Emergences

Emergences & Emergencies
New British Asian Films
Curated by Sukhdev Sandhu


From the companion catalogue:
1. Sukhdev Sandhu on "India Calling" (Sonali Fernando, 2002)
2. Michael Vazquez on "Otolith" (The Otolith Group, 2003)
3. Naeem Mohaiemen on "Bradford Riots" (Neil Biswas, 2006)
4. Jon Caramanica on "Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music" (Vivek Bald, 2001)
5. Vijay Prashad on "The Road To Guantanamo" (Michael Winterbottom 2006)
6. James Brooke-Smith on "England Expects" (Tony Smith 2004)
7. Karen Shimakawa on "Skin Deep" (Yousaf Ali Khan: 2001)
8. Kamila Shamsie on "A Love Supreme" (Nilesh Patel, 2001)
9. Mohsin Hamid on "My Son The Fanatic" (Udayan Prasad, 1997)
10. Bharat Tandon on "The Warrior" (Asif Kapadia, 2001):
11. Gautam Malkani on "Young, Angry and Muslim" (Julian Hendy, 2005)

Festival Details

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India Calling (Sonali Fernando, 2002)

Perverted By Language
- Sukhdev Sandhu

India Calling is a work of science fiction, a dispatch from a foreign galaxy whose inhabitants have been put through a strict program of identity mutation. They are voluntary abductees, night-for-day swappers who have chosen to conceal their names in favour of those of Bondi Beach surfers, cartoon web-slingers, boldface celebrities. They contort their mouths in order to neutralize their accents and communicate in corporate upspeak. Told that their places of birth are shameful, they engage in creative teleporting, hatching new origin myths in which, or so they tell their Western interlocutors, they were raised in the wilds of Wyoming or the back lanes of suburban Penge.

India Calling is Macaulay's 1835 Minute on Indian Education brought up to date. A beady-eyed look at the efforts of international capitalism to form a cadre of cultural interpreters, 'a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.' And, what's more, 'to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.'

Macaulay's goals were thwarted; millions of Indians refused to be perverted by language or to mimic-men their way through society babbling in babu brogues. Speaking the Queen's English did not make them loyal subjects. Similarly, for all that their put-on names and laboriously articulated v-sounds give the impression that they are digital coolies and obeisant speak-and-spell robotniks, the graduates in this film gradually bridle at their lousy pay. They turn against their companies.

India Calling is a postcolonial sitcom, The Office set in modern-day Delhi. Its setting is an air-conditioned new republic lorded over by self-proclaimed managerial maestro and beergut-general David Brett, aka Rob Bissett. Yomping around in his starchy white shirt, winking to a camera he thinks is there to salute his people-skills savvy, cracking up at his own lofty rhetoric, he embodies Western self-interest masquerading as corporate philanthropy. Cherish his cheeks-flushed pride as he rewards employees with $25 bonuses. Savour his boss-class largesse as he dons a Santa costume and hurls sticks of candy from atop a knock-kneed elephant. He is quite as alien as any of the young men and women who, we can be certain, are laughing behind his back.

Sukhdev Sandhu teaches at New York University and is the author of London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined A City (2003), I'll Get My Coat (2005) and Night Haunts: A Journey Across Nocturnal London (2007)
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Otolith (The Otolith Group, 2003)

Little Girls Come From the Stars
- Michael Vazquez

A certain kind of child stares into the night sky and dreams of sailing through it. Most of the time the child grows up and forgets, toils in some uncertain vineyard, blithely and irrevocably terrestrial. One child in ten million never forgets, joins the military-industrial complex, becomes a spacefarer. A few hundred million become nerds.

Kodwo Eshun is one of the great nerds of the age. A DJ, critical theorist, and artist, he is the author of More Brilliant Than the Sun (1999), a strange and lovely book about futurism and experimental music that paid more than a little attention to Herman Poole Blount, the Alabaman pianist and bandleader who called his band the Arkestra and claimed to belong to a race of angels from Saturn. Together with Anjalika Sagar, Eshun is a member of the Otolith group, named for the semi-liquid organ in the ear that is responsible for the sensation of pitch and tilt.

Otolith is also the name of an ongoing series of film projects that owes a considerable debt to the crypto-postcolonial visual essays pioneered by the Black Audio Film Collective. Otolith I is a serious work of incredible whimsy, and a terror to describe. It is personal: the musings of a 22nd-century woman about her 21st-century granddaughter, much of it in the form of quotations from letters to her 20th century grandmother. It is science fictional: the narrator is a New Woman''agravic,' in the film's pleasing coinage'the product of a 'bifurcation in hominization' that has left most of us behind, vertical and challenged, while the new mammals, hopeful monsters, live without gravity in space.

It is also political: itself an emblem of latter-day Afro-Asian solidarity (Eshun's family came to England from Ghana; Sagar's from India), Otolith also evokes a nostalgia for a time when the globe was divided in three, when the Third World turned to the Second for inspiration and instruction (and also, guns and military advisors). And it is poetical: Usha and her forebears reflect on verticality and modernity and the 'bravest woman' of their era, Valentina Tereshkova, the Russian cosmonaut who became the first woman in space.

To date only 450 people have been in space (not counting the angels), nearly all of them engineers, scientists, or test pilots. Here's hoping that the next space race takes a few poets and theorists along for the ride.

Michael Vazquez, former editor of Transition magazine, is a writer and consultant based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is a fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.
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Bradford Riots (Neil Biswas, 2006)

Shuldn't b callin us Pakis
- Naeem Mohaiemen

The first time I was in the middle of a fight was at the now defunct Mutiny asian underground night. The early adopters (gay boys + misfits) had been replaced by I-bankers, setting up turf wars with the hardcore borough crew. The tussle was about the usual stuff, somebody looked at somebody's girl. But as I waded into the crowd, I was pushed to the ground with surprising vigor. Muscular, angry and jacked up: these Asians were spoiling for a fight.

I always feel an irresponsible, secret thrill at these testosterone displays of masculinity. These are not the get along/go along meek Asians of my father's generation. When 1960s England turned into a nasty brutish place with bottle attacks at bus stands, my father decided to pack up the family and go 'home'. Others with fewer options had to stay and take a beating. When Bengali tailor Altab Ali was beaten to death in 1978, seven thousand Bengalis took to the streets in the largest Asian protest in England. But asswipe-in-charge Morrissey would still reminded the 'Bengali in Platforms': you don't belong here.

Tectonic shifts are underway as a muscular new asian/black identity asserts itself. That's right, we are here because you were there. The cloying accents of Mind Your Language, or the chuddy-kissing minstrelsy of Goodness Gracious Me, have given way to sharp shards on the street and screen. The thrill I felt on that New York dance floor is the same impulse in Gautam Malkani's Londonstani, as Hounslow rude boys go ballistic: 'Shuldn't b callin us Pakis, innit, you dirrty gora'. As the Empire (subjects) strikes back, a panicked white working class seeks common cause with BNP proto-fascists and the shoot-on-sight tactics of the security-panic police force. The mixture is toxic and explosive, the larger Asian community the collateral damage.

Bradford Riots commemorates one among many explosions of urban violence. On display: raw orgiastic rage, street violence as CNN of the inner city, and anarchic energy that is easy to glamorize. The burning fires of the banlieu gave me a momentary thrill: 'That's right, fuck things up!' But in the cold, hard after-light, the French riots ended up empowering Sarkozy and moved Segolene to embrace the flag. Is it really revolutionary violence if it further empowers Empire? When I'm not swept away by adrenalin rush, these conflicting thoughts come crowding in.

Naeem does art/text interventions in Dhaka + New York. Projects include ‘Oppose Us & Rome Will Not Forgive You’ and "Sartre kommt zu Stammheim".
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MUTINY: Asians Storm British Music (Vivek Bald, 2001)

What Lies Beneath?
- Jon Caramanica

Early 1998: Mutmahim, Malik and their crew would come grab me in SE London's New Cross in an old beater and we'd all scoot up to the Notting Hill Arts Club, a little cocoon in W11. 5 quid at the door bought entry to a small, often dank basement space where DJs brought in tabla players to spar with, where traditional dances competed with more contemporary styles, and where the drinks were overpriced. Even when it was raging, it was still moody and somehow calm - everyone there looked like they had a sense of purpose, like just being there was important.

But was it somehow too comfortable? The regular night, a spin-off of the Outcaste record label that had become a home for progressive-minded, cross-pollinating Asian musicians, was itself ultimately a home for folks who (mostly) looked the same and (mostly) thought the same. And this 2nd generation was fashionable, too. The magazines and newspapers had caught on, and nothing seduces quite like seduction. Is it possible to be both cool and purposeful?

Maybe it was speed garage, as they used to call it, which took the spotlight away, with the mainstream press only so capable of juggling subcultures. At the end of Mutiny, many of the artists interviewed bemoan their late-90s dealings with British major labels, though I'm sure no one was honestly, truly surprised. Every artist interviewed here sees the act of music-making as an act of resistance, and the record industry was no more an ally than the government.

Talk of music as resistance can seem quaint in an age where, thanks to technology, more voices can be easily heard than ever before. The fantastic archival footage here - of traditional bhangra bands, Asian punks, Asian breakdancers and the like infiltrating UK television - is a throwback to the days of chipping away at the monoculture. By 1998, the questions were different, though, and what Mutiny best captures is the struggle over place. How fighting for it, or against it, can make us who we are. How having it is no guarantee of true power. And how the moment the doors open onto it is the moment it changes, ideas and sounds escaping out into the world, sometimes forgetting whence they came.

Jon Caramanica is the Music Editor of Vibe magazine. He writes regularly about music and television for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and several other publications.
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The Road To Guantanamo (Michael Winterbottom 2006)

Fifth Column
- Vijay Prashad

Patrice Lumumba Ford, son of a Black Panther, went to China as an undergraduate. There he met some of the 18 million Chinese Muslims, found succor in their faith and converted to Islam. He returned to Portland State University, where a professor remembered, 'He was devout, but he was not a missionary.' A few weeks after 9/11, a sheriff's deputy saw Ford and five other Muslims in a gravel pit at target practice. He took their names and let them off. Some weeks later, the group left the U. S. for Afghanistan, where, they claimed, they wanted to make contact with the Red Crescent and help their Muslim brethren who faced the wrath of the U. S.-led invasion. When they returned to the U. S. without getting to Afghanistan, the FBI arrested them. The Portland 7 defined the presence of al-Qaeda's Fifth Column, a deadly force within the U. S. ready to do the bidding of the enemy.

The Portland 7 is the U. S. version of the Tipton 3. These are groups of young people who bear within them the histories of imperialism, and who take refuge in Islam not for its doctrinal or theological aspects, but for the platform it provides in solidarity with Muslims who face the brunt of the war machine. African Americans (such as in the Portland 7) or British Asians (such as in the Tipton 3) turn to political Islam in response to Atlantic racism and to the sustained campaigns against lands where the populations are largely Muslim (and whose land bears rich resources coveted by the Atlantic world).
Neither Europe nor the U. S. has come to terms with their imperial pasts, and they still sees their 'minority' population as outsiders, as immigrants; neither Europe nor the U. S. accept that the world's resources can't simply be seized without the generation of anger and resentment. The Tipton 3 went to Afghanistan out of curiosity perhaps or by accident, just as the Portland 7 tried to go there to do humanitarian work (as another British Asian Guantanamo prisoner, Moazzam Begg, did). Their intentions are irrelevant to the Atlantic powers who are invested in fear-mongering about their darker co-citizens, the imputed Fifth Column, whose presence engenders fear, and silences the democratic impulses of a population who pay for these wars with blood and treasure.

Vijay Prashad, Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, is the author of many books, including The Karma of Brown Folk (2000), and The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (2006)
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England Expects (Tony Smith 2004)

East London: Space of Flows
- James Brooke-Smith

England Expects maps the emergent social geographies of East End London in the era of globalization. The action takes place in and around the Canary Wharf financial district, a pre-planned island of gleaming corporate towers that dwarfs the crumbling housing estates of the working-class communities that surround it. This is an east London that has become a twenty-first-century contact zone where the human, financial, and informational flows of the globalized world collide. The narrative triangulates the uneasy relationships between the occupants of this contested social space: sharp-suited commodities traders, disaffected Asian youths caught between cultures, their immigrant parents, the struggling remnants of the urban white working-class, members of the crypto-fascistic British National Party, and the harassed public servants who distribute scarce resources from a dwindling welfare state.

The film focuses specifically on the vicissitudes of national identity in this trans-national space of flows. Alison is a Scottish trader who keeps a key-ring memento of her favoured British Unionist football club in her purse; Rashel is a young Asian heroin addict who is threatened by his mother with a return to the old country; Ray is an ex-fascist agitator who attempts to keep a lid on his boiling resentment and hold down his job as a corporate security guard. In their own ways, these characters are all trying to come to terms with their place in a new world order.

England Expects was originally broadcast on the BBC in April of 2004. It updates the British public service broadcasting tradition of social realist drama for a new generation. Its focus on local communities and class politics places it firmly in the tradition of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, but it expands on these traditional themes with its broadened focus on issues of globalization, surveillance, and post-9/11 security fears. It is a hugely ambitious film that attempts to cast a wide net over the complex social, political, and cultural energies that animate East London in the twenty-first century. Perhaps some of those complex energies will always elude the limited grasp of narrative form; but in its own messy way, England Expects manages to tap into the main channels of Britain's shifting national identity in the globalized world.

James Brooke-Smith is a graduate student of English Literature at New York University. He is writing his doctoral thesis on the pre-history of the information age.
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Skin Deep (Yousaf Ali Khan, 2001)

Mirror Skin
- Karen Shimakawa

mirrors give me back to myself as you see me, skin side out.

skin marks the border separating inside and outside, me and not-me. it is where I end and everything and everyone else begins. it contains me, protects me, encases me -- it is not me, yet it is what makes me me. (not entirely true: as a container, skin is imperfect. it has holes, it leaks, it is vulnerable to penetration, to puncture, to breach.)

it’s invisible from within: I cannot see it from the inside, despite the fact that “inside” is where I am located in relation to it.

it’s all (or nearly all) that is visible of you from the outside. it is, for me, what contains, encases, constitutes you. it is the means by which -- the form in which -- you become perceptible to me.

what is the you that skin makes? law names it: mongolian, hindoo, malay, negro. in the U.S., until well into the 20th century magistrates rolled up the sleeves of citizenship applicants and compared tan lines, then peered at the veins pulsing beneath the surface as if to pierce the membrane and see the “truth” of identity it concealed. when that method of investigation failed, and noting that their own skins were far from “white” in a literal sense, they nonetheless denied the rights of those whose skins could not be properly called white by virtue of one’s education, place of birth, or parentage.

others name it: chink, nigger, paki.

what is the me that skin makes? it contains (or is supposed to contain) within it only that which belongs in/to me, that which is “proper” to me, that which is “purely” me. everything else has to be jettisoned in order for me to stay me. but the fallibility of skin means that there is always the possibility -- the certainty -- that there is that within me that which shouldn’t be there -- waste, decay, excess. it is the expulsion, shedding, scraping away of what shouldn’t be there that keeps me me. what belongs inside, and what doesn’t, and who decides?

Karen Shimakawa is an Associate Professor of Performance Studies, and the Program Director for Asian/Pacific/American Studies in the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis. Her research focuses on the somatics of cultural identification.
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A Love Supreme (Nilesh Patel, 2001)

Those Hands
- Kamila Shamsie

In Urdu, the ultimate compliment reserved for a cook is 'haath mey mazaa hai' ' the delight is in the hands. Such a claim, when made about a cook, pushes to one side the question of the freshness of ingredients, the excellence of a recipe, the sharpness of a blade. If the delight is in your hands it will transfer itself to anything it touches, any meal it prepares.

Nilesh Patel's A Love Supreme is that old, slightly worn compliment rendered beautifully alive. The hands in the film do not function as participants in the preparation of a samosa ' on the contrary, the ingredients and utensils are merely the props which the hands use for their performance.

There are two sequences, in particular, which highlight the shifting nature, the varied properties, of the hands. In the first, lemon juice streams onto and between the hennaed fingers of a woman's hand, light sparkling off the juice; the effect is sensuous, the curved fingers and the play of light on liquid calling to mind images of a body beneath a waterfall.

In the second, seen through a fish-eye lens, a pair of hands slap together like cymbals, exerting their mastery over both the ball of flour that is flattened between them and - as the slap fills our vision - over us. Who would not be intimidated by those hands, and awed by their power, their certainty'

The division of the film into different stages calls attention to the intricate layers of action that go into the preparation of a snack; but beyond this it also allows each stage to function as distinct performance space. We know we are watching the same hands throughout, but in ' or on ' each stage, they show us a new side of themselves, and by the end ' though we have seen nothing above the elbow of the women to whom they belong - we feel ourselves intimately bound to those hands which confer delight on us as we consume the images they create.

Kamila Shamsie's novels include Salt and Saffron (2000), Kartography (2002), and Broken Verses (2005). She lives in London and Karachi.
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My Son The Fanatic (Udayan Prasad, 1997)

The Road of Inquiry
- Mohsin Hamid

I remember watching My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) on video as a teenager in Pakistan. I was shocked by the bravery and originality of Hanif Kureishi's screenplay. His world of British Asians was one I had no familiarity with, but I appreciated his daring in exploring themes of sexuality and drug use. I read his first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), in college and decided that this was a writer whose work I wanted to follow.

But I was disappointed by his second novel, The Black Album (1995), and by his subsequent film, My Son The Fanatic (1997). The old themes were still there, gritty as ever, but to my mind they were overshadowed by a fixation on extremist Islam. Having grown up in Pakistan and now living in America, I thought Kureishi's treatment of Muslims was exaggerated and fanciful.

I was wrong. I moved to London in 2001, and in the six years that I have lived here, I have realized that the radical Muslim student groups and self-segregationist impulses Kureishi presciently described a decade ago do very much exist in Britain. Watching My Son The Fanatic now, without my hostility to what I had previously thought of as its anti-Muslim stance, I can appreciate how ahead of its time the film was.

But while the title of the film might suggest that the son is its focus, in actuality the tale is centered on the father. Parvez is a man torn between two worlds, that of alcohol, messy love with a white woman, and integration on the one hand, and puritanical rejection on the other. Kureishi's compassion for his navigation of that conflict, and actor Om Puri's sensitive performance, make theirs a film that has done more than age well: it has grown in power with each passing year.

For many of us who are exploring the experiences of Muslims in the West, both in cinema and in literature, My Son The Fanatic stands as an important marker on the road of inquiry.

Mohsin Hamid is the author of Moth Smoke (2000) and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007)
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The Warrior (Asif Kapadia, 2001)

Questions of Scale
- Bharat Tandon

In terms of scale, British cinema often finds itself caught between a rock and a hard place: the widescreen epic can seem too expansive, always risking the lapse into 'eye-candy'; conversely, that small, intimate scale, too easily identified as a 'national' aesthetic, can sometimes be used merely as an excuse for a certain aesthetic parochialism. What's so unusual about The Warrior's style is that it manages successfully to maintain both large and small scales within the same film: for all its accomplished use of open space (not least the extraordinary deep-focus landscapes), the story's most important emotional and narrative shifts are conducted in much smaller exchanges.

In the early stages of the film, Kapadia cuts repeatedly between the points of view of the perpetrators and victims of violence, suggesting an entire network of power-relations; and as Irfan Khan's protagonist continues his journey towards redemption in the mountains, whole conversations take place almost wordlessly in close-cropped exchanges of significant looks; yet the style of The Warrior never lets a viewer forget the (literally) wider background against which its dramas are set.

These mutually enriching perspectives feel appropriate, somehow, to a movie with such a diverse heritage (a Japanese folk-tale, transplanted to feudal India, made by a British Asian director); of course, as innumerable 'Euro-pudding' productions attest, such eclecticism can go spectacularly wrong, but Kapadia and the cast are so in command of their material that The Warrior's elements cohere strikingly. Critics are always quick to praise Ang Lee's ability to play different generic conventions off each other; in its own, distinctive manner, The Warrior amply demonstrates that a British director can bring off comparable cinematic coups.

Bharat Tandon, Lecturer in English Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford, is the author of Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation (2003).

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Young, Angry and Muslim (Julian Hendy, 2005)

Young, Angry and Muslim
- Gautam Malkani

Here's a radical new idea: rather than simply brand as evildoers young British-born Pakistani Muslims who have taken up arms against the West, let's try to work out why instead. After all, if you want to solve a problem, it kind of helps to understand it. At least that's the basic strategy employed in science, art, business and even war. But when it comes to young, angry Muslims, this is evidently too difficult an approach both for politicians and the out-of-touch Muslim 'community leaders' they consult.

And so the challenge is met by Navid Akhtar, who appreciates the simplicity and stupidity of politicians' demands Muslims magically integrate more with mainstream Britain. Accordingly, he ventures beyond the usual 'clash of cultures' framework to show the contradictions within the two communities are often as important as those between them.

Hence CCTV footage captures the British 'yob' subculture that owes much to a drinks and leisure industry beholden to the equation that more intoxication and less conversation equals more profit. Interview footage illustrates the proverbial pressure cooker that results when parents care more for their family honour than their children's well being. Then there's footage relating to the wider world: Palestine, Bosnia - and the shameful images from Abu Ghraib that symbolise an immoral and inept foreign policy.

Against this backdrop, radical Muslim groups offer narratives that clearly appear less contradictory to the young and vulnerable. We must appreciate the extent to which these are political narratives as well as religious or cultural ones - with radical distortions of Islam becoming a seductive antidote not just to feelings of alienation, but also to apathy. After all, today's dominant 'urban' youth scene has cynically been neutered of youth culture's former political and counter-cultural content. By tackling issues of justice, poverty and the emasculation of people by powerful institutions, radical Muslim clerics take on an inspirational role once filled by the likes of John Lennon and Chuck D.

Efforts to promote a sense of 'Britishness' are therefore not as useful as promoting a more general 'civic' identity and culture to tackle political apathy. Listening to what young British-born Pakistani Muslims actually have to say is an ideal start.

Gautam Malkani is the author of Londonstani (2006) and works for the Financial Times.

Sorry Choles

I'm Sorry, Choles Ritchil
Naeem Mohaiemen
[Daily Star, April 6, 2007]

I'm sorry, Choles Ritchil. I didn't believe the evidence of your body. I kept thinking the torture report was a hysterical invention. So much damage to one corpse, it seemed impossible. No, it is impossible. Isn't it? It must all be lies. Those human rights groups, we know they always exaggerate -- just to get foreign funding and create a bad image for Bangladesh.

I'm sorry, because I couldn't find the courage. We're all so invested in getting out of the AL-BNP strangle corridor, we're so euphoric that the godfathers are being arrested, we don't want to upset the process by drawing attention to your case. Must be an aberration, somebody got a little too enthusiastic. Anyway, let's move on. For heaven's sake, don't make a fuss.

I'm sorry, because I couldn't find tears. How easy it was to dismiss your face on that poster. You look nothing like me. You have what my classmates so crudely called "chinky eyes". No one in my family has ever married anyone who looks like you, and even if we did we would make sure you converted to our religion. You see, you don't really exist. This is a country for Bengalis, not anyone else. Now you realize that, slowly, surely.

I'm sorry, because I read Nirmalendu Goon's poem with a stony heart. Then I busied myself with translating it. E-mailing friends and asking, What is Chuniya village? Is Goon being sarcastic about March and "freedom"? Is "elegy" a better translation than "requiem"? Distracting myself with aesthetics, anything to blank out the memory of those pictures.

I'm sorry, because when a blogger posted the report, somebody else complained about the gruesome picture. The picture was quietly removed to page 2. A nice disclaimer was added: "Warning: Graphic Photo". Anything to protect our delicate sensibilities. How inconsiderate of you to die with so many wounds.

I'm sorry, because I said to a Pahari friend the other day, "Welcome to shadhin Bangla", and she replied, "Ami tho Bangali na, how am I shadhin?" I laughed and dismissed her. Oh these people! They will never be satisfied. What do you want anyway? Land rights? Your Language? Parliament Seats? Ministries? Quotas? Autonomy? Come on, that was for us, that was 1969. It's 2007 now. Don't you remember what Sheikh Mujib said? "From today you are all Bengalis." And some of you are now dead Bengalis, that's equality.

I'm sorry, because I know how this will go down. There will be outrage. NGOs will issue memorandum. Bloggers will buzz. Newspapers will write. Thrithio Matra will debate pros and cons. Seminars will be cranked out. And always, some "hero" filmmaker will make a documentary and win awards. Then, just as quickly, we will forget. Amnesia is our gross national product.

I'm sorry, Choles Ritchil. You lived and died protecting the Adivasi people and Modhupur land you believed in. You were gentle and nonviolent, and we paid you back in a different coin.

I'm sorry, because I'm a citizen of a nation that after 36 years fails to see you as anything more than a nuisance. My class, ethnicity and religious privilege (and army family) gives me insurance to write these words. You don't have any such protection -- naked to the world, to Eco Park, and to our vengeful fury.

But don't think you're an agacha on our national boto brikkho. When there are visiting dignitaries or sports events, your people are very useful. You sing, you dance, you wear exotic, colorful clothes. A readymade National Geographic tableau. "Hill People of CHT". "Gentle People of Modhupur Forest". Ah, the permutations are endless.

We want to keep all of you in a museum vitrine, and bring you out on special occasions -- when we need a dash of color. But please don't demand your rights. And don't even think of raising your voice. Etho boro shahosh! You see what happened to Choles. Don't make us be sorry again.

Why Smiling

Why Are They Smiling?
Naeem Mohaiemen
[Daily Star, March 13, 2007]

Since January, we have been gulping down a steady daily diet of chomok, washed down with a drink of conspiracy cola. Big guns arrested, crown prince in the dock, bank statements seized, Hummer H2 impounded, peacocks in the pen, Bagan Bari locked up. And then dheu tin, why is this such a hot commodity? Well it isn’t really, but it’s the one thing that’s hard to get rid of quickly. You can shred documents, stash guns, squirrel money away in Swiss accounts, release a pet croc into Hosni Dalan (very James Bond…). But dheu tin—those are heavy suckers. Na pari khaithe, na pari falaithe.

When I wake up and leaf through the papers, I’m disappointed if there isn’t a new arrest, a new revelation, a big name brought low. But this insatiable appetite for chomok also masks a structural weakness. We are busy being entertained, and then we forget about it just as quickly as new thrills (or distractions) arrive. Look up in the Sky! Indo-Markin conspiracy! Nagorik Shakti! Chittagong Seaport! Shushil Shomaj’s Revenge! On to the next story…

Dhaka, city of bazillion conspiracy theories, is so busy with this daily kathu-kuthu, not many are bothered about the hard work needed to actually successfully prosecute cases. The same Special Powers Act we used to protest is now our temporary savior (“temporary” because one day we will have to face this law that has been abused by both AL and BNP). Of the SPA’s “prejudicial acts” clauses (sovereignty, defense, friendly relations with foreign states, public safety, communal hatred, law and order, etc), perhaps only “economic or financial interest of the state” clause is relevant to mass looting, corruption and abuse of power now on the dock. Given the inevitable irregularities in detention, interrogation, and evidence gathering, you can see how a sharp, well paid lawyer can start taking apart the cases.

No doubt the CTG is in hyper-drive to try to lock away as many of the black money all-stars as possible. But what are the resources they have? A new Attorney General (Fida Kamal) and AAG (Salahuddin Ahmed), but underneath them the same team – including almost 100 staffers appointed by the BNP-Jamaat coalition (some lawyers have started discussing reform proposals to remove about 60 on grounds of inefficiency and partisanship).

Consider all the political interference we saw in the lower courts in last fifteen years, and even in the Supreme Court in last five years: partisan appointments, cancellation of previous regime appointments, leapfrogging in appointments of judges (including chief justice), new appointments without consultation, mark sheet forgery, Supreme Court musical chairs, vacation bench manipulation, phantom litigants, chief justices revoking judge’s powers to rule … the list is very long. When you probe through these recent maneuvers, you wonder how there can be effective prosecution for the detainees in a court stacked with contradictions, bad precedents and partisan appointments

Consider also, the imbalance in resources between the accountability police and those who are hell bent on avoiding it. Knee deep in conspiracy chatter, people imagine the CTG as a steamroller that is rumbling along Dhaka streets according to a master plan. But in fact, everything is done with stop gaps and minimal resources. And because Fakhruddin already faces heat about structure demolitions, economy slowdown, election deadlines, “US conspiracy,” etc., there are multiple fires on many fronts.

Consider the resources (and partisan, and in some cases not highly competent, lawyers) the government has to track down the money trail and actually put the rui kathla away. Then contrast that with the resources the government had for the Ershad cases. Instead of 40+ detainees, there was only one man on trial. The government committed serious resources, including top lawyers and international investigation teams. But after all those efforts, they landed him only on charges of weapons and cash possession. There were also some charges about a “machine at home for watching foreign TV channels” (kids, it was once illegal..), and a “mobile satellite phone.” But high profile detainees are sometimes caught on precisely these small charges (Al Capone was in the end busted on income tax evasion, this may explain the current dheu tin seizures). Scimitar, Jamuna boat purchase case: all of these big cases have stalled. And of course, with BNP-AL election games, Ershad is out. Oh wait he’s being retried. No out again…makes you dizzy.

Some analysts have looked beyond the BMW shine in newspaper headlines and called for more resources for prosecution teams, replacement of partisan lawyers on government teams, more comprehensive investigation of the allegations of corruption and bias brought against certain judges, professional investigators, clean evidence gathering teams, appointment of independent lawyers (if private lawyers won’t take pay cut to go to AG’s office), and forensic accountants. And always making sure these are fair trials, and not kangaroo courts. Will all that happen, or are we too busy cooking up theories and being entertained to concentrate on hard work?

Here’s a small motivation—if you think last fifteen years were bad, imagine a scenario where all the cases fall apart and the big guns come out of jail – fed up of that jail pocha bhat diet and ready to rumble. The revenge games would reach every inch of the country. No time for fence sitters. Like Howard Zinn said, you can’t be neutral on a moving train.

If you look at the state of 1971 war crimes trials, you can see what happens when enthusiasm and emotion replaces the more mundane, non-glamorous, back-breaking work of evidence gathering. Too busy with songs, slogans and emotions, we gathered little evidence, recorded few witness statements. We thrilled at abstract, performative and emotive events, rallies and slogans about “war crimes.” No international war crimes tribunals, no truth & reconciliation committees, no methodical prosecution process. Three decades later, there’s a big fat zero in the justice and accountability column.

Can we control our fundamental windbag tendencies? Take a little break from fists, slogans, rallies and utthejona. This time around, let’s have a little less emotion, and a lot more hard work, thorough research, and follow through.

Naeem Mohaiemen does film/art interventions.

Truth Twisting

The Truth, Twisting In The Wind

Naeem Mohaiemen

[Daily Star, March 8, 2007]

Major General Manzoor has been on my mind lately. The Manzoor of the morning of May 30^th, 1981. The man whose team assaulted Chittagong Circuit House with rocket launchers, made Ziaur Rahman’s body jahjhra with bullets, in pursuit of another bloody coup. But also, the Manzoor of June 1st, hiding in the tea garden coolie quarters, watching his rebellion fail as troops defected and crossed over into Suvapur, all his plans of starving Dhaka into submission falling apart. What were the last thoughts that went through his head as he was dragged blindfolded into that army jeep? Regret? Fear? Shame? Or did he think, I didn’t do this alone…I need to name names…

I remember hearing on the radio that Manzoor was captured. It seemed only moments later that another announcer said he was dead. How, when, why? The conventional narrative was that a group of angry troops surrounded the jeep and dragged him out: “khunike payyachi!” Later he was found face-down in a drain, with a gaping hole in the back of his head. No sign of the mob. The thing that sticks in my throat is that post mortem report, signed by Lt. Col. A. Z. Tufail Ahmed (reproduced in Mascarenhas’ book): “a big gaping hole 4”x2”” from a shot to the head and “no other injury on the body.” A smooth one-bullet execution, and not a single achor on his body -- by an angry mob? No, somehow, something about it never seemed right.

No tears for Manzoor. But weep for the truth. Our history is littered with dead men -- Khalid Musharraf, Abu Taher, Mohammad Abul Manzoor -- always taking uncomfortable stories to the grave. From 1972 onwards, this country was rocked by intrigue, agitation, and violence. Somehow we muddled through, and here we are, still standing, still shadhin. But who did what, who knew what, and who kept silent and watched? We don’t even know what we don’t know.

You’re too skeptical, said a friend. Maybe the truth is exactly what we know. The public narrative is the only narrative. Maybe so, but at every wrenching historical turn, the people who planned intrigue always seem to conveniently die before they can name their partners. And when you read books about that period, every eyewitness is dead, out of the country, or someone who has incentive to exaggerate or downplay their own role.

Manzoor has been on my mind again because of the JMB verdicts. After exhausting all legal channels, their request for clemency has now been turned down by President Iajuddin. The JMB convicts have repeatedly said they want to talk to the media and name their patrons, but Law Adviser Mainul Hosein said that won’t be allowed, because there’s no precedent.

If nothing else changes, they will hang by April, and I bet there won’t be outraged reactions from rights activists (the same people who were shocked by the Saddam snuff video). Personally, I’ve always opposed the death penalty -- it does nothing for justice but everything for our bloodlust and revenge mentality. But that’s not even where I’m coming from today, I want these men to be spared, because we need to get to the whole truth.

Let’s just spell it out. Do we really believe that a fantastically well-coordinated, accurately planned, micro-second timed, nationwide bombing campaign in 64 districts was pulled off by this small group of “radical Islamist” cells? Do we really believe that the government, after denying the existence of militant groups for so long, suddenly transformed into an ultra-efficient, SWAT team that managed to scoop up the entire militant ring, as soon as international pressure became a bit too much? All that chatter about the new breed of suicide bombers, ready to blow themselves up to establish khilafat, and suddenly they all surrendered? How come none of those bagha bomaroos blew themselves up when the police surrounded them? The government was so sure things would go according to plan, a three-ring circus of TV cameras was even invited along to capture every moment of Bangla Bhai’s capture. And thrilled by “Breaking News” coverage, we forgot to ask any hard questions.

Like, where are the real puppetmasters?

The JMB captures are super convenient for all concerned. Attacks on cultural functions? Machete attacks on Humayun Azad and Shamsur Rahman? Mysterious Chittagong arms drop? Forget all that. We’ve got JMB, all is well. An all purpose monster under the bed, the solution is also childlike simplicity -- hang ‘em high, and we can have shonar bangla back.

In a country where bureaucracy moves at molasses pace, and cases can hang in court for years, why did the JMB case get such speedy treatment? Why the mad rush to hang them before the Caretaker Government took office? After a BNP MP's explosive allegation of links between JMB and high-ups in BNP, and press reporting of the same, Advocate ZI Khan Panna filed a Public Interest Litigation (WP No. 8621 of 2005), asking that investigations regarding the bomb attacks also take into account such allegations. After the High Court gave a positive direction to the Police and others to extend the range of investigation, the former Attorney General AJ Mohammad Ali, on behalf of the 4-Party Alliance, appealed and got a stay order from the Appellate Division. What are they all so afraid of? And whatever happened to FBI, Singapore, Interpol, and Scotland Yard investigation reports, results of searches and seizures, information gathered by Investigating Officers, sources of supply of weapons, financing source investigations, etc. None of those were ever made public.

The death penalty is wrong on humanistic grounds, but also tactically in this case, because it chokes off the investigation trail. There is still time for this CTG to commute the sentences to life imprisonment, make public all documents from investigations to date, and continue interrogating them, through neutral, non-partisan investigation officers -- until we get to the whole truth.

Maybe some people are lusting to see bearded faces turn black and blue, tongues bulging out, twisting in the wind. Mar shala gulo ke. The truth would be the real casualty. Once again, chuno putis would die, while puppetmasters roam free.

Tattered Flag

Tattered blood-green flag: secularism in crisis
Naeem Mohaiemen

[Daily Star, Feb 26, 2007]

Last winter, I was filming a follow-up to an earlier project, Muslims or Heretics. With the first kuasha of the season had come, like clockwork, a new program of anti-Ahmadiya rallies. Khatme Nabuwat, now splintered into two groups, had announced yet another gherao of the Bokshibazaar mosque.

The anti-Ahmadiya rallies were on Friday (baad jumma, a toxic mix of misinterpreted khutbas and hate speech). The secularists announced a counter-rally — on Thursday. At the Thursday rally, I found myself the lone cameraman; but on Friday I was joined by scores of others: stringers for AP, BBC, the usual suspects.

The footage from the two adjacent days were a study in contrasts. The anti-Ahmadiya marchers were stern young men dressed in kafon white -- steady gazes that express conviction, confusion, or both. The rallies of the secularists are gender-mixed, with women dominating the chants. There is no uniform, but everyone is in colorful saris and warm looking shawls. Inside the camera frame was an inspiring (and cinematic) sight of fluttering green and red flags, with marchers chanting Ekatthur er Rajakar / Ajker Bomabaj and Al Badar Rajakar / Ajkei Bangla Char.

But outside the frame was the startling fact that the secular rally had drawn only a few dozen people. As they marched through Dhaka University, not a single student joined them. Perhaps they didn't understand the chants. Or more likely, they were busy thinking of shopping or taking a phone call: “Ki Rejwan, nishchoy girlfriend shathey? Good, good.”

I thought of this footage again recently after the Awamis cancelled the MOU with Khelafat that (temporarily) legalized fatwas. Lost in the scuffle of why AL did what they did, who was betrayed, who was sidelined, bla bla, was a much larger, looming issue.

Secularism today is in a deep free fall. This is not just the crisis of betrayal and maneuvering by political players. The deeper issue is that in thirty five years, we have yet to articulate a strong cultural, economic or political argument for secularism beyond “this is why we fought in 1971.” In our version, secularism stands for nothing, only against something – a mish-mosh of opposition to Pakistan “ponthi”, rajakar, hijab, or Jamaat.

So…

What do we do when 1971 is no longer enough?

Humayun Ahmed once had a TV serial where a parrot was taught to say thui rajakar. In each episode, the parrot would mouth the same line (well, that’s what parrots do..). These days, secular arguments that invoke 1971 feel like that –– pretty to look at and easy to ignore. Over-use has blunted all effectiveness.

Islam as a political force is taking over the vacuum left by the global collapse of the Soviet-aligned left (and the Latin American resurgence has yet to touch Bangladesh). No Bangiyya Muslim politician goes to elections without going on umrah, invoking Allah in every speech, and doing ghomta if they are women. Mon-Muslims? To hell with them, who else are they going to vote for anyway?

1971 as the sole rationale for secularism hinges on anger, memory and villains. Jamaat’s smart response to this was to remove Golam Azam from the leadership –– knowing that he was a lightning rod for controversy. They still have Nizami, Mujahid, Sayeedee and other liabilities – but increasingly you start to see the rise of new “brands” within Jamaat. Within a decade they will have a brand new leadership, a majority of which will be of the post-71 generation. At last week’s midnight hour at shaheed minar, we listened to a litany of names of people giving tribute. First CTG, then (reduced) BNP, then AL, then the rest. My friend turned to me and said, “Any moment, we’ll hear, Jamaat er omuk coming forward with flowers!” A joke right now, but how much longer before they appropriate these symbols as well?

Sharp Islamist minds have already appropriated many icons, while the tired figures of Ghadani/Bangla Academy/et al recycle stale slogans and photo ops. The man who was once "Kafir Nazrul Islam" is now Jamaat’s icon as a Muslim poet. This year, Islamist-aligned newspapers touted a slogan for Ekushey “Matri Bhasha Allahr Sreshtho Daan." DVDs are being sold on a Jamaat history of the language movement that has the logo with Bengali calligraphy in Arabic style.

Gone is the Jamaat of murthad campaigns, anti-Grameen slogans, and NGO-tree choppers. Today’s Jamaat occupies Industries Ministry and negotiates with the “malauns” of Tata. Instead of fighting NGOs, they form their own giant NGOs with Arabist money. Slowly, always patiently, Islamists are infiltrating the civil service, banks, and all sectors of the national infrastructure. All with an eye on the long-term, and more integrity, consistency and ideological honesty than any mainstream party.

As Khatme Nabuwat, Khelafat e Majlish, JMB, occupy the loony right, mainstream Islamists like Jamaat start to look moderate, rational and normalized. Nor has it escaped collective attention that there are very few Jamaat men among the list of big crooks bring hunted by the CTG. Expect even more “We want Allah’s law/And Honest Men’s Rule” slogans at the next election.

In the end, what are our arguments for separation of mosque and state? “1971 er Pak hanadar” is emotionally resonant but insufficient in 2007. As time passes, historians will start looking at 1971 with a more analytic, non-melodramatic eye. As with all national liberation struggles, uncomfortable gray areas will emerge: including how deep was AL’s commitment to secularism even in 1970. Afsan Chowdhury’s forthcoming comprehensive history of 1971 may be the first attempt at uncomfortable history, warts and all.

Flaws and contradictions are expected in any foundation mythology. A normal maturing process leads to a more open discussion of these issues. But along with that, the opening will weaken the traditional argument for secularism. It’s time, really urgent, to support secularism for its own sake, not for 1971.

Many of us have always been for class-based politics that targets the incredible wealth disparity, obscene money race, and insane, unsustainable consumption that is poisoning the globe. But secularism is the missing part of this equation. We are not only a class elite, but also a Muslim elite that ravages this country and renders all others as shadow citizens. From the Vested Property Act onwards, there are laws, “understandings,” social norms, politics and quiet discrimination that have rendered our Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, Adivasi, and Pahari citizens as subhuman —- frozen out of schools, jobs, politics, culture and lived life.

(But look, I’m busy right now, says my friend. Writing a letter to Daily Star – the situation in Iraq-Palestine is intolerable, we must fight injustice.)

Many of our crises are due to greed, power play and discrimination impulses being played out on the vulnerable second class. But in the absence of real ideology (what exactly is AL/BNP/JP’s position on Globalization? Structural adjustment? Unionization?), religion is still a powerful political cover for these agendas. If you try to oppose it, the answer is always the same. This is Allah’s law as I choose to interpret it. If you speak against me, you are a murtad.

Time to imagine a completely different movement, one that is for class politics that also incorporates secularism within a Muslim identity, not the inadequate, irreligious fig leaf of “ek shagoro” brand pseudo-secularism (easily bought off with a parliament seat and Pajero). Many of us are comfortable inside, and speak from, a Muslim identity -- either as a religious/cultural identity at home or as ethnicized shorthand for “other” or “immigrant” in western diasporas. But we can be inside that identity and still fight to our dying breath to build a left-progressive, equitable, and secular state.

This is a battle cry for secular Muslims. And we are legion.
.

These Guys

[Catalogue Essay for System Error: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, a project by Lorenzo Fusi & Naeem Mohaiemen @ Palazzo Papesse, Siena]

These Guys Are Artists, And Who Gives A Shit
Naeem Mohaiemen

Scenes From A Looking Glass War
"Play some more Bach. We won't shoot."[i]


Scene 1: Mufathalle, Munich
The weekend event is part of a series called Dictionary of War. Twenty five artists and academics, presenting themes based on a word they had chosen about warfare. Camouflage, Declaration of War, Desertion, Heroes, Liberation, Mobilization, National Anthem, Negotiation, Resistance, the list was exhaustive (my word: Prisoner of War). As we present our concepts, the Lebanon war is in its second week. There are accommodations made to reflect this rude insertion into our mannered program. Mansur Jacoubi joins us from Beirut for some clunky IRC chat (somebody asks him "can you describe the situation there?", I wince). Akram Zaatari flies in from Paris to present some earlier work––stranded outside the country, he's available to us. E-flux brings in all their Lebanese videos.

I feel the cramp of anxiety. Will all these well-sculpted words have an impact outside this room? Somehow I'm missing the codec to transmit all this theoretical, creative energy into real world action. I've been scolded for seeking use-value in art, but I can't restrain this tourette-like impulse. Back in Dhaka, friends are organizing rallies to protest the war. But they are worried because the main organizers are Islamist groups. I send them the announcement for Dictionary and get a withering response by e-mail "Sitting in a room discussing war, while the Middle East burns down–– a luxury indulgence."

I try to muster up an appropriate response as to why representation, aesthetics, theory, all of this still matters, even in this moment. I believe in everything I say, but today I feel small comfort, because the external geopolitical context seems so extraordinary and extreme. In an attempt to band-aid the situation and, yes, insert "direct action" into the Munich event, I talk to the organizers. Could we issue a statement from the artists calling for an immediate cease-fire? More importantly, there is a peace rally in downtown Munich, perhaps we can take a break and join it. People like the idea in principle, although the logistics are challenging. Eyal Weizman is particularly enthusiastic. But in the end it fizzles out. Before too long, the weekend is over, everyone is bolting towards the airport–– no rally, no statement. I feel deflated, even though the weekend went as promised. But, is that all there is?

Scene 2: Soho gallery, New York
Valentin Manz of London's Vision Machine is very persuasive. Somehow he has persuaded a gallery, not previously known for patronizing political work, to host his group show. "I don't understand," I ask as we start installing my piece. "On what basis did they give you the space? Did they see the title? Rule of Law? What do they think it's about?" According to Valentin, the curators had seen his exhibition of glass pieces in Williamsburg, and that was enough. They didn't comprehend that the gnarled glass shards were exploded Iraqi heads. Perhaps, I suggested, your labels were hazy enough to succeed as illusionists.

As we put up photocopied statements by Alberto Gonzales, neatly labeling them with artist (A Gonzales), media, year, I wonder if there will be a "freak out" moment before the opening. I've been here at least once before. Everyone was all smiles until a few hours before that opening, when a museum director made the rounds and read labels. Then came frantic scuffling, a quiet meeting and then the junior curator coming over to me, and with maximum tortured, circuitous prose explaining that, well, you see, I don't quite know how to say it, but, um, there's a slight problem, no nothing big, but we were just wondering if, that is would you consider...

But somehow, this time around, the entire install goes off without a hitch. I'm not entirely delusional. It is August, "dead time" to most galleries as their patrons are away. The opening is, as a result, over-representative of the activist community. The same faces I had been seeing at meetings of Action Wednesday, an anti-war group, were out in force. The art crowd having gone on summer break, a different energy permeated the room. The staff at the gallery seemed a bit nervous. Nobody here looked like they had money, and not even in that neo-Factory, lower east side, almost famous manner.

Still everyone is polite to us until two friends start debating Hezbollah's role, liberators or destroyers, very near the drink table. The woman serving the drinks gets increasingly jittery. Very soon, there is no more wine. Valentin is puzzled–– he also bought a case of wine, that can't be gone too? Then one of the gallery assistants informs us that because it's summer, they have to close the place early. Sorry, the opening is not until 8 pm after all. It's all very rush rush, almost as if someone broke wind and the room needs to be cleared. As I walk towards the exit, I spot one potential source of trouble. One of our friends had kindly assumed -- well, from the name of the show-- that this was an appropriate venue and had left copies of the IndyMedia newspaper at the front desk. There, splashed out in garish outrage, were images of bloody warfare in Lebannon. A little too much of a reality intrusion, like Linda Blair's possessed girl walking in on a party, peeing on the carpet and blurting out: "You're going to die up there"[ii]

Enough anecdotes, let's start the rest of our conversation.

Permanent War, Elusive Peace
"Every morning, Shamshad Hussain goes to his rooftop, just opposite Red Fort, to enjoy a cup of tea after the azaan, his ears catching strains of prayers from the nearby Jama Masjid. Today, he carried two cups — the second was for the sniper on the rooftop."[iii]


It is almost banal to start by talking about the ongoing Iraq apocalypse. After thousands of lives, and many multiples more of ink and video have been spilt, what more remains to be said about this manifestation of permanent war? Those who marched in anti-war rallies can now feel some schadenfreude at the unraveling of the entire project for a New Century. But at what a terrible price we earned the right to say "we told you so". Even after all the interventionist fantasies have shattered, there is no post-war peace dividend. The madness of the Neocon project only replaced by the equally insane Islamist project of the Mahdi Army, and the ethnic cleansing and forced partition dreams of the Shiite and Sunni death squads.

The New York Times has just printed the most unflattering and bizarre photograph of Condoleeza Rice. Confronted by a chorus of furious opposition by both Democrats & Republicans (but we all know that this too will pass), Rice looks angry and cornered. Her hands are raised in martial pose, warding off noxious peaceniks and liberal harpies. A friend remarks that she looks like a Bollywood villain. Her body language spelling out a Gabbar Singh-like threat, "Mei thum sob lokogo tukra turka korenga" (all of you people, I will cut you into pieces). We have a good laugh. But a day later, newpapers carry a headline about Rice's threat come to life. Senior administration official Charles Stimson tells a radio show that corporate America should cut off business from all law firms that have represented Guantanamo detainees. He then lists all firms that are representing Muslim detainees. Even after a drubbing at the elections, the war on terror shows no signs of winding down, or opening itself up to logic. The world's largest (for now) superpower is still lost and thrashing around, doing untold damage to the world and, to a greater degree, to itself. Should we sit silently by? Well, friends don't let friends drive drunk.

It is fatuous to talk of "since 9/11" as if history started on that day and the current global conflagration is something new or unexpected. The previous century was in fact the most violent in recorded history–– ranging from world wars to colonial expansion, anti-colonial struggles, civil wars, revolution, guerilla warfare, urban war, genocide, and witch hunts. Simply to hint at the astronomical toll of the Stalinist terror alone, Martin Amis recalls this argument between his father (Kingsley) and A. J. Ayer:
"In the U.S.S.R., at least they're trying to forge something positive."
"But it doesn't matter what they're trying to forge, because they've already killed five million people."
"You keep going back to the five million."
"If you're tired of that five million, then I'm sure I can find you another five million."[iv]

Surveying the post "Good War" scenario of the other camp, Mahmood Mamdani[v] casts a cynical eye on the maximalist expansion of the US sphere of influence and destructive interventions in Africa and Latin America. In the blue-sky rhetoric of the time, countries were divided by the Heritage Foundation into compartments for "rollback" (Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Iran, Laos, Libya, Nicaragua, Vietnam). The skeleton closet from this period seems endless. What to do, for example, with the recent admission by Peter Matthiessen that he was a CIA recruit in the 1950s and used The Paris Review as his cover? It has been far too easy for cultural figures to be drafted into larger war-strategy programs, in the past through active recruiting, and now through silent assent.

Compared to these cowboy interventions, today's conflicts seem to have a slightly finite boundary––a sizable Muslim population is needed to qualify as a threat (Nepal or Sri Lanka never grab as many headlines). This reassures until you start counting the countries, or sizing up the growing internal populations of Europe and North America. With a renewed intensity not seen since the era of "negros with guns"[vi], the state is monitoring the internal "fourth column". "Muslim" serves as an ethnicized shorthand for migrant populations that were in the past seen as an obedient taskforce (North America) or a non-assimilating welfare nuisance (Europe), but now are seen as a ticking time bomb. During the Vietnam protests, "bringing the war home"[vii] meant gumming up the daily industrial, commercial and cultural machinery that made possible the prosecution of a napalm-orange war in Indochina. Today, the term has been perverted to mean the shadow surveillance of frantic citizens.

Even in countries that launch ferocious tirades against the new Rome, there is also a move to clone its tactics against their own citizens. After a rash of suicide bombings, the Bangladesh government passed far-reaching surveillance and enforcement measures, the language of which seemed to have been taken directly from Homeland Security's playbook. The paranoid mindset of endless security checks has now infected Southern nations. During a screening at Dhaka Public Library, a bearded musolli walked into the middle of the screening, blocking the projector. We had already gone through security checks, those same security guards rushed up and grabbed the man, and a tremor of thrill and fear ran through the crowd. Was this it, is this how it all ends? "Amare chaira den, ami kichu kori nai!" cried the poor man in a feeble voice. It turned out he was the night watchman for the Library. He had been looking for the prayer room, and had stumbled into the auditorium. The madrasa recruits are an icon of fear and resentment for the Bengali middle class, just as they are to xenophobes and power structures in the US and Europe. For the Dhaka elite, madrasa graduates are people who can't afford to drink Coke, have Josh ring tones on their phone, buy bar-coded fruit at Agora mall, or wear jeans from Westecs; they cannot exist in our consciousness. A similar frisson rises in the mind of the Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris or Rome pensioner as they see the hijab-clad (over-used cultural signifier), or bearded paan chewing migrant shuffling towards their bus stop. Why don't these people learn to speak the language properly, they mutter. The pensioner may not be Goldhagen's "ordinary German"[viii], but he will agree quietly as a national security state is built up to police these undesirables.

The "Necessary" War & Saviors for Civilian Life
" What, what if they don't even want the sheik, have you considered that? What if what they really want is for us to herd our children into stadiums like we're doing? And put soldiers on the street and have Americans looking over their shoulders? Bend the law, shred the Constitution just a little bit?"[ix]


There is now the terribly seductive idea of wars as "necessary" and a force for good. Paranoia is the driving factor, and the astonishing abundance of flags in today's American urban landscape is one demonstration of this out of control, emotional response. Fear eats the soul, as Kalle Lasn writes: “Is everybody crazy? … If you add up all the psychological ailments Americans complain of, the portrait that emerges is of a nation of basket-cases.”[x] Post-traumatic witnesses also incentivize programs of revenge killing on a micro scale and necessary war on a global scale. Amitava Kumar described this impulse in the context of the Gujarat anti-Muslim pogroms: “I saw from the way in which he recited the details that, in the name of charity and the need for news, this little boy had been turned into an automaton or an agony-machine. Insert a coin into the slot, and hear a recitation about rape.”[xi] Borrowing from Malcolm Gladwell, there is also the idea of the flash point event, whether it is an assassinated Gemayel, the purloined Prophet’s hair in Kashmir, a missing German industrialist, or a racial slur on an Australian beach, that can give rise to the "justified" response. The results are predictable–– justifiable wars inflame things even further. As the anti-war sign in Boston warned: "Bombing For Peace Is Like Fucking For Virginity"

In the middle of many righteous protest rallies, I encountered at least one conflict that truly put me in mind of pre-emptive violence. Like clockwork, another petition arrived in my email inbox, accompanied by the rote, garish, vaguely pornographic, jpeg. A large red target was drawn on Belgrade, and the slogan said "STOP NATO/STOP US". No, I have to admit, I could not cheer that slogan. We had been watching the genocide in Bosnia unfold for over two years. "Never Again" had been mouthed ad nauseum, but nothing had happened. Like the Rwandan and Darfur genocide, the world was watching (as Chicago '68 announced), but also sitting quietly on its' hands. Having read Robert Kaplan, they had concluded that "Balkan ghosts"[xii] were "primeval histories", not a place for modern intervention. In that scenario of stupefying inaction, even the Clinton and NATO bombings, however convoluted their motives, were a relief. At last, someone, somewhere was doing something. Sure enough, soon enough the Serbs were back at the negotiating table.

This was also the watershed moment when Christopher Hitchens broke with the American Left over its' refusal to endorse limited intervention. Unfortunately, Hitchens then made the leap to extend the lessons of Belgrade to Iraq. Operation Infinite Justice was also a "necessary" war that must be fought and would be won. Like many armchair pundits, Hitchens has neither experienced nor learnt from the brutality and unpredictability of war. His chorus was joined by hawks such as Thomas Friedman (on a break from touring Victoria's Secret factories in Sri Lanka), whose rhetoric recast war as a series of bloodless analogies: "You know, honey, the wheels aren’t on tight out there", "It’s O.K. to throw out your steering wheel as long as you remember you’re driving without one", "If we don’t turn around now, we may just get where we’re going", and of course re-quoting Lawrence Summers: "In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented car."

With an avalanche of such bastardized reasoning making the case for preemptive war, low-level strikes, mass detention, secret prisons, and leave-no-marks torture, the idea of ends-justify-any-means has infected other spheres of civilian life as well. We see this now in the extreme prejudice and brute force being applied to law enforcement, which increasingly resembles the dystopian vision of 2000 AD's Judge Dredd or Paul Verhoeven's Robocop. The first time I saw lethally over-armed and cocoon-wrapped riot police was during the first major anti-WTO battles in Seattle. Since then, the model of machine-tooled lethal force is a common sight at every demonstration–– from Genoa to Doha, and of course always in New York.

Along with a military-level increase in the ability to police, enforce, detain, harass, spy, and attack, there is also a rise, especially in developing nations, of an expanded military role in governments. As democratic experiments fail, the idea of the benevolent dictator is back in vogue. This was evident even in genteel events like the Asia Society's Asia 21, where some Singaporean speakers battled democracy advocates by expounding on "Asian Values" and "stability not democracy." We see this played out in the images that appeared on Flickr after the Thailand coup, showing people placing flower garlands near military checkpoints––the Vietnam protest image of long-stemmed flower placed inside a National Guard rifle, played in reverse. The army man in (or out of) khaki is a specter again in countries such as Algeria, Turkey and Fiji, and Parvez Musharraf proves that opposition to military coups is always conditional and opportunistic. Reflecting on the seductiveness of warrior-solutions to the messy business of democracy, the late writer Humayun Azad predicted: "One dawn morning a General will take over the country. He will call in a judge, that stupid judge will believe that he is the one who is really running the country. Then the general will keep giving the country boot-sunglass-left-right democracy. All the famed opportunists (this word is now praise) will come to the shade of his boot. One day that General will be immortal."[xiii]


Artist in Age of Diminished Expectations
"Strangely, life was becoming almost bearable. I don the robe of hermit without a cry, he thought. On the phonograph, music played, quiet and unhurried. Outside, the vampires waited."[xiv]


Without devolving into an endless litany of all the soft and hard conflicts in the world (there are so many to choose from), we can conclude that the post millennium world is in sorry shape and in need of many interventions. And so, we can dive into the conversation about the potential, ability, and responsibility of cultural actors. In particular, many of us have felt a growing realization over the last few years that the visual arts are conspicuously absent from today's contentious political debates. An explosive art market has created a "Green Zone" inside which we are bubble boys[xv], insulated from external, grim, realities. This is not to place a relative value judgment on artwork that is not (or is) socially engaged. But we need to fight against profit calculations that marginalize and punish those artists who do choose to engage political issues directly in their practice. Also of concern is a critical impulse that reflexively categorizes such work as didactic. These cultural equations and frozen positions must be urgently critiqued and dismantled.

We live in an age of reduced expectations and diminishing returns, especially in the area of political dissent. In spite of numerous rallies over the last four years against the Afghan invasion, Iraq war, Darfur carnage, Guantanamo black hole, Abu Ghraib horrorshow, and continued racial profiling of the "other", tangible victories have been dishearteningly rare. Of course, people come out to register vocalized, visible opposition even in the absence of results. But facing an endlessly resilient power structure, the movement faces exhaustion. At the first anti-Guantanamo rally of 2007, Pakistani poet Sarah Husain sms'ed me angrily from the freezing streets: "Where is everybody?" I typed out a flippant reply from my warm apartment. That was the theme and fate for many recent organized protests. Getting bodies on the streets sometimes feels like an exhausted tactic, new methods need to supplement and replace them. I'm vaguely embarrassed even by that moment of euphoria when we were chanting "George Bush Corporate Whore/We Don't Want Your Oil War." I fear that footage from those rallies will suddenly appear on YouTube–– like Joschka Fischer's street-fighting years, we're suddenly embarrassed by youthful optimism.

The role of the cultural producer in these times requires dissection. Richard Hulsenbeck told a 1918 conference audience: “We were for the war. Dada today is still for war. Life should hurt. There is not enough cruelty.” Of course Dada had a distinct war critique, but others took on the role of creating fascist mythos that assisted in annihilation projects–– Foujita's theatrical wartime paintings[xvi], Leni Riefenstahl's paean to the fetishized Aryan body, Syed Ali Ahsan's poetry for the dictator, or Amitav Bacchan's saber-rattling in jingoistic filmi projects. There are also the military dictators who were frustrated artists, famously Hussain Ershad, who wrote poetry, and Idi Amin, who displayed filmmaking elan for Barbet Schroeder.

Beyond critiquing this impulse to grease the military machine, how do we understand and support the cultural practitioner who actively opposes war culture? Their role may sometimes be direct and confrontational, at other times a quiet, post facto reflection. For those who do take on the role of last man in front of Tiananmen tanks, it is important to understand the structures that militate against them. Looking at an exhibition of Soc-Art (or "New Red Art")[xvii], I thrilled at the documentation of blotchy, hand-lettered "Solidarnosc" slogans jammed on top of a Polish news broadcast. A live, pre-digital hijack of the television signal that gave an electric shock to Warsaw living rooms. I'm waiting for someone to similarly hijack one of the giant billboards in Soho, Times Square or Piccadilly Circus and commit creative vandalism. Why is it only Banksy who still dares to sabotage a Disneyland ride with visions of orange jumpsuits? I keep hoping for gangs of culture jammers, not within the rarefied confines of "street culture" gallery shows, but mounting full assaults on the warrior-friendly mediascape.

There are of course numerous adventurous artmakers who are tackling these issues head-on, but there are many institutional barricades that impede their path. Wishful nostalgia is dangerous, but reading the narrative elsewhere in this book of the 1980s' Artists Call project reminds us that it is possible for artists, even in a go-go art market, to find a space for meaningful political dissent that brings tangible results to people outside the gallery perimeter. There are several factors preventing a similar impulse and result today, and we can consider at least three of them:

i) Fetish
"I heard some rumor that the CIA like, just arrested Lawrence Weiner 'cos of his beard' and I was like 'dude, that sucks. I'm gonna grow a beard in protest' and my dealer was like 'dude, that's so cool and it's gonna be real helpful in sellin' your work 'cos collectors are, like, goin' crazy over beards at the moment.'"[xviii]


First of course there is the problem of politics simply as a faddish layer or category, Just as ethnicity can be a lucrative categorization, so can a sheen of politics–– especially if it is the unthreatening, Prada-clad, faux Marxism variety. Can we think of another icon that has been so completely stripped of revolutionary or historical potential as Alberto Korda's photograph[xix], a point only (inadvertently) underscored by Victoria & Albert Musuem's exhaustive documentation of the hundred faces of Guevara. Similarly, when I look at Marianne Boesky gallery's invite for a show by Donald Moffett, I see a faux sticker with the word "IMPEACH." Later I realize it's not faux at all, in one hidden corner is a "Peel Here" tab. But will the show's visitors leave the gallery and start guerilla stickering all over town? When memorialized graffiti bombing and packaged bohemia is the bleeding edge of gallery-based "subversive" art, it is a struggle to overcome the commercial instrumentalization of genuine political positions. If political art becomes uber-trendy, the first victim is politics. Bemoaning the deafening silence of the artworld during the most recent Lebanon war, Emily Jacir wrote in her blog: " I am sure there will be conferences organized, teach-ins and always the "hero" filmmaker who will risk life to make a documentary, the readings, the art exhibits, and the art world will eat the Lebanese artists like pieces of chocolate."

ii) Dichotomy
"Our friend is an artist and he says his art is political, but he says it is also totally ineffectual and, therefore, is not activism."[xx]


The challenge for cultural producers is to find a meaningful balance between aesthetics and their desired political engagement. Okwui Enwezor delineated some of the issues embedded within critiques of Documenta XI when he wrote, “If we take on board the idea that combining aesthetic procedures with documentary/ethical questions presupposes the corruption of the autonomy of art we immediately face problems they each pose to our comprehension of reality in the context of art works, images, and events as they appear in exhibitions and institutions of contemporary art."[xxi] Paul Chan solves this by forcefully separating his activism from his art, Dread Scott opts for an extremely conjoined practice. There is a built-in cynicism towards perceived ideological agendas behind a direct approach. When the approach is more elliptical, it is more accepted territory (although here they may be charged with “trivializing”). An endless questioning can even manifest in negation, as in Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Happen. Some seek space in a continuum between direct and the poetic, putting into practice William Carlos Williams words: “It is difficult/to get the news/from poems/yet men die miserably/every day/for lack/of what is found/there” All this can lead to a false dichotomy between "genuine" art and "political" art, pushing the latter towards some rarefied ghetto. This logic even led to the recent pronouncement of Amiri Baraka as a "marginal figure" or as Stanley Crouch scathingly observed, "[he] could have been like Saul Bellow, but with his own style and perspective. If a writer goes into politics, he should maintain his independence."[xxii] Forceful political positions have frequently doomed artists to precisely this sort of dismissive indictment.

iii) Seppuku
"I was seeing work in studios and I was realizing that this work wasn't being presented in galleries because the galleries didn't know how to contextualize, engage, and sell it. It's a whole other side of the system, it's a monster, in a way."[xxiii]


Related to the above is also the real risk of politically engaged art as career suicide, especially for the young, struggling artist. Outright censorship comes usually from right-wing institutions, as when the plans for the Drawing Center at Grand Zero floundered over Amy Wilson's Life In A Free Country. The more subtle pressures come because disapproval of (some) political art manifests itself through the quiet sidelining of these artists' careers. Or even more insidious (because self-censorship is the best censorship) is when the artist starts to move away from direct political work because they realize their careers are going into free-fall. When an artist's more socially engaged practice gets relegated to "something she does on the side", while her other work is patronized and sold, most would make the logical choice. The starving artist mythos is only romantic to those who don't have to live it. Moaning about money in the artworld has become another tired trope. Of course the market is crazy and overheated, but it has always been this way–– people have been predicting apocalyptic collapses since the 1980s (and there was of course one such dip). Anyone with a modicum of interest in the future of the arts cannot possibly be upset that artists are now able to make a comfortable living from their work, at many multiples of what was possible before. Neither is early, hyper-professionalism necessarily a betrayal of some sacred trust. The real issue is not the presence of money, but whether by its' presence it is neutering politically challenging work. It is essential to carve out a space for continued vigorous thought and dissent, protected from the punishment of the market.


Engage Or Die
"From those of us who are left behind: you will be remembered, you were the one I needed, I loved you in my dreams."[xxiv]


In an effort to jolt the hyper art market out of its' current juggernaut path, Jerry Saltz wrote: "The agenda needs to be set by artists, not the market. Supply-and-demand thinking has to shift to production-and-experience thinking. Small communities or cells of artists, curators and critics should band together, take positions, make cogent arguments, and put those things out there."[xxv]
It is our desire to stake out a clear space for engaged political art that can (once again) fulfill the potential of artists as public activists, intellectuals and agents of progressive, political change. This show came about propelled by that impulse–– not to launch a grand manifesto but at least to lob a small hand grenade into smug paradigms that "manage" the artworld as if it is a trading floor or investment fund, as opposed to something with potential to shape visions of other possible futures.
This show's title borrows partially from Chris Hedges' book[xxvi] on warlust. The title of this essay similarly came from Casey Kasem's radio rant, as appropriated by Negativland. In the original radio show, America's comforting music father figure is caught in an off-air moment railing against U2: "This is bullshit, nobody cares. These guys are from England, and who gives a shit?"[xxvii] Free-associating between U2's ferocious legal response and the Gary Webb spy plane incident that inspired Negativland's guerilla warfare, I started wondering if this would be the fate of artists making (or choosing not to make) political art interventions. As the world continues to slide towards national security panic, people who do not engage with these issues risk becoming irrelevant to vital cultural dialogue. Recent Biennials seemed to operate in magnificent isolation, oblivious to a world split asunder by violence. Now that there is blood in the water and it is safe (and fashionable) to attack the American Imperial project, they have belatedly started programming political work. Will this be a temporary dip, before the art world resumes regular programming, isolated in splendid art fair echo chambers? We hope rather that it will become a robust trajectory, fostering artists and art institutions active role in deciding political futures.

In an effort to challenge hermetic trends, this show is our small contribution to a dynamic conversation that is already under way in many locations. While a small minority of these artists have exhibited at venues such as the Whitney, Venice and Sydney Biennials, we also discovered many of these works while attending protest rallies, going to concerts, browsing a comic book store, and surfing YouTube and Flickr. Within the (soon to be expanded) silo of political art, certain conflicts tend to dominate. So we sought out and emphasized conflagrations that slip under the radar. These include the Beslan school raid, rebranded School of Americas, East Timor library, Oaxaca burning, Darfur refugee camps, Rome assassination, Iraq's managed chaos, "Safe" Area Gorazde, D.W. Griffith's Night Riders, Vietnam's burning monk, Oliver Stone's 9/11 blockbuster, Jetblue's t-shirt policy, Paris' cat graffiti, Newsweek's Rwanda amnesia, Iranian embassy takeover, Che Guevara's New York visit, Bangladesh's gun culture, and Thailand's rose coup.

The current "poverty of responsive, socially active visual culture"[xxviii] needs to be challenged head on. The best response to the question of whether political art can play a viable role in shaping mass culture, world events and politics is to look at these and many other artists who are drawing out plans for their own rebellions–– both inside the frothy art market, but also far away from white cubes, in neo-situationist art practices, independent pedagogy and teaching, rebellious intervention, aesthetic innovation, street action, and public dialogues interfacing with our daily lives.


[Naeem Mohaiemen is an artist working in New York and Dhaka. Thanks to Media Farzin, Jesal Kapadia, Brian Holmes, and Doug Ashford for comments on an earlier draft.]

[i] Response to Mikhail Goldstein's concert in besieged Stalingrad, described in William Craig, Enemy At The Gates, Penguin, 2000
[ii] Linda Blair as Regan in The Exorcist, William Friedkin dir., 1973
[iii] Charu Sudan Kasturi, "Tea With Sniper", The Telegraph, 8/15/06
[iv] In the end twenty million, as exhaustively enumerated in Martin Amis, Koba The Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, Knopf, 2002
[v] Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, Pantheon, 2004
[vi] Title of Robert Williams' incendiary pamphlet, later channeled into founding of Deacons for Defense
[vii] Martha Rosler, Bringing The War Home: House Beautiful (1967-72), and also as popularized by New Left radical movements like Weather Underground and Rotee Armee Fraktion
[viii] Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Knopf, 1996
[ix] Denzel Washington in The Siege, Edward Zwick dir., 1998
[x] Kalle Lasn, Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America, William Morrow, 1999
[xi] Amitava Kumar, Husband of a Fanatic, The New Press, 2005
[xii] Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History, St. Martin's Press, 1993
[xiii] Humayun Ajad, Rajnithibidgon, Agami Press, 1998
[xiv] Richard Matheson, I Am Legend, Bantam, 1964
[xv] I borrowed this phrase from Asif Saleh's post at drishtipat.org/blog
[xvi] Phyllis Birnbaum, Glory In A Life: A Life of Foujita–– The Artist Caught Between East and West, Faber & Faber,
[xvii] Polish Socialist Conceptualism, curated by Lukasz Ronduda and Barbara Piwowarska, Ochard gallery, New York, 2007
[xviii] Brock Jones, "Hair Today", letter to Frieze, 1/07
[xix] Korda's daughter successfully sued Bruce LaBruce for his film riff on Baader-Meinhof Strawberry Reich because of "unauthorized" use of this icon
[xx] Mike Bonnano (The Yes Men), Who Cares, Creative Time, 2006
[xxi] Okwui Enwezor, "Documentary/Verité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art"
[xxii] "A Return to Rage, Played Out In Black & White", Celia McGee, New York Times, 1/14/07
[xxiii] Dead Daderko, Who Cares, Creative Time, 2006
[xxiv] Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park, Knopf, 2005
[xxv] "The Battle For Babylon", Jerry Saltz, Village Voice, 9/16/05
[xxvi] War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, Chris Hedges, Public Affairs, 2002
[xxvii] Negativland, "The Letter U And The Numeral 2", U2, 1991
[xxviii] Doug Ashford, "Finding Cythera: Disobedient Art and New Publics", Who Cares, Creative Time, 2006

System Error

System error: war is a force that gives us meaning February 3 - May 6, 2007

Palazzo delle Papesse opens the first exhibition cycle of 2007 introducing the group show System Error: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning. The show is co-curated by Papesse chief curator Lorenzo Fusi and New York/Dhaka based artist Naeem Mohaiemen.

Featuring the artwork of more than 40 international artists working in video, music, comics, flash animation, print, sculpture, installation, collage, t-shirts, and various other media, the show will explore the response of artists to the current period of expanded and endless wars, both and intense cross-border battles, and the quiet violence of "disappearances".

The curators set out to explore this fundamental question: if war is universally opposed, why do new conflicts keep breaking out? Is there an addiction to warfare in the human psyche? Has it become a drug we cannot quit? These and many other questions regarding the nature of "soft" conflict; the allure of flags, national anthems and nationalism; and pop culture's fascination with bloody violence are explored in this show.

Artists in the show range from internationally established pioneers (Chris Marker, Walid Raad, Lebbeus Woods) to newer rising artists (Chris Koji Naka, Rheim AlKadhi, Yara el-Sherbini), as well as people who have never shown in the museum or gallery context (Chaleerat Ngamchalee). While many of these artists have exhibited at venues such as the Whitney Museum, Venice and Sydney Biennials, the two curators also discovered many of these works while attending protest rallies, going to concerts, browsing a comic book store, and surfing YouTube and Flickr. In the choice of artists, mediums and genres, this project represents a look at the future of politically engaged visual arts, both inside gallery walls, and on the streets of modern cities.

As well as the established media of video, sculpture, print, and conceptual art, the show has a special emphasis on newer mediums and genre-breaking work: this includes work in flash animation (Young-Hae Chang), Hollywood mashups (Chris Koji Naka, Jackie Salloum, Christopher Moukarbel), TV satire (Yara el-Sherbini), t-shirt wars (Usman Haque), comic books (Joe Sacco, Dawolu Jabari Anderson), video games (Jon Haddock), library recovery (Tom Nicholson), music mix (Paul D.Miller aka DJ Spooky), street performance (Richard Dedomenici), museum intervention (Meir Gal), radio piracy (Negativland), and musicals (Damir Niksic).

While certain conflicts tend to dominate global media, the curators also emphasized conflicts that often slip outside the global radar. Some of the conflict zones that the artists look at include Lebanese civil wars, Darfur refugee camps, CIA Planes, Beslan school, School of Americas, East Timor library, Hollywood archetypes, Rome assassinations, Iraq chaos, Safe Area Gorazde, D.W. Griffith's night riders, Vietnam's burning monks, Oliver Stone's 9/11 blockbuster, Jetblue's t-shirt policy, Paris' cat graffiti, Iranian embassy takeover, U2's expensive lawyers, Bangladesh's gun love, Thailand's rose coup and Africa's conflict diamonds.

Artists on show: Brian Alfred, Rheim Alkadhi, Dawolu Jabari Anderson, Julieta Aranda, Shishir Bhattacharjee, Sarah Bridgland, Matt Bryans, Kevin Carter, Richard Dedomenici, Birgit Dieker, Meir Gal, Felix Gmelin, Jon Haddock, Usman Haque, Young-hae Chang, Heavy Industries, Alfredo Jaar, Emily Jacir, Agnieszka Kalinowska, Chris Marker, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky, Carlos Motta, Chris Moukarbel, Chris Naka, Negativland, Chaleerat Ngamchalee, Tom Nicholson, Damir Niksic, Stefano Palumbo, Gilles Peress, Sarah Pickering, Wilfredo Prieto, Walid Raad/Atlas Group, Joe Sacco, Jackie Salloum, Yara El-Sherbini, Francesco Simeti, Speculative Archive, Do-Ho Suh, The Critical Voice, Alejandro Vidal, Lebbeus Woods.

Apart from essays from the two curators, contributions in companion book published by Silvana Editoriale in bilingual edition, will feature the following artists: Ayreen Anastas+René Gabri, Doug Ashford, Jimmie Durham, Jean Fisher, Coco Fusco, Matt McAllester, Josh Neufeld+Martha Rosler, Michael Rakowitz, Raqs Media Collective, Israel Rosas.

Private press preview: 3 February 2007, 12.00 h., 3rd floor, Palazzo delle Papesse.

Still Dreamer

Wounded Nation, Still The Dreamer
by Naeem Mohaiemen
[Published in DAILY STAR, January 12, 2007]

"You and I are of that clan
The one that sings in the middle of pain
That painful scream is the only song..
Of this dead century."
[ Humayun Azad, Bangla Bhashar Shothru Mithro, 1999]

Once again. Bangladesh on the front page of the New York Times. But this time, instead of Yunus surrounded by smiles, boys throwing rocks at a lethally over-armed police force. A professor at Cooper Union calls me up and tells me that old communist friends are saying there's "revolution" on the streets. I laugh silently. What are they smoking? "Revolution? No, nothing of that sort, just fratricide," I reply sadly.

From this perch, an exultant Nobel Prize Friday seems quite far away. Back then, after I had sent the umpteenth SMS to various cell phones, one friend fired back, "Basta Ya! What is with this irritating display of nationalism! I thought you were above all this?" It's true, normally I'm quite skeptical of nationalism, and yet the prize announcement had swept away the typical self-restraint.

Why did that victory matter so much for Bangladesh? Why a nationalist project in this century, when these parochial feelings are supposed to be closeted. All sorts of ummah identity are to be the new transnational glue -- South Asian, Subcontinental, Deshi, Asian, Pan-Asian, Muslim, Southern, Third World, pick your kurta. But suddenly back to the national borders. Or is it forward to...?

For my friends who moved beyond borders, it's hard to explain a psyche that still craves national heroes. For decades, Bangladesh has struggled under the weight of the impossible, sky-high expectations created by 1971 and the rise and fall of demi-gods. From the Dhanmondi massacre onwards, the roller coaster ride never ends–– Khondoker's Judas kiss, jail killings, Khaled Mosharraf's musical chairs, Shipai Shipai Bhai Bhai/Officer der Rocktho Chai, the crippled war hero and a secret execution, "I will make politics difficult", Circuit House invasion, Manzur's mysterious "mob" death, Qamrul Hasan's World Shameless, Ghulam Azam's returned passport, and the ongoing dogfight between BNP and AL. The surprises or chomoks are endless, but the game has grown quite tired. Hello? Is anyone still watching? Change the channel please.

Politics is not everything, but this endless battle has poisoned many aspects of Bangladesh's trajectory. Even though the new generation would like to ignore all this, the politics of hartal and confrontation has made it impossible––everyone is hostage to the political turf war. Oh, if only they would settle their accounts inside Parliament––imagine Kahn's masterpiece with a built-in wrestling ring. The victors would get to keep their red passports and Pajeros.

A nation that cannot define itself is forced to swallow others' definitions. Thirty years after Kissinger, every new government still feels the need to say to a foreign magazine interviewer, at least once, "Well, you know we are no longer that bottomless basket, we are self-sufficient in food..." Lazy journalism and media caricature always needs a country to be "Timbuktu" -- a symbol for distance, dystopia, mystery, poverty, or anarchy. In the last few years, Bangladesh also finds itself trapped inside the box of Islam. Fighting a rising militant Islamic threat, the country is now the focus of unwelcome external attention. A steady drumbeat of parachute journalism about "Talibanization." Another zero-zero image game.

There are, predictably, a roll-call of achievements that are ignored -- dramatic increases in food sufficiency, child vaccination rates higher than the US, drop in child mortality, accelerating literacy rate, increase in female education, exploding export sector, literal rags-to-riches garment story, a technologically savvy youth culture, construction boom, digital divide leapfrogging, fiercely free press, empowered women, and the largest number of NGOs and a huge number of successful development, social welfare and grassroots organizing models. But none of these are particularly sexy, or bite-size stories for the world.

This paradoxes makes this nation vulnerable to emotion and wild mood swings. In the midst of a poverty scenario, somehow a global "happiness" survey pronounced Bangladeshis to be the "happiest in the world"! It is in this context that the Yunus Nobel was appropriated and turned into something much more. All the pent up desires for a hero, a cause, a pride flag, were projected onto one institution and moment.

Trying to explain a national pride project (while insisting to my skeptical friends that this is different from jingoism), I went back to my archives and dug out my diary notes written from Dhaka in December 2005. Filming back-to-back rallies by Islamist groups and Secularists, and finding the latter small and outnumbered, I was in a blue mood reflecting the national tenor. The country was reeling from an unbroken chain of political violence, magnified by "suicide bombings" by militant Islamists. Those six months of chaos were considered the gravest threat to Bangladesh's future since 1971 (but soon, there was more to come).

Finally, on a gloomy December 16th, known in more hopeful times as Victory Day, the weekly SHAPTAHIK 2000 mustered up impossible reserves of optimism to bring out their cover story.

A green-red cover..

A cloud cluster of words, tracing the shape of the map.

Among the many words, I could make out the following:

Terrorism
Cross-fire
Bomb blasts
Traffic Jam
Murder
Poison Pen
Militancy
Brain Drain
Fundamentalism
Gas crisis
Bribery
Water crisis
Inflation
Scandal
Monga
Fraud
Bank loot
Blackout

And underneath that long litany, an impossible defiance:

"Standing in the middle of a pile of smoke, we still dream of a prosperous, stable Bangladesh. A country where the Fundamentalists will have no space. Where we can smash their throne of blood to pieces. Bengalis are on a cursed journey, but we still dream among the ashes."

And then the seemingly impossible headline...

THOBU BHALOBASHI BANGLADESH
(AND YET, I STILL LOVE BANGLADESH)

"From a wounded land and people, who won't stop dreaming."

Hasina's Ulu Dhoni Moment

Hasina's ulu dhoni moment
Naeem Mohaiemen
[Published in DAILY STAR, December 26, 2006]

I hate giving people a chance to say, "I told you so." So imagine the chorus after reports of an AL 5-point "understanding" (soon to be denied as "misunderstanding") with the Khelafat Andolan gang emerged. In one swift move, the party rolled over and handed on a platter every major Islamist demand of the last five years. Whether BNP or AL wins in the next election, the patient, cunning Islamists are the big winners in symbolic and real terms.

A friend wrote: "Don't worry, our politicians do beimani (dishonesty). They will do beimani with Khelafat Andolon as well." But for those of us who have lost interest in the why, how, or where AL (or BNP) does anything, the motive for these electoral chomoks (displays) is irrelevant. What really matters is the manner in which every Islamist party, demand, and agenda is slowly but surely penetrating into every artery of the national body politic and infrastructure.

For the last five years, the BNP-Jamaat coalition's ferocious attacks on secularism, and aggressive push for an Islamist agenda has had an unexpected side effect. As BNP's enemy, AL has automatically received the mantle of defender-of-secularism, without doing a single thing to protect it.

During the last three years' attacks on the Ahmadiya community, I spent a significant time with the Ahmadiya mosques for my film Muslims or Heretics. I was struck by the quiet faith many Ahmadiya supporters had that AL would never allow these things to happen. In all the time that Ahmadiya property was burnt, books were seized, mosques attacked, and imams killed, the AL never raised a voice, or joined a rally. But because the BNP was actively tolerating Khatme Nabuwat, all of us presumed that AL would not do the same!

But just read a few items in the MOU with Khelafot Andolon.

* To not accept Prophet Mohammed as the last Prophet is forbidden.

*Blasphemy will be a punishable offense.

If these items sound familiar, it is because these have been demand number one and two on every single flyer given out at Khatme Nabuwat rallies. Having spent time at many KN rallies documenting their speeches, I am struck (but not surprised) by the manner in which the AL has now reproduced in toto the entire text and sentiments of anti-Ahmadiya forces.

After the 2001 elections, BNP-affiliated thugs went on a revenge spree in Hindu villages, attacking, raping, and looting, all to target presumed AL supporters. The tragedy for Hindu Bengalis is that they are getting the long pole from both ends. Beaten to a pulp for voting AL, and abandoned by AL when they are in power. But AL never has to do any work to prove their credentials. Whether minority or majority, anyone who wants a secular state is afraid to vote BNP because of its clear stance against secularism.

Khaleda Zia once said: "If Hasina gets elected, there will be ulu dhoni (ululation) in the mosques of Bangladesh." That is all it took to get AL branded secular, even while the party took a half dozen steps in the opposite direction. From lok-dekhano (just to show) umra and mathae kapor (covering head) to Bismillah in election posters, the AL has been playing the Islam card for a while -- confident that the secular vote is always theirs.

It was Hasina's infamous meeting with Golam Azam that led Farhad Mazhar to write an essay titled: "Sheikh Hasina has insulted Jahanara Imam's memory by touching her coffin." But faced with the larger embrace of Jamaat by BNP, we who are so desperate for even a minute sign of secularism have forgiven AL those past sins. Yes, Hasina sat with Jamaat, but she did not bring them into a cabinet. But at the rate things are going, can we trust that will never happen?

I wonder what Suranjit Sengupta and other minority members of AL are thinking right now. I wonder how they can keep a straight face when Sheikh Hasina talks about "secularism" to Bangali Christians on the same day that Jalil announces an MOU with Shaikhul Hadis. Like Marie Antoinette, AL thinks "let them eat cake," cutting a Christmas cake with our beleaguered Christian citizens. That is the dessert to choke on, a monument to opportunism.

When Salahuddin Quader Chowdhury was defeated in the OIC election, he blamed a global campaign alleging that he was a 1971 war criminal. Chief focus of his ire was the AL. In a furious press conference, he threatened to "Islamicize" Suranjit Sengupta's nether regions.

I remember being horrified, but now I feel that it is better to face SaQa Chowdhury -- at least he lays his cards on the table and you know exactly where you are. The problem with the so-called defenders of secularism is that they will smile to your face while running the knife very deep into your poor, unprotected back. Surely we can do better than this?

Some ask why AL gets so much hate for allying with Islamists, but the same does not happen for BNP. It's because BNP is being consistent -- they have never said they are interested in secularism. Since their founding years, BNP has been committed to a project of Bangladeshi not Bengali, Allah Hafez not Khoda Hafez, India as permanent enemy, and the gun not the carrot for CHT Paharis. If BNP sits with Jamaat, it is consistent with that vision -- they have always been the "Islam bachao" (save Islam) vote (as if our religion is so weak it needs Bangalis to "save" it). It is only the AL who has ever profited from the secularism vote (and by the way, not just minorities, but also thinking Muslims -- and we are legion -- want religion separate from state).

Most young people are bored by the 15-year serialized soap opera of BNP vs AL. A retired official says: "Shob chor" (All are thieves) and it's hard to argue with his nihilistic mind-set. But what does matter is the permanent damage being done to the secularism project (which is never anti-religion, but simply asks for separation of religion from politics). From Zia to Ershad to Khaleda to Hasina, the players change but the Islamist project grows mightier as every party makes concessions to religious politics -- whether by an inch or a mile.

Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold. Ten years from now, there may be no Hasina, Khaleda, Tarique, Joy, Jalil, Bhuiyan. There may be a whole new set of players -- who may be vibrant new jacks, or the same liquid in a new bottle. But the one sure thing is that the Islamists will be much stronger. Today they are kingmakers, tomorrow they will be kings.

When Pets Attack

When Pets Attack
by Naeem Mohaiemen
[Published in DAILY STAR, December 18, 2006]

"After each revolution several thousand of these corrupt elements are executed in public and burnt and the story is over. They are not allowed to publish newspapers...We will close all parties except the one, or a few which act in a proper manner."
[Ayatollah Khomeini, quoted in Life of the Ayatollah, Baqer Moin, Thomas Dunne Books, 2000]

Kawser Miah was a regular presence at our Elephant Road adda. Whenever we would sit for sickly-sweet cha and stale toast biscuit, he would be at a nearby table. We would smile, wave and get back to our adda. The thing I remember most about Kawser is that he was always up to some scheme––whether involving women, money or going abroad. His confidence in these matters was overwhelming and his favorite phrase was "manage korbo." Oshubidha nai, oke manage kore felbo. Or even more dismissively, dekhben kemon kore oitare size kori.

I don't really frequent the Elephant Road adda any more. But I did run into Kawser once. He wasn't looking so good. A combination of cigarettes, poor diet and a string of bad luck had left him looking haggard and prematurely old. What happened to business? Apparently his partner on one venture had run off to Singapore with the money. He had now been "managed," by someone sharper and quicker.

I was thinking of Kawser recently as I read the news of the Awami League's attempts to expand their "greater electoral alliance" by incorporating "like-minded" political parties. Like-minded is now a very elastic term, stretched to include Nejame Islam, as well as active talks with Islami Oikya Jote factions, Islami Constitution Movement, etc. This is the same AL that once talked a good game about protecting secularism, back when bomb blasts had made Islamist a dirty word.

Here we go again.

The AL thinks, of course, that they will use these Islamists to battle BNP's Islamists, and eat into the so-called Islam-ponthi vote. The same way that Khaleda, Ershad and Zia all thought they were using the Islamists to weaken their opponents.

In the absence of meaningful difference on issues such as industrialization, foreign investment, trade policy, wages, etc., our political turf wars rotate around symbols and icons––nation's father, independence announcer, and religion. In the vacuum left by the collapse of the left, religion has emerged as a powerful organizing force. The mosque and madrassa are natural gathering places that can facilitate recruitment. Over the decades, successive groups of politicians have tried to harness this power, whether by directly courting Jamaat and smaller parties, or by engaging in communal slogans like Khaleda's "moshjid e ulu-dhoni." All the while thinking they are "using" and "controlling" the Islamists.

When Zia inserted Bismillah into the constitution, and removed secularism, he never imagined he was creating future rivals. Ershad too thought ederke ami manage korbo, and introduced Islam as state religion. In Khaleda Zia's first government, Golam Azam scored a hat trick by getting his citizenship back. I remember passing Mohakhali rail crossing and steering past burning cars––that's how I learnt about that particular court verdict. But soon enough, the outrage passed. Too many other things to worry about. 1971 was no longer an issue. Ancient history, our elders told us. They would know.

When Hasina held hands with Jamaat during the oust-BNP movement, could she guess that same party would give BNP an electoral edge in 2001? BNP took things to another level, placing two Jamaat ministers for the first time in the cabinet. Not just any posts either––Social Affairs and Industry. Now both NGOs and Tata have to negotiate with them. Every time we have a new government, there is always an incremental improvement for the Islamists.

The only setback for Islamists was the recent upsurge of nihilistic bomb attacks. Some people even whisper that renegade BNP factions could have created Bangla Bhai, to "manage" AL, and create alternatives to Jamaat. Whether these allegations are true or far-fetched, something is definitely fishy about the haste to execute JMB leaders. From dead leaders in jail cells, to Manzur killed by a "mob", our history is full of these incomplete stories.

Talking about the way in which pets can turn on their masters, I'm thinking now of Ahmad Chalabi. When the US dropped him as an ally, he decided to hitch his star to the Iraqi Islamists. The avowedly secular Chalabi thought he could manage people like Al Sadr. Now he has been eclipsed and booted out by the people he helped to put in power, including those that are fomenting civil war. An Iraqi official even told a journalist recently, "Ahmad Chalabi's problem is that he is usually the smartest man in the room, and thinks he can control what happens. But these guys don't care if you have a Ph.D. in math; they'll kill you. In the end, things went way past the point where Ahmad thought they would ever go. I can't imagine he wanted that. But he helped start it."

The 2005 bombings put a temporary pall on the idea of religious politics, but that shadow too will pass (Bangali forgets nothing trivial, but cannot remember anything important). The Islamists have always been focused on a hundred year plan, while the main parties claw at each other and think of a five-year survival plan (with Bangkok plane tickets ready in a drawer). People who believe they are divinely ordained to rule can afford to be patient and build strength. Already deep inside the unversities, they are quietly infiltrating the civil service (hence the recent upgraded BA/MA status for madrasa degrees), business sector and army. Their goal is always the long-term.

There is a popular wall cheeka: "In thirty years, we are the only people whose hands are not dirty with money. We want Allah's law, and honest man's rule" There are of course many examples of clerics who came to power elsewhere and turned out to be incredibly corrupt and repressive. Last week, hundreds of Iranian students interrupted a speech by Ahmedanijed, shouting "death to dictatorship." But since clerics believe they have a divine mandate, bending to the ticking time bomb of mass dissent among post '79 generation is out of the question. Most religious people are like my father––quietly going to the mosque, fasting, paying zakaat. Beyond that, they live quiet lives and leave people alone. The thought of forcing religion on others runs counter to their ethical and moral understanding of Islam. But for others, force is the only correct language.

Bengalis sick of the mutual fratricide of AL-BNP may one day decide to cast their protest vote with various Islamists. Unless there is a real secular alternative, there may even be an Islamic state in all our futures. In 1979, the Shah's regime was so brutal and hated that even Iranian leftists donned the chador as a marker of protest. The thing is, after the Shah left, they couldn't take it off.

Here Comes Khaki Again?

by Naeem Mohaiemen
[Published in DAILY STAR, December 12, 2005]

It's a terrible moment to realize that your elders have clay feet, that they can make mistakes.

Amar baba shob jane, went a phrase when I was growing up. Yes, our parents knew everything. They were not to be questioned, doubted or second-guessed.

It was a turning point when I finally realized that my father could be wrong on ocassion. This came about while he was defending a cherished institution––the one that put food on our table, provided for his education and career, and our whole family's well being.

The Bangladesh Army.

This moment, the one I'm thinking of, came when I first dived into an argument about the Chittagong Hill Tracts at the dinner table. I was still a teenager––sure of my convictions, but green in my debating skills. I had just talked about the army's "pacification" campaigns against the Pahari/Jumma people.

"You don't know what you're talking about," my father replied, "The army is there to keep the peace. They are doing what the civilians cannot. Without them, there would be chaos. We are there because the politicians failed!"

We are there because the politicians failed....

I hesitated. I was certain I was right. We Bengalis were practicing ethnic cleansing in the Hill Tracts. The government was exploiting Army jawans to keep the Pahari (Jumma) population terrorized, and Bengali settlers were subsidized to displace Paharis from their homeland. Like occupying armies elsewhere, the Bangla soldiers believed they were a force for good (after all, it was within our own borders)––even when the indigenous population ran scared from their guns.

But wait, my father was always right. Wasn't he?

I retrieve this memory as a prologue to explain that my critique of army involvement in civilian affairs comes, and has always come, from within. My father retired as a Major General in the Medical Corps. Another uncle was a Major General in engineering corps (and head of NSI) and a third uncle was a Major General and Finance Minister for the Ershad regime (the only cabinet member who maintained a neutral stance and did not join the JP). Many of my youthful moments were spent in Cantonment, waiting for my father to finish work, or visiting my uncle. Idle moments were spent admiring the kuchkawaj of soldiers. Every time they passed a senior officer, they gave a smart salute. In a country lacking in rules, discipline or methods, it was a heart-warming sight.

Looking at these smartly turned out men, my father used to share a phrase from British army, "We always say, if it's moving, salute it, if it's standing still, paint it white." It was a mild joke, but within it was immense pride about the institution that made him who he was. I liked seeing that emotion, a precious and rare commodity.

Despite my long association with the army, and benefiting from the privileges of that institution, I feel fear and cold dread as I watch news reports of khaki in the streets once again. The past is future again, as we see the injection of the army into democracy. The President can talk a good game, but his chess move in bringing the soldiers out is clear. He is now exploiting the army to be the iron fist in a velvet glove. shabdhan, too much theri beri, and we will bring in military. Tharpor bujhbe thela. Gonothonthro koi jai.

Of course bringing in the army to ensure law and order does not automatically mean a military coup. But the more the army is used to take care of civilian tasks, the more people may ask, well why do we need democracy? Er chey army bhalo. And that is how it always starts...

Theoretically, both BNP and AL have much to fear from another military coup. But AL has a history of a family wiped out in Dhanmondi (and later the four leaders in Dhaka jail) at the hands of renegade elements within the army. Naturally, they are more fearful of the military than BNP. Of course, Ershad was an equal opportunity punisher, running the jackboot on both BNP and AL. But in the current situation, the AL is the one who is harmed more, since it is their street protests that are being targeted.

Our modern army has shown that they can be, in the right circumstances, a force for good. In UN missions abroad, the Bengali peacekeepers have set high standards and risked their lives. Bangladeshi soldiers are the second largest providers of UN troops. Current deployment is in 12 countries, and 63 soldiers have been killed in active duty (my cousin was one of them). Peacekeeping earns Bangladesh almost $200m a year.

The UN says Bangladeshi soldiers are in demand because they are highly disciplined and there are fewer complaints of corruption or sexual harassment against them than soldiers from other countries. Speaking of the impact on domestic politics, Professor CR Abrar of Dhaka University told the BBC, "They have gained international prestige, they have gained international legitimacy. So I think they would think twice or thrice before engaging in such adventurism [as military coup]."

When we read of Bengali peacekeepers guarding Mogadishu airport, flying helicopter squadrons in Ituri (Congo), controlling rebel territory in Sierra Leone, and flying the UN flag in besieged Bihac (Yugoslavia), we felt a twinge of pride. But if we look at the history of army deployment inside Bangladesh, these occasions have not harnessed this same positive energy.

From 1975 onwards, army involvement in our domestic politics has dirtied the khaki. Chucho marthe haath moila korthe hoi, and the army has been unable to keep its hands clean. During the Ershad years, the army was so compromised that I stopped riding in my father's olive green car. It did not matter that it carried an "Army Medical Corps" insignia (army doctors being one group that stayed clear of politics)––army was army, and in those days it was not seen as anything positive. But the subsequent years have largely erased the legacy of the Ershad years, and today's armed forces no longer carry the same stigma of obstacle to democracy.

Can the army resist the political manipulations of those who want to send us back to the bad old days?

General Labyrinth

The Generals In Their Labyrinth
by Naeem Mohaiemen
[originally published in DAILY STAR, Sep 28 '06]

"The #1 hot-selling item is democracy, nothing else comes close. Not religion, love, lust, hamburger, fish and chips, coca cola, beer, or Princess Diana."
[Humayun Azad, Rajnithibidgon, Agami Press, 1998]

One quiet morning in 1982, I headed to school as usual. My father used to give me a "lift" on his way to work. A military doctor, he had a long trek to CMH and would leave at the pagan hour of 6 am. I staggered out with him, unfinished homework bulging in my backpack.

Suddenly my aunt came running out.

"Bablu bhai, don't go near Cantonment! They just announced on the radio, there's been a coup!"

"Coup? Abar ke coup korlo?" my father barked with his usual brusqueness.

"General Ershad."

Ershad? Who the hell was Ershad? The only General I knew well was retired Osmani on the election trail. Ey cheese kothheke elo? I thought, still sleepy. And in the next moment, a secret thrill as the larger significance sank in.

No school today!

Over the next ten years, we got to know that cheese very well. Nothun Bangladesh Gorbo Mora led to Beshi Kore Aloo Khan, golf tournaments, poetry festivals, state religion, university closed sine die, Mishuk rickshas, street urchins renamed Pothokoli, KAFCO corruption, Atroshi's Pir as royal guru, Nur Hossain's dead body, and much more. It was a long bumpy ride, capped by Qamrul Hasan's deathbed drawing.

After a decade in the wilderness, Ershad is back. Dhaka streets carry this bold JP slogan:
Je Bole Shoirachar/Thar Mookhe Jootha Mar
(He Who Calls Us Dictator/Kick Him In The Face)

Not just the return of the king, today's political earthquakes could set the stage for an Ershad sequel, whether from the army or elsewhere. During Sattar's brief tenure, students set a bus on fire over a fare dispute. Compared to what we have seen recently, it was a zero level conflict. But even that was enough for a journalist to say, "This bura mia, Sattar, can't control the country!" Sure enough, a few days later, along came Ershad. From the journalist's mouth to somebody's ears

When an army intervenes to stop chaos, everyone is initially happy. Even diehard nationalists I interviewed for a film talked about the trains "running on time" under Ayub. The idea of the benevolent dictator has tremendous appeal, in spite of counter-examples that include Idi Amin, Augusto Pinochet, Ziaul Haq, Than Shwe, Jorge Videla, Manual Noriega, and Jose Efrain Rios Montt.

An industrialist friend recently wrote to me, "Ar Bhalo Lage Na. How do you run a business with hartal? Tomorrow if the military comes, I won't protest!" Talking to a relative, I heard another dangerously familiar sentiment, "Konta Chere Konta Dhorbo? Both parties seem equally hopeless."

When this nihilistic mindset sets in, a third force starts looking tempting. Perhaps they will even start with genuine intentions. It always starts that way. Our histories are cluttered with liberators who talked about desh ke bachathe ar kono upai chilo na (I had no other choice, to save the country). And then the rot sets in. Did I say I would return power to civilians in a year? CMLA (Chief Martial Law Administrator) means Cancel My Last Announcement.

This is not to say that the army is bubbling with intrigue or waiting to take power. Today's army appears to be more professional than in the past. Pundits say that their role in UN Peacekeeping has become a safety valve. It allows soldiers mobility and opportunities. It is also a reason that today's army cares about maintaining international reputation.

Anyway, the army is no longer the only third force. I'm also worried about radical Islamist groups. Do we really know who funds them, who they owe allegiance to, and what their future plans are? When death sentences are passed quickly on JMB men, not many voices protest. The bearded militant is an unpopular figure, who would want to defend his rights? But these "express" courts will carry out pre-election executions and destroy any chance of finding the real paymasters. From Khalid Musharraf to Taher to Manzur -- our history is littered with dead men who didn't tell the full story.

Waves of protests in Thailand ended in Thaksin's ouster. Mexico has been in a post-election gridlock, as Obrador threatens a "parallel government." Both those countries have more stable infrastructure than us. The rhetoric being used by our government and opposition is also far more poisonous than anything seen over there. Total breakdown after our election seems eminently possible. How difficult would it be for a third force to step in - whether Islamists, or Army, or something else?

What then? Another decade of struggle to regain democracy? It's 2006 not 1982. Bangladesh can no longer afford these "growing pains". By the time we extract ourselves, the world will have moved on, leaving us far behind. An economy isolated from the world will be very hard to rebuild.

Dhaka cha circles say America / Europe "won't allow" a third force. Besides the objective fact of US support for a Pakistani dictator, there are other factors at play. Two decades ago, a military regime in Bangladesh was of concern to the world because there were fewer crises jockeying for global attention. Now there are lethal new conflicts in Sudan, Somalia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq, the list is endless.

There are also positive distractions, taking attention away from Bangladesh. The BRICs (Brazilian bombshells, Russian oligarchs, India shining, China rising) now dominate world trade, and developing economies are 50% of world GDP (in purchasing power parity). The market arrival of Soviet bloc nations (Latvia and Estonia are now right after Bangladesh on shirt labels at H&M stores), rapid expansion of EU (the apocryphal Polish worker now a symbol for massive internal migration), and warp-speed globalization (tiny Uruguay partnering with Tata to create one of Latin America's largest outsourcing operations) beats even the flat-earth predictions.

Until we grow into Goldman Sachs' prediction of N-11, power blocs won't pay much attention. Whether there is election gridlock, virtual civil war, military crackdown, or islamist upsurge, none of the usual safety mechanisms of global attention may come to our aid.

After a recent government-opposition showdown, a colleague wrote in an e-mail:
"Here's a pessimistic scenario: twenty years from now, Bangla expatriate elites will roam western capitals like the Palestinians, Tibetans and pre-79 Iranians, a combination of high spending elites and idealistic intellectuals. They will not have a homeland to return to, but will have expensive maps and photos on their walls. They will look back with bittersweet nostalgia to the days when Mujib vs. Zia actually seemed like a real debate."

When Cassandras warn of third forces, they name Islamists, Army, India or Pakistan. But there may be others, which we cannot even predict or imagine. If the unthinkable came to pass, democracy would be back in cold storage. Do our political Cain and Abel know that they could be sitting on the outside, looking in, for decades to come?

Das Tripura

To The Polls, Unless Your Name Be Das, Tripura, or Roy
by Naeem Mohaiemen
[abbreviated version printed in DAILY STAR (Bangladesh), November 3, 2006]

"Why can small numbers excite rage? They represent a tiny obstacle between majority and totality or total purity. The smaller the number and the weaker the minority, the deeper the rage about its capacity to make a majority feel like a mere majority." [Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers]

"Hey Ghosh, don't do so much Ghosh-Ghoshani!"

Another day in school, another round of mutual teasing. Young boys specialize in quiet brutality. Schoolyard taunts can be cruel, but nicknames are nothing to be upset about. Everyone at St. Joseph had one. Even the son of the Police IG had been renamed "fangface" (from the cartoon) and "kaula" (lovely reference to his hue). In that context, teasing Ranjan Ghosh by his last name seemed very mild.

Who cares, right? Just another tiffin break. Everyone run to Peter's canteen to ask for an oily burger.

But something about this particular dig stuck, even though my class 6 brain couldn't navigate the cause of unease. Much later, many years on, I realized that it was the first time I was forced into awareness of a "minority" surname. Ghosh, Das, Sankar, Goldar, Adhikary, Purification, Lal, Trivedi, Larma, Gomes, Bhattacharjee[i]. They were all part of me once, before we started taking on names from elsewhere. Ahmed, Ali, Mahmud, Hossain, Jahangir, Rahman. Our elders started saying, "You see, we came from the mountains or beyond, perhaps Persia."

Yes, right.

Relative to all things we have seen in this epoch of Bangla life, St Joseph now seems to be(retroactively) a model of communal balance. Propelled by an affirmative action policy in admission, enforced by the Jesuit brothers, almost half the students were Hindu and Christian. Besides the Ghosh incident, life was fairly uneventful. Even my hyper-active brain can't locate other examples of communal tension (but perhaps I'm not looking hard enough). At that age, the only difference we saw was that the Hindu students studied Geeta in a separate room during Islamiat. Who cares, to each his own...

The mind soaks up many fragments and saves it for future processing. Even at that age some part of me vaguely registered that the wealthy students all had last names like Rahman, Ahmed and Hossain. One day a teacher asked for a collection of money to help Gomes, poorest student in the class, buy the required Geography Atlas. Scattered chuckles in the room. But perhaps at his plight, not his name. Still, a strange unease, but nothing I could pin down.

In 1985, we anxiously crowded around a notice board to find the SSC results. Star Marks, Letters, First Division, Ranking. Magic symbols of future success and prosperity. Two decades on, many in my graduating class (sometimes referred to as Generation 71) have become industrialists, bankers, television directors, ad firm creatives –– executives of every stripe. When I sit with my old Dhaka crew, there's a palpable air of "masters of the universe." But when I take a closer look, not a single non-Muslim among my classmates has made it into this magic circle. 1985 was perhaps the last moment of parity between us. The in-between time has been rough for those who don't fit the national identity project. When I ask my classmates about this, they shrug. Not my problem. One of these bright souls even said to me, during a BUET strike, "Hindu students protesting again! They are always making trouble. lai dithe dithe mathai thule rekhechi." Yes, really, we have spoilt them so!

Amena Mohsin talks about the flaws of Bengali nationalism –– a structure that sings of Ek Shagoro Roktho, yet remains blind to the invisible second class of Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, Paharis, Adivasis and all other communities that don't fit within a Bengali Muslim ethos. The concept of a singular nation, needing to be produced or naturalized at any cost, is not unique to us. Hannah Arendt argued in 1968 that the idea of a national peoplehood was a fatal flaw in developed societies. Philip Gourevitz, surveying the brutality of Rwanda, observed that "genocide, after all, is an exercise in community-building." But what is remarkable for Bangladesh is a national memory project devoted to the 1971 Pakistan army genocide (against "us") that fails to recognize how we are replaying that scenario on a smaller level against non-Bengali and non-Muslim identities. "Non" is the key modifier, everything is about what you are not. When these small groups assert their presence and refuse to be crushed under a "Bengali Muslim" identity, spectacular and extreme violence is our tool for producing a homogenized national map.

The strange, so very strange, thing is that even hyper-minority status in other spaces (North America, Europe, India) have not given the Muslim ummah an extra sensitivity, or sense of responsibility, or even historical prerogative (think of the Caliphate's decent track record vis-a-vis conquered non-converts) on how it treats its own minorities (can someone please come up with a better phrase) with respect and equality. Friends and allies say to me "This is not the time to bring up these issues. Muslims are under attack everywhere, we should talk about ourselves first." I usually respond with an expletive and a pronoun. A gentleman sent me yet another e-mail about "Quran desecration." I wrote back that this was not a priority. Waste of time, I said. Enough already with our offensensitivity. Our hysteria about the slightest offense to the Prophet, the Book, the People. Are we so very weak? A terse reply: "Maybe not a priority to you, but to us it is." Who is the us? People who value a book more than a human life? Gamal al-Banna (who parted ways with his brother Hassan, founder of Muslim Brotherhood) says: "Man is the aim of religion, and religion only a means. What is prevalent today is the opposite."

My St. Joseph memory trip came while considering the crucible of the approaching Bangladesh elections. In keeping with the overall pattern of convulsive violence, minority communities are already under threats to stay away from the polls. Unlike 2001, when the orgy of anti-Hindu violence was enacted after the elections, the idea is to block these communities from even daring to vote. As documented by Daily Star, Prothom Alo and others, a signficant proportion of minority voters have already been taken off the controversial voter list.[ii] When even Muslim voters find themselves missing in large numbers from the list, what chance for Bahadur, Kumar, or Larma?

The 1991 and 2001 Bangladesh election results could have been different given the razor-thin margins by which many seats were won, and the huge number of minority voters that were prevented from voting in those very seats. Out of 300 constituencies, there are 71 where minority voters are significant (ranging from 11% to 61%)[iii] and 50 where they are visible (5-10%). The current election sets every incentive for the 4-party rightist-islamist alliance to aggressively choke off the minority vote. The opposition Awami League's embrace of secularism has always been shaky (is there anybody with the guts to hold their feet to the fire and force them to eject Nejame Islam from the 14-party coalition?). But even this weak commitment has produced many potential Pahari candidates for Hill Tracts, as compared to the exclusively Bengali Muslim candidates from the 4-party. For Bengali candidates to win in Pahari-majority areas, a massive blocking of the Pahari vote is needed. A similar pattern is expected in all areas with a significant minority population. This is not to say that minority voters should vote en masse for AL –– but simply that they to be allowed to vote.

I invoke St Joseph because anecdotes sometimes carry more emotive power than statistics. When the silent majority continually ignores the pain of others, we end up at the embryo stages of ethnicide. These days it is hard to sit still for a song ashor during 1971 commemorations without choking on the failure of the nation project. Yes, yes, we liberated ourselves from Pakistan. Yes, they were destroying our adored Bangla language. Yes, yes, but and again but. What of the state that we created since 1971. 22 wealthiest Pakistani families have been replaced by 22 wealthiest Bangla Muslim families. Was that what the revolution was about. Pity Shiraj Sikder, Colonel Taher and all the other revolutionaries. Actually the bullet in Sikder's back, and the noose around Taher's neck saved them -- who wants to live to see this end? Today, our numerical majority has chosen methods of predatory nationalism that include racist tactics that directly echo the Pakistan regime, reify Bengali Muslims, and render all other identities invisible[iv].

My uncle used to tell the story of the maulana who stood in front of a temple in 1940s Noakhali, using his body to defy those who wanted to burn alive the Hindus who had been their former neighbors. This is in Noakhali of all places, a blight in 1940s partition narratives for so many examples of brutality, including the apocryphal story of Muslims who slaughtered Gandhi's goat (is it true? I have never been able to find any evidence). If that village elder found an interpretation of religion that taught compassion, how are we in this backwards trap fifty years on?

I shout at all of you with rage, because I refuse to accept a haven for me that is a nightmare for others. There is still time to stop this with our words, our actions and our bodies.

Amra ki ei Bangladesh cheyechilam?

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Naeem Mohaiemen is a filmmaker and artist based in Dhaka and New York. He is author of the chapter on Hill Tracts Paharis & Flatland Adivasis in the 2004 Ain Salish Kendro Annual Human Rights Report.
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Footnotes:
[i] A researcher friend recently explored the etymology of the names in Bangladesh and wrote in an e-mail:

"Of course not all surnames are created equal. Chattopadhyay/Chatterjee, Bandopadhyay/Banerjee, Mukhopadhyay, Gangopadhyay, Bhattacharya/jee, Chakrabarty, Mahalanobis, Adhikari etc are Brahmin. Some names are titles that are usually held by higher caste including Brahmins, but can also be Muslim names (as they were handed out by either the Nawabs or the British to loyal retainers) - Thakur (Tagore), Majumdar, Talukdar, Dastidar, Ghatak, Chowdhury, Biswas, Sarkar. Most of these people will still know their original "gotra" (ie, "apni ghotok? asholey ki?" - answer: chattopadhyay, sen etc so you can still signal caste when prompted). Next rung includes Sen, Das, Ghosh, Bose, Sarkar, Nath, Saha, Dev, Mandal, Pandey (Parey), etc The rung that you won't hear much of in academia, business, politics or probashi communities include Basak, Gain, Bain (as in Goopy & Bagha), Tisku, Barui, Majhi, Gop (Gope), Dop (Daup), Soren, Marandi. Many of these names are also found among Adivasis through intermarriage or loss of language some time back. Some purely sub-ethnic names as well. Rajbongshi, Tripuri, Puruli, Pradhan, Bahadur (indicates Gurkha lineage) etc. In terms of people left in Bangladesh, hardly any from the Brahmins, and most are probably at the bottom of the caste hierarchy - as they are pretty screwed whether in Bangladesh or in India."

[ii] Daily Star, May 6, 2006: "Religious Minorities Under Pressure"; Daily Star, May 10, 2006: "Minority Voters Intimidated"; Prothom Alo, January 6, 2006: "Voter List Compilers Say They Didn't Go to 4 Minority-heavy Villages By 'Mistake'"; bcdjc.org/mreport-1.html

[iii] According to the 1991 census, the following 71 constituencies have a minority ratio ranging from 11% to 61%: Rangamati, Khulna-1, Bandarban, Khagrachari, Gopalganj-3, Moulavibazar-4, Khulna-5, Sunamganj-2, Dinajpur-1, Gopalganj-2, Dinajpur-2, Barisal-1, Khulna-6, Satkhira-3, Bagerhat-1, Gopalganj-1, Chittagong-6, Thakurgaon-1, Dinajpur-4, Pirojpur-1, Bagerhat-3, Satkhira-5, Moulavibazar-2, Magura-1, Madaripur-2, Narail-1, Bagerhat-2, Hobiganj-4, Chittagong-7, Nilphamari-2, Nilphamari-3, Magura-1, Satkhira-4, Rajbari-2, Lalmonirhat-1, Jessore-6, Narail-2, Khulna-4, Barisal-2, Satkhira-1, Netrokona-4, Natore-1, Sunamganj-1, Brahmanbaria-5, Hobiganj-1, Thakurgaon-2, Satkhira-2, Netrokona-1, Manikganj-2, Sunamganj-4, Chittagong-1, Kishoregonj-5, Rangpur-1, Kurigram-2, Pirojpur-2, Dinajpur-6, Rangpur-2, Jhalokathi-2, Manikganj-1, Faridpur-1, Natore-3, Bagerhat-4, Netrokona-2, Dhaka-7, Faridpur-3, Madaripur-3, Khulna-2, Barguna-2, Mymensingh-1, Dhaka-3, Sunamganj-3. All portions of the 2001 census were released, with the exception of the religious figures.

[iv] This can be seen in the drastic drop in minority populations: 1961 (18.5%), 1974 (13.5%), 1981 (12.2%) and 1991 (10.5%). Analysts expect the 2001 census to reveal even further drop, but the government has not released those numbers.

Outside Whale

BIDOUN: The Interview Issue

Outside The Whale
Naeem Mohaiemen talks to Shahidul Alam

Shahidul Alam's work as a media activist and director of the award-winning Drik Picture Library (drik.net) inspired many Bengalis to blend cultural production with political work. Shahidul deliberately locates his work squarely inside Bangladesh, often defiantly placing himself against local stakeholders such as government ministries, the US Embassy, and the World Bank. At times, he has paid a price for his solitary defiance: DRIK’s phone lines have been cut, exhibitions cancelled, and during anti-government demonstrations in 1996, Shahidul was stabbed by unknown assailants. DRIK’s journey over the past decade highlights the relative privilege of those who live between words, within easy reach of a diasporic space of safety.

Besides Drik, Shahidul set up the Bangladesh Photographic Institute, Pathshala (South Asian Institute of Photography) and Chobi Mela (Festival of Photography in Asia). His work has shown in MOMA, Tehran Museum of Contemporary Arts, the Royal Albert Hall and Kuala Lumpur National Art Gallery.

Filmmaker and media artist Naeem Mohaiemen created Visible Collective (disappearedinamerica.org), which works on art interventions on hyphenated identities, loyalty tests and security panic. Project excerpts have shown as installations or lectures, including the 2006 Whitney Biennial (Wrong Gallery).

Naeem: In the 1980s, you left London to move back to Dhaka and start DRIK. In your writing, you've talked about the need to locate media work outside the dominant narrative spaces. Both you and your partner (anthropologist Rahnuma Ahmed) also consciously made a decision to conduct all your work in the Bengali (Bangla) language -- even in the difficult case of transliterated e-mail.

Shahidul: I did not leave England. I returned to Bangladesh, where I was always going to be. The biggest need was to change the way majority world countries were portrayed. I was working with a London-based studio, and the only pictures they ever seemed to be interested in were pictures of disaster or poverty. So being based in Dhaka was a fairly automatic decision.

My partner Rahnuma and I were involved in the anti-military junta agitations at that time, so I began documenting that movement. It was a much more ‘lived’ experience than I had felt before. The move towards speaking Bangla and the introduction of new media were, in combination, a mechanism aimed at reducing the digital divide. Without international lines, faxes or money to make expensive calls, we needed to find other ways to communicate. So setting up Bangladesh’s first email network was an obvious choice.

The introduction of written Bangla in roman text dramatically changed the demographics of participants in our internet network, which brought home the centrality of the vernacular, even in urban, literate circles. Since then we’ve brought out several books and a photography magazine in Bangla. Later we developed a Bangla font that could be used on the Net, which we used in the online magazine I was publishing, so we could reverse the information flow.

Naeem: I'm thinking of the imagine.art.after project, curated by Breda Beban, which brought together artists who left home and now live in London, and others who remained in the "country of their birth" (a misnomer anyway -- I don't know where I fit since I was born in London, grew up in Tripoli and Dhaka, and work in New York and Dhaka). This brings to mind all the differences in privilege, access, interests, methodology, and networks that are created when artists migrate. Bangladesh has a different trajectory from the exile dynamics in locales like Lebanon, Iran or Sri Lanka, but at times we've had equally volatile eruptions, especially the turbulent 70s with coups, counter-coups, and dirty-wars. Those in exile/in diasporadic conditions may choose to locate in the "belly of the beast" to challenge from inside. But for this to work, diaspora cultural producers need a theoretical and practical framework for work exchanges between those who "stayed" and those who "left".

Shahidul: Leaving aside my overseas education, I was conscious of the fact that I was highly privileged in Bangladesh, by the fact that I had the opportunity to study and did not have to worry about tomorrow’s meal. We had all used the resources of this country for our education, but wealthier countries were reaping the benefits of that training. Through us, Bangladesh was effectively subsidizing the west.

If enabling social change is measured, it is in Bangladesh that one can get the maximum returns for one’s efforts. This works at a personal and emotional level, and also if you evaluate how we can change our lives. But, there are obvious risks of working in Bangladesh, particularly for journalists for whom this is said to be the most dangerous country after Iraq [according to the Committee To Protect Journalists].

Naeem: Well, I know that when I tried to show a rough cut of Muslims or Heretics: My Camera Can Lie in Dhaka, the film was refused until you used your networks. I understood then that the risk of recrimination from the Islamists was borne by DRIK. The fact that I work in New York provided a strange kind of insulation. This is what made me think of the overlapping and divergent paths of diaspora versus "back home". What do these terms even mean when many have dual passports, conflicting loyalties, and multiple spaces of work?

Shahidul: Being overseas allows one to work with greater impunity and substantially lower risks, and take advantage of greater earning potential. Technological benefits, as well as greater mobility, and the ability to network gives advantages that working here does not allow. Traveling on a Bangladeshi passport also makes a lot of my international work quite difficult (I was off-loaded from flights twice after 9/11). I see clearly different roles for those who work within and those outside. Moral judgment and self righteousness shouldn’t enter either sphere.

You live in a country which has bombed 22 nations since World War II, and is clearly responsible for more civilian deaths in recent history than any other nation. To be a taxpayer and therefore an accomplice to the most brutal nation on earth, does require a lot of redemption! Having said that, to pay the taxes and utilize the benefits, to be able to turn the machinery in one’s favour and to actively subvert the normal course of the machinery may well be a strategically viable position, but it has to be carefully measured.

Naeem: You have a history of taking anti-authoritarian positions in your struggles inside Bangladesh, which involve a level of actualized danger. There were situations when you were covering the Ershad junta, and the collapse of the first rightist Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) regime, where you came under physical attack. From the early days of DRIK's work as an internet provider, the e-mail service as well as your phone lines came under constant, regular interference from government authorities. When DRIK sponsored the Muslims or Heretics screening, one of your employees received threatening phone calls. But I also note the recent Time magazine cover story "Bangladesh: Rescue Mission" carried a photograph of the Prime Minister, taken by you. How do we negotiate these interfaces with power?

Shahidul: Our anti-establishment position has been perceived (by governments) as pro-opposition, regardless of who is in power. Hopefully it also reinforces our credibility as being non-partisan, in the sense of party politics. When we put together the exhibition ‘The War We Forgot’ on Bangladesh's liberation war of 1971, the government asked us to remove the images which showed revenge killings by Bangalis against Urdu speakers. We replied by pulling the entire exhibition from the National Museum and holding it in Drik’s gallery instead. The government was left with egg on its face because visitors constantly asked why such a show was refused by the National Museum. Our credibility and network (local & international) dissuades governments from bothering us unless we seriously become a threat. It’s gauging that distance which is critical. One needs to feel the intensity of the heat without getting too badly burnt.

Naeem: After Zana Briski and Ross Kaufmann won the 2005 Best Documentary Oscar for Born Into Brothels, there was some talk of a "missionary rescue" syndrome where western activists come in and do work in the Southern context, but the existing infrastructure is forgotten. It may be linked to the "christmas tsunami syndrome", where certain causes get traction because they foster an idea of western enlightenment projects cleaning up and/or "helping" the South. This isn't even a critique of Brothels per se, but rather an invitation to probe the audience environment in which all projects operate. DRIK has had many western visitors come to study its work. Does this sort of reverse knowledge transfer work well, or is there some validity to the "rescue" critique?

Shahidul: Briski actually spent time with DRIK's Out of Focus project in Dhaka, which has been teaching working class children photography since 1994. Interestingly, “Kids with Cameras” was the original name of our Out of Focus group, and that also became the name of the organization Briski founded -- but perhaps that's a coincidence. Suvendu Chatterjee, the director of our India branch, has been working with Sonagachi activists for a long time and I am told that he was the one who introduced Zana to the brothel. The Sonagachi children had many tutors over time, including [director/co-founder of Contact Press Images] Robert Pledge and children from Out of Focus. Of course, Zana had spent far more time than the rest of us with those children. However, there were many contributions from many sources which I believe did not make it into the film. I find that problematic, particularly in a project that is about community building. From my own conversations with the Sonagachi women, they want rights, not rescue.

As for the numerous western visitors to DRIK, I welcome them. While it is true that Drik is not a funded organization, we have worked with and received support from many organizations. Our biggest support base has been our many friends, inside and outside Bangladesh. Besides, if we talk of being a transparent organization, we can hardly turn around and shield ourselves from curious eyes.

Naeem: There is an iconoclastic orientation in your work. You documented the outre, diamond-studded wealth of Prince Musa, the Adom Bepari or human exporter who makes millions sending poor Bangla migrant labor to the Middle East. You also have a habit of catching the powerful in unguarded moments: Prime Minister Zia surrounded by sycophants, ex-dictator Ershad enjoying a wedding feast after getting out of jail, former Pakistani PM Nawaz Sharif entourage-less at an airport. You also clashed with both the Dutch and French embassies for some strange dress code that didn't allow you to attend a formal dinner wearing sandals. How do these provocations fit with political re-orientation for our icon-blinded politics? How do today's characters compare with the founding heroes/villains: the Caesar figure of Sheikh Mujib, the tragic-romantic Maoist guerilla leader Shiraj Sikder, the secretly excuted crippled freedom fighter Colonel Taher, the hodgepodge of Islamo-Communism of Bhashani, etc. Compared to those flawed but colorful characters, today's political butcher house seems so debased that the punk ethic of "kill your idols" doesn't even seem necessary. Even satire is irrelevant for leaders who are already self-made caricatures.

Shahidul: I was young and never met [independence movement leader] Sheikh Mujib personally, though I was there for the historic 1971 rally and was moved by his speech. I suppose I’ve never been awed by these icons, and have been more observant of their human attributes. Part of our condition is we deify or vilify our political figures, losing the opportunity to sift out the good and build anew. Godfathers support such idolatry as it is essential for their survival. I must admit some pleasure from bringing down these deities a peg or two. Maintaining such a position is not easy in Bangladesh. Even after thirty five years we haven’t been able to move away from the Zia or Mujib dynasties.

Naeem: DRIK has always maintained the difficult position of not being dependent on donor money but surviving instead through your own commercial assignments. You also have a honorable commitment to internal wage equity, so that your salary is only slightly higher than the entry-level employee. But some of the photographers you train eventually leave to take higher-paying jobs with NGOs and foreign donor agencies. What are your thoughts about this dynamic?

Shahidul: Being financially independent is essential for the credibility of a media organization. But we do take on contractual work, some of which is derived from grants. From a donor perspective, “partnership” can be simply a pretty word to use. And consultants and machinery continue to be tied to sources of funds. So donors assume a subservience in any partnership they enter into. The USIS [United States Information Service] reminded us that they would never work with us since we opposed Clinton’s visit to Bangladesh. Similarly, the British Council reminded us that Banglaright’s (banglarights.net) opposition to the invasion of Iraq would jeopardise future projects. They would never demonstrate such arrogance in their own countries (and have learnt never to try it again with DRIK). We know that we are white-listed by many donor organizations and will never get work from them, but take that as an indicator of our success.

Our salary structure does cause problems, and things like our equal bonus policy is not always welcomed by those in higher ranks, and yes, we do lose people to NGOs and donor agencies, which is not a bad thing. What disappoints me is when bright energetic youngsters with spark get head hunted by the donors and turned into well paid clerks who do the donkeywork for their western counterparts.

Naeem: Some people whose work has been interesting me recently are Dawolu Jabari Anderson (Otabenga Jones & Associates), Temporary Services (Prisoner's Inventions), Richard De Domenici (Richard De Domenici is Still an Artist), Yara el-Sherbini (How To Make a Carpet Bomb), Sandy Abdallah Kaltenborn (Kanak Attac), and Valentin Manz (Vision Machine). I am curious to know whose work you are tracking at this moment?

Shahidul: Pedro Meyer (zonezero.com), Tyng-Ruey Chuang and Shunling Chen (Open Source Software Foundry), Steven Gan and Premesh Chandran (malaysiakini.com), Martin Chautari Group (Nepal), Marcelo Brodsky (Buena Memoria), and Tehelka.com.

Young Turks

Young Turks on Dark Side of Moon
- Naeem Mohaiemen

The American mediascape is agog about Google's $1.6 Billion acquisition of YouTube.com this week. The central "wow" factor is the insanely high valuation for a company that is only a year old, representing a return to the "irrational exuberance" of the first Internet mania (from which I carry battle scars). Much has been made about "Web 2.0", which is supposed to represent the new model of Internet startups -- steady leadership, bottom line focused, and no more crazy parties. Whether that's true or not remains to be seen, but the zero-to-hero trajectory of YouTube has everyone buzzing.

Looking at the YouTube story, I focused on the third co-foundery -- 27 year old Jawed Karim, a graduate student who made a fortune as the third-highest equity holder. More importantly, he generated instant clout with his track record (he was an early member of PayPal, which was bought by eBay). The youth factor is also an immense lure for an age-obsessed media cycle. For my own intervention purposes, Jawed's Bangladeshi-German roots were the more interesting twist. DNA is not destiny (far from it) and nurture is the real determinant, but you can still spin this as a story of a Bangali doing quirky, unconventional projects.

While the US media is ga-ga over YouTube (the New York Times lead Business story -- with photo -- was about Jawed), there has been little coverage of the story in Dhaka. No doubt that will change in the next few days, but it's interesting to note a six-day lag for a story with a Bangladesh link, long after the CNN mafia have chewed the story dry.

In a comparable high profile story involving an Indian, the Indian and Indian-American press runs at light speed to cover it. Kiran Desai winning the Booker, DJ Rekha's album release, Raju Narisetti becoming Deputy Editor of Wall Street Journal, Gautam Malkani's Houslow rudeboys in Londonstani, Jagdish Bhagwati's nomination for Nobel Prize, Rana Dasgupta's shimmering ephemera in Tokyo Cancelled, Indra Nooyi becoming CEO of Pepsi, Shashi Tharoor's nomination for UN Secretary General, Jhumpa Lahiri's Pulitzer, Fareed Zakaria's tenure as Newsweek International editor, Sabeer Bhatia's founding of Hotmail, Rajat Gupta's time as head of McKinsey - every single one of these stories has been celebrated (often to excess) in the Indian press. This can even lead to over-extending, as with front page stories celebrating Norah Jones multi-Grammy sweep (her father is Ravi Shankar), even though Jones herself does not (publicly) claim a primarily South Asian identity. The NRI bloc has been so crucial to molding India's global image and opening new doors, even crusty Indian citizenship laws have been changed to create a new category of PIO (Persons of Indian Origin) passports. An excess of "India Shining" should lead to nausea in the audience, and the intersection with Indian superpower designs are a potential danger. But on a simpler level, the focus on diaspora accomplishes a limited goal of instilling optimism.

By contrast, the Bangla media is slow on the uptake to talk about younger diaspora such as Deeder Zaman (Asian Dub Foundation), Moushumi Khan (Muslim Bar Association of NY), Akram Khan (Sacred Monsters), Chaumtoli Huq (Taxi Workers Alliance), Farook Shamsher (Joi), Aziz Huq (former clerk for US Supreme Court), Sham Miah (Vol de Nuit), Sam Zaman (State of Bengal), Abeer Hoque (Olive Witch), Aladdin Ullah (Port Authority Throw Down), Shazna Nessa (Milky), Monami Maulik (DRUM), Fariba Alam (Bangla East Side), Shireen Pasha (Roti Eaters), Monica Ali (Alentejo Blues), Dishad Husain (Viva Liberty), Monica Yunus (Magic Flute), Ivan Jaigirdar (3rd I), and many others are not covered comprehensively or quickly. When the voracious Chernobyl virus invaded the Internet, a young student of BUET programmed an anti-virus in 24 hours. If he had been an Indian student of IIT, the Consulate would have ensured that he was on CNN by live satellite link within hours. But I had to wait two years until the BUET wunderkind came to graduate school in the US to meet him. Living inside the New York media frenzy, I look at the wall-to-wall coverage of Indians in the media and think that Bangalis are the little engine that could -- if only the Bangla press would wake up.

I am wary of excessive nationalism because it can quickly lead to chauvinism and exclusion. There is also a deep contradiction in gaining domestic applause after validation from a Western power structure. But at the current crisis crossroads, we could do with an injection of optimism and inspiration from unconventional locations. A decade ago, Mahfuz Anam gave a heartfelt lecture at Columbia University about the Bangla diaspora. But Daily Star and others have been slow to follow the lead of those words.

Media profiles do not have to focus only on middle class professionals, or the sons and daughters of "established" people back home (the latter would re-inscribe hierarchies and local elites). There are many other stories to track down -- the near monopoly of Bangalis in Brooklyn's brownstone renovation business, the Bangali head cheese buyer at Balducci's, the huge bloc of Bangalis in the pugnacious Taxi Drivers' union, the Sylheti uber-dominance of "Indian" restaurants in London and New York, the packed-to-the-gills Belgian bar-restaurant and trendy East Village hotspots, the new young Bangla activists in New York's immigrant rights battle, and the men who commandeered a signature campaign for International Mother Tongue Day. We can also attempt, emotionally and politically, to embrace a pan-Bangali identity and take the success stories of West Bengalis as part of our mosaic.

Current politics is a death-bound roller coaster, and the passengers can't disembark. People are always banging on about the resulting short supply of optimism. The stories are there, inside and outside the borders - vested with the Innovative NGOs, Tireless Activists, Young Turks and Culture Agitators.

Papa Dont Preach

Papa, Don't Preach (or the Fallacy of Fallaci)
by Naeem MohaiemenSometimes it's good to get behind the news cycle. By the time I came back up for air, gallons of ink (and a wee smidgen of blood) had been spilt over the Vatican's new video game "Holy War: Part XXXII". Tariq Ali, Karen Armstrong, everyone and their mother has weighed in on this, so I don't have to.

The Muslim world, as always, genius at PR moves. A nun shot in the back, just to prove that the Pope was wrong. I'm non-violent, and I'll shoot anyone who says otherwise. Smooth.

The interesting concept to tease out is this idea of Muslim rage in response to critique. A rage that is directly proportional to a sense of impotence. There is almost a palpable sense of disappointment among the rightwing that more crazy stuff did not happen. A few demonstrations and then everything quieted down. Prophecies of Muslim rage are nested in a political structure that needs these explosive conflicts to keep things moving along.

There was a strange parallel between Benedict's proclamation and the death of the Italian polemicist who would have cheered his words most strongly. Oriana Fallaci, a "tough broad" to the end, died last week.

I have tremendous respect for many of the iconic interviews and moments she commandeered, including being shot while covering the student protests in Mexico City in 1968. And I empathize with her being irritated by the chauvinism, boorishness and pugnacity of Khomeini, Arafat, et al. What remains problematic is her raging diarrhea towards Islam in her last years, when her target practice veered away from the powerful to concentrate on random, buckshot attacks on working-class immigrants in Europe -- a target unable to defend itself and already on the ropes in the face of continent-wide racism and Islamophobia.

Since 9/11, she wrote three polemics: “The Rage and the Pride”, “The Force of Reason” and “The Apocalypse”. In her pursuit of a "total truth" about Muslims, she even went as far back as 1971 to re-brand the Bangladesh liberation war as an Islamist war. For anyone familiar with that history, and the rupture of Pakistan in rejection of the notion of Islamic State, these are falsifications. Here is her description of an alleged revenge killing against Pakistani collaborators after Bangladesh became independent:

“To make you cry I’ll tell you about the twelve young impure men I saw executed at Dacca at the end of the Bangladesh war. They executed them on the field of Dacca stadium, with bayonet blows to the torso or abdomen, in the presence of twenty thousand faithful who applauded in the name of God from the bleachers. They thundered "Allah-akbar, Allah-akbar"…at the conclusion of the slaughter, the twenty thousand faithful (many of whom were women) left the bleachers and went down on the field. Not as a disorganised mob, no. In an orderly manner, with solemnity. They slowly formed a line and, again in the name of God, walked over the cadavers. All the while thundering Allah-akbar, Allah-akbar. They destroyed them like the Twin Towers of New York. They reduced them to a bleeding carpet of smashed bones." (La Rabbia e l'Orgoglio, 2002).

Besides the sheer porno-voyeurism in this text, there is fabrication of the “Allah-u- akbar” chant, an impossible coda to a liberation war that had, at least temporarily, obliterated the idea of an Islamic Pakistan. It is possible that in her dotage she had remixed scenes from the Iranian revolution. Still, any Islamist revolution will do.

I am La Fallaci, trouble me not with fact checkers.

Turning to contemporary immigration (a much bigger obsession for her), Europe to Fallaci was “Eurabia”, “a colony of Islam” where there will soon be “minarets in place of the bell-towers, with the burka in place of the mini-skirt.” Contemporary immigration, to her, was a new form of Muslim invasion, using “children and boats” instead of “troops and cannons.” In particular, she resisted immigration to Italy because "our cultural identity has been well defined for thousands of years we cannot bear a migratory wave of people who have nothing to do with us . . . who, on the contrary, aim to absorb us.” Spain is particularly vulnerable because “too many Spaniards still have the Koran in the blood”

European multiculturalism and ideas of tolerance infuriated Fallaci, when she wrote:

“If you speak your mind on the Vatican, on the Catholic Church, on the Pope, on the Virgin Mary or Jesus or the saints, nobody touches your ‘right of thought and expression.’ But if you do the same with Islam, the Koran, the Prophet Muhammad, some son of Allah, you are called a xenophobic blasphemer who has committed an act of racial discrimination. If you kick the ass of a Chinese or an Eskimo or a Norwegian who has hissed at you an obscenity, nothing happens. On the contrary, you get a ‘Well done, good for you.’ But if under the same circumstances you kick the ass of an Algerian or a Moroccan or a Nigerian or a Sudanese, you get lynched.”

There was a psycho-sexual undertone to Fallaci's loathing of Muslim immigrants, often expressed in the language of body phobia. Looking at urine streaks in the Venice Piazza San Marco, she wondered if Muslims will one day “s*** in the Sistine Chapel.” She imagined Somali Muslims who left “yellow streaks of urine that profaned the millenary marbles" of the Florence Baptistery:

“Good Heavens! They really take long shots, these sons of Allah! How could they succeed in hitting so well that target protected by a balcony and more than two yards distant from their urinary apparatus?”

In the end, the best response to Fallaci is to critique and deflate her (as Umberto Eco did). The attempts by some Italian Muslims to bring her to court and ban the books ended up making her a martyr, a living Joan of Arc -- a role she revelled in.

An even better response to these brands of provocations is the one I had last week in London. Sitting in a restaurant, I spotted a young man wearing a t-shirt.

On the front:
There's A Picture Of Prophet Mohammed On The Back Of My T-shirt

And on the back:
Just Kidding! Praise Allah! (Please Don't Kill Me)

I ran up to him to take a photograph. He looked confused. He also looked slightly scared.

I had not indentified myself but I suppose some level of melanin automatically denotes "Muslim" in certain contexts.

"You just want to take a photo?"
"Yes?"
"You're not mad or anything?"
"No man, not at all."
"Just a photo..?"

Yes, just a photo.

So I can laugh with you.

And then forget about it and move on.

Go West

Go West, Young Muslim
by Naeem Mohaiemen

"Go West, young man, and grow up with the country."
[John Soule, Terre Haute Express, 1851]

A few months after the Afghan war, I was sitting in the Dhaka office of Sajjad Sharif. Sajjad is an art critic and associate editor of Prothom Alo (progressive newspaper often under attack from Islamists). The regular tea cicle was assembled (artists, poets and journalists all end up in Sajjad's office), talking about the "Muslim street" (that elusive beast!).

For two decades, my personal dual existence between New York and Dhaka had been fairly unremarkable and unremarked. Now, there was a desire to boil down everyone to their "essence". I was supposed to be some sort of stand-in for "the American street" -- a farcical concept that I usually deflect.

In the middle of a heated debate, Sajjad lightened the mood with a popular street saying of the time:

"Tomorrow, if Osama said, 'all my jihadi brothers come and join me!'"
"Yes?"
"10% of Bangladesh would cross the border into Afghanistan."
"Bolen ki bhai?"
"Yes, it's true."
"But if the next day, Bush announced 'jobs for everyone'..."
"Hya?"
"90% of Bangladesh would line up in front of the American Embassy!"

It reminded me of many, more prosaic, encounters, in "living rooms" of various Dhaka uncles and aunties that I have to visit as an obligation. The conversation always veers to, "Oi desh e pore thako kibhabe baba?' (how do you live in that place?). This is often followed a little later with the revelation that their eldest son or daughter is taking the SATs next month. "Do you have any advice about applying to American colleges?"

This strand is not to, in any way, minimize or trivialize the varied oppositions to the new Imperialism project. But we can at least complicate the conversation by looking to the revulsion and fascination projected on the same surface. A similar sentiment seems to be at play in the European obsession with the idee fixe vis-a-vis American power and culture.

Things are not of course quite so simple. Nor will they stay the same. Obsession with the American dream will be replaced by other foci, including the idea of India Shining, China Rising, and all the rest. Al Jazeera may yet replace CNN as the most watched channel (actually, CNN is already not the most watched channel anyway). Then again, certain shifts may be temporary (recall the total obsession with Japan for a minute in the 80s). Only a fool or Nostradamus makes predictions without caveats.

I was thinking of all this as I was reading a new data released by Homeland Security (they are also responsible for immigration). It shows that, contrary to all expectations, Muslim immigration to America has increased, after an initial drop, since 9/11. In 2005, more people from Muslim countries became legal permanent US residents (green card), nearly 96,000, than in any year in the previous two decade. More than 40,000 arrivals from Muslim countries were admitted into US in 2005, the highest annual number since 2001.

One of the photos that illustrates the report is taken on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn, once again a bustling center of Pakistani and Bangladeshi migrants. This is the same Coney Island Avenue targeted when "Special Registration" and Immigration raids went after Pakistanis (Bangladeshis were lesser targets). At that time, writers evoked Germany 1939, a comparison that raised hackles but also pointed to shared struggles between Jewish and Muslim migrants. That same Coney Island wears a hopeful look in this photo. Fluttering American flags in background, hugging Musollis in the foreground. It looks for a moment like a moon alignment that brought Eid and July 4th on the same weekend.

Swiss philosopher Tariq Ramadan has explored a new definition of dar al-harb (also dar al-shirk, but not to be confused with dar al-kufr). In the older consensual view, a country is dar al-harb when the legal system as well as government is non-Islamic. Dar al-harb translates in one formulation to "Abode of War". The Hanafi school says that this is a territory where Muslims are neither protected nor able to live in peace. If law and political systems define this, then even a nation like Bangladesh, which is majority Muslim, is still dar ul-harb (as are Indonesia, Malaysia, etc).

A competing vision argues that it is the condition of population, and safety of that same, that defines dar al-harb. Ramadan argues that

"Muslims may actually feel safer in the West, as far as the free exercise of their religion is concerned, than in some so-called Muslim countries."

Thus America and Europe, having large Muslims populations that maintain (even after all recent events) some measure of religious freedom, can also be defined as dar al-islam.

If Muslims feel safe in the West, Muslim immigration will continue and will create a new form of hybrid Islam, as postulated in Ramadan's "To Be A European Muslim." But there is another aspect to consider. If the West is not dar al-harb as per the old definition, militant groups' manifesto to attack the West loses a key theological underpinning. This is not to say that militants will read Ramadan and change their key strategy (and many scholars debate Ramadan on this). But it can outline the beginnings of a counter-debate, one that looks at the roots of Islamic theology to counter the bastardization of the same.

We have two visions on display in this week's newspapers.

One is the dark, apocalyptic view in Roger Cohen's essay:

"But like the world it still claims to lead, the United States has grown darker. Two wars lurk on a leafy street. Fear haunts the political discourse. A century that dawned brightly now offers conflict without end. Beyond U.S. borders, no longer those of a sanctuary, the fanatical group called Al Qaeda that turned planes into missiles has morphed into a diffuse anti- Western ideology followed, in some measure, by millions of angry Muslims. They are convinced the United States is an infidel enemy bent on humiliating Islam. Anti-Americanism has become the world's vogue idea."

Now if "millions" had already joined the jihad, there would be very few buildings left standing. But never mind, the man is writing with a flourish, allow him a moment of hyperventilation.

Let's turn instead to Andrea Elliott's lead article in yesterday's Times:

"[Muslims] have made the journey unbowed by tales of immigrant hardship, and despite their own opposition to American policy in the Middle East. They come seeking the same promise that has drawn foreigners to the United States for many decades, according to a range of experts and immigrants: economic opportunity and political freedom. Those lures, both powerful and familiar, have been enough to conquer fears that America is an inhospitable place for Muslims."

Today is the 5th anniversary of 9/11. In years past, in a more navel-gazing state of mind, I wrote pedestrian, sentimental entries about biking down to Tribeca to look for my then-partner (she had been evacuated), tracking down Bengali victims' families, losing a fond memento at airport security, etc, etc. These are not unique, nor are they (after thousands of memorial stories) particularly emotive. I wrote as an ideological naif about the end of technology in the face of box cutters. It is time to look beyond only these stories. Time to also feel the pain of others outside these borders. Time to formulate theory, trajectory and a vision for a more humane future. A shared world beyond wars without end.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Naeem Mohaiemen/Visible Collective
http://disappearedinamerica.org
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Cohen: Darker Landscape
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/09/10/news/terror.php

Elliott: Muslim Immigration Up Since 9/11
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/nyregion/10muslims.html
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

True Jet Blue

Is It True, JetBlue? Artists In Time Of War
by Naeem Mohaiemen

"The artist says, "It's not my business." Then whose business is it? Does that mean you are going to leave the business of the most important issues in the world to the people who run the country? How stupid can we be?" [Howard Zinn, Talk @ Massachusetts College of Art, October 10, 2001]

Is It True Jet Blue? JFK? TSA? A rhetorical question that leads to a tautology. Yes, of course people racially profile the darker masses while whipping up a pervasive fear in the name of "national security." Paranoia is so essential to running the modern state, other navigation tools seem permanently broken.

After learning that Raed Jarrar was told to remove his Arabic WE WILL NOT BE SILENT t-shirt before he could board a JetBlue flight, four members of The Critical Voice (TCV) boarded a Jet Blue flight last Thursday. The four members, all white women and US citizens, were wearing the same Arabic t-shirts. They were allowed to board the flight. This is more evidence that the Raed Jarrar case is one of racial profiling and censorship.

Many of us have been helping as supporters of TCV, an affinity group of Artists Against the War (AAW). Today, after consultation with other members, Laurie of TCV went on Democracy Now and broke the story. I first met Laurie when she and other TCV members were ejected from NY Public Library's "Who's Afraid of Iran" event (w/ Shirin Neshat, et al) -- they were wearing the same t-shirts, but were ostensibly ejected for carrying political posters.

The t-shirts have now spread globally, and become an icon of popular, non violent resistance. Because of the open-ended nature of the two phrases "We" (who?) and "Will Not Be Silent" (about what?), people have appropriated these t-shirts and used their bodies to register opposition to many flanks of the "War On Terror", including invasions, fear-mongering, censorship, detention of immigrants, racial profiling of Muslims, use of African-Americans, Latinos and working-class Whites as cannon fodder, the abandonment of poor Blacks in New Orleans, and the linkages and overlaps between all these and other common struggles. To give one example, two weeks ago, many of us as members of Action Wednesday, collaborated with TCV to distribute the t-shirts at Outernational concert in Central Park, to protest the invasion of Lebanon.

Caroline Parker, Laurie Arbeiter, Susan Kingsland, Ann Shirazi and other members of TCV and AAW put into practice a new model of artists as public actors, activists and intellectuals who refuse to confine their cultural production inside gallery or museum walls.

Contra Adorno, it becomes even more essential to write "poetry" (using an expansive definition) after Auschwitz. To use the many routes of contemporary culture to dissent and to shape a new mental and actual reality.

Sandy Kaltenborn of Kanak Attac in Berlin writes, "Design Is Not Enough." Neither are t-shirts, but they are a good start. To take the carrier of such witless 1970s slogans as "Have A Nice Day", "I'm With Stupid", "Pobody's Nerfect", "Kiss Me, I'm Drunk" "My Parents Went To London And All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt", and invert it into an act of body-based defiance is a good beginning.

At the risk of descending to repetition, I echo Adorno's other sentiment:

"The only relation to art that can be sanctioned in a reality that stands under the constant threat of catastrophe is one that treats works of art with the same deadly seriousness that characterizes the world today."
[“Valéry Proust Museum” in Prisms, Samuel and Shierry Weber, trans. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983)]

Stay tuned.

*********************************************
Related Links

We Will Not Be Silent On JetBlue (Press Release)
http://tinyurl.com/jjo9k
http://www.parkerstudio.com/AAW/JetBlueNotSilentweb1.pdf

Snakes On, Arabs Of The Plane
http://alternet.org/story/41140/

Artists Against War
http://aawnyc.org/

The Critical Voice
http://thecriticalvoice.org/

Our Central Park T-shirt Action


Video of Outernational Rocking Central Park w/ T-Shirt & Kufiya

**********************************
Naeem Mohaiemen
Visible Collective/Disappeared In America
http://www.disappearedinamerica.org
**********************************

Snakes On A Plane, Arabs Off The Plane

Snakes On A Plane, Arabs Off The Plane
by Naeem Mohaiemen

"In practice, the huge registers built up from the sixteenth century onward did not serve as a real means to identify people. Pre-modern identification procedures relied on much more efficient means: informers, secret individuals who were good at finding people through informal techniques." [Valentin Groebner, Ready For Inspection, Cabinet magazine # 22]
SNAKES ON A PLANE was, for a brief moment, the uber-hyped, internet-propelled, buzz film of 2006. With a title that is punch-line and plot synopsis rolled into one, the film provided a study in Barnum theory in action. Forget relational aesthetics in a museum, this was the ultimate exercise in audience participation. Long before the film opened, internet discussion of the film was at a fever pitch and the studio capitalized by adding scenes in response. The most-quoted dialogue from the script actually originated as an online parody of Samuel Jackson's pistol-whipping persona ever since PULP FICTION:

"Enough is enough! I have had it with these muthafuckin' snakes on this muthafuckin' plane!"

When you leave that theater, think of the film as a metaphor for the expansive paranoia that has gripped air travel. If it's not on your screen, it's real Arabs or Muslims biting you as you sit waiting for takeoff. Overwhelmed by the fear that Seat 3B is not just looking for a snack as he rifles through his bag, passengers have become the new enforcers on our flights.

Getting there is half the fun.

Ultimately, this is not a security conversation -- it is about enabling individuals to act out their fantasies as "terrorist spotters." Every person is now an Action Hero‘, ready to pounce on evildoers. Even after someone makes their way through security checks, passengers are indulged when they "spot suspicious behavior", kick up a royal fuss and boot that passenger off the plane.

When you target behavior and facial tics, are passengers passive actors in all this or do they start behavior modification and self-censorship? This is partially debated by Bernard Harcourt in his forthcoming book Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing and Punishing in an Actuarial Age. Faced with new measures to study passengers faces through "behavioral profiling", airports have become locations for a new form of performance art. Many of us have become used to rehearsing a script that allows an assumed normality roleplay, so that some hair-trigger suspicion meter doesn't go off.

What is suspicious? Suspect behavior has expanded to include not smiling (the Syrian musician case), going to the bathroom repeatedly (the two Indian men detained soon after 9/11), changing seats and using cell phones (Amsterdam-Bombay flight scare), wearing heavy clothes (Malaga-Manchester flight, shades of Jean Charles de Menezes who was also wearing a heavy coat), wearing hijab (JFK detentions), wearing an Arabic t-shirt (JetBlue's "We Will Not Be Silent" fracas with Iraqi activist Raed Jarrar), and speaking "arabic" (Malaga-Manchester again) In the last instance, mob rule forced two men off a Manchester flight. The men in question were Asian and were most likely speaking Urdu -- apparently everyone is an amateur and inept Arabist. Maybe they can help fill the Intelligence Department's deficit of Arabic translators.

One of my innocent pleasures are horror films for that balls-to-the-wall fear buzz. One such enabler was the first installment in the FINAL DESTINATIONAL franchise, featuring a protagonist who sees a vision of an airline crash, and by freaking out, saves a group of passengers who get off the plane.

For any of us who already have a fear of flying, the accelerating nervousness displayed in the scene below is true to life:

Alex Browning: "I saw it. Like, I don't know I just saw it. I saw it on the runway, I saw it take off. I saw out my window. I saw the ground. And-and the cabin starts to shake, right? And the left side blows up and the whole plane just explodes! And it was so real, just how everything happens, you know?"

Tod Waggner: "You've been on a lot of planes that blew up?"

This exchange is not taken well by the flight attendants, who insist:

"We will remove you from this aircraft!"

To which Alex replies with bravado:

"Fuck you! I'll remove myself!"

And he storms off the plane, along with some lucky souls who are scared by his outburst. Moments later, the plane is in the sky, and even fewer moments afterwards, it has exploded. Death does not take a holiday, and eventually all the survivors get their comeuppance in maximal gory fashion. The film was made in 2000, but subsequent sequels wisely avoid the air for freeway pileup (#2) and ferris wheel mayhem (#3).

If Alex Browning had a darker hue and a different name, the sum result of his freak out could very well be deep incarceration. Center for Constitutional Rights might still be suing for his release today. These are the realities of air travel in this eco system of fear.

Happy Flying.

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Naeem Mohaiemen/Visible Collective work on art interventions about hyphenated identities and security panic. Additional Research for this essay was done by Anjali Kamat
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Bibliography

Visible Collective: Fear of Flying
http://disappearedinamerica.org/video/part2/

Visible Collective: Driving While Black Becomes Flying While Brown
http://disappearedinamerica.org/photos/driving/

JetBlue vs Arabic T-Shirts
http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2006/08/people_here_in.html

Southwest vs "Meet The F***ers" t-shirt
http://money.cnn.com/2005/10/06/news/fortune500/southwest_shirt/?cnn=yes

Syrian Musicians Trigger Security Panic
http://www.altmuslim.com/perm.php?id=1260_0_26_0_C

Omar Ahmed vs. Southwest Airlines
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/shobak/message/2498

Diabetic vs. British Airways
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0CWU/is_2005_March_15/ai_n13252118

Mob Forces Asians Off Manchester Flight
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/5270500.stm

Omar Ahmed, Napster & Florida Pilot License
http://www.muslimwakeup.com/main/archives/2004/09/omar_ahmed_naps.php

Final Destination
http://www.metrofilm.com/destinationfinale/

Snakes On A Plane: The Money Shot
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bGv6Ijf1aU

Mobile Phone Triggers Dutch Air Scare
http://www.bangkokpost.com/breaking_news/breakingnews.php?id=112484

200 Detained at JFK, Muslims Targeted
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/newyork/am-prof0824,0,4565671.story

And the profiling cheerleaders...

Mark Flanagan Wants Racial Profiling At Airports
http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/news/local/15329196.htm

OP-ED: What Israeli Security Should Teach Us
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/08/23/what_israeli_security_could_teach_us/

OP-ED: Maybe, sometimes, profiling makes sense
http://www.theithacajournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060822/OPINION02/608220305/1014

To join the SHOBAK mailing list, click here.

London Security Panic

If you have friends in London, please pass this on to them. I have two lectures June 16+17 (7:30 pm) for the PERFORMANCE STUDIES INTERNATIONAL conference, speaking on the theme of post 9/11 security panic.

Arrived in London this morning. All of today's papers are reporting yesterday's press conference by the Forest Gate British-Bangladeshi family. The issue of security panic is brought to life with the botched Forest Gate raid on a Bangladeshi family, which has turned into a major fiasco for the British police. 11 days after the raid, Scotland Yard has cleared both British-Bangladeshi brothers who were held for almost two weeks. This is after police practically ripped their house apart, drilling into walls and dismantling the floor trying to find "terrorist equipment".

During the raid, one brother Mohammed Abdulkayar was shot in the chest and shoulder. According to press reports, he narrowly missed being shot in the heart, avoiding a repetition of the tragic police shooting of Jean Charles Menezes. At an emotional press conference, Abdulkayar said "I was begging the police, 'please, please, I can't breathe'. He just kicked me in my face and kept on saying 'shut the fuck up.'"

He also added, "Violence is not in my nature. It is not in my religion. Islam has got nothing to do with that, Islam is peace."

Here are two short pieces I wrote last year after the London bombings:

Welcome To The Terrordome

Western Muslims as "Collateral Damage"

Artist Dan Wang on Asylum NYC's Youth Focus
Chicago-based artist Dan Wang (opening in the Hyde Park Art Show this weekend) has this follow-up to Brett's comments on the Asylum NYC art show:
mostly agree with Brett's comments. I would add this thought: why the emphasis on "young" artists? While not stated as a condition for eligibility, the site does declare the selection of "ten young artists" and at least one of the artists in her statement describes herself as a "young talented artist," as if youthfulness were the preferred condition of applicants. Now I fully understand that younger people have it more difficult in many areas of life and career, but given the award of a three-year residency permit, I have to question this trace preference for youth. Because when it comes to immigration, youth is generally an advantage. Developed nations, by and large, do not want old people coming to their shores to live out their days using the public resources of a host country without having contributed the better part of their working lives. If you are wanting to move to the US or Canada or New Zealand or other developed nations but you are over 50 and without recognized skills, and without family to receive you, and without a wad of cash with which you can buy property and/or start businesses that will employ people, you are basically out of luck. There must be quite a few artists out there in just such a situation. Seems to me that the award would be more meaningful if spread across a wider range of ages on the upper end, especially given the reality that artists often possess real but unrecognized skills, and tend to accumulate and/or sharpen more of those skills as they age. These all look like worthy recipients of the award, that's not the issue for me. But to bring in older folks who could move with the momentum of a long but under-recognized career, and in that way make an immediate contribution to the host society and in the process dispel the prejudices that govern the administrative apparatus of immigration--now that would cool.

VISIBLE in Chicago, Brett Bloom's Thoughts on Asylum NYC Art Show
For anyone in Chicago, Saturday April 29, we are presenting Visible Collective's work and a talk on Post 9/11 Security Panic, Loyalty Tests & the Muslim "Outsider". Talk presented at Mess Hall at invitation of Temporary Services who do phenomenal work (we are in a show together @ Yerba Buena, San Francisco).

Brett Bloom of TS had this response to the item I sent yesterday on the AsylumNYC art show:
Naeem, I saw this in the Sunday Times. It really pissed me off. Is it really all that different from all the other ways art gets presented in NYC and elsewhere. It feels like more of the same to me. I don't understand why people think that creating this competition is a good thing. So much brutal, evil competition already exists in this country. Why turn it into frivolous art entertainment? It is really pathetic and indicative of how inept the art world is at dealing with real issues. I much prefer the activities of the Sans Papier folks in France or the Universal Embassy - do you know about this? It was really amazing. I think it was shut down years ago, but a bunch of folks occupied an abandonned Somali consulate building (when Somalia collapsed into a non-state or warlord-state, whatever it is now) in Paris, housed people without immigration papers and began issuing universal passports - much more creative than this exhibition. Any way, the decadence of the NY art world is sometimes deeply infuriating. See you in Chicago soon, Brett

Another member of the SHOBAK listserve wrote to me pointing out that none of the artists were from countries where there could be a 'security' problem getting a visa-- i.e. artists from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.