“Yo Soy Muslim” is a lyrical picture book about a parent who encourages their child to find joy and pride in all aspects of their multicultural identity – from Muslim and Latino poet Mark Gonzales.
Dear little one,
… know you are wondrous.
A child of crescent moons,
a builder of mosques,
a descendant of brilliance,
an ancestor in training…
Rebecca Rafferty: My evening wrapped at MuCCC with a staged reading of Jen Marlowe’s based-on-reality play, “There is a Field.” The premise of the story is that a young man is murdered by police at a protest. His sister, a medical student, seeks answers as her family and community grieve their loss. But the answers aren’t forthcoming, and each of the characters struggle in different ways with the concept of the futile pursuit of retribution, and if and how to engage in forgiveness.
Scraps of narration punctuate and pull together bits of live acting and flashbacks, as slowly the audience learns the story of a Palestinian Arab family living in what is now Israel. It’s important to phrase it that way, because the family did not move to Israel; they never left what was once Palestine. Through anecdotes of discrimination and conflict, the play conveys a strong picture of second-class citizenship.
Both the script and the way it is presented are important in a number of ways. The story presents the brother-sister relationship in a realistic rivalry-meets-undying-love kind of way, which feels very relatable across cultures and borders.
But crucially, the show is acted entirely by a black cast. Solidarity between black Americans and Palestinians makes a world of sense. The themes of massively imbalanced power structures, police and military brutality, and authorities investigating themselves to zero effect are all too familiar. More here.
Yes, I know that Bono is an idiot politically (as late as May this year he was hanging out with George W Bush at his ranch in Texas – need I say more?) but “The Joshua Tree” has always been one of my favorite albums, since those days back in Lahore when my brother and I used to rock to it, so I had to go to the U2 concert in Buffalo yesterday – it didn’t hurt that Beck opened the show (what a wonderfully modest guy).
Before the band appeared on stage, powerful words from a series of poems were projected onto a screen, starting with “Let America Be America Again” by Langston Hughes. There were poems by Whitman, Pinsky, and Sandburg, but also by Lucille Clifton and Palestinian American poet Naomi Shihab Nye and “The Border: A Double Sonnet” by Alberto Rios. The discovery for me was Jamila Woods and her “Ghazal for White Hen Pantry.”
The film projection that continued through most of the concert was gorgeous, riveting. It spoke to the vastness and beauty of American landscapes and lingered fittingly on the faces of the indigenous peoples of this land. There was some preoccupation with the American flag, which I could have done without.
In typically confused Bono fashion, there was a tribute to women (to She Moves in Mysterious Ways) which started with the pictures of Sojourner Truth, bell hooks and Angela Davis. I have to confess I was moved. The pictures continued. Begum Rokeya who was a Bengali writer, educationist, feminist born in 1880, Wangari Maathai, Rosa Parks, Saffiyah Khan, Heather Heyer. My eyes welled up. But then guess who came next – Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice. Broke the spell in a rather unpleasant way.
As far as the music, the band was spot-on (The Edge still got it) but Bono’s voice is gone, so much so that they’ve had to slightly reconfigure their songs in order to accommodate the cracking. But he’s a trooper and the encore was great – Elevation got everyone jumping again when it was close to midnight. So yeah, good music, some emotional moments, a fight between two drunk guys right next to us, and the thrill of sharing music from so long ago with my 17 year old daughter 🙂
enjoyed “clouds of sils maria” probably because i love juliette binoche, but also because it’s an interesting (almost literal) look at the imbrication between art and life, it keeps the lens focused on three distinct women and their candid (non-melodramatic) interactions, and because it talks about the passage of time in a poignant, beautiful way. i don’t mind the ambiguity or so-called loose ends – welcome to french cinema and olivier assayas’s work. on netflix.
Today the Whitney Museum of American Art and its beautiful city views. Started with Alexander Calder’s Hypermobility. Many of his gorgeous, delicately balanced sculptures were activated at certain times by the Museum and they danced elegantly, like three dimensional musical notes, producing ethereal shadows all around them. Hélio Oiticica’s installations were premised on the idea that artists need to be free to create – there were sandy beaches to explore barefoot, rooms filled with colorful projections, Jimi Hendrix music and fitted with hammocks for us to swing in, a pool table, and much more. Finally an Incomplete History of Protest had fantastic posters, videos and installations, all extremely relevant today. After the Whitney, my daughter and I walked along the High Line to get to Chelsea Market. Had some cheesecake at Sarabeth’s, looked at some of the artists’ stalls and then back to the hotel. The day ended with excellent Mexican food at El Rio Grande with both my kids 🙂
saw “divines” last night. directed by french moroccan filmmaker houda benyamina and shot in slums on the edges of the banlieues, it’s full of energy, female protagonists, and formidable female friendships. loved how it flipped many roles, expectations, paradigms and the very normalization of the male gaze. the end is a bit over the top but v much in keeping with jacques audiard. in fact, oulaya amamra reminded me of tahar rahim in “a prophet” – same rawness and magnetism. just stunning to think of how much talent there is out there, how many stories to tell, and new ways of approaching cinema. it’s criminal that we are still being served the same old, white, heteropatriarchal fare.
i loved the closing credits – beautifully haunting, like some kind of sacred text. title designer anaïs mak:
houda had this desire to evoke a sacred script during the end credits with references to the cosmos in particular. so i suggested that we take inspiration from the palimpsest – these are handwritten documents whose writing has been erased to be able to rewrite on top of it. the traces that preceded it are always there to be seen. i think it was an interesting way to portray the character’s quest for a spiritual father – what precedes us but which escapes us.
MAHVISH AHMAD: Sara Ahmed argues that the fragility from which the possibility of feminism is born is simultaneously a fragility to which we must remain attentive and, in some senses, loyal. The point is not to recreate another hard structure that produces another norm in which all do not fit. In fact, Ahmed warns against feminist movements that become too rigid, for instance those that exclude trans* women as women or, alternately, those who demonize feminists who point out differences between women; she urges the reemergence of the killjoy in such moments to destroy structures yet again. Unlike the brick walls of the master’s house in institutions of privilege and power, feminist dwellings must be built of a lighter material that give space for movement.
The centrality of brokenness as a condition of feminism, politics, even being is brought home in some lines of poetry that Lorde recited in 1977 in Chicago, dedicated to Winnie Mandela, who was imprisoned at the time:
Broken down gods survive
in the crevasses and mudpots
of every beleaguered city
where it is obvious
there are too many bodies
to cart to the gallows.
and our uses have become
more important than our silence
. . .
and our labor
has become more important
than our silence
Our labor has become
more important
than our silence.
It is at a moment of shattering and splintering that feminism is, or can be, born: as a powerful and dangerous army of broken-down gods. More here.
just finished reading “maus” – it’s unlike anything i’ve ever read. a story within a story, with past and present interwoven seamlessly into one visually rich narrative, the staggering, meticulous work that went into creating a highly compact graphic novel (it took 8 years to complete) but then the accessibility of its form, its brutal honesty (spiegelman is interested in a personal search for truth, not myth-making), and its undeniable intelligence and intimacy. i will be thinking about this book for a long long time.
Yesterday I saw a remarkable film about the American prison system at The Dryden Theatre. Brett Story’s The Prison in 12 Landscapes is a series of vignettes that stitch together a quiet but compelling narrative. It approaches mass incarceration tangentially, from multiple vantage points, in an effort to define the contours of a prison system that has been deliberately disappeared, camouflaged, rendered inaccessible. By painting American landscapes rooted in diverse geographies, histories and socio-economic realities, the film is able to explore many dimensions of the prison system such as urban decay, environmental degradation, poverty, unemployment, gentrification, job creation, policing, racism, injustice, the criminalization of protest, etc. By refusing to shoot inside prisons, not only does the film avoid the usual images of human beings ensnared in cages but it also decenters crime from the discussion of mass incarceration.
Inspired by the work of Ruthie Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis and others in the anti-prison movement, Brett’s film aims to interrupt our complacency and questions the very logic of an invisibilized carceral system, a crime and punishment experiment that’s not more than 200 years old, but impacts millions of people.
As a filmmaker, I found amazing parallels with my own work. For example, the idea that documentary film is a malleable art form, not straightforward reportage, the refusal to be tied to a linear plot, the freedom to mix beautiful imagery with heavy content, the decision to discard cliched images that reinforce certain stereotypes by using alternative modes of representation, the invitation for audiences to fill in the blanks and interact with the material, etc. Much like what I did with A Thin Wall, Brett too decouples the various audio-visual components of film (visuals, background noise, voice-over, music, graphics, etc) and puts them back together according to her own ethical and aesthetic preferences. It’s a different way to construct documentary film.
After the screening, I asked her if perhaps this was a feminine way to articulate film, our own écriture féminine which doesn’t subscribe to the Ken Burns formula 🙂
i came to “game of thrones” very late, as usual, but what a pile of nonsensical violence and stunningly crude misogyny. it’s supposed to be “fantasy”? indeed, it’s the fantasy of the stereotypical deeply disturbed teenage boy. i’m surprised that something this boring in its mediocrity could have ever garnered so much attention. and the misogyny? it’s so embedded in the show, so vile and routine, that it’s hard to take. digs deep into how far we’ve come as women, when this is an acceptable mainstream show in 2017. i assume it’s still going.
p.s. i know this justification well, that it’s a “period” piece. i’m sorry but it’s not a historical depiction of misogyny. look at the way it’s shot, which has nothing to do with medieval europe. they didn’t have cinematography back then. it’s the gratuitous consumption of the female body. it’s putting women in positions of subjugation where they lose all control, all identity, all the time, for no reason. it’s not about character arcs, it’s about ambient misogyny – misogyny as background noise, as backdrop to the show, much like a video game meant for teenage boys.
and the defense of the show on the basis of all the apparently strong, complex female characters and their so-called empowerment? i don’t find women acting like misogynistic men empowered and therefore don’t find the show (or alternatively the books) to be that feminist. also, i’m a bit confused about the unquestionable, historically accurate parameters within which these characters are supposed to function. as far as i know there were no dragons or zombies in medieval europe. isn’t this genre supposed to be fantasy? if we can’t fantasize about revolution, where women can be more than men in skirts, then how do we have the temerity of talking about/hoping for revolution in real life?
finally saw “i am not your negro” (had been waiting patiently for the film since i came across an interview with raoul peck back in 2016), and am still shaken. it’s an emotional experience. yes, the utter brutality of white supremacy, yes, baldwin’s luminosity and fearless words, yes, peck’s genius in reincarnating baldwin and making him present thru the medium of film, yes, samuel l jackson’s stunning narration (it doesn’t mimic baldwin’s unique cadence but rather remodulates jackson’s voice to produce a slower, smoother, weightier rhythm and timbre and flows seamlessly in and out of baldwin clips), yes, the bold graphics and robust music that highlight baldwin’s vigor and audacity but also his pain, yes, the surreal reliving of the murders of medgar evers, malcolm x and martin luther king (none of them lived to be 40), yes, the vulgarity of doris day and gary cooper dancing heedlessly when juxtaposed with photographs of lynched bodies, yes, the ugliness exposed by the desegregation of schools and captured in photographs and video footage, yes, baldwin’s searing commentary on white america’s immaturity and preference for a world of warped fantasy (embodied by john wayne, who spent his entire film career admonishing and shooting native americans), yes, to all of this and more. but what broke my heart irrevocably was when, toward the end of the film, the camera zooms in on the faces of black men and women. we are able to make eye contact with them directly, personally, and it’s almost unbearable to look them in the face. the film’s eloquence and power are worthy of james baldwin. and that’s saying a lot.
Saw Meleko Mokgosi’s stunning Pax Kaffraria (2010 – 2014) at the Memorial Art Gallery today. It is “an eight-chapter project that takes Botswana, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe as case studies, and articulates questions around issues of national identification, colonial history, globalization, trans-nationality, whiteness, African-ness, and post-colonial aesthetics.” Had the opportunity to listen to Mokgosi, who was born in Francistown, Botswana, talk about his work.
He explained how the project is a response to rising nationalism and xenophobia. Although we understand the fluidity of borders and identity more than ever before, the world is becoming increasingly nationalistic and shutting down. People invest emotions in objects such as flags and in privileges that they can access as citizens of nation-states. Is it because jouissance is limited and therefore any curtailment of enjoyment is blamed on the other, the outsider?
Mokgosi construes nationalism as highly masculine and is interested in the role of women in African liberation movements. Not only are they missing from such histories, but they continue to exist without existing – a condition that he represents through visual redaction. He wants to impress upon us that subjectivity is real, not just a theoretical exercise. It’s something that’s felt in the body.
Mokgosi’s work dealts with problems of representation i.e. painting Africans without essentializing them. He wants to background blackness and use black bodies allegorically. He finds semiotic representations to be more open-ended, whereas linguistics are finite. He is aware of the need to unlearn Eurocentric history, which is written, sequential and based on contextual analysis. History can also be oral and non-linear, as it in Africa and other parts of the world.
Art itself is strongly Eurocentric: “we all learn to paint by painting white people.” The techniques and primary colors used to paint skin are all meant to recreate white skin. Mokgosi refuses to use those techniques. He doesn’t use white Gesso as a base and rather than treat painting as an additive process, he removes layers of color. He has developed his own artistic process and language.
He also prefers more nuanced emotional registers. Obviously, he avoids the stereotypical angry black man or the sad black woman, in fact, he avoids any over-performance by his Africans subjects. He loves representations of middle-class African lives, where nothing much is happening.
He uses negative space to engage with the viewer, without overwhelming her. Inspired by Max Beckmann, a German painter and sculptor, Mokgosi is not limited by realism in dealing with space, which he sees as having a pedagogical, political function. Many of his large scale compositions are informed by the 19th century French artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau, who painted classical mythology.
Although Mokgosi is in constant dialogue with how cultures/people change as a result of contact with colonizers, he’s also aware of the fact that postcolonialism itself is an American academy object.
I spoke to him afterwards and shared how the idea of unlearning history and developing one’s own language to articulate one’s identity resonated deeply with me. I come from another ex-colony, the subcontinent. He was elated and told me that’s where many of these ideas come from, ideas such as subalternity. “There are many wise people in that part of the world,” he said. I found out later that he’s using Gayatri Spivak’s work in his new project “Democratic Intuition” in which he aims to unpack love and understand democracy.
saw this play last night at MuCCC and was amazed by the complete absence of such an important (and gruesome) story from american consciousness.
Brandon Weber: In 1921, the Greenwood district neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was the site of one of the most devastating massacres in the entire history of United States. It was a massacre so ghastly, many chose to forget it and it was hidden from textbooks and even oral histories for decades. As we struggle today to understand contemporary violence against African Americans, it’s especially important to know this history and to try to understand what happened.
Known as “Black Wall Street” to those in the community, Greenwood in the early part of the 20th century was a thriving business district featuring African-American owned businesses, a strong black middle and upper class, schools, hospitals, and theaters. It was a bustling commercial and social “island” on the Northeast side of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
In just two days in the Spring of 1921, however, it was all destroyed. Put in today’s terms, there was $30 million in damage, from fifty-five to 400 killed, 800 injured; family fortunes had evaporated overnight. Many accounts of the demise of Black Wall Street refer to it as a “race riot,” but nothing could be further from the truth. It is better described as a terrorist attack on an affluent black neighborhood. The armed black men involved were defending their homes, their businesses, and their lives.
finally saw “moonlight” and am completely floored. it will take me some time to resolve and articulate all my thoughts and emotions, but what a brilliantly immersive and intimate film. everything from the way the film is structured and shot, to the script, to the masterful performances, and the interplay between the actors, is fresh, compelling, indelible. the film explores broad themes such as identity, sexuality, masculinity, race, poverty, and the multigenerational effects of the war on drugs, but always with subtlety, through the life and eyes of its main character.
chiron, the film’s protagonist, a quiet and lonely boy living in a rough miami neighborhood in the late 1980s, is played by three different actors, each representing a different chapter of his life. the dialogue is sparse, in particular for chiron. what is left unsaid, however, is felt intensely and perhaps that’s why we are left gasping at the end of the film.
both alex r. hibbert and ashton sanders, who play chiron as a child and teenager, are magnificent but i found trevante rhodes, who plays chiron as an adult, to be absolutely astonishing. with very little dialogue and no other cinematic device, muted emotions flit across his face like shimmering moonlight. he speaks eloquently of internalized pain, vulnerability, discomfiting contradictions, repression and loneliness, without ever saying a word. he is a revelation.
the last few scenes between him and kevin (played by andré holland) are some of the most stirring love scenes i’ve ever seen on film but they’re played with incredible restraint and stillness.
i couldn’t help but think how this remarkable film is written, directed, acted and inspired by black men primarily, and how its lack of steven spielberg schmaltz, tom hanks all-americanness, and martin scorsese machismo, is what makes it refreshing. we are so used to watching movies made by white men that we can easily anticipate every cultural trope, every filmic trickery or dramatic gesture. this film opens a door to another world. let’s hope it’s just a beginning.
Last night I saw Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s film Mustang about five beautiful, orphaned sisters being duly oppressed in a Turkish village. The film has been compared to Sophia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides because of its “dream-like intensity and mostly female cast,” but it made me think of Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock.
The soft-focus, the beauty and nymph-like youth of the girls who function more as a sensual ensemble rather than fully fleshed out individuals, their otherworldly mystery (a kind of bafflement that appeals deeply to the male gaze) and the intimacy of shots capturing them in various states of undress, are all reminiscent of Weir’s atmospheric film.
It’s a v French aesthetic and certainly reflects Ergüven’s sensibilities – she studied and lives in Paris, the cosmopolitan daughter of a Turkish diplomat. What doesn’t ever gel in this story though, is its location in a nondescript Black Sea village.
The film makes a feminist statement by fetishizing the girls’ bold rebellion against a patriarchal, small-minded, asexual backdrop, but the question that I wanted to ask throughout, and which Selin Gökcesu asked in her excellent review “Five French girls walk into an Anatolian village,” was: how did a tiny backward village produce these Bardot-like, free spirited, European-looking creatures (down to their swimsuits, Converse shoes, skinny jeans and uninhibited sexual ease)?
The girls are completely alienated from their grandmother, who’s supposed to have raised them after the death of their parents, and everyone else around them. Perhaps that makes it easier for Western audiences to relate to them and be awestruck by their defiance, but it doesn’t make any sense.
This bizarre disconnect is impossible to ignore, and so the relentless tyranny suffered by the sisters becomes an operatic performance, rather than something urgent and real.
The film won four César awards in France and was the French submission for the best foreign-language film Oscar. Ergüven thinks it’s a surprising choice considering France’s questionable relationship with Islam and Muslim women in particular. I think not so much.
