Directed by Terence Nance, the film addresses the detachment we all battle, when faced with the the world's overwhelming issues. "It's hard to think about all the problems in the world without getting a little overwhelmed. So, a lot of times we just ignore things. I think Africa has suffered a lot because people choose to remain ignorant, rather than address the issues that are right in front of our faces," Blitz said.
http://embassy.mvmt.com
http://terence.mvmt.com
Nas - Queens Get the Money (Music Video)
Unofficial video for the intro off Nas "Untitled". Produced by Jay Electronica. Directed by Racmaninoff Productions. Uploaded by JSnooza.
The Subversive Human, an Online Journal featuring monthly poetry contests, from emerging poets.
Red Border
Call for Submissions
Rumpledsilksheets: Lesbian Fairy Tales
Please tell editors/publishers you read their guidelines on the
Erotica Readers & Writers Association Website
www.erotica-readers.comCall for Submissions
Rumpledsilksheets: Lesbian Fairy Tales
Publisher: Ravenous Romance
Editor: EM Lynley
Deadline: August 15, 2010
Publication Date: Fall 2010
Payment: Advance of $10 against the royaltiesEmail: lynley.editor @gmail.com
I'm looking for stories based on traditional fairy tales, but with a Lesbian slant. Here's your chance to spice up some favorite childhood tales in a way you've never seen before, but always wanted to tell the story! Feel free to use non-European tales as a base. Here are a couple of great resources for inspiration:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fairy_tales
and http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/talesindex.htmlAll stories must have an erotic element, with a preference for romance over pure erotica. That means there should be a relationship between the characters beyond merely a sexual one. The sex should have emotion and I want to feel that along with the characters. These are fairy tales so there should be HEA or HFN, whichever is more appropriate for your story.
Deadline August 15, 2010. You may submit anytime before then, but I may not have a decision on yours until closer to the deadline. I strongly suggest a query in advance, with a 1-2 paragraph summary of your plotline to avoid having 10 Little Red Riding Hood stories, though perhaps that would be an interesting anthology on its own.
Specifics: 3,500 to 10,000 words. Please be sure your submission is free of typos and errors. Polish your story before sending it, please!
No rape, underage, incest or bestiality. If you have other content you feel might be questionable, email me for clarification.
In your cover letter: include your real name, your pen name, the title of your story, a complete synopsis (not a blurb, and not a summary, but everything that happens with no mystery or teasers), the original fairy tale it is based on (if applicable), word count, and a 100-word bio suitable for publication, (i.e., not your life story.) Incomplete subs will be sent back for you to fill in the missing information.
In your attachment: save the story with your last name and the title of the story. It's nearly impossible to work with 30 docs called "fairy tale."
Also include: your name, pen name, title, word count, your snail mail and email addresses, as well as a short synopsis of the story. That means a summary including the ending. Please don't leave me guessing how it ends.
Format: send in RTF or Word (no docx), double spaced with no headers or footers. Do not use tabs to indent paragraphs.
Terms: Advance of $10 against the royalties on ebook sales (and other non-exclusive subsidiary rights) for a period of three years. Royalties are a pro rata share of the 35% on ebooks and 15% on audiobooks. If they sell additional subsidiary rights, additional payments will follow!
To submit, please send an attached document to lynley.editor @ gmail.com. Be sure your name & pseudonym, address, email, word count and a short summary of the story appear on the first page of your attached document (not only in your email).
Feel free to email me with any questions.
lynley.editor @ gmail.comEM Lynley
http://www.emlynley.com
http://emlynley.livejournal.com
Twice each year Black Lawrence Press will run the Black River Chapbook Competition for an unpublished chapbook of poems or short stories. The winner of this contest will receive book publication, a $500 cash award, and twenty-five copies of the book. Prizes are awarded on publication.To enter, please refer to the guidelines below.__________________CONTEST GUIDELINES
How to submit:
In order to reduce the costs of printing and postage and in the spirit of being a bit greener, Black Lawrence Press now accepts electronic submissions rather than hard copies for our contests.
Please include the following in your electronic submission:-A cover letter with brief bio and contact information including your e-mail address(es)-A .rtf, .doc, or .pdf attachment including a title page, an acknowledgments page, a table of contents, and your manuscript with numbered pages.
Email your submission to editors@blacklawrencepress.com.
Please submit your $15 entry fee via Paypal.
Deadline:
The annual deadlines for the prize are May 31 and October 31.
About the judges:
Black Lawrence Press does not use interns to screen entries. All entries are judged by the editors.
Notification:
Because of the high volume of entries received, all finalists and semi-finalists will be announcedon the Black Lawrence Press website. All finalists for the fall prize will be announced on or before December 31 of each year. All finalists for the spring prize will be announced on or before July 31 of each year. The winners will be announced shortly after the finalists are announced.
Other Notes:
We may request hard copies of manuscripts that make it to the finalist round and are being seriously considered for the prize.
Simultaneous submissions are acceptable, but you must notify Black Lawrence Press immediately if your manuscript is accepted elsewhere for publication.
All finalists will be considered for standard publication. In addition to each year's winner, Black Lawrence Press often offers standard publication to one or more other finalists.
Thank you for your interest in Black Lawrence Press.
A Big Issue
July 29, 2010 · 2 Comments
This TV (web?) spot was shot for Cape Town, South Africa-based magazine “The Big Issue.” You may have spotted the magazine on a visit there being sold by homeless (or destitute) people on the streets of that city; especially at traffic lights in the city center and on main roads in its mostly white middle class suburbs.
Here’s the description for the spot from the film directors at Butterfly Films:
A simple portrait of two women living and working in Cape Town. One lives in a squatter camp. The other next door to me in the city centre. Despite living in the same city, their worlds are far apart. Through the work of the Big Issue, their paths cross and, momentarily, a bridge is built, a connection is made. Build more bridges. Support the Big Issue. The Change is in your pocket.
We passed the video around the AIAC “office.”
Generally we loved it. The visuals are striking, the acting is great, the contrast between the lives of rich and poor in Cape Town–probably still the most segregrated big city in South Africa–is captured well. The filmmakers were right not to use any dialogue; the pictures are enough tell the story. And the soundtrack is not too overbearing. (The fact that that’s the the beautiful voice of Neo Muyanga, one of our favorite composers and singers, two-thirds through on the soundtrack, is even better).
But we haveissues. Sometimes we do. With the politics of the ad for example. What does this mean: “… [T]heir paths cross and, momentarily, a bridge is built, a connection is made. Build more bridges.” Just as long as you buy a magazine, this whole mess–this structural, racialized mess that is Cape Town–would be less hard to take? We know it’s an ad, but c’mon.
One response to the video was blunt: ”… [T]he juxtaposition of the “divided” yet intersecting lives is a bit too neat. [And] is it true that pocket change can really change structures? At least they’re not asking people to buy expensive red [stuff] like that AIDS charity does.”
While another could not help notice the power of pretty visuals: “… the film’s so well-done and aesthetically pleasing that I [forgot for a minute about the "neat" juxtaposition]. That’s the power of cinematography, beautiful music and a lovely storyline–they don’t provoke questions. “
Of course we like the magazine.
Comments?
The legacy of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz lives! an interview wit’ his grandson Malcolm Shabazz
July 22, 2010by POCC Minister of Information JR
Feb. 21, 1965, the late great El Hajj Malik El Shabazz aka Malcolm X was assassinated in front of his family by agents of the U.S. government, in front of his daughters and his pregnant wife, and in front of the world with photos of his body all over the media the next day. This was a move by COINTELPRO to silence one of the strongest and most effective revolutionary voices of Black people in the U.S. to date.
Malcolm ShabazzAfter his spirit passed on, his writings and teachings really took root in the minds of a new generation even to the point of inspiring young Black people in Oakland to create an organization later known as the Black Panther Party. Forty-five years later, his first male heir and grandson, Malcolm Shabazz, has come to the Bay to speak and take in the politics of the Bay Area for the first time. This is an interview that we recorded a few weeks prior to him touching down. Here he is in his own words …
MOI JR: You are listening to another edition of POCC Block Report Radio with Minister of Information JR. Today my honored guest is Malcolm Shabazz, otherwise known as the grandson of the late great El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, otherwise known as Malcolm X. How are you, Malcolm?
Malcolm Shabazz: I’m good, thank you. I’m honored for this opportunity to speak with you.
MOI JR: Man, I’m honored to have you on here. Well, just to kick it off, man, because this is the first interview I’ve done with you and I haven’t seen too many other interviews done with you. Can you tell us what it is like to be the grandson of the late great Malcolm X aka El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz?
Malcolm Shabazz: I feel just like everybody else, but at times it can seem to be a blessing and at other times it can seem to be a curse, depending on the situation. A lot of people love me and there are also those that hate me. Most of the people that hate me are because they don’t know me or they’re ignorant to certain issues or they listen to the media or certain articles that are written about me by people that don’t know me.
It can be a lot of pressure at times. Like growing up, I was placed in many situations where, say, one person, you can invite them to your house and they might throw up on the carpet. You say, oh they threw up and you help them to clean up the mess. But me, you know, I was under a magnifying glass or a spotlight. So say if I spit on the sidewalk, everyone would be like hey, what the hell is wrong with him?
It’s been a curse in certain situations, dealing with police, certain politicians and government officials. But it has also been a blessing being able to network with other revolutionary spirited individuals that are people that help to put me on to things and gain awareness.
MOI JR: Can you talk a little about your family life? Were you sheltered because of who your grandparents were?
Malcolm Shabazz: I was sheltered early on up until about the age of 9. I was raised in a family of all women. So at a certain point in my life, I started to rebel because there was no real male influence or father figure around. The closest thing I could see that represented strength to me were the cats you would see out on the corner. They were either drug dealers, gang bangers or whatever but those were the only males I could identify with that represented strength that I could immediately seek right there out in the community, so I kind of gravitated towards that. I went through a rebellious phase early on in my life, but prior to that I was somewhat sheltered.
MOI JR: How old are you now and where did you grow up?
Malcolm Shabazz: Right now I am 25 years old and I grew up all over the United States of America. I was born in Paris, France, and came to the states when I was about 3 years old. From there, I have lived in Philadelphia, California, different places in New York, Minnesota, Texas and many other different places. Right now I am in Miami, Florida. I have spent some time recently overseas studying.
MOI JR: When you were younger, you were accused of lighting the fire that killed your grandmother, Betty Shabazz. Can you talk a little about that incident, as well as the media portrayal of it?
Malcolm Shabazz: At a young age, I was about 12 years old and my mother was dealing with a case against the federal government for allegedly hiring a hit man to assassinate Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. During this time, it was a real tense climate and there was so many things going on with my family. I didn’t really understand everything at that age. I couldn’t be with my mother and I really wanted to be with her and I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t be with her.
So back in New York, not knowing where my mother was and being concerned and worried about her, I started to act out and do anything I could to be sent back to my mother, not understanding the ramifications of all my actions. I started to steal money, steal cars, run away from home and unfortunately one of the last things I did was set this fire.
The reason why I did these things was because I wanted my family here in New York to take the position, “He is out of control. We can’t control him so let’s send him back to his mother.” That was my logic. But when I got the idea to set this fire, I set it and didn’t have any intention to harm my grandmother. It was my intention to be mischievous to be sent away back to my mother but it wasn’t my intention for anyone to get hurt. My grandmother got hurt in the process and she ended up losing her life and it is something I deeply regret.
Me and my grandmother had a strong relationship. We probably had the strongest relationship than anybody else in my family. I loved her a lot and she loved me a lot. I was one of her favorites, you know.
The media portrayed it as it was something that I did purposefully or however they portrayed it. But that was not the case. That’s not what it is. I have even gave interviews in the past and after the interview they have stated that I expressed no remorse. Like I didn’t care, which is not true. This is my grandmother and I loved her deeply. To even have a grandmother pass away, of course, it hurts. But to have her pass away based on the actions that I took is even worse.
For a long period of time, I was just lost. I couldn’t speak to people. The media was coming at me from all of these different directions. All these people were trying to profile me and exploit me.
But basically with that situation, I set the fire to be mischievous to get sent back to my mother and didn’t intend on anyone getting hurt in the process. She ended up losing her life. I deeply regret that. Actually, it is the only regret I have in my life out of all the other mistakes that I have ever made.
MOI JR: Can you talk about your most recent case and what happened?
Malcolm Shabazz: Back in 2002, I was 17 years old and I was at a party in Middletown, New York. There was an individual who was a gang member and a drug dealer who tried to rape a 12-year-old girl. I defended the girl, resulting in an altercation taking place. This individual that I had the altercation with ended up in the hospital.
When I went to court, they didn’t let the girl testify, so it was almost like the rape incident didn’t take place. They didn’t let her testify because she was underage and her parents didn’t want her involved. So her testimony wasn’t admissible. The guy, despite the fact that he was a drug dealer or whatever, they just looked the other way.
I was in a town which was in Upstate, New York. It’s in an all-white area. When it came down to it, it was time for me to go to court. The thing was, was that I was facing all these charges. I was facing kidnapping, burglary, robbery and possession of a weapon. They listed me with all these charges, even though, like possession of a weapon, I had no weapon. You know, certain things they just listed it so they would have it.
So basically, when it came down to it, it’s time to go to court and I’m facing 56 years. My lawyer is asking me, “What do you want to do?” I asked him, “What are my chances of beating this case?” They say 50-50 based on certain things – 50-50 on 56 years? I was not really trying to take the risk.
So they also tell me, the jury could think that they were doing you a favor by letting you off on certain charges and sticking you with one or two. But by that you could still end up with 14 years. So they gave me a plea bargain of two and a half years. I took the two and a half years even though I wasn’t guilty of what they were asking me to admit to, which was a robbery. There was no robbery that ever took place. They asked me to admit to this in order to get this two and a half years. So I took that and they told me to return in 45 days to turn myself in.
Unfortunately, when the 45 days came, I didn’t run but I couldn’t bring myself to turn myself in either. So they ended up catching up with me and added on an extra year and a half. So I ended up with three and a half years. And after I was in the system, I had problems with the police and the racist COs (correctional officers) up north. Of my three and a half years, I ended up doing all of it. I came home on parole and the parole thing was not working for me. I couldn’t last too much in the streets on parole. They kept sending back, sending back. One time they sent me back for a year in the Athens State Correctional Facility for being a half an hour late from coming home from school.
MOI JR: Wow! Well, I think you hit on it a little bit, but can you hit it direct: How were you treated by the police specifically with you being the grandson of Malcolm?
Are you the sole male heir and, if you are or not, can you tell us how law enforcement treats you specifically in prison and on the streets?
Malcolm Shabazz: No, I am not the sole male heir, but I am the first male heir. I have a little cousin named Malik Shabazz. He is 20 years old right now.
When I was in prison, it was interesting because when you first go in, in New York City, like Rikers Island or any prison close to the city, the majority of the COs are going to be Black and Spanish. But then they also have the prisons that are way up in the mountains close to Canada, like Attica, Comstock, Great Meadow, where all the police are from the communities up there, so they are all white.
All white, 100 percent – people that have never been to the city before in their life. It’s about probably six to nine hours away from New York City. They’ve never seen so many Black and Spanish people except for where they work as prison guards in the jail. So the mentality that they have with us is that we are animals.
They wouldn’t keep me in a prison where there were all Black and Spanish COs because if they kept me in a prison like this they were more inclined to treat me like a human being. So what they would do was they would try to break me. When I first went into a correctional facility, I was 17 years old. They put me straight into a maximum security prison and gave me the highest security classification possible. I was classified with like drug kingpins, terrorists, things of this nature. I’m only 17 years old. So I was placed in prison with individuals that were never going home. They have life. They did this as an attempt to break me, but it only made me stronger.
Now when I went up there, one of the things I noticed up north was that you have red-neck racist pigs that have tattoos of Black babies hanging from trees. I couldn’t imagine it. How is it possible that they are allowed to work here? How is this allowed? How is this permitted?
If you are not a racist, you could go into that environment and definitely become a racist because it is a different energy. These pigs would line up and have their sticks out and they would threaten you and taunt you, waiting for you to do something. They would have this deep hatred in their eyes with the veins popping out of their neck. That was the type of environment I was in. So I ended up having a few altercations with the police.
Another thing I noticed was that they had this divide and conquer tactic where they had the inmates fight each other in order to keep control. It’s more of us than them but in order for them to keep control, they got to throw all of these things in the mix in order for us to fight each other.
So when I got there, certain things I noticed and I spoke on these issues and I got some of the inmates to come together and we developed a little more unity and strength in there. When we would walk up the hallway, there wasn’t no more mean mugs; it was Black Power fists.
MOI JR: That’s the business.
Malcolm Shabazz: I basically got set up by the police two times. Ended up having some physical altercations with them and they sent me to the box. They jumped me and sent me to the box. Tried to keep me in there indefinitely, extend my time. Most of my stay in prison, all of my problems, were with the police, never with any of the inmates.
MOI JR: How did the inmates treat you?
Malcolm Shabazz: The inmates treated me with a lot of respect. There are two times in my life where I really understood more of who my grandfather was and the legacy I represent.
One time was when I was 9 years old and I was in North Philly and I got robbed for some money. I was like 10 years old. One of the local kids had robbed me for some money I had. He didn’t know who I was. I told a Muslim sister about it and she made a phone call.
Thirty brothers came and asked me what happened. They were organized and I told them what happened. They went out and said they’ll be back. They went out and came back with more money than the kid took. The next day I saw the kid, who was about 16 or 17 years old. He apologized and said if there was anything I needed, he had my back. That was one time when I was like, hold on. I really didn’t understand because I was like 10 and really didn’t realize what all of this was about.
The second time was when I went to prison. I went to prison, and you would be surprised that people think everybody in prison is an animal, thug or gangsta. But some of the most intelligent people, some of the most intelligent brothas I met in my life were in prison. I don’t even regret the experience of being there. While I was there, it was rough, it was difficult. But after going through it, I’m glad that I met some of the brothas that I met who really put me on and had me reading certain books and they showed me a lot of love.
MOI JR: When were you unleashed and what have you been up too since?
Malcolm Shabazz: I was released Dec. 24, 2008. That’s when I maxed out and all my time was done. The leash was taken off of my neck and it’s interesting because even when I was on parole, every two months they would find an excuse to lock me up. I didn’t even have to commit a crime. Then they would write about it in the paper and make it seem like I was out there ripping and running reckless, which wasn’t the case. But since I have been off of parole, out of the system completely, I’ve been doing real good.
I got out Dec. 24, 2008, and from there I went to spend time with my aunt in New York, Ilyasah, and we went to Qatar, like three weeks later we went to Doha, Qatar, in the Middle East for a Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow conference. I networked, made a lot of good contacts. I came back for a little bit and then I decided to go overseas and study a little bit more. So I went to Damascus, Syria, and I studied there for about a year. I actually just came back from there on April 9. I had a good time. It was a wonderful experience. I was in Dubai, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Doha, Qatar .
Back in November and December, I was invited by a community based organization, Algerian and Moroccan, in Paris, France. They invited me there to speak. I was a guest of honor. I sat on the panel along with two other individuals to speak on various issues like social political issues, education, racial discrimination – things that they were dealing with. I also went to Amsterdam and shot a music video with a Muslim sister that I met in Doha, Qatar. I met her and she ended up writing a song about me. So I went out there and shot a video with her.
Now I’m back in the states working on my book that should be out maybe in 2011. That’s going real good and I’m just taking it easy. I’m giving speeches at mosques, schools, where I’m speaking to the youth and it’s wonderful. I feel blessed and I feel good. I feel like I’m on the right path and I’m moving forward in a positive direction.
MOI JR: Do you have the same political and spiritual beliefs as your grandfather?
Malcolm Shabazz: For the most part, yes. I’m a Muslim. I’m a practicing Muslim. That’s why I was in the Middle East. I was studying Islam. I do believe I have similar political views. Like some places where I go to speak, I don’t feel like my views are too radical or anything extreme at all. But sometimes they will say, “Oh yeah, we understand why you say this or that because of who your grandfather is. But what do you mean by that? You’re extreme.” It’s not extreme; it’s the truth. It’s unfortunate that today the way the mindset of the people is when they hear the truth they consider it radical or extreme.
MOI JR: What is your relationship, if any, with the Nation of Islam?
Malcolm Shabazz: My relationship with the Nation of Islam? To me they are not Muslim. I believe they are a deviant sect. Anybody that believes that the White man is the devil and the Black man is God, I can’t go for that. You just have to learn from history and the situations that happened with my grandfather; it’s all there.
I believe that there is a lot of sincere Brothas and Sistas in the Nation of Islam. But I don’t believe in their leadership at all.
MOI JR: Who do you believe killed your grandfather and why?
Malcolm Shabazz: I believe my grandfather was killed by the same people that killed Martin Luther King, the same people that killed Medgar Evers, the same people that assassinated Fred Hampton. These are all the same people: the United States government. They are behind the scenes and they pull the strings. But you are never going to see a government official with a suit and a badge walk up to you and pull the trigger. They are going to get somebody that looks like you to do their dirty work. So I believe they manipulated people, especially within the Nation of Islam, and they traded time for the assassination to take place.
MOI JR: How do you feel about the government releasing the self-confessed assassin of your grandfather a few months ago?
Malcolm Shabazz: Actually, a lot of people ask me that and I really have no ill will toward that individual, to be honest with you. He was a pawn and he did a lot of time. I believe in the hereafter. Everybody accounts for their actions one way or another in this life or the next life. So I don’t feel any ill will towards him. If I saw him today, I would want to sit down and want to ask him some questions but I wouldn’t feel like I’d have to do something towards him.
MOI JR: Man, you’re more graceful than I am about that issue.
Malcolm Shabazz: If anybody else were to do anything, I wouldn’t hold it against them. I could understand how they feel. But it’s just me personally, you know.
MOI JR: No doubt, no doubt. If people want to keep up with you and what you got going, man, how can they do that? Are you anywhere on line?
Malcolm Shabazz: I’m on Facebook (laughs). But I just got back to the states, so I got to get my little foundation together. There is the internet, but a lot of things on the internet are false.
MOI JR: No doubt.
Malcolm Shabazz: I will be speaking a lot more and my book is about to come out soon, Insha’Allah. And maybe I will have a website up soon, but I’m just getting back from the states. I’ve been back for a month so Insha’Allah, you can just keep your eyes open.
MOI JR: Well, what’s your book about?
Malcolm Shabazz: My book is, I wouldn’t say is an autobiography because I’m too young. I’m only 25 years old. But it’s like a memoir slash “coming of age” with social-political commentary. It’s basically different experiences I’ve been through directly from my mouth. I’m explaining what happened here, what happened there. What decision did I make and why I did I choose to make this decision and what could have been done differently. There are a lot of things people think they know that they don’t know. They read about it in the media, but the media is like, believe half of what you see, none of what you hear, if that.
I’ve read a lot of books. I’ve read a lot of articles people have written about me as if they know me, as if they were there. I’ve never met them. I’ve never sat down with them. They never interviewed me, anybody in my family or anybody that even knows me. So where does the information come from that they get to write about? So this book is very important for me because people everywhere I go, certain things I try to do, they always want to ask me the same questions. So now, by me putting this out there, it gives me the opportunity to clear everything. Clear the record. Set it straight. Expose some things and also move on into other areas.
MOI JR: Last but not least and the most insignificant of all the questions, man, have you ever met Nas? Nas had some lyrics where he directly talked about you.
Malcolm Shabazz: I have never met Nas but I know Nas is a 5 percenter. You know, I always liked his music until one of cousins, LeAsah, told me. She is from California, Crenshaw Long Beach area. One day she asked me, “Do you know what Nas said about you on his new track?” and I was like naw, send it to me. So she sent it to me. I was locked up at the time. She sent it to me and I was like, Wow, because I had a lot of respect and admiration for him. So I felt a little bad about that and at that time when I heard it, I wished I was a rapper . He doesn’t know me; he never met me. For him to say that, I would think he had more sense than that.
MOI JR: Exactly. That is why Chairman Fred ADDRESSED him on your behalf. But thank you, Malcolm Shabazz. If there is anything else you wish to say, go ahead.
Malcolm Shabazz: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure and an honor. I just want to shout out everybody in California, especially Oakland and the San Francisco Bay Area. When I was locked up, I was in the box 23½ hours lockdown and most of all my mail came from there. I had somebody from South Central send me a dollar and that meant more to me than anything else. Fred Hampton Jr. and Yuri Kochiyama.
MOI JR: Right on, man. Well, thank you for being on the Block Report. This is the first of many, you know what I’m saying, and you already know this is one of your media homes. You can call on us whenever you need to say something or whenever you want to push something, man.
Malcolm Shabazz: Thank you. I appreciate it.
MOI JR: All right, thank you, comrade.Malcolm Shabazz: Black power, Black love!
MOI JR: That’s right. Free ‘em all!
Malcolm Shabazz: Free ‘em all!
______________________________
POCC Minister of Information JR spoke after Bobby Seale at the Black Panther Party's 43rd reunion, held at Laney College in Oakland Oct. 24, 2009. - Photo: Malaika KambonEmail POCC Minister of Information JR, Bay View associate editor, at blockreportradio@gmail.com and visit www.blockreportradio.com. This Block Report was broadcast on Transitions on Traditions, Hard Knock Radio and Flashpoints on KPFA 94.1 FM and kpfa.org, where you can listen to the archived shows.
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Timbuktu: a city of mysteries
I have held an 800 year old book in my hand. Do you know what that means? This is insanity! To think that pages can survive in these conditions for so long. This happened at the Ahmed Baba Center which is the major government run institute dedicated to the preservation and study of the numerous famed manuscripts of Timbuktu. The old center is a small cluster of sand colored buildings located close to the main hospital of Timbuktu complete with a large convention hall (which they were cleaning in preparation for the visit of Iran’s President) and numerous other bungalows that house reading rooms and preservation workshops. We started the day off in the library with director of research who gave us a complete history of the center and a run through of the manuscripts. I’m not normally one for museums or historical ramblings, but there is no way not to be fascinated by all that is captured in these books, some of the most beautiful of which were stored in glass display cases – their brown and yellowed pages still intact with Arabic scrawled across in perfect lines, some with student crib notes from four or six hundred years ago in the margins. The copies of the Koran had beautiful gold leaf illustrations and patterns on pages facing texts. The volumes of legal documents, or medicine had tables.
The volumes of astronomy had star charts that though hundreds of years old still twinkled. These books are a living legacy of Timbuktu and to hold one as I did later in the restoration room is to feel absurdly empowered as a human, as an African. I shook. I smiled. I trembled. I have delivered babies – that is held a living being so precious because of it’s newness to the world – and who would have thought that to hold history would provoke the same nervous joy, the same protective instinct, the same awe. Indeed some of the private libraries only allow women to work in the restoration laboratories because it is thought that only a woman who has cared for a new born understands the delicacy required to manipulate these documents, this history. I’m not sure how to feel about that.
I have to say the major disappoint for me is not being able to read Arabic script. A book is a scared thing, but even more so when its meaning is understood. Perhaps most remarkable is what I can only term as the amazing fusion of cultures that these texts represent. Before leaving for Timbuktu, I remember commenting to a friend about my unsure feelings due to the fact that these celebrated African written texts are actually written in Arabic. Are they really an example of the African written word? Can’t somebody easily say that we sub-Saharan Africans don’t have our own record of our own languages? I am so glad I came to this place forthe questions it has answered and the numerous questions it has stirred inside my thick thick skull. As the director of research for the Ahmed Baba center explained to me so many of the texts are Arabic script, but indigenous languages. Imagine that! I thought about it and thought about it and I guess the best comparison I can come up with is the fact that French, German, English etc. are all written with Latin letters though none of these languages is actual Latin. Chinese and Japanese use similar scripts but are two very different languages. My conclusion: the script isn’t so much what matters as the language that’s written and the ideas. And then, what a fabulous exercise in cultural exchange.
That is Timbuktu encapsulated – nothing is what it seems – everything is a reflection of everything including identity. As such you are forced to see yourself in the other in a way the wider world may not allow and your mind opens. I guess this is the purpose of books – even if you can’t read them.
I don’t know that there’s all that much for me to say now that I’ve seen these libraries – at some point the boredom sets in and leather bound volumes that you can’t read cease to be exciting but wow that initial rush.
We decided to turn to other aspects of life in the city and being a medical student, high on my list of priorities was the Timbuktu hospital which is conveniently located just behind the Ahmed Baba center. Behind a high tower and blue gates is a series of one story bungalows situated around a dusty courtyard in which patients and their family’s sit and wait for care or cook food for the sick. It reminds me of many a hospital I’ve been to in Nigeria – the same structure, the same stillness in the courtyards, the smell of Detol disinfectant along the open corridors and in the doorways of rooms. I got the chance to see patients with the chief of medicine – a youngish man who was the first person in his family to attend school. There in each of the rooms, we push through cases holding plain films that show pleural effusions and enlarged hearts, bone infections and tuberculosis up to light streaming in through windows. It is a far cry from the “state of the art” medicine that I am learning in New York City, but because of this I feel better about myself as a potential Doctor. Medicine in Timbuktu, is like other things in Timbuktu, about people and connections between them, not machines, not academic journals and articles, not prestige and recognition. I’ll explain further. When learning medicine in the States, so much is focused on technology and protocols, on the precision in memory and diagnostics that will allow us to treat anybody who comes in the door. It often feels like the reason why I wanted to become a doctor (why most people what to become doctors) is lost in the mix, that ability to lay on hands and heal. Healing may not mean curing a disease but it does mean making a person feel more human. As we walked down the halls, between the beds, I would whisper to Lauren that this patient with the liver cancer or that patient with the enlarged heart probably has less than a year left in the absence of treatments readily available in the west. And that bothers me a lot. I want that to change. But what I don’t what to change is the way the Doctor must connect differently with a patient in the absence of these life saving treatments. Medicine cannot be practiced by handing over a prescription for a series of tests and then a series of drugs after twenty minutes of speaking. The conversation is extended. The doubts tendered and expelled and if it’s loss of life that one must face, the coping practiced together with the provider of care instead of in private. This is be a simple minded rendering of this situation, but I never claimed genius.
I turned to my friend Lauren – an engineer by training who dutifully traipsed around with us striving to understand medical jargon delivered in French – at one point at told her “I can do this. I can be a Doctor. I like this!” She laughed because she is so used to my enumerating the various reasons why medicine is just not for me as a profession. To think I had to venture a thousand miles from anywhere to see healing (as opposed to treating) and hear that still small voice that says yes you do care about people and how they feel.
They say Timbuktu is a city of mysteries.
Diary
Rebecca Solnit
New Orleans’s Saint Charles Avenue is lined with oak trees whose broad branches drip Spanish moss and Mardi Gras beads from the pre-Lenten parades, and behind the oaks are beautiful old houses with turrets, porches, balconies, bay windows, gables, dormers and lush gardens. There are no refineries for miles, hardly even gas stations on the stretch I was on in mid-June, and the Deepwater Horizon rig that exploded on 20 April and the oil welling up a mile below it were dozens of miles away as the bird flies. So there was no explanation for the sudden powerful smell of gasoline that filled my car for several blocks or for the strange metallic taste in my mouth when I parked at the Sierra Club offices uptown, except that since the BP spill such incidents have been common. As of mid-July, the spill is supposed to be plugged at last, except that the plug is temporary at best, and the millions of gallons of oil are out there in the ocean, on the coast – and in the air.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency has an unhelpful handout for the BP era that says:
These effects should go away when levels go down or when a person leaves the area. The low levels that have been found are not expected to cause long-term harm … If you smell a ‘gas station’ like odour … it may be volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. The key toxic VOCs in most oils are benzene toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene.
When I went out on the sea from Grand Isle, which is hardly more than a great sandbar at the end of the watery land south of the city, 109 miles from it by car, the taste was much stronger, and one of my companions on the boat had run into far worse. Drew Wheelan, a birdwatcher from the American Birding Association, told us that he had walked into a patch of fumes so intense his body seemed to react automatically and fling him away. ‘I hit a cloud so concentrated,’ he wrote on his blog, ‘that 20 hours later my mouth and tongue still feel as though they’ve been burned by a hot liquid.’
A pregnant friend wondered if she should have left New Orleans altogether, and another friend warned his pregnant girlfriend to stay indoors on the more pungent days. The smells were just part of the ominous, uncertain atmosphere of the Gulf in the wake of the BP spill. The whole region had become something like the Western Front, a place where you might run into pockets of poison gas, except that this wasn’t a battlefront: it’s home, for pregnant women, for children, for old people who’ve spent their entire lives here, for people who love the place passionately, for people who don’t know any place else on earth and don’t want to go anywhere, and for people who can’t, at least economically. And for countless birds, fish, crustaceans, cetaceans and other ocean life. The spill has hit them all hard.
If ‘spill’ is the right word for this oil that didn’t pour down but welled up like magma from the bowels of the earth. It’s also called the Macondo blowout, and maybe ‘blowout’ is a better word.
The blowout is about global capital, and about policy, and about the Bush-era corruption that turned the Minerals Management Service into a crony-ridden camp that didn’t do its job, and about Big Oil, and about a host of other things. But it is also about the destruction we’ve all seen in the images, which are horrible in a deep and primordial way. I went out on boats twice and saw an oiled pelican through binoculars and some faint oily traces on wetlands grass and couldn’t quite make out the oiled terns in the distance. And I saw what everyone else could see too, the photographs and footage from those who went to Ground Zero of this catastrophe.
Mary Douglas said that dirt is matter out of place, and petroleum is out of place everywhere above ground. We design our lives around not seeing it even when we pump it into our cars and burn it, and when we do encounter it, it’s repulsive stuff with a noxious smell, a capacity to cause conflagrations, and a deadly impact. Nature kindly put a huge amount of the earth’s carbon underground, and we have for the past 200 years been putting it back into the atmosphere faster and faster, even though we now know that this is a project for which words like ‘destructive’ are utterly inadequate.
There’s a YouTube video shot by an oil-rig diver in which huge brown globs of oil float underwater like colossal clots of phlegm. From the surface the chunky brown stuff looks like vomit. ‘Just globs of death out there,’ one diver, Al Walker, says in a Southern accent. ‘Oil so thick it blocks out almost all the light below,’ says another diver. An AP photograph by Dave Martin shows one of the gentle little waves of the Gulf Coast in close-up, a wave on Orange Beach that’s brownish gold with spots of orange and black oil on it, water acting just like water and looking just like paint thinner or gasoline.
And then there’s the aerial footage taken by John Wathen, or Hurricane Creekkeeper, that’s gone viral on YouTube, Facebook, other facets of the internet, and the media, including CNN. It shows great plumes of smoke rising from the sea, as the oil is burned off the surface. The flames are invisible but the columns of smoke rise up and float away: burning water, like the famous incident in 1969 when the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire from having so much industrial contaminant. That was one river in an industrial region: the flat calm blue ocean burning is apocalyptic, a world turned upsidedown, rules broken, taboos violated, something as unnatural as nuclear fission and fallout, something nightmarishly wrong, and it extends for hundreds of miles, on water and under it, on shore and in the air.
In the Sierra Club offices, Darryl Malek-Wiley, the club’s local environmental justice organiser, showed us a map of the Gulf, chequerboarded with gas leases, and peppered, as though the map had been hit with buckshot, with oil platforms, 4000 of them. A news story a week later mentioned the 27,000 old oil wells also out there in the territory the maps show, some probably leaking, but no one is monitoring them. Darryl, a big white-haired guy with a Southern accent and a slight Santa affect, showed me another map, an aerial photograph of a portion of the Louisiana coast, on which you could see all the channels the oil and gas industry has cut through the wetlands, creating straight routes through which water can move fast and hard, cutting the channels wider and eroding this coast still further. ‘Nature meanders but time is money,’ a bayou-dweller told me. About a football field of coastline erodes away every 45 minutes, and a third map of Darryl’s showed how much land has been lost in the past several decades, since the petroleum industry came to the Gulf, an area about the size of Delaware, or 2500 square miles.
Oil and gas channels are responsible for nearly half of this erosion of land that is for the most part sediment laid down by the Mississippi over the aeons before it was tamed. When you look at the remnant land on a map, it looks like tattered lace, a frail smear of soil pitted and pocketed and veined by fresh and salt water. From the flat ground you can’t see much of this texture, but water is everywhere and anything can flood. Most structures rebuilt since 2005 are on stilts a dozen feet or more high, ready for the next surge, flood or sea-level rise, if not for the continuing erosion that will leave a lot of these structures literally out at sea. Sometimes travelling through this country you see drowned old structures whose underpinnings the sea has already reclaimed.
Another source of coastal erosion is the channelisation of the Mississippi, which no longer delivers sediment in the quantities it did when it was building up the delta. The place had a lot of problems before BP, really. Shrimping was being undermined by cheap, ecologically horrendous shrimp farms in Asia and Central America, and the Mississippi was delivering its own form of death to the ocean: nitrogen from synthetic fertilisers in the corn belt of the Midwest washes into the river and out to the delta, where it feeds algae blooms that die, decay, and take much of the oxygen out of the seawater. The dead zone is about 8500 square miles. About a third of the corn is supposed to be for ethanol, the not very green alternative to petroleum, so you can see the Gulf being throttled by a pair of energy-economy hands. Inland are the refineries and chemical plants that have given a swathe of the region the nickname Cancer Alley.
Louisiana is in many ways a semi-tropical Third World country with a resource-extraction economy that subsidised splendid social programmes in the era of Huey Long, a lot of subsistence lifestyles in remote and roadless places, and corruption and incompetence galore. The current conservative senator, David Vitter, has been mixed up with prostitutes while preaching family values; the Democratic congressman from New Orleans had to resign after he was found to have an unexplained $90,000 in his freezer (in an interesting twist, the disarray he created in the large African-American population allowed the much smaller Vietnamese-American population to send its first representative to the House, Anh ‘Joseph’ Cao, the congressman who in June suggested that BP’s president should be given a knife to commit hara-kiri).
People like to say that New Orleans is not a particularly poor, corrupt American city, but the rich northern capital of the Caribbean, with its vibrant ex-slave cultures, carnival, sweet gregariousness, and warm weather conducive to living in public. It is rich in cultural creation and continuity in a way no other place in the US is. Before Katrina it had the most stable population of any American city: people stayed in one neighbourhood, sometimes one house, for generations; they knew their music, their food, their history and their neighbours, and they celebrated their rituals, which are complex and frequent in this Catholic bacchanal of a port town that has a second-line jazz parade with dancing in the streets every Sunday and a plethora of social organisations, mostly segregated.
It’s also part of the deeply racist South, and of the hurricane coast. Hurricanes make and unmake the landscape. In Hurricane Rita, Chevron’s deepwater platform, cleverly named Typhoon, drifted dozens of miles from its position. Another platform was carried 66 miles by Katrina and washed up on Dauphin Island. A rig owned by Shell broke free from the Mars platform and dragged a 12-ton anchor that crushed oil pipelines. The hurricane destroyed seven platforms, damaged 24, and created underwater mudslides that dislodged more than a hundred pipelines. When you travel around the coast, signs everywhere warn you not to dredge or even cast anchor, because of the underwater pipelines. This place was already a toxic mess before the Macondo blowout, thanks to oil.
Eight million gallons of petroleum were spilled in Hurricane Katrina alone, and other spills in the Gulf include the colossal Mexican oil-well blowout of 1979 that sent oil all the way up the Texas coast. That one is over and maybe it’s evidence that a region can recover, if the most directly affected town, Ciudad del Carmen, did recover – what was once a shrimping economy there is now based on petrojobs.
Before the blowout Katrina seemed like the worst thing that could have happened. Now people mention the hurricane to explain how much worse the blowout is. Not in terms of immediate loss of human life or social conflict, but in terms of clarity and solutions. Hurricanes come in; they wreck and flood; they’re over; you clean up. This thing – when will it be over and how can you clean up? Technological disasters – meltdowns, contaminations, toxic spills – tend to be more traumatic than natural disasters, because their consequences are hard to measure and hard to recover from. If you’ve just been irradiated or poisoned, you don’t know if you’re going to die of it in 20 years’ time or have kids with birth defects; you don’t know if it can be cleaned up or how or what clean or safe means; your home might be permanently contaminated and you don’t know. You’re also likely to have the liable corporation lying to you, whether the incident is Three Mile Island or Bhopal or the Exxon Valdez.
Uncertainty has been central to the horror of the spill: unlike a hurricane or an earthquake, the spill has no clear termination, no precedent, there’s little that ordinary people can do to respond, and no imaginable end to its consequences. ‘People have a feeling their way of life is disappearing,’ Darryl at the Sierra Club told me. ‘What if a really big storm comes right at the rig? Is BP gonna give me one cheque? Two cheques? The next 20 years while we can’t fish? Sometimes I don’t wanna think about it. I drink a beer, maybe more than one.’
‘It was already poor and now it’s gonna be fuckin’ destitute,’ Henry Rhodes, the tattoo artist who called the first big demonstration against BP in New Orleans and then co-founded the organisation Murdered Gulf, told me. ‘I don’t even eat seafood anymore, because that shit’s fucked up.’ A native New Orleanian, the blond, goateed and heavily inked man spoke passionately, mournfully, about what he saw as the destruction of his homeland. And he said the moratorium on deepwater rigs on top of the destruction of the seafood industry means ‘100 billion annually that’s just gone’.
Margaret Dubuisson, the communications director for the local branch of Catholic Charities, spoke with me at the crisis centre in the Vietnamese community in New Orleans East. A huge portion of the immigrant Vietnamese population either fish or process seafood for a living, she said. They are not well educated, and often their English is negligible: ‘They have PhDs in fishing, but some of them did not go to high school – did not go to grade school. The skills don’t transfer. Oyster fishermen especially. If that closes you can’t go a hundred miles up the bayou. It’s not transferable.’ Oystermen here work like farmers, with designated beds they tend and harvest; if your bed is contaminated, you’re out of luck. Mississippi river water redirected to keep oil away from the oyster seedbeds has devastated them and the $330 million industry is in big trouble.
It’s said that Corexit, the dispersant now being used on the oil, causes birth defects and testicular and reproductive damage, particularly the old batch of more toxic Corexit 9527 that’s been used along with the new formula, Corexit 9500. The 407 dead sea turtles may have drowned because of neurological damage from the oil or the dispersant – or in shrimp nets operated by fishermen desperate to get their last catches. About two million gallons of dispersant are said to have been poured into the sea.
Why BP has been using dispersant at all is a question whose answer seems to be about a policy of disguising, repressing and hiding the damage. One clean-up worker quit because she said they were told to remove only the surface sand: the BP supervisors just wanted the beach to look clean. One BP contractor, ex-soldier Adam Dillon, was fired for questioning the clean-up after working for months to keep the media at bay. He describes thick oil and disgruntled workers whom he kept journalists away from. BP has created a no-fly zone; the co-operative Coast Guard keeps boats at bay, their captains afraid of huge penalties if they cross into restricted waters; workers were obliged to sign non-disclosure contracts, others had all recording technologies confiscated, data on worker exposure were suppressed; scientists were not allowed data; birders were allowed to band but not to put transmitters on rescued birds, according to Drew Wheelan; and data on the spill were constantly spun so the volume of gas upwelling was smaller, the impact was less, the facts were unavailable. A vast area of the ocean is now the scene of a cover-up. Even Anderson Cooper, the star anchor on CNN, has spoken out vehemently against this oceanic lockdown that treats scientists and journalists as the enemy.
BP rules the waves and a lot of Louisiana. I met one boat’s captain who’d been trying to get information from the Coast Guard but was repeatedly passed on to BP, which also seemed to be calling the shots on land about who could go where, controlling media access and even air traffic to the area of the spill. Police, sheriffs, National Guardsmen and politicians seemed to be taking their orders from the corporation whose power, rather than shrinking, has in a strange way grown from its folly and destruction. BP has also taken over virtual space, buying up ads on the internet and spending a great deal of money to ensure that its own propaganda sites come up first in searches for topics related to the spill. BP’s hegemony is part of the helplessness people here feel. BP negligently created a blowout but has intentionally staged a coup. Of course Big Oil has been running American politics for more than a century, an achievement that peaked with the Bush administration. Much of the criticism of Obama is for not sufficiently reining in what his predecessor wrought.
The blowout was not only the biggest oil spill in American history by far: it’s a story that touches on everything else – taints everything, like the black glop on sandy beaches, on pelicans, terns, boats, sea turtles, marshlands and dolphins. It’s about climate change, peak oil, the energy future, the American presidency, about corporate power and the corrosive effect of Big Oil on global politics. It’s also about technology, geology, biology, oceanography, ornithology, the rich, deeply entrenched cultures of the Gulf, about human health and risk management, about domestic violence, despair, drinking, unemployment, bankruptcy, about British pension funds, the wake-up call to shareholders and the class action suit brought by the New Orleans chef Susan Spicer of the restaurant Bayona because contamination, scarcity or outright loss of the primary ingredients in the region’s cuisine – shrimp, crab, fish and crayfish – is one current and probably continuing outcome of the blowout.
Drill baby drill, Sarah Palin’s petro chant, is not going to be heard again soon. If the BP blowout had to happen, it happened at an opportune time. Weeks earlier, Obama had said that offshore oil wells were safe and that he was going to open up for exploration and drilling portions of the Atlantic and northern coast of Alaska, much of it for the first time. Shell was preparing to drill in the fragile Beaufort and Chukchi sea regions of the Alaskan Arctic. All that got put on hold. Timing is everything. If the global economy had waited a month longer to collapse in 2008 there’s a good chance John McCain would have become president and Sarah Palin would have been even harder to get rid of.
The blowout also happened at an interesting moment in global history. On the one hand, the conversations about climate change, after the post-Copenhagen hangover, got a little jolt of urgency from this reminder of how brutal, humanly and ecologically, petroleum extraction is. In an essay for TomDispatch.com posted in May, Michael Klare reminded us that the Deepwater Horizon blowout is an augury of the age of extreme extraction to come: ‘While poor oversight and faulty equipment may have played a critical role in BP’s catastrophe in the Gulf, the ultimate source of the disaster is Big Oil’s compulsive drive to compensate for the decline in its conventional oil reserves by seeking supplies in inherently hazardous areas – risks be damned.’ The disaster furthers the arguments for moving away from a carbon economy sooner by putting on display how grotesque these systems – gigantic offshore rigs, drills that go miles below the deep ocean floor – are even when they work.
Horrendous as the spreading oil is, the overall effect on the environment – more climate change – would have been even more irreversibly destructive had the stuff been collected and burned as planned: the biggest disaster, a number of scientists say, is the invisible one we all add to every day with our airplanes and cars, steaks and air conditioners, overseas goods and coal-fired power plants. When everything goes exactly as planned, a deepwater drilling platform is profoundly destructive, polluting, toxic and dirty: waste goes directly into the surrounding water, drilling releases heavy metals from the sea floor into the sea, other toxins enter the water. Deepwater drilling releases colossal quantities of methane hydrates, thus releasing methane, a greenhouse gas at least 20 times as potent a climate-changer as carbon dioxide. I don’t know if this has been a wake-up call to the horrors of the carbon economy, but I haven’t heard much from the climate-change deniers lately.
In the wake of the economic collapse of 2008, a new anti-corporate rage has seized the United States, and the BP disaster has focused hatred on the oil companies. If there was a left with the capacity to focus this rage into reform, we might be arguing about the abolition of their huge tax dodges or even the end of corporate personhood – the granting of human and even constitutional individual rights to these behemoths – or the nationalisation à la Venezuela of the oil industry. But we’re not. Things are dying from BP, but not much is being born that I can see.
Still, the $20 billion claims fund and the $100 million for worker compensation constitute a fairly unprecedented assault on the citadel of corporate profit, a pre-emptive payment. Exxon was able to fight out compensation for the 1989 Exxon Valdez’s Prince William Sound spill in court, dragging the process out for decades, outlasting its opponents, and finally settling in 2008 for a pittance compared to the destruction and suffering the corporation’s spill had created. As Antonia Juhasz wrote in 2009, in The Tyranny of Oil,
Big Oil gets sued a lot, and its greatest defence is its financial might – its ability to outspend any and all challengers (whether it’s a single gasoline consumer in Illinois or the federal government) and ride cases out for five, ten or even 20 years … Chevron alone has 300 inhouse lawyers and an annual budget of $100 million for farming out litigation to private firms. It employs some 450 law firms globally.
‘This is the biggest thing to happen to Big Oil in a hundred years,’ Juhasz told me on 26 June, just after the local iteration of the national Hands across the Sand solidarity demonstrations at Ocean Beach in San Francisco. ‘That is, since the Standard Oil monopoly was broken up. And maybe bigger,’ she added. The damage of the spill remains to be seen both in the Gulf and in the way it may reshape or dismantle Britain’s single largest corporation, encourage the regulation of the oil industry, perhaps corporate accountability, and affect the significant but subtler business of public opinion. The recently radicalised Sierra Club used the blowout as an occasion to call for an end to the US’s dependency on oil within 20 years.
Obama compared the blowout to 9/11, which brings up all kinds of possibilities, notably the one that BP is the new al-Qaida, and once you speculate about that, all sorts of interesting ways of mapping the situation arise. Bin Laden’s inherited wealth was also oil money, or rather construction money from building the infrastructure for the Saudi oil empire, and 15 of his 19 hijackers on September 11 were Saudis too. The blowout is really just part of what you could call the contemporary oilscape, which includes the war in Iraq, the presence of the US in Kuwait and formerly in Saudi Arabia (this was one of bin Laden’s grievances), and the role of Big Oil in American politics – which was not long ago dominated by a president, vice-president, secretary of state and others direct from the industry.
The clean-up’s lack of safety measures also recalls 9/11. After that disaster, Rudy Giuliani and the Bush administration, anxious to get business back in business and to assert their capacity to handle the situation, suppressed information about the toxicity of the burning heap of rubble that had been the World Trade Center. Asbestos, plastics, heavy metals, PCBs and other toxins were all going up in smoke and into the lungs of anyone nearby, but the Environmental Protection Agency was pressured into turning scary scientific analysis into reassuring press releases and thousands of workers worked for months without respirators. ‘World Trade Center cough’ is a widespread disorder among New York City firemen today, and more than 10,000 people have sought treatment after inhaling the fumes.
Similarly in the Gulf, many of the clean-up workers have been sent into toxic situations without protective clothing or respirators. ‘When I visited a La. Parish Work Release jail this past Friday, it was early evening, and the inmates were returning from their 12-hour workday shovelling oil-soaked sand into trash bags,’ my friend Abe Louise Young, whom I met through her Katrina oral history project nearly five years ago, wrote to me in early July.
Wearing BP uniforms and rubber boots (nothing identifying them as inmates), they were driven in an unmarked white van, and looked dog-tired. The majority of beach workers are African-American. It’s a striking sight in the Louisiana coastal towns where eight out of ten people are white – and the only tell-tale sign of their incarceration. In the first few days after the blowout, clean-up workers could be seen wearing scarlet pants and white T-shirts with ‘Inmate Labor’ printed in large red block letters. Outrage flared among local officials and newly unemployed residents desperate for work. Those explicit outfits disappeared in a matter of days. The clothing change is no accident – it’s an effort at concealing the nature of BP’s labour force. Work-release prisoners have no choice in their job assignments. After arriving in BP uniforms, the inmates suit up in Tyvek head-to-toe coveralls.
Forced labour in toxic conditions. Cheap prison labour undercutting clean-up income for unincarcerated, unemployed Gulf residents. Dead sea turtles by the hundred. Turtles being burned. Plumes of smoke rising up from the burning ocean. Dead whales. Pelicans soaked in oil. Fourteen thousand Vietnamese fishermen out of work in New Orleans Parish alone after having survived Katrina, Rita and Gustav, after surviving the Vietnam War and exile. A way of life dead, at least temporarily, for the Vietnamese, Cajun, white, black and indigenous communities of the waterlands. Rebuilt homes in a landscape suddenly without jobs. Derrick Evans of Turkey Creek Community Initiatives, a big African American ex-professor, told me, as we travelled through the oil-smeared islands of marsh grass in Grand Bayou, that a bayou redneck named Mike had told him: ‘Osama fuckin’ bin Laden could not have imagined, planned or executed more devastation than BP has.’
I met Evans at Grand Bayou, out on the road to Port Sulphur and Venice. Think of southern Louisiana as a hand whose fingers are the remnants of the eroded land, pointing south into the sea. New Orleans is somewhere in the palm of that hand, and the easternmost finger has one road running down its length. More than halfway, past the giant mountain of coal and a few of the countless refineries in the region, there’s a tiny sign for Grand Bayou and you turn off onto a dirt road running west. When I did, a beat-up truck passing in the other direction paused, and the dark-skinned driver rolled down his window to say that the party we were looking for was standing by the road just up ahead. Apparently not a lot of people come down that road.
The road soon petered out into a set of boat docks, an abandoned house, and cane marshes into which flocks of little blue crabs with big right claws scurried when I approached. We found the sailors we were looking for: Rosina Philippe and her brothers Danny and Maurice, members of the Atakapa-Ishak tribe. She told me that their name was Choctaw for ‘cannibal people’, a long-ago slur they hung onto in case it made the small group seem like more impressive opponents. There had been 23 families living in Grand Bayou before Katrina; the Amish and the Mennonites helped them rebuild their houses on stilts, but only nine families remained. Some of the evacuees come when they can: ‘Vacation time, summer time they come back. We make up pallets on the floor. They wanna come back. I didn’t get home until August 2009.’
As Danny, her younger brother, the one with the God Is My Hero. And He Rocks black T-shirt, steered the flat-bottomed boat, Rosina Philippe, a strong woman with a thick dark braid down to her waist, told me that ‘this situation with the oil will be with us for at least another decade. How to move forward? Our primary food source is from the water. Not only is our source of revenue cut off from us, but our food supply. Maybe three people here work in the [petroleum] industry, but it’s not a conflict because they’re not the decision-makers.’
As the boat went down the wide channels between the flat islands of grass she added: ‘This area was forested. My father passed last year, at 86. When he was a boy you could cross from one side to another of the channels.’ The word bayou means moving water in a flat, low-lying area, a place that is neither swamp nor stream, and once most of the bayous were wetland forests. Like Grand Bayou, many places still called bayous have eroded into something else.
Ibis flew overhead, young birds who retained their brown markings, and the wind blew through the grasses, and the sky overhead was stormy, but it seemed impossibly peaceful if you could forget it had all just been contaminated, parts of it were dying or dead, and more might be doomed. Rosina Philippe said: ‘This is nursery for shrimp and fish and crabs – when the oil is all along the banks and into the grasses, everything dies. What’s happening in the Gulf right now is death.’
Andrea Schmidt, who had just wrapped up an al-Jazeera documentary on the spill when I spoke to her, told me that everyone kept comparing the relationship between fishing and oil extraction to a marriage. Oil was the bellicose husband; fishing was the battered wife; but divorce was not in the works. They are the two economies of coastal Louisiana. This is why the moratorium that’s laid off thousands of oil workers and more workers in support industries is not popular locally. In the minds of a lot of people a disaster that’s trashed half the economy is not a good reason to shut down the other half.
It was on a trip to Grand Isle (we never got to Queen Bess or any other bird island, thanks to prohibitions against getting within 65 feet of a boom) that we met Drew Wheelan, the birder, who saw far more than we did. He wrote on his blog:
What we found on Queen Bess was oil-soaked sorbent boom tossed into the colony by the waves, and that about 85 per cent of all young royal terns on the windward side of the island were oiled on most of their plumage. Many of these birds were severely oiled, and could barely stand. There were at least 45 young royal terns that if I had my say would need immediate rescue and care, though at this point I would have to think that many would succumb to the effects of this oil and weather regardless of care received. The Coast Guard has imposed new rules on these colonies to keep people out, which include criminal trespass, a felony, which could be punishable by 15 years in jail and up to a $450,000 fine. No one I know is prepared to save a bird with that kind of a risk attached.
A major disaster brings in outsiders, some like Drew, some not so altruistic or not so competently engaged with the facts on the ground. Or at sea. At its best, it’s like Katrina, which brought an unprecedented wave of volunteers – probably more than a million – to the Gulf and particularly to New Orleans to rebuild, to clean, to cook and to tend. At its worst, it’s a fundraising and travel opportunity for the self-serving. We went to lunch down the road from Grand Bayou, at Ann’s Restaurant and Catering, a collection of trailers by the side of the road in Port Sulphur, with the Reverend Tyronne Edwards of the Zion Travelers Co-operative Center, a dark-skinned man in a light-coloured linen jacket and trousers, and Byron Encalade, the African-American president of the Louisiana Oystermen Association, an organisation announced on his orange T-shirt. We ordered versions of deep-fried seafood that came in a series of styrofoam containers, and we washed it down with the oversweetened ice tea that is the totemic drink of the South. (Was the seafood contaminated? Everyone ate it.) The oysterman and the preacher talked about all the outsiders who were going to be using the Gulf blowout to raise funds, then use the funds to augment their existing programmes or meet payroll, a syndrome they’d grown acquainted with after Katrina. They had many complaints about outsiders, politicians and BP. They wanted everything managed locally.
The reverend talked about all the local African-Americans who were disaffected with Obama, including his aged mother. ‘We wanna support him but man … he’s really lost a lot of respect. I feel sorry for the president. He’s got people around him making him fail. I’m still a supporter of the president, but it’s gotten so hard.’
Encalade said: ‘It’s the unknown things. Even after Katrina, you assessed where you stood. Here you don’t know what your damages are and how long it’s gonna last.’ And he spoke of the Vietnamese refugees and the veterans of the war that made them refugees who had come here: ‘That’s all any of them ever wanted to do is come home, get a trawler. That was peace by them. I’ve been talking to the VA.’ He’d told the Veterans’ Administration he was worried about old trauma resurfacing. He talked about the crews on his three boats, now fighting the spill. Later, when we had followed him on the ferry that takes cars across the river to the eastern side of the peninsula, where he kept his boats, he stood on a dock and talked about getting his first boat when he was 13, about working in the petroleum industry himself, but ‘you’re always coming back to fishing. We got salt water in our veins and we can’t get it out. We ain’t trying to. We don’t know what’s going to happen and that’s the thing. Seems like we’re down to the last try.’
As I write, the Macondo well seems to be capped, though the cap is only temporary. A lot of people will be ready to say the story is over, but that’s like saying that you put the bottle of poison down after drinking only a pint of it. The oil is out there, and the consequences will be felt for the foreseeable future. A little more than a week after my trip, I went to the national disaster studies conference in Colorado, where I hung out with a guy who’s been studying the Exxon Valdez spill for 21 years. He told me that the herring industry there never recovered, and fishermen were hard hit. The Gulf, in his view, can look forward to the death of the shrimping industry, massive unemployment, an outmigration of those who can go, leaving behind the elderly, indigent and infirm, a loss of trust and social capital, a lot of despair and a lot of medical consequences of the chronic stress of living in a ruined world. And to living in a poisoned environment. That this is the Gulf – a place of deeply rooted families and cultures, as well as wildlife – means that there’s a lot to lose. Nothing now suggests it won’t be lost.
(Video: guardian.co.uk)
Neve Gordon writes in The Guardian about arriving in the Bedouin village of al-Arakib as Israeli bulldozers finish razing it to the ground:
The signs of destruction were immediately evident. I first noticed the chickens and geese running loose near a bulldozed house, and then saw another house and then another one, all of them in rubble. A few children were trying to find a shaded spot to hide from the scorching desert sun, while behind them a stream of black smoke rose from the burning hay. The sheep, goats and the cattle were nowhere to be seen – perhaps because the police had confiscated them.
Scores of Bedouin men were standing on a yellow hill, sharing their experiences from the early morning hours, while all around them uprooted olive trees lay on the ground. A whole village comprising between 40 and 45 houses had been completely razed in less than three hours.
I suddenly experienced deja vu: an image of myself walking in the rubbles of a destroyed village somewhere on the outskirts of the Lebanese city of Sidon emerged. It was over 25 years ago, during my service in the Israeli paratroopers. But in Lebanon the residents had all fled long before my platoon came, and we simply walked in the debris. There was something surreal about the experience, which prevented me from fully understanding its significance for several years. At the time, it felt like I was walking on the moon.
This time the impact of the destruction sank in immediately. Perhaps because the 300 people who resided in al-Arakib, including their children, were sitting in the rubble when I arrived, and their anguish was evident; or perhaps because the village is located only 10 minutes from my home in Be'er Sheva and I drive past it every time I go to Tel Aviv or Jerusalem; or perhaps because the Bedouins are Israeli citizens, and I suddenly understood how far the state is ready to go to accomplish its objective of Judaising the Negev region; what I witnessed was, after all, an act of ethnic cleansing.
Here is another video that was posted on Promised Land:
And here are some amazing images from Activestills:
