I am not familiar with the works of Spinoza, but I have come across quite a few people who really like him. One of my college professors identified him as being influenced by medieval Islamic philosophers, at least by way of Maimonides. Of course, given my deep interest in the Sephardim, I have been particularly curious of Spinoza’s background: an Iberian Jewish family exiled in Amsterdam. Oddly enough, in an interview published in last fall’s ISIM Review, Abdolkarim Soroush admitted to an affinity with Spinoza:
I have a personal relationship with Spinoza; I feel a certain similarity in my fate with that of Spinoza: because of some of his unorthodox views, he was excommunicated, and had to leave his place of birth in Amsterdam. Of course, Spinoza’s was not a biblical God; I think it is very unfair, however, to call Spinoza an atheist. Some of his ideas are very relevant to the modern Muslim world: reconciling the religious law with democracy and providing a modern understanding of the state is much like what Spinoza has been doing. What makes Spinoza modern is that he historicizes all prophethood; but his ideas of prophethood are inspired in part by al-Farabi and Moses Maimonides.
The full interview is available online (PDF file).
This week’s Nation is carrying an interesting review of the new book by Samantha Power (who is perhaps now best known for her Hilary-Clinton-is-a-monster-gaffe). Chasing the Flame is a portrait of Sérgio Vieira de Mello, the UN diplomat who was killed by the 2003 car bomb at Baghdad’s UN headquarters. Michael Massing’s book review tries to understand Power’s fascination with this man, whose life can best be described as sketchy. Incidentally, I learned, Vieira de Mello’s UN field career began in Bangladesh!
Unable to find a teaching job, Vieira de Mello landed a position with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). In 1971, at age 23, he was sent into the field for the first time, to Dhaka, Bangladesh, to help Bengalis displaced from Pakistan. Feeding and sheltering refugees, Vieira de Mello realized that he was meant to be a man of action, and his career path was set.
Even as my familiarity with Power is limited to talks at conferences in DC and Cambridge, I think Massing’s effort to locate the book in the context of her intellectual development makes sense–or, at least, make for interesting food for thought, especially for those of us angry youth who sneer at cooptation by power (Which makes me wonder, what will happen of Obama the Prophet? *shudder*):
Just as Vieira de Mello made the journey from student revolutionary to senior diplomat, so has Samantha Power gone from being an independent critic working outside the system to being a high-profile figure operating within it. Her book’s odd shifts in tone and frustrating gaps in analysis reflect, I think, the ambivalence she feels about making that transition. In grappling with the many compromises Vieira de Mello made in the course of his career, Power may be unconsciously wrestling with the accommodations she’s been forced to make as she’s traveled the perilous path from obscurity to celebrity, from being an outside analyst assessing those in power to being one of the powerful herself.
Read the full article here.
Filed under: Littéraire
Prière d’un petit enfant nègre
Guy Tirolien [1917 - 1988]
Seigneur
Je suis très fatigué
Je suis né fatigué
Et j’ai beaucoup marché depuis le chant du coq
Et le morne est bien haut qui mène à leur école
Seigneur je ne veux plus aller à leur école,
Faites je vous en prie que je n’y aille plus.
(more…)
While browsing some random blogs I came across a post on the adventures of artist/academic Hasan Elahi, who once had to deal with a false alarm at the FBI, which eventually gave him the idea for a ridiculously interesting project: putting up his whole life on the internet! On googling for more on this guy, I found that incidentally, The Colbert Report had him as a guest on the show just a few days ago: check out the wildly funny interview! The logic is impeccable:
If being candid about his flights could clear his name, why not be open about everything? “I’ve discovered that the best way to protect your privacy is to give it away,” he says [Wired]
I have to admit, nearly the same thought crossed my mind the last time I was flying back into the country and had a rather frustrating encounter with my “special registration” officer at the airport. Elahi’s work, nevertheless, raises some very thought-provoking questions about the intersections of the virtual and the real, and the meaning (and economics!) of privacy and intelligence in the cyber-age. Check out his website: www.elahi.org. There are pictures of all the meals he’s eaten over the course of three years, all the airports he’s been through, and (check this) all the toilets he’s been in! (Looks like he’s in Europe right now).
Filed under: Critique
I have often complained, along with my friends in college who were engaged in critical activism, about the pervasive tendency in our culture to treat racism as if it’s merely an issue of attitudes and personal prejudices. It was therefore refreshing to read a great article by Thomas Sugrue in The Nation, in which he presents a nuanced review of this and related issues. A pertinent excerpt:
The story of inequality is one of the maldistribution of power and resources. Racial inequality has persisted in American life not just because whites harbor bad thoughts about blacks but because the advantages that redound to whites through racial segregation, especially in housing and education, have yet to be dismantled. But structural explanations of racial inequality have never fared well in a culture that attributes success to individual merit and pluck. White Americans who live in privileged suburbs pride themselves on their colorblindness but resist efforts to construct affordable housing lest it interfere with property values. They rebel against the misuse of their tax dollars to support the indolent and efforts to shore up failing urban schools. Structural explanations are taboo because they puncture our treasured myths of upward mobility and self-reinvention. Anyone can make it if they try hard enough, if they break free from the chains of dependency, if they get up in the morning and say, “Yes, I can!”
If that last phrase sounds familiar, that’s probably because it’s deliberately so. The four books reviewed by Sugrue include one that was co-authored by Bill Cosby, and he also raises some interesting questions about notions like “sellout” or “race traitor.” Read the full piece here.
Filed under: Cinemático
I finally got to watch Caramel (2007) last night at a screening by a Lebanese initiative at KSG. It’s a very well-made film, all the more impressive considering that one of the main characters, Layale, was played by director Nadine Labaki herself—which I found out only at the end as the credits were rolling. I think the element that stands out most is the delectable sense of humor that runs throughout the film, and which places it squarely in the genre of comedy. The other thing I felt or imagined was a distinct nostalgic tenor, heightened by the many quiet, pensive moments in the narrative, by a certain use of colors (as in the poster image), and by its attention to inter-generational encounters (most notably with the character of the utterly adorable old woman, Rose’s older sister). In that sense, I think of the film as almost a recounting of a Beiruti belle époque, of a magical but lost era before the long and disastrous Lebanese civil war (although I think the story’s setting is contemporary). It is also rather ironic, as I could not help but keep thinking of as I watched the film, that the shooting for Caramel was apparently finished just nine days before that other recent war, when Israel attacked Lebanon two summers ago. And if you’re following the news this week, Beirut is again in the midst of crisis right now, and the worst fear is that we are on the brink of another civil war.
As most reviews have noted, Caramel is unique in completely ignoring politics: apparently the only Lebanse film that does not speak of conflict. But of course, it would be mistaken to say that it’s not political (is any story ever really apolitical?). Rather, the story of the five women at the heart of the movie appeals to the more universal, the more human story of women’s struggles as women. By showcasing resistance while also locating it in everyday life, imbued with humor, the film ends up being a deeply humanistic portrayal of society. Considering that this is her debut feature film, we should expect more great works from Labaki.
Filed under: Política
Last week on Sunday morning, I was sitting in the reading room at Boston Public Library, flipping through the pages of Poems from Guantanamo one last time before returning it to circulation. I was strangely calm, knowing not how or what I should be feeling. Empathy, after all, was useless: it would not get you out of prison, or any of the many other innocent men locked up in the horror that is Gitmo. It was perhaps that sense of incapacity, the inability to do anything that threw me into a state of half-despair. I had copied the following lines into my small black notebook:
They have monuments to liberaty
And freedom of opinion, which is well and good.But I explained to them that
Architecture is not justice.America, you ride on the backs of orphans
And terrorize them daily.Bush, beware
The world recognizes an arrogant liar. (more…)
Filed under: Uncategorized
Just happened to discover through Rezwan that Dr. Mahathir has launched his own blog. A remarkable coincidence, for reasons I can’t explain here. But it has to do with him and my work today. I am, after all, a man of coincidences, like Paul Auster’s protagonists.
Anyways, I then suddenly realized from the date that exactly six years ago from today I entered the blogosphere. Let’s just say that both me and my blog have come a long way since then! And I can bet, most of you folks probably didn’t even know what a weblog was, back then. Err, that makes me feel old, so I’ll stop.
So, y’all know how Facebook has this new feature in your homepage called “People You May Know”? (basically just a strategy for FB’s hegemonic empire to further encroach upon our lives). Well, occasionally it does show people I know, though most of them are ones I don’t know well enough to be FB-friends with. So today it showed this one person whose last name happens to be the same as that of a very famous artist, who I happen to be a fan of. It’s not a rare last name, but just out of curiosity I clicked to open up the profile, where I noticed that this person’s high school is in the same city that the artist lives in (a city that is also very much at the heart of said artist’s work). So as an expert researcher, the next thing I did was to quickly open up the wikipedia entry for the artist, and voila! Artist has a child of the same first-name as this person on Facebook! Small world, eh?
