An effective criticism of social and political woes by public intellectuals might get the attention of some segments of the public, especially those who might be labeled “politically aware”—individuals who regularly follow the news and crises of the day. But there is more to being a public intellectual than becoming a gadfly gnawing on the pestiferous hide of the establishment. Eloquently depicting misdirection, mismanagement, and overweening ambitions among the political class can be motivating but often prove insufficient. Worse yet, it could become a self-defeating enterprise when these criticisms lead to public despair and political alienation. It is akin to the proverbial heralding that “the emperor has no clothes,” with the added twist that no tailor can sew one either. When others pile on, we get closer to a political black hole.

Churning out critical essays and commentaries should not be the end but an inducement to search for remedies. What utility do such analyses offer if their message only intimates a rotten and entrenched status quo immune to change and improvements?

Channel 4 New Video: “Hannah Ritchie on replacing eco-anxiety with ‘cautious optimism’ & how to build a sustainable world”

The public intellectual must go beyond criticism of the unsatisfactory status quo and policies by inspiring a sense of optimism in the public’s mind about change and reform and suggesting how they might be achieved. How can this be done responsibly?

Paul Romer, a Nobel laureate in Economics (2018), distinguishes complacent optimism from contingent optimism (he calls it  “conditional optimism”; I prefer contingent optimism to  accentuate the difference with complacent optimism) by giving an example of each: “Complacent optimism is the feeling of a child waiting for presents. “Contingent optimism “ is the feeling of a child who is thinking about building a treehouse. ‘If I get some wood and nails and persuade some other kids to help do the work, we can end up with something really cool.” In the first case (complacent optimism), the child is passive, awaiting a present with earnest expectation. In the second case (contingent optimism), the child lays out a plan to make her wish a reality. The optimism of the first child is wholly dependent on the largesse of others; she makes herself the object of her expectations. The optimism of the second child is born of her agency to identify and secure the resources she needs to build her treehouse.

Contingent optimism begins by taking stock of the challenge. Once the problem is defined, you search for credible solutions to change the situation in the desired direction. In other words, contingent optimism makes the reason for developing an optimistic outlook contingent on working out a strategy of change that makes it likely to achieve the outcomes one seeks. It is the careful mapping out of a plan that justifies feeling optimistic about change. That optimism is contingent on having correctly defined the problem and potential solutions.

We should expect contingent optimism from public intellectuals, not despair. They are uniquely equipped and positioned to critically analyze our societal ills and propose remedies that can change the system to better serve the common good. The same goes for the rest of us. Deluding ourselves with passive hope is the essence of complacent optimism. Planning how to achieve our wishes justifies optimism—contingently, of course!

The current Israel-Hamas war has dominated the news for the past few months. As reports of military machinations and diplomatic efforts have gained attention, the art world has struggled with responses to the horrors of this war.

For example, controversy and calls for transparency and accountability followed the departure of Anishinaabe-kwe curator Wanda Nanibush from the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). The departure was apparently related to her expressed opinions on the war.

After the Royal Ontario Museum tried to change a Palestinian American artist’s work, Jenin Yaseen staged a sit-in and others protested.

I have been teaching and writing about the “art world” — what sociologist Howard Becker calls the network of artists, art institutions, funders, patrons and audiences — for years, and researching how artists navigate their thorny relationship with contentious political moments.

Policies and regulations can serve artists, but can also engender a lack of trust and create administrative burdens that impact the healthy functioning of artists and organizations.

Endeavouring to speak truthfully, meaningfully

The Globe and Mail reported some Canadians “active in a support group of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem” expressed concern to the AGO, and that one signatory to a letter said the letter didn’t call for Nanibush’s departure but rather for “antisemitism training and for the AGO to make use of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism.”

If the gallery did try to silence Nanibush, critics have reason to be concerned about how they reacted as the curator and others in the art world endeavoured to speak truthfully and meaningfully in a time of crisis.

In a statement, the AGO’s director and CEO Stephan Jost expressed the gallery’s support for Indigenous artists and a need to “reflect on our commitments to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report …”

Refugees in their Own Homeland, by Mohammad ElMetmari; Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

He acknowledged cultural institutions are “being asked to better define the rights and limits of political and artistic expression in a locally diverse but globally complex environment” and that “intense discussion” also raises questions about good governance.

Rights, limits, regulation and the purpose of artists’ work are what is at stake in this discussion. An investigation is underway to see how the gallery’s policies may have impacted the board’s decision-making.

People trying to create and speak truth

How people assess the value of policies and regulation affecting the art world depends on how much they feel the art world should, or should not, reflect political realities.

Some might suggest that artists should entertain and enlighten us but stay away from contentious issues.

I believe artists have a unique role, different than that of journalists, political leaders or even documentary filmmakers. Beyond parsing the facts of a situation or deliberating and brokering political solutions, artists work to bring human richness and complexity to experiences like conflict and strife.

Art and our lives

Thinking about “art worlds” as “patterns of collective activity,” as Becker does, helps us to think about art in relationship to our social and political lives, and the conditions under which artists create.

Art schools, professional organizations, galleries and performance spaces all play a part in enabling some artists and their messages to shine, whether through financial support, attention or time — while constraining or even silencing others.

Museum and gallery spaces, frequently dependent on government and philanthropic funding, curate and elevate certain artworks and in so doing mediate relationships and foster cultural dialogue between governments and pluralistic communities of citizens. At the same time, they prescribe behaviours and actions that constrain both artists and the public perception of their work.

In this way, the support systems around artistic work have political implications, just as much as the art itself may have.

Discipline via funding

As I examined in my doctoral research, the Summerworks Theatre Festival briefly lost funding from Canadian Heritage in 2011 after staging playwright Catherine Frid’s controversial play Homegrown.

The play critiqued the reach of the Anti-Terrorism Act and the use of solitary confinement as it examined the story of one man convicted of participating in a terrorist group. This was after a high-profile 2006 RCMP investigation saw 18 Muslim individuals accused of terrorism. (Charges against seven people were stayed or dropped, while four people were convicted). Some accused the play of being pro-terrorist.

Artists responded to this institutional censure by staging readings of the play to support the festival.

The art world will find pathways to speak its own truth in the face of such pressures.

For instance, as the Globe and Mail reported, the Belfry Theatre in Victoria made a recent decision to cancel its run of the Israel-set play The Runner. But Vancouver’s PuSh Festival is sticking by plans to run the play as a part of its program along with other works, including the immersive installation Dear Laila that depicts a model of one artist’s former home in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp.

When political pressure closes one door, the art world will often seek to open another, though we have yet to see how this might play out in the case of the AGO and Nanibush.

What do we want from our artists?

In the face of numerous wars, the climate emergency, housing and food insecurity, this is a challenging time. People around the world face what some scholars and activists have called a “polycrisis.”

Artists represent and reflect this social and political upheaval. Banksy scrawls murals on the blasted Ukrainian cityscape. Theatres across the world stage performances or screenings — like The Gaza Monologues — to try to represent Palestinian voices.

Especially in a time when trust in our political leaders and institutions continues to wane, artists, arts leaders and policymakers face daunting but critical questions about making ethically sound decisions.

If the public trusts the art world to do their work with rigour and honesty, artists and arts institutions can be a community of voices expressing diverse perspectives on our collective humanity, reflecting suffering and the power of resistance to violence in this polarizing conflict.

We must critically assess the value of the arts and of artists to perform this important work. And we should be mindful of desires to discipline the art world at a time when its voices are so deeply needed.

Lowell Gasoi, Instructor in communication studies at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa, Carleton University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam

When New Year’s rainclouds wash the tulip’s face,
get up and to red wine your will entrust.
Since this green lawn that now delights your eye
Tomorrow will be growing from your dust.

(In Mohammad ibn Bahr Jājarmī, Mo’nes al-Ahrār, dated 1340, in E. Denison Ross, “’Omar Khayyam,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies 4, 3 (1927), pp. 433-439.)

Now that the bloom is on the rose of bliss,
Don’t hesitate to raise a wine glass high.
Drink up, for your determined foe is time:
You won’t again come by a day like this.

Whinfield 71

Wine server, rise and bring shame to my name.
The old and young have often seen our like.
Musician, my physician, sing a song,
then grab a wine decanter: a chord strike!

“Kholāsat al-ash`ār fi al-Robā`īyat,” Safīneh-‘e Tabrīz.

Into the garden flew a drunken nightingale,
delighting in the cup of wine that was its rose.
It whispered with its mystic voice into my ear:
“Grab hold, for life is gone when once it goes.

Whinfield 81

Tonight, who brought you from behind the veil;
who brought you, tipsy, to me, drawing near?
–to one on fire because you had been gone–
one like an arid wind; who brought you here?

Whinfield 2

The dawn has broken: rise, you hopeless flirt,
and gently – gently -— sip some wine and strum.
For those who dwell here will not be here long.
Of those who left, not one again will come.

– Mo’nes al-Ahrar

“Now Ruz on Sunset,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream/ Dreamland v. 3/ Lunapic, 2023

What’s being, then, if death is the reality?
What is the road to our impossible desires?
No layover will offer any benefit.
And when the journey’s done, what kind of rest transpires?

Whinfield 88

Wine is an essence that takes many forms:
It animates all life and waters roots.
Do not imagine that it ever dies.
Its essence lives, if not its attributes.

Whinfield 75

Since I translated the poetry into a contemporary idiom, I thought I’d try my hand at a digital image that pays homage to the Bravo show, “The Shahs of Sunset,” instead of the Victorian, pre-Raphaelite sort of painting that has typically accompanied the The Rubaiyat in Western publishing.

These poems are not in my translation of the Yerbudaki manuscript, which is available as below:

Juan Cole, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam: A New Translation from the Persian (London: IB Tauris/ Bloomsbury, 2020). Click here.

Reviews:

“’To read Juan Cole’s deft, plain-spoken translation of the Rubáiyát
is to find companionship, to rejoin a thousand-year human
conversation about how to endure, enjoy, and find a fleeting beauty
in everlastingly dire times. The lucid, cogent and mind-opening
Epilogue is a kind of grace, a gift freely given, from one of our
most astonishing and generous intellects.’”
– Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Moonglow (2017)

“’Omar Khayyam is a Persian treasure and Juan Cole’s new
translation brings him anew to Western audiences who
for centuries have been both delighted and educated by this
medieval sage! Reading The Rubáiyát is a thrill – you feel the
echoes of the 12th century seamlessly into our 21st, as this is
a holy book of wisdom and magic. In another perilous era for
Iranians, it’s wonderful to see this enchanting volume make
its way through the world yet again!’”
– Porochista Khakpour, novelist, essayist and author of Brown Album (2020)

As the war on Gaza began being described as a “genocide,” the years of pain that I buried finally burst and led to the creation of this art.

( Waging Nonviolence ) – I woke up on Oct. 7 to a Facebook timeline full of friends posting about how the world is just so cruel. Confused, I scrolled a bit further, and read what Western newspapers were saying: Israel and Hamas were targeting each other again.

The heaviness that lives in my chest laughed. Of course, here we go again. I’m a diasporic Palestinian American, so I’m used to these news cycles. Horrors and atrocities enacted on my people by Israel for generations, and we Palestinians struggle to get one article about it in the back pages of major, or even small town newspapers. Israel bulldozes our houses, detains children without trial. Kills nonviolent Gazan protesters and declares six human rights groups supporting Palestinians to be terrorist organizations. Forces Gazans to live in a region that the U.N. said would be unlivable in 2020 without escape.

But the minute Hamas does anything, Western news blares again about conflict, complexity, how “both sides” are equally bad. Turn on almost any news channel and they’ll say that’s why Israel has a right to its security, it’s all Hamas’ fault. Israel has a right to defend themselves, so let’s once again use U.S. tax dollars that could be funding health care and housing to kill more Gazan children.

However, something different clicked through the digital screens before me. The word “genocide” was popping up everywhere, from advocacy emails to Instagram infographics. Social media graphics educating on the “Nakba” were filling my feeds. I was amazed, remembering how even a few years ago throwing out the word “occupation” was controversial. With that, the heaviness in my chest suddenly did something it had never done before: it burst. Years of pain I’ve had to bury, swallow like knives came pouring out of me. The silence stitched into every Palestinian tongue broke loose, and we all screamed.

And for me, for the first time, I truly felt like the world was watching. For the first time, I fully realized it was my right and duty to express the grief and rage living inside of me.

From that, came this art.

1. To be Palestinian (Oct. 12)

A heaviness built in my gut as I drew this piece. I feel torn — I want to touch on universal Palestinian experiences, but I know I only taste a shade of the larger knot of pain. I know that Palestine is not defined by grief and trauma, and carries with it a rich, delicious (seriously, Palestinian fruit is top fucking notch) and vibrant culture I have the privilege of being a part of, even if from a diasporic distance.

I also know our lives are defined by persistent othering. Dehumanization. I’ve lost track of the times I have had to explain what’s really happening in Palestine, dealing with irreverent questions, being told as I beg advocacy spaces to listen to Palestinians that our needs call for an impossible “moral purity.”

This is a norm for U.S. Palestinians even in progressive spaces. Today I watched as the U.S. agreed yet again to send military aid to Israel at the same time Israel said they’re cutting off electricity in Gaza. One Gazan doctor said soon the hospital will be a mass grave as they run out of fuel.

I watch with a nonstop knot in my chest as progressive politicians try to equate Hamas (which yes, is fucked for targeting civilians, but I shouldn’t even have to add that addendum) with a nuclear state with a multibillion-dollar military budget that’s been killing my people for 75 years. That has been abducting children, raiding villages, all while the media was silent.

I watch as celebrities usually vocal on social issues stay silent. As I read the horrible news every day and know that no one in my circles, or most circles, knows what’s going on.

It’s not just the horrors Israel perpetuates that forces us to swallow stones. It’s the silence, the normalization, the knowing of just how much of the world sees us as a nuisance, does not care if we live or die.

So I desperately do what I can. I make art piece after art piece after art piece hoping more people feel the pain that always lives in my gut, that lives in every Palestinian gut. That the norm changes, that Palestinians will get some God damn apologies. Reparations. Freedom. That I can use the word “genocide” without stirring controversy. That I’m just heard.

2. Palestine is bleeding (Oct. 8)

The Arabic word you see on the left says “Gaza.” I wanted to write “we love you Gaza” but my Arabic isn’t that great sadly.

Of the two regions legally declared “Palestine” right now, the West Bank is considered the part of Palestine that has it “easiest,” especially major cities. What is one thing you’ll see all over West Bank houses, especially major cities? Massive black water tanks.

Why the massive black water tanks? Israel only gives Palestinians water, at best, three days of the week, at worst twice a month. Most Palestinians can’t even wash their hair or flush when they pee. Because yes, Israel controls Palestine’s water flow, as well as their trade and airwaves. Palestinians still are only allowed access to 3G at best. Want to send your Palestinian friend a package? Forget it. Oh, and Palestinians, especially Palestinian refugees, can be shot and killed by the Israeli military for walking on the wrong sidewalk or driving on the wrong road. Or for no reason at all.

And Israel won’t even give 66 percent of the West Bank access to water. They’re forced to poop in trash cans and go to local towns for bottled water. I know, because when I visited this part of Palestine (called “Area C”) I had to do both.

And no, the water tanks are not due to water shortages. Israeli settlements, which sit right next to Palestinian towns, regularly have pools in the backyard.

And Gaza has it worse. People in Gaza can’t leave, even for medical emergencies. They’re denied access to electricity. There is no clean drinking water. It was declared unlivable in 2020 and is unlivable because of Israel’s blockade. This sudden uptick in violence and horrendous bombings by Israel is a small grain of sand in a sea of violence against Palestinians by Israel. Yet the effects are treacherous.

That’s why we call it apartheid, colonization, genocide.

3. We just want to be free (Oct. 10)

This piece speaks from my perspective as a Palestinian of the diaspora. I cannot fully speak to the horrors beyond human language taking part in the Gaza Strip. I only watch it from afar, do all I can to support my people, but feel mostly powerless. I speak as someone where getting to visit my own homeland is becoming harder as each year goes by, even with recent political actions by the U.S. government for Palestinian-Americans that are supposed to ease our transit.

I want to go home. I want to not sit with knots in my stomach praying my relatives are safe. I want to be able to call for the freedom of my people without getting the automatic racist response of, “but what about Hamas? Does Israel not have a right to its security?” To be allowed to speak about the horrors of what Palestinians are going through without fear it will hurt my career and future.

I want Israel to stop bulldozing Palestinian homes. I want all Palestinians to have full access to water and electricity, to not have to drive on separate highways and walk on separate sidewalks from Israelis. For Israel’s detention of Palestinian children to end. I want people in Area C to be able to build beautiful homes, to not have to live in caves because Israel won’t let them build anything. I want the people of Gaza to be able to go to bed at night with their only concern being whether or not it will rain tomorrow. I want Israel to stop killing our culture. I want everyone in the West Bank to be able to go to the beach.

I want apartheid to end. I want this genocide to end. I don’t want my tax dollars funding this anymore. I want to scream my truth loud and clear without harassment. To not have to swallow myself over and over and over and over again. I want, simply put, for Palestine to be free.

The people of Palestine are steadfast, and wake up every day refusing to leave their home, their identity. But they shouldn’t have to. They should be able to live their lives with ease, joy, peace.

4. Grief beyond language (Oct. 14)

I have grieved the loss of many loved ones in my lifetime. But the grief over watching the people in Gaza, my people, my ancestry, die in droves under Israel’s horror, is beyond anything I can explain.

I’ve spent half this past week starting at the wall feeling helpless. Genocide feels like too kind, too formal, too soft of a word.

We let Gaza down. We saw them suffer for decades and did nothing. Gaza, you deserved love and a fight for your freedom. The world should’ve stopped just to save you. I’m sorry will never be enough. You were failed. Let us now carry you in our hearts. We will not allow the world to forget your fight for freedom.

5. What is left (Oct. 16)

The grief of a genocide happening to your people while being told it’s your fault and watching the world support it wreaks havoc on the soul in ways I could not comprehend before. My body refuses to eat. This is a pain no one should know or carry.

6. Children should never be ancestors (Nov. 6)

Almost 4,000 children in Gaza dead, killed by Israel, this number not including children who died from lack of access to medical care, dehydration and hunger from Israel cutting off electricity, water and food.

I can’t even comprehend that number. I can’t comprehend one.

We just passed Samhain, a holiday meant to celebrate our relationship to the dead, since the veil between the living and the dead is thin. When I hear the word “ancestor,” I think of the elderly who lived long, hearty lives, people who have had enough life experiences to give guidance to the living.

Children should never be ancestors. Children never had the chance to grow, develop into full beings who know themselves, their quirks, their flaws and strengths. To even learn how to walk, talk, in the cases of many who Israel has killed.

To accept what Israel is doing in Gaza as necessary for their security is to intentionally dehumanize us. To look at us Palestinians as a people and say “yeah, they’re allowed to die.” Do not fall for the genocidal myth. What Israel is doing is unacceptable, unconscionable. Targeting hospitals, schools, mosques and densely populated refugee camps is an atrocity beyond human language.

Call for a ceasefire. Call your government officials every day and demand a ceasefire. Especially if you’re in the U.S. Call for a ceasefire, call for an end to all military support to Israel, call for an end to Israel’s occupation and apartheid. Call for a free Palestine.

7. The world will remember (Oct. 18)

Now is not the time for complicity. The world is watching. Free Palestine. End all U.S. military support to Israel. Demand an end to Israeli apartheid. Call for a ceasefire. Hold Israel accountable, name what they are doing as ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Call your government officials. Post on social media. Educate friends on disinformation. Donate to Palestinian mutual aid funds. Go to a protest. Do not shut down. We need action if we are to survive as a people.

Liz Bajjalieh

Liz Bajjalieh (she/they/he) is a queer Palestinian of the diaspora, artist, poet, and staff member with Peace Action National. All views displayed here are their own.

Via Waging Nonviolence

( Tomdispatch.com) – I’m a voracious reader of American fiction and I’ve noticed something odd in recent years. This country has been eternally “at war” and you just wouldn’t know that — a small amount of veteran’s fiction aside — from the novels that are generally published.  For at least a decade, Americans have been living in the shadow of war and yet, except in pop fiction of the Tom Clancy variety (where, in the end, we always win), there’s remarkably little evidence of it.

As for myself — I’m a novelist — I find that no matter what I chose to write about, I can’t seem to avoid that shadow. My first novel was about Vietnam vets coming home and my second is permeated with a shadowy sense of what the Iraq and Afghan wars have done to us. And yet I’ve never been to, or near, a war, and nothing about it attracts me.  So why is it always lurking there?  Recently, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about just why that might be and I may finally have a very partial answer, very modestly encapsulated in one rather un-American word: class.

Going to War in the South Bronx

I come from — to use an old-fashioned phrase — a working class immigrant family. The middle child of four siblings, not counting the foster children my mother cared for, I grew up in the post-World War II years in the basement of a building in the South Bronx in New York City.  In my neighborhood, war — or at least the military — was the norm. Young men (boys, really) generally didn’t make it through life without serving in some military capacity. Soldiers and veterans were ubiquitous. Except to us, to me, none of them were “soldiers” or “veterans.” They were just Ernie, Charlie, Danny, Tommy, Jamal, Vito, Frank. In our neck of the urban woods — multi-ethnic, diverse, low-income — it was the way things were and you never thought to question that, in just about every apartment on every floor, there was a young man who had been in, would go into, or was at that moment in the military and, given the conflicts of that era, had often been to war as well.

Many of the boys I knew joined the Marines before they could be drafted for some of the same reasons men and women volunteer now. (Remember that there was still a draft army then, not the all-volunteer force of 2013.)  However clichéd they may sound today, they reflected a reality I knew well. Then as now, the military held out the promise of a potentially meaningful future instead of the often depressing adult futures that surrounded us as we grew up.

Buy the Book

Then as now, however, too many of those boys returned home with little or nothing to show for the turmoil they endured. And then as now, they often returned filled with an inner chaos, a lost-ness from which many searched in vain for relief.

When I was seven, the Korean War began. I was 18 when our first armed advisers arrived in Vietnam. After that disaster finally ended, a lull ensued, broken by a series of “skirmishes” from Grenada to Panama to Somalia to Bosnia, followed by the First Gulf War, and then, of course, the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

I dated, worked with, or was related to men who participated in some of these wars and conflicts. One of my earliest memories, in fact — I must have been three — is of my anxious 19-year-old sister waiting for her soldier-fiancé to make his way home from World War II. Demobilized, he finally arrived with no outward signs that war had taken a toll on him. Like so many of those “greatest generation” vets, though, he wouldn’t or couldn’t talk about his experiences, and remained hard to reach about most things for years afterwards. His army hat was my first military souvenir.

When I was eight or nine, my brother was drafted into the Korean War and I can still remember my constant worries about his well-being. I wrote my childish letters to him nearly every day. He had been assigned to Camp Breckinridge, Kentucky, given a pair of lace-up boots, and told he’d be training as a paratrooper. He could never get past the anxiety that assignment bestowed on him. Discharged, many pounds thinner and with a bad case of mononucleosis, he came home with a need to have guns around, guns he kept close at hand for the rest of his life.

My first “serious” boyfriend was a sailor on the U.S.S. Warrington. I was 15. Not surprisingly, he was away more than home. He mustered out with an addiction to alcohol.

I was 18 when my second boyfriend was drafted. John F. Kennedy was president and the Vietnam War was, then, just a blip on the American horizon. He didn’t serve overseas, but afterwards he, too, couldn’t figure out what to do with the rest of his life. And so it went.

Today, I no longer live in the South Bronx where, I have no doubt, women as well as men volunteer for the military with similar mindsets to those of my youth, and unfortunately return home with problems similar to those suffered by generations of soldiers before them. Suffice it to say that veterans of whatever war returned having experienced the sharp edge of death and nothing that followed in civilian life could or would be as intense.

Rejecting War

It’s in the nature of militaries to train their soldiers to hate, maim, and kill the enemy, but in the midst of the Vietnam War — I had, by then, made it out of my neighborhood and my world — something challenged this trained-to-kill belief system and it began to break down in a way previously unknown in our history.  With that mindset suddenly in ruins, many young men refused to fight, while others who had gone to war, ones from neighborhoods like mine, came home feeling like murderers.

In those years, thinking of those boys and many others, I joined the student antiwar movement, though I was often the only one in any group not regularly on campus.  (Working class women worked at paying jobs!)  As I learned more about that war, my anger grew at the way my country was devastating a land and a people who had done nothing to us. The loss of American and Vietnamese lives, the terrible wounds, all of it felt like both a waste and a tragedy. From 1964 on, ending that war sooner rather than later became my 24/7 job (when, that is, I wasn’t at my paying job).

During those years, two events remain vivid in my memory. I was part of a group that opened an antiwar storefront coffee shop near Fort Dix in New Jersey, a camp where thousands of recruits received basic training before being shipped out to Vietnam. We served up coffee, cake, music, posters, magazines, and antiwar conversation to any soldiers who came in during their off-hours — and come in they did. I met young men from as far away as Nebraska and Iowa, as close by as Queens and Brooklyn. I have no idea if any of them ever refused to deploy to Vietnam as some soldiers did in those years. However, that coffee house gave me an education in just how vulnerable, scared, excited, unprepared, and uninformed they were about what they would be facing and, above all, about the country they were invading.

Buy the Book

Our storefront hours ran from 5 pm to whenever. On the inevitable night bus back to the Port Authority terminal, I would be unable to shake my sadness. Night after night, on that ride home I remember thinking: if only I had the power to do something more to save their lives, for I knew that some of them would come back in body bags and others would return wounded physically or emotionally in ways that I remembered well. And for what? That was why talking with them has remained in my memory as both a burden and a blessing.

The second event that stays with me occurred in May 1971 in Washington, D.C. A large group of Vietnam veterans, men who had been in the thick of it and seen it all, decided they needed to do something that would bring national attention to the goal of ending the war. The method they chose was to act out their repudiation of their previous participation in it. Snaking past the Capitol, an extremely long line of men in uniform threw purple hearts and medals of every sort into a trash bin. Most then made a brief statement about why they hated the war and could no longer bear to keep those medals. I was there and I’ll never forget their faces. One soldier, resisting the visible urge to cry, simply walked off without saying a word, only to collapse on a fellow soldier’s shoulder. Many of us watched, sobbing.

Breathing War

In those years, I penned political articles, but never fiction. Reality overwhelmed me. Only after that war ended did I begin to write my world, the one that was — always — shadowed by war, in fiction.

Why doesn’t war appear more often in American novels? Novelist Dorothy Allison once wrote, “Literature is the lie that tells the truth.” Yet in a society where war is ever-present, that truth manages to go missing in much of fiction. These days, the novels I come across have many reference points, cultural or political, to mark their stories, but war is generally not among them. 

My suspicion: it has something to do with class. If war is all around us and yet, for so many non-working-class Americans, increasingly not part of our everyday lives, if war is the thing that other people do elsewhere in our name and we reflect our world in our fiction, then that thing is somehow not us.

My own urge is to weave war into our world, the way Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer, once wove apartheid into her novels — without, that is, speechifying or pontificating or even pointing to it.  When American fiction ignores the fact of war and its effects remain hidden, without even brief mentions as simple markers of time and place, it also accepts peace as the background for the stories we tell. And that is, in its own way, the lie that denial tells.

That war shadows me is a difficult truth, and for that I have my old neighborhood to thank. If war is the background to my novels about everyday life, it’s because it’s been in the air I breathed, which naturally means my characters breathe it, too.

Copyright 2013 Beverly Gologorsky

Tomdispatch.com

Former Osage chief says film will force state to come to terms with its troubled past

By: Carmen Forman 

( Florida Phoenix) – OKLAHOMA CITY — Although many Oklahomans were long ignorant about how white settlers systematically murdered members of the Osage Nation for their oil wealth in the 1920s, “Killers of the Flower Moon” will mark a milestone in how the state addresses its complex and painful history.

The Friday release of the film that shines a spotlight on that dark chapter in Oklahoma will force a deeper conversation about the state coming to terms with its past, said former Osage Nation Principal Chief Jim Gray.

“This history’s been buried just like the Black Wall Street massacre,” he said. “There’s a lot of unfortunate events that have happened in Oklahoma’s past that a lot of people, especially people who live in Oklahoma, just do not know. If it wasn’t for this book and this movie, I don’t think anybody would know this story outside of Osage County.”

“Killers of the Flower Moon,” which will be screened in movie theaters across the world, tells the true story of the Reign of Terror — in which non-Native Oklahomans killed members of the Osage Nation to claim their land and mineral rights that held the key to immense riches.

The Martin Scorsese film is an adaptation of David Grann’s bestselling nonfiction book that taught many Oklahomans about the Osage murders for the first time.

Gray and Lt. Gov. Matt Pinnell, formerly the state’s tourism secretary, drew parallels between the release of the film and the state coming to grips with the Tulsa Race Massacre.

Many Oklahomans didn’t know the full story behind the Tulsa Race Massacre or didn’t talk openly about the incident until the city marked the 100th anniversary of the 1921 tragedy in which a white mob destroyed the affluent Black neighborhood of Greenwood in north Tulsa.

The nation turned its attention to Tulsa in 2021 when the city marked the massacre’s centennial with a series of events that included a visit from President Joe Biden.

The nation will once again turn its attention to Oklahoma upon the release of “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

The 2023 film “Killers of the Flower Moon” starring Lily Gladstone, left, and Leonardo DiCaprio depicts the true events of the Osage Reign of Terror in 1920s Oklahoma. (Photo provided)

Addressing history

Pinnell said he grew up five minutes from the site of the massacre but never learned about the incident in school. Now, Oklahoma is addressing that history head on, he said.

There is a growing cultural tourism movement for civil rights trails and other historical sites that tell the unvarnished truth about the past, he said.

“What you saw with telling the whole story of the race massacre is that it opened up opportunities for the businesses all along Main Street in Black Wall Street and the new Greenwood Rising Museum,” Pinnell said. “It’s not just a mural anymore. It has to be more than that. And with “Killers of the Flower Moon,” I would say it has to be more than just a movie and a book.”

Gray, who led the Osage Nation from 2002 to 2010, is the great grandson of Henry Roan, whose murder is addressed in Grann’s book and depicted in the movie.

The Osage Nation has about 24,000 enrolled members. Roughly half of them live in Oklahoma.

Filmed in parts of northeastern Oklahoma, “Killers of the Flower Moon” stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone, and Robert De Niro. At least 24 members of the Osage Nation and their supporters were murdered during the Reign of Terror, although the death toll is presumed to be much higher.

Scorsese and others producing the film worked closely with members of the Osage Nation, including Gray, to tell the story of the serial murders in a culturally sensitive manner.

When the movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival this summer, Osage Nation Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear said his people still suffer from the tragedy “to this very day.” But he said working with Scorsese and his team “restored trust” that the director would tell the story appropriately.

Oklahoma Film and Music Office Director Jeanette Stanton praised the director for working closely with members of the tribe to ensure the film’s authenticity.

“Obviously, it’s a story that needs to be told,” she said. “It’s part of our history.”

Gray said it can be difficult to talk about the Reign of Terror when Oklahoma’s 38 other Native American tribes have similarly horrific stories.

Trail of Tears

The federal government forced the Five Tribes to move from their ancestral homelands to Oklahoma before it became a state through a series of arduous marches known as the Trail of Tears.

“We have to make peace with this past of ours and, in some way, move forward with the knowledge that something’s happened that should never be repeated,” Gray said.

Local historian and attorney Bob Burke said allegations of non-Natives breaking the law to steal money from Indigenous Oklahomans in the years after statehood are not new.

Although not taught in schools, Oklahoma’s history is full of stories about the estates of Native American children being stolen and efforts to appoint guardians for Indigenous adults who became wealthy due to oil, he said.

Kate Barnard, Oklahoma’s first commissioner of charities and corrections and the first woman to win statewide elected office, investigated hundreds of cases of wrongdoing involving appointed guardians who stole from the Native children they were supposed to protect, Burke said.

“This part of Oklahoma history is sad and unsettling,” Burke said. “If the movie causes Oklahomans to pause and reflect upon what happened to our fellow citizens a century ago, that is good.”

This story is republished from the Oklahoma Voice, an affiliate, like the Phoenix, of the nonprofit States Newsroom network.

 

Carmen Forman

Carmen covers state government, politics and health care from Oklahoma City. A Norman native, she previously worked in Arizona and Virginia before she began reporting on the Oklahoma Capitol.

 

Via Florida Phoenix

Published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Almost a decade ago, the Sunni jihadist network known as the “Islamic State” (IS) declared the formation of an Islamic Caliphate after they captured the Iraqi city of Mosul in June 2014.

In response, tens of thousands of Shia men joined a complex patchwork of militias to fight against IS. Many of these militias are notoriously violent and directly loyal to Iran’s theocratic state.

But very little is known about how these Shia militias were so quickly and so effectively mobilised. In our research, we have taken a novel approach, examining the many popular music videos produced by these militias.

These music videos drew on a complex cocktail of historical myths and contemporary clergymen to mobilise Iraq’s Shia population to fight the IS.

Foundational myths, historical grievances

The popular music videos explicitly reference a deeply held set of religious myths and symbols that have informed Shia politics since its inception.

One video shows images of militiamen driving towards the front-lines and firing from a bunker at IS targets.

The singer extols the religious virtues of fighting the IS by comparing those killed today with the Shia martyrs at the Battle of Karbala:

We fight our enemies. Our martyrs are similar to the martyrs of Karbala. Our people are supporters of Hussein.

The divide between the Sunni and Shia sects dates back to the early years of Islam.

A debate emerged after the Prophet Muhammad’s death about who should lead the Islamic community. The majority accepted the authority of the Prophet’s senior companion, Abu Bakr. A minority, later identified as Shiites, believed only a blood relative of the Prophet – in particular, his cousin Ali – had the right to lead.

In the year 680, the division between the two sects escalated at the Battle of Karbala, where Ali’s son Hussein and many of his followers were defeated and executed by Sunni forces.

The legend of the Battle of Karbala has come to symbolise the historical injustice of the Shia faithful at the hands of the Sunni majority. It is commemorated at the annual Ashura festival in which Shiites reenact the battle, including by self-flagellation.

The emotive lyrics and tone of the song are specifically designed to resonate with this history of suffering.

The Shia jihad against the IS

The popular music videos produced by different Shia militias also draw on fatwas (religious edicts) issued by several prominent Shia clerics in response to the violence of the IS.

In 2014, Iraq’s most senior Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Sistani issued a fatwa announcing a jihad (holy war) against the IS.

He called for a mass Shia mobilisation, arguing

It is the legal and national responsibility of whoever can hold a weapon to take up arms to defend the country, the citizens and the holy sites.

Some popular music videos explicitly cite the fatwas of Sistani and other clerics, encouraging their young supporters to heed these calls. A short clip shows armed members of one militia chanting: “Al-Sistani is like a crown on our heads. Your wish is our command.”

One very slickly produced music video refers to both historical grievances over the failure to recognise Ali as the legitimate heir of the Prophet Muhammad and to the centrality of Sistani’s fatwa to their decision to fight the IS:

We are the Turkmen [of Iraq]

We follow Ali’s path

Iraq must live in peace and happiness

When Sistani orders us, we obey. We will defeat and destroy the IS

We believe in the fatwas of our religious authorities, and we defend our holy sites.

As the singer recites each verse, the footage shows heavily armed Shia men posing in front of a tank. It also features live action footage from various battles against the IS, including advancing on key targets, firing machine guns and heavy artillery.

Mobilising young men

These videos serve as a unique archive of the war against the IS, demonstrating the ways in which these militias found novel ways to mobilise young men to fight by drawing on a rich catalogue of Shia religious symbolism as well as the fatwas of clerics like Sistani.

Slick popular music videos draw on a rich catalogue of historical motifs of suffering as well as the contemporary edicts of key clergymen, produced by different Shia militias and shared on YouTube and other social media platforms.

These evocative and poignant songs played an underappreciated and under-examined part in mobilising young men to fight back against the horrors of the IS, indicating the powerful role popular culture plays in contemporary warfare.

Benjamin Isakhan, Professor of International Politics, Deakin University and Ali Akbar, Sessional lecturer and researcher, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Human Rights Watch Testifies Before Senate Subcommittee on Investigations

Human Rights Watch – (Beirut) – The United States should investigate and regulate sovereign wealth funds like Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) that have been linked to human rights abuses, Human Rights Watch said in testimony today before the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

The hearing examined the fund’s substantial holdings in the United States. It followed the announced merger in June 2023 of the Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) and LIV Golf, which is owned by the Saudi fund. Under Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, the fund has facilitated and benefitted from human rights abuses. The crown prince is chairman of the US$700 billion fund, which is built on the state’s oil wealth.

“Mohammed Bin Salman has shown a clear interest in expanding his influence beyond Saudi’s borders often through high-profile business deals with sports teams and leagues,” said Joey Shea, Saudi Arabia researcher at Human Rights Watch. “US businesses considering a handshake with Saudi’s PIF should undertake extremely rigorous due diligence to ensure that sovereign wealth funds that invest in US companies are not furthering human rights abuses.”

Human Rights Watch has reported extensively on the Crown Prince’s consolidation of political and security power over the last few years in Saudi Arabia, and the dire implications for human rights. In tandem, MBS has consolidated economic power in the Kingdom notably via the PIF.

The fund has been directly involved in human rights abuses linked to the crown prince. They include the 2017 “anti-corruption” crackdown that involved arbitrary detentions, abusive treatment, and the extortion of property from former and current government officials, prominent businessmen, and rivals within the royal family, as well as the 2018 murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

This raises serious concerns for US businesses engaging with the PIF, and any possible links this may create between them and abuses in Saudi Arabia and abroad, particularly as the fund expands its investments in key sectors of the US economy, including technology, sports, entertainment, and finance. This should also be a concern for US regulators and Congress, Human Rights Watch said.

Some sovereign wealth funds are structurally separate and distinct from a government’s chief executive. But the crown prince wields significant control over the PIF, one of the largest such funds in the world, and exercises unilateral decision-making with little transparency or accountability over the fund’s decisions. While Saudi Arabia’s state finances have long been characterized by a lack of transparency and oversight, the restructuring and dramatic expansion of the fund has consolidated – to an unprecedented degree – vast economic power in Saudi Arabia under the Crown Prince alone.

Human Rights Watch wrote to the fund’s governor, Yasir al-Rumayyan, who, according to a LinkedIn page attributed to al-Rumayyan and various media reports, was managing director of the fund between 2015 and 2019, on December 21, 2021, and again on March 15, 2022, requesting his response to allegations of serious human rights violations associated with the fund. He has not responded.

As a result of the corruption crackdown, about 20 companies were captured as part of the crackdown and transferred directly into the fund at the crown prince’s instructions, according to documents in a Canadian lawsuit that Human Rights Watch reviewed. Some of those detained in 2017 remain in detention without charge, and others have not been heard from since.

There has been no transparency regarding the asset seizure process. Some of the assets seized during the crackdown appear, according to The Guardian, to have been transferred to a holding company that is wholly owned by the PIF, apparently on the orders of Mohammed bin Salman. Other assets were reportedly transferred to a different government-controlled holding company managed by the Ministry of Finance. It is not clear who ultimately took ownership of the other assets.

The documents also indicated that one of the companies transferred was Sky Prime Aviation, a charter jet company that owned the two planes used in 2018 by Saudi agents to travel to Istanbul, where they murdered Khashoggi. In February 2021, the CIA released a report assessing that Mohammed bin Salman had approved the operation.

Over the last several years, the Saudi government has embarked on a vast campaign to rehabilitate its image and deflect from the global perception of the Saudi state as a severe and persistent human rights violator, particularly under the de facto leadership of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The PIF, although an arm of the Saudi government and controlled by the country’s de facto leader, has sought to portray itself as an investor acting based on financial interests, rather than at the direction of the Crown Prince.

Saudi Arabia has hosted or sponsored events that celebrate human achievement, like major sporting events in the effort to improve its image. The fund is a central component of the country’s Vision 2030, which explicitly laid out the role of sports in enhancing the image of Saudi Arabia abroad.

On June 6, the PGA Tour announced an agreement combining the fund’s golf-related commercial businesses and rights, including LIV Golf, with the PGA Tour and DP World Tour into “a new, collectively owned, for-profit entity.” Unlike the sponsorship of an event or ownership of a team, control over an entire sector of professional sports raises the possibility of pressuring players, sponsors, and media to stay silent on Saudi Arabia’s abuses, and raises concerns about what measures will be taken within the league to undermine human rights.

Human Rights Watch wrote to the PGA Tour’s Policy Board on June 22 detailing concerns about the implications of the fund effectively obtaining a monopoly over professional golf while it is also complicit in human rights abuses. As of September 13, Human Rights Watch had not received a response, nor are there indications that the tour has sought to develop a human rights strategy.

“It’s important that the US Congress is looking into the influence of the Saudi fund into US business,” Shea said. “The Biden administration should be taking similar cautions in its further engagement with the Saudi government, given its rights record and how it is using its billions to launder its image.”

(The Conversation) – Through her poetically constructed images, Hoda Afshar illuminates a world overshadowed by history and atrocity. Yet we never see despair: we see defiance, comradeship, reinvention and a search for how photography can activate new ways of thinking.

Afshar was born in Iran and migrated to Australia in 2007. She began her practice as a documentary photographer in Tehran, having originally been attracted to acting.

Staging and creative intervention would become significant features of her work.

Even in her early, nominally “documentary” series, you can sense an embracing of the ambiguity of the still image, and an interest in composing a reality more vivid (and perhaps genuine) than dispassionate reportage might be capable of.

Afshar is now one of Australia’s most significant photo media artists, so it’s a surprise that Hoda Afshar: A Curve is a Broken Line at the Art Gallery of New South Wales is her first major survey exhibition.

What unites her materially diverse work is a concern with visibility: who is denied it, what is made visible by media, and how photography can reveal, overlook and manipulate truth.

Much of her work addresses critical humanitarian issues of our time: war, statelessness, diaspora, oppression, corruption. She challenges stereotypes. We don’t see passive victims or closed narratives: we are introduced to new perspectives that might lead us to reappraise the world we inhabit.

Familiarity and distance

The exhibition is made up of six bodies of work, the first of which began with the passing away of her father in Iran.

In the exodus, I love you more (2014–) is a portrait of her home country formed by experiences of familiarity and distance. The artist is both at home and searching, like an outsider. Images suggest at times an intimate proximity, and at others a separation akin to the one made by raising a camera to your eye.

Afshar examines her experience of migration and, she tells me, seeks to “dismantle the idea of there being one way of seeing Iran”.

The final image in this series shows the erasure of a woman’s face in a painted Persian miniature.

In the adjoining room, the new series In turn (2023) is a suite of large, framed photographs of Iranian women based in Australia. Many images show them as they tenderly braid one another’s hair. These women are unidentifiable, apart from artist and activist Mahla Karimian, who appears airborne with a pair of flying doves.

This work was catalysed by the women-led protest movement sparked by the death of Mahsa Jina Amini, an Iranian Kurdish woman arrested in September 2022 for not following Iran’s strict female dress codes. The uprising filled the streets with women chanting “Women, Life, Freedom!” and “Say her name!” in fearless defiance of authorities, who responded with murderous retaliation.

Afshar was observing her homeland from afar. She says she wanted to “share voices the media was ignoring”. She was inspired by social media images of women plaiting each other’s hair in public: a rebellious act that echoes a practice of female Kurdish fighters preparing for battle.

But the images aren’t violent. They’re quietly peaceful, showing solidarity in grief, hope and determination. In making this “visual letter” to her Iranian sisters, Afshar has risked long-term exile from her country of birth.

Resolute defiance

Much of Afshar’s work fearlessly tells stories that have been hidden or misrepresented.

Remain (2018) was made in collaboration with asylum seekers detained on Manus Island.

This work is made up of a series of austere, absorbing portraits and a large-scale two-channel video installation.

We see men imprisoned in a place that would otherwise resemble paradise. We hear their voices recounting experiences of trauma and displacement. But, with Afshar, they co-create performative, narrative-evoking works that avoid degrading cliches of victimhood.

The most widely recognised image in this series is a portrait of Kurdish Iranian writer and filmmaker Behrouz Boochani, who chose to be pictured alongside fire. Smoke and flames echo the ardent strength of his gaze. This strength allowed him to emerge a free man after six years of incarceration.

In Behold (2016), once more we see acts of resolute defiance by people performing for the camera. Afshar was invited by a group of gay men to observe re-enacted gestures of protection and intimacy outlawed in most of the Middle East.

Unable to freely express their love in society, they disclose and affirm it for Afshar and her lens.

Agonistes (2020) pays homage to a group of Australian whistleblowers who appear as a Greek chorus of heroic truth tellers.

Created through a complex process of photographic recording and 3D printing that conjures lifelike detail, the portraits look like sculpted marble busts. But this rendering leaves the eyes blank, and captions describing the corruption revealed by each figure don’t divulge their names.

Afshar maintains her practice of disclosing truth while protecting those who have the courage to tell it.

Being alive is breaking

Speak the wind (2015–22) returns us to Iran, to the Strait of Hormuz, where “ill winds” are said to blow. African slaves were brought here over centuries, a trade only stopped in the 1920s.

Afshar’s photographs and video imagery explore a place haunted by history. We see the outward manifestations of an invisible wind (dramatically carved rock formations, ripples in water, flowing fabric). Shrouded figures bow on the dry earth, seeking cure from possession by malicious spirits.

Afshar investigates to what extent we are captives of history (in Australia we must grapple with the legacy of colonisation). In making this lyrical work, Afshar again collaborated with local people, some who made drawings of “wind spirits” they said they had encountered.

The title of the exhibition was inspired by lines in a poem by Kaveh Akbar:

a curve is a straight line broken at all its points so much
of being alive is breaking.

Hoda Afshar’s work addresses conflict, injustice, mobility and the often fragile state of being alive. It reminds us that dominant powers can be challenged by exposing truth and envisioning something new.

Hoda Afshar: A Curve is a Broken Line is at the Art Gallery of New South Wales until January 21 2024.

Tom Williams, Lecturer – Visual Arts, University of Wollongong

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.