Pink's stripper-burka at the 2010 Grammys

You will pardon me my posts are sometimes not "timely." I am going back through old notes that I've stashed in various places, and finding things that I meant to post much earlier.

Here's what Terry Sawyer, in Popmatters.com, wrote about Pink's appearance at the 2010 Grammys: "While I admired her athleticism, Pink’s performance was a yawning Cirque du Flashdance...I know all the fashion attention of the Grammys will rightfully center around Lady Gaga’s sci-fi burlesque, but Pink deserves accolades for debuting the stripper-burka with its pleasure trail neckline rendering of traditional Islamic dress, even if it ends up earning her a Salman Rushdie-style fatwa. Performances like this represent the quiet neutering of awe."

Frankly, I'm not convinced that Pink's outfit truly evokes a burka, or female Islamic dress of any sort. (Sawyer needed to consult something like the Huffpost guide to "veiling," the subject of my previous post.) But it's interesting that he thinks it does. You decide.

Lupe Fiasco & Erykah Badu at Hip Hop Awards '11: #occupy, Palestinian flag, kufiya, burkah...

Rapper Lupe Fiasco performed his song, "Words I Never Said," at the Hip Hop Awards 2011 on October 10. The performance was provocative in all kinds of ways that we like here at hawgblawg.

First, Erykah Badu backed him up on vocals (singing), dressed like this:

Yes, full-on burqa. And green fingernail polish. And a hat that makes her look, kinda like an Orthodox Jew? In any case, the most remarkable thing is the burqa. This does not mean that Badu (who in the past has laced her lyrics with the doctrine of the Nations of Gods and Earths, and who in the past used to dress in the style of an Earth, a modestly dressed female Five Percenter) has become a devout Muslimah. Rather, one guesses, she is expressing solidarity with the devout burqa wearer. Or trying, by putting the burqa on, to make it appear less strange, alien and exotic. I doubt it's a matter of burqa chic.

And then there is the matter of the banner that Lupe Fiasco has attached to his mike stand, a combination kufiya and Palestinian flag, with the word, Palestine stitched into it.

Avid readers of this blawg will know that Lupe was seen waving a Palestinian flag in concert on September 16, when he expressed his support for Palestine's admission to the UN. They will also recall that Lupe is a Muslim who doesn't hide it and that he has been spotted in a kufiya several times in the past. The real avid readers might also recall these lines from the song he performed at the Hip Hop Awards, "Words I Never Said":

Gaza Strip was getting bombed, Obama didn’t say shit
That's why I ain't vote for him, next one either
I’m a part of the problem, my problem is I’m peaceful
And I believe in the people...

I really think the war on terror is a bunch of bullshit
Just a poor excuse for you to use up all your bullets...

Now you can say it aint our fault if we never heard it
But if we know better than we probably deserve it
Jihad is not a holy war, where's that in the worship?
Murdering is not Islam!

And you are not observant
And you are not a Muslim
Israel don’t take my side cause look how far you’ve pushed them

And then there is the matter of the shirt that Lupe was wearing:

What can I say? We really like this. Occupy everything.

Erykah took her hat and face covering off at the end of the song:

The purpose was not to "disrobe." (Unlike Erykah did famously here.) The purpose was to show her face so that Mos Def could introduce her -- otherwise, I guess, no one in the audience would have known who that "weird" person in burqa was. Here, she looks like someone in less "severe" Islamic dress, in hijab rather than burqa.

I only wish I really loved the song, "Words I Never Said." I think the rap/rock combo is hard to pull off, and for me, it isn't successful in this case. I do, however, admire the performance and the lyrics, a lot. Especially all the provocation and the expressions of solidarity. And I do like a lot of Lupe's material. But not this song, so much.

pardon my french, pardon my halal, pardon my burqa

Michael Kimmelman published an interesting piece in the New York Times' Arts & Leisure section back on April 25, 2010, about the globalization of the French language. I'm just now getting back to this article, as I sort the heaps of paper in the home office. And finding that the article still relevant. Check out this report on MSNBC about the new controversy in France, replacing (perhaps, or perhaps only for the moment), the issue of the burqa: halal fast-food burgers.

On Wednesday, "popular French fast food chain Quick, the No. 2 burger chain in France after McDonald's, started serving halal-only food in 22 of its French outlets, targeting France's large Muslim population, an underexploited market that has long been ignored by big business...[among other things this means...no more bacon burgers at these outlets.]

Politicians left and right have attacked the move from every conceivable angle. Some ask why halal food should be foisted on the general population, while others worry the Quicks in question will promote segregation of the Muslim community instead of acceptance. France argues that integration is the only option for minorities, and the only way to preserve social cohesion."

Meanwhile, here are some excerpts from Kimmelman's piece:

Didier Billion is a political scientist with an interest in francophone culture...“A multipolar world has emerged,” he said... I am very proud of being French, but 40 years ago the French language was a way to maintain influence in the former colonies, and now French people are going to have to learn to think about francophone culture differently, because having a common language doesn’t assure you a common political or cultural point of view.”

...In a country where pop radio stations broadcast a percentage of songs in French, and a socialist mayor in the northern, largely Muslim town of Roubaix lately won kudos for protesting that outlets of the fast-food chain Quick turned halal, cultural exceptionalism reflects fears of the multicultural sort that Mr. Zemmour’s book [the controversial, pro-assimilationist French Melancholy] touches on.

It happens that Mr. Zemmour traces his own roots to Sephardic Jews from Spain who became French citizens while living in Algeria in the 19th century, then moved to France before the Algerian war. He belongs to the melting pot, in other words, which for centuries, he said, absorbed immigrants into its republican culture...

Yasmina Khadra, the best-selling Algerian novelist, whose real name is Mohammed Moulessehoul [is a] 55-year-old former Algerian Army officer who now lives in Paris heading the center, [who] writes novels critical of the Algerian government under his wife’s name, which he first borrowed while in Algeria because the military there had banned his literary work...

“Paris is still fearful of a French writer who becomes known around the world without its blessing,” Mr. Moulessehoul said. “And at the same time in certain Arab-speaking circles I am considered a traitor because I write in French. I am caught between two cultures, two worlds.

“Culture is always about politics in the end. I am a French writer and an Algerian writer. But the larger truth is that I am both.”

A footnote on Yasmina Khadra: I've read his first novel, a policier called Morituri, and it was terrific. But friends who stay abreast of such things say that his subsequent novels have focused more and more on the problem of Islamist fanaticism, in such a manner that makes his work very palatable to French Islamophobic tastes. Moreover, check out The Toby Press, which publishes Yasmina Khadra's translated work. Strange, isn't it, that most of the authors are Jewish, many of them Israelis (the likes of Amos Oz and S. Yizhar), and that Khadra is the only Arab name listed. What sort of politics does this represent, one wonders.

Another note: I tend to think that halal-only menus for a burger joint discriminate against members of the community who might want bacon on their cheeseburger. I guess Beurs who want to eat bacon-cheese can go to MacDonald's. But still.

Here's a graphic example of the predictable, and over-heated, reaction from French rightist circles.