After the Bulldozers

May 29, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Beautifully shot short film about the fate of 10,000 residents displaced after a thriving market in Ajelogo, a neighborhood in Lagos, Nigeria, was destroyed by local authorities. The film is told through the perspective of one of the residents. The director is Charles “Stretch” Ledford, a University of Miami communications student.

Via Jeremy Weate.

Friday, May 28, 2010

James Town, 54 lyndurst rd, Kingston - Jamaica

 

I did this entry as a dedication to the innocent people who died recently in Kingston, Jamaica as a result of the misdeeds of those who put these innocent lives in harms way. The gun battles that took place between the army and the gunmen placed the lives of "human" beings between the bullets, persons who had nothing to do with this political fire fight. Simple people who just wanted to get up everyday and provide for their family. These photos I present to you exemplify the humanity that exist within these people and the everyday dignity they project. I can call them poor, oppressed or disenfranchised but at the end of the day people are people and offering anyone a little respect and regard goes a long way. Enjoy

 

Posted by Kwesi Abbensetts

onenawlins — October 17, 2007 — A traditional New Orleans Jazz Funeral for the late tuba player Kerwin James. He died in Oct. 2007. Alot of viewers have been asking whats the reason for rocking the casket, it's so he can dance one last time. I also have a Mardi Gras Black Indian Funeral video on here too. I must WARN you it is'nt your "typical" funeral. For more videos, pics and New Orleans unique culture check out my myspace page at www.myspace.com/onenawlins

BigRedCotton — April 04, 2009 — Jaran 'Julio' Green's homegoing in the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans, La. He was 23 years old, father of a new born baby girl, killed on March 26, 2009. Loved ones danced on his casket, carried him thru his old neighborhood one last time.

http://www.nola.com/timespic/stories/...

http://obits.nola.com/NOLA/DeathNotic...

R i c h a r d  J.  M a r g o l i s  A w a r d   The Richard J. Margolis Award of Blue Mountain Center combines a one-month residency at Blue Mountain Center with a $5,000 prize. It is awarded annually to a promising new journalist or essayist whose work combines warmth,  humor, wisdom and concern with social justice. The award was established in honor of Richard J. Margolis, a journalist, essayist and poet who gave eloquent voice to the hardships of the rural poor, migrant farm workers, the elderly, Native Americans and others whose voices are seldom heard. He was also the  author of a number of books for children. Blue Mountain Center is a writers and artists colony in the Adirondacks in Blue Mountain Lake, New York. How to Apply Applications should include at least two examples of the writer's work (published or unpublished, 30 pages maximum) and a short biographical note including a description of his or her current and anticipated work. Please send three copies of these writing samples. Samples will not be returned. Send applications to: Richard J. Margolis Award of Blue Mountain Center c/o Margolis & Bloom 535 Boylston Street, 8th floor Boston, MA 02116 Deadline: July 1, 2010 The award winner will be announced in November. Donations Donations to the Richard J. Margolis Award qualify for an income, gift and  estate tax charitable deduction as long as they are made payable to the Blue  Mountain Center, a not-for-profit foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of the  Internal Revenue Code.  Donations during life qualify for all these tax  advantages.  In addition, gifts of stock or other highly appreciated property  also avoid tax on any capital gain, since the sale of the securities by a  tax-exempt organization are not subject to tax.  While not qualifying for any  income tax deduction, the advantage of gifts as part of an estate plan are that  the donor continues to have the lifetime use of the funds to be gifted when or  if they are ever needed. Lifetime Gifts Contributions to the Award fund may be made at any time by sending checks  payable to the "Blue Mountain Center" to: Richard J. Margolis Award c/o Margolis & Bloom 535 Boylston Street, 8th floor Boston, MA 02116 Testamentary Gifts Gifts may be made as part of an estate plan by using language such as the  following: "I give $_______ to the Blue Mountain Center, a not-for-profit corporation  located in Blue Mountain Lake, New York, for the purpose of funding the Richard  J. Margolis Award." Questions You may direct any questions about gifts or bequests to the Award fund  to: Harry S. Margolis Margolis & Bloom 535 Boylston Street, 8th floor Boston, MA 02116 Telephone:617/267-9700, x517 Fax:617/267-9700, x517  E-mail: hsm@margolis.com

Postmark Deadline:
August 1st, 2010

 

 

RATTLE POETRY PRIZE:

The annual Rattle Poetry Prize offers $5,000 for a single poem, plus ten honorable mentions of $100 each. All 11 winning poems are published in the winter issue of RATTLE, and additional poems from the entries are frequently offered publication as well. In 2009 we published 22 poems that had been submitted to the contest, from over 1,500 entries.

Judged in a blind review by the editors to ensure a fair and consistent selection, and with an entry fee that is simply a one-year subscription to the magazine, we've designed the Rattle Poetry Prize to be one of the most writer-friendly contests around.

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Watch “Missionaries Of Hate” (Homophobia In Uganda)

By Tambay, on May 25th, 2010

Some of you, I suspect, have been following the developments of the proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill that was introduced last fall in Uganda, which has been the subject of much uproar, especially here in the west. Why? Well, in short, the bill will further criminalize homosexuality (already illegal in Uganda), making it a crime punishable by death!

The bill is particularly notorious because it’s believed that its introduction was spurred on by good old American Christian evangelicals who, just prior, visited the country, and spoke at a conference called the “Seminar on Exposing the Homosexual Agenda,” suggesting that countries like Uganda are in better positions to protect themselves from what the evangelicals call “the scourge of the gay agenda.”

Essentially, these predatory mofos, realizing that their influence is waning in their own country, here in the USA, are seemingly seeking out other nations – “under-developed” nations to be crude – that appear much more malleable to their agenda, to sell their doctrine too. And it’s apparently working!

“These are good Christians; better Christians than there are here in the states… They care about each other. And I think the reason they’re pushing so hard on this law is that they don’t want to see what happened to our country happen over there,” says Scott Lively, a pastor from Springfield, MA, of the Ugandan people. I wonder if he also patted them on the backs of their heads like obedient little pets…

I came across this insightful new 45-minute documentary on the matter (courtesy of Bombastic E), titled Missionaries of Hate, which will air on Current TV tomorrow night, May 26th, at 10PM, but you can watch it all below, thanks to Hulu:

Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project

 

 6th Annual

Queer Women of Color Film Festival

June 11-13, 2010
Brava Theater, San Francisco

Festival Focus
Two-Spirits: Reclaiming Remembrance
Queer Native American, Indigenous & First Nations Women

The 6th annual QUEER WOMEN OF COLOR FILM FESTIVAL (QWOCFF) is a 3-day Film Festival, featuring 38 films in 4 screening programs, the majority of which are brand-new QWOCMAP films! This year's Festival includes a focus on Queer Native American, Indigenous, First Nations Women and Two-Spirits; four Q&A sessions with filmmakers after the films; and a performance with Two-Spirit artists. Please note that Festival Focus events are clean and sober. QWOCMAP Film Festival is eco-friendly - we recycle and compost for the duration of our three-day Queer Women of Color Film Festival. Please bring your REFILLABLE WATER BOTTLE with you to the Festival and help us be even more eco-friendly! Admission is FREE to all film screenings. PLEASE ARRIVE EARLY TO ENSURE SEATING!     FESTIVAL INFORMATION   Sign up to volunteer at the festival! Five things to know about the Film Festival (Community & Solidarity Statements)   An Official Event of SF Pride and National Queer Arts Festival Sponsors

Single story homophobia and gay imperialism revisted

by Sokari on May 28, 2010

in African LGBTI

Two excellent articles by Keguro Macharia [Gukira]. The First was published on  Kenya Imagine and is a response to an article on homophobia in Africa by Madeline Bunting in which she attempts to explain “African Homophobia”.. Keguro’s criticism first points to her claim that the West should “rightly” be concerned and hugely angry about homophobia in Africa.

Being “rightly” concerned is, as far as I can tell, a full time occupation where Africa is concerned. To be western, Bunting suggests, is to have “the right” to be concerned and angry about what happens in Africa. 40 years after African’s independence from colonialism, I remain puzzled at what gives “the west” any rights over Africa. And because I am an intellectual, I wonder at Bunting’s need to posit an autonomous “west” against a knowable “Africa,” even after more than 30 years of scholarship that has emphasized the cross-hybridization of these two spaces.

Keguro goes on to question the source of Bunting’s “authoritative voice” considering  she makes no attempt to seek out scholarly voices such as his and Canadian Marc Epprecht and those of others easily accessible online with a little effort and Google.

Given the article’s authoritative tone, I would have assumed that, at the very least, Bunting would take the time to read the body of activist and scholarly work available on African homosexualities and African homophobia, much of which lives online. Had she bothered, she might have found the long-standing website Behind the Mask, which offers a range of resources and reports on Africa. She might have discovered the erudite scholar writer Sokari Erkine whose blog is a historical and scholarly resource. A little digging might have turned up Feminist Africa , which has devoted special issues to questions of sexuality in Africa, including a moving article by Uganda-based professor Sylvia Tamale .

If Bunting had cared to actually study her subject, she might have discovered scholarly monographs by South African  Neville Hoad and Canadian Marc Epprecht, both of which offer nuanced, historically grounded analyses of homosexual and homophobic practices and discussions in Africa.

In the second piece published in  yesterday’s  Guardian, he challenges the notion that homophobia in Africa  is somehow unique and that homophobia exists in continental or regional forms.  In reality there is no single story.   In answer to the question “how do we account for what APPEARS TO BE  the intensification of homophobia in Africa?” he provides two examples, one from Kenya where the first mass attack against gay men took place recently.  Unlike the usual reports in the Western media where Africans are presented as passive and unengaged, Keguro  names local activists organisations and their responses…..

So what has changed? Activist organisations such as Minority Women in Action (MWA), Transgender Education and Advocacy (TEA) and Gay Kenya have been established and run educational workshops across the country. As with other human rights groups in Kenya, their efforts have been met with mixed reactions, ranging from acceptance to indifference to hatred. Their increased visibility has led to increased vulnerability, a trajectory shared by progressive organisations across the world.

The second example he uses is the  marriage of Tiwonge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza and again challenges the “unique” single story…

To grasp the Malawi case, we need to understand the meaning of the engagement ceremony chinkhoswe. Chinkhoswe certifies marriages in the eyes of the law and also creates stable ideas about gender. It is worth noting that Tiwonge Chimbalanga identifies as a woman, so this case is also about transgender politics.

Notably, despite some gains in gay marriage in the west, transgender politics remain contested. Without a locally based understanding, rooted in a history of Malawi and a grasp of its cultural politics, we cannot comprehend what is at stake in the case. Discussions that frame the case as Malawians opposing westernisation tell only a very partial story.

Last week British Gay activist Peter Tatchell published HIS response to the sentencing of Tiwonge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza in which he, in the style of the single story, reduces homophobia in Africa to a simplistic colonialist and passive explanation.

Before the British came and conquered Malawi, there were no laws against homosexuality. These laws are a foreign imposition, they are not African at all. Despite independence, these alien criminalisations were never repealed.

Today, the minds of many Malawians – and other Africans – remain colonised by the homophobic beliefs that were drummed into their forebears by the western missionaries who invaded their lands alongside the conquering imperial armies.

By contrast, Phumi Mtetwa of the Gay and Lesbian Equality project, South Africa  made this more considered and contemporary statement on the sentencing of Chimbalanga and Monjeza.

The increasing incitement, in multiple African countries especially Zimbabwe, Malawi and Uganda, against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people is a gross violation of human rights. Homophobic laws are being used as political decoys by politicians instead of facing the real problems of poverty and declining standards of living on the continent. The door has been opened to reverse and retard a post-colonial progress on all human rights. Human rights can only be ensured through an unwavering commitment to equality, freedom and justice for all. The South African government, as the only state in Africa to recognise equality for sexual minorities, must be called to defend the South African constitution by offering asylum to the two men convicted in Malawi and negotiating their immediate release from prison.

What I find  disturbing about Mr Tatchell’s perspective and work around LGBTI rights in Africa is his constant failure to ever recognise the many country and issue based grassroots human rights defenders / activists working on the continent and who in many cases put their lives at risk.  Africans are presented as passive and  silent justifying his need to act on our behalf and often compromising the work of frontline defenders. [see below].   The focus is more often than not on those with a homophobic agenda rather than the struggle against it and the victories that have been won by in Uganda, Cameroon, Nigeria, the campaigns and work of many activists across the continent.     Language is powerful and more so when the user has an “authoritative” [in the UK] voice  and white privilege such as Peter Tatchell.

In his article, Tatchell then goes on to quote Rudi Bleys clearly missing the irony as he uses the very language of the colonialists he blames for homophobia as he pursues his own “civilising mission”

As Rudi C Bleys documented in his book, The Geography of Perversion, the existence and, sometimes toleration, of same-sex acts was used by the colonising European nations to justify what they saw as their “civilising” mission.

To them, homosexuality among the indigenous peoples was proof of their “barbarity” and confirmation of western theories of racial superiority.

Some questions to consider about the language in the Independent article;  why did Tatchell choose such aggressive language which conflates Africa into a single homogeneous space, historically, culturally and geographically  and which feeds into the notion, as Keguro states,  that  homophobia in Africa is somehow unique?  How does such language support the struggle on the ground in Malawi, in Uganda, in Nigeria?  What stereotypes does this language reinforce?

As I write I am minded that criticsing Peter Tatchell has it’s perils as the authors of Gay Imperialism: Gender and Sexuality Discourse in the ‘War on Terror’” (Out of Place: Interrogating Silences in Queerness/Raciality, – 2008),  can attest.   Their voices silenced by the very gay imperialism they critique…..

white gay discourses in Germany and Britain that trade in Islamophobic constructions of a gay-friendly, sexually liberated ‘West’ and a homophobic, sexually oppressive ‘Islam’ as the West’s Other.  They argue that these constructions are validated in the politics of the ‘war on terror’ and the erosion of migrant citizenship, and that racism is “the vehicle that transports white gays and feminists into the mainstream” (p. 72)

Peter Tatchell who together with his organisation Outrage were named in the book, was issued an apology by the publishers  Raw Nerve who in an act of censorship and white privilege  then declared “Out of Place: Interrogating Silences in Queerness/Raciality,” Out of Print.

In February 2007,  20 African LGBTI activists issued a “Statement of Warning” against Tatchell and Outrage which  the authors of Gay Imperialism, Jin Haritaworn, Tamsila Tauqir and Esra Erdem, referred to  in their article.  The statement begins…

In order to prevent Peter Tatchell and Outrage! from causing further damage through their unfounded campaigns and press releases, we issue this public statement of warning.

As Human Rights Defenders from across Africa, we strongly discourage the public from taking part in any LGBTI campaigns or calls to action concerning Africa that are led by Peter Tatchell or Outrage!

Collaboration across continents is both important and valuable. We are willing to work with those who respect our advice and expertise regarding our continent.  However, Outrage! has been acting in contempt and disregard of the wishes and lives of African Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and
Intersex (LGBTI) Human Rights Defenders. We have made every attempt to address this matter with Outrage!, personally, and they have refused to listen. We now take this matter to the public, requesting
you not to take part in any of Peter Tatchell or Outrage!’s campaigns regarding Africa, as they are not factually-based and are harmful to African activists.

Through the following actions, Outrage! has repeatedly disrespected the lives, damaged the struggle, and endangered the safety of African Human Rights Defenders: [Continue reading the Statement here or here]

Peter Tatchell has been at the forefront of LGBTI rights in Britain for the past 25 years or more and for that there is much respect.  But surely it is not too much to ask for some reflection of the statement issued by African LGBTI activists and the article written by Jin Haritaworn, Tamsila Tauqir and Esra Erdem?   There is a degree of arrogance around those who refuse – for whatever reason – to engage in self-reflection, to question their language, motives, ambition.

Tatchell ends his diatribe with a call for the African liberation to be completed through the liberation of African gays – considering his primary audience is a British one – who is he calling to complete this liberation? The Africans he cannot  bring himself to mention or the gay imperialists waiting at the door?