World
Putting Women First
The first photograph I remembered showing the Taliban at work actually dated to the Soviet occupation. It showed a victim of the mujahedin, a woman in a burqa lying on the ground with a caption explaining that she had been shot to death for teaching girls to read. I think my mistake came from later reading about such killings by the Taliban. One of the more horrific newspaper anecdotes I can remember about the Taliban was very recently repeated, probably in either the Times or the Washington Post, by a reporter apparently once as startled by it as I was—it related Taliban amputating the finger tip of a woman who’d applied nail polish. The most memorable internet-viewable home video showed a middle-aged man identified as a member of the Taliban morals police repeatedly beating a woman in a burqa with a leather paddle, the woman screaming, and her screams translated in the subtitles as something like “Just kill me”. The relatively frequent news stories about the forced marriage of quite young girls to Taliban fighters were much more common, also arguably worse, so it is presumably the rarity of the video, perhaps surreptitiously recorded on an early smart phone, that made it stick in my mind.
Bridges to Misogynists
A graph in a recent Times op-ed by an apologist for China’s rulers summed up their party-line takeaway from an American defeat:
Afghanistan has long been considered a graveyard for conquerors — Alexander the Great, the British Empire, the Soviet Union and now the United States. Now China enters — armed not with bombs but construction blueprints, and a chance to prove the curse can be broken.
My Summer Vacation in Afghanistan
This beautiful piece of travel writing was first published in First of the Month in 2002. The following passage hints at how it provides a deep back story to current events:
The fact that the Taliban succeeded in taking over Afghanistan has always seemed to me a certain sign that the Afghanistan I knew was completely smashed to hell by the Russians and by civil war. I never heard any Afghan, however pious, praise “fundamentalism” or mullah-inspired bigotry. No one had ever heard of this perversion of Islam, which then existed only in Saudi Arabia. Afghan Islam was very orthopractic, but also very pro-sufi; essentially it was old-fashioned mainstream Islam. The idea of banning kite-flying would have probably caused hoots of incredulous laughter. It must have taken twenty years of vicious neo-imperialist ideological cultural murder and oppression to make Talibanism look like the least of all available evils.
A Piece from “The 14 Ounce Pound”
The late Nat Finkelstein contributed photographs and prose to “First” in the 00’s. He’s best known for his 60s pictures of Warhol’s Factory, but his life was bigger than his images. This piece, “Kandahar, 1971”, about his time in Afghanistan is from his memoir, “The 14 Ounce Pound.” (You can read another chapter here.) Nat knew this hunk of his past was pretty far gone, but he wondered if Afghanistan has “changed much in the past 1200 years.”
The Riderless Horse (Letter from Port au Prince)
The year was 1963. The name of the horse was Black Jack.
Even for a 10 year old, it was both moving and troubling to see the horse with no rider following the coffin of President John Kennedy–with a spirited strut, yet not easily controlled.
The horse with the empty saddle is an ancient symbol of poignant absence.
The horse without a master, the nation without a leader, the body without a soul.
We are living the painful and dangerous days after the brutal killing of Haitian President Jovenel Moise. The horse has no rider, and does not know where to turn.
New Directions: Aram Saroyan’s Q&A with Gerald Hausman
After meeting Gerald Hausman as a fellow poet and colleague in the Poet-in-the-Schools program in Massachusetts in the early 1970s, I soon admired his poetry. The work seemed to me a fresh incarnation of a tradition I identified with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch. Uniquely, looking into those early chapbooks today, the work continues to hold its charge. Over the years, while we stayed in touch and exchanged books, it was only recently, with the publication of two new books, Little Miracles and Mystic Times with Noel Coward in Jamaica, both of which might be characterized as nonfiction novels, that I recognized he’d in the meantime emerged in a way I never could have imagined. In his prose the same ease and accuracy remain, and a deceptive modesty in the tone, but the explorations have expanded and magnified in all directions. I haven’t read anything that has affected me so powerfully in years. A.S.
It’s Tricky: Thinking Through “Dear Comrades”
When Putin was re-elected in 2018, Andrei Konchalovsky, director of Dear Comrades—the acclaimed historical drama about an atrocity erased from history during the Soviet era—spoke on RT of his “extraordinary joy” (though he sounded dutiful rather than giddy). Putin’s win, per Konchalovsky, was proof Russia was “going the right way.” I didn’t see his election spin on RT until after I’d watched Dear Comrades so it was a shock to hear him express disdain for the “fuss” made by Putin’s “paranoiac” critics since his film about the 1962 Novocherkassk massacre limns what happens in a country where no-one’s allowed to disturb powers-that-be.
Thionne Ballago Seck R.I.P.
Thionne Seck—perhaps the purist vocal talent in an extraordinary cohort of male Senegalese singers that includes Youssou N’Dour, Baaba Maal, Omar Pene and Ismael Lo—died on March 14th.
Boston Massacre Energy (in Russia)
The kicker…
Addio Alle Armi
Bruce Jackson wrote this reflection on an Italian cultural festival, lessons of Attica and a perfect night in Piacenza a few years ago, but it’s still on time.
Christmas and the Multiplication of Light
Fr. Rick Frechette is a medical doctor and Catholic priest who has been working in Haiti for a more than a generation. He wrote the following epistle to his family and supporters last Sunday, December 20th, the day before the Winter Solstice.
Papi Don’t Preach: Pedro Lemebel’s Anti-Macho Metaphysics of Love
Pedro Lemebel, queer artist and radical provocateur, was acknowledged to be an “essential figure of Chile” in his own country when he died in 2015. His work and life–“more than a writer; he was a free man” (per Wikipedia!)–are now becoming better known in El Norte. A documentary film, Lemebel, came out last year and Lemebel’s book Loco afán: crónicas de sidario (Crazy Desire: chronicles of the AIDS ward) has just been translated into English. What follows is a swatch from that report on gay life and death in a Latin American city of night.
On Verra Ca: Balla Sidibe R.I.P. & Orchestra Baobab’s Legacy
Balla Sidibe—one of the original front men of the legendary afro-pop band Orchestra Baobab—has gone to see what’s coming for all of us. You can watch the late Sidibe sing lead (and dance) here as Baobab does a charming version of a song that dates back to the 70s, “On Verra Ca.” 2020 is the 50th anniversary year of the band’s founding.
This next song is another Baobab classic. It’s the track that got me on board their train to heaven.