Nirah Elyza Shirazipour - filmmaker

Friday Film Pick: Unrecognized

by Ezra Winton on September 3, 2010 · http://artthreat.net/?p=5004">View Comments

<p>UNRECOGNIZED from nirah elyza shirazipour on Vimeo.</p>

This week’s Friday Film Pick is a short doc by filmmaker Nirah Elyza Shirazipour. In her own words, the doc is: “A brief chronicle of the last 60 years of Bedouin life in the Naqab. How the state of Israel is striving to sedentarize this historically nomadic indigenous population by uprooting them from their culture and community.

Through the denial of basic resource allocation, house demolitions, land appropriation and strategic exposure to industrial pollution, the Bedouin of the Naqab are subject to myriad social and environmental injustices that most minority populations face within Apartheid Israel and Occupied Palestine.”

Shirazipour’s other documentaries (co-directed with Jessica Habie) include the excellent Art and Apathy and sister film Beyond Blue and Gray.

COMPETITION RULES IMPORTANT NOTE: New submission dates below. Submissions for the 2011 Competition must be postmarked no earlier than October 1, 2010 and no later than November 15, 2010. See Guidelines for Submission below for precise information regarding your entry. Rules Governing the Competition Each year, Yale University Press seeks one book-length poetry manuscript to be published in the Yale Series of Younger Poets. The competition is open to any American citizen under forty years of age who has not published a book of poetry (contestants must be under the age of forty at the time they submit the manuscript to the competition). The winner receives royalties when the book is published. All poems must be original - translations are not accepted. Writers who have had chapbooks of poetry printed in editions of no more than 300 copies are eligible. Only one manuscript may be submitted each year. Manuscripts submitted in previous years may be resubmitted. There is no application form. Please follow these guidelines in preparing your manuscript: 1. The manuscript must be a minimum of 48 numbered pages and a maximum of 64 numbered pages in length. All manuscripts must be paginated. Each new poem must start a new page. Manuscripts must be printed single-sided. 2. The manuscript must begin with unnumbered frontmatter: a title page that shows the book's title and your name, address, telephone number, e-mail address (if you have one), and page count; a second title page which lists the title of the collection only; a table of contents; and (if applicable) a list of acknowledgments. 3. Begin paginating the manuscript after the frontmatter. If your book is divided into parts or has an epigraph, Page 1 will be the first part title or the epigraph. Otherwise, Page 1 will be the first poem. 4. In formatting the manuscript, please make legibility your first concern. If you use a word processor, select a standard typeface (such as Bodoni, Garamond, or Times New Roman) in at least 10-point type. Manuscripts may be single-spaced, double-spaced, or 1.5 spaced. Manuscripts may be prepared on a typewriter instead of a word processor. Handwritten manuscripts will not be accepted. 5. A brief biography may appear at the end of the manuscript. The information is not required and, if submitted, need not be included in the page count. 6. Do not bind or staple the manuscript. Place the loose sheets in a plain envelope of appropriate size. Send the manuscript to Yale Series of Younger Poets, P.O. Box 209040, New Haven, CT 06520-9040. Include a check or money order for $20.00 made out to Yale University Press. Please do not send cash. Submissions for the 2011 competition must be postmarked no earlier than October 1, 2010 and no later than November 15, 2010. Do not send the only copy of your work. Manuscripts cannot be returned after the competition. If you wish receipt of your manuscript to be acknowledged, please include a stamped, self-addressed postcard. If you wish to be informed by July 2011 of the contest results, please include an email address on your title page.
CONTACT US For more information regarding the Yale Series of Younger Poets please write to us at: Yale Series of Younger Poets P.O. Box 209040 New Haven, CT 06520-9040

Posted by: lisaparavisini | May 17, 2009

Cuban writers Wendy Guerra and Leonardo Padura Fuentes choose to remain in Cuba

The Miami Herald has published a profile of Cuban novelist Wendy Guerra as one of several writers who have chosen to remain in Cuba despite achieving literary success abroad. Guerra is a young writer whose novels Todos se van (Everyone leaves, 2006) and Nunca fui primera dama (I was never first lady, 2008) have been published to great success in Spain by Brugueras but are not available to Cubans except as single copies that circulate from person to person.  She is, however, a writer who, unlike many of her contemporaries, is not contemplating leaving Cuba. “I don’t want to leave here,” she tells the Miami Herald, I love my country. My novels will undoubtedly be published in Cuba when they have lost their relevance,” like has been the case with earlier writers like José Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piñera. “It seems like Todos se van has become a sort of cult book in Cuba,” she adds, explaining that the book circulates clandestinely through photocopies.

Guerra’s work, she claims, although dealing with problematic aspects of current Cuban conditions, is not intended to be political. Todos se van, for example, uses the form of an intimate diary to trace its protagonist’s path through a society “in hibernation” that everyone, in one form or another, ends up abandoning. In Cuba, Guerra says, “everything is politics. You have to leave Cuba in order to escape politics, my mother used to say.” Speaking of Cuba’s reputation for restricting freedom of expression, she adds that, her home island “is a land surrounded by water and silence.”

Unlike Guerra’s work, Padura’s novels are published and distributed in Cuba as well as abroad. Padura, who thinks of Cuba, especially of Havana, as the “protagonist of my work,” says he has never had problems as a writer in Cuba, although he experienced problems as a reporter, since the Cuban media “do not exist to describe reality or feed social reflection.” His goal, however, is not to be political. “I hate politics,” he argues, “I don’t want my books to be political soapboxes. What I am interested in is in describing a social reality that includes corruption, exile, and marginality.” Padura is completing a new novel called El hombre que amaba a los perros (The man who loved dogs), to be published in Spain in September. Its subject is Ramón Mercader’s attempt to assassinate Trotsky. (Mercader spent the last four years of his life in Havana.) “What interests me in this book is to show how the great Utopia of the 20th century disappeared.”

Despite its myriad problems, Padura, like Wendy Guerra, remains committed to his country, vowing never to leave.

For more on the subject see the article by Sylvie Briand at http://www.miamiherald.com/1321/story/1047257.html

The photograph of Wendy Guerra is by Phillipe Matsas/Opale for the Miami Herald.

Holding Company

In Holding Company, his third collection of poems, Major Jackson achieves the difficult feat of writing a book that feels simultaneously both intensely personal and yet also archetypally American. 

In Holding Company, his third collection of poems, Major Jackson achieves the difficult feat of writing a book that feels both intensely personal and yet also archetypally American. These are poems that seem as well-suited to being whispered like quasi-confessions into the ear of a sleeping lover in the dark as they do to appearing in smudged newsprint on the Op Ed page of one of our finer daily papers, grouped under the headline of “How We Live Now.” The speaker of these poems lives firmly ensconced within the loneliness of his “indestructible hunger,” and yet his affairs–these attempts at establishing a connection with an other or others– unfold within the greater disconnect of the American landscape where even as one praises the vast Tahkenitch and its “coniferous wall” one still notes that there is “not / a Domino’s for miles.”

It makes perfect sense then that, despite how so many of these poems circle around the corporeal realm, Jackson refuses to surrender himself to the myopia of the poet who only contemplates sexual love. Instead, he is a master of doing more with less, which is to say that these short muscular poems (almost all of which ring in at no more than ten lines each) not only contain a clear-eyed assessment of the self (alone and in relation with others), but that that assessment is grounded firmly within an awareness of the other external forces that bear down upon us. This is, after all, a book whose title not only name-checks a type of business at the zenith (or nadir, depending on one’s perspective) of capitalism, but could also easily serve as a vague euphemism for sex. That twined braid of American commerce and physical congress is the silent engine that hums beneath the poems in this collection, while a few iconic pop songs play faintly far away (let us not forget the title’s echo of Big Brother & the Holding Company, Janis Joplin’s iconic 1960s band).

Jackson frequently pilfers his poems to recycle lines, weaving recurrent phrases throughout the book so that later poems refract back upon earlier work, creating a cumulative power. The solitary “I” of “Towers” who “broadcast(s) my hunger” and claims “When the lonely swirl nights, I run toward them” returns in “More Feeling” with a line repeated from “Towers”:“I could give your glass palace more shine”–only, this time, instead of running towards others, the speaker contemplates dissolution, “undreaming the sea from the mountains.” Here, the body is a disappointment and communication is failure: “Your sportive flesh in the empire of blab” leads to the rueful admission of “Over our shoulders, our bodies fall–the lamps. / For I was born, too, in the muted winter of History.”

And yet History is, at its most basic level, the story of bodies as well–bodies that come together and fall apart, facts of which Jackson is cleanly aware. “How did I come to make a crisis of the body?” he asks in the first line of “More Feelings.” This question becomes part of the opening couplet to “Jewel-Tongued,” which is, along with “Hookups,” perhaps one of the loneliest sex poems ever written. In “Jewel-Tongued,” Jackson expands on the question he posed in “More Feelings,” this time saying, “How did I come to make a crisis / of the body, my fingers evaporating inside?”. He continues on to detail a life where “I scattered / myself into a luminance, shining over a village / of women. Was I less human or more?” In this poem, the sexual act is posed as a sort of radiant negation–shining but scattered–and so the last line, “We were blown away” reads more as an acknowledgment of loss, rather than of pleasure. “Hookups” shares this desolatory sexuality, delineating an assortment of brief lovers of whom, the speaker says:

they swarm to my room. Bored
I lead them to the firmanent of touch:
forage my blues, they say, as such,
cloud formations who graze horrors,
then release their internal weathers. Boom
boom in the dark regions. I wish I’d pulled
the covers over my head and were left alone.

What makes this poem so effective is that way the speaker’s gimlet eye gazes on but then looks past these nameless hookups, “moths mistaking the bulb,” to narrow in on the self as well. The speaker is aware of his inability to be what these others want (a lightbulb instead of the “dark moon”), and so presents the potential that the “horrors” they graze against may as easily be him as anything else. The solitary “I” remains separate even after the most intimate of acts, wishing for the meager consolation of at least being physically alone with his emotional isolation.

But the book is not so entirely bleak as I’ve thus far painted it. There are poems of consolation within as well, including poems of platonic and romantic love. There is the idea that one might be able to, at least, “live in the luxury of my friends” and the hard-earned optimism of the final poem in the book, “Forecast,” which begins by claiming “Whichever way our shoulders move, there’s joy” and continues on to present a real romanticism–one that acknowledges both personal responsibility (“we’ve our own hourglass / and no one else to blame”) and the truths of the world (“ruins through half-opened window” that we still somehow bring ourselves to caress). There is the continual desire to make something out of this world, in which “Despair (falls) into despair, building its music” and to find some connection, however tenuous, to sustain us. Even after “young boys expire / like comets” and “Blood darkens a stoop,” somewhere “a sunshower baptizes shadows on a street” and a “girl grabs / the hand of a boy and runs over the rubble,” somewhere there is still “a metropolis / of Sundays, an empire of hand-holding / and park benches” and “ a single kiss / that will contain us like a marathon / with no finish line.”

• 
  

···
Kate Angus's writing has appeared in Subtropics, Gulf Coast, Barrow Street, Third Coast, Verse Daily, Barrelhouse, and Poet Lore, among other places, and is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2010. She lives in New York.

On the 9th October 2010, from 11am – 7:30pm Amazing Africa turns Trafalgar Square into a bubbling calabash of celebration of African culture through music, dance, enactments, food and arts & crafts.

Rhythms of a Continent The music and dance line up includes a wide spectrum of musical genres from the motherland. From ancient to modern from tradition to innovation, Amazing Africa offers the very best of Africa including:   PERFORMERS African music is always accompanied with pulsating dance movements. Each dance has a storyline based on legends and folk tales that dictates its pace, style and particular costume or attire. The music and dance line up includes a wide spectrum of musical genres. From ancient to modern from tradition to innovation, Amazing Africa offers the very best of Africa including: CARMEN SOUZA – Cape Verde - This songstress has it all: excellent repertoire, a mesmerizing, expressive and versatile voice that glides effortlessly through a huge range of registers and a spellbinding, charismatic stage presence. Whether she is singing the plaintive morna (the Cape Verdean variation of the blues) or an exuberant batuco, Souza is always convincing owing to her swingy jazz sense of timing and her virtuoso voice full of nuances from the highest to the lowest notes she sings. COCO MBASSI: Cameroon – Her music is a subtle blend of African roots, classical music, jazz and gospel, along with the modern feeling of acoustic soul music, which she mostly composes herself and co-produces with her husband Serge Ngando Mpondo. Winner of several awards including the Radio France International Decouvertes Contest in 1996, German World Music CD Critics Award in 2001 and nominated for the BBC World Music Awards 2002. MODESTE: Madagascar - Modeste Hugues Randramahitasoa grew up in Betroka, in south central Madagascar and the music he plays is unique to this region of Madagascar. His music is influenced by all the traditional sounds of the area together with the sounds of the bush and softer South African dance rhythms, the gifted self taught guitarist is now an award winning songwriter. “Hugues is a pleasingly smoky-toned singer and a fine guitarist, able to play rhythm and lead all at once. He's so effective in this musical sleight of hand that audience members scan the stage in search of a (non-existent) second guitar player.” -- Jamie Renton the Independent GRUPO LOKITO – DR Congo, Latin America + UK– A gorgeous mélange of Congolese and Cuban rhythms and melodies. This brilliant band is made up of super talented and respected Soukous and Rumba musicians playing side by side with some of the most gifted salseros around, including the inventive "Burkina Faso", one of the most revered Congolese popular guitarists; you only have to mention his name in Kinshasa for people to bow down in supplication. Grupo Lokito take you to the place where Soukous meets Son producing an effervescant mix of classic and brand spanking new songs, throw in their outrageously infectious dance moves and the scene is set for music for the heart and feet. MUNTU VALDO – Cameroon – A child of Cameroon’s Sawa coast, Muntu is a fantastic multi instrumentalist. He is a one man band who builds loops to create layers of textures of rhythms and melodies that lovingly support his supple voice and engaging songs, his live shows are spell binding. Very much at the vanguard of the new generation of insightful African singer songwriters he has been noticed by and invited to share a stage with international artists that include Alpha Blondy, Ali Farka Touré, Lokua Kanza, Cheick Tidianne Seck, Tony Allen, and Manu Dibango who encouraged Muntu to produce his debut album “Gods and Devils – Moiye Na Muititi”. The album resonates with a sensual and spiritual music, both delicate and powerful, a synthesis of Muntu’s many musical influences blues, bossa nova, jazz, afro-cuban, soul, funk, a wide spectrum of music whose origins are rooted deep in the heart of Africa. With special guest award winning Cameroonian songstress Coco Mbassi. HARARE – Zimbabwe - Kuduashe Motimba, virtuoso marimba player presents full throttle Zimabwean dance music with his band Harare. The exiled musician was a member of Zimbabwe’s’ legendary Bhundu Boys and was at the heart of his country’s music scene is now based in London. Kuduashe has formed a vital new outfit that confronts his homelands woe and looks to the future while celebrating the musical alliances he has made in the UK through the prism of Zimbabwe’s urban Chimurenga and Jit Jive music. GEATA (Genna Ethiopian Arts & Theatre (Dance of Culture) – Ethiopia. They present a dazzling display of dance drawing from the rich heritage of the 82 ethnic groups that make up the Ethiopian nation. GEATA’s captivating traditional dancers amaze and thrill as they cast a spell with their breathtaking rootsy shoulder and body popping dances.   Drummers and traditional dancers, acrobats KAAGO FEAT: HENRI GAOBI - Ivory Coast – Kaago was formed by the outstanding percussionist and dancer Henri Gaobi and Rose Zan Lou both of whom attended the Guoro Ivory Coast National Ballet. Kaago bring to life their heritage through the many different traditional rhythms and dances and masquerade enactments of their homeland. The physical strength needed to perform these dances is matched by the skills, grace and interaction between musicians, dancers and acrobats who tantalize the imagination as they evoke the animist and natural worlds that are the foundations of their audacious art forms. SAMOS PERU: South American – This dance group are renowned for their eye catching and captivating African dance rhythms. One of these, the "Alcatraz", was developed in the Peruvian coast by African slaves and is accompanied by flames. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRQl_fH2Aig

‘Taste of Africa’ Food Court  A testament to the popularity of African food in London is the large numbers of Moroccan, Ethiopian, Nigerian, Ghanaian, Eastern and Southern African restaurants in all areas of the city. >>> Food Court

Arts & Crafts  Stalls have been made available to retailers who stock various traditional colourful arts and crafts like beads, textiles, paintings, carvings, etc. >>> Stall holders.

 

Op-Ed Contributor

The Seat Not Taken

By JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN

Published: October 6, 2010

AT least twice a week I ride Amtrak’s high-speed Acela train from my home in New York City to my teaching job in Providence, R.I. The route passes through a region of the country populated by, statistics tell us, a significant segment of its most educated, affluent, sophisticated and enlightened citizens.

Brian Cronin

 

Over the last four years, excluding summers, I have conducted a casual sociological experiment in which I am both participant and observer. It’s a survey I began not because I had some specific point to prove by gathering data to support it, but because I couldn’t avoid becoming aware of an obvious, disquieting truth.

Almost invariably, after I have hustled aboard early and occupied one half of a vacant double seat in the usually crowded quiet car, the empty place next to me will remain empty for the entire trip.

I’m a man of color, one of the few on the train and often the only one in the quiet car, and I’ve concluded that color explains a lot about my experience. Unless the car is nearly full, color will determine, even if it doesn’t exactly clarify, why 9 times out of 10 people will shun a free seat if it means sitting beside me.

Giving them and myself the benefit of the doubt, I can rule out excessive body odor or bad breath; a hateful, intimidating scowl; hip-hop clothing; or a hideous deformity as possible objections to my person. Considering also the cost of an Acela ticket, the fact that I display no visible indications of religious preference and, finally, the numerous external signs of middle-class membership I share with the majority of the passengers, color appears to be a sufficient reason for the behavior I have recorded.

Of course, I’m not registering a complaint about the privilege, conferred upon me by color, to enjoy the luxury of an extra seat to myself. I relish the opportunity to spread out, savor the privacy and quiet and work or gaze at the scenic New England woods and coast. It’s a particularly appealing perk if I compare the train to air travel or any other mode of transportation, besides walking or bicycling, for negotiating the mercilessly congested Northeast Corridor. Still, in the year 2010, with an African-descended, brown president in the White House and a nation confidently asserting its passage into a postracial era, it strikes me as odd to ride beside a vacant seat, just about every time I embark on a three-hour journey each way, from home to work and back.

I admit I look forward to the moment when other passengers, searching for a good seat, or any seat at all on the busiest days, stop anxiously prowling the quiet-car aisle, the moment when they have all settled elsewhere, including the ones who willfully blinded themselves to the open seat beside me or were unconvinced of its availability when they passed by. I savor that precise moment when the train sighs and begins to glide away from Penn or Providence Station, and I’m able to say to myself, with relative assurance, that the vacant place beside me is free, free at last, or at least free until the next station. I can relax, prop open my briefcase or rest papers, snacks or my arm in the unoccupied seat.

But the very pleasing moment of anticipation casts a shadow, because I can’t accept the bounty of an extra seat without remembering why it’s empty, without wondering if its emptiness isn’t something quite sad. And quite dangerous, also, if left unexamined. Posters in the train, the station, the subway warn: if you see something, say something.

 

John Edgar Wideman is a professor of Africana studies and literary arts at Brown and the author, most recently, of “Briefs.”

UN condemned over 'appalling' Haiti earthquake camps

The report says camps for displaced Haitians are squalid and close to anarchy

UN agencies in charge of refugee camps for victims of Haiti's earthquake are inexperienced and dysfunctional, the US charity Refugees International says.

The groups says reports of gang rapes are common, and a lack of translators means UN police cannot do their job.

A UN spokeswoman told the BBC that the organisation was doing its best, but said the scale of the disaster made their job very difficult.

More than a million people were left homeless by the quake.

Related stories

• Why did so many Haitians die?
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Former US President Bill Clinton, who has been visiting a camp, has vowed that US aid long promised to Haiti but yet to materialise will soon be released.

No protection

Refugees International, in its report titled Haiti: Still Trapped in the Emergency Phase, said the people of Haiti were "still living in a state of emergency, with a humanitarian response that appears paralysed".

"Living in squalid, overcrowded camps for a prolonged period has led to aggravated levels of violence and appalling standards of living," the report says.

__________________________

Full report

PDF download Haiti: Still Trapped in the Emergency Phase_[150kb]

__________________________

 

"Despite these alarming conditions, the UN co-ordination system in Haiti is not prioritising activities to protect people's rights."

The group's spokeswoman Melanie Teff, who took part in a recent fact-finding trip to Haiti, told the BBC that many of the camps had no police presence.

"I spoke with women's groups, who told me of women being forced to exchange sex for food because they were so desperate, in order to support their families," Ms Teff said.

She said reports of gang rape were common, and in some camps, the security committees were run by members of the local gang.

But the UN's Imogen Wall defended the organisation, saying the camps were relatively peaceful places, and that the UN had doubled the numbers of police since September.

Analysis

Mark Doyle BBC international development correspondent

---

The most striking thing about this report from an independent aid agency is its utter condemnation of the management of the crisis by the United Nations. It says the UN body charged with protecting people's basic rights in the camps, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, lacks experience in coping with disasters, is understaffed and dysfunctional.

It says UN police officers don't patrol the camps consistently and, almost incredibly, that what UN patrols there are do not have translators, so cannot communicate with camp residents.

Refugees International says there should be much more involvement in managing the camps by local Haitian civil society groups who understand the situation - but the report points out that none of the UN meetings about camp management is held in the local language, Creole.

"We've had very, very few security incidents in the camps," she said.

"People do expect the UN to solve everything, but we have deep and endemic problems here that need very long-term and committed solutions."

She said many of the problems Haiti faced - including high rates of sexual violence - had plagued the Caribbean nation before the quake, and had little connection to the refugee camps.

But she said the priority for the UN was to get the people out of the camps.

Meanwhile, Mr Clinton, who co-chairs the UN commission overseeing Haiti's reconstruction, heard the concerns of Haitians on Wednesday as he toured a large camp in the capital, Port-au-Prince.

Mr Clinton's foundation pledged $500,000 (£313,000) to help the camp, which is located on a former golf course.

The former US president spoke of his frustration about the slow arrival of funding - with the US still to deliver on any of the $1.15bn of aid promised at a donors' conference in March.

"In the next day or so, it will become obvious that the United States is making a huge downpayment on that," Mr Clinton said, without elaborating.

The former president said that the money was being held up by a "rather bizarre system of rules" in the US Senate.

José James, Vocalist + Songwriter :: Artist Profile

<br /><b>José James, Vocalist + Songwriter :: Artist Profile</b><br /><i>Uploaded by friendswelove. - Music videos, artist interviews, concerts and more.</i>

Critically acclaimed and world renown artist, Jose James invites us to witness the Black Magic of his new record with an intimate studio session that reveals the many facets of his creative process.

PARIS JVC FESTIVAL OCTOBER 2008

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Park Bench People

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Love Day

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