Uday Mehta is Clarence Francis Professor in Social Sciences at Amherst College.

In the opening lines of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber declared that the ultimate stakes of the book were not the causal and historical roots of capitalist enterprise but rather the question of what aspects of “Western civilization”  “lie in a line of development having universal significance and value.” His answer, which followed in the very next sentence, was: “Only in the West does science exist at a stage of development which we recognize today as valid.” What made this science valid and uniquely Western was its rationality. “Knowledge and observation of great refinement existed elsewhere, above all in India, China, Babylonia, Egypt,” but what they lacked were the rational principles for the very activities that they practiced with great and often surpassing acumen.  Indians had geometry, mathematics and the natural sciences but “no rational proof” or “method of experiment.” Chinese “historical scholarship,” though “highly developed,” did “not have the method of Thucydides.” Indian political thought, despite being a predecessor to Machiavelli, lacked “systematic method” and “rational concepts.” And, crucially, given the focus of Weber’s work, India, Babylon and China had merchants, domestic and foreign trade, banks, credit markets and entrepreneurs but “their activities were predominantly of an irrational and speculative character.” Rational capitalism was uniquely a feature of the modern West.

Weber is of course not alone in associating the defining kernel of the West with principles. Samuel Huntington famously identified America with the Anglo-Protestant creedal “principles of liberty, equality, human rights, representative government, and private property” and with the specifically liberal and democratic culture, values and institutions that these principles, on his account, produced. Buruma and Margalit associate the West with the principles of scientific rationality and the formal aspects of democracy. But Weber is ultimately very different from these others with whom he appears to shares an initial impulse. For him, the specific kind of rationality that triumphed in the modern West did in fact produce a form of life. It was a form of life and a culture about which he had a deep ambivalence because it was characterized by the immanence, and not merely the epiphenomenal accident, of an “iron cage.” It was one whose epitaph would be, “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that is has attained a level of civilization never before achieved” and in which, moreover, regeneration might very well turn on the rise of “new prophets” or the “great rebirth of old ideas and ideals.”

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I am grateful to the contributors to this web symposium on “Occidentalism, The Very Idea: An Essay on the Enlightenment and Enchantment”, (first published in Critical Inquiry, 2006) for having bothered to read my work and comment on it. I would like to apologize to them (and to Abbas Raza and Robin Varghese, the editors of the excellent website “3 Quarks Daily” who proposed this symposium to me well over a year ago) for being so delayed in my responses.

I have replied to the comments in the order in which they were sent to me. If I spend proportionately more space on the comment by Bruce Robbins, it is only because I feel he continues to drastically misconstrue my views in a way that that I would not like to stand uncorrected.

Reply To Robbins II

There is a cast of mind I find a strain, even a repugnance, which constantly seeks to reduce issues of historical and philosophical depth to a galumphing topicality.

In my reply to Robbins’s first comment on my initial essay, I had pointed to how utterly misplaced his suggestion was that I had some concern in that essay to instruct ‘the Left’ about how to win an election (‘seize power ‘, I believe, was his expression) in America. My refusal to be drawn into this effort to steer the discussion of my work to his own up-to-the-minute political preoccupations has left him frustrated.

In the first sentence of his latest comment, he pounces hungrily on an opening remark in the comment by Colin Jager in this web symposium, saying: “I’m grateful to Colin Jager for attaching this renewal of the “Occidentialism” conversation immediately and firmly to the upcoming election.” But Jager does nothing of the sort. He merely cites Obama’s controversial claim about how some of the political attitudes and the religiosity in working class America might owe partly to certain broadly characterized social and economic deprivations they have suffered in the last few decades with a view to raising the hard questions about false consciousness that I had briefly discussed in my essay, and then proceeds to ideas about disenchantment, community and solidarity that I had presented there in the long genealogical diagnosis I had offered of some of the conditions of advanced, industrial society in the West, especially in America, from its early conceptual and material origins in the late seventeenth century. Jager’s interest is in assessing my account of these things, not at all in the ‘upcoming elections’.

In the next sentence, Robbins writes: “Akeel Bilgrami’s Critical Inquiry (2006) article suggested that the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004 was in large part the result of the ‘shallowness of the Left diagnosis,’ which saw the red states’ bitterness and turn to religion as ‘consequences of the market.’ ” This, too, is false. I mentioned the 2004 election once only to cite an undemocratic Liberal Left response to the ordinary people who were responsible for its outcome. In the brief last section of my essay where the election gets this mention, my canvas is the much bigger one of modern American culture and politics, whose span was delineated by me explicitly with phrases such as “ever since the Goldwater defeat” and ‘for some forty years’. I do believe that the Liberal Left has been shallow in America and I do believe that the Republican Party has been cynically tapping things in the American heartland that metropolitan Liberals have not grasped with any searching historical analysis or psychological sensitivity. But these beliefs were not presented as opinions geared to any recent or future election.

It is a depthless journalist’s tendency to think, as Robbins does, that the latest shifts in poll-monitored percentage points in a given week or month reflect any appreciable difference in the facts, accumulated over the last few decades, about the religious commitments of extraordinarily large numbers of people that have made and continue to make an overwhelming difference to American politics. If this or that politician today (McCain, for instance) does not speak in a campaign with the same religious fervour as his predecessor nor get quite the same response that his predecessor got, that is not a sign that matters of religion and ‘values’ –as Robbins puts it—are not relevant to this country’s politics. Their accumulated relevance is too obvious to deny, and this difference in the behaviour of a particular politician at this particular instant may just be because, over these many years, the Republican alliance with the Religious Right has made more or less certain that the very considerable conservative religious vote is quite secure for the Republicans, and McCain can now focus on the swing voter instead.

I feel embarrassed indulging Robbins’s obsession with yesterday’s headlines and today’s polls and the coming November, in a symposium such as this, given its larger theme –much the same embarrassment someone would feel in having to engage an infatuated man who parades his mistress in a thoroughly inappropriate place.

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///
Don Q. in Mahattan
–Biting the dust of ’01 
Jim Culleny

Dining in Soho alone, a man
served by a girl with lip studs, nose ring,
and serpent tattoo uncoiling
from deep cleavage,
sees the new man of La Mancha,
in dim light across the room,
seated with his back to the street:

He topples a pepper mill with his fork
gesturing to his wife, Sancha,
vowing he’ll redeem New York.

Sancha smiles and re-sets the mill in place
among constellations of pepper stars
strewn across formica space.

Between them supper’s done:
spent dinnerware, filaments of flaked filo
circling half a buttered bun,
remnants of dense moussaka,
and that pepper mill now standing like a dustbowl silo
near languid cubes in tepid water.

Don (el Hombre), enemy of disorder,
sweeps a hand through this small universe
like a superanal patriot
and plows a thousand miniscule black galaxies
into his cupped palm
and dumps ’em on a plate.

He takes his tined baton
between forefinger and thumb
and sets a cadence in the atmosphere
thumping his undiffident drum.

Then Don, el futile hombre,
maestro of mishap,
conducts the ice and water glass
into long-suffering Sancha’s lap.

///

by Atiya Batool Khan

I had the honor of meeting Ahmad Faraz 26 years ago in Washington. A local Urdu literary society, the Aligarh Alumni Association, had invited him to recite at a gathering they had organized in his honor—a Mushaira, or poetry reading. This was after he had left Pakistan under pressure from military strongman Zia-ul-Haq's government. My husband and I were asked by the Aligarh Alumni Association to host him for a week, but in that short time we became fast friends, so his stay turned first into a month and then it ended up being almost a year. This was the beginning of a lifelong relationship and he gradually became like a member of our family. We would visit with him at least once a year in Pakistan, and he visited us just as often. Though he became one of our closest friends, we always addressed him by the honorific name “Faraz Sahib” (Mr. Faraz) out of respect, and that is how I shall refer to him here.

As far as Urdu poetry goes, none of his contemporaries could touch Faraz Sahib, or even come close. The superiority of his poetry owes much to his personal qualities: the boldness of his thought, his willingness to fight oppression and his very costly (to himself) political activism, his rebellious nature, and of course his romantic worldview.

It was actually love poetry that first made him very popular at the tender age of 19 years. Here is one famous romantic poem of that early time which already announces the bold and beautiful lyrical rhythm in Urdu that would become characteristic of him later:

Ranjish hi sahi dil hi dukhaanay kay liyay aa
Aa phir say mujhay chhorr kay jaanay kay liyay aa

Pehlay say maraasim na sahi phir bhi kabhi to
Rasm-o-rahay duniya hi nibhaanay kay liyay aa

Kis kis ko bataayengay judaai kaa sabab ham
Tu mujh se khafaa hai to zamaanay kay liyay aa

Kuchh to meri pindaar-e-mohabbat ka bharam rakh
Tu bhi to kabhi mujh ko manaanay kay liyay aa

Ek umr say hun lazzat-e-giryaa se bhi mehruum
Aye raahat-e-jaan mujh ko rulaanay kay liyay aa

Ab tak dil-e-khush_feham ko tujh say hain ummeedain
Ye aakhari shammain bhi bujhaanay kay liyay aa

*

Come, even if only to break my heart
Come, even if only to leave me again

Yes, it is no longer like before, but still
Come, if only for the sake of convention

I cannot tell people the reasons for our separation
Come, even if unhappy, for public show

Respect just a little my love for you
Come, for once, just to appease me

For long I haven’t had even the pleasure of lament
Come, joy of my life, if only to make me weep again

My heart, the optimist, still retains some hope
Come, to extinguish even these last little embers

*

As a poet, he was as sensitive as an artist should be: he frequently observed and then took the time to reflect upon things that others did not notice. During one of his visits with us, my husband took him to see the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. The next day he wrote his famous poem “Kaali Deewaar” (The Black Wall), a meditation not only on the utter futility of that war and the destruction wreaked upon the Vietnamese, but also an outpouring of sympathy for the loved ones of the American veterans he saw placing flowers near their names on the wall.

On another occasion I took him to work, to the Johns Hopkins Hospital, with me, and he soon wrote a poem about the Eye Bank there. In this especially notable poem, he movingly describes the deprivation of blind people, offering his own eyes to them. But then he wonders if others would ever want eyes that have witnessed so much pain; whether such eyes, that have seen so many of their dreams shattered, would even be bearable to others.

His frustration and anger against inhuman practices and political oppression is obvious in a poem that he wrote in praise of the prophet Mohammad in which he also writes:

Mere zameer ne qabeel ko nahin bakhsha
Main kaise sulha karoon qatal karne walon se.

*

My conscience has yet to forgive Cain
How can I make peace with these killers?

*

And when he teaches us to be an activist he says:

Shikwae zulmate shab se to kahin behtar tha
Apne hisse ki koi shama jalate jaate

*

Rather than lamenting the darkness of that night,
We should have done our share and lit a candle or two

*

In a philosophical mood he would recite:

Ek diwana ye kehta hua hansta jata
Kaash manzil se bhi age koi rasta jata.

*

A lunatic, laughing, would go along, saying
I wish this path went further than my destination

*

For friendship he wrote:

Zindigi is se ziada to nahin umr teri
Bas kisi dost ke milne se juda honay tak

*

Life, your duration is easily measured:
From the moment of meeting a friend, to the moment of parting

*

He not only wrote well but also recited his poetry with a uniquely charming cadence. The audience was invariably mesmerized. He would always get standing ovations and uproarious applause. In person he was a very cheerful, friendly person, greeting all he met with a warm smile. We shared a love of puns and plays on words, and he loved to recite jokes and make people laugh. Using his love of language and his creative gift, he made any gathering he attended extremely enjoyable. He was a very progressive thinker, always eager to hear about new ideas or try out new inventions. He never hesitated to voice his opinions or inner feelings, even if they were different than the norms of his native culture or the time.

Faraz Sahib was a person of stature with charisma, glamour, wit, humor, kindness, caring and sensitivity who was also bold, vivacious, a true friend, poet, philosopher, human rights activist, agnostic, non conformist, an avid reader, humble, extremely patriotic and notably passionate. He had a palpable urge to create and write. He was a world-renowned Urdu poet and national icon in Pakistan. He died on August 25th of complications from a severe stroke and Renal Failure. He was 77 years old. He is survived by his wife, Rehana, and his sons, Saadi, Shibley and Sarmad.

He was a great person and an exemplary friend. He lived a full and happy life, and whoever met him once would not be able to forget his charming personality and will miss him. He called me his friend and that is my pride.

In short I would say that he cared for people more than others thought was wise, he took risks more than others thought was safe, and he dreamt more than others thought was practical.

Atiya B. Khan is a pediatrician practicing in Maryland and a social activist who has raised millions for the education of the poor. The Urdu poetry here has been loosely translated by her brother, S. Abbas Raza.

Michael Blim

I am printing here an advance copy of one half of Barak Obama’s upcoming convention acceptance speech.

For the record, I obtained it through a family friend who labors in the bowels of Chicago’s Daley Democratic Machine. I am calling him Billy here so that his gift to me doesn’t bring down the wrath of Richie Daley on his head. Billy has a no-show job at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. I don’t ask him what he does there, because I am pretty sure he doesn’t do anything.

The only time you can be sure of finding Billy is at his apartment in the 42nd ward two weeks before every Election Day. He’s a precinct captain. And now I guess you understand why he has a no-show job. I heard via a mutual friend that he spends most of his time in Las Vegas running a strip club.

Billy sent me the speech in a PDF. He had gotten it from his sister-in-law who does clerical work inside the Obama inner sanctum in Chicago. She had given Billy the PDF because she figured that he wouldn’t be watching the convention, with the Sox and Cubs in tight pennant races and all. Billy wrote me that she sent it on to the whole clan in Bridgeport. He thought a scoop like this might generate interest in my column, given that he thinks nobody reads it, and he is a loyal friend and wants to see me make out as a writer.

Given that the whole Bridgeport clan has this part of the speech, and most of them are connected, I decided to put this out, and see if I can pick up a reader or two.

The following is the part of Obama’s acceptance speech that concerns foreign policy:

“The Republicans say that I talk a lot about change, but I don’t say what I want to do.

Not true, but just so there is no mistaking what I intend to do as president, let me lay out my new direction for American foreign policy.

I am going to make big changes.

First, the Iraq war was the biggest mistake America has made since the Vietnam War, and it has cost over 4000 men and women their lives. Tens of thousands will carry grievous wounds around for the rest of our lives. Countless tens of thousands of Iraqis have lost their lives, suffered terrible injuries, or are worse off than they were under Saddam Hussein.

I intend to pull out our troops by the end of the first year of my term. There is already a consensus in the country that this is the best thing to do. There is no guarantee that a McCain administration, once they get in, will do it.

I will. And I will not leave garrisons of American troops on Iraqi soil after the combat pullout. They would be a provocation for Iraqis and their neighbors who wish to govern themselves without American interference. Their resentment would put our troops constantly in harm’s way.

Everybody is coming home. You can count on it.

Second, I favor engagement – not war or isolation — with Iran. Only war could possibly stop them from building nuclear weapons if they choose to. This would be a disastrous course of action. Even a cold war with Iran would fail. We couldn’t stop friends like Pakistan and India, so what gives us the confidence that our hostility will change their minds?

My administration is not going to war with Iran. It is better to establish a relationship with them. It would be even more important if they develop nuclear weapons.

Some argue that we must use force and eliminate Iran’s growing nuclear capabilities to support and protect Israel. I ask you: Since when has Israel ever needed defending? The certain knowledge that Israel would use its A bomb against Iran is deterrent enough. Deterrence worked between the former Soviet Union and us during the Cold War, and it seems to be working between Pakistan and India. Let’s leave Iran to decide its own fate.

Third, we should leave the Israelis and Palestinians to sort out their destinies. Our involvement doesn’t help. Instead, it hurts the chances for peace. Because the United States has given Israel our unconditional support, Palestinians believe they cannot trust us to be even-handed, and they are right. Our constant pressure drives them further away from making peace. Israel too, given our total support, has no real incentive to make peace. We provide each of an excuse. In the long run, they are locked in a deadly and ruinous embrace.

The Palestinians and the Israelis must make their own peace, and their chances of success increase if we get out of the way.

Fourth, we had better acknowledge that we face a new cold war if we do not find better ways of coexisting with Russia. We can blame former President Putin and his governments for making it more likely. But it takes two to make a cold war.

We never stop to consider Russia’s position. We told them to make an American economy out of the shambles of the failed Soviet system. After years of trying and failing, they went back to their old ways of doing things. At least for the time being, their new arrangement works.

When they were down, we lorded it over them. Our plan didn’t work, and the Russian people suffered terribly.

So the state once more controls Russia’s massive corporations, and Russian citizens enjoy what we consider a limited set of civil liberties.

This is their affair. Just as we would resent former President Putin lecturing us about how we eliminated many of our civil liberties after September 11, they find it irritating too to be told how they should run their society.

We also don’t seem to get it about why they are becoming more aggressive. How would we feel if Canada became a close ally with Russia – a second Cuba in other words? We are expanding NATO, the historic bulwark against Soviet ambitions, to their very borders. We would never stand for it, and they won’t either.

How would we feel if Russia put missiles of any sort in Canada or in Cuba again? John Kennedy wouldn’t stand for it, and once more today, neither would we.

We would risk war, and that is the point. If we want to work with Russia, we need to understand its motives – not prattle on about how the Old Russian bear is returning. We need to help find a new détente that will strengthen the treaty obligations that we, the Europeans, and the Russians agreed to when we ended the Cold War. We need to find ways among all of us to make peace and cooperation more desirable.

The bottom line: Nobody needs a new cold war, least of all our friends in central and Eastern Europe. For their sake, we need to support mutual respect and understanding on the part of all the nations of Europe, including the Soviet Union, and avoid unwittingly encouraging Russian aggression.

Fifth, we need to become again, as Franklin Roosevelt put it, a good neighbor to countries near us and to nations around the globe. We consider America great humanitarian, and we are. But we are also quick to tell others what to do, and to back it up with force.

We have military bases in 153 countries. We have half a million soldiers and their dependents stationed permanently abroad. We have an array of weapons and the ability to project deadly force on the ground within 48 hours anywhere in the world.

We need to turn this around. We need to pull back, and give up the bases. They are only an incentive to our meddling in the affairs of others. If nations need our help, we can provide it quickly and efficiently. And we have much to do at home. Our neighbors need the freedom to pursue their own paths to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Sixth, the threat of terrorism. I believe we have accomplished more to defeat terrorism with intelligence, with vigilance, and with stealth than with our military operations. Terrorists do not form armies. They are not even revolutionary guerillas wanting to take over nations. They are persons who want to make the world suffer for what they believe are its sins. They seek vengeance and believe wrongly that violence converts people to their cause.

Let us continue to treat them for what they are: international criminals whom we must pursue relentlessly until they are ours. No war can successfully destroy a small group or a network of the angry and unappeased. Smart police work and counter-terrorist initiatives can — and will under my administration.

Finally, we should support the United Nations, and help it have greater impact on the world’s many crises. Let us recall that the United Nations was America’s idea. Franklin Roosevelt made its creation part of the post-World War II settlement. We need to reaffirm his noble vision by helping to make a stronger United Nations.

Mankind’s success as a species depends upon the existence of a grand arbiter such as the United Nations that protects the concerns of all in the management of our world.

To get America moving in a new direction, it must start with us. Let us help the United Nations grow. Let it discover a new role as the arena where peace is made, and agreements undertaken observed.

Let us grow too. Let us find a new way of being a great power. Let us use our power for good rather than our power for war. Let us work together with all peoples and nations of good will, and make the world a better place.

This, my fellow Americans, is change you can believe in. Americans young and old have heard the call. They hunger for changes that will be more than promises. They want changes that revolutionize our ways of life and that of citizens of the world wherever they find themselves.

More of the same will not do. Look at our performance over the past eight years. Does anyone want four more years like the last eight?

John Kennedy once quoted an ancient Chinese proverb that said that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

If I become your president, I will help us take this new step together. Let us work to build a world of peace and prosperity for us – and for our global neighbors. “

Wow, helluva speech! Change I believe in.

Glad too that I could reproduce it here, as I know that outside the Bridgeport neighborhood of Chicago, many of you have teams in pennant races and such.

So I say thanks to Billy’s sister in law for the sneak peak and the scoop. I have pennants on the mind too, so go Cubs – and Barak too!

///
From the Indictment and Abjuration of 1633:
“Whereas you, Galileo, son of Vincenzio Galilei … were denounced in 1615, to this Holy Office, for holding as true a false doctrine … namely, that the sun is immovable in the center of the world, and the earth moves … We pronounce, judge, and declare, that you … have rendered yourself vehemently suspected by this Holy Office of heresy… “
…………………………..
Dermatology & Galileo
………………….
A creationist student of mine with a wart the size of a gumball on the end of his nose recently told me science is overrated and is anathema to God.  In the same breath he said he was seeing a dermatologist about the wart.

I asked, “Have you prayed about this?”

He said, “All the time.”

I asked, “Has it helped with the wart?”

He said, “I don’t pray about the wart.  I pray for forgiveness for consulting a dermatologist.”

As his guru, I told him it would be smart to meditate not only on the wart, but upon his inclination to view God as an idiot.  He looked at me as if I’d told him the earth revolves around the sun and excused himself to call his dermatologist on his iphone.
–Roshi Bob

Perennial Argument
Jim Culleny

“The earth revolves around the sun,”
Galileo said.

“No,” said the Pope,
“and if you say it again
you’ll be cut off from the benefit
of my infallibility and exiled
to the wilderness of reason
and lose all hope of hope.”

“Ok, maybe for the moment
it does not,” the miffed voyeur said,
and sheathed his telescope.
“But trust me, it will when
you’ve turned your head.”

//

The Vendyak

Justin E. H. Smith

In his 1957 structuralist masterpiece, Le croustillant et le gluant, the French anthropologist Jean-Robert Klein argued that the fundamental binary distinction through which the savage mind filters the world is that between the crispy and the chewy. The first and primary domain of application of these concepts is of course the alimentary one, but in primitive cultures, he argued, the crispy and the chewy are often projected from there into the cosmos as a whole. In his own fieldwork among the Yanomamo of Brazil, he showed in more than a few elaborate diagrams that, for them, men, rubber trees, the color green, the East, vipers, and butterflies are held to be ‘crispy’, while women, black, jaguars, the North, the stars, and ground foliage are in turn ‘chewy’.

Beginning in the late 1970s, Klein’s former student, Françoise Pombo, argued in a series of influential publications that her mentor had failed to notice something of great importance. What he was actually in the process of discovering, she claimed, was a tripartite schema, in which the crunchy [le croquant] was to be sharply distinguished from both the crispy and the chewy. The crunchy stands as the ‘in-between’ class, what cannot be subsumed, what remains forever outside of Aristotelian dualistic logic. It is neither crispy (which is to say, brittle throughout) nor chewy (soft throughout), but manifests something of both of these opposites. (To the criticism that, in everyday speech, what is crunchy is not at all chewy, Pombo responded that these are technical terms we are dealing with, and we should not try too hard to make them match up with our quotidian usages.) The crunchy, she maintained in a Hegelian vein, is nothing less than the Aufhebung or sublation of the crispy and the chewy: a category that simultaneously overcomes and preserves these lower-order concepts.

From Pombo’s extensive field interviews with both male and female members of the Vendyak tribe of the Kamchatka peninsula –the only indigenous people of the former Soviet Union, incidentally, to have been considered by the authorities too distant and too intractable to be worth the effort of forced sedentarization and modernization–, we find the following sort of exchange: “How would you describe this?” (she hands the informant a table-water cracker).
“It’s sort of crispy [li’xak],” answers the Vendyak.
“What about crunchy [at’xak],” Pombo presses. “Do you think it’s at all crunchy?”
“Yeah. I guess. That too.”

Pombo’s 1983 book, Au-delà du croustillant et du gluant, was a solid work of structuralist anthropology, even if somewhat critical –in view of the new wave of feminist theory of which she was a leading exponent– of the theoretical limitations of structuralism’s founding fathers. But in no time Pombo’s findings were taken up by the various poststructuralist schools. Lanier Pippidi, a follower of Alain Badiou and a self-described practitioner of ‘Maoist topology’, thought that the croustillant and the croquant were not sufficiently differentiated categories, and, in his 1994 book, Les surfaces kleiniennes, took to writing instead of the ‘crouquant’. In the recent English translation of his work (Touching Klein, University of Nebraska Press, 2004), this term of art has been rendered as ‘cruspy’: a forced amalgamation of ‘crispy’ and ‘crunchy’.  “Strictly speaking,” Pippidi tells us, “the cruspy is always-already densely imbricated in both the crispy and the crunchy. The double movement of the cruspy inscribes itself in both: it plays on surfaces, it crystallizes meniscuses.” 

Followers in this vein of interpretation grew more radical still; some claimed that the cruspy could not be written about at all, and took to denoting it as the ‘cruspy’. In her monumental 1997 book, Le double mouvement du crouquant, the Romanian feminist philosopher Raluca Mitici argued that “as long as the surface is intact, the ‘thing’ presents itself as impenetrable; once it is bitten into, it is no longer there in its thingliness at all, and the question of its penetrability does not arise. This is why the cruspy cannot be written” (translation ours).  Since then other variants have appeared in print, including ‘cro(u)quant’, ‘cro/uquant’, ‘crouquant’, ‘crXquant’, and, in an uninspired jeu de mots first seen in the memoir of a University of Chicago French professor turned South Side step dancer, ‘Crew Kant’. A forthcoming special edition of Semiotext(e), appearing in 2009 and summarizing the past 15 years of debate on this fraught subject, will be entitled “What Remains of the Cr—-?”*

“I don’t know if it can be written or not,” said Hünn-Tuk, at the time a 25-year-old Vendyak informant for Pombo’s book who, unique in his community, had received a university degree at Ryazan State University, in engineering, before returning to the place of his birth. “Doesn’t really matter. I’m the only one who knows how to write here anyway.”   

Some years later, Hünn-Tuk took part, along with four other members of the Vendyak community, in the aboriginal-peoples contingent of a conference on the anthropology of food at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Their hosts had taken them to a diner a bit out of town called ‘LeAnn’s’. A professor from the Slavic department was along to translate for Hünn-Tuk into Russian, who in turn translated for the others into their native tongue. I was at the conference, and heard about the incident first-hand from the professor (we had been roommates during my years at Michigan). 

The Vendyak were very curious about everything on the menu, as the diner had been played up to them by their hosts for days as featuring ‘authentic’ local cuisine. Just as the Russian professor was struggling to come up with an adequate rendering of the concepts of ‘cheese grits’ and ‘chicken-fried steak’, one of the Vendyak pointed to the cover of the menu and asked to know the meaning of the phrase underneath the name of the restaurant: “LeAnn’s: Home-cookin’ just like granny use [sic] to make.” The professor translated the phrase into Russian, and at once Hünn-Tuk’s face contracted into a worried cringe. He tried to hide it, but the other Vendyak had already become excited, and Hünn-Tuk found himself unable to invent a lie under pressure. They demanded to know what the phrase meant at once, and he gave in: “This food is prepared as if by an elder woman,” he told them sombrely in Vendyak. 

Two of the men ran out of the restaurant at once, right out across the state route, and disappeared into the forest on the other side. The youngest of them dropped to the floor and began convulsing, as if in the early throes of an epileptic seizure. The fourth, a man of nearly 60 with grey whiskers and a few teeth, marched over to the anthropologist who had arranged the outing, an innocent young Melanesianist who had simply taken it for granted that love of granny’s cooking was a cultural universal. The Vendyak grabbed the Melanesianist by his throat and bellowed: “Do you want to poison our people!? Do you want to shrivel our testicles and make our arms too weak to hunt!?”

No, the Vendyak are no fans of granny’s home cookin’. Remarkably, however, there is not a single mention of this central prohibition in Pombo’s supposedly exhaustive study of Vendyak food-preparation practices. Why is this?

My assistant Tanya thinks she knows. She had been the on-the-ground facilitator for Pombo’s fieldwork in the late ‘70s, long before glasnost had got underway and before it was at all common for French anthropologists to learn about indigenous Soviet peoples from any other source than the occasional anthology of translated articles from the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. In an era when most visitors were shuffled through minutely planned, 7-day tours of the great achievements of the people’s economy, courtesy of Inturist, Pombo wanted to disappear into the field for several months, alone. Tanya had been assigned to take care of Pombo on her way through Moscow before and after her stay in the field (for in those days one could not travel to the Russian Far East via Tokyo), and, of course, to report everything that she had learned of Pombo’s research to the relevant officials. How could you have made such a compromise? I asked her when she revealed this to me. “We all made compromises,” she said.

Pombo had taken a deep liking to Tanya already on her first passage through Moscow, and on her way back had decided to entrust to Tanya a notebook, in a sealed envelope, that, as she explained, she would not be needing during the final preparation of her study for publication.  She did not say why it would not be included, but only that it “didn’t have its place” in the picture of the Vendyak she thought it imperative to convey. When Pombo died in Paris in 2002, Tanya deliberated for some months, unable to decide what to do with this problematic material. She left it in a drawer for six more years, and only now, as I am in Moscow on my way back from my own field work among the Lomi-Ek (likely my last visit, as I have reached forced-retirement age and the granting agency on which I’ve depended for the past thirty years no longer considers me an active researcher), has she decided to turn it over to me. “Do what you want with it. She’s been dead long enough. There must be some kind of statute of limitations. And anyway no one cares about structuralism anymore.” 

If what Pombo wrote in her unpublished notebook is true, the sociocosmic role of the crunchy may be quite different from the picture she gave of it in her published works. From these works, we know that the crunchy is associated with bones and decay, and foods held to be crunchy should only be consumed on one of the two annual feasts of the dead. Outside of these feasts, crunchy foods put the person who eats them at risk of sickness, impotence, and hunting failure.

But what we learn in the notebooks is that nothing has the power to make food crunchy more quickly and intensely than the implication of an old (post-menopausal) woman in its preparation. At the feasts of the dead, the elder women do all of the cooking, and it is for this reason, the Vendyak say, that the dishes that are served all come with such a thick crust: there is a desert resembling crème brulée, for example, made from churned deer milk, that must be hammered with a ritual mallet in order to break through the burnt, glass-like surface. The Vendyak sit and gnaw and suck this delicacy late into the evening. It is held to be very delicious, but also, outside of the context of the feasts, extremely dangerous. They are “eating their own death,” the Vendyak report, “which is something you cannot do every day.”

I suspect that Pombo’s suppression of this notebook had to do with her own personal experience of the Vendyak contempt for older women (she was 61 when she arrived there in 1979), and with a stubborn desire, one that she could never quite get over, to project onto the people she studied only laudable features, features that would present a promising alternative to the ‘dualism’, the ‘linearity’, etc., that she was striving to theorize her way out of. The truth is, the Vendyak treated her execrably, and she could not but have been angered by this.

Almost immediately upon arrival, the elders had placed her tent furthest from the cooking fire at the center of the encampment, and from the second or third day Pombo reported hearing whispers about the deteriorating quality of the food. By the third week of her fieldwork, the elder Vendyak sent Hünn-Tuk to her with a request: during the preparation of meals, might the anthropologist be willing to stand waist-deep in the lake, 50 meters or so from their encampment?
“Why do I have to wait in the lake?” Pombo asked. “There are many other post-menopausal women in the encampment who only have to stay in their tents.”
“The elders say they aren’t as za’laq as you are,” Hünn-Tuk explained to her in Russian, leaving the key concept untranslated from the original Vendyak. “They say that in all the history of the Vendyak, no woman has ever possessed za’laqtak to such a dangerous degree as you.”

Za’laqtak may be roughly translated as “the drying or desiccating principle.”  Many other things in nature possess it, including the sun. But the sun also includes its opposite, linaagtak, the principle of life and growth. Older women possess primarily za’laqtak, but in view of their enduring nurturing and care-giving skills they are thought to keep a portion of linaagtak throughout their lives, even if the overwhelming presence of za’laqtak in them makes it impossible for them to participate in food preparation. But Pombo was held by many to contain nothing but za’laqtak. Some said she was the very embodiment of za’laqtak, and a few elders with shamanic gifts began to mutter after a few weeks that Pombo was Za’laïq herself: the hideous underworld creature from whom all za’laqtak in the universe was thought to flow.

One early morning in the middle of the sixth week Pombo was woken up by Hünn-Tuk with an important message: “They want you to stand in the lake up to your neck today.”
“What?!”
“They say you need to go deeper. The food’s still coming out too crunchy.”
She struggled to recompose herself. “When you say ‘crunchy’,” she asked, ever the thorough researcher, “do you mean ‘crunchy’, or do you mean something closer to ‘crispy’?”
“I don’t know,” said Hünn-Tuk. “It’s just, you know. Hard. Dry… Can’t hunt.” 

Later that morning, as the women began to grind the roots and to tenderize the deer meat for cooking, Pombo dutifully waded out into the lake up to her neck. The water was cold, but in the mid-August heat she found it refreshing. She listened to the girls singing songs of fertility and promise as they pounded the meat on wooden boards strewn across their laps. The problem seemed to have been resolved in a manner acceptable to everyone, but the whispering continued, and Pombo was sure that, sooner or later, her freedom would be further restricted.

“You’re going to have to go in all the way,” Hünn-Tuk announced, shaking Pombo’s shoulder early one morning towards the beginning of the eighth week.
“All the way?”
“Just for the most dangerous period, when the girls are tenderizing.”
“You mean with my head underwater?”
“I brought you a breathing reed.” 

Hünn-Tuk explained that lake water is the most potent source of linaagtak in nature, and that the only way to keep her za’laqtak from reaching the encampment was by submerging her entirely in water. He apologized, evidently sincerely, and Pombo was touched enough by this to abandon the offence she had taken at first and to return her thoughts to the long-term scientific benefits of putting up with all this.  She grabbed the reed and stoically walked toward the lake.

Breathing through a thin straw underwater was not as difficult as she had first imagined, and it even brought back pleasant memories of childhood, snorkelling on the Lusitanian coast, silvery fish darting about her. Mostly she was proud of what she was willing to do for her work. She knew that Klein himself had repaired back to Sao Paolo after just a few weeks among the Yanomamo and a few mosquito bites too many, and after his favorite pipe tobacco had fallen overboard during a crossing of the Amazon in an overcrowded boat. He checked into the Excelsior, the story goes, and harassed the room-service staff until one of them agreed to journey across town by streetcar to Sao Paolo’s only purveyor of imported tobacco.

Pombo was reminiscing about this story when, happening to look up, she saw four or five human figures hovering above her, standing on a sharp rock jutting out over the lake. From his rough dimensions, she recognized one of them to be Hünn-Tuk. He was signalling for her to come up. 

“Your breath is drying out the meat,” he yelled to her in Russian. The other Vendyak did not understand, but they nodded their heads in affirmation.
“My breath?”
“It’s coming up through the reed and blowing towards the encampment.”
“Well I can’t very well stop breathing, can I?”
“That’s what the shamans are calling for. The other elders just want to banish you. They came with me to chase you into the forest.”

Hünn-Tuk was a good-hearted go-between, fully belonging to neither world, believing in none of it. After the banishment (during which the four Vendyak elders walked a few paces behind her, ritualistically shrieking “Get out!” and gathering up pine needles and nuts to throw at her, while studiously avoiding the rocks that were all around them and that could have caused real pain), Pombo waited in the forest. At an agreed-upon hour, Hünn-Tuk came to meet her, bringing her belongings from the encampment, apologizing profusely. He walked with her to a road, and waved down a car headed to Magadan. From there she could fly to Vladivostok, and from there back to Moscow. Pombo proposed jokingly that she just might be so dry as to ruin the Vendyak’s food all the way from the comfort of her Paris apartment. “It’s a good thing you didn’t say that during the banishment,” Hünn-Tuk replied.   

“Well, do you feel it?” Tanya asked me after I had finished the notebook and placed it back in its envelope.
“Feel what?”
“The desiccating principle. Do you feel it emanating throughout the apartment?” Tanya was my age, and was evidently trying to milk the notebook for some self-deprecating, old-lady humor.

She brought a bowl of those puffed shrimp chips from Southeast Asia that, for some inexplicable reason, had become so popular during the Putin years in Russia. We sat on her couch and snacked on the chips for a while in silence. Our teeth sank right through them, as though we were eating nothing at all. 

—

*Certainly, any complete account of the history of the crispy/crunchy debate would not fail to mention that it had its share of skeptics, as evidenced by the so called ‘FAZ hoax’ perpetrated against the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung at the height of the debate’s intensity. In a book review in the feuilleton of Germany’s paper of record published on August 18, 1997, the critic Benno Bleibtreu heaped unqualified praise on what was supposedly an advance manuscript of a book entitled Jenseits von Knackig und Knüsprig by a certain Rolf Magendarm. It turns out that Magendarm did not exist (indeed, to the less gullible speaker of German, even his last name should have been a clear give-away, suggesting as it does the crude physiology of the lower intestinal tract), and that his book, praised by Bleibtreu as “the most important contribution yet to the debate unleashed by J.-R. Klein some decades ago and sharpened for the new generation by Françoise Pombo,” was in fact only a pastiche of texts from the grand tradition of German moral philosophy with the term ‘crispy’ replacing every occurrence of ‘good’, and ‘crunchy’ standing in for every instance of ‘evil’. Having learned of the mistake from an anonymous telephone call, on the front page of the feuilleton of August 25 the FAZ’s editor-in-chief denounced in the harshest of terms what he saw as a “reckless disruption of the free exchange of ideas that forms the bedrock of a civil society.” He wrote that we may agree to disagree about the importance of this or that scholarly debate, but that nothing could be solved by an “intellectual fire-bomb” of the sort thrown at his newspaper. To date, the true identity of Rolf Magendarm has not been uncovered.

—

To see Imaginary Tribes #’s 1-4, please go here, here, here, and here.

For an extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing, please visit www.jehsmith.com.

Edward B. Rackley

Now back in Goma to continue work on these peace talks after a refreshing week in Dakar, on the other side of the continent. Marathon return journey via Bamako, Nairobi, Kigali, then Goma. I’m still in a zombie state—just like the Congolese who are forced to put up with this ni paix ni guerre situation as it drags on and on.

During the three years before national elections in 2006, we used to call Congo’s transitional government an Etat fantome because there was no administrative presence anywhere in the country outside the capital. Things haven’t changed much. Governance is deliberately centralized, with no devolution of power to the provinces—the Mobutu bras de fer model all over again. Yesterday in a closed door session with our group of international representatives to the peace talks, the Force Commander of the UN peacekeeping mission referred to us collectively as ‘a bunch of zombies’.

We march obediently to negotiation sessions, listen to infinite grievances and push for reasoned compromise, visit sulking rebel leaders when they storm out after some minor slight or infantile malentendu. All this zombie-like to and fro in the service of a consensus that no one—particularly the government—has the remotest intention of seriously entertaining or accepting. I had to laugh at the Force Commander’s exasperation: here we are, zombies controlled by phantoms. Hard to get less visceral than that.

But it’s true, we wander from one event to the next, trying to move molehills that the belligerents perceive as mountains. There’s little political will on any side of the conflict, meanwhile money is flowing hand over fist to keep the twenty-two armed groups at the negotiating table. Last night, a visiting ICC representative here to pressure rebel leaders under investigation (or already indicted but not yet arrested) mocked me, saying: “The peace talks are already over, didn’t they tell you?”

An email from home this morning put the dilemma simply: what if western powers just got out and let the cards fall where they may? Well, western powers did not start the war, nor does their departure figure among belligerent demands (contrary to, say, Iraq). But the spirit of the question merits response: why do international efforts to broker peace seem to fail in so many situations? ‘Seem to fail’ is the operative phrase here: the track record for African conflict over the last twenty years shows that perseverance pays a tidy dividend. Sudan, Angola, Ethiopia/Eritrea, Mozambique, Liberia, Sierra Leone, even the Congo itself have experienced peace after years of fitful negotiations supported and prodded by the international community. Congo’s eastern provinces will get there one day, I’m certain. The timeline is just longer, a lot longer, than western taxpayers or casual Africa observers are used to.

Stand proud

A colleague who’s been in the region since Rwanda’s 1994 genocide (he is now responsible for rounding up militant Hutu extremists and shipping them back to Rwanda) described the current situation with an historical anecdote from Herodotus. The story goes something like this: Representatives from an occupying power (Athens?) visit a newly conquered but recalcitrant state that refuses to pay tribute. The messengers say, “We are here with the most awesome of gods, ‘power’ and ‘force’, so you must obey and pay us tribute.” Receiving officials in the occupied land respond, “Oh, that’s nice, lucky you. We here are under two other gods, ‘poverty’ and ‘incapacity’.”

The vignette captures how rule of law and military might can be impotent before the inertia of destitution, dysfunction and incapacity. It also captures the inability of the international community to get anything done in Congo, particularly on this peace process. A toxic cynicism is always in the back of my mind; resistance strategies are required. I console myself with minor victories of a different sort.

Most progress here is so slow and glacially incremental, it is wholly impalpable to the short-term visitor. Having been involved with the place for twenty years, I’ve learned where to find signs of hope, of change. It is definitely not in the political realm, in deliberate freefall since I first arrived in 1988. But there is powerful transformation on the personal scale, in the rebuilding of individual broken lives, one by one, one day at a time.

I recently visited a rehabilitation center for child polio victims founded by another American, a long-time ‘Congomani’ a few years older than me, whom I’ve known for some time. Called ‘Debout et Fier’ (‘Stand Proud’), there are about ten such centers around the country. Polio continues to afflict children here because vaccination coverage is so poor. Handicapped children are usually kicked out of the house and become street urchins, and must beg to survive. The Debout et Fier center here in Goma houses about 45 kids from around the region who are either waiting for an operation or recovering from one, and learning to walk with braces and crutches instead of dragging themselves around on the ground ‘like a snake’, as they always describe it. Snakes are particularly despised, because feared, in Congolese culture.

Because they’re Congolese kids, they are amazingly resilient, physically and psychologically. With proper meals, decent sleeping conditions and medical care, their recovery is quick. Also, because they are among equals, there is no shame or stigma, and learning erect mobility becomes child’s play, literally. Even before their surgical wounds heal, kids are struggling to stand in their new braces (made on site), hopping when stepping or walking doesn’t work. There are always makeshift footballs lying around the dusty compound, and whenever I visit the entire group is hopping around madly, chasing the football at which they swing their metal crutch poles. Laughing and sweating, entirely unconscious of their handicap, they’re regaining the mobility they’ve lacked all their lives.

Watching such a match at dusk the other day, the sun’s fading red light caught the dust thrown up by the footballers in front of me. I thought: if the price for this moment is all my personal frustration and anger at Congo’s political mess and its enormous cost to human development here, I am happy to pay.

What’s broken can’t be bought

Even out here in forsaken Goma, images from the Olympics can be had. Coverage is spotty and one cannot actually sit down and watch the Olympics, but visual impressions and reports are getting through in drips and drabs. Watching synchronized diving, or gymnastics, it’s obvious that the Olympic ideal is perfection of form as the pinnacle of beauty. Very few can achieve this ideal, hence the rarefied competition among elite athletes. Echoes of classical Greece are obvious, a vertical society despite its democratic pretensions. Cosmology can do that to a people.

The Olympics are tailored to this particular ideal of beauty as the rarefied perfection of form. No room for fractured beauty, obviously, as that would disqualify. Although pristine beauty is by definition more rare than fractured beauty, I tend to champion the latter because it’s more pedestrian, more democratic because accessible to all of us, if we open our eyes wide enough. I love cosmologies, but only for their literary value. It’s too late to actually believe in one. Fractured, democratic, horizontal: that’s where I’m most comfortable. Zeitgeist I guess.

Of course, fractured beauty abounds here in Goma. As my boss and I bounced along these terrible roads the other day, inhaling pounds of volcanic dust (always in the air) and diesel fumes blasting into the car from all the trucks lumbering by in the other direction, the boss mused that he felt like he was on a merry-go-round. Everybody’s on the narrow road at once, navigating enormous potholes as dozens of moto taxis blur past, honking constantly (think rickshaw madness in Delhi). The 360 degree view is just heads bobbing up and down, some buzzing past, others slow or stationary–pedestrians lost in the melee.

So instead of being overwhelmed by the oozing human morass of it all and thinking cynical thoughts about Congo’s prospects for progress, my boss slips into childhood reverie and comes up with the merry-go-round comment. A kindred soul, I thought: he appreciates fractured beauty too. Goma’s inexhaustible abundance: broken beauty, and the possibilities of redemption. While I appreciate the objective criteria that allow for judgments of Olympian beauty and that raise it above mere opinion or taste, I’ll defend ‘spurious’ or broken beauty any day. First, it’s often accidental, and thus available to everyone. It generally has little or no economic value, and so resists commoditization and the clutches of elitists (notice how contemporary art is the new ‘hedge’?). The human pathos contained in a football match between recuperating polio victims is the perfect antithesis of a Jeff Koons poodle, brilliant critic of the art world though he is.

So the first thing I’ll do when I get off this merry-go-round and make it home: ride my beloved bikes, then open a book of Borges stories and sit by the sea. Nothing could be more pristine … or fleetingly beautiful.

///
Humor and Light
Jim Culleny

Even in gloomy
shuttered rooms one beam
managing an invasion
through impossible slits
reaches to where
shadows rule

one joke, a laugh
one light remembrance
and dis-ease for an instant
disappears

Punch lines and photons
comedians and brilliant suns
take us as close to god
as anyone need be

//

by David Shasha

Ah, those New York Jews.

Woody Allen, Philip Roth, Ed Koch, Alfred Kazin.

Katz’s Deli, Zabar’s, Pastrami Sandwiches, Lox and Bagels, Matzoh Ball Soup, Chopped Liver, Gefilte Fish.

The Lower East Side.

All one big Ashkenazi world.

I was once told a story by Mickey Kairey, one of the patron saints of the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish community, that by now I have repeated many times, about his father’s experience on the Lower East Side in the first part of the 20th century. Mickey’s father was praying in an Ashkenazi minyan and was asked by the man sitting next to him, “Are you Jewish?” Mr. Kairey was praying donned in his tallit and tefillin and thought it a strange question. The “Are you Jewish?” question is a ubiquitous one among many Ashkenazi Jews – especially the Orthodox – and speaks to a sense of ethno-cultural prejudice that is endemic to the Ashkenazi condition. People are seen in gradations of ethnic acceptability: the Ashkenazi-Yiddish identity is central and all else is simply a drifting away from the core. Mr. Kairey made the mistake of not being able to speak Yiddish and was marked as suspect when it came to being a Jew. In fact, it should be remembered that the Yiddish language was even called “Jewish” by its native speakers.

Now in Israel, this idea that Ashkenazi culture is transcendent in the socio-political sense is one that is clear and needs little commentary. But in America, there is still the pretense that Jews – especially the fabled “New York Jew” – are filled with love and tolerance of their fellow Man.

So when I received the new catalog of events from the 92nd Street Y – it does not get more “New York Jew” than that – I carefully filtered out these Ashkenazi prejudices which are often thought by many to be a product of my own imagination.

Before I begin my argument, I should note that many events in the Y’s program series contain a plethora of non-Jewish figures. From the New York Mets’ Keith Hernandez to the African-American academic Cornel West to famed folksinger Joan Baez to Jazz pianist Dave Brubeck to media celebrity Martha Stewart, the Y has diversity seemingly covered. It is just that this “diversity” is of a very specific kind; a “diversity” that excludes two critical components – Sephardim and Arabs.

While it is not always easy to prove a negative – that Sephardim and Arabs are not welcome in this place of “civilization” – I will try and outline what seems to me to be an ideological bias that speaks to the current condition of the “Jewish” condition here in America.

The central event of the massive series of programs is a day-long tribute to the Holocaust survivor and Ashkenazi activist Elie Wiesel (10/2). I cannot add much to the reams of material that has been written about Wiesel, who represents so perfectly the problem at hand. Wiesel is a humanitarian whose work is predicated on a single issue – the suffering of the Jews of Europe. Very often he uses this suffering as a means to comment on other events where his moral stance is taken as sacrosanct. As has been noted, Wiesel is quite vociferous on the issue of Zionism and Israel and rarely if ever comments on Jewish violence against Arabs. His voice is perfectly attuned to the orthodoxies and rigid ideological posture of the Jewish community that maintains an almost complete silence about the Palestinian Arabs and their travails. Wiesel has been out front on Darfur and other tragedies in our time, but has remained silent on the Middle East conflict out of his own sense of personal Jewish loyalty. In other words, making a moral stand is acceptable, so long as that stand does not apply to your own community – the very thing Wiesel insistently demands of non-Jews.

There is precious little balance in terms of the Israel-Palestine matter on the program for the season: Rabbi Michael Lerner (10/30) and Gershom Gorenberg (2/5) appear to be the only critical voices that will be heard in the series. Not a single Arab or Palestinian voice is to be allowed into the discourse. From Right Wing ideologues like Bret Stephens and Abe Foxman (3/24) to Ed Koch (10/30) to Cynthia Ozick (10/29) to more moderate Zionists like Aaron David Miller (5/7) and a panel on the new liberal lobbying group J Street (3/16), the basic idea is to appear to be presenting a wide-range of ideas, but in reality only affirmations of Israel will be presented. It is important to note that Gorenberg will be presenting in a series on the media and Rabbi Lerner will be part of a four-person panel where he will likely be the only participant critical of Israel in any way. And by no means should we think that Rabbi Lerner’s voice can truly represent a Palestinian vision, even if it is sympathetic to that position.

Most importantly, the series will have two programs that deal with the hysteria over Israel and the sense of embattlement that is a central part of Zionist thinking at present. There will be (12/8) the now-obligatory panel discussion of anti-Israel sentiment on college campuses – a panel loaded with Right Wing ideologues including a member of the U.S. Congress. There will be another panel called “Why Zionism has Become a Dirty Word” (3/24) that will in effect be another uncritical look at the current situation in the Middle East.

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by Ram Manikkalingam

Twenty-five years ago Sri Lanka’s conflict was suddenly transformed into a violent civil war. The Tamil Tigers – then barely more than a couple of dozen – ambushed a convoy killing a dozen soldiers in Jaffna on July 23rd 1983. Instead of targeting those who carried out the attack Sri Lankan state-backed goons went after Tamil civilians throughout the country the following day, leading to a week of violence and bloodletting. Since then, the separatist rebellion has been transformed from ragtag groups fighting a parade army to a high intensity conflict with the use of air-strikes, artillery, naval units, bombings and suicide attacks. While lamenting what we as Sri Lankans have gone through (it is really hard not to), I would like to take a moment to share with 3qd readers what I have learned about ethnic conflict from my direct involvement in political efforts in Sri Lanka, as well as my more indirect efforts in other parts of the world, as an activist and a scholar. I apologise in advance for the slightly dry tone of this article and the links to my research on this topic that I have pulled together.

The lessons I have learned are about two basic questions: what is an ethnic conflict and how do you resolve it?

Three conflicts, not just a single ethnic one
The civil war in Sri Lanka consists of three distinct conflicts: the ethnic conflict between Tamils and Sinhalese, and other groups, the armed conflict between the Sri Lankan state and the rebel Tamil Tigers and the political power conflict among the main forces that have capacity to influence political rule in Sri Lanka – the governing Sri Lanka Freedom Party, the opposition United National Party (UNP), and the rebel Tamil Tigers.

Ethnic Conflict
The ethnic conflict between Tamils and Sinhalese is commonly considered the hardest to resolve. Most descriptions of Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict (or for that matter any ethnic conflict) are variations of the hate-and-greed explanation. These descriptions depict Tamils and Sinhalese (or you can substitute them for Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians, or Blacks and Whites, or Hutus and Tutsis, or Israelis and Palestinians) as either hating each other, because of conflicting nationalisms, or competing with each other for resources because of greed.

Where the nationalism comes from – ancient history (we did bad things to each other thousands of years ago), myth (we told stories about what we supposedly did to each other), or recent acts of violence (your father killed my uncle, so I will kill you) – is less relevant than that it exists and manifests itself in mutual hostility between Tamils and Sinhalese. Similarly, where greed comes from – individual interests (that Tamil took the clerk’s job I wanted), group solidarity (I want my kin to get more stuff) or nationalist passion (my people deserve more because they are superior to yours) – is less important than that it ultimately leads ethnic groups to get into conflict.

Existing approaches to ethnic conflict, however sophisticated, converge on hate and greed as the motivations to explain it. They fail to examine how reasonable differences might also cause conflict. If hate and greed are the only motivations of conflict, then we would be living in a very grim world indeed. Prospects for its resolution would depend either on external force (NATO will point a gun at you and make you co-exist) or economic incentives (the World Bank, EU, and other rich westerners will give so much money that you will be bought off and corrupted into not fighting). This is the implicit assumption behind contemporary models of peace building or humanitarian intervention. The failure to secure the support of rich western countries for UN peace keeping efforts in Africa and the abysmally low amounts of aid provided to these countries suggest that mobilising the resources for this approach is simply impossible in most parts of the world. Moreover, the widespread challenge to international efforts in the Balkans indicate how this approach is rarely sufficient – even when billions have been spent and tens of thousands of peacekeepers continue to be present.

Another approach is to focus on how identities are constructed, and to change them from more violent to less violent expressions. This is the implicit assumption behind the plethora of studies about the construction of identities. These studies show (correctly) how what it means to be a Sinhalese or a Tamil, a Jew or a Palestinian, a Hutu or a Tutsi, a Serb or a Muslim, today, is quite different from what it meant fifty or a hundred years ago. But the silence about how to change identities for a peaceful future indicates that the latter is too difficult or takes too long. All these approaches invariably lead to deep pessimism about peace in situations of ethnic conflict.

While the explanation that Tamils and Sinhalese are enmeshed in a conflict over ethnic identity and material resources may continue to have relevance, it is becoming less and less plausible today as the only explanation for Sri Lanka’s intractable conflict, or for that matter many others, as well. Most Tamils and Sinhalese desire an end to the war. Many of them have come to realise – whether enthusiastically or reluctantly – that a solution to the conflict will require the central government dominated by the Sinhalese to share political power with other ethnic groups, particularly the Tamils. Whatever the various solutions proffered, they will invariably converge on some form of federalism, in fact, if not in name.

Except for extreme Sinhalese who want to centralise all power in Colombo and deny the presence of an ethnic conflict, and extreme Tamils who want a separate state on the grounds that the only conflict is ethnic, the majority of the people in Sri Lanka are likely to accept such a solution. But if that were the case, why haven’t we arrived at a solution. This is where reasonable differences come in.

Reasonable differences can cause conflict
Even many Sinhalese who are critical of power-sharing are less concerned that it will give more rights to Tamils than they deserve, than that it will enable the Tigers to consolidate their power and establish a separate Tamil authoritarian state. Similarly, many Tamils who are wary of sharing power in a single state – are less concerned about living among Sinhalese and more concerned that the state will actually implement its promises in the absence of the armed leverage of the Tamil Tigers. This reasonable difference can even lead to advocacy of war, belying the common association of those who seek peace with those who are reasonable.

For example, there are many who distrust the Sri Lankan state so much that they advocate violence as a way of pressuring the state to come to a solution that is just by Tamils. These people, mainly Tamils, but also members of other ethnic groups, do not necessarily believe the Tigers are decent freedom fighters. On the contrary they condemn and even oppose its excesses. But they fear that only violence against the state, or the threat of it, can lead to a political solution where power is shared and that is subsequently implemented.

Similarly there are those who advocate military violence against the Tamil Tigers. These are Sri Lankans, primarily Sinhala, but also members of other ethnic groups, who feel that the Tamil Tigers are only interested in consolidating their own power and not interested in a political solution for the Tamil people. They believe that as long as the Tamil Tigers are present a peaceful solution will not be possible. The Sri Lankans who advocate these positions are not opposed to a just solution that treats members of all communities as equals. So it would be a mistake to simply view them as chauvinists, although many do so.

These two political positions – exerting military pressure on the Tigers or on the Sri Lankan state for a just solution – may appear in the heat of war to be on opposite sides of the political divide. But they are ideologically closer to each other and desire the same political solution, than those who may share their views about militarily fighting the other side.

Unfortunately, because reasonable differences are rarely acknowledged in ethnic conflicts, we do not look for ways to reduce their adverse impact on finding a solution. This also leads us to more pessimistic views about the prospects for peace. By contrast, identifying reasonable differences offers a more optimistic alternative by showing how contemporary identities that lead to conflict may also be compatible with just and stable solutions, for which institutions can be designed. Taking these reasonable differences into account can help design a peace process that mitigates the role they can play in exacerbating conflict. Part of the challenge of identifying these reasonable differences in an ethnic conflict is that there are two other conflicts that complicate it further.

Armed Conflict
Addressing the ethnic conflict is complicated by the armed conflict between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan state. Although the armed conflict is generally viewed as stemming from the ethnic conflict, it is also distinct in character. States claim a monopoly over the legitimate use of force in a given territory. So any state will repress those who seek to oppose it by force. It matters little to the state that those who oppose it do so on the basis of democracy, ethnicity, class or regionalism. And when it comes to suppressing an armed rebellion, it matters little whether the state is capitalist or socialist, authoritarian or democratic. All states have acted with varying degrees of violence and repression in stemming armed rebellions. So also have rebel groups opposing states. There are two ways armed conflicts between states and a rebel group can end – when one side defeats another or when both sides concede that they cannot defeat each other.

Sri Lankan governments and the Tamil Tigers oscillate between these two approaches. Sometimes promising outright military victories, and at other times agreeing to ceasefires. Which option will ultimately prevail is still not clear. The current Sri Lankan government continues to give deadlines for defeating the Tamil Tigers – the latest is yet another year. And the Tamil Tigers continue to assert that they are militarily secure. In the next few months, the fighting capacities and political sagacity of both sides will provide the answer to this question. I do not intend to speculate about the military outcome of Sri Lanka’s war. Rather I simply want to point out another element to the conflict – that of an armed group versus a state – that is distinct from the ethnic conflict – with its own dynamic – one that cannot be reduced to ethnicity alone.

Political Party Conflict
Addressing the armed conflict is complicated by the political power conflict among the main contenders for political power in Sri Lanka – the ruling Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and the Opposition United National Party (UNP) and the Tamil Tigers. While there are many other smaller political parties and paramilitary groups contending for political power – it is only these actors that have the capacity to unilaterally transform the political context. There is a distinct power conflict among these three contenders that is derived from competition over the business of rule. The main political parties compete over who gets to rule the Sri Lankan state, while the Tigers seek to rule a separate Tamil one.

This competition cannot simply be reduced to varying ideologies of nationalism or competing policies over how to resolve the ethnic conflict or, for that matter, different socio-economic policies. Political parties are built around the express intent of securing political power. They may have different ideological leanings or social bases and therefore wish to carry out different programmes. Still, one of their central goals is simply to rule, not rule in order to do something else. Clearly, all three parties – the SLFP, the UNP, and the Tamil Tigers – do not contend for power the same way. The two main political parties in Sri Lanka do so through more or less democratic means. The Tigers do so through more or less violent means. Yet, an important part of what they all contend for is power.

The position taken by these parties helps illustrate the distinction between policy on the ethnic conflict and political alliances to secure power. During the last Presidential elections, the candidate of the current ruling party the SLFP who is the current President, was considered to be a hardliner. During the campaign his manifesto condemned the ceasefire agreement and opposed a joint mechanism to work on post-Tsunami reconstruction. He also opposed a federal solution in favour a unitary one. Yet the President said he would be willing to talk directly with the Tamil Tigers to resolve the conflict, even when he took hard-line positions on a political solution for the Tamil people.

This kind of contradiction between political deal-making and ethnic policy is not limited to one or the other ruling party in Sri Lanka – or for that matter only to Sri Lanka. During earlier two parliamentary elections, the current opposition UNP opposed the government’s political proposals for resolving the conflict – saying that it granted too much autonomy to the Tamils. At the same time, the UNP supported a ceasefire and talking to the Tamil Tigers, who were asking for a separate state.

These seemingly contradictory positions – opposing Tamil autonomy, but supporting a dialogue with the Tamil extremist Tigers – can be reconciled. The two parties competing for the power to run the state, wanted Tiger support to obtain Tamil votes or block them, in areas under Tiger domination, while keeping their Sinhala base satisfied. Similarly, the Tigers seeking a separate state were implicitly supporting a political party that sought to dilute measures granting autonomy to Tamil areas. The Tigers expected one party, and then the other, to be more conciliatory towards them. All three – the Tamil Tigers, and the two main political parties have been disappointed by the outcome of their pre-electoral dalliances after the elections.

The Tamil Tigers attribute this disappointment to opportunism on the part of the political parties, and the governing political parties to deception on the part of the Tamil Tigers. But this explanation is too simplistic and ignores instances where mutual commitments have been adhered to by different sides. Rather once political parties secure power, they are now running the state, and the logic of the armed conflict between a state and an armed group takes over – making it harder for these parties to unilaterally fulfil political commitments they may have made in the past, when they were parties, operating outside the constraints of being office bearers of the state.

So if there is one thing I have learned about what an ethnic conflict is, it is that ethnic conflicts are never about ethnicity alone. This does not mean that ethnicity is not a central element of the conflict or that ordinary people often experience the violence as ethnic. It is simply that failing to take the other two elements of the conflict – the armed and the political power – into account and seeing how they are inter-related, can lead to a mistaken view of what the conflict is and can befuddle efforts to resolve it.

How do you resolve ethnic conflict?
The toughest part in resolving conflicts, in general, and ethnic cones, in particular, is not about finding the correct solution, or even agreeing on what it ought to be, but actually getting to a situation of peace, from one of war, once the political solution becomes clear. For example in the case of Sri Lanka, there is little doubt that the political solution will be federal in nature, if not in name. Similarly, in December 2002, the Tamil Tigers and the then Government of Sri Lanka agreed “to explore a federal solution”. Now clearly agreeing to explore is not the same as actually agreeing to such a solution, but the key point is the common understanding that any future solution to the ethnic conflict will be along these lines. The challenge we face lies less in intellectually figuring out what the solution should be, but in actually getting there politically. And these challenges can be better understood once we get beyond the broad goals such as reducing levels of violence and protecting rights, to actually seeking to implement these goals through practical mechanisms.

In Sri Lanka, as in many other situations, a solution requires that we move from a situation of violent polarisation to one of peaceful co-existence. And this usually entails doing the following simultaneously – reducing violence, protecting human rights, working out a political solution and reconstructing the war affected areas.

Ceasefires are not always helpful to peace negotiations
Ceasefires are an integral part of all peace processes. How and when does a ceasefire help negotiate an end to violence and how and when does it hinder such a process? While most mediators work to secure a ceasefire prior to political negotiations, they often find the ceasefire becomes the focus of the talks, rather than the political settlement, itself. Mediators involved in resolving a conflict, usually make an effort to secure a ceasefire agreement between the two parties before they do anything else. The implicit assumption is that a ceasefire will be helpful both in humanitarian terms as well as in political terms.

In humanitarian terms, ceasefires lessen the daily pain and suffering caused by war. They allow people to go about their daily lives without fear and anxiety. They create a climate that enables freer travel between areas, the movement of goods to markets and the transportation of the injured, the infirm and the old for medical treatment. No one disagrees that no war is better than war from a humanitarian perspective. Obviously people prefer the peace and the right to go about their daily life without hindrance over the pain and suffering that inevitably accompany war. This is true even when the respites from war are only temporary, since a temporary respite from war is better than no respite.

In political terms, as well, ceasefires are considered to be helpful. The assumption is that ceasefires can contribute to a positive climate for negotiations by improving the lives of civilians and building trust between the two parties. In addition, a ceasefire it is believed helps insulate political negotiations from military fighting, and move the negotiations away from pressing military and humanitarian concerns to longer term political ones. So many efforts to resolve conflict begin with mediators working out a ceasefire and proceeding to monitor parties’ compliance with it.

But the humanitarian and political desirability of ceasefires is not that clear cut, and in many cases, can actually lead to the opposite – more adverse humanitarian consequences and less trust. For example, ceasefires, can contribute to temporary respites, that allow parties to re-arm and re-group and begin another phase of conflict with greater intensity, rather than to engage in political talks. Respites from war that lead to intensified fighting may not be desirable on humanitarian grounds if the subsequent conflict results in even greater pain, suffering and loss of life. Furthermore, a ceasefire that enables parties to attack minorities or suppress dissenting political opinion within their own communities, can also vitiate the humanitarian arguments in favour of it. All of these factors have had a perverse effect on ceasefires in Sri Lanka – where children have been recruited, dissidents killed, and minorities expelled during ceasefires and more intense fighting has broken out after they have ended.

Ceasefires can also have a perverse impact on a peace process because they are not isolated military decisions to cease fighting that take place outside of a political context. Instead in most conflicts ceasefires are expressly political decisions made in the context of political jockeying for power. When negotiations and ceasefires are linked, it is common to find the relative military strengths of the two conflicting parties on the ground affecting their decisions whether or not to support a ceasefire. The party that is militarily gaining ground is unlikely to favour a ceasefire and vice versa. Under these circumstances, for a ceasefire to lead to viable negotiations, the two parties must not only be in a strategic stalemate but also a tactical one. They must feel that neither sides is likely to win the war in the long term, and that neither side can gain a tactical advantage in the sort term that will strengthen their bargaining position at the negotiating table.

Ceasefires can also hinder progress in political negotiations, because parties will, in the absence of clarity about a permanent settlement, prepare themselves for a possible outbreak of conflict. This preparation can lead to increased suspicion among belligerents. And lead them to focus efforts on addressing ceasefire violations, rather than political problems. And ceasefires can reduce the political pressure on parties to a conflict to work out a settlement. Finally, when ceasefires are a precondition for political talks, any violations, however small, can lead to parties dissipating political focus and effort on maintaining a ceasefire rather than proceeding towards tackling the longer term political causes of the conflict. This can not only delay solution, but also lead to the erosion of trust and goodwill.

This suggests that mediators/peacemakers ought to resist the instinct to negotiate a ceasefire prior to political talks. Instead making efforts to de-escalate a conflict with steps to improve the humanitarian situation, rather than a ceasefire may contribute to a more stable peace process. Several peace processes – such as the Salvadoran one mediated by Alvaro de Soto, and the Aceh process mediated by Martti Ahtisaari did not include a ceasefire.

Conflict resolution and human rights do not always go together
We generally expect and would like good things to go together. When conflict breaks out, human rights violations invariably take place. So we hope the opposite is true – i.e., when we protect human rights, we can contribute to ending armed conflict. While this may be the case in many situations it is not always so. In my experience observing Sri Lanka’s conflict closely, as well as studying a number of other violent conflicts – efforts to protect human right do not always contribute to efforts to promote peace. Sometimes these efforts can come into tension with each other in practice.

First the good news, strengthening human rights can be good for resolving conflict. Human rights can contribute to the long-term stability of a society. It can help identify causes of conflict and potential mechanisms for its resolution. It can protect bridge builders between communities in a divided society. It can provide a neutral standpoint for addressing contentious issues, and it can generate international support for a peace process.

But strengthening human rights can sometimes be in tension with resolving conflict. This is particularly true at the initial phases of a peace process. Raising human rights violations with belligerents can reduce trust in a mediator. For example the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan government today are accused of widespread human rights violations. Indeed they are also probably guilty of most of these accusations. Nevertheless, unless one or the other is decisively defeated, it is hard to imagine a serious peace process that does not involve these two parties. But is also equally hard to imagine these two parties entering a peace process, if the first issue raised is their violations of human rights. Because this is bound to make them anxious that they will have to face some form of justice and make them skittish about entering a serious process of peace. Similarly they will see protection for human rights as reducing their control over populations. And finally they may be anxious about the prospect of being prosecuted for war crimes. While these tensions between resolving conflict and promoting human rights exist, they are not inevitable and can be reduced through institutional design and political skill.

To summarise my lessons. Ethnic conflicts are not only about ethnicity. They are also about political parties seeking power and armed entities confronting each other militarily – who are not necessarily divided neatly along ethnic lines. Starting with a ceasefire may not be the best way to resolve ethnic conflicts, even if this might give you a temporary respite from the armed conflict. Protecting human rights may not always help with promoting peace, though such tensions can be reduced with political shrewdness and strategic design. These lessons I believe are true not only for Sri Lanka, but for many countries struggling to go from a situation of war to one of peace.

///
Communication
Jim Culleny

A short-haired yellow mutt
standing at the side of the road
wearing a day-glo
orange scarf around his neck
so as not to get whacked
steps boldly out as I approach
as if to test for interspecies respect.

I slow and stop, roll my window down,
and bark, “Cool scarf.”

He looks me in the eye
turns on his heel
lifts his leg to pee on a wheel
then trots up the hill to his house
for a little water and chow
wondering where his day went,
then circles the rug twice
looking for that sweet spot
drops and dreams
and barks in his sleep
thanking me for my
compliment.

///

P D Smith

Reden nur dort möglich ist, wo man lügen will.

There is something about Kafka’s writing that gets under your skin. Perhaps that’s because he was always so uneasy in his own skin. Kafka described it as “a garment but also a straitjacket and fate”, suggesting that he saw skin as both clothing, something you choose to wear for a day before shedding, but also as a tightly bound involucre, restricting and suffocating the self – a biological fait accompli and a life sentence. Only Kafka could react so ambivalently and with such psychological acuity towards something most people take for granted and indeed scarcely think about.

It brings to mind Kafka’s story “In the Penal Settlement” with its glass punishment machine and its teeth-like rows of gleaming needles. The offender is strapped into this sadistic device and the laws he has broken are slowly and painfully incised into his skin. The operator praises its redemptive effects on the criminal: “how quiet he grows at just about the sixth hour! Enlightenment comes to the most dull-witted. It begins around the eyes. From there it radiates.” [1] After twelve hours of agony and of learning the meaning of the law through his skin, the coup de grâce is administered to the prisoner and the emblazoned body dumped in a ditch. “Like a dog,” as Josef K. says at the end of The Trial.

It is one of Kafka’s most grotesque stories, one that swings sickeningly between cruelty and humanity. As ever with Kafka, paradox and ambiguity are fundamental. I remember how, as a student, some of my friends were utterly repulsed by this story, unable to see past the horrific details to the chilling vision of human strangeness beneath. As I read it again today I am reassured to find it has lost none of its disturbing intensity. I can’t say that it is my favourite Kafka story, although it is uniquely Kafkaesque, to invoke that tired old cliché.

“The Judgement”, “Metamorphosis”, “A Country Doctor” – all wonderfully strange stories that share the sense of being caught up in a nightmare, where normal expectations are shattered and nothing seems to make sense any more. Reading Kafka is the literary equivalent of an earthquake: as you read, you can feel the walls of reality begin to tremble and shake until eventually they come tumbling down around your ears. At the end, you find yourself wandering in an unfamiliar wasteland. All around are scattered the jumbled fragments of what you once recognised as normal life. Now you, the reader, have to begin putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again.

Kafka has been in the news recently. His friend and executor, Max Brod, died in 1968, leaving a suitcase of Kafka’s writings to his former secretary and lover, Esther Hoffe. Ever since then she has guarded it jealously in her Tel Aviv flat. The conditions were far from ideal. Warnings that the documents might be damaged by damp went unheeded. Until two years ago she shared her flat with a menagerie of cats and dogs. Then her neighbours finally complained about the stench and they were removed by health inspectors. Now, at the age of 101, Hoffe has died, leaving the Kafka cache to her septuagenarian daughters.

Among the papers are Brod’s diaries (sold to a German publisher for a five-figure sum in the 1980s but as yet undelivered), letters by Kafka as well as his travel journal, postcards, sketches and some of his personal belongings. A decade ago Hoffe sold Brod’s manuscript of The Trial for £1 million at auction. How much the remaining documents are worth can only be guessed. But obviously this is a gold mine for Kafka scholars. Josef Cermak, author of several studies of the Czech-Jewish author, told the Guardian: “There are so many mistruths which have been written about Kafka. For academic purposes it is crucial that we get to see what the unpredictable Miss Hoffe has kept from us for so long.” [2]

I’m as intrigued as everyone else by what the Kafka suitcase contains. Indeed its history has something delightfully Kafkaesque about it. I’m sure countless TV producers have spotted this and are at this very minute flocking to Tel Aviv to make their documentaries. (Part of me hopes that when they open the case, no doubt on live TV, all it contains are a few startled cockroaches.)

The private lives of famous writers and scientists are fascinating. Reading Einstein’s correspondence gives you an astonishingly detailed picture of the man behind relativity. And anyone can do it now thanks to the Princeton University Press’s superb edition of his Collected Papers. Of course, you don’t need to read Einstein’s letters to Mileva (his “sweet little witch”, as he described her in 1901) to understand relativity, although they do place the science in a wonderfully human context. But people will read whatever the Kafka cache contains looking for clues that might explain his fiction.

And why not indeed? Literature, I hear you say, is different from science. It’s subjective and personal, for a start. Sure, but it’s also a public activity in the sense that most of Kafka’s writing was meant to be read by other people. Unlike Leonardo da Vinci and Newton who used mirror writing or coded language in their notebooks to obscure their words, Kafka wanted to tell us something important. He didn’t set out to create a series of coded autobiographical puzzles in order to keep future literary historians in a job. The Germanist Martin Swales argues convincingly that the obsession with Kafka’s private life does not help us to understand Kafka’s writing: “an unremitting interest in the personality behind the utterance suggests that the utterance has in some way broken down”. [3]

In a recent article, Zadie Smith has suggested that Kafka is “a writer sullied by our attempts to define him”. [4] Novelist James Hawes, author of a new book called Excavating Kafka (or in the US, Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life), seems to agree: “The myth of Kafka’s life so overshadows what he wrote that millions who have never read a word of his know, or think they know, something about the middle-European Nostradamus, almost unknown in his own lifetime, trapped in a dead-end job, whose mysterious, endlessly interpretable works somehow foresaw the Holocaust (and so on).” [5]

Hawes spent ten years writing a Ph.D. on Kafka. Now he is on a mission to deconstruct the “hagiographic myth” surrounding the Prague author in order to expose the real Kafka. His works are “wonderful black comedies written by a man soaked in the writings of his predecessors and of his own day”. Indeed, Max Brod provides some evidence of this comedic dimension to Kafka’s works. He recalled Kafka reading aloud from The Trial. At times, he said, Kafka “laughed so much that there were moments when he couldn’t read any further”. This Kafka has been somewhat obscured, but he’s certainly there, struggling to free himself from the chitinous, beetle-like skin into which fate and literary fame has sealed him.

It was always a challenge teaching first year classes on Kafka, but rewarding too. Undergraduates rarely did any preparation for German lit classes (wie immer) and so they turned up knowing very little about him apart from a general expectation that the man who gave us the term Kafkaesque had to be pretty weird. They weren’t disappointed on that score. We had three hour-long sessions dissecting the short story “Das Urteil” (“The Judgement”), reading it in German, line by line, often word by word, slowing down the process of reading as if you were analyzing a film frame by frame.

At some point, usually towards the end of the sessions, I would explain some details from Kafka’s life. For many of the students, the biographical information transformed what was a deeply strange, even incomprehensible, reading experience. Suddenly, as if by magic, it all seemed to make sense. Why didn’t you tell us this before, they wanted to know. Kafka’s writing was psychology in action, a cathartic release. Kafka, frantically scribbling in his room late at night, was assuaging his guilt for failing to live up to parental expectations, doing penance for breaking unwritten laws, and so on.

The process of reading a text, line by line, is hard work. Not quite as hard work as writing it, perhaps, but almost. Biographical interpretations are an excuse for lazy reading. Using an author’s life to crack the code of his texts is just too easy. There are no shortcuts to interpretation. That was why I spent three hours reading ten pages of Kafka with my students.

It’s only through this intense engagement with a text that a reader can feel what Terry Eagleton has memorably called that “moment of wondering self-estrangement” which is unique to the aesthetic experience. [6] It was the Russian Formalists who first proposed the idea of defamiliarization, or ostranenie in Russian. In “Art as Technique” (1917) Victor Shklovsky explained what this meant:

“Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. … And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.” [7]

This is one of the most perceptive and powerful statements about the purpose of art and its ability to transform our way of seeing that I know. As in metafiction, the defamiliarizing artwork places the reader centre stage: you are no longer a passive decoder of signs but actively interpreting, constructing theories and being challenged. And it highlights something which is so often lost in today’s qualification-driven education system – reading literature can actually change people, change how they see the world. It can make the stone stony.

I was reminded of this recently when reading neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid. In her fascinating book, Wolf shows how learning to read changes individual brains forever, both intellectually and physiologically. Indeed, different languages put their own unique stamp on the brain, creating distinctive brain networks. Reading Chinese requires a different set of neuronal connections from that needed to read English. As the writer Joseph Epstein has said, “we are what we read”. Indeed, doctors treating a bilingual person who developed alexia (inability to read) after a stroke found remarkable evidence of this. Although he could no longer read English, the patient was still able to read Chinese.

Of course, Kafka didn’t need lessons from Shklovsky or anyone on how to make the world strange. In a wonderful comment, he once disagreed with a friend who accused Picasso of distorting reality. “I do not think so,” said Kafka. “He only registers the deformities which have not yet penetrated our consciousness. Art is a mirror, which goes ‘fast,’ like a watch—sometimes.” [8]

Kafka’s story “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse-folk” explores this idea. I first read it at university when I was studying German literature and it has haunted me ever since. (I even named my website after it.) It was written in March 1924, three months before Kafka died. He was in the last stages of tuberculosis of the larynx, and was unable to speak – a poignant background for a story about a singer. But it was Kafka’s writing, not his tragic life, that made such an impression on me.

The story is about a singer and her place in the community. The fact that Kafka chooses to make this a community of mice can itself be seen as an example of making strange: what better way to explore the role of the artist in society than to defamiliarize the artist by turning her into a mouse? In fact mice are only mentioned by name in the title and if this is ignored, then the world described could easily be our own. Similarly, although Josephine is described as a “singer” in the title, she does not sing in the story, but whistles, pipes or squeaks, depending on your translation (“pfeift” in the original German), thus defamiliarizing the act of singing itself. Subtly and with immense skill, Kafka’s language begins to change our perceptions from the very first words.

The unnamed narrator is writing about Josephine in order to understand why she played such an important role in their society. For Josephine has disappeared and despite the narrator’s evident ambivalence about her, it is clear she has left a hole at the heart of their community. As he thinks critically about Josephine, the narrator begins to wonder whether the fascination he feels for her art lies not in the art itself – the singing or “Pfeifen” – but rather in its context, in the fact of it being set apart from everyday life:

“To crack a nut is truly no feat, so no one would ever dare to collect an audience in order to entertain it with nut-cracking. But if all the same one does do that and succeeds in entertaining the public, then it cannot be a matter of simple nut-cracking. Or it is a matter of nut-cracking, but it turns out that we have overlooked the art of cracking nuts because we were too skilled in it and that this newcomer to it first shows us its real nature, even finding it useful in making his effects to be rather less expert in nut-cracking than most of us.” [9]

The concept of art formulated here has much in common with Shklovsky’s theory of ostranenie. According to the narrator, the act of cracking a nut does not in itself amount to Art. Yet if one were to call it Art and repeat the same act in front of an audience, then, although it would still be someone cracking nuts, the act itself would be transformed, and the audience would see an aestheticized and gesteigert version of nut-cracking. By taking an object out of its usual context and rendering it strange, the viewer is granted a heightened awareness of that object and its significance within the scheme of things.

In his attempt to deconstruct Josephine’s art, the narrator reveals the paradox that lies at its heart: that essentially it is nothing more than their everyday speech. Her audience may know that her voice is nothing special; but there remains an undeniable yet elusive quality to her performances that commands attention and moves them all profoundly: “Something of our poor brief childhood is in it, something of lost happiness that can never be found again, but also something of active daily life, of its small gaieties, unaccountable and yet springing up and not to be obliterated.” As the narrator finally understands, her singing-piping is “set free from the fetters of daily life and it sets us free too for a little while.” [10] Mundane her voice may be, but what Josephine does is art, and without it her community feels bereft.

As the novelist Alice McDermott has said, fiction is “the way to enter into another universe, a way to see the world anew”. [11] The singing of Kafka’s mouse set her people free, if only for a few blissful moments, and with his writing Kafka offers readers a similar intellectual release. You don’t need a suitcase of yellowing documents to know that. Just a dog-eared paperback copy of his stories will do.

References

1. “In der Strafkolonie” (1919), “In the Penal Settlement”, tr Willa and Edwin Muir, in Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis and Other Stories (Penguin, 1980), p 180.

2. Kate Connolly, “End of a Kafkaesque nightmare: writer’s papers finally come to light”, Guardian, July 9, 2008.

3. Martin Swales. “Why Read Kafka?” Modern Language Review 76 (1981): 357-66

4. Zadie Smith, “F. Kafka, Everyman”, New York Review of Books, Volume 55, Number 12, July 17, 2008.

5. “The week in books”, Guardian, July 26, 2008.

6. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, 1990), p. 89

7. Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” (1917). Originally published as “Iskusstvo kak priëm.” In Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, trs., Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (University of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. 12.

8. Cited by Zadie Smith, op.cit., from Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, p. 143.

9. Kafka, Wedding Preparations in the Country and Other Stories, tr Willa and Edwin Muir (Penguin 1982), p 176. The original German text:

“Eine Nuß aufknacken ist wahrhaftig keine Kunst, deshalb wird es auch niemand wagen, ein Publikum zusammenzurufen und vor ihm, um es zu unterhalten, Nüsse knacken. Tut er es dennoch und gelingt seine Absicht, dann kann es sich eben doch nicht nur um bloßes Nüsseknacken handeln. Oder es handelt sich um Nüsseknacken, aber es stellt sich heraus, daß wir über diese Kunst hinweggesehen haben, weil wir sie glatt beherrschten und daß uns dieser neue Nußknacker erst ihr eigentliches Wesen zeigt, wobei es dann für die Wirkung sogar nützlich sein könnte, wenn er etwas weniger tüchtig im Nüsseknacken ist als die Mehrzahl von uns.” (“Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse”, in Ein Hungerkünstler, 1924)

10. Ibid., 184.

11. Carole Burns (ed), Off the Page: Writers talk about Beginnings, Endings and Everything in Between (Norton, 2008), p. 73.

by Adrienne Hyat

Since my recent return from a lengthy stay in Pakistan, I’ve been asked numerous times about my safety while I was there. My standard reply is something like, “It was a tumultuous year–and I could have done without all the headlines–even encountered a few anxious moments–but for the most part I felt pretty safe and welcome.” But that reply often is met with puzzled and doubtful looks. It’s difficult to convince people that there is another side to the place that has been called, “the most dangerous nation on earth.”

To those with first hand knowledge, the reality on the ground is in sharp contrast to the image the media presents:

Father Daniel Suply, 75, is a missionary priest with the Roman Catholic order of Belgian Capuchans. He has resided in Pakistan for nearly 45 years. When asked about his safety, Father Suply spontaneously replies, “I feel absolutely safe.”

He teaches in a seminary and performs religious services in a parish. Except for one brief incident in the early 1990’s which was quickly snuffed out thanks to Father Suply’s fluency in Punjabi, he has never felt threatened here.

Nevertheless, he finds it difficult to convince people back in Belgium to the contrary—until, that is, they come and see for themselves,

“Over the years quite a few people have come to visit us from Europe.” He says. “Of late, many of these people are often advised not to travel to Pakistan because it’s[considered to be] such a dangerous place. When they do come here, they say, ‘…no, no, no it is totally safe. We are totally safe…That was a very negative picture we got from the people.’ A very negative picture… which is not just, actually. Not correct. Not the reality. Of course, Waziristan, that is a dangerous place. I would never venture to go there. The Taliban are there.”

Father Suply is quick to point out that Pakistan is facing some deeply critical issues which could lead to the destabilization of the country. However, he does not dwell on those issues. Instead, he focuses on his “very meaningful ministry” in which he finds great reward and which, he adds, “is very much appreciated” by his students.

Alan Cheshire, 52, is a former United Nations Field Officer. He is currently working on a bio-fuel project in Pakistan. Cheshire has done stints in Bosnia, Albania and Kosovo. He finds Pakistan much safer than any of the other places he’s been.

“In those places,” Cheshire says, “I could not go out without an armed guard. But here in Pakistan, I go into the villages on my own.”

He, too, finds it difficult to convince people back home to the contrary, “They think Pakistan is full of terrorists,” Cheshire says, shaking his head. “ …they’re actually lovely people. The only problem I’ve got is too much tea. They’re always offering me tea.”

Cheshire has felt threatened here, once, on the night of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. He and two Norwegian friends were in a restaurant in the inner city of Lahore when they heard the news. Riots broke out, shops closed and they rushed to get home. On their way, some local shopkeepers lifted up the shutters of their shops and invited them in. “These people were prepared to risk their lives for Europeans. Now that”, says Cheshire emotionally, “is friendliness.”

Laura and Dale Sinkler are from Kalkaska, Michigan. They have lived in Pakistan with their children for several years. Their first stint was from 1996-2001 in a remote area in the outskirts of Multan where they worked on construction of two power plants. In 2001, they left Pakistan to work on power projects in Bangladesh. In 2006, Dale returned to Pakistan this time working for his own power generation firm. Laura and two of their children, a third is in the US Army, joined him in Lahore in 2007.

They speak fondly about Pakistan and the people they’ve met here. They say that coming back to Pakistan the second time around, “felt like coming home.” What has impressed them the most has been the generosity and hospitality of the poor villagers whom they befriended while working in the outskirts of Multan.

“We would go to their homes and have lunch or dinner with them.” Dale Sinkler says. “Oftentimes, we’d feel very uncomfortable because they would be serving us food that we knew they couldn’t afford to serve us. We’d go there and sit on a charpoy [a wooden framed straw bed] and they’d treat us like royalty out of a tin cup.” Even now, years later, when the Sinklers go back to visit their friends in the villages they are treated “like royalty”.

As for their security, the Sinklers say they have felt safe and comfortable during their time in Pakistan despite the risks, which they don’t necessarily consider to be any greater than the risks that exist in other places. And, as experience has shown, some things they perceived as threats actually turned out to be friendly encounters.

Laura Sinkler amusingly recalls a nervous encounter she once had while horseback riding in a village with some female friends “… my horse got away from me, I couldn’t stop it, so I pulled it’s head back to get it to stop and it ended up turning and I actually ended up in a little yard of one of the mosques. I was afraid I was going to be in trouble because you know, that’s their holy ground, so I hurried up and got it out of there but instead of getting in trouble they invited me in for tea.”

The Sinklers have found that the secret to their success here has been tolerance. “If you treat them with respect” says Dale, “ultimately they will return that two-fold.”

Gillian Thornton, 48, is a school teacher from England. She came to Pakistan in 2006 to work for a year as a volunteer teacher trainer in the government schools in Lahore. Thornton explains her reason for coming to Pakistan, “I found the idea of working in a Muslim culture very interesting…from the perspective of a single woman, I wondered if I could fit in and how.” Thornton admits, however, she was apprehensive about the decision of whether to come to Pakistan in light of media coverage about the country.

Two years, and a second contract later, Thornton believes she does, indeed, fit in here, thanks to her willingness to respect the culture. Her experience has been so positive she now has plans to stay on for a third year. She says the best thing about her time here has been the way she’s been received by the Pakistani people and the friendships she has made with them.

As for the apprehensions she had before coming here, she says, “The reality of living and working here has been very different than the media coverage. I’ve never been threatened, I feel very comfortable here…I’m living proof that Pakistan is not the place the media has portrayed it to be.”

Thornton credits her experience in Pakistan for broadening her horizons and understanding of the world. She and some of her fellow former volunteers, who originally came to Pakistan through the UK-based Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO), have joked about VSO’s motto, ‘Sharing skills, Changing lives.’ “It was, undoubtedly, the lives of the volunteers,” says Thornton emphatically, ”that changed the most!”

To be certain, there are parts of Pakistan that are very dangerous and especially hostile to foreigners—parts of the Northwest Frontier Province and Balochistan, as well as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas or FATA, which is reportedly the current home of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. And even the major cities throughout the country have had their share of violence. Earlier this year, Lahore, which was historically peaceful and quiet, experienced several suicide bombings. And attacks specifically targeting foreigners have also occurred throughout the country.

But to consider these events as an accurate reflection of the whole picture is a gross misperception. Just as it is wrong to assume that the extremist views held by a few represent the many. And the irony in adapting these views is that it tends to fuel anti-Western resentment. As Dale Sinkler put it, “If you treat people like that is what they’re made of than that’s exactly what you’re going to get in return.”

Ms. Hyat is an attorney who has lived and taught law in Pakistan.

It is impossible for me to express what I feel about the passing of Mahmoud Darwish. Like many Palestinians, I had grown up reading his poetry in order to express how I feel about whatever significant events happen to Palestinians. I turned to his writings to understand the periods of Palestine’s history that happened before I was born. If ever anyone in history deserved the title of a Poet Laureate, it was indeed Darwish, who spoke the mind of his people in a way I doubt anyone has ever been able to do for any other people. Today, I wake up missing my voice. The real travesty of Darwish’s death is that it revealed to me that he is no longer there to eloquently express to me how I feel about such travesties.

An often underemphasized aspect of Darwish’s life is how he truly lived every single episode of modern Palestinian history, and lived in all the significant locations and periods of Palestinian life. He was born in 1942 in Al-Birweh, Galilee, before the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine that made him a refugee in Lebanon in 1948. His father decided to return his family to Palestine in 1949, risking murder by Zionist militias that had murdered countless Palestinians who attempted to “escape home”. Somehow, Darwish succeeded in returning, and thus lived the years of his youth as a second-class Israeli citizen. He would then leave to study in the Soviet Union in the early 1970’s, joining the growing Palestinian Diaspora in Europe. His political activism lead to Israel stripping him of his second-class citizenship, and thus returned him to the ranks of Palestinian refugees and the Diaspora. He would then live in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, getting to savor the experience of the homeless Palestinians wandering across the Arab World.

Darwish witnessed the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon—one of the pivotal points of his life, his poetry and of Palestinian history—and left with the Palestinian resistance on the boats headed to Tunisia. From then on, he lived the quintessential Palestinian nomadic life; the whole world was home for this stateless nomad. In 1995, he finally returned to Palestine with the PLO’s signing of the Oslo Accords, and attempted to build his life there. He again witnessed another brutal Israeli siege of Palestinians, this time in Ramallah in 2002, which inspired his powerful poetry collection, ‘Haalat ‘Hisaar (A State of Siege). Since the 1980’s Darwish had serious heart problems, and had a very close encounter with death in 1998 after heart surgery, an experience that inspired his monumental work, Jidaariyyah (Mural).

Throughout all these episodes of Palestinian history, Darwish was there, the voice of the voiceless Palestinians to the world. His peerless poetry and striking emotion were enormously successful in drawing world attention to the plight of Palestinians, galvanizing Palestinian to their cause, and rallying millions of Arabs around the cause. All the countless millions spent on PR campaigns by the Israeli Foreign Ministry were never a match to any of Darwish’s powerful poems.

For me, the most striking and admirable thing about Darwish’s poetry is how it remained so resolutely humanist and universalist in its message. Never did Darwish succumb to cheap nationalism and chauvinism; never did he resort to vilification of his oppressors or the usual jingoism so common in political art and literature. Never did he forget that his oppressor too is human, just like him. The magnanimity, forgiveness and humanism he exhibited in his work remain the ultimate credit to this great author.

Throughout ethnic cleansing, living as a second-class citizen, being placed under house arrest, having his second-class citizenship revoked, being chased and hounded from one exile to another, being bombed in almost each of these exiles and living under countless sieges, Darwish’s humanism never succumbed. One of his most popular poems, Rita, spoke of his love for a Jewish Israeli woman by that name; and about the absurdity of wars coming between lovers. This poem was made into a popular song by Lebanese musician Marcel Khalife.

In his powerful 2002 poem, A State of Siege, written during the Israeli siege of Ramallah, after talking of the sixth sense that allows him to skillfully escape shells, Darwish takes time to address the very Israeli soldiers shelling his neighborhood:

You, standing at the doorsteps, come in
And drink with us our Arabic coffee
For you may feel that you are human like us;

…

To the killer: If you had left the fetus thirty days,
Things would’ve been different:
The occupation may end, and the toddler may not remember the time of the siege,
and he would grow up a healthy boy,
and study the Ancient history of Asia,
in the same college as one of your daughters.
And they may fall in love.
And they may have a daughter (who would be Jewish by birth).
What have you done now?
Your daughter is now a widow,
and your granddaughter is now orphaned?
What have you done to your scattered family,
And how could you have slain three pigeons with the one bullet?

Darwish’s last poem, published a few weeks before his death, tells the fascinating tale of falling into one hole with one’s enemy. Darwish explores the dynamic of enemies facing a common plight; how the past is remembered and yet forgotten when they cooperate to murder a snake; how instinct triumphs over ideology and how a common plight makes the concept of enmity absurd. In a pretty accurate description of the current plight of Palestinians and Israelis, and in a very ominous phrase indicating that Darwish felt his impending death, he concludes:

He said: Would you negotiate with me now?
I said: For what would you negotiate me now,
in this grave-hole?
He said: On my share and your share of this common grave
I said: What use is it?
Time has passed us,
Our fate is an exception to the rule
Here lie a murderer and the murdered, sleeping in one hole
And it remains for another poet to take this scenario to its end!

But for me, the most memorable of Darwish’s work will always remain his seminal poem, Madeeh Al-Thill Al-‘Aaly (In Priase of the High Shadow). The poem was written on the deck of one of the ships carrying Darwish, along with thousands of Palestinian fighters, from Beirut to Tunisia after Israel’s barbaric destruction of Lebanon in 1982. Darwish recounts the daily realities of living under shelling and under siege in Beirut, the deafening silence of the rest of the world towards the plight of the Palestinians and Lebanese, and the harrowing details of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Acerbic, witty, and powerful, Darwish skewers everyone from the Israeli government murdering civilians while pretending to be the victim (“You stole our tears, wolf”), to the American government (“The Plague”) giving every child a cluster bomb toy as a gift, to the Arab governments (“the bastard nations”) who refrain from doing anything to help their Palestinian brethren, and instead resort to pathetic anti-Semitic rhetoric to deflect attention away from their ineptitude.

Yet through it all, and as dark as the plight becomes, Darwish never loses sight of the humanism at the heart of his cause and at the heart of the Palestinian struggle. He continuously disparages nationalism and mocks its silliness. The ending of the poem, in particular, serves as a sort of Palestinian anti-Zionist humanist manifesto. In it, Darwish addresses the Palestinian fighter with powerful rhetorical questions, asking him about the true nature of his cause, and what he is really after. Mocking the trappings of nationalism and statehood, Darwish—in no uncertain terms—asserts that the cause has always been about humans, about freedom from oppression, about the revolution against persecution, about the lofty ideals of liberty, and most definitely not about petty nationalism and the toys of statehood:

It is for you to be, or not to be,
It is for you to create, or not to create.
All existential questions, behind your shadow, are a farce,
And the universe is your small notebook, and you are its creator.
So write in it the paradise of genesis,
Or do not write it,
You, you are the question.
What do you want?
As you march from a legend, to a legend?
A flag?
What good have flags ever done?
Have they ever protected a city from the shrapnel of a bomb?
What do you want?
A newspaper?
Would the papers ever hatch a bird, or weave a grain?
What do you want?
Police?
Do the police know where the small earth will get impregnated from the coming winds?
What do you want?
Sovereignty over ashes?
While you are the master of our soul; the master of our ever-changing existence?
So leave,
For the place is not yours, nor are the garbage thrones.
You are the freedom of creation,
You are the creator of the roads,
And you are the anti-thesis of this era.
And leave,
Poor, like a prayer,
Barefoot, like a river in the path of rocks,
And delayed, like a clove.
…
You, you are the question.
So leave to yourself,
For you are larger than people’s countries,
Larger than the space of the guillotine.
So leave to yourself,
Resigned to the wisdom of your heart,
Shrugging off the big cities, and the drawn sky,
And building an earth under your hand’s palm–a tent, an idea, or a grain.
So head to Golgotha,
And climb with me,
To return to the homeless soul its beginning.
What do you want?
For you are the master of our soul,
The master of our ever-changing existence.
You are the master of the ember,
The master of the flame.
How large the revolution,
How narrow the journey,
How grand the idea,
How small the state!

Darwish’s legacy will live on as eternally as his ultimate triumph against his oppressors: he never let them succeed in making him dehumanize them. In spite of living through the full gamut of Zionist oppression and the Palestinian plight, in spite of all the murders, the sieges, the shelling, the racism and the oppression, Zionism never succeeded in turning Darwish into a racist, and never succeeded in making Darwish hate his fellow human. His humanism shone through as his ultimate triumph, and the ultimate insult to the chauvinist, parochial, racist, and criminal Zionist project to which he was the quintessential antithesis.

——

The following video is Darwish reciting a part of Madeeh Al-Thill Al-‘Aly (In Priase of the High Shadow):

The following is Darwish reciting part of Jidaariyyah (Mural), talking about his brush with death in 1998:

///
Girl on Trapeze
—Vignette through a windshield
Jim Culleny
……………………………………..
Young chick at a curb waiting for a green.

It comes, she goes head down
checking out the cut of her jeans:
how they lay across her shoes;
the way the inseams hug her firm thighs;
the fine, faded blues.

Sweet on self, she imagines
an approaching guy
sees what she eyes:

sees himself as her squeeze.
Him, turned-on. Her, self-pleased.

She smiles
raises head reins eyes
veers right launches keys
and swings into her car
with beautiful and satisfied
greatest of ease.
….

…………………………………………………
………………………………………
……………………………………..
………………………………….///

…………………………………..
………………………………………………

 Above, Basket of Wild Strawberries, 1761, private collection, and Still Life with Fish (detail),1769, J. Paul Getty Museum, by Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin

 All food photography below courtesy of Karen Peters. Use the titles to search her blog for the recipes.

Elatia Harris

Recently, I embarked on one of those side trips that committed foodies can be lucky enough to get an invitation to — I became a designated taster for a line of organic blended spices created and distributed by Winnipeg chef Karen Peters. (Warning: Do not attempt to compete with me for this job! It is mine!) 

My first occasion to be useful came in June. Excitedly, I pried open a 250 mg tin of Karen’s Ras el Hanout and sniffed in delighted reverie for several minutes, enjoying the synergy of more than two dozen spices – cardamom, cinnamon, coriander, peppercorns, among many others. Ras el Hanout is a discretionary blend, with ingredients and proportions varying from kitchen to kitchen.  Sometimes, it’s nothing special; other times, its aroma carries with it a civilization.  My vendor of choice for the spices of the Eastern Mediterranean was Maison Hediard, in Paris. But Maison Hediard fell – that’s the only way to put it – and now that it’s been propped up, it’s all different. That was a big loss, for my own efforts to blend those spices – not only Ras el Hanout, but Baharat, Berbere, Mitmita and Za’atar – produced only tragic results. In one whiff, I ceased to worry about all that. Next to Ras el Hanout in my pantry now is Karen’s Baharat – a Turkish rub for meats with cassia bark, cumin, black pepper, mint – and there’s more to come. I am once again confident that when I prepare the dishes of this region, they will create for diners a civilizational encounter.

I could not help wanting to know more about any chef artful enough to get this stuff right. It’s the equivalent of designing a truly great perfume – one that is definitive and characteristic and slots into your mind all the most precise and coveted associations – instead of one that is vaguely pleasant but will never generate a nanosecond’s notice. Or, like being able to write – and not by accident – a melody that people will remember instead of one they will forget. All I really knew about Karen Peters when I became a designated taster for her product line was that we liked many of the same classic food movies, that she had four Russian grandparents and a Masters Degree in Philosophy from the University of Heidelberg. How did this add up to her taking the Mistress of Spices title?

By coincidence – this does tie in, so bear with me – I had been corresponding with 3QD columnist Justin Smith about the philosophical aspect of food. Justin had put up a new site, Opera Minora, for archiving his professional papers, and had just given a talk at Caltech, “How to Feed a Corporeal Substance: The Metaphysics of Nutrition from Fernel to Leibniz.” In it, I found a line about the “transformation of world into self,” and a fascinating reference to “the process of nutrition within the context of a corporeal-substance metaphysics.” This resonated with my thinking on those immaterial-seeming fragrance molecules that carried with them a civilization – effecting the transformation of world into dish, perhaps – and I made haste to find out if philosophy came into play in Karen’s kitchen.

Elatia Harris: Karen, you have an advanced degree in philosophy from the University of Heidelberg. While you are not the only cook I know highly trained to do something entirely other than cooking – there are lots of us – I want to know whether you believe cooking is a vacation from philosophy, or if philosophical ruminations in fact arise from it.

Karen Peters: I first went to Germany in 1989, after the program I had been planning to attend at the Beijing Teacher’s College was canceled. It was a phenomenal experience.  I had Hans-Georg Gadamer as a professor and was keen on studying the philosophy of language, especially examining the ideas of meaning presented by Kant and Wittgenstein. 

EH: What about Food World?  Not yet on your screen?

KP: I was also fortunate to apprentice in a restaurant in Mannheim during my studies.  I find cooking to be very calming, even in the rush of it all for business.  I think about the combinations of ingredients and the anticipated delight of the diner.  From my own philosophical experience, I try to be aware of the good, the true and the beautiful in all endeavors – including cooking.  A lot to ask from an item to be consumed but I hope that I’m paying attention.  I want to be aware of that first sip of good tea, coffee or wine and note that I should pay attention because this is good.  It likely seems like fuzzy philosophy but being open to the ineffable is being open to delight.  Or is that a tautology?  In any case, I don’t see cooking as a vacation from philosophy but the action can put me in a state of mind where thinking is clearer.  In some ways, having the mise en place kind of discipline is very Kantian in that there is a great deal of freedom arising through the discipline.  I can’t have chaos in the kitchen, and I clean as I go.  I hope that because of that discipline that I can make culinary ideological leaps as well.

EH: I should try it your way — every now and then I feel like Mickey in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” I am in control of my result, perhaps not so perfectly in control of my process.  The freedom I experience cooking is a freedom from the claims of the verbal imagination.

KP: Although there is great freedom offered in Nietzsche and great process can be learned from Kant, neither would likely be much good in a kitchen – not to trivialize.  It’s somewhere between the chaos and the control.

EH: Are there systems within thinking about food that you subscribe to? 

KP: The Slow Food movement and Hundred Mile Diet tie in nicely with my other degree, a Masters in Environmental Studies.  I did my field work on small-scale fisheries in Kerala, India.  I was so lucky to have met and worked with so many amazing people.  A group of women took me in as their daughter.  I felt quite honored and humbled.  These women would go into the clean canals without fishing gear and catch shrimp just by sensing their vibrations with their hands.  It was absolutely fantastic.  They would later sell their catch in the local markets.  When we didn’t have a translator, we could communicate about food, family and living in simple terms.  Malayalam, by the way, is the hardest language that I’ve ever come across.

EH: That was the language they spoke in The God of Small Things. There was a Western character so put off by it that she said, “I would have thought you’d call this Keralese…”  At the time I remember thinking it must be awfully hard, if the word for the language was itself a palindrome.

KP: Malayalam is indeed the language of The God of Small Things.  The author, Arundhati Roy, is a Keralite.  She’s very controversial in her home state as she demonstrates for human rights.  When I arrived in Cochin, I looked for a simple language book.  Not that easy to find.  I found one that didn’t help me function in the market, but showed my how I could enroll a child into school and read essays on the importance of the elephant.

Meyer lemon and blood orange marmalade, grilled chicken rubbed with Baharat

EH: What will the M. Env. do for your life – in and out of the kitchen?

KP: My M. Env. means that I am trained to work with communities around their resources.  I have done a lot of work around food security issues not only in terms of GMOs vs. organic but in terms of charity and dependency models of food banks vs. self-sufficiency models of community kitchens, gardens and buying clubs.  I am hopeful to get out of the kitchen more and work with those ideas with communities or in policy work.

EH: You and your parents traveled a lot. People my parents knew were usually deterred from going off the beaten track by all the really unfamiliar food involved. But your family sounds different. How did traveling lead you to cooking? Or did it?

KP: All of my grandparents came to Canada from Russia in 1925.  My Dad’s parents were farmers and my Mom’s parents and uncles traveled due to work with immigrants and refugees.  My grandmother traveled extensively throughout her life, and her children and my cousins all seem to have wanderlust.  At one reunion, we discovered that in our family, there wasn’t a single country that hadn’t been visited or lived in.  The foods of those countries are part of the discovery, and a door to their cultures. 

In 1983, after I completed high school, my parents and I went to teach at Chongqing Medical College in Sichuan Province, China.   Sharing food, learning and cooking together was a great way to gain understanding.  When I came home from China in 1984, I tried to share some Sichuan foods with friends and family.  Family members all seemed to enjoy Hot Pot and other spicy foods — but friends were quite a bit more than hesitant.

EH: Did that surprise you? I made a Tuscan rabbit dish for a friend I hadn’t seen in decades, and she acted like it was some kind of a test.

KP: I was surprised — I was not expecting people to be hesitant to try foods from another part of the world.

EH: Well, hm — maybe it’s about rabbit or very hot spices. Still, the principle holds — you don’t expect it when you think how diverse Canada and Canadian cuisine already are. That’s something that can be a surprise to us “other” North Americans.

KP: Canadian cuisine has influences from all over the world.  I live in a medium-sized city but can access excellent world cuisines here.  Toronto and Vancouver have that to a much larger degree as well as the fusion of cultures.  Toronto Chef Susur Lee creates wonderfully inspiring food.  His cookbook is accessible and comprehensive.  Vancouver’s Tojo’s is listed in the book, Top 1000 Places to See Before You Die, and is a great experience. I love the Vietnamese restaurant across the river from where I live, Binh An, where I can get a huge portion of soothing sour soup for $10 with the tip.  The owner tells me with pride that the broth is cooked for over 14 hours.  While the food provides enjoyment and nourishment, a few questions and a little interaction provide warmth, insight and possible friendships.  I guess that you can be open or closed where ever you are.

EH: Canada is way ahead of the US in policy encouraging a multicultural society.

KP: Multiculturalism is a difficult concept in many respects.  I think that a Liberal notion of tolerance is not a desirable concept.  That is, if I’m told that I’ll be tolerated, I’d suggest not to bother.  Of course, there isn’t a war or violent situation going on here.  Also, I am Mennonite and would rather leave a situation than be part of violence. I hope that we are growing up when it comes to addressing “the other.”

Acorn squash soup with lemongrass

EH: You know so much about the food of South Asia — did you learn all that in Kerala?

KP:  For a time, my parents were country reps of a relief and development organization in India based in Calcutta.  They lived there for over 4 years.  I traveled to visit with them for a while with my grandmother. They had a chef, Kasim, who had been a chef for a Maharajah’s family in Kashmir.  I had time to sit and learn from him.  I started to learn about cooking by the sense of smell.  I also learned about biryanis and other north Indian dishes.  I feel very lucky to have these exposures, and I think about the people and places when I cook some dishes.  I taught for a while in South Korea, and came to adore good Korean food.

EH: Then you had more material than most to sort through before deciding what you wanted to be when you grew up…

KP: I really don’t think that I ever knew what I would do when I finally grew up.  I think that I just knew that I would travel. Maybe our language is how we think but the food is how we love.

EH: I’ve heard of getting your chops as a cook in some very unlikely places. But you’re the only one I know who did it on a Turkish boat. Please tell me about that.

KP: I had been home in Canada for a while, kind of floundering as to what to do next. A cousin who set up a thriving tourism business in Bodrum, Turkey, called to say that she needed a chef on her boat right away — and could I come?  A couple of weeks later I was on a boat in the Aegean, learning Turkish and Turkish cuisine, how to be a sailor and a German-speaking tour guide.  Great learning curve, and just a gorgeous place to be.  I learned so much about eggplants, tea, spices, cheeses, lamb, etc.  I learned new cooking techniques as well as different healing properties of foods and herbs. 

EH: When you want to get inspired now, what do you do?

KP: I read, of course. But I really love going to the different markets and trying out unknown ingredients.  We have wonderful fish markets as well as stores for Italian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Ethiopian, Halal, India and West Indies as well as local foods.  I often go to these markets to see what is new and what could be served in a new way.  I have hundreds of Chinese soup spoons, for example, and I look to how they can be used for delightful purposes.  For one-bite appetizers of cold soba noodles, stuffed pasta shells, sashimi with grilled udon squares, for example. 

EH: If someone wanted to go from being a restaurant habitué type of a foodie to being one who was also a confident cook, would there be a fast lane to that transition?

KP: The economic argument is a great motivator.  I usually ask people what their favorite foods are, and if they would like to learn how to make those.  Then it’s about going back to first principles, just breaking down a recipe to the how and the why with each step. 

I had the pleasure of being a guest chef twice for Les Marmitons, a fine group of gentlemen who gather with the mandate, Gastronomy through Friendship.  No one seems hesitant, and there is a whole range of skill levels.

I don’t want people to get bound up by the recipes always.  I find a lot of grads of the culinary arts programs to be unable to adapt to situations outside of their recipes.  In that regard, the informal learner might have an advantage over the trained chef.  I have done a locally produced public access television cooking show. I want people to be excited about possibilities and not be intimidated by food.  I want people to be brave enough to enjoy making risotto instead of adding water to instant varieties.

EH: I have Heaven knows how many cookbooks, but just a few I really don’t like to be separated from. What about you?

KP: There are some I even travel with. One book that I’ve enjoyed, and have taken with me is World of the East Vegetarian Cooking, by Madhur Jaffrey.  I found out in traveling just how authentic her recipes are.  They are also great recipes for learning the basics, step by step, such as making yoghurt or paneer. The Larousse Gastronomique offers a great base from which to work.  I use it as a springboard to what I might have locally or could have on hand — wherever I am.  Other great books are Fields of Greens, by Annie Sommerville, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, by Deborah Madison, Amuse Bouche, by Rick Tramonto, and two books by Jeffrey Alford, Hot Sour Salty Sweet and Mangoes & Curry Leaves. One book of further inspiration that my husband, Desmond Burke – an architect – gave to me is The Architect, the Cook and Good Taste, edited by Petra Hodgson and Rolf Toyka.  It’s a series of essays and photos around the idea of the two disciplines.

Stuffed bison tenderloin, elk moussaka

EH: I get from reading your blog that elk is good. When you’re looking for local, organic provender in Winnipeg, what else is good?

KP: The gardens here provide so much great local vegetables in a very short season.  To start in early spring with fiddleheads and morels and then all what the garden grows through the season.  Local fish is amazing with sweet pickerel, Arctic char, Manitoba goldeye and golden caviar. Wild rice, blueberries, saskatoons, rhubarb, crabapples are all local products.  There is a growing organic meat production here with beef, bison, elk, lamb, goat, chickens and rabbits.  The Trappist monks make a wonderful local cheese and there is a small artisanal goat cheese producer nearby as well.  Raw milk cheeses face some regulations but I have found them relatively available.  You can find the raw cheeses more in Quebec than where I live.   

University of Manitoba student garden, where Environmental Studies and City Planning students practice permaculture agriculture

EH: You have an incredible Russian bread recipe. I love the photo of it that Desmond took.

KP: The Russian Easter bread is my grandmother’s recipe, but it was my husband, Desmond, who baked it as well as photographed it.  He’s a gifted amateur baker/pasta maker.  He even takes the Russian Easter bread out and puts it on feather pillows, as per my Großma’s instructions.  Desmond isn’t from my cultural background but he’s really nailed this bread.

EH: When I cook for Russians, I think “mushrooms,” because I remember a scene in Speak, Memory where Nabokov’s mother was made unreasonably happy by them.

KP: There really is something about mushrooms.  Unreasonably happy is quite apposite to how I feel about mushrooms.  I make a porcini mushroom consommé that is reduced and added to and reduced several times.  In the final service, it is a dark and clear mushroom broth with a few porcini slices topped with a drizzle of truffle oil.  I served it for a wonderful birthday party that I felt honored to cater.  When the soup course came out, the formerly boisterous room fell silent.  I asked what was wrong and they said that they were enjoying the soup too much to talk.

Russian Easter bread, shitake mushroom bouches

EH: Ah, a moment that one lives for! Is the mushrooming pretty good where you are?

KP: I had gone mushroom hunting a few years prior to that event of the mushroom consommé.  We found Chicken of the Woods in autumn on the elm trees in certain neighborhoods.  I love mushroom hunting.  In early spring you can find local morels, later chanterelles and in the autumn, chicken of the woods.  To be invited to go mushroom hunting by regulars is something never to be turned down. With morels, you can get quite giddy in the hunt.  You can be looking directly at the mushroom and then have the experience that it has revealed itself to you.   

Salmon on a cedar plank

EH: We have some favorite movies in common. Mainly Babette’s Feast, Big Night and Tampopo. Those are all between 15 and 20 years old by now – yet even people too young to have seen them first time out know them.

KP: I’ve always loved “food movies”.  There is so much delight and passion in them.  Babette’s Feast is very inspiring.  I’ve prepared formal dinners based on that inspiration and its been so enjoyable.

EH: I’ve read some of your menus – they’re spectacular. I don’t necessarily think of Babette as a cook, but as an artiste who has, after long exile, given everything to be reunited with her materials.

KP: I absolutely concur.  Babette is an artist.  There is such a celebration when she comes out of isolation from her materials. 

EH: There’s a strain of fanaticism in all these movies too.  The chef in Tampopo undergoes grueling muscle conditioning to be fit enough to make the best noodles.  When she finally succeeds, her lover/trainer leaves her, having boarded up her bedroom window. Well, that’s the price of perfection. Funny that these “food movies” that are so delightful are also quite dark.

KP: I understand – I tend to be a dark thinker but really need the delight and the “Aha” moments.  I had a whole semester with Gadamer just on “Ach so.”  I am keen on the hermeneutical, that quickening moment of understanding, ach so.  Perhaps, then, I have more Romantic views of food and feeding the soul.  What the Romantic German poet, Novalis, gives us is that every thing, every item and construct is a communication and can be understood.

I relate to the fanaticism of the chefs in these movies, too. I used to be much more fanatical with people when I cooked for them.  I wouldn’t allow them to come to the kitchen to taste the food, as it was a pure offering that I was creating for them.  They really got offended, so I have to dance around that one a lot.

EH: I’ve learned to be a good sport about it. But I will never understand why, when I am orchestrating a superb experience for them, people would want to jump the gun to take a bite out of it – half-cooked, yet.

No such interruptions blending spices, I should think.  What made you start your product line with Ras el Hanout?

KP: My cousin was in Morocco and brought me back a tajine and some Ras el Hanout.  When I ran out of the spice blend…I just had to have more.  I researched it and didn’t find much that matched my experience.  I also didn’t find anything commercially available.  So I had to make it myself. With a bit of trial and error, I came up with the blend of 28 spices with which I am happy.

EH: Oh, you should be happy with it. What future plans have you for your blended spices?

KP: At the moment, it’s a cottage industry.  The product is in demand, however. How to get bigger while retaining full creative control over ingredients is an intellectually worthy problem to be solving.

To inquire about blended spices, contact Karen via her site.

The US annual health care expenditure is riding a nonstop escalator. The current spending of over two trillion dollars will reach an unsustainable four trillion dollars or 20% of the GDP in 2017. Yet, an estimated 47 million Americans had no insurance for a whole year in 2006 and 89.5 million people under the age of 65 did not have any insurance for one month. And last week, the AMA reported in the American Medical News that middle-income insured Americans have difficulty in accessing care. About 59 million Americans, either delayed or did not get health care in 2007, a problem that only low-income uninsured commonly face.

Current per capita expenditure of $6697 – the highest in the world – has bought financial grief for many but not good health for all. The US health infrastructure is probably the best in the world (probably overbuilt) and technology – even unproven – penetrates early and spreads fast. But each service costs more in the US compared to the OECD countries. Where does this place US in the quality of care? In a study by the Commonwealth Fund comparing six counties (Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, UK, and the USA) in various indicators like quality care, access, efficiency, equity, healthy lives and expenditure, the USA ranked lowest – fifth or sixth- in almost all indicators except ‘right care’ (a subset of quality care) where it was at the top.

The catastrophe of unaffordable care is unfolding like a Greek tragedy before the national audience; the characters sense the looming disaster but the flaccid leaders seem powerless to stop it. The explanation lies in the way we finance health care – a global problem and not particular to the USA.

Nations have used three ways to finance health care: tax revenues, non-profit community health insurance and commercial insurance. They pool financial resources either with a single payer like in Canada, UK, Japan and Taiwan or with multiple payers (pluralistic systems) like in the USA, France, Belgium, Australia, Denmark, Germany, New Zealand and Netherlands. The pluralistic US health care depends mainly on tax revenues and commercial insurance.

These pooled funds purchase health services from providers – hospitals, doctors, pharmaceuticals and device manufacturers – on behalf of their clients. Allocation of funds (what to buy) and efficiency (for how much) control supply side costs. Currently, 30% of total expenditure goes to hospitals, 21% for clinical services and doctors, 10% for pharmaceuticals and 25% for other services.

A prepayment by individuals into a pool affords an assurance of financial risk coverage in case of unpredictable future sickness. The fund remains solvent by recruiting a large number of consumers with varying health profiles, so a large number of healthy people subsidize the unfortunate 20 percent unhealthy, who use 80 percent of health services.

The US health system – which is expensive and not equitable – has faltered in the mechanics of purchase of health services. McCain wants to rectify it by injecting market competition at two points of purchase: one, to empower individuals to buy less expensive health insurance and second, to encourage them to negotiate the price of services with providers.

This plan is similar to what Cogan, Hubbard and Kessler have expressed in their well-written book, ‘Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise’. They recommend five steps, which I quote below:

1. Health care tax reform
   • Tax deducibility of health care expenses
   • Expanded health savings account
   • Tax credits for low income people
2. Insurance reform
   • Interstate portability
   • Subsidized private insurance for the chronically ill
3. Improve health information
   • Report cards on providers
   • Guidelines for best practices
4. Control anticompetitive behavior by providers and insurance
5. Reform malpractice

McCain intends to drop the tax deductibility of health insurance expenditure of employers and instead give a tax credit of $ 2500 to individuals and $ 5000 to families who will buy their own insurance. The plan will also allow insurance companies to sell products across state lines to encourage competition and offer a ‘no-frills’ insurance to low risk individuals.

As inexpensive insurance does not translate to affordable health care, McCain will popularize individual health saving account (HSA), which frees the consumer of the illusion (moral hazard) that care is free because a third party is picking up the tab. Instead, HSA empowers her to shop for value for money and works as a tool for demand side cost control against ‘moral hazard’.

John McCain, the republican presidential hopeful, believes that a free market will provide the healing touch to the ailing health care system. He has a reform plan: cut off the regulatory hands and let the invisible hand work its magic. Will it succeed? The answer is a two-letter word: no.

McCain’s plan may induce employers to drop health benefits for the employees and encourage individuals to shop for their own insurance across state lines. This will fragment the original risk pool. It is likely that young brawny frolickers on Miami Beach will get cheaper health insurance from some distant company; they will abandon their pool loaded with retirees in Tampa, who now will have to pay higher premiums to cover the higher risk. While the young may find affordable insurance, the total health care cost to the system will stay the same.

McCain has faith in the ability of an individual – armed with free choice – to wade through the maze of health information. The HSA will encourage consumer directed health care, which allows patients to decide which health services to buy. But explosion of medical knowledge leaves a vulnerable consumer – in this case a patient- with an insurmountable disadvantage of knowledge asymmetry with his clinician. Add to that numerous insurance plans (Seattle has 747!), which compound the asymmetry with incomprehensible complex multiple insurance products with caveats and uncovered services, which are more difficult to decipher than Egyptian hieroglyphics. Assuming the unlikely scenario that patients will be able to overcome this asymmetry, the HSA plan still will have distribution distortions; healthy adults and children will spend less leaving the sick with higher expenses.

The world experience of last century tells us that health care is impervious to the free market justice and the system needs both supply and demand side controls. Innovations like co-payment, capitation, pay for performance, evidence based medicine and tax subsidies generate distortions, enough to undo any benefits they accrue. Attempts to correct these distortions require substantial administrative organization and expenditure and have been difficult to implement.

Health care in the US is approaching “The tragedy of the commons” described by Hardin in ‘Science’ in 1968: a group of herdsman can increase their number of cattle as long a common pasture has enough carrying capacity, but as the pasture reaches its feeding limit the herdsman can do irreparable harm by over-consumption. The current health care system comes with built in cost escalation mechanism: expedience guides its operation. Over consumption of the medical commons provides illusionary protection for the patient and profits for the provider.

In an article in the New England Journal Of Medicine in 1973, the author Hiatt asked: “Protecting the medical commons: who is responsible?” He exhorted “It is imperative that physicians and other health providers work closely with professionals from many fields, and with consumers, to ensure the availability and dissemination of information that will permit decisions that are in the best interests of society.” The clinician alone cannot do it, as she works both as an independent businessman and patient advocate simultaneously; she is always treading the boundary between ethics and profits; between imperfect medical science and legal threats. The medical commons will become barren unless all stake holders in the system stop overgrazing.

The solution seems obvious: repair the current pluralistic system with stronger cost cutting measures and provide universal coverage and subsidies for the poor. But considering the hurdles to overhaul of the current system, single payer system may be the only option. Almost all developed nations are moving towards a single payer system, which saves considerable money on administrative costs. While estimates on administrative costs vary in various studies, most developed countries with a single payer spend approximately 10 percent on administration, while the US spends over 25 percent. This saving alone could meet the needs of the uninsured.

No panacea exists when aspirations for health care far exceed the need. And when the constrained resources do not even satisfy the unmet need, it may be the time to concede that the poor, old and the sick need a helping hand and not an invisible one; or they will be at the mercy of a hand that is sure to stay invisible when they need it the most.

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“I don’t think I ever was a child.”
–Coleman Hawkins, top sax jazzman

Jazzman Said

I don’t think
I ever was a child

Was I a child?
I don’t think so

If I ever was a child
I’d know. …I don’t
even know, Jazzman said,
if a child ever was

Child, Jazzman said,
I don’t just think
I play jazz man.

……………………
……………………
Jim Culleny
5/08

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