Chrisco Spins

I linked you to an article discussing what this would mean the other day, but yesterday the International Criminal Court prosecutor’s office requested an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmad Al Bashir. The charges include genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Here’s the press release, summary of the case (a really fascinating and disturbing read), and the prosecutor’s statement on the application for an arrest warrant.

Every once in a while I happen to visit someone’s home or office and notice their collection of African tribal art, and I can’t help but question the appropriateness of it. Sure, the masks and figurines are visually appealing. The approach to symbolism and use of negative space are so different from the European-style art we’re used to, that you can’t help but be drawn. Even Picasso was fascinated by the the art he found on his trips to Africa, so much so that he mimicked some of the elements in later work. (That’s right, ya’ll. Picasso was down with the aesthetic swirl.) Still, I am wary of bringing tribal art pieces into western decor because, well, sometimes it isn’t supposed to be art at all.

The fact is, what is referred to as tribal art is often more like “found objects” in the sense that it wasn’t created with the intention of serving as an art piece, but someone found it and decided to hang it up somewhere because of its visual appeal and, perhaps, the statement it makes out of context. This has nothing to do with its original function. At times, this countervailes its original function. There’s something a bit suspect about using a fertility goddess as a paperweight. I know that original tribal artifacts, or authentic-looking facsimilles thereof, are often sold by industrious African merchants capitalizing on Stuff White People Like. Yet, the fact that Africans are willing to hustle to make ends meet doesn’t make it any easier for me to see replica Igbo ceremonial masks in Pier1. Even more unsettling for me is when people collect the real ones. Now you have a village god nailed to the wall above the cat’s litter box.

To be fair, you have no reason to find me credible. I failed Art History and slept through African American Studies. I have only a little bit of knowledge about where different pieces come from and what they mean but no personal attachment to any of it. While I was contemplating this essay and the sources of my unease, I realized that my opinion certainly isn’t the most relevant. So I grabbed an African and asked him.

He explained to me that there are some pieces sold in mass that everyone accepts as decorative, while there are others that are supposed to be sacred. Because, over time, the export of sacred artifacts robbed so many believers of their spiritual objects, they shifted their focus to immovable things like mountains. Now many people feel as though their traditions have survived the violation of trade because the spirit still lives on in holy places, which are not so easily taken. Of course, this is one man’s take on things. Certainly their are other voices, other perspectives.

And perspective is important. No, I don’t expect white urban hipsters to start respecting the religious rites of far-away villages more than they do their own sense of fashion. I can’t see myself blaming someone for liking to have something in their house because it looks cool and goes with the loveseat. But I can’t help but wonder if appropriating someone’s culture to brighten up your foyer would be possible if you truly understood what it means to them? Does it require a certain level of disrespect, or at least disinterest to exoticize a person’s life in that way? Can I use the Bible as a coaster? A crucifix as a coat hook? May I purchase the wedding veils of dead brides from their bereaved widowers because they would make bitchin’ curtains?

Or perhaps the significance of an object ends when it leaves its owner. Living in Philadelphia, I noticed that alongside the large population of Muslims who still adhere to strict dress codes (hijab, full length dishdasha, etc.) there are non-Muslim black women in head-wraps and men in 5x white tees. Coincidence? ‘Fraid not.  We see, we like, we copy.  Maybe that’s inevitable, and if people find it offensive it’s only because they are sensitive, since the trivialization of their culture is only part of a larger system of oppression. Maybe everybody’s sprinkling salt, but only the wounded feel it burn.

I can’t call it. I’m just sayin’.

To the group of Trinidadian gentlemen with whom I danced briefly on Friday:

I know it’s not your fault. You couldn’t have possibly known what was going through my head that night. You were just out with your friends, trying to enjoy your youth, making the best of a rainy night and a hot club with too few women to wine up on, and even fewer who know how to wine back. I get that you figured a Guyanese girl with locks down her back must know enough about what’s supposed to happen when Dawn Penn’s “No,No,No” drops. You expected me, as one of your own, to understand. The problem is I understand all too well.

West Indian men, I fear, are roosters. Lemme ’splain. You know how roosters strut around the farm, knowing it’s their job in life to bang every hen in their territory? There is never any pretense of monogamy, and all foul-kind accept this to be the way things are. West Indian men are sort of like that.

Make no mistake. I’m not blaming the men. Women have been just as complicit in allowing men to cock about. It’s actually pretty complicated. When you have a culture which frowns upon divorce, and staying married is the only way to secure your children’s rights to their father’s wealth and standing as a member of his family, and when being cheated on makes you look like you’re not handling your business as a wife while he gets to blame his natural virility for his infidelity, it makes it hard to hold a man accountable for cheating. Combine that conundrum with the long-term psychological effects of colonialism, a system in which men were encouraged to impregnate women but not always allowed to be husbands and fathers, and I can understand where the lingering dependence on sexual conquest as a form of validation comes from.

So, somehow, all of this amounts to you pressing your cock into my back every time a slow song comes on?

I remember watching my uncle hit on very young girls whenever he was out, even though he had a wife at home. He did it in front of me and my sister, like it was something to be proud of. I also remember watching his friends ridicule him for not having any children, though he had been married almost 4 years. His wife had had 2 miscarriages, but, somehow, it was still his shame to bear. I can’t help but think these things are related. I’ve watched it go down my whole life. Men forced to prove at every turn that they really are men. If, as is often the case, they don’t have access to or knowledge of other methods of proof, they fuck.

Of course, I could be overthinking. Even without all of the historical, psychological, and socioeconomic complications, nature builds us all with a sex drive. There are plenty of physiological reasons to grind on a girl in a club. It might be perfectly natural to try to wink and grin your way into her bed the same night. Not so sure about the motivation to brag endlessly about it, though. Eh, like I’ve said before, I admit I don’t always understand men.

What I do understand, though, is that if you tell a Trinidadian man in front of his boys to please not touch you and that you’d rather dance alone, it hurts. I spent a large portion of my time that night weighing my right to avoid choreographed molestation against my genuine sympathy and love for men with beautiful white teeth, vaccine-dimpled arms, and the weight of the world on his broad black shoulders. If they had been from anywhere else, I might have just been rude.

I danced for a little while, then excused myself, letting them know firmly but gently that that was all. I’m not sure if I helped or just dragged out the roosterism a bit longer. I don’t know if they could ever interpret my modest hip-swaying as love, but that’s what it was.

I believe in symbols. I believe that one of the most effective ways a human being can spend his/her life is not to die. If you stand up strong enough for long enough for the things you really care about, your whole life becomes a story, and your name, a reference to an ideal. You become a symbol for those who come after you, and the mere fact that they can cite your sacrifice gives meaning to whatever it was you were standing up for. That symbolism will live as long as people remember you.

The thing about symbols, though, is that they are abbreviations of concepts. A person is not a concept, and abbreviation of any aspect of their life is akin to amputation. Necessarily, when a person becomes a symbol, they stop being a person. That’s why we avoid discussing the character flaws of our icons. We don’t need to discuss MLK’s infidelity or FDR’s polio. The dirty human details, if they do not add to the legacy, are often snipped away.

Still, a glimpse at the person behind the symbol can sometimes reveal a truth about the concept we are attempting to crystallize. If the person’s sacrifice proves the importance of the virtue in question, what if find out that our knowledge of the sacrifice is defective?

I had just heard about the teargassing of Wangari Maathai, when I bumped into someone who knows her online. I had just begun to embark on a rant about how tough she is and how proud I am that she can stand up to the Kenyan government bullying her, trying to silence her message over and over. When I started I did not know just how well my friend knew Maathai, so I was thrilled to be interrupted and offered some perspective:

Wangari will be told “Don’t set up a stage in the middle of a highway.” then she’ll start arguing about the rights she’s due… and then she’ll get beaten… and then she’ll find another obscene place to set up the same stage, like on top of a police station… and then she’ll get maced
and then she’ll relocate to doing it in an allowed location. By this time she’s given the government enough ammunition to justly bomb her, but they settle for tear gas. And in the news, it sounds beautiful. In reality, not very….productive.

Come to think of it, I could not really argue with this. She has always been known for her defiance, so it’s not obviously out of character. As for the wisdom of her strategy, I could not possibly comment, since everything I know about her has been edited and published after the fact,  usually by some unavoidably biased party. It’s not so much that I would believe anything my friend told me. It was more that I knew that these words were spoken from personal experience, from a place of respect but not hero-worship.

I had to strongly consider at that point whether or not this was the sort of evidence that should keep Wangari Maathai from being a symbol for me. If her tenacious, unyielding pursuit of change was simply the flip side to blind stubbornness, perhaps her legacy is less martyrdom and more masochism. I don’t know.

It’s not that this conversation was enough to ruin her for me. Even if everything I heard was true, the good far outweighs the flaws. A harsh criticism of her tactics (and maybe even her motives) would not be enough to negate what she has been able to accomplish. Probably, in the end, she will still live on as a symbol for so many people. By the simple invocation of her name, we will be reminded that planting trees can stop war.  Why shouldn’t that be enough?

Yesterday, I was incensed by something. I meant to write about it then, but I got distracted. Blame my mosquito-like attention span. But now I’m incensed again and I just happen to be sitting around my house not doing anything.

I was driving my son to his grandmother’s house yesterday. He’s reading a book (hooray literacy). And I was listening to one of the local Spanish language radio stations. About an hour into our drive he was half-way through his Captain Underpants book and I hadn’t heard an English word since he started. Then I was accosted by the height of American arrogance. It was the kind of thing that perfectly illustrated the “ugly American” stereotype.

An hour into my trip, I heard the mid-Western English that has become the standard of television presenters the whole country over. It was a commercial for a weight-loss supplement. Some cut-rate Jenny Craig program. Did I mention it was entirely in English? Did I mention I was listening to the Spanish language station? Anything else I’m leaving out?

It’s not like this was a television spot that they would have had to re-dub, re-shoot, and possible recast to create a Spanish version. This was a radio spot! All they had to do was hand their script to any solidly bilingual person and get a translation knocked out. It would have taken about 20 extra minutes. But that was too much for this company to bother with.

Wouldn’t it have been easier for them to just come right out and say, “We don’t respect you our potential customer enough to bother reaching out the slightest little bit. Screw you, buy our product. Oh, and go back to Mexico.” Because really, isn’t that what they were saying anyway?

For those who don’t know, an embargo on a news story essentially means that respectable news outlets have jointly agreed not to tell a story, or to not tell a story until some future date. It’s the reason that journalists can tell you what the President will say at a speech a day before he says it. It’s also the reason you never see that President Bush went to Iraq until after he has already left. News people know he’s there, but they’ve agreed not to tell anyone else. Why? Because it could get someone killed. Maybe the president, maybe someone protecting the president.

It’s also the reason that no news outlet has told you that Britain’s Prince Harry was serving in Afghanistan. There was a fake story run out by the British Defence Ministry that he was training in Canada. Truth is, Harry had been in Afghanistan for months. A lot of journalists knew. I knew. But no one had leaked the information because it would paint a big target on Harry’s back for every Taliban fighter in Afghanistan to take aim. Until today. (more…)

A story about water got me thinking today. Authorities in Gaza are telling residents to boil their water before using it to drink or cook. Why? The ongoing Israeli blockade has caused a shortage of the chlorine needed to treat municipal water supplies.

The story got me thinking about a question. At what price can I protect myself? (more…)

We’re all pretty familiar with the omnipresent accusations that Wal-Mart treats its employees poorly. And that’s in the United States where we at least pay lip-service to the idea of workers’ rights. Travel abroad and you get a true sense of the cynical attitudes at the heart of the company.

Here’s an example from Mexico. South of the border, Wal-Mart is now in the micro-lending game. In Mexico, that essentially means Wal-Mart has opened a loan-sharking operation. (more…)

We get worked up when grown men shoot up steroids to throw a ball harder, or run a little faster. But in Japan, the case of a dead sumo trainee is making our little sports scandal look about as important as a game of pick-up sticks. (more…)

Cameroon has a forest for lease. They’re willing to lease it to loggers and have it destroyed. But they’re also willing to lease it to conservationists and have it preserved. Morally, the Cameroonian government is neutral. Actually, to their credit, they’ve stated a preference for leasing it to an environmental group.

The forest is priced at $1.6 million annually and so far none of the deep-pocketed, save the Earth types have ponied up. There’s not a George Soros, a Bono, or a Bill Gates in sight. Hell, Sir Richard Branson could pay for a good decade out of his walking around money. So what’s going on here? (more…)