Sunday, October 08, 2006

Counting Cherry Stones: the White Feather Wielder and the Down-trodden Woman

Despatching young men to drown in mud, just as the sirens sang them down beneath the swell. Her creator described her and her gift as �far more terrible than anything they [men] can meet in battle.� Perhaps to those who believed in ideas of manliness and womanliness she was more terrible at that.

Friday, July 28, 2006

Counting Cherry Stones: The Grocer’s Daughter

“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Rich man, Poor man, Beggarman, Thief.”

It’s a rhyme for counting cherry stones. A kind of game.

You count the stones and they tell you who will be your husband. Or rather his occupation, which amounted to the same thing for those of an age to play it. It’s from a time before mine, when girls – or at least the particular girls likely to have leisure for such games – were expected to take husbands (not partners, not girlfriends, nor to live in glorious solitude). And from a time too, when the equivalent rhyme for those particular girls didn’t let them count too many cherries.

It’s cherry season here in a dangerously over-heated summer. I’m counting stones, but the types turning over in my head don’t come from the rhyme.

Grocer’s Daughter, Rosie the Riveter, White-Feather Wielder, Downtrodden Woman.

“If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.”

“I want not to ask you but to tell you not to participate in the oppression of your sisters. Mothers who abuse their children are women, and another woman, not an agency, has to be willing to stay their hands. Mothers who set fire to school buses are women, and another woman, not an agency, has to tell them to stay their hands . . .”

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Music for the People

Once upon a time I found a collection of G.B. Shaw’s music criticism in a second-hand bookstore. It only cost a dollar, so I bought it. I didn’t know much about Shaw – only that he’d written a play I very much liked (Arms and the Man) and that he had a reputation for a fierce wit. Well-earned. Leafing through the book I found gems such as:

Happy are those composers, performers, musical impressarios and organisers of choral festivals who did not happen to be living and working during his tenure as a music critic, for he was that most dangerous of creatures: an honest man. I took it home to read in more detail. After all, it was only a dollar. And at some point in the following days I found this:

“What we want is not music for the people, but bread for the people, rest for the people, immunity from robbery and scorn for the people, hope for them, enjoyment, equal respect and consideration, life and aspiration, instead of drudgery and despair. When we get that I imagine the people will make tolerable music for themselves, even if all Beethoven’s scores perish in the interim.”

I typed out Shaw’s words, printed them off and propped them up on top of my monitor. The rest of that term, I used to glance up at them occasionally, while I wrote about fourteenth-century motets, or – yes—Beethoven’s approach to form. But whether or not I looked at that piece of paper, it looked at me. After that term I don’t remember what happened to it: perhaps it was lost or discarded out when I moved. It no longer mattered by then: Shaw’s accusation, his question, was in my head every time I set finger to keyboard or pen to paper.

I fought him. Every day for more than six years, I fought. I accused, I denied, I contradicted, justified and rationalised, weaved, dodged, ducked and dived with the best of them. For though I was an economic emigrant, money was not my only motive. And I had something to lose: I had left a lot of people and all the places I knew, to pursue this particular future.

The opening salvos in that long war of attrition were sadly predictable.

“How dare you, George?” (he just hated being called George, so I called him George on every possible occasion – Georgie Porgie if I were feeling particularly vindictive), I said between clenched teeth, “How. Dare. You. Judge. By what possible right? You –a writer of clever social comedies for the leisured classes – yourself a music critic! You are a complete hypocrite. Shame on you.”

“What we want,” he replied with infuriating calm, “is not music for the people, but bread for the people, rest for the people, immunity from robbery and scorn for the people, hope for them, enjoyment, equal respect and consideration, life and aspiration, instead of drudgery and despair. When we get that I imagine the people will make tolerable music for themselves, even if all Beethoven’s scores perish in the interim.”

But this time, I heard what had been there in those words the first time too. Accusation? Yes. Perhaps. But self-accusation in equal measure. And whereas he was dead, I was still alive.

“But George.” I said after some pause. “This isn’t my fault. Really. It isn’t. I did not invent Empires. I did not make the munitions. I didn’t go soldiering. I did not build the barbed wire borders. The thumb screws, the hoods, the exposed wires, those prison cells with grated drains? – these were not of my construction. The maquiladoras? Not of my manufacture. I have not grabbed land in the Taranaki, or anywhere else for that matter. In the bigger scheme of things I am innocent: there are no flies on me. I am not to blame for sexism, for racism, for xenophobia, for homophobia, for imperialism, for any of that. Why then should I not live my life in peace and quiet, doing something which – after all – does not cause anyone any particular harm? There are many far worse things I could choose to do.

“What we want,” he replied, rootling through my well-stocked fridge, rummaging through my full cupboards and wardrobe, casting a sceptical eye over my over-burdened bookcase and peering out my dorm window out over the peaceful snowbound town, “is not music for the people, but bread for the people, rest for the people, immunity from robbery and scorn for the people, hope for them, enjoyment, equal respect and consideration, life and aspiration, instead of drudgery and despair. When we get that I imagine the people will make tolerable music for themselves, even if all Beethoven’s scores perish in the interim.”

I had little reply. The point was clear enough.

Truth be told, those opening salvos were brief. A week? Two weeks max. And from there, Georgie and I settled down in our respective trenches for a long slow war of attrition. The weapons of choice? Justification. Rationalisation. Prevarication.

“Hey George,” I shouted across No-Man’s Land, “I teach people – students, yeah? That’s useful isn’t it? And music can be political and we need to know how that works don’t we?”

But George was having none of it. He just sat there, hunkered down in his trench, darning his socks, looking smug. “What we want –” he began to call back –

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever. Shut up already.”

I told George to ‘Shut up’ most days for a good few years, but he just didn’t seem to do so. And in that time I came up with any number of variants on the general theme, but the answer stayed the same.

“Hey Georgie” I yelled much later, thinking that maybe this time I’d discovered a devastating new tactic that would keep him quiet once and for all, “Look at this – I’m doing all this union work. Lots of it – oodles of it. That makes it ok, right? I can keep on with the music thing if I’m doing stuff like this the rest of the time, can’t I?”

He didn’t even bother opening his mouth. He just raised an eyebrow from across No-Man’s-Land and even at that distance I could see he was going to give me one of those Looks.

It was a long slow war: in the end it was a relief to lose.

The more I tried to justify what I was doing, the more my deeds required justification.

The more I tried to give reasons, the more they seemed like rationalisation.

And the thing about both justifications and reasons is that sooner or later, they run out. About six years in, I found myself one day with nothing left. I had nothing left to say to Shaw’s words.

“Yes,” I was finally forced to concede, “That is what we want. And yes, if we have that, people will make tolerable music for themselves, even if . . .”

It was the first moment of peace I’d known for a long time, that moment when I realised I couldn’t be a musicologist after all.

(Though to an external observer it might have seemed that nothing changed, or rather, not immediately. I still finished (most of it was already written by then, after all – and figuring out what one cannot do is not the same as discovering what one can) but what usually serves as one’s introduction to a field became, to all intents and purposes, my farewell.)

It’s not that I sleep better now exactly, but what keeps me sleepless is not that particular angst, not that particular maze of justification. It’s not that I’m out of the woods, either – but it is true the trees do seem sometimes a little less entangling. So there’s something I want to say which is well overdue:

Hey Bernard. Thanks. A thousand thanks. And I’m sorry that I called you names.

Thursday, June 08, 2006

This is What Complicity Looks Like

A web of collusion tethered to four continents, ensnaring the world: a secretive geography of fear.

This is what complicity looks like.

It is a perverse reflection of the forced immobility of refugees.  Those who flee torture are held paralysed in the static limbo of the detention centre, the temporary hostel, the holding pen. Those whom certain client states (doubtless for reasons of political expediency and the preservation of ‘special relationships’) consent to persecute are forced into flight. Not flight from torture but towards it. And – in some cases at least – they are not flown far. In the cautiously discrete words of Dick Marty, “a number of coherent and converging elements indicate that secret detention centres did indeed exist in Europe.” Dick Marty Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights Alleged Secret Detentions and unlawful inter-state transfers involving Council of Europe Member States ( Draft Report Part II , June 2006, 1.8.23). It is thought that Rumania and Poland currently harbour secret CIA detention centres.

The chief-spider-in-charge officially began the weaving of this web in the mid-1990s. The programme was devised under Clinton by Michael Scheuer (who remained in the employ of the C.I.A. until November 2004) as a way of taking “terrorist suspects in foreign countries ‘off the streets’ by transporting them back to other countries, where they were wanted for trial, or for detention without any form of due process.” (Marty, 2.26)

Rendition. It’s a lovely word in its way, doubtless chosen with exquisite care. On its surface it’s merely another mealy-mouthed euphemism: kissing cousin to ‘collateral damage,’ ‘surgical strike’ and ‘shoot to incapacitate.’ But as Naomi Klein and others before her have observed, torture is predicated upon a ‘knowing / not knowing.’ It is a secret that is really no secret at all: a “semi-clandestine institution” (Sartre, “A Victory” Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism ). And herein lies the particular appropriateness of ‘rendition’ for it is a semi-clandestine word. Though bland enough on its surface, it bears the resonance of other meanings (albeit philologically distinct): to rend – to tear with violent force; to render – to extract (fat) by melting (meat).

And in selecting as his leitmotif the spider’s web, Marty chose well. For even the process by which prisoners are ‘prepared’ with a ‘security check’ for ‘rendition’ bears a grotesque resemblance to the spider’s systematic entombment of its prey.

85. The general characteristics of this “security check” can be established from a host of testimonies as follows:

i. it generally takes place in a small room (a locker room, a police reception area) at the airport, or at a transit facility nearby.

ii. the man is sometimes already blindfolded when the operation begins, or will be blindfolded quickly and remain so throughout most of the operation.

iii. four to six CIA agents perform the operation in a highly-disciplined, consistent fashion – they are dressed in black (either civilian clothes or special ‘uniforms’), wearing black gloves, with their full faces covered. Testimonies speak, variously, of “big people in black balaclavas”, people “dressed in black like ninjas”, or people wearing “ordinary clothes, but hooded”.

iv. the CIA agents “don’t utter a word when they communicate with one another”, using only hand signals or simply knowing their roles implicitly.

v. some men speak of being punched or shoved by the agents at the beginning of the operation in a rough or brutal fashion; others talked about being gripped firmly from several sides

vi. the man’s hands and feet are shackled.

vii. the man has all his clothes (including his underwear) cut from his body using knives or scissors in a careful, methodical fashion; an eye-witness described how “someone was taking these clothes and feeling every part, you know, as if there was something inside the clothes, and then putting them in a bag”.

viii. the man is subjected to a full-body cavity search, which also entails a close examination of his hair, ears, mouth and lips.

ix. the man is photographed with a flash camera, including when he is nearly or totally naked; in some instances, the man’s blindfold may be removed for the purpose of a photograph in which his face is also identifiable.

x. some accounts speak of a foreign object being forcibly inserted into the man’s anus; some accounts speak more specifically of a tranquiliser or suppository being administered per rectum - in each description this practice has been perceived as a grossly violating act that affronts the man’s dignity.

xi. the man is then dressed in a nappy or incontinence pad and a loose-fitting “jump-suit” or set of overalls; “they put diapers on him and then there is some handling with these handcuffs and foot chains, because first they put them on and then they are supposed to put him in overalls, so then they have to alternately unlock and relock them”.

xii. the man has his ears muffled, sometimes being made to wear a pair of “headphones”

xiii. finally a cloth bag is placed over the man’s head, with no holes through which to breathe or detect light; they “put a blindfold on him and after that a hood that apparently reaches far down on his body” .

xiv. the man is typically forced aboard a waiting aeroplane, where he may be “placed on a stretcher, shackled”, or strapped to a mattress or seat, or “laid down on the floor of the plane and they bind him up in a very uncomfortable position that makes him hurt from moving”.

xv. in some cases the man is drugged and experiences little or nothing of the actual rendition flight; in other cases, factors such as the pain of the shackles or the refusal to drink water or use the toilet make the flight unbearable: “this was the hardest moment in my life”.

xvi. in most cases, the man has no notion of where he is going, nor the fate that awaits him upon arrival.

Marty, 2.7.1.85

Usually, what awaits them on arrival at that unknown destination is a secretive indefinite detention, profound isolation and torture.

Go.

Read the whole report It does not take long.

See for yourself the complicity of the colonies, the collusion of the client-states, set forth in calm judicious (though alas, not judicial) tones.

Monday, June 05, 2006

This is What Solidarity Looks Like

If ever they did, they need no longer doubt whom they are or where they stand. The members of Education sans Frontières -- and many others—have made their choice.

Spring has come and gone. A long and anxious summer is beginning.

On May 19th 2006 (though I suspect most had made their promises earlier) they vowed to hide and shelter school-children and college students whom French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy had ordered to be rounded up and summarily deported in late June 2006. The basis of the planned deportations is the irregular status of the children’s parents.

So now and through the coming weeks, all over France, families under threat of deportation will be meeting—often for the first time—with those who are going to shelter their children from the police and from the State. Plans are being laid. Spare rooms are being recurtained, attics and basements are being prepared. Indeed some are already in hiding.

Without doubt—just as those who prepare to send their children into hiding with strangers must wonder ‘Can I trust you?’—those preparing shelter will find themselves considering their circumstances anew. “Whom among my friends and neighbours do I trust to not flap their mouth?” they must ask themselves. “Whom among my own child’s friends knows how to keep silent?”

As they plan for contingencies (plans some will doubtless need as the imperative to recruit and organise volunteers necessitated public offers of shelter in some cases), they will be wondering about these questions in ways, perhaps, that they have not before. For it is one thing to trust one’s neighbour with the house keys, to be confident that they will water the potplants and feed the cat while one is on vacation—it is one thing even to trust them with one’s own life. But it is something else to entrust another’s. Some deep friendships will be forged this summer: inevitably, others will be broken.

So where do they stand then, these attic tidiers, these curtain purchasers, these basement redecorators?

With those who place water in dry places.
With Miep Gies.
With those who claim that these behaviours—far from being heroic—are merely the normal, civilised thing to do in the face of incivility.

As one put it, ‘It is quite simple. They live in my road. Their kids go to the same school as my son. It’s normal. It’s the only thing to do.’”

Friday, June 02, 2006

The Tip of the Iceberg

Well, actually in an over-optimistic (not usually one of my faults) and over-populous feat of misreading and mathmatical ineptitude, I actually said 200 000 million, but I�ve corrected that now. Mea culpa.)

I�m one of that 200 million.

Primarily, I�d categorise myself as an economic migrant with regular status � at least that�s what I am in my head. Technically though, mine has been a case of hopping from one non-immigrant visa to the next, with some country hopping thrown in for good measure. I started out as a (non)migrant in the U.S.: once it became impossible to remain there legally I became a (non)migrant in the U.K. At least my current visa offers a tenuous path to residency.

Obviously, migration is like everything else: mixed motives go with the territory and my motives were no exception. A big part of it was wanting to keep on studying the thing I loved most � which it took me a good seven years of struggle and moral angst to finally abandon in favour of something that � well, I would say it lets me sleep at night, but that�s a whole ‘nother kettle of fish. Part of it was curiousity � wanting to see the heart of the Evil Empire up close and personal (and yes, in the time and place from whence I come, the United States was without doubt the Evil Empire. N.Z. is a client state but that doesn�t mean the populace likes it too much.) Part of it was peer pressure: most of my close friends had left already. Part of it was that leaving was � in many ways at least � the path of least resistance. Which is a bit odd if you think about it, given that emigration is almost always an experience of profound dislocation � and it certainly did turn out to be so in my case. But nevertheless, filthy lucre was up there somewhere very near the top of the list � not in the sense of a desire to earn millions but certainly in the sense of not wanting to worry about electricity bills and not being able to afford a doctor any more � and for that reason I shall always class myself as an economic migrant first and foremost.

Anyway, personal digressions and self-indulgence aside, I thought it might be interesting � especially in light of the excellent work Man Eegee and Migra Matters are doing around migration in the U.S. context to find out a bit more about the other 199 999 999. Where do we live? Why did we migrate? And who are �we� anyway?

Well fortunately, the Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM) have been doing some work on answering some of these questions. There�s a lot there to disagree with as well as to agree with (at least if you’re like me and have somewhat un-nuanced views on borders and the desirability of opening them forthwith), but it�s well worth the read.

Mostly likely though, they underestimate the count of undocumented migrants, so really, it�s 199 999 999+ of us.

�We� � and it�s one of the very few �we�s� to which I shall lay unequivocal claim � are non-nationals. But if we were a nation, we would be the fifth most populous on Earth depending on that undetermined (but valued!) number of us who are �irregular.�

Still, we are only about 3% of the world’s population in total or perhaps a little more.

Migration has often been thought of as a young man�s game, but almost half of us are women.

We come from everywhere and we go everywhere: the �distinction that has been made between country of origin, transit and destination� has become increasingly difficult to sustain� (GCIM, 5). In other words, you cannot escape us.

49 million of us live in Asia. 16 million of us live in Africa. 6 million of us live in Latin America and the Caribbean. The rest of us, if only by process of elimination, live in North America, Europe (that�s me!), Russia and the states of the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, Australasia and Oceania (and doubtless other places too that are not so easily categorised).

A few of us (like me) are educationally, economically and racially privileged: most of us are not.

About 20 million of us are refugees and most of that subset of us lead desperate lives indeed.

An awful lot of us are economic migrants and an awful lot of us send money �home.� In terms of developmental impact that�s hugely important. Although the extent to which we have a home is questionable. Notions of �home� are � in my, and in the experience of those very few of us for whom I feel entitled to speak � among the very first things to become problematic. It might be more appropriate to say that a lot of us send money to people whom we love or care for.

It�s sad but true that some of us are trafficked. Some of us are forced migrants. But slamming the door in our faces is no solution to this.

Whoever we are and whereever we are, we did not surrender our humanity the day we crossed the border. All too often � though this would be true even if it had been only one of us � we crossed the border because it was the only way we had to preserve our humanity.

And here�s the important bit � we migrants are only the iceberg�s tip. Like most icebergs, 90% lies below the waterline. For after all, be you the most stay-at-home person from the most stay-at-home family � still, most likely you have migrant ancestors and relatives, distant or near, migrant friends and colleagues, close or casual. (Were we a nation, we would after all be the fifth most populous on Earth.) So even if you have not yet yourself ventured out into that wider world, it has nonetheless most likely ventured towards you, smiling, with welcoming hand extended. Mostly likely, you, too, are part of diaspora. The question that remains is whether you will choose to claim it.

Open the borders.
The world was never meant to be a prison.

“The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot for ever fence it out � J.R.R. Tolkien, (b. Bloemfontein, S.A., 1892, d. U.K., 1973).

Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Boarding the Ark

Let me tell you a story.

Once, in a time and place that now seems as remote and unfathomable as any long-lost Atlantis, I trained as a medieval musicologist. A rigorous and thorough preparation for a life very different than mine. That’s not the story. But that distant far-off place is where I learned this story, by reading the lines and what lies between them. 

In a smallish town, many years ago, there lived a man called Noe. He had a wife and some married sons. There’s no point in asking his wife’s name - no-one remembers it. This town was perhaps a little licentious. On special occasions it’s possible that it could even have been described as libidinous. Noe - most assuredly a virtuous man - certainly thought so. Often he could be seen moping about and grumbling into his beard about the `youth of today’ and `sinks of iniquity.’

Evidently Noe wasn’t alone in his opinions, for after a few years of moping he began building a sizeable boat. The town being fairly well inland, it would be fair to say that this attracted some local attention. Noe told all who asked - and many did - that God planned on flooding the entire Earth and drowning everyone, since the youth of today were simply not up to scratch, the whole place was a sink of iniquity and thoroughly libidinous to boot. Only he and his family were to be saved.

It’s unclear whether Noe started out thinking that only he and his family were to be saved, or whether his sceptical reception from inquirers led him to this view.

His wife rolled her eyes and did her best to ignore the sounds of sawing and hammering. She did her best not to see the thick layer of wood-dust that settled on everything as fast as she could wipe it. She went about her business as usual, selling her goods in the market, meeting with her friends and sharing the news of the town. Perhaps she spent less time than usual at home, but in this she was alone within her family. For the sons had been roped into sawing and hammering, and the daughters-in-law were occupied with tending an ever-increasing menagerie whose yammering and clamouring threatened to outdo even the noise of construction.

And then the rains came. At first this was a welcome break in the dry season, a chance for the wells to be replenished, an omen of a good harvest free from drought. But they did not stop.

And Noe’s wife looked at the ark and at her husband’s barely disguised glee at the prospect of divine retribution.

The rains continued. People retreated to the highest ground within the town, to the rises, the hillocks, the roofs. All crowded together, people grew sick from strange illnesses and died, especially the very old and the very young.

Noe’s boat began to float.

And here is where the story diverges. In the usual version, Noe’s wife gets on board like a good little girl, leaving her friends, their children, her relatives and all to drown. On the ark, she floats for forty days and forty nights. Eventually a dove is released and disappears for a few days before flapping back with an olive branch.

But in some much later versions - plays enacted in England’s wealthier market towns in the later middle ages - the tale is told a little bit differently.

In one, Noe’s wife refuses to board the ark. Then, feeling the water at her feet, her courage fails her and she runs aboard.

In yet a different version, she and her friends are gathered before the ark. She refuses to board unless they too are saved. Noe forces her aboard and leaves her friends to drown.

At the time these plays were performed, Noe’s wife was understood as a comic character - an example of the vice-filled, contrary wife. Her refusal to board the ark is meant to be funny. Whether through her own cowardice, or a lack of physical strength, her rebellion is so easily undone. But to me, peering at her this way and that through my mis-matched eyes, Noe’s nameless wife does not seem so very funny.

For left to my own devices, virtue and vice should be assigned quite differently.

Afterword

Oddly enough, I don’t take my name from this particular dove.
It’s a name I took some years ago now for various and sundry reasons.
I needed a user-name for a long-defunct BBS in a far-off country. Which is true.
It seemed a kind of counterbalance to a serpent pendant that I used to wear: it reminded me of the phrase “Be ye therefore wise as serpents, harmless as doves. “ (An injunction! Not a self-description!) I didn’t encounter the phrase in the Bible, but rather in Strength to Love a collection of Dr. Martin Luther King’s sermons which is part of why it stayed with me.  That is true too.
But the reason I have kept it as one of my names is because the dove is a symbol of peace and non-violence—and since I am by nature neither peaceful nor non-violent, it provides me with a useful reminder. And this is true also.