They lay together on the ground until it stopped.
Aliodor picked up his head. His apartment, a five-story building, was flat. Everything he owned was buried inside. He didn't know where his wife and children were.
Then the screaming began all around him.
Aliodor ran to his parent's house a few blocks away. It had fallen. He shouted and an answer came from inside. He smashed a window and pulled out his mother, hurt but alive. Neighbors rushed to help rescue other relatives. Still his wife and children were missing.
His heart raced. He and a friend ran through the neighborhood, pushing off concrete and slicing through barbed wire with pliers. In one doorway, they found a young girl who had nearly escaped before the house fell forward onto her lower leg. "Save me!" she screamed. Aliodor looked for a hacksaw to cut her free, but she died in front of him.
Dazed, he followed the crowd through the falling light to the central plaza. People were shouting: The national palace, Roman Catholic cathedral and Episcopal cathedral — where Aliodor sometimes played guitar — were gone. He looked for the white domes, but couldn't see them.
He sat down near a statue of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the liberator and first president of Haiti.
————
Hours later Aliodor had still not found his wife, Manette Etienne, their 7-year-old daughter, Sama, or their 3-year-old son, Safa. Pain wrenched his stomach as he pictured them dead. He didn't know what had happened to the nursing school his wife attended.
He started walking toward his neighborhood. As he reached a gas station, suddenly there was Manette, walking toward him. The children had been saved by a teacher who ran them out of school when the shaking began. They had thought he was dead, too. They held each other and for a moment the broken city disappeared.
"It was like the earthquake never happened," he said.
By morning, people began carving up the lawns and plazas, marking space with blankets, umbrellas and bits of cardboard to sleep on. Some thought being near the government might mean being closer to the aid. But there was no government there. When Preval came out of hiding, he set up shop at a police station that backed directly onto the airport runway. Maybe he was leaving, people mused.
They wanted to leave. The Champ de Mars plaza reeked. Stagnant fountains became toilets, washing pits for clothes and wells for bath water. Bodies trapped under the rubble started to smell. Those survivors who could got surgical masks. Others painted toothpaste mustaches under their noses.
Two days after the quake, roaring gray helicopters dropped onto the rubble-strewn lawn outside the palace. American soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division jumped out with their rifles, packs and armor — the vanguard of what President Barack Obama called one of the largest relief efforts in U.S. history.
The soldiers took over the airport and stood guard as U.N. peacekeepers handed out rice, beans and water to a desperate crowd. Fights broke out and pepper spray filled the air. Aliodor lined up once for food, then swore never to do it again.
He asked the soldiers why they had come with guns. A young private told him they had been on their way to Iraq when they were told to go to Haiti instead. Aliodor asked why he wasn't carrying food, water or something to help people build houses.
"He said to me, 'I'm just a sharpshooter. I'm very good at shooting,'" Aliodor recalled. "But I said, 'Haiti's not at a war.'"
————
On the last day of March, donors at a United Nations conference pledged nearly $10 billion for the reconstruction of Haiti, with its almost 10 million people. The United States alone promised $1.15 billion for 2010, the largest one-year pledge.
Days later, word spread that the national palace would be torn down. Radio reports said the government of France had agreed to help build a new one. On April 8, people came to see the demolition begin.
The palace was the backdrop for the famous statue of the Neg Mawon, the escaped slave blowing a conch shell to call others to fight for freedom. But the palace's history, like Haiti's, was never simple.
The Beaux Arts mansion, designed in 1915, was torched while still under construction by a mob bent on assassinating the president, Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. It was completed under the U.S. occupation that followed his death, and was the scene of successive coups and ousters. Eventually, it became a symbol of terror under the father-son dictatorship of Francois and Jean-Claude Duvalier.
Presidents ceased living in the palace after Jean-Claude's 1986 overthrow, but it continued to host world leaders in its salons — and protests and coup attempts on the lawn.
The people of the Champ de Mars watched as the backhoes tore down what was left of the portico and, for the first time in most of their lives, they got a glimpse of the grand salon and the crystal chandeliers inside.
Then the machines stopped. A Preval aide said there were disagreements over how reconstruction should proceed. Demolition came to a halt.
On the plaza, aid groups had handed out plastic tarps and put in portable latrines. Shacks went up across every open space. Someone tied a tarp to the side of the Neg Mawon.
Aliodor scraped together most of the money he had — about $51 — to buy wood, sheets and tarps to put up a little shack, a few feet (meters) from where he had sat down the first night.
The bonhomie and spirit of sharing that had prevailed in the days after the quake cracked, and then broke. Mugging, robbery and rape became facts of life. Aliodor sent his children to his quiet hometown in the rural south to live with relatives.
Without a government to organize them, the people began organizing themselves. In settlements all over the capital, camps set up organizing committees in an intricate bureaucracy. Aliodor's Place Dessalines was the largest. He was named spokesman for its central committee.
"I'm one of those guys who has little money but I have a lot of strength," he explained.
———
There was, at one point, a plan.
As the homemade camps swelled beyond 1.5 million people, the government said it would relocate 400,000 to the capital's outskirts. Officials set up card tables around the Champ de Mars to register people who talked excitedly about getting new homes, better than the slums where they had lived before.
In April the first camp was ready in the open desert north of the capital, designed by U.S. military, U.N. engineers and aid groups. About 7,500 people living on a golf course were chosen to move, encouraged by their camp's manager, actor Sean Penn.
It was a disaster. There were no trees and the site was too remote. Also, it turned out that the parcel belonged to Nabatec Development — whose president was head of the relocation commission. And so the company stood to gain government compensation for its land.
Over the summer, a storm ripped through a quarter of the camp's tents. People screamed and cried as, again, they lost their homes.
Only one more relocation camp was built. The rest of the project was abandoned.
In May, an old smell returned to the Champ de Mars: Tear gas. Parliament dissolved because an election could not be held to replace expiring seats. Its last act was to grant emergency powers to Preval and create a reconstruction commission co-chaired by Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive and former U.S. President Bill Clinton.
Clinton was already the U.N. Special Envoy for Haiti. Aliodor and others wondered if he was now their governor.
When Preval announced that he might extend his term beyond February 2011, opponents marched to the palace. Police and U.N. peacekeepers fired rubber bullets and tear gas at rock-throwing demonstrators and into the camp.
Then Haiti settled in for a summer break. The World Cup was on.
In July, exactly six months after the quake, big cars pulled up to the palace. The government was moving back in. News conferences, once held under a mango tree at a police station, would now be in a new wooden gazebo. A defiant Preval said the lack of massive disease outbreaks and violence was proof that the quake response had gone better than people were saying.
Then came the medals. Twenty-three honorees — including Penn and Clinton — received certificates deeming them Knights of the National Order of Honor and Merit. There was no mention of the dead, or the giant shantytown a few hundred feet (meters) away.
The officials then announced that the previous six months of grinding inaction had merely been the emergency-recovery phase. Now, they said, reconstruction would begin.
———
Aliodor and Manette were losing weight. Food was scarce and there was no work. The shack boiled in the summer heat.
Every day Aliodor woke up in their cramped bed and walked out to the sight of a big rubber bladder, wider than his shack, that aid groups sometimes filled with treated water. Above it stood the statue of Dessalines on a horse, waving to his left.
The sun beat down until it gave Aliodor a headache. He had an eye infection. He was starting to get angry.
"The government, the ones who are responsible for us, don't really want us to go because while we are in misery they are enjoying themselves," he said. "Every day they are making money on top of our heads."
The aid groups promised they would do this and that, fix a toilet, bring more food. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't. The committee squabbled. People stole what they needed.
Behind Aliodor's shack, the backhoes and bulldozers at the national palace had been sitting idle for months.
"The country needs to have a national palace. But if it's under these guys who are in power now, the palace will never be built," Aliodor said.
He looked at Dessalines again, waving on his horse. Maybe he was trying to leave, too.
———
Rumors had been spreading for weeks. A strange disease was killing people in the countryside: like diarrhea, but it could kill you in hours.
In mid-November, it arrived on the Champ de Mars. A woman everyone said was crazy walked into her tent one day and did not leave. In two days, the tent gave off a nauseating smell. A brave soul opened the tarp and found her lying dead in her own filth. A fight broke out between neighbors and police about who would clear her out.
The next day a young man was found dead in a toilet. Word came in from the Cite Soleil slum that dozens of children were dropping dead. The foreigners called it cholera.
Then the news spread that U.N. peacekeepers might have brought the disease to Haiti.
"I'm not supposed to be here, waiting for cholera to kill me in a public park," Aliodor said, jutting out his lower teeth.
As the year drew to a close, the international community pushed for a presidential election. Donor countries provided $29 million, including $14 million from the United States. Black-and-white pictures of the 19 candidates were hung on the palace gates.
The Nov. 28 election was, by most measures, a failure. Hundreds of thousands who had died in the earthquake were still on the rolls, and untold thousands of survivors were turned away because of disorganization or alleged fraud. There was violence and voter intimidation. Nearly all the major candidates called for the vote to be canceled.
When results were announced days later, the city was shut down with flaming barricades. Gunmen wearing shirts of the ruling-party candidate called for people on the Champ de Mars to come out and celebrate. Then they opened fire. Up to three people were killed and several injured. Aliodor and others took turns keeping lookout at night.
Nearly 3,000 people died of cholera and more than 100,000 were infected.
Clinton's commission had approved billions of dollars in projects, but many remained unfunded. Less than $900 million of the donors' conference pledges was delivered.
The United States delayed the bulk of its $1 billion pledge of reconstruction money until 2011. So far, it has sent $120 million to a reconstruction fund and provided about $200 million in debt relief.
———
The guys hanging in front of Aliodor's house still call him Ti-Lunet, but his glasses are long gone. His hair has receded.
The afternoons are still baking hot, and tire fires from a daily protest burn black, acrid smoke nearby. Aliodor has criticism for everyone. He asks me to deliver a message to my country:
"I blame this on the United States, because the United States is the world power," he says. "Why would you accept for us to be living in poverty?"
If Dessalines were alive today, Aliodor says, he would lead the people in a revolution against the government, foreign soldiers and other foreigners who aren't helping. He hopes the spirits of the ancestors will come back and teach Haitians to be independent again.
"God is the only one we have hope in," he adds.
Aliodor pulls out a photo album from under the bed and flips through pictures taken before the quake. There is Manette, in a nursing uniform. And there he is, fit and muscular, a gold cross hanging from his neck and nearly brushing the guitar in his confident hands.
He looks down at his stringy arms. They look like someone else's.
Afternoon shadows come upon the tens of thousands of tents in the central plaza. Soon the people will be shrouded in darkness, just as they were on that night almost a year ago.
Beside them, the national palace lies cracked upon the lawn. There's a gaping hole in the middle.
via npr.org
France:
A Show of
Tunisian Pride in Paris
Posted 15 January 2011After weeks of popular upraising, and a dramatic 24 hours when in rapid succession, ex president Ben Ali fled Tunisia to seek asylum in Saudi Arabia, his prime minister took power, only to be replaced a few hours later by the head of Tunisian Parliament, and with elections now planned to take place in two month, the 600,000-strong Tunisian diaspora living in France gathered today, saturday 15th, in the streets. Despite their concern for the continuous violence in Tunisia, their relatives and the future, they granted themselves one day to rejoice, celebrate and share an overwhelming collective emotion. Here are a few pictures* of the “day after”, a Tunisian Pride in Paris.
"Thank you, (Mohamed) Bouazizi !" Hommage to the fruit seller in Sidi Bouzid who sacrificed his life
"I love you, my people"
A clean Tunisia - Shove off, RCD (Ben Ali's parti)
Questions: "Is the West innocent?" "1881-1956: colonisation 1956- 2011: dictatorship 2011-…: ?
"Don't forget the martyr Boazizi and all the Tunisian martyrs"
Long live free Tunisia
January 15th, 2011: a day to remember for ever
A last-minute poster, where a Tunisian demonstrator writes: “The will of the People”Many Tunisian and French readers will save today's issue of the French daily “Libération” that says it all, with one word, in French and Arabic: Freedom.
In the deluge of comments and tweets congratulating the Tunisians, one message to all Tunisians, from Adrien94, on France 24 website:
Merci pour cette leçon, peuple tunisien
Vous nous avez monté ce qu'est le courage.
Vous nous avez montré qu'on peut se battre pour une idée même quand tout semble verrouillé par un groupe.
Et vous ne l'avez pas fait au nom d'un dieu ou d'un autre futur despote. vous l'avez fait parce que c'était JUSTE.A l'heure où la coupe du monde devient le seul moyen de faire vibrer mon peuple, vous nous rappeler le vrai sens des choses.
Je vous souhaite d'éviter les périodes sombres qui suivent parfoir les révolutions.
Mais je crois en vous, car votre révolution est exemplaire!Vive la Tunisie et vive la démocratie
Thank you for this lesson, Tunisian people
You showed us what courage means. You showed us that we can fight for an idea, even when everything looks locked up by a group.And you did not do it in the name of a god or another future despot. You did it for JUSTICE.
In a time when the World Cup is the only way to make my (French) people vibrate, you remind us of the true meaning of things.
I hope you will avoid the dark times that sometimes follow revolutions. And I believe in you, because your revolution sets an example.
Long live Tunisia and long live democracy* The photos were all originally taken by the author of the post.
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Protests spread across
North Africa
As Tunisia struggles with its new political reality, protests have kicked off in Algeria, Libya, Egypt and Jordan. The protests stem from a multiplicity of root causes, but seem to be populated by a public emboldened by what they saw unfolding in Tunisia. Like Tunisia, the protests are being promoted and discussed using social media.
There has been deep unrest in Egypt since the bombing of a Christian Coptic church on New Year’s Eve. Protests from the Christian community, bolstered by many Muslims, petered out but have now returned after recent events in Tunisia. The video below, titled “Today Tunisia, Tomorrow Egypt! Down with Mubarak!”, was taken at a protest by opponents of the Mubarak government at the Press Syndicate in Cairo. The video was posted by Egyptian activist Gigi Ibrahim. She tweeted this message: @Gsquare86 Video: Protest in celebration of free #Tunisia turns into a bash of #NDP & #Mubarak ..Down with all dictators http://bit.ly/e7y5VN #Egypt
Jordanians gather to demand reform
I have a feeling that great things are in store for Jordan, we must focus#ReformJO
Wow, leading Islamist tells crowd of protestors in #Jordan that the problem is King himself? http://bit.ly/f5919S #reformJO
On his Black Iris blog, Naseem Tarawnah argues that the protests in Tunisia will not be mirrored to the same extent in Jordan.
Will the events in Tunisia cause a similar situation to unfold in Jordan?
Probably not. While parallels, such as those mentioned above, can be easily drawn throughout much of the Arab world where the majority of the population is struggling to make ends meet, the paradigm is quite different. Both the economic, political and social situations are completely different when it comes to these two countries. Jordanians will likely be inspired enough by Tunisia to engage in the vocalization of their financial despair, even to the extent of calling on the typical toppling of the Rifai government (or whatever government is in play). But they will, for the most part, avoid widespread violence, or calls for a complete overhaul of the system.
Libya reacts to Qaddafi's Tunisia statement
In the aftermath of the Tunisian uprising, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi criticised the fast pace at which change was implemented in the neighbouring country. Gaddafi, an ally of the Tunisian president, also condemned the role of Wikileaks in the protests. Wikileaks recently released cables indicating possible corruption in Tunisia. But videos are being uploaded to YouTube which show unrest on the streets.
News flying around about protests in Libya. Not just in one place, but seemingly in several towns and cities.. #LIBYA #Sidibouzid
#Libya I am working on confirming news of protests and clashes, apparently in 2 cities at least but some talk of even more #sidibouzid
Algerian protests begin with self-immolation
A very grim video on YouTube shows the aftermath for one protester in Algeria who set himself on fire, in what may have been a deliberate echoing of the action taken by Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi. Due to the graphic nature of the video, we have decided not to publish it here, but it is available at this link.
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Saturday, January 15th, 2011
By Mona Eltahawy
Washington Post, Saturday, January 15, 2011
For 23 years, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali presided over the most tightly run ship in the Arab world. So perfect a police state was his Tunisia, with its ubiquitous informers and portraits of the president, that no one predicted Ben Ali’s ship could capsize.
But capsize it did Friday, after a 29-day popular uprising against unemployment, police brutality and the regime’s corruption. It was the worst unrest since Ben Ali took over.
Not once in my 43 years have I thought that I’d see an Arab leader toppled by his people. It is nothing short of poetic justice that it was neither Islamists nor invasion-in-the-name-of-democracy that sent the waters rushing onto Ben Ali’s ship but, rather, the youth of his country.
Their rage at political and economic disenfranchisement spilled over last month with the desperate act of an unemployed man. Mohammed Bouazizi, 26, distraught when police confiscated his unlicensed produce stand, set himself on fire on Dec. 17 and died on Jan. 3. Soon, several other unemployed youth tried to commit suicide, and at least one of them did. Is there a more poignant portrayal of what ails the Arab world than images of its young people killing themselves as their leaders get older and richer?
Human rights groups say more than 60 people have died in clashes with Ben Ali’s security forces since Dec. 17, but Bouazizi’s self-immolation has come to symbolize what many are calling the Jasmine Revolution.
Tunisia is a typical Middle East country in that its population is composed largely of young people. Half the population is under 25 years of age and so have known no leader other than Ben Ali, who was only Tunisia’s second president since it gained independence from France in 1956.
For decades, a host of Arab dictators have justified their endless terms in office by pointing to Islamists waiting in the wings. Having both inflated the egos and power of Islamists and scared Western allies into accepting stability over democracy, those leaders were left to comfortably sweep "elections." Ben Ali was elected to a fifth term with 89.62 percent of the vote in 2009.
All around him is a depressingly familiar pattern. Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi (68 years old) has been in power since 1969; Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh (64) has ruled since 1978 and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak (82) since 1981. Algeria’s Abdelaziz Bouteflika (73) is a relative newcomer, having been in power only since 1999. Not so much fathers as grandfathers of their nations, these autocrats cling to office – and are increasingly out of touch with their young populaces.
No doubt, every Arab leader has watched Tunisia’s revolt in fear while citizens across the Arab world watch in solidarity, elated at that rarity: open revolution.
"Goosebumps all over. I can’t believe I lived through an Arab revolution!! Thank you, Tunisia!" tweeted Gigi Ibrahim, a young Egyptian woman whose handle is Gsquare86. "The power of the masses is capable of toppling any dictatorship. Today was Tunisia. Tomorrow is Egypt, Jordan. LONG LIVE REVOLUTION!"
Social media, where young Arabs organize and speak out against their respective regimes, have given the world a clear view of the thoughts, hopes and videos of Tunisians. For days, I have been glued to Twitter, on which events in Tunisia are discussed much faster than mainstream media could report them.
"Tunis now: the chants continue ‘No to Ben Ali even if we die,’ " tweeted a Tunisian who joined the 6,000 to 7,000 protesting outside the Interior Ministry hours before Ben Ali fled.
Tunisia is not a major U.S. ally. On Jan. 7, the State Department said it was concerned about the regime’s online and real-life crackdown. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Jan. 12 that Washington would not take sides, infuriating those who saw a double standard in the vocal U.S. position on Iran.
But others saw encouragement from Washington’s reticence. U.S. leaders are "supporting us with their silence," a Tunisian told me on Twitter. "If they say anything, we will lose."
As Arabs everywhere marvel, those in Tunis still seem grounded. Even as Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannoushi announced on state television Friday that he had taken over, people noted online that the acting president was part of Ben Ali’s despised inner circle. Surely Ghannoushi is aware that Tunisians who have faced down live ammunition, curfews and tanks on the street the past month have little appetite for more of the same leadership.
Indeed, one Tunisian tweeted me: "What is unfolding is another dictatorship, we must continue the battle!"
Tunisians were fed up with not just Ben Ali but the "quasi mafia" surrounding him, as the family and cronies were described in a WikiLeaks cable, because of their "organized corruption." President Obama issued a statement on Friday in support of the Tunisian people and calling for free and fair elections.
Ben Ali imprisoned or chased into exile viable alternatives to his rule, so what comes next politically is not clear. But the world is watching this small Arab country and wondering if this is the first step in ridding the region of its granddaddies.
===========
Mona Eltahawy is an award-winning columnist and an international public speaker on Arab and Muslim issues. She is based in New York.
She is a columnist for Qatar’s Al Arab newspaper, Israel’s The Jerusalem Report, Denmark’s Politiken and Metro Canada. Her opinion pieces have been published frequently in The Washington Post and the International Herald Tribune and she has appeared as a guest analyst in several media outlets.
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Arab World: After Tunisia,
Who's Next?
| Countries | Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria |
| Topics | Freedom of Speech, Cyber-Activism, Diaspora, Elections,Governance, Human Rights, Protest, Youth, International Relations, Politics |
| Languages | Arabic, English |
This post also available in:
| Français | · Monde arabe : Après la Tunisie, à qui le tour ? |
| Malagasy | · Tontolo Arabo: Aorian'i Tonizia, iza ny manaraka? |
| polski | · Świat arabski: Kto następny po Tunezji? |
Following the events in Tunisia that forced former president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to flee the country, netizens across the Arab world are asking: “are we next?”
Egyptian journalist and blogger Mona Eltahawy, who has kept close watch on the Twittersphere throughout the Tunisian uprising, penned a widely-read column this morning entitled “More Tunisias, Please” in which she noted that the Arab world is watching with bated breath to see if “another Tunisia” will occur:
Image by Andrew Ford Lyons @drew3000
Ben Ali imprisoned or chased into exile viable alternatives to his rule, so what comes next politically is not clear. But the world is watching this small Arab country and wondering if this is the first step in ridding the region of its granddaddies.
Analyst Juan Cole also suggested the potential for Tunisia to be the start of something bigger:
…But since Tunisia is Sunni and Arab, it would not be embarrassing for Egyptians, Algerians, Syrians and Jordanians to borrow its techniques and rhetoric for their own domestic purposes, which makes it potentially influential. Certainly an alliance of frustrated BA holders, professionals, workers, farmers, progressives and Muslim activists that results in a parliamentary democracy would likely have more resonances in the Arab world than Iran’s authoritarian rule by ayatollah (Sunnis don’t have ayatollahs). It remains to be seen if little Tunisia is the start of something, or one more false dawn.
All day, similar sentiment has echoed across Twitter and the Arab blogosphere. Saudi journalist Ebtihal Mubarak (@EbtihalMubarak) tweets:
If the unexpected kept on happening next to Tunisian revolution is not Egypt but SYRIA. Now that will be a New Arab world#Sidibouzid #Syria
“Majnoon Habibi” (@majnoon4) writes, along the same lines:
Tunisia today, fascist Syria tomorrow. The revolution is coming. Bring democracy to the Arab Middle East.
Created by Egyptian @ZeinabSamir
Syrian Arwa Abdulaziz (@arwa_abdulaziz) alsopredicts that Syria will be the next to fall:
اليوم العالم ينشد “حماة الحمى يا حماة الحمى _ هلمو هلمو لمجد الزمن” وغداً بإذن الله سينشد العالم “حماة الديار عليكم سلام ” #Tunisia #syria
Today the world sings [the Tunisian National Anthem] and tomorrow God willing they will sing [the Syrian National Anthem] #Tunisia #Syria
Syrian Yassine Essouaiha (@syriangavroche) feels similarly:
فليتعلم الطغاة و لتنتبه الشعوب: الجوع هو شرارة الغضب, لا الدين و لا الطائفة و لا “الفتنة” و لا نزاعات زعماء الأحزاب #sidibouzid #tunisia
May tyrants learn and peoples pay attention: Hunger is the spark for anger; not religion, sect, “fitna”, nor the conflicts of leaders of different parties
Despite the hopes, however, Nader Haddad (@NaderHaddad) notes that the Syrian state news agency has not made mention of the popular revolt in Tunisia:
No mention whatsoever of the popular revolution in #Tunisia by the Official news agency of #Syria. http://bit.ly/g4xNY8
What will happen next remains to be seen, but it is undeniable that the Tunisian uprising has sparked hope for tides of change across the Arab world.
Several reasons immediately come to mind for this state of affairs. First, black churches have always been complicated spaces. Our traditional stories about them -- as necessarily prophetic and progressive institutions -- run up against the reality that all too often black churches and those who pastor them have been and continue to be quite conservative. Black televangelists who preach a prosperity gospel aren't new. We need only remember Prophet Jones and Reverend Ike. Conservative black congregations have always been a part of the African American religious landscape. After all, the very existence of the Progressive Baptist Convention is tied up with a trenchant critique of the conservatism of the National Baptist Convention, USA. But our stories about black churches too often bury this conservative dimension of black Christian life.
Second, African American communities are much more differentiated. The idea of a black church standing at the center of all that takes place in a community has long since passed away. Instead, different areas of black life have become more distinct and specialized -- flourishing outside of the bounds and gaze of black churches. I am not suggesting that black communities have become wholly secular; just that black religious institutions and beliefs stand alongside a number of other vibrant non-religious institutions and beliefs.
Moreover, we are witnessing an increase in the numbers of African Americans attending churches pastored by the likes of Joel Osteen, Rick Warren or Jentzen Franklin. These non-denominational congregations often "sound" a lot like black churches. Such a development, as Dr. Jonathan Walton reminded me, conjures up E. Franklin Frazier's important line in The Negro Church in America: "In a word, the Negroes have been forced into competition with whites in most areas of social life and their church can no longer serve as a refuge within the American community." And this goes for evangelical worship as well.
Thirdly, and this is the most important point, we have witnessed the routinization of black prophetic witness. Too often the prophetic energies of black churches are represented as something inherent to the institution, and we need only point to past deeds for evidence of this fact. Sentences like, "The black church has always stood for..." "The black church was our rock..." "Without the black church, we would have not..." In each instance, a backward glance defines the content of the church's stance in the present -- justifying its continued relevance and authorizing its voice. Its task, because it has become alienated from the moment in which it lives, is to make us venerate and conform to it.
But such a church loses it power. Memory becomes its currency. Its soul withers from neglect. The result is all too often church services and liturgies that entertain, but lack a spirit that transforms, and preachers who deign for followers instead of fellow travelers in God.
Black America stands at the precipice. African American unemployment is at its highest in 25 years. Thirty-five percent of our children live in poor families. Inadequate healthcare, rampant incarceration, home foreclosures, and a general sense of helplessness overwhelm many of our fellows. Of course, countless local black churches around the country are working diligently to address these problems.
The question becomes: what will be the role of prophetic black churches on the national stage under these conditions? Any church as an institution ought to call us to be our best selves -- not to be slaves to doctrine or mere puppets for profit. Within its walls, our faith should be renewed and refreshed. We should be open to experiencing God's revelation anew. But too often we are told that all has been said and done. Revelation is closed to us and we should only approximate the voices of old.
Or, we are invited to a Financial Empowerment Conference, Megafest, or some such gathering. Rare are those occasions when black churches mobilize in public and together to call attention to the pressing issues of our day. We see organization and protests against same-sex marriage and abortion; even billboards in Atlanta to make the anti-abortion case. But where are the press conferences and impassioned efforts around black children living in poverty, and commercials and organizing around jobs and healthcare reform? Bishop Charles E. Blake Sr., the presiding bishop of the Church of God in Christ, appears to be a lonely voice in the wilderness when he announced COGIC's support of healthcare reform with the public option.
Prophetic energies are not an inherent part of black churches, but instances of men and women who grasp the fullness of meaning to be one with God. This can't be passed down, but must be embraced in the moment in which one finds one's feet. This ensures that prophetic energies can be expressed again and again.
The death of the black church as we have known it occasions an opportunity to breathe new life into what it means to be black and Christian. Black churches and preachers must find their prophetic voices in this momentous present. And in doing so, black churches will rise again and insist that we all assert ourselves on the national stage not as sycophants to a glorious past, but as witnesses to the ongoing revelation of God's love in the here and now as we work on behalf of those who suffer most.
Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. is currently the William S. Tod Professor of Religion and chair of the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University.
Follow Eddie Glaude, Jr., Ph.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/esglaude
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Is the Black Church Dead?
Debate Flares Among
African-American Christians
LITHONIA, Ga. -- Under a sparkling blue sky, thousands of worshipers in cars and SUVs streamed into the mall-like parking lots at the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, a sprawling campus just off I-20 in this suburb of Atlanta.
It was Sunday morning, and for the African-American families flocking to services that meant it was time for church, just as it had for generations of black Christians who had found in the pews not only a sanctuary from a hostile world, but also a platform for communal action to make their lives better.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday the nation commemorates on Monday, was a product of the black church, and the black church has arguably done as much as any Christian community to inspire the soul and culture of modern American society. It has supplied the prophetic language that has driven the nation's ongoing reconciliation with the original sin of slavery, and it helped form the character of Barack Obama, the nation's first African-American president and an orator with the delivery of a black preacher.
Yet New Birth Missionary Baptist -- with 25,000 members who generously bankroll high-living pastors and high-tech services -- is also emblematic of what many in the African-American community see as a profound crisis in black Christianity, or even the "death" of the black church.
One objection is that this prominent Georgia megachurch preaches a money-centered "prosperity gospel" that traditional African-American clergy consider a betrayal of their faith's legacy of sacrifice and social justice. This focus on personal financial gain represents a kind of cultural conservatism that is spreading among black churches, critics say, and signals a concern for the success of each individual congregation rather than the national community.
In addition, New Birth's charismatic leader, Bishop Eddie Long, is under intense scrutiny for allegations that he used his position as a spiritual counselor to coerce at least four men into sexual relationships while they were teens, giving them cars and cash in return. Long and his representatives have denied the charges, saying only that Long -- who said he takes pride in being called "Daddy" by the congregants -- was just serving as a mentor to the teenagers and did not engage in sex with them.
Long, who is 57 and married (and an opponent of gay rights) freely admits that he is "not perfect." But he is also not about to step aside from his pulpit, and, more importantly, his congregation has rallied to his side.
"Of course we support him," a congregant who gave his name only as Roger said after a nearly three-hour service of rollicking music and praise for Long, and insistent appeals for donations -- appeals that were repeatedly answered as thousands streamed up to the pulpit to lay wads of cash in a growing pile on the stage.
"We're just men. We have no right to judge," Roger said. "Whatever happens is between you and God."
"He's doing what God anointed him to do," agreed his wife, Eleanor, as they pushed a stroller with their 1-year-old grandson. "This is a little thing," she said of the charges. "There are so many big things to worry about."
That's not how a lot of other voices in the black church see clergy like Eddie Long.
"They're pastors, but they're really in the Halloween costume of a Fortune 500 CEO. And in the process they're trick-or-treating the people," Jonathan L. Walton, an assistant professor of African-American religion at Harvard Divinity School, told an appreciative audience three days earlier at Ebenezer Baptist Church in downtown Atlanta.
Ebenezer Baptist is 20 miles away from New Birth Missionary Baptist, and light years distant in terms of black history and a lot of contemporary black Christianity.
Founded in 1886 during the brutal post-Civil War period of Reconstruction, Ebenezer Baptist was the church of Martin Luther King, Jr., (and his father), the seat of "pastoral royalty" in the church, and the icon of what the black church hoped to be, and what it became. The event where Walton and others spoke opened with the black gospel standard, "We've Come This Far By Faith," and concluded with "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing," known since the civil rights era as the black national anthem.
Yet for all that poignant history, the Ebenezer Baptist panel focused on what the black church needs to do today in order stay relevant, and above all to help a community struggling more than ever.
During the discussion, participants lamented the growing conservatism and anti-intellectualism that they often found in the black church. They also cited the community's broad antagonism toward homosexuals, a phenomenon that has been widely noted as black voters have been crucial blocs in voting against gay marriage ballots.
The panelists also ripped what they see as the accommodation of black churches like New Birth to the kind of winner-take-all, capitalist mentality that Dr. King struggled against in the name of social justice -- a gospel concept that has become anathema to believers like Glenn Beck and his Tea Party followers.
"We're baptizing a lot of this crap in the name of Jesus," Walton protested, sparking more applause.
These vastly disparate views of contemporary African-American Christianity -- and the fact that the differences are roiling the black church to such a degree -- can come as a surprise to outsiders who tend to see "the black church" as a monolithic entity, a community of like-minded liberals walking arm in arm like those grainy newsreel images from the civil rights era.
But in fact the problems are real, the arguments are passionate, and it has all spilled in to the open over the past year.
The precipitating event was an essay posted last February on the Huffington Post by Eddie Glaude, Jr., a young African-American religion professor at Princeton who gave his column the eye-catching title, "The Black Church Is Dead," and continued that with an equally arresting lead:
"Of course, many African-Americans still go to church," Glaude began, noting surveys that track the higher-than-average religiosity of American blacks. "But the idea of this venerable institution as central to black life and as a repository for the social and moral conscience of the nation has all but disappeared," he said.
In his obituary, Glaude cited a number of official causes of death, including the fact that black churches are -- like houses of worship in other communities -- increasingly just another facet of people's lives rather than the central organizing principle: "I am not suggesting that black communities have become wholly secular; just that black religious institutions and beliefs stand alongside a number of other vibrant non-religious institutions and beliefs."
Also, upwardly mobile blacks are continuing the process of assimilation and are therefore attending traditionally white churches, while African-Americans of all classes are drawn to megachurches led by white pastors such as Joel Osteen and Rick Warren. Entrepreneurial black clergy, including Bishop Long and Creflo Dollar, are also trying to create their own megachurch phenomena, and are building on the legacy of flash-and-cash African-American pastors of the past like Reverend Ike and Prophet Jones.
Above all, however, Glaude in his essay was hoping to expose the "myth" of the black church as a unified, progressive entity that served as both central rallying point for the African-American community and its engine for social and economic uplift.
That view never really reflected the reality on the ground, Glaude notes. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his activist allies were sharply criticized by some fellow black clergy for being too liberal, for example, and split from the more conservative black church establishment of the day to establish the Progressive National Baptist Convention.
If anything, that myth of a large, liberal and influential black church is less viable today than ever, and that has profound political ramifications. Resurgent conservatism like the Tea Party movement, for example, seems to have channeled the grass roots energy that the black churches once had, and the black churches -- representing as many as 30 million people in 50,000 congregations -- have not been able to marshal the votes to respond in kind.
Just look at exit polls from the 2010 mid-term elections, which indicated that only 10 percent of African-American voters went to the polls, a dismal turnout of what is by far the most reliably Democratic bloc and in a campaign in which every sign of support was critical for the political prospects of Obama, the first African-American president.
"If the 2010 election is a preliminary tea-leaf-reading to 2012, then President Obama has a lot to think about in terms of re-mobilizing the strong African-American voter base that he enjoyed in 2008," Anthea Butler, a professor of religion at the University of Pennsylvania and a prominent African-American voice, wrote in a post-mortem. "Part of that base -- the old guard 'black church' coalition -- is not as strong as it could be. Republicans have learned to mobilize their 'affinity groups,' but black churches do not have the same strong community and 'affinity' links that existed in the past."
But whatever the realities, the black churches occupy such a sacred space in the African-American imagination, as well as the national consciousness, that Glaude's obituary was bound to spark intense debate. And did it ever.
The website ReligionDispatches.com called Glaude's essay "the Digital-Age equivalent of nailing a set of theses to a church door" when it hosted a series of often pointed responses a month later, in March 2010. Glaude and one of those respondents, Josef Sorett, an assistant professor of religion and African-American studies at Columbia University, engaged in a bloggingheads.tvdebate on the topic.
Then just last month, leaders representing the nine largest traditionally black denominations gathered in Washington to try to re-launch a national entity to "fill the void for a unified voice of faith" -- an implicit acknowledgment of aspects of Glaude's critique. The newly constitutedConference of National Black Churches (CNBC) aims to affect public policy on issues like health care, education and the economy, all areas where the black churches have had nothing like the impact they had during the civil rights era.
"[T]he absence of voice has allowed more conservative voices to come in and say they speak for the black church," the Rev. W. Franklyn Richardson, head of the CNBC, told NPR. "They may speak for some aspect of it, but that's not the whole story. What we want to make sure is that the whole story of prophetic social engagement, public policy challenge is a part what it is that we do."
While Richardson acknowledged the truth in some of Glaude's critique, others were not so open to his jeremiad.
Some sharply criticized Glaude for airing the community's dirty laundry -- allowing the broader public, as Samuel Freedman put it in a New York Times column, "to eavesdrop on the theological equivalent of a black barbershop, a place of glorious disputation that is usually kept out of white earshot."
Others objected that Glaude's own connection to the historic black churches was too tenuous to give him standing to criticize the community (Glaude was raised a Catholic and considers himself a Christian but rarely attends church) while a few protested that he was an intellectual, not a minister with experience in the pews.
"Theologians and philosophers like Eddie Glaude don't go to black churches," Lawrence H. Mamiya, a professor of religion at Vassar and co-author of the "The Black Church in the African American Experience," told Freedman. "They haven't been out in the field. And unless you're in the field, you can't see what's happening."
But in the end, many seem to accept that the debate has been healthy, even if uncomfortable, including Glaude.
"I was somewhat shocked by the initial reaction," Glaude told PoliticsDaily last week. "But I think the subsequent conversation was really good, despite the passions of some of the exchanges."
He said the essay helped to show that black churches "are not inherently progressive or somehow necessarily places where prophetic energies emerge," and to push the black church "to insist that progressive black Christians insert their voices more powerfully into the national conversation."
"This is really about turning over the soil so we can think about what it means to be black and Christian in the 21st century."
"In Christianity death never has the last word," Glaude said. "So to declare the death of the black church is actually to declare the precondition for its resurrection."