Jihadism vs. Humanism
Film director Abderrahmane Sissako, best known for Timbuktu, his film about the Islamist occupation of that historic city, spoke about his life and work in a dialogue with film scholar Michael Cramer at the French Consulate in New York City last week. His comments on the vicious killjoys who meant to humiliate Africans in Timbuktu by forbidding music, sports, and irreverence have taken on a new resonance in the wake of the terror attacks in Paris. But Sissako’s presence would be bracing at any time. Click on his picture below to see/hear video of the event at the French Consulate. Be aware it runs on empty for a couple minutes before you begin to hear crowd noise. The conversation starts about 1o minutes in. (And before you go there, you might want to check this memorable scene from Timbuktu, which was also shown about an hour into the discourse at the Consulate.)
Sissako noted he hoped Timbuktu would uphold the humanism of those in that city “who resisted silently”: “Those who hid to sing, or listened to the radio under the blanket, or were playing soccer in their minds.” He averred he lacked such quiet courage, but his modest, yet undeniable acts of imagination make one doubt his self-assessment. What seems most likely is that Sissako’s characters are true to their director’s beautiful core. You’ll catch a glimpse of it, if you watch the conversation above.
Thanks to Judith Walker, Mathieu Fournet and Cultural Services of the French Embassy for enabling First to embed their video (and to Oliver Conant for steering your editor to the event last week). B.D.
They’d Rather Be in Philadelphia
Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun observed that “if a man were permitted to make all the ballads he need not care who should make the laws”. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton is now testing an expansion of this proposition: if you could make all the ballads, need you care what is taught in the schools?
Timothy Mayer’s “Adams Chronicles”
Fredric Smoler’s mockery (above) of wannabe worldly—truly deadly—approaches to the American Revolution has an extra kick for this editor. My son’s assigned reading in his 7th grade class this season is a Y.A. text, My Brother Sam Is Dead, that leeches glory—and all the juice—out of our country’s creation story. Higher learning’s disdain for “American exceptionalism” seems to have trickled down to progressive high schools and middle schools.
“Hamilton”
In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body – it is heritage.” The United States has brutalized not only the black body but the indigenous body, simultaneously denying these people, along with women and non-Anglo immigrants and their descendants, the full rights of citizenship. Since the late 1960s, it has been commonplace for the arts to highlight American hypocrisy. And so, hearing, in the age of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, of a hip-hop musical about the American Revolution and the early days of the Republic, written by and starring a Latino-American with African American actors playing most of the second leads, one might reasonably assume that such a play would drip with irony. One might anticipate raps about the three-fifths clause and property requirements for voting, eleven o’clock numbers by displaced Shawnee, and choruses sung by Sally Hemmings’ children. One would be wrong.
Caravaggio (Redux)
One night in bed you asked me who was my favourite painter. I hesitated, searching for the least knowing, most truthful answer. Caravaggio. My own reply surprised me. There are nobler painters and painters of greater breadth of vision. There are painters I admire more and who are more admirable. But there is none, so it seems—for the answer came unpremeditated—to whom I feel closer.
Greider and Goodwyn
William Greider published a piece last week criticizing a New Yorker “Talk of the Town” take on Trump (and Bernie Sanders) that conflated their political theater with American populism. Greider emailed a link to his Nation piece, which he self-deprecatingly described as a “rant,” to me (and others). I responded as follows…
Is Dan Mad?
George Trow’s magnificent, prophetic piece on Dan Rather—first published in First of the Month in 1999—never grows old.
Square Dance With God
The author is a physician and priest who has been working in Haiti for more than a generation, running hospitals and social programs in Port au Prince as well as a Nuestros Pequenos Hermanos (NPH) orphanage on the outskirts of the capital. Fr. Frechette is the author of The God of Rough Places, the Lord of Burnt Men and First has often posted his stories from Haiti.
The Other 9/11
On September 11th, every year, it became a habit for certain melancholic leftists who consider themselves heretical thinkers to reflect, not on the Ouroboros of McEmpire and McJihad, or whatever, but on Allende shooting it out with fascist generals with Castro’s sub-machine gun.
The African Lady (Redux)
When Ta-Nehisi Coates was trying to make sense of the world as a young student, his first working theory “held all black people as kings in exile, a nation of original men severed from our original names and our majestic Nubian culture.” With help from teachers at Howard, Coates thought his way out of compensatory history. Coates’s movement of mind sent your editor back to the following post by Anita Franklin, which originally appeared here in 2013. B.D.
Very Serious Fantasts
P.W. Singer and August Cole have just published Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War.
Doom in the Bud: Golding’s Studies in a Dying Culture
Full Communism
Communism is free time and nothing else, he thought when he woke up in the morning. And when he went to sleep: predicting what life will be like under communism would be like packing for a dream.
Enigma & Genius: On Lebron James and Draymond Green
After a grueling six preparatory weeks of the NBA Playoffs, basketball fans and Lebron James followers alike had a week off before the Finals began. After conquering the Eastern Conference, King James seemed as worn out as I felt, but one could hope that the rest would be as rejuvenative as the two week mid-season rest he gave himself for his thirtieth birthday, after which he returned to his own self, turning around what looked like a disappointing season for the returning Odysseus of Northeast Ohio.
Kazin, Bellow and Trilling: A Tryptich
I have a stake in Zachary Leader’s new huge first volume biography of Saul Bellow that has just appeared. Bellow was a friend and Leader gives a brief account of the exchange I had with him days before he died. When I visited, his assistant told me that Saul had not been speaking for days and would I try to get him to speak. I asked Saul “what do you have to say for yourself?” A pause and he lit up. “I’ve been thinking: am I a man or a jerk?” I said “would you believe my answer?”
Part Two
What follows is the second installment in an ongoing serialized essay about two overlapping developments within modern American culture: the questionable popular demand that political leaders come “with a narrative” and, on the literary front, a general revival of approval for long serial narratives.
Ambassador Satch’s Talk-Back
Julian Bond dug the first issue of First of the Month and stayed in our corner. While his support for First was of vanishingly small import compared to his other services to our country, it was an honor to know he was paying attention. After Amiri Baraka died last year, Bond sent First a swatch of an interview he’d conducted with Baraka under the aegis of the University of Virginia’s “Explorations in Black Leadership” program. Once it was edited and published he wrote to say “it was great to read this again, especially the Louis Armstrong section.” What follows is the section he highlighted.
Giving Us Something We Can Feel
You couldn’t buy a copy of Between the World and Me on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for a stretch last month since it was sold out of every book store. It was rousing to find out readers were hungry for Ta-Nehisi Coates’s polemic against structural racism.
Shelby Steele’s Historylessness
What follows is a compacted version of a critique of Shelby Steele’s The Content of Our Character (1991) that originally appeared in The Trouble With Friendship (1995).
Southern Changes
Dylann Roof almost didn’t go through with it–“everyone was so nice to me.” The thought of him waiting/wondering in the church before he used the gun he bought at “Shooter’s Choice” reminds me of this passage in Intruder in the Dust where Faulkner claimed every white Southern boy could lock into the moment before Pickett’s Charge–the disaster at Gettysburg that came to stand for the Confederacy’s mad gambles:
Teaching the Conflict
Writers and cartoonists who refuse to honor Charlie Hebdo aren’t thinking straight. Yet I don’t hate their impulse to distance themselves from those who are down with gratuitous humiliation of Muslims in France or anywhere else.