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letterboxd · 3 years

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A Cinematic Outcoming.

From Istanbul to Chicago, and C.R.A.Z.Y. to Spirited Away, Letterboxd member, writer and film programmer Emre Eminoğlu explores the films that drove his gay awakening.

“I see it as my duty to never shut up about how representation matters.” —Emre Eminoğlu

I was one of the luckiest ones, yet I had no idea how lucky I was. Growing up in Istanbul, Turkey, a predominantly patriarchal, conservative and homophobic society, my luck was being born into an open-minded, secular and loving family.

In this bubble, I was isolated from the struggles of the majority of my people. I was not bullied at school by my peers, I was not forced into being someone else by my family. Yet I still had that voice in my head. As soon as I realized something could be different with me, I became my own bully and forcefully adopted a fictional persona: ‘exceptionally normal’.

Coming out was hard, but coming out to myself was harder. Although I was perfectly aware of my sexual identity, I could not come to terms with the possibility of being ‘abnormal’. Cue cinema. Watching films was a way of escape for high-school Emre—it still is—and it was inevitable that I would come across some LGBTQ+ films. I was not consciously in search of a ‘truth’ about myself but I started seeing my reflection in them, as they slowly disarmed the bully I involuntarily created.

Twenty years later, now, as a 34-year-old gay man professionally writing on cinema and television, I see it as my duty to never shut up about how representation matters. Streaming LGBTQ+ shows on various platforms, seeing widely released, mainstream LGBTQ+ films, listening to the music of openly LGBTQ+ stars, and hearing words of wisdom like “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?”, I am confident that the personal, inner bully that I created twenty years ago would not survive a week in today’s world.

‘C.R.A.Z.Y.’ (2005)

Jean-Marc Vallée’s C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005) was definitely not the first LGBTQ+ film I ever watched, but it was an invaluable juncture in my life. It was a hot summer in Istanbul, freshman year of college was over. One of my best friends, who had been accompanying me through most of my cinematic discoveries, told me about a French-Canadian film with this guy on the film poster with David Bowie makeup on his face. We headed to an independent theater in Kadıköy to see it.

Zachary Beaulieu was different. As the lone gay son in a family of five boys, he too was forcefully adopting a fictional persona, and his way of escape was music. He was constantly worried about how to be worthy of his parents’ love, how to realize their ideals of him, and how his difference and truth contradicted all of that. Zac’s 1960s basically mirrored my story in the 2000s. I perfectly muted the life-changing enlightenment I was going through and did not vocalize my inner screams.

In two hours, C.R.A.Z.Y. helped me realize my true self and admit my sexual identity after all those years. It was a personal threshold I had been longing to cross… but there was still a lot to go through.

‘Les Amours Imaginaires’ (Heartbeats, 2010)

Liking someone, falling for someone, being loved, dating someone, sex, refusals, misinterpretations, heartbreaks, break-ups, bad sex. On the other side of the closet, I was being introduced to new, sometimes euphoric, sometimes gut-wrenching experiences. But coming out to my friends was still a challenge. I was feeling so lonely keeping all these wonderful and horrible experiences in my chest.

But I was not alone: LGBTQ+ films were my life’s understudy. The same heartbreaks, worries, and disappointments I was going through were right there on the silver screen. I took note as two best friends, Francis and Marie, fall for the same guy and navigate their friendship in Xavier Dolan’s Les Amours Imaginaires (Heartbeats, 2010). I studied how a popular student, Jarle, falls for the new guy in school, but cannot risk his reputation to be with him in Stian Kristiansen’s Mannen som Elsket Yngve (The Man Who Loved Yngve, 2008) and I watched as close friends Tobi and Achim become lovers, until one’s need to keep everything secret threatens to destroy the relationship in Marco Kreuzpaintner’s Sommersturm (Summer Storm, 2004).

Things were not always accessible via online platforms and the internet, so film festivals were often the only chance to see the latest independent and queer films. Two of the biggest film festivals in Istanbul, thankfully, had LGBTQ+-focused sections; !f’s Gökkuşağı (Rainbow) and Istanbul Film Festival’s Nerdesin aşkım? (Where are you, my love?) felt like home.

‘Tomboy’ (2011)

Being the lone avid cinephile among my friends, I was used to seeing half of my festival picks alone. Even before coming out to myself, my hopes for a romantic relationship included, among other things, having a festival partner. When I, fortunately, found the one, I was delighted to have also found the perfect festival partner. Shortly after our first month together, the first film we saw at a film festival was Céline Sciamma’s Tomboy (2011).

Although I was a 24 year old cis man, I was more than able to empathize with the title character, a ten-year-old trans boy. With his family unaware of his true identity, Mickaël experiences the liberation of a fresh start when ‘mistaken’ for a boy after they move to a new neighborhood—finally able to introduce himself as Mickaël, not Laure.

Changing my career path, a new job in the creative industry, and a stable relationship had similar effects on me. I was still not completely out to my parents, or some of my friends, schoolmates, and acquaintances from my past, but I was freed of the obligation to explain anything to my new friends or colleagues. I would proudly introduce them to my boyfriend, or simply correct people by saying I was attracted to men during a conversation. The perfect festival partner turned out to be a perfect partner as well—over the past ten years, he has helped me grow and be proud of myself.

‘Weekend’ (2011)

We moved in together in the fifth year of our relationship. Right above our bed hangs a poster of Andrew Haigh’s Weekend (2011). At the time we saw it, it was just another film that we watched together and liked—no significance, no symbolism. It is the story of two young men, Russell and Glen, who are fascinated by the connection they find between each other, and are surprised how their one-night-stand evolved into the perfect weekend. When Glen reveals that he will be leaving for another country the very next day, it only makes their connection stronger, and their time together more precious. Being a timid and socially anxious person, none of my romantic relationships or my friendships had formed this organically. Even my first date with my partner was a disaster. We built what we have now over time, slowly and patiently. I did not believe in ‘weekends’.

And yet, one summer night, we met a guy on Grindr, as we occasionally did. What we thought was just another one night stand was in fact a transformative experience for us both. Intense conversation, a triple connection, the drinks we enjoyed instead of hurrying to bed, and the passionate sex turned that casual one-night-stand into a magical reality for us. We realized that we still had feelings and instincts to discover in ourselves and in each other. Over a week-long, unexpected, unpredictable polyamorous fling, we learned to act as one instead of two—only to find out that he was leaving for another country the very next week. This was our ‘weekend’.

‘Hamam’ (Steam: The Turkish Bath, 1997)

Thinking how LGBTQ+ films of other cultures and languages had played a significant role in some precious, threshold-crossing moments of my life, it was alienating not being able to feel embraced and represented openly in Turkish cinema. There were certainly multiple Turkish LGBTQ+ films or characters, but they were in films addressing more urgent issues—right to live, violence against LGBTQ+ individuals, honor murders, trans murders—rather than the nuanced experience of queer love.

Although I discovered it years after it was released, Italian-Turkish director Ferzan Özpetek’s Hamam (Steam: The Turkish Bath, 1997) was a mind-blowing experience for me. The relationship, and the sexual tension, between Francesco, the Italian heir to a building with a Turkish bath in it, and Mehmet, the young son of the family managing the compound, felt much closer to my story and my cultural, familial identity.

Aşk, Büyü vs. (Love, Spells and All That, 2019)

Today, I am glad to see more and more filmmakers finding the courage to maintain the LGBTQ+ narrative in Turkish cinema, despite the oppressive, intolerant and exclusionary policies. Some are telling the youthful, urban stories I was longing for at the time: In Leyla Yılmaz’s Bilmemek (Not Knowing, 2019), Umut, a high-school athlete from a middle-class family in Istanbul, is bullied by his so-called modern and open-minded teammates after not replying to a query about whether he is gay or not. In Ümit Ünal’s Aşk, Büyü vs. (Love, Spells and All That, 2019), Eren and Reyhan, two adult women reunite in the magical atmosphere of The Princes’ Islands on the Istanbul coast, decades after they were forcefully separated by their parents.

The story of me coming out to myself all started with an urge to escape reality through cinema, and on the way, I found films that gave meaning to my muddled existence. When I saw Levan Akin’s And Then We Danced (2019), I smiled as I noticed the Spirited Away poster in Merab’s room; this minor detail another reminder that I was not alone. Merab, a gay dancer who is part of a very traditional and conservative Georgian dance company, was dealing with similar challenges in his life. He was trying to discover his true identity in a society that does not celebrate being different. He was too, finding an escape in cinema.

Coming out was hard. It still is. A recent Instagram post by the 27-year-old actor Connor Jessup, who came out as gay two years ago, reminded me coming out is not a single moment, but a never-ending process, a ‘becoming’. He writes, “When I first came out, a friend wrote to me and said, ‘Now you can really start coming out.’ Start? I thought. I just did it. But he was right. […] I’m going to keep trying. I’m going to keep looking.”

I keep trying, and looking. Learning about myself, my identity, my relationship. And LGBTQ+ films keep helping and inspiring me, just as they did in my journey to accept myself and become the person I am today. This is the power of cinema; unconsciously, you see your past, actuality and possibilities through the stories filmmakers tell. And I am so grateful to these filmmakers.

Related content

The Ten Greatest Turkish Films of All Time, according to the Turkish Film Critics’ Association

Emre’s Favorite LGBTQ+ Films: a personal top 50

Queer Films in Turkish Cinema—a list by Atakan

The Top 100 Turkish Movies of the 21st Century: Emre’s personal favorites

#letterboxd #pride #pride 2021 #lgbtqia cinema #lgbt film #turkish cinema #turkish film #queer cinema #coming out #jean marc vallée

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kemifatoba · 3 years

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C/O Berlin Magazine | It’s a space for everyone, and everyone can come in — Thoughts for the future

“I cringe when I hear words like ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion.” To quote the civil rights activist, philosopher, and writer Angela Davis, “diversity” and “inclusion” are terms that you, dear reader, might have also stumbled across in recent months, whether you wanted to or not. Inspired by global Black Lives Matter protests, mainstream media, corporations, and other institutions finally realized – in some cases as it seems overnight – that racism is also an intractable problem in Germany. Unfortunately, we need more than just hollow words and empty promises to solve this problem. You might be thinking to yourself: “But didn’t people take to the streets or write opinion pieces in newspapers to protest structural racism? And didn’t major institutions promise to offer diversity and inclusion workshops in discussion after discussion on television?” Perhaps, but don’t be fooled. Instead of critically questioning the role that white decision-makers play in perpetuating systemic racism, “society” was blamed. Over and over again, Black* people were asked to answer if they had really experienced racism through scrutiny of their real-life stories, while predominantly white “experts” were invited onto talk shows to discuss the so-called “racism debate”. Profound, structural changes are still lacking, at least as of the time this text goes to print.

Presence equals power. This brings us to the current moment where you are reading these words about British photographer Nadine Ijewere’s solo show at C/O Berlin. Nadine Ijewere is the first Black woman to be given a space that has previously been occupied almost exclusively by white men. As such, this exhibition is significant not only for Black photographers, but for everyone more used to being treated as the object than the artist or curator in spaces like this where many people don’t feel welcome or simply don’t exist. As trivial as it may sound, visibility comes from being able to hang pictures on a wall—or write these lines.

Joy as an act of resistance. Nadine Ijewere belongs to a generation of artists and creatives who have realized that there are more options than simply following the traditional path. Knowing that society has long since changed—even if many gatekeepers in fashion, art, and the media still cling to the status quo—this DIY generation is creating its own platforms to elevate their own role models with an army of loyal followers. In their work, representatives of this generation create worlds that rarely center Eurocentric beauty norms. The same goes for this young British artist, whose work shows people in all their beauty and uniqueness. Her photographs regularly appear on the pages of British, American and Italian Vogue, i-D, or Garage, and she has collaborated with brands such as Nina Ricci and Stella McCartney. Ijewere proves that beauty is multifaceted and that fashion is fun and for everyone.

More than a seat at the table. When artists like Ijewere make it to the top, it’s not because of nepotism, tokenism, or diversity as a trend, but despite all the obstacles that have been put in their way. And instead of assimilating after being accepted by the old guard, they continue to write their own rules. In Ijewere’s case, this means not only working with diverse models and teams, but also passing her knowledge on as a mentor to keep the proverbial door open. She’s less driven by the desire to stand out from the mainstream than she is to give back by inspiring younger generations, who are able to see themselves in magazines. “Within the time I have, I’ll use every opportunity I get and every space I can get into to expand the horizon of others.”

Representation matters. Celebrating Black people and people of color in a traditionally white space was also the goal of “Visibility is key – #RepresentationMatters,” a watershed moment for the German lifestyle magazine industry when it launched on vogue.de in spring 2019. The goal was to take first steps toward a forward-thinking future where inclusion and diversity would no longer be mere buzzwords, but lived practices. Part of that effort meant ensuring representation in front of as well as behind the camera. The results weren’t perfect and they might not have led to social change, but we proved that there isn’t a lack of creative talent among Black and Brown people in Germany. If anything, we proved that these talents are often denied the space to develop their full potential.

Ideas for the future. As you see, dear reader, it takes teamwork to bring about long-term change, and for the first time the doors are open a bit. Nadine Ijewere's exhibition shows this, as does being able to write these very words in the C/O Berlin Newspaper. In the statements below, we asked German and international artists and creatives to envision a future where representation and inclusion are lived practices instead of rare exceptions. The results are ideas for a future that is reachable—as long as we all keep working towards it every day. Together.

Nadine Ijewere, artist Art is about art. It’s not about you personally. That’s why artists need to be seen as artists. We all get stereotyped and put into the same box—but we have our own identity. We are put into the same space just because we are Black, but we are all very different people.

Edward Enninful, OBE, Editor-in-Chief of British Vogue Nadine is one of the leading fashion photographers of her generation. She’s not only inherently British in her work, she’s also Black British. She really understands the complex mix of culture, fashion, beauty, and the inner working of a woman, so when you see her images, it’s never just a photograph. There’s also a story and a narrative behind it.

Benjamin Alexander Huseby & Serhat Işık, designers for the label GmbH Our work has always been about wanting to show our community and culture to tell our stories as authentically as we can. It was never about “diversity”, but about being seen. We want to create a world where not only exceptional Black and Brown talents no longer have to be truly exceptional to get recognition for their work, a world where we no longer are the only non-white person in the room because we built the motherfucking house ourselves.

Mohamed Amjahid, freelance journalist and author, whose book Der weiße Fleck will be published by Piper Verlag on March 1, 2021. It's time that Black women become bosses. Gay Arabs should get to call the shots. Refugees belong on the executive boards of big corporations. Children of so-called “guest workers” should move into management positions too. People with disabilities should not just have a say, they should make the decisions. Vulnerable groups deserve to put their talents and ideas to work in the service of the whole society. Not every person of color is automatically a good leader by virtue of their background, but all-white, cis-male executive boards are certainly incapable of making decisions that are right for everyone. That’s why we need more representation at the very top, where the decisions are made.

Melisa Karakuş, founder of renk., the first German-Turkish magazine For a better future, I demand that we educate our children to be anti-racist and to resist when others or when they themselves are subjected to racism. I demand that discrimination is understood through the lens of intersectionality and solidarity! I demand that even those who are not affected by racism stand up against it! This fight is not one that we as Black people and people of color fight alone—for a better future, we all have to work together.

Tarik Tesfu, host of shows including the NDR talk show deep und deutlich When I look in the mirror, I see someone who grew up in the Ruhr region and loves currywurst with French fries as much as Whitney Houston. I see a person who has his pros and cons and who is so much more than his skin color. I see a subject. But the German media and cultural system seem to see it differently because far too often, Black people are degraded and made into objects for the reproduction of racist bullshit. I'm tired of explaining racism to Annette and Thomas because I really have better things to do (for example, my job). So get out of my light and let me shine.

Ronan Mckenzie, photographer The future of our industry needs to be one with more consideration for those that are within it. One that isn’t shrouded in burnout and the stresses of late payments, and one that doesn’t make anyone question whether they have been booked for the quality of their work or to be tokenized for the color of their skin. The future of our industry needs to go beyond the performative Instagram posts and mean-nothing awards, to truly sharing resources and lifting up one another. Our industry needs to put its money where its mouth is when words like “support”, “community” or “diversity” slip out, instead of using buzzwords that create an illusion of championing us. How there can be so much money in this industry yet so many struggle to keep up with their rent, feed themselves, or just rest without worrying about money is truly a travesty. If this industry is to survive then we who make it what it is need to be able to thrive.

Ferda Ataman, journalist and chair of Neue deutsche Medienmacher*innen A recent survey of the country's most important editors-in-chief revealed that many of them think diversity is good, but they don't want to do anything about it. This is based on the assumption that everyone good will succeed. Unfortunately, that’s not true. It’s not just a person’s qualifications that are decisive, but other criteria as well, such as similarity and habit (“XY fits in with us”). It's high time that all of us—everywhere—demand a serious commitment to openness and diversity. Something is seriously wrong in pure white spaces that can’t be explained by people’s professional qualifications alone. Or to put it differently: a good diversity strategy always has an anti-racist effect.

Nana Addison, founder of CURL CON and CURL Agency Being sustainable and inclusive means thinking about all skin tones, all hair textures, and all body shapes—in the beauty industry, in marketing communications, as well as in the media landscape. These three industries work hand in hand in shaping people’s perceptions of themselves and others. It’s important to take responsibility and be proactive and progressive to ensure inclusivity.

Dogukan Nesanir, stylist The current system is not designed to help minorities. By giving advantages to certain people and groups, it automatically deprives others of the chance to attain certain positions in the first place. That's why I don't even ask myself the question "What if?" anymore. My work is not about advancing a fake worldview, but about highlighting all the real in the good and the bad. I strongly believe that if some powerful gatekeepers gave in, if representation and diversity happened behind the scenes and we had the chance to show what the world REALLY looks like, we wouldn't be having these discussions at all. I don't just want an invitation to the table, I want to own the table and change things.

Arpana Aischa Berndt & Raquel Dukpa, editors of the catalog I See You – Thoughts on the Film “Futur drei” In the German film and television industry, production teams and casting directors are increasingly looking for a “diverse” cast. Casting calls are almost exclusively formulated by white people who profit from telling stories of people of color and Black people by using them, but without changing their own structures in the process. Application requirements and selection processes in film schools even shut out marginalized people by denying them the opportunities that come with being in these institutions. People of color and migrants as well as Black, indigenous, Jewish, queer, and disabled people can all tell stories, too. Production companies need to understand that expertise doesn’t necessarily come with a film degree.

Vanessa Vu & Minh Thu Tran, hosts of the podcast Rice and Shine It may be convenient to ignore entire groups, but we are and have been so much more for a very long time. We contribute to culture by making films or plays and bring new perspectives to science, politics, and journalism. We’re Olympic athletes, curators, artists, singers, dancers, and inventors. We dazzle and shine despite not always being seen. Because we have each other and we’ve created opportunities to do the things we love. We’ve created platforms for each other and built communities. Slowly but surely we are finally getting applause and recognition for the fact that we exist. That's nice. But what we really need is not just the opportunity to exist, but the opportunity to continue to grow and to stop basing our work primarily on self-exploitation. We need security, reliability, and money. That's the hard currency of recognition. That would mean being truly seen.

*Black is a political self-designation and is capitalized to indicate that being Black is about connectedness due to shared experiences of racism.

Written by: Alexandra Bondi de Antoni & Kemi Fatoba C/O Berlin Magazine April 2021

#editorial #coberlin

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vavuska · 4 years

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“Cancel culture” is nothing new, so why are we acting like it is? Those in power have written their own version of history as they’d like it to be remembered for ages. That “winners write history” is simply another way of saying that selective erasure (or canceling) of inconvenient truths is built into the fabric of documenting history.

What’s new is that now we’re looking backward to “uncancel” some of the important stories not widely shared about groups of people who have more power today than they’ve had in the past to record their truths for a broader audience.

An exemple is how has been washed, cleaned and packed up, the figure of Christopher Columbus in history books and mainstream european culture.

Some facts that you must know about Christopher Columbus:

- Christopher Columbus didn't discover America as a continent, and wasn't aslo the first European to visit American coasts: half a millennium before Columbus “discovered” America, Viking's feet may have been the first European ones to ever have touched North American soil. The expedition’s leader was Leif Eriksson (variations of his last name include Erickson, Ericson, Erikson, Ericsson and Eiriksson), son of Erik the Red, who founded the first European settlement of Greenland after being expelled from Iceland around A.D. 985 for killing a neighbor. (Erik the Red’s father, himself, had been banished from Norway for committing manslaughter.)

But Christopher Columbus was remarkably the first who came with the intention of a great military conquer.

- He didn't discover that the Earth is spherical: this knowledge was still accepted in the Middle Age and by the Christian doctrine.

Knowledge of the sphericity of the Earth survived into the medieval corpus of knowledge by direct transmission of the texts of Greek antiquity (Aristotle), and via authors such as Isidore of Seville and Beda Venerabilis.

Though the earliest written mention of a spherical Earth comes from ancient Greek sources, there is no account of how the sphericity of the Earth was discovered.

A recent study of medieval concepts of the sphericity of the Earth noted that since the eighth century, no cosmographer worthy of note has called into question the sphericity of the Earth.

Some examples are the papers of Pope Silvester II, who was awer of the knowledge of ancient greek philosophers and also of the researches of Muslim mathematicians. Also Saint Hildegard portrayed the Earth as a sphere in her Liber Divinorum Operum; Giovanni Sarabosco, an Italian astronomist wrote a paper (Tractatus de Spahaera) based on the knowledge of Ptolemy about the sphericity of the Earth; Honorius of Autun, a theologist very popular also in lay community,in his Elucidarium, a survey of Christian beliefs wrote about the sphericity of the Earth. His works was translated frequently into other languages.

Another proof that this knowledge was diffused also in the low folk and not only among the intellectuals of the Church, can be found in some of Berthold von Regensburg homelies in which he explained that the earth is spherical.

A practical demonstration of Earth's sphericity was achieved by Ferdinand Magellan and Juan Sebastián Elcano's expedition's circumnavigation (1519-1522).

- Christopher Columbus was the first European to have the idea to enslave native Americans and force them to work in colonizer's encomiendas. According to Cuneo, Columbus ordered 1,500 men and women seized, letting 400 go and condemning 500 to be sent to Spain, and another 600 to be enslaved by Spanish men remaining on the island. About 200 of the 500 sent to Spain died on the voyage, and were thrown by the Spanish into the Atlantic. (Bergreen, 196-197)

Those left behind were forced to search for gold in mines and work on plantations. Within 60 years after Columbus landed, only a few hundred of what may have been 250,000 Taino were left on their island.

- If you think that Christopher Columbus was loved and admired by people of his age, you are wrong: he gave land to the settlers and permitted the enslavement of the Taino people to work it. Complaints for his violence against Caribs and Taino Indians, but mostly for his cruelty against Spanish settler, trickled back to Spain, and eventually the monarchs sent a commissioner to investigate. Shocked by conditions at the colony, the commissioner arrested Columbus and his brothers and sent them back to Spain for trial. The brothers were released by the king and queen, but Columbus was removed from his position as governor of Hispaniola.

- Christopher Columbus was the fist European to commit a genocide: 56 years after Columbus's first voyage, only 500 out of 300,000 Indians remained on Hispaniola.

Population figures from 500 years ago are necessarily imprecise, but Bergreen estimates that there were about 300,000 inhabitants of Hispaniola in 1492. Between 1494 and 1496, 100,000 died, half due to mass suicide. In 1508, the population was down to 60,000. By 1548, it was estimated to be only 500.

Some important facts about slavery, Catholic Church and the famous Monarchs of Spain, Isabel of Castile and her husband Ferdinand of Aragon:

In 1492, Kingdom of Castile and Aragon had a disperate need of money: King Ferdinand and his wife Qeen Isabel used a lot of money in their wars against Portogual and their Conquer of the Emirate of Granada, that was an indipendente Muslim state at the age. They were deeply in debt, also with jews pawloaner, who at the age, were the only allowed to borrow money (Christian doctrine, by the way, didn't allow it), so they wrote the infamous Alhambra Decree with witch all jews were forced to left Spain and their properties passed in the Monarchs' hands.

I red some people associated the Dum Diversas with Columbus, but it has nothing to concern with "discovery" of the "new world": Dum Diversas is a papal bull issued on 18 June 1452 by Pope Nicholas V. It authorized Afonso V of Portugal to conquer Saracens and pagans and consign them to "perpetual servitude". It was referred to the muslim population of North Africa and also to the Turkish territories in Europe.

By the way, the Catholic Chruch condamed slavery in various occasion: in 1537 pope Paul III condemned "unjust" enslavement of non-Christians in Sublimus Dei. In 1686 the Holy Office limited the bull by decreeing that Africans enslaved by unjust wars should be freed. Eugene IV and Paul III did not hesitate to condemn the forced servitude of Blacks and Indians, in Sicut Dudum (1435) and in Sublimis Deus (1537). Their teaching was continued by Gregory XIV in 1591 and by Urban VIII in 1639. Except those formal condemn of slavery, the Church keep an ambiguous sentiment: the condamn was absolute, but most of the government of their age were built on slavery and keep allow their people to profit on slavery, for the reason that "indigenous" people were not Christians, they didn't have a soul, so they were like animals. The Holy See was unable to stop the trade, despite their good intentions.

The pontifical teaching was continued by the response of the Holy Office on March 20, 1686, under Innocent XI, and by the encyclical of Benedict XIV, Immensa Pastorum, on December 20, 1741. This work was followed by the efforts of Pius VII at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to have the victors over Napoleon outlaw slavery. The 1839 Constitution In Supremo by Gregory XVI continued the antislavery teaching of his predecessors, and was in the same manner not accepted by many of those bishops, priests and laity for whom it was written.

#us history #american history #history #christopher columbus #columbus day #indigenous peoples day #indigenous peoples of the americas #indigenous people's day: bay area led the change #indigenous people&039;s day #kingdom of spain #colonial history #colonialism #vavuskapakage #cancel culture #slavery #genocide #crimes against humanity #leif erickson day #leif erikson

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thewestmeetingroom · 3 years

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Looking to the Future of LGBTQ+ Identities in Eastern Europe and the Slavic Diaspora

Broadcast Jan. 9, 2021 - 58:12

SPEAKERS

Rebekah Robinson, Gala Mukomolova, Damir Imamović, Mateusz Świetlicki

[Into Music]

Rebekah Robinson: Hello, and welcome to the West Meeting Room. On today's episode, hosted by me, Rebekah, one of the producers here, you'll hear part of a conversation that I moderated titled, Looking to the Future of LGBTQ Identities in Eastern Europe and the Slavic Diaspora, which took place on Zoom on Monday, November 2, 2020, and organised by the Slavic Languages and Literatures Department here at the University of Toronto. I sat down with writer and poet Gala Mukomolova, Dr. Mateusz Świetlicki, and musician, Damir Imamović, to discuss the role of culture and activism in the community as they look toward the future. I would like to thank professors, Dragana Obradovic, Zdenko Mandušić, and Angieszka Jezyk, for putting together this conversation and inviting me to moderate. The bios for these accomplished speakers will be available in this episode’s show notes.

Rebekah: I've been really looking forward to this conversation over the past few weeks. And so, I'm hoping in order to get started, that each of you could briefly tell us about the context in which you're coming from, and the work that you do. And if the cultural context from which you're coming from influences your work in any sort of way. I know, we've mentioned that a little bit during your bios. I'd like to get into it a little bit more. And let's start with Gala on this one.

Gala Mukomolova: Okay, sure. Um, well, I am primarily a writer, and that's what I do. I write a lot of astrology things.

[chuckles]

And that is, I mean, I feel it's interesting already, just to think about like musicians and philosophers and rebels, and literature scholars as a point of conversation around world events. I think that I came to astrology writing sort of by circumstance. And I've mostly tried my best because it's very commercial and I work for a major syndicate to subtly or unsubtly move large masses that would otherwise be un-politicized by my like weekly astrology writings. And all my writing work that's more creative or personal, like the essays or the poems that I write, are very influenced by my upbringing, and I guess, just where I'm at, right. So I was raised, but, I mean, I was born in Moscow. My family's Jewish. We had to immigrate to Brooklyn, around the wave time that everybody else did. 1992 / 1993, I was raised very much in, in a kind of, like, understanding of difference as marker, right. So it's like the idea that who we are is always in relation to who we are not, or history. And I think that what I'm interested in, actually, in this discussion is, is learning more about people who are in place. Like I think I come from, my writing comes from being displaced. And, yeah, I don't know, I feel like there's so much, I mean, it's just who we are always influences what we make, right? I think that I also am very invested in a queer post-Soviet perspective, and that's really particular because I, I have an okay relationship with my family now, but I was disowned for many years and didn't speak to them. And the idea of being like, queer, or lesbian was antithetical to being Russian, to being Jewish -- Russian Jewish, because we're like, Well, you know, like, when you're, when you're a Jewish person from Moscow, but like, my family doesn't identify as Russian. They identify as Jewish. So it's like a particular thing to say, but, um, I think understanding the amount of disavowal that happens amongst like, how people come to define themselves. Like, with my family, being like, “Well, you know, if you're choosing this aspect of yourself, then you're not one of us, right?” But the “one of us” mentality has to come from a fear that you need to keep being like, non-Western. I'm just, like, kind of like creating this idea of devotion to the to the national idea. I don't know. So, which doesn't claim you, right, the national idea which doesn't claim you. So like, Russian people for so long, did not really claim Jewish people as one of their own. And yet, like to be clear, like Jewish Russia is to create a disavowal from the country that you come from, which we actually disavow to begin with.

Rebekah: Thank you so much, Gala, I think that's, I like the idea of, you know, or I find the ideas fascinating about being displaced within, like these different communities. You know, and I know you mentioned your work with astrology. And I'm hoping that you can about how these sort of intersections and ideas maybe even play into like contributing to your writing these astrological pieces. And as well as just know who we are is in relation to who we are not. Like, that's especially prevalent in today's politics throughout Eastern Europe and throughout the world, really. You know, everyone's trying to juxtapose themselves. And there's this fear of othering. So, I hope we can touch on that in this conversation as well. Let's move over to Damir, if you could introduce us, tell us a little bit about the work that you do. And if you find that your cultural context is influencing your work as well.

Damir Imamović: Thanks Rebekah. No, yeah, of course. I was born in 1978, during the time of Socialist Yugoslavia. And probably, mostly the kids at that time, end of 80s, I was what 10, 11, 12 when the war, when the dissolution of Yugoslavia started that I, 14, 13 and a half, something like that. So I somehow feel that most of us who are coming from that geographical area , we we carry this mark and this, most of our interests of that generation, or are of those generations are still colored by this, you know, traumatic event that happened in Yugoslavia. In the beginning, I started playing music during the war when Sarajevo was under the siege. I was in a shelter. And us kids, we were bored basically, so I had to do something. You know, you can't go out you can't do much. And some days, you cannot even go to your apartment upstairs. And I picked up a guitar and started learning songs. And, but actually, and of course, traditional music was always big around me in my family of traditional musicians. But I also, my first songs that I fell in love with were, you know, rock and roll, jazz. It was 90s. So, the whole Nirvana. But somehow in Bosnia, in Sarajevo, especially this sevdah traditional music, which was strongly rooted in Slavic oral culture, but also had a strong Turkish Ottoman Empire influence was always around, you know. So I just, I woke up as a 20 something year old and realized that I know all these songs. You know, in the day, I even use them not only as songs, I speak in that way sometimes. You know, they're some little pieces of those songs, some parts of it, I use it in everyday speech and it's so much a part of me. And then I realized only actually several years back that I was always interested, because this trauma really formed me. And my primary school class completely dissipated when the war started, you know, and suddenly, we became strangers. And that's why even today, I'm still probably quite close, closer to my friends from primary school, because I was in seventh grade when we started, then with later on high school, friends and university friends and other people. And I realized that without me knowing that all of my themes I was really interested in, you know, like, after high school, we have this system where we write at, like, a final paper in high school. Some kind of a diploma or something. And, of course, the University the same. And just when I look back, I realized that all of these things were actually connected to the same topic. And it is, how is it possible that people become strangers to one another, you know, when I, I never had the problem, intellectual or artistic with people being, you know, foreigners, people being unknown to one another. And you discover something that you don't know, but this very feeling that due to some act of politics, history, whatever, you become stranger. You become this foreign person, you know, and of course, coming out is a big part of that. Because it's, you know, the situation when you have some friends, you have family, and after coming out, and that's what a lot of LGBTQ people know, you suddenly become somebody else and you're still the same fucking person. But there's this estrangement, or whatever the word is in English, that happens, you know. So a lot of what I do is is kind of colored by that. Even without me knowing that I - That's actually one thing I'm rediscovering about what I do. But I have, you know, I always had diverse interests. I always loved literature, history, philosophy. Music was just a part of it. And after studying philosophy in Sarajevo, I had my ideas of pursuing a career as a philosopher means mostly sitting at one place and thinking, anyway. But I was lucky enough that I, just by chance, I was offered a gig as a musician, and I did it. And it was a big success. And I just felt that that's what I love doing, you know. And of course, later on, after that, I realized that I don't have to give up on my intellectual interest, you know. But I can still write, I can still, you know, research stuff and, and I realized that you have to, if you have an opportunity, you have to take over this place in mainstream society and speak with a different voice from there. You know, it's not, because mostly, I mean, the whole of Balkans, meaning former Yugoslavia, plus other countries in Eastern Europe, is actually today a place people are mostly forced to leave if they want to live their dreams, you know. And I remember this, this first Pride parade in Sarajevo last year at which I played. There was one moment when I literally wanted to cry. And that was when I saw all these guys and girls, queer couples of all kinds who are from Sarajevo, usually, both of them, you know, from a couple they were both from Sarajevo, but they've been living in, I don't know, all over the world for 15 plus years. And then they came back for that particular date was such a strong message, you know? So that's just for starters.

Rebekah: Absolutely. Thank you so much. I feel like you brought a lot of food for thought. e\Especially, I like the concept of how even within a specific region, you know, you become a stranger to one another through force of trauma, but also how that can also impact how LGBT people are also impacted as well. Especially when coming out from to their families or to their society, to their communities, on how you can even be ostracized and a kind of stranger in that way too. So, I hope we can explore that idea of being considered other and this estrangement that you mentioned later on in our conversation. How about you Mateusz?.

Mateusz Świetlicki: That's a difficult question. First of all, I want to say that I absolutely love my job. I love everything about it. It gives me satisfaction for a number of reasons. But before I say few things about these reasons, let me answer the question. Because your question was about, you know, the personal experience. I think that we cannot escape our personal experience at all. In order to, you know, succeed. You need to combine your personal experience. You need to stay, you know, truthful to your own self and your heritage and your identity. And, I was born in Poland. I lived in Poland when I was a child. I also lived in Germany. I also live in Louisiana, Shreveport, Louisiana. And I decided to stay in Poland. I decided to stay here because I do have hope. And I think that sharing my experience, sharing all of the things that I know. Sharing my you know, vision of the world, can actually help my students. And I absolutely do use my experience when it comes to my writing. When it comes to my teaching. When it comes to my writing, I have a degree in Slavic studies and Ukrainian studies and in American Studies. And I published a few things about Ukrainian literature, about Polish literature, about American literature. I try to write some things about gender, about men studies, about masculinity studies about queer things. I tried to find some queer themes in Ukrainian literature, but I always, I've always been interested in children's literature and YA literature and popular culture. I find this trash culture to be extremely inspiring. Now I'm working on a project on North American children's literature. By North American, I mean both American and Canadian. But, I'm writing about literature books written by Ukrainian and Polish authors. I mean, second, third, fourth generation Ukrainian / Polish authors. So books written in English, but books about the experience of being Polish, the experience of being Canadian, the experience of being Polish Canadian. The experience of being Ukrainian Canadian, experience of being Ukrainian, in Canada, and so on. So I think I'm trying to somehow combine my expertise. Like, I think this is the perfect topic for me, because I'm using everything of my knowledge. So I can use my Slavic studies, background, and my English studies, American Studies, background. And every single time when I want to write about, let's say, memory. When I want to write about something else, I always end up thinking about queerness, I always end up thinking about the ways in which sexuality or gender are, you know, constructed in the literature or film. And I think it is connected to my identity, you know. This topic, I cannot escape this topic, you know. I absolutely cannot escape this gender theme, and it's difficult to do that in Poland. And when it comes to the last few years, when you hear your president saying that LGBT is not people, LGBT is ideology. When you hear politicians saying that we have to make sure that gender ideology and the so called LGBTQ ideology doesn't destroy our children. And there's always the child to use as this political, you know, tool. It's, on the one hand, it's challenging to write about such topics. But on the other hand, I find it so fascinating and stimulating, intellectually stimulating. And I think that we should resist. And this leads me to what I said at the beginning of my little speech. My students, teaching is fascinating, really, and inspiring. And my students are absolutely brilliant. I am so privileged to be teaching a number of really intelligent, clever young people who are sick and tired of this situation. Who grew up in Poland, with the internet around them, who grew up traveling, you know, going on vacation to various different places. And there are queer individuals who want to live in Poland, and who want to, and who are proud or openly gay, or lesbian or transgender, and they don't care. And they don't want to move to America or to Canada or to Germany. They want to stay here and they want to make a change. And what I hear my students tell me that my classes made them want to fight. I'm shocked because I always think that my classes are ideologically neutral. So I always think that I'm not really that political in class. But it turns out that while I'm not trying to be political, I am political. So yesterday, my wonderful graduate student told me that during one of like, random classes, like ethics of academic work, stuff like that - I taught them about the phenomenon of angry white men in America, like Trump supporters. And someone, and I didn't remember that, I just used some basic examples of books, and I, and I asked them to come up with a list of Works Cited. And then she told me that because of this little class, the entire group, read that book. And that's why I find my job to be really, my profession to be really inspiring, because I can teach. I can write and my students really inspire me. So I, every single class influences my writing.

Rebekah: We'll tease that out, for sure. I really enjoyed this idea of Polish people who want to remain in Poland because that's like their home, you know. And just trying to make it a place. I think that's going to be one of the ending questions, you know, what are their hopes for the future? How can people you know, move to this place where they can build a society and build an area where they can be completely themselves. And so I want to hold on to that idea and bring that up a little bit later. Thank you. Gala, I wanted to go back a little bit to talk about your astrology workings. And I want to see how might your traditional Slavic values, maybe that you have been surrounded with ongoing in your life, how you maybe incorporate them a little bit into your writing astrology? Or how even being part of a diaspora community, how that might influence your work when writing about astrology?

Gala: I'm just feeling inspired a little bit by all the hopefulness. I think that, I'll say this. I think that when I came to astrology as more of a work than a hobby or an interest, so much of it has to do with the fact that in ways I was raised with astrology, it's like a shared language with my family, because it's pretty similar in Russian or post-Soviet culture. Soviet culture, as it is in the West. That said, I don't know. I think that as Mateusz was speaking, I was thinking about, you know, what it means to have pride in place, or like a nationalistic love. I think that I was very much raised without it. Very much raised without place, and in some ways, like a kind of - like, I feel like I was raised in a refugee Jewish community, which had a lot of pride in the fact that they came from a Jewish lineage. And also, at the same time, kind of had no God, and no rituals, no practices, right? No, no prayers that we knew. And so, most esoteric practice was sort of memory based. We light a candle on this day, we don't wear shoes in the house, I can't tell you why. You know, things like that were just sort of based on like a rule, a rule you inherited that you follow blindly. And so for me, I think astrology as I got older, and as I found, safety and pattern was a place where I could connect to all these different types of rituals and understandings about the largeness of the universe, without being completely far away from where I came from. And I do think that now as I inhabit this world. And like the astrology world, is kind of a world because they're, you know, on a, on a level of who's creating it and how there are just so many social media facets. So many different types of writers, many different types of people who are offering the same thing. But I do think that astrology is inherently invested in like the domino effect or the collective effect, right? So there's this idea that what happens there affects us here, right? That the sun is not shining on one side of the planet, for no reason at all. And that there is a continuation, and also that there is a story that happened before us and is happening after us. And I think that being in a lineage of people who were moved toward the collective, who sacrificed a great deal for the collective is information. Like I don't think that I was raised to believe in the collective. Like I actually was, I was brought into a country, I was brought into your country with this premise that now we'd like that we would have individual lives, right. And that being said, I was then raised in this sort of, in a tense, what an astrologer might call a kind of square between two planets aspect between people who actually wanted to escape a collective, authoritarian, totalitarian really, rule, and people who actually valued collective ideology as more righteous and more ethical. So this idea that I wasn't just myself, I was part of my family and I wasn't just part of my family. I was part of a lineage of people who survived numerous mass genocides, you know. I wasn't just, I wasn't just learning to live in a country for myself, but at the same time, also, one could never go back to what those collective ideas and beliefs lead us, right. So that tension, that place for me is a lot of the place where I write from as well. I think when it comes to astrology, because I think that astrology has always been political, has always been, you know, used in rulerships of presidents and kings. So I think that there's a sense that the, the stars that you might be interested in, in terms of like your love life, or whatever, like your new job, are also the same stars that if one were to believe it so, are impacting the people who make it hard for you to get that job. Make it hard for you to be present in your love life. I think that if I can use whatever medium I have, that maybe people seek for just gentle comfort or some sense of accompaniment, some sense of like, pleasure or relief, if I can use that medium to let people know that not only are they connected to a larger picture, but that larger picture is also connected back to them and their daily behaviors and their daily lives and what they think about, then maybe I'm doing my job.

Rebekah: Absolutely, that's actually really beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. I think this idea of using different creative mediums, whether that's through astrology, with your music, finding ways to connect, to connect these different themes and different ideas that are inherently political, that we sometimes don't always see as being political and reaching a larger audience that might otherwise not choose to engage with it. So, thank you for sharing that. And then speaking of music, I wanted to go back over to Damir and ask, you know, how do you take this genre of music of sevdah, and how might this traditional music make sense, and how do you incorporate that? How do you speak to this modern world in which you're producing this music? I'm wondering what that looks like for you?

Damir: Well, there are many ways of course, and the very act of doing that today, at least at a time when I was beginning 16 / 17 years ago, the very act of doing that was in a way that you know, I was already, you know, quite active in, as a student in many feminist and queer organizations. I was already, you know, doing different stuff. And I remember some of my friends told me, come on, you're a young hip guy. You should do jazz or rock or pop or stuff like that, why would you do sevdah? You know, because sevdah was similar to the folk music in United States. You know, or country music was some kind of, you know, popular, extremely popular music, but it was some kind of a redneck music. One part of it was some kind of rural community music, you know, not all of it. And, but for me, I always saw other things in it. You know, I saw how important it is. And, and it was actually at the time end of the 90s beginning of 2000s, when actually quite a lot of music, musical groups or individuals started to see, like - I remember this, they were really good at the beginning, actually from Poland. So, they were doing Polish folk music, but in a really punk way. On the on the other hand, on this kind of research side, I completely feel what Gala just said, about finding some structure in this whole you know, crazy crazy world. And I remember when I was a kid, I read a poem by Rita Mae Brown and she said at some point, like you know, she's having cancer, she's queer, and she had so many layers of her personality and her body and her everything, but she said at some point like, which one of me, of I's, will survive all these changes? You know, what will be left at the end? So, I feel that what God said that this need to find some order in this crazy world, and for me, it's it's music theory and scales of this sevdah music because it's when you see it from that point of view, it's actually sevdah music, as a lot of Balkan music, is situated between two worlds. Two worldviews of music you know, one is a Western European, and another one is this oriental, usually Ottoman history gave us this, this oriental way of thinking about music, you know, which is different. And it's not like, completely different but they, you know, that they're places where they connect. So when you do theory, in Bosnian, in sevdah music, you're constantly with one leg you're in this Eastern world of hearing music and thinking about harmonies, melodies, and everything. And at the same time you're doing, you're doing it in the western medium. For me those scales and teaching them, researching them, and then teaching them and trying to find some order in that is also a way of doing that, you know. And of course, there are a lot of, you know, everyday usage of music in many ways. And that's sometimes with artists, it's hard to control it, you know, what your music is. How you convey it. And how will people use it.

Rebekah: Thank you so much for all that. I did want to ask in terms of like your music, are there any themes or ideas that you try to incorporate, like modern themes into your traditional folk music? And how do you incorporate those, like, what kind of language and stuff do you use, especially considering the, I guess, the traditional structure of the framework of music, how you choose to go about doing that?

Damir: Well, when I started doing it, I realized that this music was codified in the socialist time, in the time of famous socialist radio stations. So, there was a time when this, in former Yugoslavia, every different ethno national groups had their own cultural expression. And I realized that behind that there's a, there's just a peak of an iceberg, you know. A huge, huge, there's a whole iceberg of music, you know, that we just see the top of. And I realized that, that's why that's where I wanted to go. And there I found a crazy humane, everyday, everyday world of old recordings, interviews, everything, you know. And I was especially happy to find, and I used it in this exhibition I curated in 2015, in Sarajevo, where I can try to portray the history of this music behind what people usually know, through, you know, all the different materials. And I included many, you know, of course, queer stories, all the different other things that were just left out of official histories, you know. But for me, my idea, talking about writing about this music and researching it was, I never wanted to write the queer history of sevdah music. And I've spoken to many of my friends who are, you know, queer activists, or activists in different fields. And they taught me that, you know, if you do only this "small thing," you become some kind of expert in queer stuff, and that's your field. In that way, I realized that there is no history of music. Nobody, it has never been written by anyone on any, not even a positivist stupid, dumb, you know, kind of a book. And then I said, Yeah, I'm gonna write a history of the music. I have to take this mainstream position, you know, and push it. And my music and what I do artistically is completely different. And I, to be honest, I have no control of that. I was lucky enough to be invited to do music for films and theatre, a part from my scene of the stage work and performance quite early. And I started in 2007. And when I realized that I can do that. I can write, you know, when you work, in so called in functional music, which is theater, film and stuff that you have a director, you have a need for a particular music, you know, in a scene. So nobody asks you: What do you like? You have to do that, that as a craftsman, you know. You just do what's needed. So when I realized, you know, I can write the rock and roll song, I can arrange for chamber quartet, that I can do stuff for a choir and stuff. Then I realized, maybe there's a way for me to write sevdah songs, you know, because it's been decades since new sevdah songs kind of appeared. And that's how I started in 2007 and writing for myself and other people. My first song was traditional lyrics and my own melody. It's called Dva Se Draga Vrlo Milovala: Two Darlings Caressed Each Other. And that's a beautiful lyrics about two souls in love, but of course, mother and father forbids it, so they have to separate and they die and they buried them together, blah, blah, blah. It starts with this gender neutral description of two darlings. You know, Dva Se Draga Vrlo Milovala, for those of you who speak language, you recognize the pattern. And, there's been a lot of these songs in the history of sevdah genres and neighboring genres of music, but they were abandoned because they were, you know, modern culture didn't tolerate this gender neutral. So they become male and female, in the second part of the song, after mother comes in, and prohibits the marriage, or them being together, you know, and everything in this song separates into, you know, into genders, into graves, into everything. So I was so inspired by the lyrics that I wrote the melody to it, and that's how it started. So these days, luckily enough, this sevdah genre, I wrote a lot of songs for myself and other musicians, other performers. There are other people writing new songs. So, I think something is happening there. And a significant part of it also has this queer, I mean, there are different kinds of people in this in the scene. But there are also people who are who are pushing this new idea of what tradition is.

Rebekah: I really love this idea of incorporating, you know, different ideas and queer elements of culture into this new tradition of music and going forth, like in that way. And that's something that more and more people are starting to get involved with. And I like this idea of representation of like, the queer communities, especially if even if it's gender neutral, that it's part of the history. It's not like just made up, it's an ongoing thing. And so how can we modernize that and shape that for a new audience? And also thinking about representation? I wanted to turn to Mateusz and think about what does representation look like, especially concerning LGBT interests in young adult literature and children's literature? And how does that look specifically within Poland? And do you think that students and children are getting their needs met or interests met within literature?

Mateusz: That's a very good question. Um, there's a number of LGBTQ themed Polish books, mostly picture books and YA novels, and of course, there are a number of translations, mostly from English, but not only from English. And similarly to Ukraine and Hungary, such books usually become, quite, let's say, political, or maybe not the books themselves become political, but they become political tools. And this, you know, political, anti-LGBTQ+ discourse. For example, there's this really interesting book: Kim Jest Slimak Sam. I'm not sure if you've heard about it, probably not. So, yeah, it was published in 2015. By it's a picture book by Maria Pawłowska and Jakub Szamałek illustrated by Katarzyna Bogucka. It's quite similar to And Tango Makes Three, let's say, became similar because it caused a number of controversies because its protagonist Sam the snail, who is just starting school is a hermaphrodite. He's a snail. Yeah, I mean, Sam is a snail. Interestingly, both advocates and opponents of the book seem convinced about the power of literacy. In this book, when a teacher asks pupils to split into two gendered groups, Sam does not know what to do and hides inside their shell. And the school psychologist asks Sam to prepare a report on the storm that passed the area the day before. And to do that, Sam needs to meet and talk to several queer animals inhabiting the nearby woods. While the picture, while this picture book is biologically accurate, some Polish Education Officers ordered the book removed from school libraries as inappropriate for young children and for its potential to promote "gender ideology." And this is not surprising when we remember that an educational supervisor from lesser Poland tweeted that LGBT is an endorsement of pedophilia. And when we remember the fact that the former Minister of Education, Anna Zalewska, tried to ban Rainbow Friday. Rainbow Friday is a name of events aiming to show queer children and teenagers that school should be a safe space for all. And it's worth mentioning that despite the years of progress, the situation of LGBTQ+ individuals in Poland has deteriorated under the role of the populist Law and Justice (PiS) Party, resulting in the increase of number of suicides among queer teenagers. We have gay celebrities like Jacek Poniedziałek, Michał Piróg, and allies, great allies of the LGBTQ community, like Anja Rubik, who is a top model, you know, fashion model, Beata Kozidrak, this iconic Polish Madonna, let's say, or Taco Hemingway, who is a Polish rapper. You can read about him and the latest issue of New York Times, if I'm not mistaken. So when it comes to equality, Poland, a member state of the EU is closer to Ukraine and Russia than its EU neighbors. And of course, I'm talking about politics. But we do have a lot of books, like Sam the Snail, also translations like I Am Jazz, this picture book about a transgender girl, but what I find particularly interesting is that we don't have books about same sex parenting in Poland at all. And what, yeah, it's quite interesting, because when you compare Poland to other countries, including Ukraine, usually the first queer, let's say, I'm using this term really frivolously, let's say, usually queer themed, usually the first queer themed books are picture books about same sex parents, that's the pattern. When it comes to practically every single country, which has queer themed books, but in Poland, we don't have same sex parenting books. We have books about transgender children, we have books about like, YA novels about gay characters, gay and lesbian characters, of course, and I think that is quite - you know, literature, children's literature, YA literature is really crucial in the development of young people, and representation is fundamental. We all know that. When we compare the, like the number of picture books or just books, children's books in general, depicting children belonging to different ethnicities, the representation, like disparities in the representation are shocking. So most books present white children. Yeah. So there is this discussion about the need to include other types of children. And Poland is a very specific country. I want you to remember about the fact that 96% of Poles are white. Most Poles are culturally Catholic. I'm using this term "culturally Catholic" on purpose, because most Poles do not go to church at all. But being culturally Catholic is a totally different thing. It's all about customs, traditions. And this guilt. I don't go to church. I'm not part of this institution. But you know, cultural Catholicism is stronger. Yeah. So, though I was, okay, I was talking about children's books, and then I started talking about, you know, the church. Okay, so when it comes to the need to include such themes, it's quite similar. There are queer children, queer adolescents in Poland who need to see that they are normal, you know. And such books should appear in the book markets, such books should be published and should become part of the mainstream. And it's not enough to have translation of Love Simon and, you know, American YA novels. I think it's crucial to have local books, including local themes, or references to our local culture. And I think that it's crucial for the development of young people. And I know that I also take, I believe in the power of literacy. But that's what I've heard from a number of students who, throughout the years have told me “When I was growing up all of the books and all of the characters and YA books and children's books were just straight. And I've always thought that I'm weird.” I think that it's amazing that this situation has started to change. That we do have queer books, that we do have books featuring non heteronormative, let's say, elements. And you know, I've already said it, children are the future.

Rebekah: Absolutely, thank you so much for all of that. I think it's definitely important that the literature reflects local customs and traditions. And I think that every student should have the opportunity to be represented and feel represented, their family or themselves in general within this kind of literature. Because it's crucial to the development of young LGBT students and just other children in general to be exposed to such themes to learn about differences. I think that's incredibly important. But yes, I love the idea that you know, that things are starting to change. That there's, we're moving towards like a state of future. We're trying to incorporate more radical literature into like earlier settings in schools. And so my last question for you all is, what are your hopes for the LGBT communities from where you're coming from? We've mentioned radical changes within literature, talked about astrology, we talked about music. What does that look like for your specific communities?

Damir: Well, here's a good candidate, if you allow me this combination of nationalism and LGBT issues. An example of Bosnia, Bosnia is a small place. It used to have three and a half million people, when Yugoslavia parted. Now, I think it has, some people say not even 3 million people. And the thing is such a small place is really, it's really hard to have an authentic agenda for anything, you know, let alone the fact that we are completely politically paralyzed because we still live the consequences of dissolution of Yugoslavia. Because the Constitution of Bosnia is basically a peace agreement, which was signed in 1995. Like a ceasefire peace agreement. We still have that as a constitution, you know. So just to cement the opposing sides in the war, and blah, blah, blah, to stop the war. The problem with that, why am I mentioning that is that it's really hard to promote LGBTQ rights in Bosnia as an authentic need of the local people. And it's so easy, by opposing side nationalist fascists of all kinds from these communities, etc. to give it some kind of: "oh always this sort of guy, those are Americans, Angela Merkel, and Swedes are promoting you know, lesbianism" and that kind of stuff, you know. So that's why I think that's one of the reasons. And of course, the lack of tradition, why we only had Pride last year. And those people who are, who are doing it, activists, are brilliant. They really did a great job. We had a huge Pride, three and a half thousand people without any problems. It was a really beautiful day. And I see that, you know. But I guess and I would love maybe to hear if there's time for Mateusz, about, because Poland is such a big country with a strong culture and just in numbers, also huge country and market and everything. Is it in any way easier for such a big country to promote the need for queer rights as some kind of an authentic need? So you understand what's my problem? You usually have nationalists who are saying, you know, “yeah, but we never had gays around here. We were all straight. It's just when Americans came or whoever came, Germans, that we've gotten queer people.”

Mateusz: It's similar here, really.

Damir: I think, in a interesting way to connect nationalism and queer rights.

Mateusz Yeah, it's always somebody else's problem when it comes to LGBTQ rights in Poland. I mean, rights, maybe not rights. So once again, the biggest problem in Poland is that we are a monoethnic country. So there are no "enemies," you know. It's quite difficult to find a common enemy. After all, culturally Catholic, all white. Someone has to be blamed for everything. So the last few months our politicians, right wing politicians have decided to use, once again, to use members of the LGBTQ+ community as this enemy of the nation, enemy of the state, say that these are not people. This is just a foreign ideology of the EU trying to destroy Poland, all over the country, trying to destroy Poland. These are not real people There's this Polish Regional Education Authority called Barbara Nowak, who said that after the Coronavirus, we'll get back to normal quickly, but what about the long term effects of gender and the LGBTQ ideology? Coming back to the, to your question Rebekah, I would love my LGBTQ+ students to know that it's okay to be Polish and LGBTQ+. That is okay to be Polish and non-Catholic. That it's okay to be Polish Jewish and gay. That it's okay to be Polish and Black, you know. We have Afro-Poles are also discriminated and so on. But and I think that most of our problems come from the fact that we are so monoethnic. And of course, we know that when it comes to our history, it all changed after World War II. Because before World War II, Poland was not as mono ethnic. Poland has no colonial history, in this traditional, of course, understanding of colonialism. We're not going to dig deeper into local like, Ukrainian Poland, Ukraine, Poland, stuff. But we don't have this, I mean, we Poles don't have this colonial guilt. What I find really problematic is that nationalists, the so-called patriots have decided to claim this one particular vision of being Polish. And there's no place for members of the LGBTQ community and this, you know, Polish label and this particular identity. And in the last few months, young people, mostly young people, young queer people, have rebelled against this notion, you know, maybe not notion, against this vision of Polish-ness. They've been fighting. They've been using, you know, acts of civil disobedience. They've been rebelling against this vision, they are unapologetic, they don't care. They are, they are not here to just, you know, talk. They're here to fight. And let's be honest, you're probably all familiar with the current situation in Poland regarding the abortion rights, of the protests, and so on. The first protests in Poland this year started in August and these were protests initiated by young LGBTQ+ individuals who fought really. And what's happening now, all of the nasty slogans used by protesters are quite similar to the nasty explicit slogans used by of members of the LGBTQ community in August. But back in August, they were criticised for, you know, for using explicit vocabulary for breaking taboos. And now, the mainstream, let's say mainstream protesters, are using their methods. And this, I think, shows us how effective our local LGBTQ+ community can be.

Rebekah: Yeah, absolutely. That's beautiful. Thank you so much. And I think that it's super important to highlight, you know, the people who are on the ground doing the actual work. And they're the ones out here who are trying to make a difference for themselves and the ones who come after them. How about for you, Gala.

Gala: I think I've just been - So I want to say that I was thinking this whole time about bubbling of ideology that can create this sort of flattening of human experience. But I think that if one were to apply this idea of the flattening of the human experience, what you know about what you're fighting for, what you're good at, what involves you, what affects you into a general hope, right, for the collective. Like for me, I think if I were to imagine my hope for queer people in the US, it would be the same hope that I have for people in every country, which is that they hold otherness as sacred and they continue to. And I think that when it comes to queer activism, right, like when we see it in action, the people who have made the most difference in a lot of activist spheres pushing against government have been people who have been invested in human otherness as sacred and integral. So if you think about I don't know, like what was happening in Chechnya. And so many activists, like so many Russian activists were from queer activists, were actually creating secret, like were getting people out of Chechnya, and creating like secret lives for them to live in Chechnya. Queer people are constantly in, especially in countries where queerness is criminalized, but also countries where it isn't like the US theoretically, are constantly being placed in this business to choose between this idea of being loved and being part of a nation and being themselves. Right. But ultimately, at least for the US, as an example, like queerness is a part of the national story here. It's a part of the American story, if you think about it. Like there is this idea that people inherit, right? That isn't necessarily true, that if they come here, they can be whatever they want. Right? And so, in some ways, that is like this, like false bat signal, right? Like you get to come here, and you get to be whatever you want in this country, which is inaccurate, because then you could wind up going to a nightclub with all your friends and get shot for being who you are. Right? So there's this idea, then that a lot of people who come with, like what I imagined is a true, I don't know, I don't want to give it value. But I think that queerness, or aligning oneself with queerness has to do with recognizing that it's not something that you inherit from an authority, right. And so I think that if I were to imagine a true optimistic hope it would be that queer people as they are pushed toward action, as they are pushed toward some acts of sovereignty, that they hold otherness as sacred, as opposed to falling into traps of homo-nationalism, where they can serve the nation state, but also whiteness. So queer whiteness against like, people who are anti-racist and against the carceral state.

Rebekah: Thank you so much for bringing that up. I am absolutely in love with this idea of holding otherness as sacred, you know. Because I think a lot of the issues where we get pinned against one another and trying to blame our issues on this other, there's a fear of the other. And I think that's an issue worldwide. And so if we can come to a point where we can hold otherness as sacred, I think that we can move forward to a more promising future.

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carefreeblackho · 4 years

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Espresso has Become a Relentless Power all Throughout the Planet.

In excess of 2 billion cups of espresso are tanked each day across the globe – affirms that it's a beverage, however the soul for some individuals, and living without it would be incomprehensible. http://reviewmycoffee.com/

Presently it's an entirely different world with its own fragrance, flavors, and celebrations, which have taken perpetual residency in our lives.

In case you're another individual from its high roads, you may be mistaken for the language of the espresso menu and asking yourself, what the heck is macchiato? Would it be a good idea for me to arrange this beverage with luxurious finished froth? Will the barista believe, I'm a weakling on the off chance that I request a beverage with loads of milk?

Take a full breath; in this guide, I've laid out practically each one of those beverages you find at your neighborhood caffé menu, so in the future you'll realize what to arrange – and anticipate.

Essential Coffee Drinks

Dark Coffee

Dark espresso resembles a delightful dark dress in the drinks world. From easy to refined, it goes including ports transportation to rooms, polytechnic to humble community coffee shops, American cowpokes to French Press models. It's an ageless work of art – so regardless of whether you're attempting to beat the odds, you can in any case have a cup of joe prior to taking off to the drives. Essentially heat up some water and add espresso (beans, grounds, or leaves) to it. Refine cautiously – and you're prepared to grip fingers around your ideal cup of caffeine. No seasoning, it'll knock your socks off! On the off chance that you see it interestingly, you may think it tastes severe or ashy, yes it likely does. Yet, the normal pleasantness and other flavor ascribes are interesting to this beverage.

Besides, you may discover numerous valid justifications to drink dark espresso, however the medical advantage of eliminating dairy and sugar will likely start your longing to find out about the flavor subtleties of dark espresso.

However, in the event that it's consuming your tongue or your taste buds aren't tolerating its taste, you can add the cream or milk and sugar or fake sugar to change the blessing to coordinate with it to your style.

Ultimately, it will not damage your wallet as you'll as a rule discover it as the similarly least expensive alternative in the greater part of the caffé menus. Learn more

Turkish Coffee

With regards to espresso, Turkish espresso aficionados love to cite;

Despite the fact that bistros offering coffees, level whites, and cappuccinos have gotten mainstream in Istanbul, still, Turkish Coffee is a critical piece of their way of life and an ideal expansion to any profound discussion with loved ones.

Turkish espresso culture and custom have the UNESCO World Heritage status due to their exceptional planning and preparing strategy. In this way, regardless of whether you haven't went to Turkey ever, you presumably heard the reference or even attempted it.

However, on the off chance that you don't have a clue, when you'll allude the nose-ringed barista about "Turkish Coffee," more often than not, it implies you're requesting a thick, dark espresso.

In any case, in the event that you need to give it a shot at your home, it will not expect you to have any unique barista abilities to make a serious mug of java.

Here is the breakdown of steps:

Essentially bubble one cup of water alongside two tablespoons of coffee beans in a cezve, a little pot with a long handle, generally made of copper – it's otherwise called ibriks.

Since sugar is never added, you'll need to indicate the amount you need to add. You can get it with no sugar, one sugar 3D shape for semi-pleasantness, or two 3D squares for sweet Turkish espresso.

As the espresso arrives at the bubble, let the froth rise and eliminate it from heat before it's going to spill. This ensures your espresso will have full froth, and without it, it's absolutely unsatisfactory.

You can rehash the third step a few times.

Serve it in a little cup; it never implies it's to be burned-through rapidly; taste a bit, converse with your buddies and rehash.

Cold Brew

It's something other than the cool, it gives you caffeine-taste of frosted espresso. Begun from store coffeehouses, it could have its spot on the Caffe menus of major groups like Starbucks and Peets.

The flavor is one of those small bunch of reasons why Cold Brew detonated throughout the most recent couple of years, and with the primary taste, you may think why individuals didn't cold blending espresso a very long time prior.

It's most likely going to be your best-cherished beverage If you're a devotee of a smooth, offset mug of espresso with low causticity, covered with a rich body.

You will not need to ask your organs to co-work for this beverage, It's essentially distress free in any event, for a fretfully unfilled stomach.

Basically, in case you're delicate to corrosiveness, Cold Brew is your lifeline.

Weaken the concentrate with milk, and you'll have your frosted latte prepared to taste. Or on the other hand, blend the move in with your soul of decision, and you'll have another form of Cold Brew (charged mixed drink) prepared to chug; it's so delectable!

All in all, what I mean? Flavor prospects are perpetual with Cold Brew!

Frosted Coffee

Stand by! Cold Brew isn't the Iced Coffee?

Frosted espresso can be any type of espresso – trickle, pour-over and even coffee. However, chilly brew is a particular style of frosted espresso or a frosted espresso method. One isn't superior to other people; they are made diversely and have unmistakable preferences.

At the point when you ask the barista for a virus brew espresso at a café or bistro, you'll be given out a mug of java delicately blended with frosted shapes.

Its approach is essentially the immediate openness of cold water with espresso beans for around 12-16 hours to guarantee the best and tasty experience of cold mix. When the soaking closes, the concentrated fluid is blended in with water to make you a solid and delish cup of cold brew.

Then again, when you'll arrange a frosted espresso, frequently you'll be presented with a hot espresso poured over ice, yet it tastes excessively weakened so the vast majority of the java consumers currently incline toward espresso fermented at twofold strength (by utilizing the twofold measure of espresso), however it can likewise be the trickle espresso that is administered straight ridiculous precious stones or chilled in the cooler and presto Reviewmycoffee.com !

You'll see a lot of frosted espresso fortes in a large portion of the cafés as it doesn't require some investment to mix one cup, you point your finger at the bill of admission.

Assortment of Espresso Based Drinks

Coffee is the foundation of a variety of mouth-watering juiced drinks.

In case you're new to the espresso world, you most likely noticed the java sweethearts mentioning the talented barista for "single-shot" or "twofold shot." at the end of the day, they were really requesting the little focused punch of each one of those normal cancer prevention agents in a delectable bundle – the coffee.

All in all, for what reason do individuals cherish coffee? You can't deny the spirit contacting fragrance of newly preparing shot, its taste, gigantic jolt of energy, less caffeine per ounce, crema besting, and above all, the punch of many medical advantages in each taste.

The greater part of the delectable strengths create from coffee, and that is the reason they are ruling most of space on the menu. It's the type of substance of each latte, cappuccino, and a lot of different varieties – mocha or level white, we can't get enough.

In any case, before jump into the ocean of coffee drinks, you simply need to know how master baristas create fulfilling coffee shots to make your most appropriate mug of java.

The interaction includes delivering a concentrated fluid by constraining the water at an ideal temperature (190 to 196 degrees Fahrenheit) and pressing factor (normally 9 to 15 bars) for 18 to 20 seconds through entirely fine espresso beans.

An appropriately extricated shot looks delectably smooth, covered with a smooth crema and an extraordinary fragrance. With the main taste, you'll surely fall in ceaseless love with this cup of joe.

How about we discover how baristas all throughout the planet utilize this Italian designed marvel to make those delish claims to fame that sparkle like stars on the cafeteria menu.

Ristretto

"Confined" or "restricted" in Italian methods, it's basically the primary portion of a full coffee shot while utilizing a similar measure of espresso beans. Connoisseur espresso aficionados regularly incline toward ristretto as it gives you a sheer quality alongside the rich and fragrant kind of espresso beans.

Try not to be messed with "close to nothing"; this fun-size shot is loaded with a particularly incredible punch.

A solitary ristretto shot ought to be 15 ml, while 30 ml for a twofold shot.

Doppio

In Italian "doppio" signifies "twofold," it implies you need twofold shots of coffee. It's separated utilizing a twofold espresso channel in the portafilter so you get 60 ml of coffee served in a demitasse cup which is double the measure of a standard coffee shot, 30 ml.

Presently numerous coffeehouses all throughout the planet just offer twofold coffees to beat the quality control issues. Regularly, it's additionally called as "standard twofold," so you don't have to confound if a barista utilizes this term to affirm your coffee drink.

Americano

From the outset, it's idea to call "Caffe Americano," however throughout the long term it has been abbreviated to simply "Americano."

In any event, when you demand the barista in an American manner, you'll in any case be presented with an Italian beverage, arranged by weakening the coffee shot with heated water, that is comparative in strength however extraordinary in flavor to ordinary trickle espresso.

The strength of Americano is subject to the quantity of coffee shots and the measure of water added to coordinate with your taste.

Lungo

Dissimilar to ristretto, it signifies "long" on the grounds that you'll get the coffee drink with considerably more water, which for the most part brings about a long mug of java. This isn't the quality element yet basically the piece of individual inclination.

From my experience, most of the espresso darlings request a "lungo" just to appreciate a less extreme "coffee" in a cup while as yet having the taste and characteristics of coffee.

Caffé Crema

You'll discover Caffé Crema exceptionally unprecedented in the Caffe menus on the off chance that you have a place with the English-talking world, and this is a direct result of the critical contrast of granulate when contrasted with standard coffee. Caffe may rather serve you with Americanos or long blacks.

In Italy, throughout the mid year, the majority of the customary cafés present with this coffee variation, Caffé Crema.

You'll presumably discover less English-language guides on the most proficient method to mix Caffé Crema. Its preparing strategy includes extricating the coarsen grounds (go against to totally fine justification) for a similar time as we accomplish for coffee shot, however it brings about a more prominent volume mug of java.

Barista can give some different varieties of this beverage on demand, by temping less or removing for somewhat more than expected.

Bistro Zorro

Practically like Americano however it actually total opposites. The significant distinction is that Café Zorro contains twofold shot and boiling water in the equivalent proportions that give you a more focused and less weakened twofold coffee.

Notwithstanding, in Americano, heated water is added to make the beverage weakened and taste-like dribble espresso surface.

Bistro Cubano

As the name demonstrates, this beverage is started from Cuba and alluding this kind of espresso, implies, you're requesting for a coffee shot that is improved (customarily with the regular earthy colored sugar which has been whipped first with the drops of the most grounded shot of coffee).

This beverage is a piece of noticeable social and social action in Cuba and especially in Miami, Tempa and Florida Keys (Cuban-American people group).

Generally, it's made utilizing an electric coffee machine or regularly in Moka pot with hazier dishes.

#http://reviewmycoffee.com/#Reviewmycoffee.com #Reviewmycoffee

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jewish-privilege · 5 years

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One of Wenzel Michalski’s early recollections of growing up in southern Germany in the 1970s was of his father, Franz, giving him some advice: “Don’t tell anyone that you’re Jewish.” Franz and his mother and his little brother had survived the Holocaust by traveling across swaths of Eastern and Central Europe to hide from the Gestapo, and after the war, his experiences back in Germany suggested that, though the Nazis had been defeated, the anti-Semitism that was intrinsic to their ideology had not. This became clear to Franz when his teachers in Berlin cast stealthily malicious glances at him when Jewish characters — such as Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice” — came up in literature. “Eh, Michalski, this exactly pertains to you,” he recalls one teacher telling him through a clenched smile. Many years later, when he worked as an animal-feed trader in Hamburg, he didn’t tell friends that he was Jewish and held his tongue when he heard them make anti-Semitic comments. And so Franz told his son Wenzel that things would go easier for him if he remained quiet about being Jewish. “The moment you say it, things will become very awkward.”

As a teenager, Wenzel defied his father’s advice and told a close friend. That friend quickly told his mother, and the next time Wenzel saw her, she reacted quite strongly, hugging him and kissing his face: “Wenzel! Oh, my Wenzel!” Now a stocky, bearded 56-year-old, Wenzel recalled the moment to me on a recent Saturday afternoon. He raised the pitch of his voice as he continued to mimic her: “You people! You are the most intelligent! The most sensitive! You are the best pianists in the world! And the best poets!” In his normal voice again, he added, “Then I understood what my father meant.”

Wenzel Michalski is now the director of Human Rights Watch for Germany. He and his wife, Gemma, an outgoing British expat, live in a cavernous apartment building in the west of Berlin. In their kitchen, Gemma told me that after arriving in Germany in 1989, she often got a strangely defensive reaction when she told people she was Jewish; they would tell her they didn’t feel responsible for the Holocaust or would defend their grandparents as not having perpetrated it. And so, to avoid conversations like these, she, too, stayed quiet about being Jewish.

Recently, the Michalskis’ youngest son became the third generation of the family to learn that telling people he is Jewish could cause problems. The boy — whose parents asked that he be called by one of his middle names, Solomon, to protect his privacy — had attended a Jewish primary school in Berlin. But he didn’t want to stay in such a homogeneous school for good, so just before he turned 14, he transferred to a public school that was representative of Germany’s new diversity — a place, as Gemma described it, where he “could have friends with names like Hassan and Ahmed.”

The first few days there seemed to go well. Solomon, an affable kid with an easy smile, bonded with one classmate over their common affection for rap music. That classmate introduced him to a German-Turkish rapper who would rap about “Allah and stuff,” Solomon told me. In return, he introduced the classmate to American and British rap. Solomon had a feeling they would end up being best friends. On the fourth day, when Solomon was in ethics class, the teachers asked the students what houses of worship they had been to. One student mentioned a mosque. Another mentioned a church. Solomon raised his hand and said he’d been to a synagogue. There was a strange silence, Solomon later recalled. One teacher asked how he had encountered a synagogue.

“I’m Jewish,” Solomon said.

“Everyone was shocked, especially the teachers,” Solomon later told me about this moment. After class, a teacher told Solomon that he was “very brave.” Solomon was perplexed. As Gemma explained: “He didn’t know that you’re not meant to tell anyone.”

The following day, Solomon brought brownies to school for his birthday. He was giving them out during lunch when the boy he had hoped would be his best friend informed him that there were a lot of Muslim students at the school who used the word “Jew” as an insult. Solomon wondered whether his friend included himself in this category, and so after school, he asked for clarification. The boy put his arm around Solomon’s shoulders and told him that, though he was a “real babo” — Kurdish slang for “boss” — they couldn’t be friends, because Jews and Muslims could not be friends. The classmate then rattled off a series of anti-Semitic comments, according to Solomon: that Jews were murderers, only interested in money.

Over the next few months, Solomon was bullied in an increasingly aggressive fashion. One day, he returned home with a large bruise from a punch on the back. On another occasion, Solomon was walking home and stopped into a bakery. When he emerged, he found one of his tormentors pointing what looked like a handgun at him. Solomon’s heart raced. The boy pulled the trigger. Click. The gun turned out to be a fake. But it gave Solomon the scare of his life.

When Solomon first told his parents about the bullying, they resolved to turn it into a teaching moment. They arranged to have Wenzel’s father visit the school to share his story about escaping the Gestapo. But the bullying worsened, Gemma told me, and they felt the school did not do nearly enough to confront the problem. The Michalskis went public with their story in 2017, sharing it with media outlets in order to spark what they viewed as a much-needed discussion about anti-Semitism in German schools. Since then, dozens of cases of anti-Semitic bullying in schools have come to light, including one case last year at the German-American school where my own son attends first grade, in which, according to local news reports, students tormented a ninth grader, for months, chanting things like “Off to Auschwitz in a freight train.” Under criticism for its handling of the case, the administration released a statement saying it regretted the school’s initial response but was taking action and having “intensive talks” with the educational staff.

...For the Michalskis, all this was evidence that German society never truly reckoned with anti-Semitism after the war. Germany had restored synagogues and built memorials to the victims of the Holocaust, Wenzel said: “So for a lot of mainstream, middle-class people, that means: ‘We’ve done it. We dealt with anti-Semitism.’ But nobody really dealt with it within the families. The big, the hard, the painful questions were never asked.” In Wenzel’s view, the Muslim students who tormented his child were acting in an environment that was already suffused with native anti-Semitism. “A lot of conservative politicians now say, ‘Oh, the Muslims are importing their anti-Semitism to our wonderful, anti-anti-Semitic culture,’ ” he said. “That’s bull. They’re trying to politicize this.”

Jewish life in Germany was never fully extinguished. After the Nazi genocide of six million Jews, some 20,000 Jewish displaced persons from Eastern Europe ended up settling permanently in West Germany, joining an unknown number of the roughly 15,000 surviving German Jews who still remained in the country after the war. The new German political class rejected, in speeches and in the law, the rabid anti-Semitism that had been foundational to Nazism — measures considered not only to be morally imperative but necessary to re-establish German legitimacy on the international stage. This change, however, did not necessarily reflect an immediate conversion in longstanding anti-Semitic attitudes on the ground. In the decades that followed, a desire among many Germans to deflect or repress guilt for the Holocaust led to a new form of antipathy toward Jews — a phenomenon that came to be known as “secondary anti-Semitism,” in which Germans resent Jews for reminding them of their guilt, reversing the victim and perpetrator roles. “It seems the Germans will never forgive us Auschwitz,” Hilde Walter, a German-Jewish journalist, was quoted as saying in 1968.

Holocaust commemoration in West Germany increasingly became an affair of the state and civic groups, giving rise to a prevailing erinnerungskultur, or “culture of remembrance,” that today is most prominently illustrated by the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a funereal 4.7-acre site near the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, inaugurated in 2005. But even as Germany’s remembrance culture has been held up as an international model of how to confront the horrors of the past, it has not been universally supported at home. According to a 2015 Anti-Defamation League survey, 51 percent of Germans believe that it is “probably true” that “Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust”; 30 percent agreed with the statement “People hate Jews because of the way Jews behave.”

...The exact nature of the anti-Semitic threat — and indeed, whether it rises to the level of an existential threat at all — is intensely debated within Germany’s Jewish community. Many see the greatest peril as coming from an emboldened extreme right that is hostile to both Muslims and Jews, as the recent shootings by white supremacists in synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway, Calif., and mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, horrifically illustrated. Multiple surveys suggest that anti-Muslim attitudes in Germany and other European countries are more widespread than anti-Semitism. At the same time, a number of surveys show that Muslims in Germany and other European countries are more likely to hold anti-Semitic views than the overall population. The 2015 Anti-Defamation League survey, for instance, found that 56 percent of Muslims in Germany harbored anti-Semitic attitudes, compared with 16 percent for the overall population. Conservative Jews see the political left as unwilling to name this problem out of reluctance to further marginalize an already marginalized group or because of leftist anti-Zionism. The far right, anti-Islam A.f.D. — the very political party that, for its relativizing of Nazi crimes, many Jews find most noxious — has sought to exploit these divisions and now portrays itself as a defender of Germany’s Jews against what it depicts as the Muslim threat.

...The early signs are mixed. Sigmount Königsberg is the anti-Semitism commissioner for Berlin’s Jewish Community, the organization that oversees synagogues and other aspects of local Jewish life. At a cafe next to the domed New Synagogue, which was spared destruction during the pogroms of November 1938, Königsberg, an affable 58-year-old, told me his mother had been liberated from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and had intended to move to Paris. Instead, she became stranded in the German border town of Saarbrücken, and she soon met Königsberg’s father, also a Holocaust survivor. Like other Jewish families, they were ambivalent about remaining in Germany. Königsberg employed an often-used metaphor to describe this unsettledness: Until the 1980s, he said, German Jews “sat on a packed suitcase.” After East and West Germany reunified, many Jews feared a nationalist revival. Despite a wave of racist attacks on immigrants, that revival did not seem to materialize. In fact, the European Union, which was created to temper those impulses, was ascendant. Jews felt more secure, Königsberg told me: “We unpacked the suitcase and stored it in the cellar.”

Now, he believed, that sense of security has eroded. People aren’t heading for the exits yet, he said, but they are starting to think, Where did I put that suitcase?

...[Felix Klein, Germany’s first federal Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight Against Anti-Semitism] listed several things the German government should be doing at the federal and state levels to fight anti-Semitism; chief among them was training teachers and the police simply to recognize it. He also said school books should include more lessons about Jewish contributions to Germany. “We only started to talk about Jews when the Nazi period came up in our history lesson,” he said. “We didn’t speak about Jewish life before that, and we didn’t speak about Jewish life after.”

The rise of anti-Semitic acts, Klein told me, was not just a matter of rising hate but a rising willingness to express it. This was because of social media, he said, as well as the A.f.D. and its “brutalization” of the political discourse. There are also the challenges that are caused by anti-Semitism from Muslims, he said, though, he added, according to criminal statistics, this was not the main problem...

He added that the existing statistics should not be used as a pretext “to avoid a discussion regarding anti-Semitism from Muslims.” I asked him if there was any fear that such a conversation would raise tensions between minority groups instead of protecting them. “I think there is a fear,” he said. “This is why I think the right strategy is to denounce any form of anti-Semitism, regardless of the numbers. I don’t want to start a discussion about which one is more problematic or more dangerous than the other.”

He leaned in to underscore this point. “You should not start this discussion, because then you start using one political group against the other. We should not do that.”

...Last year, two-dozen Jewish A.f.D. supporters founded a group called “Jews in the A.f.D.,” or J.A.f.D., asserting, in a “statement of principles,” that it is the only party willing to “thematize Muslim hatred of Jews without trivializing it.” In response, the Central Council of Jews in Germany and 41 other Jewish organizations released a joint statement condemning the A.f.D. as racist and anti-Semitic and warned Jews not to fall for its “apparent concern” for their safety. “We won’t allow ourselves to be instrumentalized by the A.f.D.,” the statement read. “No, the A.f.D. is a danger to Jewish life in Germany.”

On a Sunday afternoon last October, J.A.f.D. held its inaugural event in a gymnasium on the outskirts of the Hessian city of Wiesbaden. A J.A.f.D. supporter in the crowd of attendees, who wore a yarmulke and a Star of David necklace that dangled outside his shirt next to an A.f.D. pin, told me, in a strong Russian accent, that he had emigrated from Moscow in the early 1990s. As reporters gathered around him, he rattled off a series of claims often recited at far-right political gatherings: Muslim immigrants come from an “absolutely alien” culture. They would “bring Shariah law” and “rape” to Germany. When a reporter from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung tried to get his name, the man refused to give it. He didn’t trust the lügenpresse — “the lying press” — he said, using a phrase that, long preceding “fake news,” had been deployed by propagandists in Nazi Germany to spread conspiracy theories about newspapers controlled by “world Jewry.”

...The Fraenkelufer Synagogue sits on Berlin’s Landwehr Canal, a snaking, several-mile-long waterway that meets the city’s major river, the Spree, on each end. In September 1945, according to a Chicago Sun reporter, the canal still stank of decayed corpses when 400 Jewish survivors and about 30 American Jewish soldiers gathered for the first postwar synagogue service in Berlin. The main neo-Classical sanctuary that had once stood at the site sat in ruins, but a Jewish-American lieutenant stationed in Berlin named Harry Nowalsky, who could see the synagogue from his bedroom window, had made it a personal mission to restore a smaller, still-intact sanctuary in time for Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year. On the cool holiday evening, the congregants, as one reporter wrote, “sang songs of Israel with tear-stained faces.”

...Fraenkelufer Synagogue would not exist today without immigration. After the war, Jews from Eastern Europe formed a small congregation. After 1989, Jews from the former Soviet Union joined, but by the turn of the millennium, the congregation had dwindled. That began to change several years ago, with the immigration of young Jews from around the world to the neighborhood, including some of the thousands of Israelis who have migrated to Berlin in recent years — many of whom lean to the political left and are troubled by Israel’s rightward political shift...

One evening last summer, three generations of the Michalski family — Wenzel and Gemma, Wenzel’s father, Franz, and his mother, Petra, as well as Solomon’s siblings — sat in a row at an English-language theater in Berlin to watch Solomon, now 16 and enrolled in a new private school, perform in a play inspired by his experience with anti-Semitic bullying.

The play began with a scene in a classroom where an assignment was written on the board: “Tribalism Divides Communities — Elucidate.” The teenagers portrayed two tribes, the Whoozis and the Whatzits, who, because of ancient rivalries, fight. Eventually, everyone falls to the floor and perishes in a final battle. But then everyone slowly rises.

“So that’s it?” one tribe member said. “Everyone dies in the end?”

“That sucks,” another said.

“Yes, but it’s realistic,” another said.

Solomon had the last line.

“Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m not leaving until we get this right.”

After the play, Gemma told me that she didn’t hold grudges against the kids who bullied her son. “I didn’t give up on those kids,” she said. “The school gave up on those kids.” The attitude from many of the teachers, she said, was: “You can’t talk to them; they’re just Muslims.” This revealed a troubling unwillingness to stand up for, as she put it, “life in a liberal, tolerant democracy for everyone, beyond racism.”

I asked Solomon if he had thought much about anti-Semitism before the bullying episodes. He told me about a trip he took with his grandparents just before the bullying began. They visited the places in Poland, the Czech Republic and eastern Germany where his grandfather had hidden from the Gestapo. “That really opened my mind,” he told me. “I knew about my grandpa’s experiences, but I just, you know, felt really proud to be Jewish after that trip. Then after this whole thing happened, it makes me even more proud to be Jewish. I wouldn’t say I feel more religious. But it’s just the identity, the ethnic background of being Jewish and walking in Berlin as a Jewish boy.” His mother later told me that she found it sad that her son had formed a stronger sense of tribal identity based on the experience of mistreatment. She had not wanted him to forge his identity in fear. “I wanted him to be free,” she said.

Solomon told me that he was happy at his new school. He had made new friends of diverse backgrounds, and they had formed a band called the Minorities. Still, he added, he did not feel free to express his newfound Jewish identity in public. He had wanted to wear a Star of David necklace, he told me, but he and his parents had decided that this was not a good idea. The necklace could be exposed if someone were to pull his shirt back. “The thing is,” he said, “it’s still really dangerous. I mean, it’s not like, ‘O.K., everything is fine now.’ ”

[Read James Angelos’s excellent piece in The New York Times Magazine.]

#long post #germany #antisemitism #islamophobia

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africanization101 · 5 years

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I am a huge fan of your blog and politics, and I was wondering what other reading (Like other blogs or books) you would recommend to your followers? I don't mind if any of your recommendations aren't necessarily "sexy", I'm just very interested in your writings and want to find more like-minded people!

Sure, let’s spread some love around the blog-o-sphere.

If you’re following me for my writings, there are a few kindred spirits I can recommend, but the list is shorter than I would like it to be: I started this blog precisely because interracial promotion with an intellectual twist was hard to come by and I wanted to see more of it. The recent cultural revolution on tumblr has made the selection even smaller. But enough complaining, here’s who you should check out - right after a little visual aid to get you in the mood.

@goodgirlsgetgentrified runs an eclectic interracial blog with lots of alluring captions and musings of her own. I suspect the Venn diagram of our followers is a circle already, but in case anyone is not aware of her work, now is the time to go forth and binge on her content!

@browneurope is a writings-based blog that explores the inevitable racial transformation of Europe based on real-world developments. He uses a uniquely kinky-academic tone in his articles and I love it very much. Sadly he hasn’t been as active lately, but maybe a bunch of new followers might encourage him to start posting more?

@mixed-fantasy-returns manages to express in captions with few words what it takes me three paragraphs to say, so naturally a shout-out is in order. They also have a keen eye for aesthetics in general and will entertain you with great multicultural imagery. Following them will definitely enrich your timeline.

@lordkilo is a prolific captioneer with a sexy assortment of long-form and short-form captions that will always get you in the mood to celebrate the Blacked future. He has a particular soft spot for promoting interracialism among Slavic and Turkish women, which is a fascinating niche to explore.

@erasewhite has a very infectious way of celebrating white extinction. It’s both direct and playfully devotional at the same time. You’re bound to encounter his oft-reblogged work in the interracial scene, but why not get it directly from the source?

There isn’t a great mainstream universe of interracial publications, sadly. It seeps into general culture in various ways, but “Eurafrika Magazine” has yet to be founded. Nevertheless, since you also asked for content that isn’t kinky in nature, there are some more general pro-Black sources you might enjoy.

The Root is a great e-zine to follow to keep up on Afrocentric culture and politics. If you want to stay hip, make it a daily read!

@medievalpoc showcases the many ways in which people of color were represented in Medieval European art. It’s fascinating since we think of Medieval Europe as a monolithically white place when it really wasn’t. Very educational and beautiful.

I would also suggest you add a few important voices of color to your Twitter feed. There’s many more than the ones I will recommend, but you know how Twitter works: they retweet someone else, you find new people, your universe expands. Nikole Hannah-Jones, April Reign and Ayanna Pressley should be good starting points to get a feel for what’s important to the Black community and how you might be able to help.

I hope that was enough content for now. I’m tempted to also recommend a primer on post-colonial theory, but I don’t want to torture my followers too much.

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zamancollective · 5 years

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Nationalist Mythologies and the False Friendship of Nostalgia

By Mirushe Zylali

Additional Writing by Sophie Levy

What is a mythology?

Through mythology, one locates oneself within history and creates a sense of continuity between the past, present, and future.

The impulse to place oneself in a historical continuum is understandable, especially within postcolonial contexts. For Europeans, myths provide a basis of identity for the nation-state. For Euro-colonized peoples, a desire to return to a pre-colonial body politic often becomes integral to liberation movements, and later, becomes a method of garnering mass popular support for a burgeoning post-imperialist nation-state. Postcolonial mythologies are often manifestations of an emotionally-tinged hunger for a life that does not ache of colonialism.

Mythology has a vital role in legitimizing the construction of modern ethnonationalist states and their respective languages, cultures, and propaganda systems. When “British India” was cleaved in two, Pakistan adopted an alphabetic script based on Arabic, while India adopted a script based on Sanskrit, though similarities abound between spoken dialects in the subcontinent’s northern regions. To this day, India’s far-right Hindu nationalists are working to incorporate more words derived from Vedic Sanskrit into modern Hindi, while nationalist Pakistanis do the same with Islamic terminology derived from Arabic.

In his construction of the Albanian nation-state, Enver Hoxha outlawed religion and claimed that modern Albanians descended from ancient Illyrian tribes. Modern Turks assert that they are heirs to the Ottoman Empire established by Byzantine tribes over 700 years ago. During WWII, German Nazis even claimed to be descended from Aryans, somehow also insisting upon their origins in the lost city of Atlantis, and repurposed the swastika, a Hindu symbol, to this aim. Later in the twentieth century, Iranian nationalist groups would adopt a link to this “superior” Aryan race in order to incite violence against ethnic minorities within Iran, such as Jews and Kurds. Saddam Hussein insisted upon modern Iraqis’ link to the people and culture of ancient Babylonia in building his autocratic government - just as the Pahlavi Shahs of Iran belabored their connection to Darius’ pre-Islamic empire.

Evidently, it has been a nation-building tactic of autocratic regimes across Europe and Asia to emphasize links between a current population and an ancient culture or mythology. Here, I take time to deconstruct why this method is somewhat futile.

Iraqis, for instance, cannot claim direct historical continuity with Babylonia because its religion-and the way of life it spurred- has not been maintained since the fall of Babylon in 539. Since then, cultural diffusion, conquest, and the shifting borders of empires have made Iraq a thoroughly Arab nation-state, notwithstanding the presence of non-Arab ethnic minorities.

Victors often write what history survives. What records exist of the processes of the Persian and Arab conquerors who altered the culture of ancient Mesopotamia? One could infer that those attempting to keep up the ‘old ways’ would have been brutalized or disenfranchised by their new conquerors. Neither the ethnic composition nor the historical legacy of ancient life in present-day Iraq is continuous with those who live there today, and the recovery of such a culture would be nearly impossible. But why would anyone want to undertake such a task in the first place?

the Eagle of Saladin - often used as a symbol of Ba’athist ideology.

Let us follow the logic of this desire for belonging. A branch of my mother’s family hails from Al-Andalus. What would an ‘un-exiling’ of ourselves look like? With very few Spanish Jews left in Spain, and others having fled to places such as Turkey, Greece, the Americas, the Balkans, and Morocco, which of them can lay a true claim to the “authentic” ancestry that would provide a basis for such a social movement? Do I learn from the Jews of Tangier, Fez, and southern Spain, who would have fallen within the borders of the Umayyad Empire? No. Their cultures, changed by hundreds of years of innovation, diffusion, and empire, may barely resemble our ancestors’ shared Andalusian moment. I can enjoy camaraderie with them for what we share, but to claim a singular flashpoint of origin for all of us, thus suggesting that we share a contemporary ‘sameness’ and deny such unique facets of our respective cultures would do a deep disservice to all of us.

Often intentionally, mythos functions to create ‘out’ groups and ‘Others’, consolidating power for the in-group as they build a new state. The Other can even be transformed into an inhuman creature. The Kurd, at times racialized as white for the purposes of the Iraqi, Syrian, or Turkish imagination, becomes a foreign interloper, even as Muslim Kurds may discriminate against Ezidis, Kurdish Jews, and Kurdish Christians for similar reasons. Within the imagination of the previously-colonized subject, the Jew can stand in as a figure of corrupting European influence, or the Jew can stand in as the backward Other not yet converted to the dominant religion or way of life of whichever empire. The same goes for Christians in southwestern Asia who maintain knowledge of spoken and written Coptic or Syriac. Often, by the logic of Muslim Arab in-groups, Arab Jews aren’t not Arabs. Rather, they just aren’t the right type of Arab. It is difficult to build a pluralistic nationalist movement; just look at the Ba’athist party.

European Zionists explored the idea of land-bound, Jewish nationalism as early as the 1800s. The Haskalah, or “Jewish Enlightenment” that began in the eighteenth century, had already kick-started the initiative to revitalize Hebrew as the lingua franca of the Jewish world. Zionists then harnessed Hebrew’s potential for Jewish unification in their development of a formalized national consciousness.

It is not a coincidence that Zionism’s genesis resembles that of other European nationalisms. Today, its proponents often overlook the fact that Zionists thinkers and leaders formed pragmatic alliances with European colonialists in an effort to solve the Jewish Question or gain a reputation as a “modernized” people. Though a historical and religious Jewish connection to Israel/Palestine cannot be denied, Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, was just as willing to establish a “Jewish Nation-State” in what is modern-day Ghana or Argentina. He was desperate to secure any place to use as a safe haven for Jews. Even as he cast Jews as Oriental Others in the eyes of gentile Europeans, he was playing by the rules of Western colonialists as if he were one of them.

Zionism, then, is a complicated nationalism in that it has to reconcile an orientalized, ancient Jewish mythology with a “modernized” European character. This cognitive dissonance within the Zionist national consciousness has visibly influenced the vocabulary of mainstream modern Hebrew, as developed by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. On one hand, Hebrew’s newfound role in early Zionist settlements as a more broadly and colloquially-spoken language represents the revival of an ancient language, culture, and peoplehood. It centralized a scattered nation in the name of a mythologized history, repurposing the words of a holy language for use in secular contexts - paralleling the incorporation of Qur’anic vocabulary into Modern Standard Arabic.

Yet, if modern Hebrew is meant to be “authentic,” why is the word for tea ‘teh’ and not ‘shai’ as it is in other Semitic languages like Arabic and Aramaic? Why is the word for banana ‘banana’ and not ‘muuza’ as it would be in Arabic? In the same vein, why does the mode of Hebrew pronunciation taught in Israeli schools sideline the guttural sounds of quf, ayin, and het originally spoken by Jews in ancient Tiberias, opting instead for a more European flair?

Most of the loanwords that exist in Modern Hebrew come from Germanic languages. Of course, it is understandable that the introduction of vocabulary not previously existent in biblical or rabbinic Hebrew could be pulled from English, which was already a lingua franca during Hebrew’s revival in a nationalist context. However, such influence does call for further inquiry where existing, foundational verbiage with Semitic origins was discarded and replaced with European terminology.

These small details in the modern Hebraic lexicon reveal much about the sentiments and convictions of European Zionist nation-builders. Firstly, the disposal of selected nouns with Semitic roots arguably reflects a latent desire to separate this artificially monolithic conception of the “Jewish people” from southwestern Asian languages- languages perceived to not be Jewish. The same goes for the systematic labeling of Mizrahi accents as “incorrect” in professional contexts in Israel. Yemeni immigrants, for instance, have faced and continue to face ridicule and discrimination because of their accents. Ironically, however, Yemenite Jews are generally thought to pronounce liturgical Hebrew most similarly to the ancient Tiberian inflection. Does this mean that all Jews who are not Yemenite have “inauthentic” pronunciations? Of course not. What it does mean is that Arabic, for example, is not an un-Jewish language. The accent that many Mizrahim are discriminated against for having is not a “corruption” of anything.

Secondly, modern Hebrew’s European loanwords and inflection indicate that Zionist leaders seeking to revitalize Hebrew as a “universal” language for Jews heavily prioritized the comfort of Ashkenazi Jews in their adjustment to life in the Holy Land. Of course, learning Hebrew was still very difficult for Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim (read: women) who hadn’t been exposed to the study of rabbinic or biblical Hebrew in the heder, but leaders like Ben Yehuda clearly geared this ancient Semitic language to be as accessible to Europeans as possible in its revival. Had there been a genuine effort to make Hebrew a language for Jewish ‘olim hailing from across the globe, Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Persian-speaking Mizrahim would have been consulted much more.

Lastly, Hebrew’s Germanic loanwords and smoothed-out modern pronunciation made it a more palatable language in the eyes of European colonialists, with whom Israel’s founding parties sought to form pragmatic alliances. The more similar Hebrew could be to European languages while still retaining its own mythologized, ancient character, the more British proponents of settler-colonialism could perhaps be willing to lend a hand to Jewish settlers. And so goes the balancing act between the orientalized nostalgia and modern European appeal of Hebrew.

"Vote for the Zionist list (No. 6), all who believe in the rebirth of our land through Hebrew labor." From the Zionist List in Russia, 1917

Zionists are quick to point out that since a majority of Israelis are Mizrahim, the growth of the Yishuv and Israel’s eventual establishment could not have been functionally settler-colonialist in character, to which I say: What is the Turkish, Iraqi, Persian, and Syrian treatment of Kurds? What is the North African Arab treatment of Imazighen? These, too, are essentially colonial projects which seek to supplant indigenous peoples by relying on idealized ancient mythologies and constructions of “authenticity”. A common source of discomfort for progressive critics of Zionism is the prevalence of conservative viewpoints held by Mizrahi Jews inside and outside of Israel, but the idea of colonized peoples colonizing other peoples should not be a revolutionary or difficult one to reconcile and accept.

Israel may not have taken on the character of a settler-colonial project had the Zionists of old integrated with Palestinian and Samaritan society. Palestinians’ apprehensive or negative reactions to early European Zionist settlers were understandable, considering Zionist collaboration with British Imperial forces. The reactionary right-wing politics of the majority of Mizrahim in Israel is, too, understandable considering their alternatives. The State of Israel has always propped itself up on the rejection and effective demonization of Arabness, so racism against Mizrahim based on accent, physical features, or culture resembling that of gentile Arabs comes as no surprise. Rather than facing social immobility and expendability as a source of cheap labor, conservative Israeli Mizrahim align themselves with Israel’s hybrid mythologized / Europeanized national consciousness, rejecting Arabness because doing so simply benefits their survival in a state established by European Zionists.

Mizrahim live in a time of nesting doll diasporas. In their 2019 song “Hana Mash Hu Al Yaman,” the Yemeni-Israeli sisters of the band A-WA lament a common traumatic thread connecting Mizrahi families in Israel:

“I came to you fleeing

You saw me as primitive.

I came to you as a last resort.”

What does decolonization look like, in a literal sense? Mizrahim living in Israel cannot go back to the countries which initially tried to stamp them out. Why would the current generation want to learn their grandparents’ forgotten Arabic, Darija, Turkish, or Farsi - or dig up their grandparents’ buried memories? To do so is like pressing one’s tongue against a tooth stripped of enamel. Many Israelis are also of mixed heritage. An Israeli friend’s family hosts Tunisian, Arab Iraqi, and Syrian-Turkish Jews. Which nation-state should she return to? For which mythology should she feel nostalgia? People have always migrated. Issues arise when territorial and cultural dominance- not pluralism- becomes the collective goal of populations.

Discarding nationalist mythologies altogether can help afford modern populations some clarity. Mizrahi liberation is inextricably linked with Palestinian liberation, Kurdish liberation, Yazidi liberation, and all other liberations of oppressed indigenous peoples and ethnoreligious minorities. Even within the construct of ‘Mizrahi’ as a label for MENA Jews, Arab Iraqi Jews may hold harmful attitudes towards Kurdish Jews hailing from within Iraqi borders. My close friend, who is a Kurdish Jew, recounts to me the almost Ba’athist undertones of a conversation she had with an Arab Iraqi Jew, whose nostalgia for Iraq was based on a desire for inclusion within Arab supremacist power structures. Nostalgia is a reactionary, false friend. Seeking acceptance within the monolithic ideologies of Pan-Arabism, Pan-Turkism, Pan-Iranism or Zionism is not a solution in the long term, nor is clinging to conservatism under nationalist governments.

Ceding space or resources to other colonized peoples does not mean that there will be insufficient space or resources for you. It is the overlap of these spaces that becomes a vital standpoint for reconciliation. Solidarity begins with truthfully baring the histories witnessed by multiple populations, and remaining able to acknowledge them simultaneously. The nation-state’s mythology does not allow for admission to the atrocities of the Farhud; the Algerian War of Independence; Deir Yassin; the Aleppo Riots. It is up to the people to shift their collective consciousness toward empathy and mutual recognition.

Mirushe Zylali is a junior at Mount Holyoke College double majoring in Studio Art and Religion. Through poetry, nonfiction work, and printmaking, they are interested in examining who remains within cultural memory, and how the Other is constructed in service of the nationalism of post-colonial states.

#mirushe zylali #sophie levy #nonfiction & opinion

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militant-holy-knight · 4 years

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Since the founding of Iran's Islamic Republic in the wake of the 1979 revolution, the government in Tehran has smothered the country's rich, diverse, and ancient culture beneath a theocratic dictatorship. The regime is openly contemptuous of Iran's history, its ethnic and religious minorities, and its secular-minded citizens. It enforces its own rigid Islamic values in a variety of ways, from requiring women to cover their hair to imposing religious principles in schools. Repression has resulted in various social issues among Iran's youth, such as drugs and prostitution. As a result, nostalgia for the Persian Empire's pre-Islamic past legacy is steadily rising, especially among Iranian exiles and their children in the United States. Washington would be well advised to take note of it and understand what it may portend for the future.

Islamic Conquest

The early Islamic conquerors of the seventh century spread Islam and the Arabic language throughout the Persian Empire and attempted a wholesale replacement of the indigenous culture. Over time, most of the country's population converted to Islam, but Persia's historical and cultural legacy proved resilient. This fact was so central that when Col. Reza Khan established a new dynasty in 1925, he linked his family to Persia's pre-Islamic history by adopting the ancient Persian surname Pahlavi for the dynasty. Reza's son and heir, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, occasioned the October 1971 celebration of his fifty-second birthday, probably the biggest birthday extravaganza in modern times, to coincide with the supposed 2,500th anniversary of the founding of the first Persian empire in the sixth century B.C.E. by the Achaemenids.

That changed in 1979 when the Islamic Republic founded by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini recast Iran as a full-fledged theocracy with a "guardian jurist" (vali-ye faqih) as its supreme leader; spurned Iranian nationalism in favor of a world conquering Islamist vision; and dissociated itself from Iran's pre-Islamic past, for instance, by Arabizing many Tehran street names from their classical Persian.

The Islamization of Iranian politics and society stirred discontent among the country's minority groups, which viewed the regime's policy as designed to suppress their identities, not least given Islamic law's institutionalized discrimination against religious minorities. Sidelined and marginalized, they have been officially referred to as aqaliyat (minorities) and excluded as the "stranger" or the "other" (gheyr-e khodi).

Many Iranian dissidents—both active and passive, at home and abroad—have responded to this diminished status with a revived Persian pride based on nostalgia for the pre-Islamic culture of classical Persia. Exiled Iranian journalist Amir Taheri and University of Montana professor Mehrdad Kia find evidence of such pride in the desire for purification of the Persian language, the emphasis on Zoroastrian culture over Arab and Islamic culture, and a revulsion against the theocratic government.As University of Toronto professor Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi explains,

The refashioning of Iran and a rescripting of "the people" and "the nation" in Iranian political and historical discourses was to take place through a selective remembrance of things pre-Islamic and a disassociation of Iran from Islam.

Many Iranian nationalists and scholars hope to de-Arabize the Persian language to distinguish their ancient culture from the Islamic one imposed by the government. Writes historian Kia:

The dominance of the Shi'ite clergy led some nationalist intellectuals to believe that the cultural hegemony of Shi'ite Islam must be challenged and replaced only by a new form of identity which emphasized Iran's pre-Islamic history and culture as well as the Persian language and its rich literary heritage.

This scope of pre-Islamic pride has been established via "a linguistic nationalism that became part of a programmatic plan to "purify" Persian of Turkish and Arabic contamination." Its proponents call for a complete return to the Persian language as it existed before the arrival of the Muslim conquerors.

Pictured are some of the twenty-four Baha'is arrested by the Iranian Intelligence Ministry in a raid on a religious gathering in Shiraz, 2018. Such experiences of non-Muslim minority groups have prompted a longing for Iran's earlier culture in response to the establishment of the Islamic Republic.

The experiences of non-Muslim minority groups and the suppression of pre-Islamic sentiment have encouraged some nationalists to rebel with unmistakable love for Iran's earlier culture. This nationalistic pride has arisen in Iran primarily in response to the establishment of the Islamic Republic rather than in opposition to Islam itself. "Much of this longing for the purity of ancient Persian culture," writes Taheri, "has arisen with the societal dislike of the contemporary Iranian religious regime as well as the regime's very aversion toward such pre-Islamic identity."

Roya Hakakian's memoir, Journey from the Land of No, is the personal account of a young Persian, Jewish girl caught in the middle of the Islamic Revolution. She describes how many Iranian Jews yearn for a suppressed and more inclusive Persian culture. "Instead of their given Hebrew names, they went by Persian names, borrowing heroic titles from old myths, like Rostam or Zaal." She explains further, "With more than two thousand years of history in Iran ... Jews were right at home exactly where they were, as they would be nowhere else."

The Iranian-American Narrative in California

California is home to the largest population of Iranians and Iranian-Americans in the United States. If a mainstream Iranian-American narrative exists anywhere, it will be found here.

This author interviewed five University of California-Berkeley students regarding their views of the Islamic Republic of Iran, U.S. foreign policy in Iran, and their identification or lack thereof with Iran's pre-Islamic culture. These interviews provide an in-depth look at the opinions of several individual students along with a broader survey of Iranian-Americans in California, discussed below. The surveyed students are first generation, U.S.-born Iranians and are the most likely to represent the views of future Iranian-American politicians and organizers of Iranian-American lobbies. Understanding what they think and why could help reveal where their loyalties lie, a common concern regarding influential figures with dual citizenships and backgrounds.

Interviews

Three University of California-Berkeley students—Shahrzad Makaremi, Tina Noohi, and Taraneh Harirchi—were asked the same questions used in a wider survey of Iranian-American college students throughout California.

Makaremi is one of the founding members and leaders of the UC Berkeley Iranian Students' Cultural Organization (ISCO). Hailing from a Muslim background, Makaremi's family left Iran for the United States to pursue better educational and professional opportunities. When asked whether she identifies more closely with the contemporary culture of Iran or with the pre-Islamic culture of ancient Persia and how she views current foreign involvement in Iran, Makaremi appeared perplexed:

I have a lot of interest in the pre-Islamic culture of Iran. It's quite romanticized, but still very important. Still, it is very difficult to separate Islam from Persia because the Islamic conquests happened so long ago. Radical pre-Islamic pride is misleading, since Islam and Persia influenced each other so much. ... Although I am not strongly averse to the Islamic Republic myself, I would say that it has turned off many Iranian and Iranian-American people to the Islamic nature of today's Iranian government. As far as foreign activity in Iran, such as sanctions, it hurts the people just as much as the government does.

Overall, Makaremi believes that several problems face Iran today and that the regime is not necessarily the worst of them. She does not seem to harbor much opposition to the Islamist regime and does not dislike it strongly enough to favor pre-Islamic Iran.

Zoroastrians celebrate the end of winter by kindling bonfires in temples scattered across Iran. Scholars believe that the teachings of Zoroastrianism predate other monotheistic religions. In recent years, some 4,000 people have joined the festival in Cham, Iran.

The third respondent and student cultural leader, Taraneh Harirchi, shares her classmates' perspectives regarding cultural identity, the current Iranian leadership, and international involvement in Iranian affairs. Harirchi does not belong to a religious minority, and she identifies more with pre-Islamic Persian culture despite her family's Muslim background:

Even though I am technically Muslim, I identify more with the classical Zoroastrian culture of the ancient Persian Empire because I am extremely proud of my culture and not necessarily my "religion." Both my family and I practice all the traditional Persian holidays, and it is taken very seriously especially around New Year's time. My family and I never go to mosque or acknowledge any of the martyrs like some religious Iranians do.

On the government and international sanctions, Harirchi said:

For me, the religion largely represents the government, not the Iranian people. As far as sanctions, I believe that they're very dangerous and only hurt the Iranian people. Foreign involvement is obviously the most debilitating risk to Iran right now.

All three student leaders emphasize their cultural identities over their religious ones. The separation of culture from religion among Iranian-Americans appears to originate from a broadly negative view of the Islamic Republic. However Harirchi, like her two peers, does not view the government as more detrimental than foreign involvement.

The interviewees perceive pre-Islamic culture as important but do not necessarily oppose the regime because of it. One even viewed it as "romanticized." Still, all state that the Islamic Republic creates problems for Iranian society, from cultural suppression to limitations on education. It is clear from these students' responses that they do, indeed, oppose the regime.

Statewide California Survey

Reza Pahlavi, crown prince of Iran, speaking at Arizona State University in Tempe. Iranian-Americans back Washington's support for the exiled crown prince by a two-to-one margin.

While the interviews provide some personal details from student activists at a particular university, a survey conducted at the same time used the same questions to gather more data about Iranian-American views of the regime and the extent of opposition to it; U.S. intervention; and pre-Islamic Persian pride. Respondents were polled anonymously from the campuses of University of California, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Irvine, and Santa Barbara; University of Southern California; University of San Francisco; Santa Clara University; San Jose State University; Mission College, and West Valley College.

Seventeen out of twenty-five (68%) expressed pre-Islamic pride and cultural nostalgia in opposition to the Islamic Republic while only five out of twenty-five (20%) identified more with the contemporary Islamic culture of Iran, were not averse to the regime, and considered U.S. involvement to be the biggest threat to Iranian society. Another two participants (8%) favored neither pre-Islamic nor contemporary Iranian culture due to a lack of knowledge while only one (4%) felt pride for both pre-Islamic and contemporary Iranian culture and expressed a strong interest in Iran's ancient history as well as its current political situation.

As expected given Taheri's analysis of minority oppression and the Middle East Institute's Hossein Godazgar's description of the downplaying of Iran's pre-Islamic history by the regime's Islamist educational system, students who identify more with pre-Islamic classical Persian culture also oppose the regime. These students are mainly inspired by the plight of their parents, who fled religious oppression in search of a freer and better future elsewhere. The majority considers U.S. intervention a lesser evil than the regime itself and regards their cultural nostalgia as part of their broader feelings of dissent.

In 2018, the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian-Americans released an annual survey measuring opposition to the Islamic Republic. It found that by an eight-to-one margin, respondents oppose U.S. support for the Islamist-socialist People's Mujahedin of Iran (or MEK) party as a legitimate opposition force in Iran while backing Washington's support for exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi by a two-to-one margin. Opposition by Iranian-Americans to Islamic groups is primarily anti-theocratic. And since Pahlavi states on his social media channels that he supports a secular democracy in Iran, widespread support for him is indicative of the secular route many Iranian-Americans would like to see their ancestral homeland take. Pahlavi's enthusiasm for Iran's pre-Islamic Persian history also echoes the cultural nostalgia felt by many Iranian-American civilians.

Pre-Islamic Persian Pride

Additional data published in an article by Nilou Mostofi in The Sociological Quarterly sheds light on the Iranian-American diaspora's feelings of kinship with Iran, their views of the Islamic Republic, and how many choose to identify with their heritage. The majority of Iranian immigrants, especially in southern California, left Iran in the wake of the Islamic revolution. They tend to be secular and "anti-Islamic," and most emphasize their pre-Islamic roots by identifying as Persian. Like the students interviewed and surveyed earlier, they left Iran for the United States hoping for better opportunities, professional careers, and education. Estimates place the number of Iranians living in Southern California at 300,000-500,000, with some 87,000 people of Iranian ancestry living in Los Angeles alone.

According to an analysis by Radio Payam, Persian Jewish immigrants in the United States identify with Iran's classical Zoroastrian culture more than with Iran's contemporary Islamic culture:

Not identifying themselves with the current Iran—stigmatized by fundamentalism and terrorism—Iranian [web]sites attempt to [re]construct a Persian profile by using tokens, symbols, and signs from the pre-Islamic cultural heritage.

This response is common among Iranians living outside Iran, especially among Iranian minorities.

Conclusion

Following its progression from Iran, pre-Islamic Persian pride in California seems to have merged with American democratic ideals to pit most young Iranian-Americans against the Islamic Republic and some against foreign involvement in the region. And while not all Iranian-Americans necessarily wish for the complete return to pre-Islamic Persian culture, they are proving loyal to both Iran (though not the Islamist regime) and the United States. Indeed, politically active Iranian-Americans who oppose both the Islamic Republic and foreign interference could promote the withdrawal of all financial support from the regime, so as to force it to reform, while supporting the development of a strong, independent Iranian society that will be less dependent on foreign aid.

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booklynart · 5 years

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Interview with Beldan Sezen

Boundaries of Pain, Sociopolitical Legacies, and Confronting the Superhero Complex: A sit down with Beldan Sezen

Beldan Sezen

Beldan is a Booklyn artist of Turkish and German background who creates graphic novels, comics, artist books, and other works that often comment on the socio-political collective experience. She focuses on the broader implications of small interactions, placing more emphasis on overall circumstance than on stand-alone moments or characters themselves. She was courteous enough to drop by Booklyn for an interview. Below is a highly truncated transcript of my interview with Beldan:

________________________________________

What makes you a Booklyn Artist?

When I first went there, they still had the word alliance in [Booklyn Artists Alliance], and I really liked the term alliance because it’s not like you’re taking a sit back; it’s more together. I appreciate very much that Booklyn has this objective that artists who are not the common mainstream—I have a leftist, whatever, immigra[nt], of color, lesbian background, the whole shebang—that they found it important enough to see that we are in the general canon of this country or any other countries. Simply [by being] accepted at Booklyn, I wouldn’t have made it [into] the Library of Congress or other institutions. I really value how they work in terms of doing the work, going out there, traveling, and showing and maintaining their appliance. I think it’s that mindset that makes me a Booklyn artist.

What makes Booklyn stand out to you as a center for community engagement with the arts and as a center for artists?

What I’ve learned through meeting Marshall is that there is this world of institutions who buy artist books and who use the artist books either as an exhibition piece or in their curriculums. I see my work through Booklyn reaching a broader audience which is not just a gallery place. I do believe artists can give a different perspective to the general sociopolitical issues that we have to live with. I was especially pleased to hear that my first book was bought by the biomedical department of the University of California. It never crossed my mind that medical students would use the work of an artist to gain a different approach on how to deal with certain issues in healthcare.

Can you talk about your relationship with the materials you choose to work with? Do you limit your practice to specific materials, or do materials develop depending on the project?

Different reasons. One is that the books or the stories or the art that wants to come out chooses their meanings… most of them. The other thing: I’m a woman artist, worker’s kid. My art often developed on a kitchen table. I don’t have the means, or I didn’t have the means often enough, to have a big studio or to have the expensive materials. [...] It’s not just because I can’t afford a bigger place or I can’t afford a bigger paper when I started making artist books. It was more like, hey, these are things I commonly use in my daily practice. [...] These are things that we use in society as a common practice; why just single it out? If I use something we all use, I can give it a different meaning. I as an artist can add to a journalistic approach in a different way. I can add stuff that other journalists can’t say or won’t say because of their profession or ethics, but I can. So why not take that sort of level and sustain my art practice in a way that I can do it without having to wait to be rich or to wait for certain things. I have to produce. There’s this urge in me to just throw it out there, and that’s how I approach my style.

What impact would you hope your work to have/do you see your work having? What do you hope the reader walks away with when they read your work?

For most, it’s not really the reader that I’m busy with when I do these books. It’s more my urge to tell something. But now I have enough experience with whatever I seem to tell, it resonates in different ways. It doesn’t matter if it’s a painting, or a book, or a comic. It’s more a means to me to express myself that I can’t do otherwise, and it seems to resonate.

Do you think it resonates because people have similar experiences or because they’ve never thought about these situations? Or is it just different facets: people from different walks of life having different reactions?

Well, people always take what they need to take in at that moment because we see things differently, so for you, it might be a butterfly, and for someone else, it might be a dragon. Both [are] fine, it’s just what you need and that’s how I look at art too. I will respond to what I am and who I am at that moment in time and what furthers me, not what limits me. If anything, when people read my art or see my art, that it furthers them to go beyond [whichever] way at that moment and not limit. I do believe, as far as I can tell, that I’m pretty honest in my work. And I’d also believe that I’m telling stories from perspectives that are not very much told without putting it in the forefront. That allows people to take what they need without feeling pushed to be this or that.

There’s a quote in Wetrocities where you say “To listen to you, to grant you my ear, to grant me your heart means to connect with my atrocities” while talking to someone you had prejudged. Do you think there is no way to connect with another without forgetting your own atrocities or racial biases? Do you think these "atrocities" will always linger?

(Sezen's Wetrocities)

It depends how deep you want this relationship with someone to be. And it’s not even so much about the other, it’s about how much you allow yourself to connect and be whole with that moment. We all are living in societies and come from societies who have done immense atrocities. We are part of that. I don’t think you should shy away from what you carry with you or address[ing] that. And again, it’s not so much about the other, it’s… You feel it. You feel when you connect with someone. What lingers in you and do you dare to go there or not? And if you don’t go there it will close you off, and you will harm yourself at the end by not looking at that. […] You have been raised in a culture that rules through the creation of binaries. What are the limitations for yourself? I mean, what works for you in any of your cultures? What are the good parts, what are the sources of pain? If it fits, it’s fine and if it doesn’t fit, what is it? What am I missing?

In To Separate the Body From the Machine, as a caretaker, you share multiple moments with a man that has physical conditions to the point where he can barely move on his own. You question his autonomous bodily functions with no malice in the same way a child would ask questions out of genuine curiosity. There's a sense here of wanting to help but not being able to. It seems to have left an impact. How do you deal with the boundary of pain in moments like these?

To Separate the Body From the Machine is actually the most honest way and the most straightforward way where I had the least problems with the boundary of pain. I had much more problems with to not go and say “oh my god, I have to save the whole world” because it’s kind of an escape mechanism to want to save the whole world because it takes you away from that moment to acknowledge what had just happened and to just acknowledge my pain or my limitations.

(Sezen's To Keep that Bit of Physical Distance)

So with To Separate the Body From the Machine, it just was a given. He needed more than I could give. Even if I wanted to give it, I couldn’t. Like you said, I had my questions that were childlike, it was that childlike honesty that allowed me to work with him. To not blame him or me for a situation that neither of us is guilty of. It wasn’t his fault, it wasn’t my fault that he ended up like this. It was very painful to see it and for him to live it. I wouldn’t have done him any favors to either feel guilty or shame about it and go “poor me, poor me” nor be the over-caretaker in his terms. It’s just, I’m not out in the world to save anyone, and I’ve seen it happening in that realm of work. Like caretakers say “oh, but I’m there for you” and give you everything. It just doesn’t work like that, it’s not honest. And just no one wants that. And it lays the foundation for abuse and power games.

It was great having you.

Yes, I enjoyed talking to you.

________________________________________

Beldan often works between Amsterdam and New York and has currently been working on her solo exhibition for Bronx Community College set to debut November 2020. Beldan’s zine I Saw an Act of Kindness is currently available at Booklyn’s webstore. Visit Beldan’s Artist Page

http://beldansezen.com

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samuelcarveraccidentman · 5 years

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By Rany Jazayerli

The year was 1860, and the world was, as usual, in upheaval. In China, the Second Opium War was coming to an end. America was preparing itself for major surgery, in the form of the Civil War, that would finally cure the young nation of its congenital defect of slavery. And in the heart of the Middle East, in a province of the Turkish Ottoman Empire that would later become modern-day Syria, an unholy concoction was brewing. That’s right: politics was mixing with religion.

Christians and Muslims had lived side-by-side in the holy land for over a thousand years. Muslim armies had conquered modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Egypt in the middle of the seventh century, and while the Muslims maintained full political authority, Christians and Jews were allowed to freely practice their religion. The notion that non-Muslims were forced to convert at the point of a sword is laughable – in Egypt, for instance, it is estimated that Muslims made up only half of the population in the year 1200 – five hundred years later.

The area around Lebanon and Syria, in particular, was as religiously diverse as anywhere in the world in the mid-19th century. In addition to substantial numbers of Muslims (both Sunni and Shiite), Christians (Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Maronite, Chaldean, Syriac, and others), and Jews, there were also religious groups like the Alawi and Druze, who had splintered out of mainstream Islam centuries earlier and were now considered their own religions.

By the standards of that era, these groups lived in relative harmony. Which is to say, by the standards of that era, the fact that these groups co-existed at all was a miracle. If you were a religious minority anywhere in the world, your life was in peril. Just the year before, the very first pogrom in Russia took place in Odessa, claiming the lives of many Jews. Not even America was immune to this sort of religious violence; in 1838, 18 Mormon men were killed in the Haun’s Mill Massacre in Missouri.

The Druze and Maronite Christians were concentrated in Lebanon. The two groups had never liked each other, and their relationship was getting worse. It didn’t help that outside powers were encouraging both sides. The French supported the Christians, the British supported the Druze, and with the Ottoman Empire crumbling by the day, the Turkish rulers were unable or unwilling to end the conflict.

In 1858, Christian peasants in Lebanon mounted an uprising against their Druze feudal lords. The Druze retaliated. The patriarch of the Maronite Christians then threatened to forcibly remove the Druze from the Lebanese mountains. Then things got ugly.

In May of 1860, a group of Christians fired upon a group of Druze outside Beirut, killing one. In the wave of violence that followed on both sides, dozens of villages were burned to the ground, and hundreds of people were killed. The violence spread outside Lebanon and into Syria, towards Damascus, where ambitious men were plotting to shape this heretofore random violence into something much more sinister.

Chief among them was the Turkish governor of Damascus, Ahmed Pasha, who wanted nothing more than to give his population a “correction” – today we would call it ethnic cleansing. In March, he had already begun meeting in secret with two chiefs from the Druze and the mufti of Damascus. Together they hatched a plan to bring about a full-on war in the Christian quarter of the city.

The plan appears to have been this: that the Druze would incite attacks against Christians, “forcing” the Turks to step in and escort the Christian community to a citadel outside the city for their protection. There, Druze conspirators would be waiting to slaughter them all.

With tensions rising between the two sides every day, it would only take a single match to light the fire. That match was lit on July 8th. Pasha arranged for some Muslim boys to draw images of crosses at the edge of the Christian quarter of the city, then to desecrate those images by spitting and throwing garbage at them. The bewildered kids were immediately arrested, with their punishment designed to provoke the rage of the greater Muslim community.

“On July 9, the culprits, mere props in a scenario planned by Ahmed Pasha, were ordered to be publicly beaten, then forced on their hands and knees to wash the streets they had slopped with garbage. Provocateurs did the rest.”

The massacre of Damascus had begun.

“I was told Abd el-Kader was the Algerian George Washington, the father of modern Algeria…Abd el-Kader was the first Arab to create a semblance of tribal unity in order to combat the French occupation. But in defeat, I noted a resemblance to Robert E. Lee. He was gracious, magnanimous, respected by his enemies, and deeply religious.”

Abd el-Kader was one of those men who, in Shakespeare’s words, had greatness thrust upon him. He certainly was not born into it. He was born in a remote region of the Turkish province of what we now call Algeria, in 1808, to a tribal family living on the edges of the Sahara desert. You would be hard pressed to find a region on Earth from which one of the century’s most influential men would be less likely to emerge.

Abd el-Kader was born into a tribe of warriors, men who for centuries had valued valor above all else, and prized nothing more than a fast and sturdy horse. His father Muhi al-Din was a marabout, a religious leader for his tribe, and a leader of a Sufi Muslim tradition known as the Kadiriyya order. It was expected from the time of his birth that Abd el-Kader would follow in his father’s footsteps. “His destiny, had it been his to guide, would have been that of a married monk, living a life of prayer, meditation, and teaching.”

Like all men of his tribe, Abd el-Kader was trained in horsemanship and swordplay and the other arts of warfare, but his primary training was in his religious studies. As a teenager he was sent by his father to the city of Oran to continue his studies. He would return home when he as 15; at the age of 17 he was married, and then set off with his father on the pilgrimage to Mecca, a journey that would take two years to complete. This journey would include stops in Damascus and Baghdad, where “word spread of the amazing knowledge and intellectual agility of this young Maghrebin who could politely hold his own with the leading scholars of the city.” Abd el-Kader returned to his home village of Mascara in 1828, and likely would have spent the rest of his life there had events not interceded.

But they did. In 1830, King Charles of France saw an imperial campaign as a great way to counter unpopularity at home, and used a minor diplomatic incident as an excuse to invade Algeria. Algiers surrendered to the French quickly and fairly bloodlessly, although it was not enough to save the King; Charles abdicated later that year and transferred the crown to his cousin, Louis-Phillipe.

Had the French been more magnanimous in victory, the war might have been over quickly. The ruling Turks were hardly beloved by the local population, so if it was just a matter of paying taxes to a different leader, most of the citizens would have gone along with minimal protest.

But like so many foreign conquerors, the French soon turned the local populace against them by being unnecessarily harsh, by being completely tone-deaf to the local culture, and by kicking out the Turks, the only group of people who could have served as intermediaries. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1837, “Once the Turkish government was destroyed with no substitute to replace it, the country fell into appalling anarchy.”

The political vacuum cried out for leadership, which by default fell onto the religious leaders of the various tribes outside the city. The brutality of the French occupation forced these tribal religious leaders to unite against their oppressor. In 1832, the various tribes came together to nominate Abd el-Kader’s father Muhi al-Din to be their sultan.

Muhi al-Din agreed on one condition: that immediately after he accepted the position, he would abdicate in favor of his son. This was met with immediate approval; Abd el-Kader’s religious knowledge, strength, and courage were already famous throughout the region. At the age of 24, Abd el-Kader became the leader of his people in a war against foreign occupation. He would soon earn his title of “Emir al-Mumineen” – the Commander of the Faithful.

In retrospect, Abd el-Kader’s task was hopeless from the start. No amount of military brilliance could have made up for the difference in manpower and technology between the French army and the ragtag bunch of Algerian Bedouins. But man, did he try.

For 15 years, Abd el-Kader led his people in resistance against the French. He led his soldiers by example, staying in the saddle day and night, stopping only to pray, sometimes covering as much as 150 miles in a day to engage the enemy in battle. The French were astonished, and then impressed, at the military prowess of their young enemy.

Abd el-Kader wasn’t simply fighting a war against the French; he was also fighting to establish a nation among his own people. He commissioned a free-standing army. He established and collected taxes necessary to keep his army supplied. He created a cabinet of advisers, including a Jewish merchant who served as his ambassador to the French.

He had to battle not only the French, but the leaders of his own people, many of whom were not averse to working with the enemy or rebelling in other ways if it suited them.

By 1834, Abd el-Kader’s forces had achieved such success that the French general in charge with subduing them sued for a cease-fire, which was granted. Some extremists in his own community labeled him a heretic for negotiating with the French, forcing Abd el-Kader to wage another battle to defeat them.

A year later, though, another general in the French army used a flimsy pretext to break the cease-fire and marched upon Abd el-Kader’s forces. The French forces were ambushed and suffered a humiliating defeat, which burnished Abd el-Kader’s reputation, both with his own people and around the world.

This only made the French mad, though, and they returned in 1836 with more forces and more determination to exterminate their annoying adversary. Abd el-Kader learned quickly that he could not defeat the French army in a pitched battle, and resorted to lightning attacks, his cavalry emerging out of the desert to overwhelm a surprised French unit, then disappearing into the sand just as quickly.

Meanwhile, the exploits of this undermanned, underfunded guerrilla leader, standing up to the mighty French, began to draw the interest of the British and the Americans – the British because of their long-standing rivalry of the French, the Americans because of their own experience with fighting off British imperialization only a few decades before.

Abd el-Kader’s exploits were recounted in America in popular digests like Littell’s Living Age, and one reader was sufficiently taken by el-Kader to name a town after him. Timothy Davis, a lawyer who had settled in Dubuque in 1836 (Iowa had not yet become a state; it was still part of the Louisiana Territory), had acquired property on the Turkey River nearby which seemed ideal for a flour mill, and sketched out a new town to be built around the mill. “So Timothy Davis, a pioneer spirit, respected lawyer and distant admirer of this resilient underdog, named the new settlement after Abd el-Kader, wisely shortened for American tongues to Elkader.”

Elkader, Iowa was founded in 1846. It remains today as the seat of Clayton County, with a population of around 1500. It is the only city in America named after an Arab.

In 1837, General Thomas Bugeaud was put in charge of the French operations in Algeria. His initial assignment was to secure another peace treaty with Abd el-Kader, which he did. This treaty acknowledged France’s sovereignty over the coastal cities of Algiers and Oran, while conceding the interior desert regions to Abd el-Kader. Once again, the French government was not pleased with the terms of the treaty once the details became known. Furthermore, the text of the treaty in Arabic was slightly, but crucially, different than the text in French. In 1839, the French took advantage of the ambiguity by marching their army through a region of the country that was forbidden to them in the Arabic version. The war began anew.

By 1841, the French had become fed up with the resistance of Abd el-Kader and his small army. It was clear that their conventional war tactics were not working. General Bugeaud gave his recommendation to the French Parliament. “We need a leader who will be implacable and wage unlimited war.” He was referring to himself.

For the next six years, the French waged Total War. Over 100,000 soldiers – one-third of the entire French army – was stationed in Algeria, and they were not constrained by the ordinary rules of warfare. Houses were burned, livestock was shot, crops were destroyed. If Abd el-Kader was Robert E. Lee, then Bugeaud was William T. Sherman.

In the words of one of Bugeaud’s most trusted officers, “I shall leave not a single tree standing in their orchards, not a head on the shoulders of these wretched Arabs…I shall burn everything, kill everyone.” The same officer was responsible for suffocating hundreds of men, women, and children who had taken refuge inside a series of caves. In the English press, Bugeaud became known as “The Butcher of the Bedouins.”

By contrast, Abd el-Kader conducted war in as civilized a manner as possible. He devised a series of rules for the treatment of prisoners which were, in some ways, a forerunner to the official rules codified in the Geneva Convention in 1949. In one instance, he released a group of French captive soldiers because he did not have enough food to feed them. Some prisoners were so impressed with Abd el-Kader’s treatment of them that they formally defected to the other side, and served as foreign advisors to the emir.

Through intermediaries, Abd el-Kader set up a correspondence with the Bishop of Algiers, and agreed to release French prisoners of war in exchange for the bishop’s promise to press the French military to release Arab prisoners – which he did, with only limited success. If the French soldiers knew that they would not be slaughtered by the enemy if taken prisoner, they might not fight quite so passionately. As a French Colonel wrote, “We are obliged to try as hard as we can to hide these things [the treatment accorded French prisoners by the Emir] from our soldiers. For if they so much as suspected such things, they would not hasten with such fury against Abd el-Kader.”

Prisoners who were brought to Abd el-Kader were questioned to make sure they had been treated well on their journey; if they weren’t, the Algerian soldier responsible for their care was flogged. Female captives were turned over to the care of the one person in the world that Abd el-Kader trusted most: his own mother.

But the French were too strong, and Abd el-Kader’s Algerians were too disunited. By 1847 he wasn’t fighting a war so much as he was evading capture. His lieutenants were starting to surrender to the French. Abd el-Kader took his family to Morocco, seeking refuge there, but were refused by the Sultan, who did not want to anger the French. Many of his remaining loyal followers wanted to launch one last attack, to go out in a blaze of glory. Abd el-Kader refused.

“If I thought there were still a possibility to defeat France, I would continue. Further resistance will only create vain suffering. We must accept the judgment of God who has not given us victory and who in His infinite wisdom now wants this land to belong to Christians. Are we going to oppose His will?”

In December, 1847, Abd el-Kader sent word to General Lamoriciére, now leading the battle against him, that he was prepared to discuss the terms of his surrender. An agreement was reached, and signed by the King’s own son, that Abd el-Kader and his men would surrender, ending the 15-year war, in exchange for safe passage to Alexandria or Acre in Egypt, where Abd el-Kader planned to live out the rest of his days.

And once again, Abd el-Kader was betrayed when an agreement he reached with one Frenchman did not go over well with the rest of them. The French had more important things on their mind than what to do with Abd el-Kader – the monarchy of King Louis-Philippe was collapsing, and in February of 1848 he abdicated before he could be overthrown. The new government refused to ratify the agreement. Abd el-Kader and his family were instead forcibly moved to France, where they were held prisoner – in fairly luxurious surroundings – for over four years.

The French betrayal of Abd el-Kader only made him a more heroic figure in the eyes of the world. In 1850, a horse named Abd el-Kader (nicknamed “Little Ab”) was entered into the Grand National Steeple Chase in England. The horse, a 33-1 longshot, won. And won the same race the following year. The British author William Thackeray wrote an elegy to Abd el-Kader entitled “The Caged Hawk.” De Tocqueville himself called Abd el-Kader “a Muslim Cromwell.”

And within France, Abd el-Kader became a sort of celebrity. “A cult of sorts began to form around the personality of the emir. People streamed from all over France to visit him.” It was, I imagine, sort of the 19th-century version of going to see the Pope at Yankee Stadium. At one point Abd el-Kader was assigned a new French guard who had requested to be transferred; “he wanted the honor of guarding the emir to repay the consideration with which he had been treated as a former prisoner.” As a nun who cared for Abd el-Kader’s family wrote to her superior, “Allowing for certain exceptions of a theological nature, there is no Christian virtue that Abd el-Kader does not practice to the highest degree.”

In 1849, citizens of Bordeaux put Abd el-Kader’s name on the ballot as a candidate in the presidential elections. By 1852, French public opinion had turned in favor of their fallen enemy, and the elected President, Louis Napoleon (soon to be Emperor Napoleon III), announced that Abd el-Kader was to be freed. After a triumphant parade through Paris, Abd el-Kader and his family were sent to Bursa, a Turkish city not far from Istanbul. Bursa did not agree with the emir, though, and in 1855 – after obtaining approval from Napoleon – Abd el-Kader moved to Damascus.

On the way to Damascus, Abd el-Kader met and befriended the British military attaché in Lebanon, Colonel Charles Henry Churchill – distant cousin of Winston. Churchill would eventually write the definitive biography of Abd el-Kader of his time. When Abd el-Kader arrived in Damascus, as Churchill wrote, “Not since the days of Saladin had anyone received such a triumphal welcome.”

And so it was that in 1860, Abd el-Kader, the tragic hero of the Arab world, found himself in the epicenter of the maelstrom of mayhem. Abd el-Kader had retired from political life, but he still wielded a substantial amount of symbolic power, should he need it. He would.

Connected as he was to the elites of Damascus, Abd el-Kader had heard rumors that certain elements of Damascene society were planning to take advantage of the violence in nearby Lebanon to launch an attack on the local Christians. He was sufficiently concerned to inform the French Consul, and together they went to see the governor, Ahmed Pasha, not realizing that the conspiracy went all the way to the top. Pasha reassured them that there was nothing to the rumors.

Nonetheless, the rumors were so persistent that the Consul was persuaded to do something extraordinary: under the tightest of secrecy, he authorized the expenditure of French money to arm Abd el-Kader and a thousand of his Algerian men.

On July 8th, Abd el-Kader had learned the details of the plot between the Druze and the Turks, and had rode out of the city to confront the Druze cavalry before they attacked. He – and his small army – succeeding in, ahem, convincing the Druze to call off their attack. Meanwhile, though, he was oblivious to the fact that there was a mob already sweeping through Damascus.

He returned to the city on July 10th, and found chaos before him. “Abd el-Kader soon learned that the Turkish troops assigned to protect the populace had been ordered into the citadel or were lackadaisically watching as rioters were running amok, burning homes and slaughtering Christians.”

And at that moment, Abd el-Kader, the man who had led his Muslim people in a war against Christian invaders for 15 years, knew what he had to do. And that he had to do it quickly.

First he and his men hurried to the French consulate to offer safe harbor; the French were immediately joined by Russian, American, Dutch, and Greek diplomats looking to flee the scene. And then:

All afternoon of July 10, Abd el-Kader plunged into the chaos of the Christian quarter with his two sons shouting: “Christians, come with me! I am Abd el-Kader, son of Muhi al-Din, the Algerian…Trust me. I will protect you.” For several hours his Algerians led hesitant Christians to his fortresslike home in the Nekib Allée, whose two-story interior and large courtyards would become a refuge for the desperate victims.

“As night advanced fresh hordes of marauders – Kurds, Arabs, Druzes – entered the quarter and swelled the furious mob, who, glutted with spoil, began to cry for blood. Men and boys of all ages were forced to apostatize and were then circumcised on the spot…Women were raped or hurried away to distant parts of the country where they were put in harems or married instantly to Mohammedans,” wrote Churchill of the events. “To say that the Turks took no means to stay this huge deluge of massacre and fire would be superfluous. They connived at it, they instigated it, they shared in it. Abd el-Kader alone stood between the living and the dead.”

Abd el-Kader returned with his men, and every Christian they could pull away to safety, to his estate.

News spread among the rioters that the emir was protecting the Christians. The next day an angry crowd gathered at his door to protest. They were prepared to tolerate his harboring diplomats, but demanded that he hand over the local Christians under his protection. As the mob got larger and more unruly, the emir came to the door.

“Give us the Christians,” the crowd shouted after he had quieted it by his silent presence.

“My brothers, your behavior violates the law of God. What makes you think you have a right to go around killing innocent people? Have you sunk so low that you are slaughtering women and children? Didn’t God say in our holy book, Whoever kills a man who has never committed murder or created disorder in the land will be regarded as a murderer of all humanity?”

“Give us the Christians! We want the Christians!”

“Didn’t God say there should be no constraint in religion?” the emir vainly replied.

“Oh holy warrior,” cried out one of the leaders in the mob. “We don’t want your advice. Why do you stick your nose in our business?”

“You have killed Christians yourself,” shouted another. “How can you oppose us for avenging their insults. You are like the infidels yourself – hand over those you are protecting in your home, or you will be punished the same as those you are hiding.”

“You are fools! The Christians I killed were invaders and occupiers who were ravaging our country. If acting against God’s law doesn’t frighten you, then think about the punishment you will receive from men…It will be terrible, I promise. If you will not listen to me, then God didn’t provide you with reason – you are like animals who are aroused only by the sight of grass and water.”

“You can keep the diplomats. Give us the Christians!” shouted the mob, sounding more and more like Romans in the Coloseum.

“As long as one of my soldiers is still standing, you will not touch them. They are my guests. Murderers of women and children, you sons of sin, try to take one of these Christians and you will learn how well my soldiers fight.” The emir turned to Kara Mohammed. “Get my weapons, my horse. We will fight for a just cause, just as the one we fought for before.”

“God is great,” his men shouted, brandishing their guns and swords. Faced with the emir’s battle-hardened veterans, the crowd melted away bravely hurling insults.

Well over a thousand Christian refugees were housed inside Abd el-Kader’s home, making it so crowded that people could not sit or lie down, let alone use the facilities. So Abd el-Kader arranged for small groups of his Algerian men to accompany the Christians, in groups of 100, to the citadel outside the city – the same citadel that the Druze had originally planned to use to slaughter them.

The residence was finally emptied out and cleaned. Abd el-Kader then circulated word that a reward of fifty piasters would be paid for each Christian brought to his home. For five days, the emir rarely slept, and when he did, it was on a straw mat in the foyer of his residence where he dispensed reward money from a sack he kept by his side. As soon as 100 refugees were collected, his Algerians escorted them to the citadel.

The worst of the rioting ended on July 13th, 1860 – one hundred and fifty years ago today. At least 3,000 Christians were killed before it was all over. Abd el-Kader was credited with saving upwards of 10,000 Christians, including the entire European diplomatic corps.

Word reached France a week later – both the horrifying news of the massacre, and the incredible news of Abd el-Kader’s pivotal role in stopping it. The French were in equal parts ecstatic and dumbfounded. Editorials praising his actions were printed in newspapers throughout the country. Le Gazette de France wrote:

“The emir Abd el-Kader has immortalized himself by the courageous protection he has given the Syrian Christians. One of the most beautiful pages of the history of the 19th century will be devoted to him.” Another paper wrote: “When the carnage was at its worst, the emir appeared in the streets, as if sent by God.”

Word traveled across the Atlantic in due course. On October 20th, the New York Times published its own editorial:

“For Abd-El-Kader this is indeed a chapter of glory, and of the truest glory, too. It is no light thing for history to record, that the most uncompromising soldier of Mohammedan independence, when that independence kept the mountains, sword in band, became the most intrepid guardian of Christian lives and Christian honor in the days of his political downfall, and in the decline alike of his people and of his faith. The defeats which surrendered Algiers to the Frank have been strangely and nobly avenged…To-day the Christian world unites to honor in the dethroned Prince of Islam, the most unselfish of knightly warriors, risking limb and life to rescue his ancient foes, his conquerors and the conquerors of his race and his religion, from outrage and from death.”

(Amazingly, the New York Times has archives that date back to 1851. You can read the full editorial here.)

Abd el-Kader was not the only Muslim who strove to defend the Christians of Damascus from the raging mob. In particular, in the area of Damascus known as Maydan, which (then and now) was home to the most devoutly religious Muslims in the city, Muslims hid and protected their Christian neighbors from the violence. But Abd el-Kader became the face of those Muslims who had stood up to defend the Christian community, and as such, honors and accolades descended upon him from all over the world.

The French immediately bestowed upon Abd el-Kader, who barely a decade before had been their greatest enemy, the French Legion of Honor. (This would be like America, in 1987, awarding the Congressional Medal of Honor to Ho Chi Minh.) Russia, Spain, Prussia, Great Britain, and the Pope all awarded various distinctions on Abd el-Kader. And from the United States came a gift of a pair of finely wrought colt pistols – one source claims they were made of gold – delivered in a maple box which bore the inscription: “From the President of the United States, to his Excellency, Lord Abdelkader, 1860.”

(Two of my sources claim the gift was sent by President Lincoln, not President Buchanan. While this would make the story even better – one of our best presidents rather than one of our worst – Lincoln did not take office until March, 1861.)

Abd el-Kader was characteristically modest about his role. In a letter to the Bishop of Algiers, he wrote,

“…That which we did for the Christians, we did to be faithful to Islamic law and out of respect for human rights. All creatures are part of God’s family and those most loved by God are those who do the most good for his family. All the religions of the book rest on two principles – to praise God and to have compassion for his creatures…The law of Mohammed places the greatest importance on compassion and mercy, and on all that which preserves social cohesion and protects us from division. But those who belong to the religion of Mohammed have corrupted it, which is why they are now like lost sheep. Thank you for your prayers and good will toward me…”

The impact of the massacre was significant. As soon as word reached France, an army was dispatched to Lebanon. The Turkish sultan, looking to deprive the French of a reason to invade, dispatched his own army to Damascus to identify and prosecute the perpetrators. In the end, over 300 men were found guilty, half of whom were exiled from the empire. The others were sentenced to death, including the governor, Ahmed Pasha, who was shot. But the lingering question of who was the true instigator of the unrest – whether it was the Turks who wanted revenge, or whether it was even the British or French who were looking for an excuse to occupy Syria – remains unsolved to this day.

Meanwhile, the French and British both still had designs on the area, and as a bridge until the day came when they could officially colonize the region, the idea was floated of installing Abd el-Kader as the ruler of Damascus. The only problem was that Abd el-Kader had no interest. As he told a visiting French journalist, “My career in politics is over. I have no ambition for worldly glory. From now on, I want only the sweet pleasures of family, prayer, and peace.”

He was true to his word. Abd el-Kader lived out the rest of his days in Damascus, and his residence was on the must-visit list of any European who came to the city. In 1869, Abd el-Kader was influential in convincing the Arabs of the worthiness of a project to build a canal to link the Mediterranean with the Red Sea, which helped to make the Suez Canal a reality.

Otherwise, Abd el-Kader lived a life of simple spirituality, spending much of his time writing a commentary on the works of Ibn Arabi, the famous 13th-century Muslim scholar. He died of renal failure on May 25th, 1883, and was buried next to Ibn Arabi’s tomb in Damascus. The New York Times ran an obituary a few months before his death, which read in part:

“One of the ablest rulers and most brilliant captains of the century, if the estimates made of him by his enemies is correct, is now, in all probability approaching the end of his stormy career…The nobility of his character, no less than the brilliancy of his exploits in the field, long ago won him the admiration of the world…Great men are not so abundant that we can afford to lose them without a word. If to be an ardent patriot, a soldier whose genius is unquestioned, whose honor is stainless; a statesman who could weld the wild tribes of Africa into a formidable enemy, a hero who could accept defeat and disaster without a murmur – if all these constitutes a great man, Abd-El-Kader deserves to be ranked among the foremost of the few great men of the century.”

One of the youngest people to accompany Abd el-Kader on his journey into exile, first to France and later to Damascus, was Muhammad Yunus, who was just seven years old when he left Algeria. When the mob invaded Damascus. Muhammad Yunus Al-Jaza’iri (Al-Jaza’iri is Arabic for “The Algerian”) was in his early 20s, but he had already earned a position as a trusted confidant to Abd el-Kader and occupied a high place in the emir’s army, and he played a pivotal role in rescuing the Christians from the mob. Which isn’t surprising, as Muhammad Yunus’ own father, Muhammad Sha’aban, had been one of Abd el-Kader’s most trusted lieutenants during the war in Algeria. Also, Abd el-Kader was his uncle.

While Abd el-Kader’s fame made him untouchable, those around him were not so lucky. Muhammad Yunus was poisoned and died suddenly in 1880. The Druze were suspected, but nothing was ever proved.

When Muhammad Yunus died, Abd el-Kader himself was the executor of his estate, and until he passed away Abd el-Kader served as the guardian to Muhammad Yunus’ young son, Mahmoud, my great-grandfather.

Muhammad Yunus was my great-great-grandfather.

Abd el-Kader, as best as we can discern from the genealogy records, was my great-great-great-great uncle.

I’ve been writing professionally for 15 years, and particularly since 9/11 I have tried, when circumstances allow, to make this an underlying theme in my work: that Muslims and Christians can live together, that there is more that unites us than divides us, that it is only the extremists on both sides who want to see a Clash of Civilizations, and not co-existence, rule the day.

Just know that greater men have tread this way before. My efforts to do so are a speck of dust on top of a mighty mountain of tolerance my ancestors built in 1860. I am honored to play whatever miniscule part I can in echoing the message that Abd el-Kader spread so eloquently, and with such impact, 150 years ago today.

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