#kufiyaspotting: Esperanza Spalding at the Grammys (+ watermelons: Aja Monet + artists4ceasefire: boygenius and Annie Lennox)

At the Grammys last night, jazz bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding (double nominee)

showed her support for the Palestinians by donning a kufiya.

Also: poet Aja Monet, up for Best Spoken Word Poetry Album, carried a watermelon clutch.

and...boygenius wore arists4ceasefire pins.

And finally, Annie Lennox gave a shoutout for #ceasefire

 

#kufiyaspotting Zeina Ashrawi Hutchison & Gaza

I grabbed this off of twitter in November 2019, and I can't find the original tweet, sorry. Zeina Ashrawi Hutchison is a Palestinian American and a Bernie Sanders 2020 VA State Delegate & National Delegate to the DNC. I'm pretty sure she's got her son on her shoulders. 

Gaza

I think this photo, by Mohammed Salem of Reuters, is the best I've seen from the recent Gaza events, the state-sponsored mass shootings in response to Palestinian protests. Click on it, fill your screen with it. I posted the photo on Facebook and one of my friends observed that it was like a Delacroix painting. It's from Friday, April 6, the second big day of the weekly rallies of the Great March of Return, when protesters burned tires to try to hinder the Israeli snipers posted at the border, who killed at least 20 people and wounded hundreds on the previous Friday. They were only partially successful: the snipers took out 9 more on the 6th.

The photo, I think, shows the indomitable spirit of the Gaza Palestinians who live in a huge open air prison, with very limited access to the outside world, whether coming or going, with massive unemployment, very degraded water resources, etc. Note that these protesters are unarmed. Note their youth, And note, of course, the inevitable kufiyas. Long Live Palestine.

A new generation of Palestinian strugglers and their kufiyas

The Electronic Intifada recently (January 28) published a set of stunning photographs, courtesy ActiveStills, of young Palestinians confronting the Israeli forces of the occupation as well as the security forces of the PA, over the last four months. They are amazing photos (by Anne Paq in Bethlehem, Ezz Al-Zanoon in the Gaza Strip, Mohannad Darabee in the Ramallah area, Oren Ziv in Bethlehem and the Ramallah area). I find EI's report somewhat disingenuous, however, in that it fails to mentions one key aspect of the recent upsurge in confrontations -- that many have called this the "knife intifada," given that it has been characterized by a series of lone wolf knife attacks, as well as car rammings and shootings, aimed at Israelis, both soldiers and civilians, and has resulted in the deaths (between September 13 and January 5) of 25 Israelis. The period of course has been marked by clashes between groups of Palestinians (usually, rock-throwing) and Israeli soldiers, and of course Palestinian casualties are far higher, totaling over 160. (EI does mention the numbers of Israeli dead, but not the nature of the killing.) Since the fact that knife attacks are a significant element of the current struggle, it seems odd to me that EI doesn't discuss them at all. Instead, the quite striking images of Palestinian resistance seem to be the story.

And while I admire the courage as well as the stylistic flare of those Palestinians now fighting the occupation, at the same time it pains me to think that these young people represent yet another generation of Palestinians condemned to confronting violence. This occupation is about to be (in June) 49 years old. FORTY NINE. How can this keep going on and on and on and on? What does it mean for us to admire the bravery and fortitude of this new generation of heroic Palestinian strugglers? I would much rather not see such photos any more, instead I want to see photos of young Palestinians dancing and partying and studying and enjoying "normal" life. I am sick of it. And yet...don't they look flash?

 

Bethlehem

 

North of Ramallah, near Beit El settlement

 

 North of Ramallah, near Beit El settlement

 

 Bethlehem

 

“We cover our faces because the occupying authority might [otherwise] arrest us. We also 

fear our own [Palestinian] authority would arrest us in the same way.” Bethlehem

 

 

North of Ramallah, near Beit El settlement 

(the insignia of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine is on the headband)

 

Bethlehem

 

Bethlehem

 

Gaza Strip, east of al-Bureij refugee camp

 

Bethlehem

 

Gaza Strip, east of al-Bureij refugee camp 

Kufiya solidarity: Bolivia at the UN

Yes, I know, a little late in the game...

In July, the Bolivian representative to the UN, Sacha Sergio Llorentty Solíz, showed up wearing a kufiya, in solidarity with Gaza, which was being pummeled by the Israeli "Defense" Forces. This was all over social media.

And it went further: Bolivian president Evo Morales on July 30 declared Israel a "terrorist state" and revoked Bolivia's visa agreement with Israel.

and in South Africa kufiya news...

At the World Debating Championships in Thailand in early August, the South African team put on kufiya scarves, as well as badges in the form of Palestinian flags, at the opening ceremony, in protest of Israeli human rights violations against the people of Gaza. And they took a photo, posted on Facebook on August 6. 

As a result, a petition was circulated calling for the team captain, Joshua Broomberg (on far right in the photo), who is also deputy head boy of the King David Victory Park High School, a Jewish day school, to be removed as deputy head boy. The petition picked up 2,000 signatures; a petition opposing his removal garnered 4,000, according to the Times of Israel.

Yoni Bass, writing for 972, explains that the uproar over the incident is symptomatic of a strong and perhaps growing conservative trend in South Africa's Jewish community. Read more here.

Adam Shatz, Edward Said, and kufiyas

Adam Shatz, contributing editor at the London Review of Books, recently published an excellent essay ("Writers or Missionaries?") in The Nation that, among other things, took on the critique of Orientalism that Edward Said launched in the late '70s, and that continues in full force in academic studies of the Middle East. I first met Edward Said in 1977 and met up with him several times since then, in Austin, Ithaca, Egypt...I've read and absorbed and taught much of his work and and used it extensively in my own. And yet...I find what Shatz has to say about where it has evolved, into a kind of orthodoxy, to be quite salutary and bracing, and needed. (And I'll be teaching parts of Said's Covering Islam in class this week.)

And yes, it mentions the kufiya, in the context of Palestine solidarity.

"Writing about the region, never an easy undertaking, is likely to become still more difficult. I am not sure whether the most influential current of oppositional thinking about the Middle East is equipped to deal with the changes the region is undergoing. I am referring to the critique of Orientalism that Edward Said initiated. This style of thinking was formative for me, but I fear that it has congealed into an orthodoxy; and, as George Orwell wrote, “orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.” That we are now able to have a more open conversation about Palestine, that students are mobilizing against the occupation, is welcome; but Palestine is not the Middle East, and it seems peculiar, if not myopic, to talk about Palestine as if it were insulated from the rest of the region. And while it is understandable that young American students are particularly concerned about their government’s policies in the region, these policies do not wholly determine its shape and direction. America’s power in the Middle East has weakened, though not in favor of forces that most of us would consider progressive. Today, we are witnessing a tacit alliance of Israel, the military regime in Egypt and the Gulf states—particularly Saudi Arabia—against Iran, with which the United States, in conflict with its own regional allies, is seeking rapprochement. The latest Israeli offensive in Gaza is a measure of how marginal Palestine has become to the agenda of Arab states...

Today, it seems to me, Palestinians are for the radical Western left what Algerians were for Third World–ists in Vidal-Naquet’s day: natural-born resisters, fighting not only Israel but its imperial patrons, as much on our behalf as theirs. That is the role assigned to them in the revolutionary imagination. Like the kaffiyeh worn by anti-globalization protesters, this Palestine is little more than a metaphor. Palestine is still “the question” because it holds up a mirror to us. “Too many people want to save Palestine,” one activist said to me. But it could just as well be said that too many people want to be saved by Palestine...

Enormously liberating when it was developed, the critique of Orientalism has often resulted in a set of taboos and restrictions that inhibit critical thinking. They pre-emptively tell us to stop noticing things that are right under our noses, particularly the profound cleavages in Middle Eastern societies—struggles over class and sect, the place of religion in politics, the relationship between men and women; struggles that are only partly related to their confrontation with the West and with Israel. Indeed, it is sometimes only in those moments of confrontation that these very divided societies achieve a fleeting sense of unity. The theoretical intricacy of academic anti-Orientalism, its hermetic and sophisticated language, sometimes conceals an attempt to wish away the region’s dizzying complexity in favor of the old, comforting logic of anticolonial struggle. Anti-Orientalism will continue to provide a set of critical tools and a moral compass, so long as it is understood as a point of departure, not a destination. Like all old maps, it has begun to yellow. It no longer quite describes the region, the up-ender of all expectations, the destroyer of all missionary dreams.

drone life Gaza: zenana

By Jonathan Cook, via Richard Falk, on the "unfolding tragedy of Gaza."

Drones are increasingly being used for surveillance and extra-judicial execution in parts of the Middle East, especially by the US, but in nowhere more than Gaza has the drone become a permanent fixture of life. More than 1.7 million Palestinians, confined by Israel to a small territory in one of the most densely populated areas in the world, are subject to near continual surveillance and intermittent death raining down from the sky.

There is little hope of escaping the zenana – an Arabic word referring to a wife’s relentless nagging that Gazans have adopted to describe the drone’s oppressive noise and their feelings about it. According to statistics compiled by human rights groups in Gaza, civilians are the chief casualties of what Israel refers to as “surgical” strikes from drones.

 An unmanned aerial vehicle (Photo: Israel Aerospace Industries)

An earlier post on Israeli drones over Gaza and surfing as a way to avoid them stated that "zanana" translated as mosquito.

Ha'aretz wrote in 2010 that Gazans "have begun using the slang word zanana to also refer to those Gazans who report to the Hamas authorities what people say and do, with whom they meet, who visits them, and whose brother has gone to Ramallah."

The Washington Post in 2011 wrote this: "Roughly translated, zenana means buzz. But in neighboring Egypt, a source of Gaza custom and culture, the term is slang used to describe a relentlessly nagging wife."

I guess it could be all those things. And deadly. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Gaza surfers

 Very nice piece by Matt Olsen on the Gaza Surf Club, from Surfer Magazine.  

Only a few miles offshore, Israeli patrol boats run up and down the coast, preventing boats from venturing more than a few miles out to sea. Watch the sky long enough and you’ll spot the occasional Israeli Air Force drone, called Zanana (“mosquito” in Arabic, because of the buzz that they omit). Still, the beach is probably the safest place in Gaza—as far away as possible from the border areas where most of the fighting takes place. As it turns out, the main threats to Gaza’s surfers have come not from the conflict that characterizes the region, but from inside Gaza, from greedy hands looking to benefit from this new and exciting sport.
 
Most assume that the Hamas government in Gaza would pose the greatest obstacle to the cultivation of this “Western” sport. In reality, the Hamas government has been mostly cooperative in allowing the development of surfing and the local surfing community. Instead, the challenges facing the surfers have come from local, well-connected “charitable organizations” that see dollar signs in this media-friendly sport and try to demand exclusive control over surf equipment, hoping to dictate when and where people can surf.

Gaza, the numbers (Gideon Levy)

Writing in Ha'aretz:

Since the first Qassam rocket fell on Israel in April 2001, 59 Israelis have been killed - and 4,717 Palestinians...

between the start of the year and the outbreak of Operation Pillar of Defense, only one Israeli was killed by rocket and mortar-shell fire from Gaza (the figure should have been three, according to Haaretz's data ). During that same period, Israel killed no fewer than 78 Palestinians in Gaza. That was during a period of calm that, according to Israel, was broken only by the Palestinians. 

To these figures must be added the data from Pillar of Defense: 156 Palestinians killed, and six Israelis. The Economist reminds us that 19 of those killed were children...

During this period, Palestinians fired 7,361 rockets at Israel. It's hard to find data on how many missiles, shells and bombs Israel launched, but the numbers would be immeasurably higher...

In 2001, the year the Qassam was born, four rockets were fired from Gaza, killing one Israeli. And how many Palestinians were killed that year? One-hundred and seventy-nine. In 2002, 34 rockets were fired, from which not a single Israeli died, yet 373 Palestinians were killed. In the two years after that, the picture is even more stark: In 2003, there were 155 rockets; 370 Palestinians were killed, and not a single Israeli. In 2004, there were 281 rockets; 625 Palestinians were killed, and seven Israelis...

what does Israeli propaganda try to do? To paint the south as the sole and only victim...

the primary victim, the one who is bleeding most, is Gaza; Israel is only in second place. It's impossible to ignore this. In Gaza, the death toll is enormous. 

"all that is left for the inhabitants of Gaza is the thin surface of the earth that is sandwiched between Israeli-controlled zones"

Israeli architect Eyal Weizman on Gaza, writing online for the London Review of Books.

'knock on the roof' or, ‘teaser’ bombs/missiles 

fired "onto houses designated for destruction, with the intention of making an impact serious enough to scare the inhabitants into fleeing their homes before they are destroyed completely...Teaser bombs are just another means of sending a warning."

warning civilians

"if a warning has been issued, and not heeded, the victim is no longer a ‘non-combatant’ but a voluntary ‘human shield’."

perpetual "surveillance and strike" capacity

"Israel’s real power over Gaza is invisible. It is the ability of the Israeli air force to maintain a perpetual ‘surveillance and strike’ capability over Gaza – drones can stay in the air around the clock – that made the territorial withdrawal possible. Together with its control of the Gazan subsoil – manifested in the robbing of much of the water from coastal aquifers – and over the airwaves, including the use of electromagnetic jamming technology, all that is left for the inhabitants of Gaza is the thin surface of the earth that is sandwiched between Israeli-controlled zones. No wonder they try to invade the space below and above them with tunnels and rockets."

Sara Roy on Gaza

 Ayman Mohyeldin

In The Boston Globe, Nov. 23, 2012.

Gaza’s economic decline is seen in the near collapse of its agricultural sector. One factor is the destruction of around 7,800 acres of agricultural land during Cast Lead. Consequently, approximately one-third of Gaza’s total arable land is out of production. Furthermore, Israeli-imposed buffer zones — areas of restricted access — now absorb nearly 14 percent of Gaza’s total land and at least 48 percent of total arable land...

Another critical constraint is water. Gaza’s aquifer has been ruined by prolonged over-pumping and sewage and contaminant infiltration...

Israel’s blockade policy restricts the entry of materials needed to repair, maintain, and upgrade Gaza’s sewage and wastewater treatment infrastructure. Save the Children reported in 2011 that Israeli airstrikes destroyed water and sanitation infrastructure valued at $1.3 million.

The impact on health is clear: Just under 10 percent of Gazan children under five suffered from chronic malnutrition in 2010. According to Save the Children, “Diseases of poverty and conflict combined with a degenerating health care system are claiming growing numbers of Gaza’s children.”

Birth defects, congenital anomalies, and cancer cases are reportedly rising. This is likely due to environmental contamination, including the possible use of toxic weaponry during Cast Lead. The current military assault will undoubtedly worsen environmental conditions.

Kufiyaspotting: Jill Dougherty, CNN (Gaza coverage)

Thanks to Youssef for taking this photo and sharing it with me (here's the source). This is from yesterday's CNN coverage of the Gaza ceasefire (November 21). Jill Dougherty, CNN's Foreign Affairs correspondent, showed up to discuss the Gaza agreement with Wolf Blitzer wearing a pink kufiya scarf. Did she do it on purpose? Is this, as Youssef observes, why Wolf looks bummed? Given that Wolf studied at Hebrew University, speaks Hebrew, worked for AIPAC, and covered Washington, DC for the Jerusalem Post from 1973-1990, he (unlike some US correspondents), definitely knows what a kufiya is and what it might mean.

Gaza Surfing

This is a gorgeous and moving set of photos of Gaza surfers from Andrew McConnell. There are 23 surfers there who own boards, and other surfers who borrow when possible. Supplies are impossible to get in, so international donors have helped supply boards and wetsuits. But the surfers have no wax, so they improvise. This photos shows them melting candles on their boards before they head out onto the beach.

photo: Andrew McConnell

You wonder whether the Gaza surfers know that surf music was invented by the Lebanese-American guitarist Richard Mansour, who recorded under the name of Dick Dale. 

As Dale told George Baramki Azar, "My music comes from the rhythm of Arab songs," he says. "I applied the beat of the darbukkah (fluted drum) to my guitar. This is where a lot of great surf motifs originated."

Probably Dale's most famous song (due to Pulp Fiction) is "Misirlou," which is based on a Greek song (the title, meaning "Egyptian Muslim Girl," comes from the Arabic for Egypt, Misr) that was popular in the Arab-American community since at least the 1930's, and has been recorded in multiple versions. The song emerged from the rebetika tradition, forged in Smyrna, one of the Ottoman Empire's great cosmopolitan cities, which was emptied of its Greek population in the disastrous "population exchange" between Greece and Turkey that occurred after the First World War. Wikipedia has an excellent account of the song, its history, and its multiple versions. This excellent blog posting discusses the song and offers downloads of a number of versions, including one of Dick Dale.

Here's Dick doing the song in the 1963 film, "A Swinging Affair."

Gaza (dancehall version)

(Niketa Thomas, New York Times, June 19, 2011)

There's no evidence that Vybz Kartel gives two whits about Palestine's Gaza. Gaza is the name of Vybz's dancehall posse, as well as the name of the section of the Waterford housing scheme in Portmore, Jamaica, where Vybz Kartel grew up. He is also known as Gaza Emperor. Gully is the name of the actual gully which bisected Cassava Piece in St Andrew, where Vybz's rival Mavado grew up, and it's the name of his posse. Gaza/Gully feuding is constant in Jamaica. Read more here. (Thanks to Wayne Marshall for the reference. Don't blame Wayne for the fanciful account of the 'real' Gaza.)

(There is also a 'Tel Aviv' area in central Kingston.)

Vybz has released two albums called Pon Di Gaza. Please check out his Mavado dis song, "Pon Di Gaza":

interzone radio, podcast for 6/1/10 + muslimgauze + Gaza's DARG Team

the podcast for the june 1 show is here

playlist is here

as you might imagine, as I was preparing this show, I was thinking a lot, obsessing in fact, about Gaza.

(a very good commentary on the Israeli assault on the Freedom Flotilla, from Merip, is here).

so, among the tracks I played were Muslimgauze's "Curfew, Gaza," from the album Zul'm. an earlier post about Muslimgauze can be found here. if you go there, be sure to read the comments. and thanks to Nabeel, I learned about this site, where you can download, for free, the album El Tafkeera: Re-mixs in Remembrance of Muslimgauze. It's produced by Islamophoniacs. (I love the name.)


I also played a track by a rap group from Gaza that I quite like, DARG Team (DARG stands for Da Arabian Revolutionary Guys). You can go here (at palrap.net) to listen to some of their very fine tracks. (And PalRap is a great place to access all sorts of Palestinian rap. But it helps to know Arabic to navigate the site.)

Massive Attack and the Palestine Connection (of course)

Massive Attack's latest (fifth) album, Heligoland, is out now. I am listening to it right now, because it is now available to listen to in its entirety, thanks to NPR. (This almost, but does not quite, make up for the execrable attack on All Things Considered last week on the late Howard Zinn. Almost.)

Go here for NPR's take on Heligoland. To listen:

I've only listened to a few tracks, so can't give an informed opinion, except to say that so far I like it. I've loved Massive Attack ever since the first one, Blue Lines, back in 1991.

Long after I had become an avid fan, I learned of another reason to admire Massive Attack: for their politics. I noted back in 2007 that the band had played benefits for the Hoping Foundation, which supports projects for children in Palestinian refugee camps.

I want to quote now from a longish article about Massive Attack that was published in New Statesman back in 2007 ("Two-man Army," by Alice O'Keeffe, Feb. 5), that tells us a bit more about the group's notions about Palestine, about the Iraq war, and about the potentiality for development of a Middle Eastern trend in the British music scene. NPR won't be talking about this aspect of Massive Attack. (In the photo above, which is "sampled" from Massive Attack's blog, Grant (Daddy G) Marshall is at left, Robert (3D) Del Naja at right.)

It quickly becomes evident that [Robert] Del Naja is unfashionably political, and not in the woolly way we have come to expect from our pop stars. "When you are travelling around the world on tour, you see all these places that you hear about on the news and you start to actually feel some connection with them," he says. "We've been to Israel, to Bethlehem twice, and to Lebanon, performing in Baalbek, which was heavily bombed in the last [Israeli] attacks. You see these places and you start to feel a connection, and to feel a bit more responsible for what happens there. I wanted to actually do something."

Thus it is that Massive Attack will be playing three benefit concerts this month in Birmingham and London for the HOPING (Hope and Optimism for Palestinians in the Next Generation) Foundation, a charity set up by Jemima Khan, Bella Freud and the academic Karma Nabulsi to support grass-roots organisations in the Palestinian refugee camps across the Middle East. Primal Scream played a similar concert in 2004 (it was Primal Scream's lead singer, Bobby Gillespie, who introduced Massive Attack to Nabulsi), but Del Naja insists this is not simply a case of "sleb" guilt. "It is easy to get cynical about this kind of thing. As much as an event like Live 8 was monumental, it left me cold. It does raise awareness, but then you ask, 'Were any of those ambitions really met? Which targets have been reached?' This charity is a small group of people, with specific aims. You can understand that; you know where you are."

For more on some of the Hoping Foundation benefits, which have involved the likes of Elton John, Jade Jagger, Kate Moss, Hugh Grant, Chrissie Hynde, Nick Cave...go here. I've said this before, but here goes again: our US celebrities are lame on the question of Palestine compared to the Brit stars. Or is it that we have no Karma Nabulsi to mobilize them?

Del Naja has occasionally been sneered at by less earnest music-industry types for his interest in political issues - an indication, perhaps, of how disengaged pop music has become. On the eve of the 2003 Iraq invasion, he and Damon Albarn tried to organise a group of similarly prominent musicians into an anti-war campaign, only to be greeted, he says, with a silence bordering on hostility. "We approached people who we knew, people who were our peers or who we respected. But no one was interested. The only ones who got behind it with us were [the British Asian rap group] Fundamental. The majority didn't even respond, and those who did asked us if we supported Saddam Hussein's regime.

"Everyone is happy to get behind a cause like Make Poverty History, or fair-trade and environment issues. But when it comes to politics, they are reluctant."

Comment: props, once again, to Damon Albarn--who, as far as I can tell, is not often credited for being so politicized. The heavy involvement he has had in promoting Arab music in England, through his Honest Jons label, is certainly connected to his politicization around Middle East issues. As for Fun'Da'Mental, well, if you read this blog, you know about Fun'Da'Mental.

I wonder if Asian and Middle Eastern cultures might begin to permeate popular music, in the same way as Massive Attack and their ilk absorbed African-Caribbean influences during the 1990s. "It's interesting - we have done some exciting work with Asian and Arab artists, but I think there is still an unbridgeable gap there in terms of what happens in clubs and bars," he says. "When I was a kid, the Asians got more passive abuse than any other race, just because people are ignorant - they don't understand the culture. And of course, integration is difficult in the current political climate."

Again, Del Naja is pretty clear-eyed on the problems of racism toward Asians and Middle Easterners in England. We can only hope that the work of artists like U-Cef and Natacha Atlas are helping to shift things, at least a bit.

(Wish I knew which Arab artists Massive has worked with.)

I seem to remember that Massive Attack had made some statement in the wake of Israel's assault on Gaza. If they did, I cannot put my hands on it. But check out the group's blog. Almost every one of the 'relevant links' is about Gaza. (And people think I'm obsessed!)

misc. #2010.z

Hipsters. Orientalism. Qaddafi. Yusuf Islam. Rififi. Taqwacore. The Japanese Red Army. Any interest? Read on...

Random stuff I've been gathering for awhile. I meant to do longer posts on some of this material, but the time has passed for that. Time to get all this off my desktop. Here goes.

1. Bashing the hipsters. According to Ben Sisario, this is the place. Hipster Runoff. Only two kufiya posts, here, and here, that don't really add much to kufiya snarkiness. But if you are in search of snide, irreverent and often witty hipster satire, it's all here.

2. Popular Orientalism. Last February the New York Times published an article, in the Antiques section, about Goldsheider ceramics, very popular among the US middle class. Especially popular were the Art Deco figures of the 20s and 30s, including those featuring "harem dancers." What caught my eye was the photo of a figurine called "Aida," which the online version did not reproduce. Now I've found an image (at left). The one I saw on ebay was selling for $4000. An earlier post on the popularity of harem and belly-dance dress among the US bohemian bourgeoisie is here.

3. Gaza and pop culture. Last January, Yusuf Islam (ex-Cat Stevens) released "The Day the World Gets Round." Proceeds from the sale of the single go to UNRWA and Save the Children, for their work with children in Gaza. It's a cover a George Harrison song, and recorded with bassist Klaus Voorman, who used to play with the Beatles. I'm not a big Islam/Stevens fan, but I like this one.



4. Qaddafi, the Opera. Almost too odd to be true. News from September 2006, but still worth recording. Put on by the English National Opera in London, and called "Gaddafi: A Living Myth," it was ostensibly meant to attract younger audiences. To that end, Asian Dub Foundation was commissioned to dub the score. If we can credit The Guardian, it didn't work too well. I'm a huge fan of Asian Dub Foundation, but I can't figure out why they were involved in this project. But you can watch a clip about it here.

5. Rififi: a footnote. I had heard of this film but never seen it until last night. The name intrigued me, however, because it seemed to be some kind of riff on the Moroccan Rif. Of course this is the film that blacklisted US director Jules Dassin famously shot in Paris, was a huge hit in 1954, and reestablished his reputation (and income).

It is based on a novel by Auguste le Breton called Du Rififi Chez les Hommes, which was given to Dassin to film. He hated the novel but took the job because he needed it. In particular, he hated it because of its racism. The bad guys were all North African, and Dassin said, when interviewed later, "The truth is the book shocked me: it was all about Arab bad behavior, including necrophilia." So Dassin made the bad guys French, and focused the film in particular on the robbery caper.

The title of the film only comes up in the theme song, "Rififi," sung in the cabaret by Viviane (played by Magali Noël), but even then, you can't really make sense of what it means other than that it seems to be gangster argot. (Watch the sequence here.)

Dassin explained the meaning in a 2000 interview: "The title comes from the North African tribe, the Rifs, who were in constant conflict...So it's all about melees and conflicts and fighting, out of which the novelist Auguste Le Breton made the word 'rififi.'"

There's a history of US citizens being sympathetic to Riffians, going back to Abdelkrim's celebrated revolt against the Spanish colonialists in Morocco (1920-1926). But that's another tale.

6. The Kominas/Taqwacore. Since they toured, they've been getting lots of media attention. The Taqwacore movie (see below) has helped garner media attention too. Here's a nice AP report. My favorite line is this: "Usami said a reporter once questioned him on how he felt about some Muslims being terrorists. He responded by asking her how she, as a white person, felt about the African slave trade."

Here's another from Sapna. "[T]he band is not supportive of 1947, the partition of Pakistan. It is always much more important to be desi than Pakistani, Bengali, Indian. Having a south Asian identity is much more important than being from a region."

The film, Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam, will be screening at this year's Sundance Film Festival! Check out the film website.

Other good reports have been done, I've been trying to keep track, but right now, I can't locate the archive...Later, inshallah.

7. Japanese Red Army & PFLP on film. The invaluable magazine of Middle East art and culture, Bidoun, has partnered with the avante-garde art website Ubuweb to put up some fascinating sound and film documents. I've only just begun to explore.

Check out this one: Sekigun-PFLP: Sekai Senso Sengen (The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War), 1971.

In 1971, Koji Wakamatsu and Masao Adachi, both having ties to the Japanese Red Army, stopped in Palestine on their way home from the Cannes festival. There they caught up with notorious JRA ex-pats Fusako Shigenobu and Mieko Toyama in training camps to create a newsreel-style agit-prop film based off of the "landscape theory" (fûkeiron) that Adachi and Wakamatsu had developed. The theory, most evident at work in A.K.A. Serial Killer (1969), aimed to move the emphasis of film from situations to landscapes as expression of political and economical power relations.

In 1974 Adachi left Japan and committed himself to the Palestinian Revolution and linked up with the Japan Red Army. His activities thereafter were not revealed until he was arrested and imprisoned in 1997 in Lebanon. In 2001 Adachi was extradited to Japan, and after two years of imprisonment, he was released and subsequently published Cinema/Revolution [Eiga/Kakumei], an auto-biographical account of his life.

Yes, really, "newsreel-style agit-prop." Fascinating. (The photo is from the film, of one of the four jets the PFLP hijacked in September 1970.) Of course, if you are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, like I am, the connections that groups like the PFLP made with the Japanese Red Army as well as Germany's Red Army Faction are, to say the least, the source of embarrassment. (I'll have more to say about the RAF in future.)

There is also a short Agnès Varda film here, Plaisir d'amour en Iran, which I hope to look at soon.

And speaking of popular Orientalism--or maybe, rather, avant-garde Orientalism--there are also some Jack Smith films on Ubuweb, including Flaming Creatures, Normal Love and Scotch Tape. Normal Love is quite as amazing as Flaming Creatures, and I hope to have something to say about it in future.

M1 of Dead Prez in Gaza (and Kufiyaspotting #50)

Those familiar with the work of the rapper Dead Prez will not be surprised that he is now in Gaza, as part of a 200 person delegation, including former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and New York City Councilman Charles Barron, bringing in humanitarian aid under the auspices of Viva Palestina.

Hopefully he will have a chance to perform in Gaza in the company of Palestinian rappers, as he did back in April in Chicago:



M1 is one of those kufiya wearing rappers who are knowledgeable about Palestine and who is active on behalf of Palestine.

Here's what he told Youth Radio about Gaza in March:

At the seat at every one of these motions that happen in the Middle East is the instability that's brought on by the oppression that's been in that region forever. Since 1948, there, the interjection of the same type of imperialism that shakes the world everywhere around in Africa, in the U.S. The reason I act the way I act is the same reason why the Palestinian people are being attacked. And I think there's one way out, there's one way towards peace and that's the same thing as Peter Tosh say, equal rights and justice.

Here's M1 in kufiya, kicking it Kenya in 2007 (courtesy lukas).


Here he is at the 2008 Slamdance Housewarming Party in Park City, Utah (the alternative to Sundance).


M1 was also present at the 2008 Sundance for the screening of Slingshot Hiphop, but I haven't found any pictures of him garbed in kufiya there.

More on the white phosphorus tip

Human Rights Watch recently (March 26) produced this short documentary:

And Al-Jazeera English did this report (March 25) on Pine Bluff Arsenal, the source for the white phosphorus shells the Israel 'Defense' Forces used in/on Gaza.