Thank you, Joe

Thank you Joe Sacco for doing what you do. I love this interview because its rare for someone to talk about how hard it actually is to do what you want to do. This guy has been through a lot.

I highly recommend his book Palestine - its one of the best books I've ever read on Palestine.

This is an interview from the Guardian on his latest work.


In his books, Joe Sacco always draws himself the same way: neat and compact, a small bag slung across his body, a notebook invariably in his hand. At a single glance, the reader understands that he is both reporter and innocent abroad, an unlikely combination that propels him not only to ask difficult questions, but to go on asking them long after all the other hacks have given up and gone home. You sense in this black-and-white outline, too, a certain taut, physical alertness. Should there be trouble, he is, it seems, ready to run.

The expression on his face, however, is more difficult to read. Sacco keeps his eyes permanently hidden behind the shine of his owlish spectacles; anyone wishing to gauge his deeper emotions must rely instead on his bottom lip. Basically, this lip has two modes. When he is frustrated, bewildered or angry, it moves stubbornly forward and its corners droop. When he is happy, contentedly drinking beer, say, or mildly flirting, it peels back to reveal his teeth, which are big and rabbity and exceedingly un-American, as if crafted from a piece of old orange peel.

Is his eyelessness intended to send some kind of subtle message regarding the reliability of the reporter-narrator? Sacco, who in real life has elfin features and brown eyes, and is sitting next to me at a gleaming white table in the offices of his London publisher, winces. "It is deliberate now," he says. "But it certainly wasn't in the beginning. If you look at the first few pages of [my first book] Palestine, you'll see that I didn't used to be able to draw at all! Also, back then, I really was more like a tourist than a reporter and I suppose the way I drew myself reflected that. I was this naive person who didn't know where he was going or what he was doing. Since then, I've learned how to behave; nowadays, it would be a lie to make myself seem too bumbling.

"But some people have told me that hiding my eyes makes it easier for them to put themselves in my shoes, so I've kind of stuck with it. I'm a nondescript figure; on some level, I'm a cipher. The thing is: I don't want to emote too much when I draw myself. The stories are about other people, not me. I'd rather emphasise their feelings. If I do show mine – let's say I'm shaking [with fear] more than the people I'm with – it's only ever to throw their situation into starker relief."

Thanks to publishing hyperbole, writers often get called "unique". But Sacco's work truly is, combining as it does oral history, memoir and reportage with cartoons in a way that, when he started out, most people – himself included, at times – considered utterly preposterous.

Twenty years on, though, and the American cartoonist is widely regarded as the author of two masterpieces: Palestine, in which he reported on the lives of the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza in the early 1990s, with flashbacks to 1948, the beginning of the first Intifada, and the first Gulf War; and Safe Area Gorazde, which describes his experiences in Bosnia in 1994-95. Palestine won an American Book Award, and has sold 30,000 copies in the UK alone (this is a huge figure for a comic book, let alone a political comic book).

"With the exception of one or two novelists and poets, no one has ever rendered this terrible state of affairs better than Joe Sacco," wrote Edward Said in his foreword to the complete edition of Palestine (it was originally published as a series of nine comics). Safe Area Gorazde, following ecstatic reviews in which Sacco was named Art Spiegelman's heir apparent and tipped to win a Pulitzer, won the 2001 Eisner Award for best original graphic novel.

Footnotes in Gaza, his new book and his first long narrative for six years, returns Sacco to Palestine and, being rooted as much in the past as in the present, is perhaps his most ambitious work to date. But why go back? Aren't there plenty of crises to report elsewhere?

He shrugs. All he knows is that, a few years ago, he felt a fresh "compulsion" to write about Gaza; events in the territory had left him feeling "agitated". So in 2001, he and journalist Chris Hedges travelled there on assignment for Harper's magazine. The idea was that they would go to one city and focus on its history alone. Sacco suggested Khan Younis. In the back of his mind, he dimly remembered something he had read in Noam Chomsky's book, The Fateful Triangle, about an incident during the Suez crisis in 1956 in which a large number of Palestinian refugees were killed by Israeli soldiers.

"We asked around, people confirmed the story, and we thought it important for the history of the town," says Sacco. "But when Chris's piece was published, they cut Khan Younis out. Well, that further agitated me. I know the big picture is important but the big picture is made up of a lot of smaller things. It's a shame when those things get lost. It seems… unfair. I wanted to look at it myself. According to the UN, 275 people died in Khan Younis: why did that figure deserve to return to obscurity?"

In 2003, he went back. But once there, Sacco found himself becoming increasingly interested in another incident that had occurred around the same time – November 1956 – in the neighbouring town of Rafah. According to a couple of sentences in a UN report, scores of Palestinian civilians had also been shot by Israeli forces there during a procedure that should have been standard (the Israeli soldiers were screening Rafah's men in the hope of finding terrorists). Sacco wanted to know what had happened. Had the Israelis, as the UN report surmised, simply "panicked and opened fire on the running crowd"? Or was it more complicated than that?

Moreover, what effect had this incident had on the collective memory of Rafah, now once again in brutal conflict with the Israeli army?

In Rafah, almost all men of military age had reputedly been caught up in the incident so there were likely to be survivors still living whom he could interview at length. As a result, Footnotes in Gaza is divided in two. A first, shorter section investigates the killings at Khan Younis, and a second, longer section is devoted to events in Rafah.

"Both towns stand in for all those places, all those things, that are more widely left out of history. They're footnotes, but these were also an important day in some people's lives."

Footnotes in Gaza features all Sacco's trademarks. For a start, there is the author himself, one minute infuriated beyond all endurance by checkpoint bureaucracy, the next delightedly scoffing honeyed Arab pastries; unlike many reporters, Sacco is as interested in the process of getting the story as in the story itself, a fact which only serves to remind you of how highly filtered and polished most "news" is.

Then there are the people he meets. Sacco's ear for the way Palestinian men talk is as sharp as ever (as Edward Said has put it, they exchange their tales of suffering the way fishermen compare the size of their catch). Ditto his nose for lies and embellishments. As usual, his fixer – this time, his right-hand man is called Abed – takes a starring role, his tenacity seeming to surprise even his employer at times. Best of all, there are the moments when Sacco covers a page with one or two large frames, these bigger, more panoramic drawings capturing not only the claustrophobic scrum of a single, 21st-century Rafah street, from aerials on corrugated tin roofs down, but also the way it might have looked when Palestinian refugees arrived there in 1948 (he used old photographs as the basis for these drawings and has rendered the land dry, empty and bleakly forbidding).

But Footnotes is also a darker, less humorous book than Palestine; Sacco calls it "sombre". It's not only that the old men and women he interviews are describing such painful events. Footnotes is punctuated by a sense of history repeating itself or, perhaps, of history failing ever to stop, not even for the merest breather. As someone in Gaza tells Sacco: "Events are continuous."

You look at his drawings of hundreds of men sitting in a pen one day in 1956, under armed guard, no food, no water, their hands on their heads, and you could be looking at an equivalent atrocity at almost any time before or since, and in any number of places. "There are only so many ways you can skin a cat when it comes to screening people so you can kill them," says Sacco. "It was a horrific incident in and of itself but it is also representative of any number of other incidents, even if I'm reluctant to make direct comparisons myself."

Meanwhile, life in present-day Gaza grinds on. We see Sacco and his room-mate, Abed, listening to mortar fire, braving the curfew (the book is set before the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza) and witnessing the demolition of homes. The book is haunted by a ghostly presence called Khaled, a man wanted by the Israelis. Always on the move, he has not had a proper night's sleep for several years. In Sacco's drawings, Khaled's features – his hawkish nose and long chin – cast impossibly long shadows over the rest of his face, leaving the reader unnervingly unsure whether he is to be feared or pitied.

Joe Sacco was born in Malta in 1960. His family emigrated, first to Australia and then, finally, to America when he was just a boy; his parents, who were socialists, were worried about the influence of the Catholic church on Maltese life. Sacco believes that the experiences of his parents had a big impact on his career. "In Australia, there were a lot of Europeans and they would all meet up and the commonality was the war. You heard a lot about it. I guess I realised conflict was just a part of life."

He decided to be a reporter and did a journalism degree at the University of Oregon (he still lives in Portland). His early jobs, however, were so indescribably boring – he worked initially for the journal of the National Notary Association – that he soon decided he'd be better off working for himself. First, he set up his own comics magazine. Later, he had a staff job on the Comics Journal. As far as his own drawing and writing goes, his influences include George Orwell and – this makes such perfect sense – Bruegel.

It was in the early 1990s, while he was living in Berlin, that he became interested in the Middle East. "I didn't have some grand plan. I just felt like I needed to go there and see for myself. It's so under-reported in America. At the time, I was trying to make a living as a cartoonist. I thought to myself: I can't just be some adventure tourist but maybe it is conceivable that I could do a comic about it. But I didn't even know if I would have the guts to go into the West Bank! This is how naive I was: I was bumbling around in East Jerusalem for a few days and I met a tourist who'd been to Nablus in a taxi. Oh, I thought: I could just get a taxi! I was pretty sheepish about telling people what I was doing. If I met a journalist or someone from an NGO, I was always afraid they would laugh – and one or two did."

Did he seriously believe he could make a living from this kind of work? "I'll be honest. I thought it was commercial suicide, writing about Palestine. I was cutting my own throat! It came out in nine issues and each one sold progressively worse. The last one sold under 2,000 copies in the US. That's when I thought: OK, I really made a mistake. When I did the next book [Safe Area Gorazde], I decided to do it as a single volume, simply so I wouldn't get demoralised as I went along."

It was Safe Area Gorazde that changed his fortunes. "Most American journalists agreed with my position on Bosnia and it was incredibly warmly received. The New York Times named it a notable book of the year and I received a Guggenheim fellowship, which really helped me financially. So when Palestine came out in a single volume, it had a new life. It sold 60,000 copies in America and it was widely translated. It has long since outsold Safe Area Gorazde. I think it'll be the book I'm remembered for."

In the years since, Sacco has published several more tales from Bosnia, among them the brilliant The Fixer: A Story From Sarajevo, and he has reported from Iraq and Ingushetia for newspapers and magazines. He is now at work on two projects: a 48-page comic for the Virginia Quarterly Review about African migrants who attempt to get into Europe via Malta, and a story for Harper's about Camden, New Jersey, currently the poorest city in the US.

When he's not travelling, he treats his work "exactly like a proper job… I have to: Footnotes in Gaza took me four years. I have to produce at a certain rate and stick to a rigid two pages every five days. I don't story-board. I hardly even sketch anything out. I draw directly on to the board with my pencil. It's all hand-drawn. If I make a mistake, I cut out the panel and cut and paste the old-fashioned way".

Nevertheless, he is often away from home for long periods. In his books, he sometimes depicts himself gazing dreamily at a pretty girl in a bar. Has his career played havoc with his private life? "It played havoc with my life until I was almost 40. I have a girlfriend now and a mortgage, which feels pretty odd, but for about a 10-year period I was just so broke. I had to ask friends and my parents for money. It's difficult to have a personal life when you're broke because you can't afford to go out, and it isn't that attractive, either; people get fed up pretty quickly."

It seems to me, though, that Sacco must be quite tough; even when things are at their most difficult in Gaza or Bosnia, they never really seem to get him down. "Well, I know I'm going to leave," he says. "If I knew I was trapped the way people in Gaza are trapped, their lives simply closed down, maybe I would go insane. That's not to say that my stomach doesn't get a little twisted up as I'm going in and as I'm leaving. I love Gaza. I wouldn't say I see physical beauty in it. It's more to do with its people and my experiences with them: that physical closeness that you can't really avoid. Things are so hard there but – wow! – they always feed me the most amazing food." Still, for the "sake of my own sanity" he is planning on stepping away from war reporting in the near future. He is planning a graphic memoir about the Rolling Stones.

Will he one day return to Gaza for a third time? Or perhaps he could look at the conflict from Sderot or some other town on the Israeli side. "It depends on what I feel in my gut. There are lots of places in the world where things are pretty bad. When I read about them, though, I have to wait for the story to work on me. With Bosnia, it took a full year for that to happen. But I do feel Palestinians have been misrepresented in the America media over a long time; we've internalised all sorts of things about them.

"With Footnotes, I want people to appreciate the lost molecules of conflict: the details and sideshows that only exist until the people who remember them die. But I also want them to remember, when they're watching the news, that it comes to them out of context and that history always comes back to haunt you. An incident can resonate for a whole century or even longer."

As he considers the weight of all those years, his eyes narrow and I think to myself how good it is to be able to see them at last.

In his books, Joe Sacco always draws himself the same way: neat and compact, a small bag slung across his body, a notebook invariably in his hand. At a single glance, the reader understands that he is both reporter and innocent abroad, an unlikely combination that propels him not only to ask difficult questions, but to go on asking them long after all the other hacks have given up and gone home. You sense in this black-and-white outline, too, a certain taut, physical alertness. Should there be trouble, he is, it seems, ready to run.

The expression on his face, however, is more difficult to read. Sacco keeps his eyes permanently hidden behind the shine of his owlish spectacles; anyone wishing to gauge his deeper emotions must rely instead on his bottom lip. Basically, this lip has two modes. When he is frustrated, bewildered or angry, it moves stubbornly forward and its corners droop. When he is happy, contentedly drinking beer, say, or mildly flirting, it peels back to reveal his teeth, which are big and rabbity and exceedingly un-American, as if crafted from a piece of old orange peel.

Is his eyelessness intended to send some kind of subtle message regarding the reliability of the reporter-narrator? Sacco, who in real life has elfin features and brown eyes, and is sitting next to me at a gleaming white table in the offices of his London publisher, winces. "It is deliberate now," he says. "But it certainly wasn't in the beginning. If you look at the first few pages of [my first book] Palestine, you'll see that I didn't used to be able to draw at all! Also, back then, I really was more like a tourist than a reporter and I suppose the way I drew myself reflected that. I was this naive person who didn't know where he was going or what he was doing. Since then, I've learned how to behave; nowadays, it would be a lie to make myself seem too bumbling.

"But some people have told me that hiding my eyes makes it easier for them to put themselves in my shoes, so I've kind of stuck with it. I'm a nondescript figure; on some level, I'm a cipher. The thing is: I don't want to emote too much when I draw myself. The stories are about other people, not me. I'd rather emphasise their feelings. If I do show mine – let's say I'm shaking [with fear] more than the people I'm with – it's only ever to throw their situation into starker relief."

Thanks to publishing hyperbole, writers often get called "unique". But Sacco's work truly is, combining as it does oral history, memoir and reportage with cartoons in a way that, when he started out, most people – himself included, at times – considered utterly preposterous.

Twenty years on, though, and the American cartoonist is widely regarded as the author of two masterpieces: Palestine, in which he reported on the lives of the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza in the early 1990s, with flashbacks to 1948, the beginning of the first Intifada, and the first Gulf War; and Safe Area Gorazde, which describes his experiences in Bosnia in 1994-95. Palestine won an American Book Award, and has sold 30,000 copies in the UK alone (this is a huge figure for a comic book, let alone a political comic book).

"With the exception of one or two novelists and poets, no one has ever rendered this terrible state of affairs better than Joe Sacco," wrote Edward Said in his foreword to the complete edition of Palestine (it was originally published as a series of nine comics). Safe Area Gorazde, following ecstatic reviews in which Sacco was named Art Spiegelman's heir apparent and tipped to win a Pulitzer, won the 2001 Eisner Award for best original graphic novel.

Footnotes in Gaza, his new book and his first long narrative for six years, returns Sacco to Palestine and, being rooted as much in the past as in the present, is perhaps his most ambitious work to date. But why go back? Aren't there plenty of crises to report elsewhere?

He shrugs. All he knows is that, a few years ago, he felt a fresh "compulsion" to write about Gaza; events in the territory had left him feeling "agitated". So in 2001, he and journalist Chris Hedges travelled there on assignment for Harper's magazine. The idea was that they would go to one city and focus on its history alone. Sacco suggested Khan Younis. In the back of his mind, he dimly remembered something he had read in Noam Chomsky's book, The Fateful Triangle, about an incident during the Suez crisis in 1956 in which a large number of Palestinian refugees were killed by Israeli soldiers.

"We asked around, people confirmed the story, and we thought it important for the history of the town," says Sacco. "But when Chris's piece was published, they cut Khan Younis out. Well, that further agitated me. I know the big picture is important but the big picture is made up of a lot of smaller things. It's a shame when those things get lost. It seems… unfair. I wanted to look at it myself. According to the UN, 275 people died in Khan Younis: why did that figure deserve to return to obscurity?"

In 2003, he went back. But once there, Sacco found himself becoming increasingly interested in another incident that had occurred around the same time – November 1956 – in the neighbouring town of Rafah. According to a couple of sentences in a UN report, scores of Palestinian civilians had also been shot by Israeli forces there during a procedure that should have been standard (the Israeli soldiers were screening Rafah's men in the hope of finding terrorists). Sacco wanted to know what had happened. Had the Israelis, as the UN report surmised, simply "panicked and opened fire on the running crowd"? Or was it more complicated than that?

Moreover, what effect had this incident had on the collective memory of Rafah, now once again in brutal conflict with the Israeli army?

In Rafah, almost all men of military age had reputedly been caught up in the incident so there were likely to be survivors still living whom he could interview at length. As a result, Footnotes in Gaza is divided in two. A first, shorter section investigates the killings at Khan Younis, and a second, longer section is devoted to events in Rafah.

"Both towns stand in for all those places, all those things, that are more widely left out of history. They're footnotes, but these were also an important day in some people's lives."

Footnotes in Gaza features all Sacco's trademarks. For a start, there is the author himself, one minute infuriated beyond all endurance by checkpoint bureaucracy, the next delightedly scoffing honeyed Arab pastries; unlike many reporters, Sacco is as interested in the process of getting the story as in the story itself, a fact which only serves to remind you of how highly filtered and polished most "news" is.

Then there are the people he meets. Sacco's ear for the way Palestinian men talk is as sharp as ever (as Edward Said has put it, they exchange their tales of suffering the way fishermen compare the size of their catch). Ditto his nose for lies and embellishments. As usual, his fixer – this time, his right-hand man is called Abed – takes a starring role, his tenacity seeming to surprise even his employer at times. Best of all, there are the moments when Sacco covers a page with one or two large frames, these bigger, more panoramic drawings capturing not only the claustrophobic scrum of a single, 21st-century Rafah street, from aerials on corrugated tin roofs down, but also the way it might have looked when Palestinian refugees arrived there in 1948 (he used old photographs as the basis for these drawings and has rendered the land dry, empty and bleakly forbidding).

But Footnotes is also a darker, less humorous book than Palestine; Sacco calls it "sombre". It's not only that the old men and women he interviews are describing such painful events. Footnotes is punctuated by a sense of history repeating itself or, perhaps, of history failing ever to stop, not even for the merest breather. As someone in Gaza tells Sacco: "Events are continuous."

You look at his drawings of hundreds of men sitting in a pen one day in 1956, under armed guard, no food, no water, their hands on their heads, and you could be looking at an equivalent atrocity at almost any time before or since, and in any number of places. "There are only so many ways you can skin a cat when it comes to screening people so you can kill them," says Sacco. "It was a horrific incident in and of itself but it is also representative of any number of other incidents, even if I'm reluctant to make direct comparisons myself."

Meanwhile, life in present-day Gaza grinds on. We see Sacco and his room-mate, Abed, listening to mortar fire, braving the curfew (the book is set before the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza) and witnessing the demolition of homes. The book is haunted by a ghostly presence called Khaled, a man wanted by the Israelis. Always on the move, he has not had a proper night's sleep for several years. In Sacco's drawings, Khaled's features – his hawkish nose and long chin – cast impossibly long shadows over the rest of his face, leaving the reader unnervingly unsure whether he is to be feared or pitied.

Joe Sacco was born in Malta in 1960. His family emigrated, first to Australia and then, finally, to America when he was just a boy; his parents, who were socialists, were worried about the influence of the Catholic church on Maltese life. Sacco believes that the experiences of his parents had a big impact on his career. "In Australia, there were a lot of Europeans and they would all meet up and the commonality was the war. You heard a lot about it. I guess I realised conflict was just a part of life."

He decided to be a reporter and did a journalism degree at the University of Oregon (he still lives in Portland). His early jobs, however, were so indescribably boring – he worked initially for the journal of the National Notary Association – that he soon decided he'd be better off working for himself. First, he set up his own comics magazine. Later, he had a staff job on the Comics Journal. As far as his own drawing and writing goes, his influences include George Orwell and – this makes such perfect sense – Bruegel.

It was in the early 1990s, while he was living in Berlin, that he became interested in the Middle East. "I didn't have some grand plan. I just felt like I needed to go there and see for myself. It's so under-reported in America. At the time, I was trying to make a living as a cartoonist. I thought to myself: I can't just be some adventure tourist but maybe it is conceivable that I could do a comic about it. But I didn't even know if I would have the guts to go into the West Bank! This is how naive I was: I was bumbling around in East Jerusalem for a few days and I met a tourist who'd been to Nablus in a taxi. Oh, I thought: I could just get a taxi! I was pretty sheepish about telling people what I was doing. If I met a journalist or someone from an NGO, I was always afraid they would laugh – and one or two did."

Did he seriously believe he could make a living from this kind of work? "I'll be honest. I thought it was commercial suicide, writing about Palestine. I was cutting my own throat! It came out in nine issues and each one sold progressively worse. The last one sold under 2,000 copies in the US. That's when I thought: OK, I really made a mistake. When I did the next book [Safe Area Gorazde], I decided to do it as a single volume, simply so I wouldn't get demoralised as I went along."

It was Safe Area Gorazde that changed his fortunes. "Most American journalists agreed with my position on Bosnia and it was incredibly warmly received. The New York Times named it a notable book of the year and I received a Guggenheim fellowship, which really helped me financially. So when Palestine came out in a single volume, it had a new life. It sold 60,000 copies in America and it was widely translated. It has long since outsold Safe Area Gorazde. I think it'll be the book I'm remembered for."

In the years since, Sacco has published several more tales from Bosnia, among them the brilliant The Fixer: A Story From Sarajevo, and he has reported from Iraq and Ingushetia for newspapers and magazines. He is now at work on two projects: a 48-page comic for the Virginia Quarterly Review about African migrants who attempt to get into Europe via Malta, and a story for Harper's about Camden, New Jersey, currently the poorest city in the US.

When he's not travelling, he treats his work "exactly like a proper job… I have to: Footnotes in Gaza took me four years. I have to produce at a certain rate and stick to a rigid two pages every five days. I don't story-board. I hardly even sketch anything out. I draw directly on to the board with my pencil. It's all hand-drawn. If I make a mistake, I cut out the panel and cut and paste the old-fashioned way".

Nevertheless, he is often away from home for long periods. In his books, he sometimes depicts himself gazing dreamily at a pretty girl in a bar. Has his career played havoc with his private life? "It played havoc with my life until I was almost 40. I have a girlfriend now and a mortgage, which feels pretty odd, but for about a 10-year period I was just so broke. I had to ask friends and my parents for money. It's difficult to have a personal life when you're broke because you can't afford to go out, and it isn't that attractive, either; people get fed up pretty quickly."

It seems to me, though, that Sacco must be quite tough; even when things are at their most difficult in Gaza or Bosnia, they never really seem to get him down. "Well, I know I'm going to leave," he says. "If I knew I was trapped the way people in Gaza are trapped, their lives simply closed down, maybe I would go insane. That's not to say that my stomach doesn't get a little twisted up as I'm going in and as I'm leaving. I love Gaza. I wouldn't say I see physical beauty in it. It's more to do with its people and my experiences with them: that physical closeness that you can't really avoid. Things are so hard there but – wow! – they always feed me the most amazing food." Still, for the "sake of my own sanity" he is planning on stepping away from war reporting in the near future. He is planning a graphic memoir about the Rolling Stones.

Will he one day return to Gaza for a third time? Or perhaps he could look at the conflict from Sderot or some other town on the Israeli side. "It depends on what I feel in my gut. There are lots of places in the world where things are pretty bad. When I read about them, though, I have to wait for the story to work on me. With Bosnia, it took a full year for that to happen. But I do feel Palestinians have been misrepresented in the America media over a long time; we've internalised all sorts of things about them.

"With Footnotes, I want people to appreciate the lost molecules of conflict: the details and sideshows that only exist until the people who remember them die. But I also want them to remember, when they're watching the news, that it comes to them out of context and that history always comes back to haunt you. An incident can resonate for a whole century or even longer."

As he considers the weight of all those years, his eyes narrow and I think to myself how good it is to be able to see them at last.

By Rachel Cooke

Roy and the Economist

Who is the reviewer? I've not been able to find out - isn't that interesting? I find it quite sad that the Economist published a review that undermines Roy's amazing and necessary work. I wonder what's going on...


From: Arundhati Roy

Hi folks
A letter to the Economist about their charming review of my book. No news from them, so feel free to post on websites/circulate.

To,
The Editor
The Economist 25 August 2009

Dear Sir

This is with regard to the review of my book “Listening to Grasshoppers” that appeared in the Economist. If this letter is long, ironically it is because the factual errors in the review are so many. In an attempt to highlight my “flawed reporting and incorrect analysis” the reviewer makes some extraordinary errors and leaps of logic:

1. “Ms Roy cites a massacre of perhaps 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, in which the state’s Hindu-nationalist government was allegedly complicit. Almost no senior official or Hinduist agitator has been prosecuted over the atrocity. And Narendra Modi, Gujarat’s chief minister then and now, is currently vying to take over the leadership of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, and one day India. Many of the country’s industrialists would approve of that; even Ratan Tata, the gentlemanly head of the vast Tata Group which prides itself on its ethical dealings, has praised Mr Modi’s business-friendly policies. Nothing annoys Ms Roy more.”

Mr Tata did not merely praise Modi’s business policies, he endorsed him warmly and publicly as a future candidate for prime minister. In India the said Mr Modi is still being investigated for his role in the 2002 pogrom. In his successful election campaigns after the pogrom, Modi brazenly cultivated communal hatred. He is a member of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh) an organization that is proud of its fascist origins and counts both Hitler and Mussolini as its heroes. In addition to the massacres about 150,000 Muslims were driven from their homes during the carnage. Even today, under Mr Modi’s administration, most continue to live in ghettos, socially and economically boycotted in a brutal system of communal apartheid, while the killers continue to live as free, respectable citizens. Incidentally, after considering the available information, the US government has denied Mr Modi a visa. A handicap, wouldn’t you say, for a potential prime -minister? Incidentally, for more on the Tata’s “ethical dealings” you could google “Kalinganagar” or “Singur”.

2. “…she is not always a reliable witness. Her claim that in Kashmir last summer protesters were as likely to call for union with Pakistan as freedom from India is probably wrong; most seemed to want to be shot of both countries.”

I have never made such a claim. Nobody with an even passing acquaintance with Kashmir would (or should) say something so ridiculous. Given the intensity and violence of the fratricidal wars that Kashmiris have fought, and the thousands that have lost their lives over the Pakistan vs Freedom issue, and given that Kashmiri leadership is still unresolved about the question, it’s extraordinary that the reviewer can so casually and so glibly claim to know what the majority of people of Kashmir want. My essay on Kashmir is actually titled “Azadi”, which in Urdu means “Freedom”. Perhaps the reviewer is unfamiliar with the language?

3. “More typically, she appears to gather her facts from newspapers (her articles strike the reader rather as ‘lounge notes’), before selectively arranging and then exaggerating them to suit her own ends. For example, about 25% of India's territory is alleged to be affected by a Maoist insurgency, but that does not make it, as Ms Roy writes, ‘out of government control’.”

If the reviewer had cared to read the book instead of ransacking it, he/she would have come across a sentence that clarifies that several of the essays are “responses to the responses” about certain events. Given that much of my book is a critique of the disturbing role that a section of the corporate media has played in these events, is it surprising that media reports are frequently referred to? Most of the time this is in order to expose them for being false and motivated. To conclude from this that my “facts are gathered from newspapers” and that the articles are “lounge notes” is laughable.

The figure of 25 % of India’s territory being under Maoist insurgency is a figure advanced by the Indian security establishment and is probably a slight exaggeration. However, it is a fact that vast swathes of India’s territory are out of government control. It is for this reason that the Government has announced that in October, after the rains, there will be a military operation in states like Chhattisgarh, Orissa and Jharkhand in which ground troops will be backed up with helicopter gunships and satellite mapping. A brigade headquarters is being established in Raipur (Chhattisgarh), and 26,000 paramilitary troops (the same Rashtriya Rifles who are deployed in Kashmir, and similar to the Assam Rifles deployed in Assam, Manipur and Nagaland) are being raised for this war. This is in addition the thousands of security personnel who are already deployed in these areas. Perhaps the reviewer has never visited Dantewara , seen the burned, empty villages, or crossed the Indravati into the territory that is called “Pakistan”, where police and security forces do not venture? Perhaps he/she hasn’t heard of Abujmaad?

4. “Beyond India, her grasp of her subject-matter gets looser. If Ms Roy believes, as she writes, that a good portion of Africa’s ‘contemporary horrors’ are caused by America’s ‘new colonial interests’, she would do well to pay a visit to the continent.”

My book is about India, not Africa, but yes, there is a paragraph about Africa. Here’s the sentence the reviewer refers to: “The battle to control Africa’s mineral wealth rages on— scratch the surface of contemporary horrors in Africa, in Rwanda, the Congo, Nigeria, pick your country and chances are that you will be able to trace the story back to the old colonial interests of Europe and the new colonial interests of the United States.” My mistake here is that I didn’t mention the new colonial interests of countries like China and India as well. Does your reviewer not know about the legacy of Shell Oil in Nigeria? Or the politics that surrounds the mining of a mineral called coltan? Or of how Belgium’s colonial regime structured the barriers of hatred between the Tutsis and the Hutus in Rwanda with their racist profiling and social engineering? As for the recommendation that I pay a visit to the continent…it’s a grand idea, but how does one visit an entire continent? I have visited parts of it. Plenty of times. But the reviewer should know that it is possible to know things about places even if you haven’t been to them, like historians know things about history without traveling back in time.

5. “For a more measured analysis, Ms Roy should perhaps turn to the finance ministry’s recently published Economic Survey. There she would read that, ‘High growth is critical to generate the revenues needed for meeting our social welfare objectives.’ Ms Roy should take note.”

Am I really being waved back into my seat with the finance ministry’s Economic Survey? I thought everybody knew that the cut back on public spending (social welfare objectives) is almost in direct proportion to the growth rate? It’s often a pre-requisite when loans from the World Bank, the ADB and the IMF are negotiated. Isn’t that what structural adjustment is all about? Or is this the old Trickle Down theory being re-cycled? I’ve always wondered about this. Some times they say the Free Market provides a level playing field – but then when questioned, they ask us to wait for Trickle Down. But things only Trickle Down slopes don’t they? Anyway, there is a school of thought, which believes that people actually do have rights. The right, for instance to resist the Government taking away their land and their livelihoods, often at gun point, and then ordering them to wait for the leftovers (if the gentlemen leave any) to trickle down after the feast.

Regardless of our obvious ideological differences I hope you agree that errors and innuendo of this nature undermine the real debate.

With best wishes

Arundhati Roy
2A Kautilya Marg
New Delhi 110021

***

Necessary, but wrong

Jul 30th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy. By Arundhati Roy. Hamish Hamilton; 256 pages; £14.99. To be published in America as “Field Notes on Democracy” by Haymarket Books in October. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

IT IS impossible not to admire Arundhati Roy. Despite her flawed reporting and analysis, her left-wing prejudices and one-sided portentous writing, the author who carried off the 1997 Man Booker prize for her novel, “The God of Small Things”, is just the sort of brave and energetic critic that India needs.

Not for her the national image projected by India’s smug elite, of a nascent superpower lifting off. Ms Roy’s India is a truer one—a poor, rural country beset by grave problems, where, notwithstanding the holding of regular elections, wretched injustices are perpetrated by a corrupt and often brutal state.

As prime evidence of democracy’s failure to protect Indians, in this collection of her recent journalism and other writings, Ms Roy cites a massacre of perhaps 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, in which the state’s Hindu-nationalist government was allegedly complicit. Almost no senior official or Hinduist agitator has been prosecuted over the atrocity. And Narendra Modi, Gujarat’s chief minister then and now, is currently vying to take over the leadership of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, and one day India. Many of the country’s industrialists would approve of that; even Ratan Tata, the gentlemanly head of the vast Tata Group which prides itself on its ethical dealings, has praised Mr Modi’s business-friendly policies. Nothing annoys Ms Roy more.

The Hindu nationalists’ hateful tendencies are well-known. Perhaps less notorious is the weakness of India’s non-political institutions, and Ms Roy skewers most of them. In three deft articles, she examines the dubious methods of the police in securing the conviction of Muhammad Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri, for masterminding a 2001 terrorist attack on the Indian parliament building—allegedly by planting evidence and torturing him into confessing. Given that India’s police are often alleged to use torture, and have long enjoyed impunity in Kashmir, where Mr Guru was picked up, this would not be surprising. But neither India’s complacent judiciary nor its often-craven journalists shows much interest in reinvestigating his case. Mr Guru remains on death row.

Whether or not he is guilty, Ms Roy does laudable work in defending Mr Guru when others—including at times India’s legal fraternity, according to Ms Roy—would not. On other issues, however, she is not always a reliable witness. Her claim that in Kashmir last summer protesters were as likely to call for union with Pakistan as freedom from India is probably wrong; most seemed to want to be shot of both countries.

But that faulty observation was at least noted by Ms Roy in the field. More typically, she appears to gather her facts from newspapers (her articles strike the reader rather as “lounge notes”), before selectively arranging and then exaggerating them to suit her own ends. For example, about 25% of India’s territory is alleged to be affected by a Maoist insurgency, but that does not make it, as Ms Roy writes, “out of government control”. Beyond India, her grasp of her subject-matter gets looser. If Ms Roy believes, as she writes, that a good portion of Africa’s “contemporary horrors” are caused by America’s “new colonial interests”, she would do well to pay a visit to the continent.

So entrenched is the anti-globalisation that informs her world view, she would be tough to dissuade. But what alternative strategies does she advocate for improving India? Hard to say. A rare suggestion for better governance—the formation of a shadow parliament “that keeps an
underground drumbeat”—does not seem terribly serious. On economic policy, Ms Roy has even less to offer—other than to slam recent governments for aspiring to rapid economic growth. This is a “project” she considers to be “encrypted with genocidal potential”. For a more measured analysis, Ms Roy should perhaps turn to the finance ministry’s recently published Economic Survey. There she would read that, “High growth is critical to generate the revenues needed for meeting oursocial welfare objectives.” Ms Roy should take note.

Dear Tropical Storm Danny

Dear Tropical Storm Danny,
You sure like to rain a lot. But its ok, I don't mind, because I don't have to walk around in the city.

Instead I'm visiting the comic family in Boston who have a cat that likes to follow me around and sit on all of us. Some members of the comic family like to imitate how their cat constantly meows. Today we made stuffed mushrooms and it was a bit difficult to not lick my fingers in the process. Earlier we went to the Indian shop and I witnessed how my phupi and phupa buy their meat - by being very animated and loud. The cashier guy at the front left the shop for something and so my phupa stood behind the counter and pretended to be the cashier. In the meantime my phupi bought what she claims is the best aachar that I will ever eat: "Punjabi Mango Pickle" made by a company called "Mother's Recipe." I'm taking it back to NY with me.

I've been told recently that its quite remarkable that my whole extended family still speaks Urdu/Hindu predominantly. I always took it for granted that all the adults in my family speak only Urdu to each other, and for the most part, to their kids as well. In my family if you don't speak Urdu well or have difficulty speaking it, you basically get teased. But no one really minds getting teased - when I was growing up it was a catalyst for me to speak and learn Urdu. I forced my parents to speak to me only in Urdu when I was about 10 because I didn't want to get teased anymore. And it worked, though of course my Urdu could definitely improve.

And so I've always taken it for granted that my whole family still communicates in our native tongue, instead of the language of the colonizers. I realize now though that many South Asian families, especially in these States, have practically abandoned their native languages in an effort to assimilate. I guess my family members are more stubborn to stick to their ways - which in this example, is a good thing.

Peace.

"Various"

I wonder how many mixtapes there are around the world that are buried in boxes, titled "Various."

I am at my parents' house at the moment. My family has done so much moving around over the years, that most of my stuff is in boxes, with a lot of things getting thrown out over time. As a result, I have very few remaining possessions from high school and beyond. Somehow, I didn't throw out my small cassette collection. I rediscovered them yesterday in my cupboard when I was trying to make my room look as clean and tidy as it was before this visit. My sister-in-law once said something like "Hena whenever you come home it looks like your room just throws up stuff."

Anyway, here's such a mixtape from my early high school days, I think from the year 2000. That means that this tape is almost a decade old! I played it today in the car. Let's just say the audio quality wasn't that amazing - but it was great to hear these songs again.


Here's the complete playlist, with the correct spellings and titles. Its a bit obvious that I was going through a bit of a funk and disco phase, with some soul thrown in. As you can tell I had discovered the oldies station. There's also some classic house.

Side A:

BeeGees - Staying Alive
The Spinners - Its A Shame
KC & the Sunshine Band - That's the Way I Like It
Archie Bell and the Drells - Tighten Up
PM Dawn - Set Adrift on Memory Bliss
U2 - Beautiful Day
Michael Jackson - Rock With You
Grace - Not Over Yet
Livin' Joy - Dreamer

Side B:

Jennifer Paige - Crush
Michael Jackson - Billie Jean
Michael Jackson - Beat It
Soul Decision - Faded
Cheryl Lynn - Got To Be Real
The Friends of Distinction - Grazing in the Grass
Labelle - Lady Marmalade
Average White Band - Pick Up the Pieces


Its kind of fun to rediscover my old tapes. I never had that many as I transitioned to starting a CD collection pretty quickly. But its kind of nice to have to press forward, and rewind, to hear certain songs - there's no ultimate instant gratification, that you get with CDs, mp3s, and now Youtube. I haven't heard many of these songs in years, and now I can find them right away online, which is kind of cool but I feel like something is taken away with that instant gratification.

I didn't know who half of these songs were by or had totally forgotten, until I typed up this playlist just now. Another discovery.

I now remember making these tapes and listening to the radio, waiting for the right song to come on so that I could record it. I must have gotten pretty good at this, because this tape sounds almost seamless - I must have got skilled at pressing record and pause at the right time. I had such useful skills.

And, I don't think of myself as a nostalgic person. This mixtape however is a bit of a window into a past version of me - I can hear what I was listening to at that time, at what was influencing me. Can mixtapes be a sort of personal historical documents, like journals? I've never read one page from my old journals, but I'm listening to my old mixtapes.

MJ. Michael.

Michael.

As soon as I heard the news of his death, I knew that it was a significant moment, for me, and millions of others everywhere. Right away I thought that months from now, years from now, we will reflect and ask ourselves "Remember when Michael Jackson passed away?", and remember how we felt at the time. For now, his passing is still fresh in our memory, and for his many legions of fans, his music and moves cannot leave our minds for the time-being.

Michael's death shows the extent of his global influence. In our Internet-driven society, the passing away of one man caused grief and mourning across the world, and also a celebration of his life and his musical legacy. His death is a sobering reminder, that yes, we all have to go someday. Thursday, June 25th, 2009, was Michael's time to go and leave us. May he finally be at peace, God willing.

Michael's death shows how his music truly unified us, crossing generational lines, racial lines, cultural lines, language barriers, religion, as well as musical genres. The 80s' generation might be the actual MJ generation, but the generation before and after also witnessed the phenomenon that was Michael Jackson.

The news of his death being splashed across the Internet and then riding across the globe in waves, was more evidence of his immense popularity. Michael's massive success and fame came of age far before the current Internet age, with his legacy being stamped primarily in the 1980s'. His last album, Invincible, was released in 2001. The face of the Internet changes dramatically every couple years or so. In 2001, there was no Gmail, or Facebook, or Twitter, or Youtube, or even many online radio stations. Yet, in 2009, the news of his death crashed the Internet giants of today, in just a few minutes. It was perhaps a final display of how much he had impacted our world.

Michael, the ever-changing chameleon. I think that the many transformations in Michael's life perhaps reflect shifting undercurrents in American society. His changing skin colour complicated and confronted racial lines - a man with white skin who was still seen as a black artist, and a black figure. Michael's increasing androgyny also remarkably bended the strict boundaries of gender. And finally, most recently of all, his perceived flirtation, if not acceptance, of Islam. In the wake of his death, religion is another aspect of society that Michael continues to blur and challenge.

Finally, let's not forget, what we did to Michael Jackson. We, as in us, the public. Us as a collective. We, the ones who feed off the media, who gulp down what the media feeds to us. Because ultimately, the many trials and demons that Michael faced in his life, was because of us. He had been in the spotlight since he was 5 years old, and died at 50 - a 45-year career in the public eye. If we, as the public, had recognized that this young, amazing child, had immeasurable talent, but that he was still a child, we would have known to respect him as a person. To see him as a human being, and not just as an entertainer. We can blame the media all we want for exploiting Michael since he was young, but we allowed the media, the giant, Conglomerate Media, to do so. We didn't hold back.

Because of such vast amounts of attention, Michael inevitably receded further and further into isolation, and alienation. His fantastic talent was a great gift, but also a great curse. Because of his talent, Michael was forced, by us, to sacrifice his whole existence, to us. By endlessly performing, touring, and creating. Millions idolized him and saw him only as the Michael Jackson, and not realizing that Michael was just like one of us as well - a fellow human being, who happened to be extremely gifted vocally and in his dancing abilities. The never-ending media spotlight on him made Michael retreat into dark shadows, resulting in an excessive and odd lifestyle - surefire signs of mental distress. But still, we never let up, and we allowed the media to continue to exploit him, and it only got worse after 1993. And it still continues with his death.

So let's remember Michael for who he truly was - a fantastic performer, singer, and dancer, as well as a great humanitarian. And let's recognize, and not forget, that he was also a human being, one who we all took advantage of.

The Amazing Adventures of Timmy the SuperMouse

Timmy the Supermouse can get on top of the microwave and nibble his way through a packet of roti.

He also likes to hide under the bed and squeak from time to time.

Timmy the Supermouse is capable of disappearing for months at a time. And when he returns, you wonder if he ever left at all.

Timmy the Supermouse is lucky he lives with girls who are too nice to get mousetraps for him.

He is also lucky that our neighbours don't have a cat whom we could borrow for a day and find Timmy and help him with his social awkwardness and shyness, by chasing him.

Timmy the Supermouse might actually be his cousin Tommy, or Jimmy. But as Timmy doesn't have any distinct features at his high running speeds of dashing into dark and unknown corners, he is known as Timmy. Sorry Tommy or Jimmy.

Timmy the Supermouse - I will be gone in a couple of weeks. You will have one less friend. Sorry mate!

Read. Iqra.

Ev-ery-one should have the right to education. Education should not be a privilege. The fact that education is a privilege and not a right is extremely scary - because it really shows the manifestation of power coming from the top-down. To even educate ourselves can be a huge struggle, even in the world's richest country.

Education should be a right. It doesn't matter what kind of education - home-school, public school, private school, oral history, written history - whatever. Education is the most empowering tool a person can have. To not have that tool, that right, is extremely disempowering and we can see what the results are all around us - people going off to fight someone else's war, people falling into crime, drug addiction, people getting arrested and locked behind bars. Or people being enslaved to the middle class and having to work as servants, cooks, drivers, dealers, hustlers, sex workers, and all the rest of it. If people had the right to education...all of that would be a different story.

And that's probably why they don't have access to education. To a good, solid, education.

And for those who have degrees and what-not - its not enough. We all have to continue to educate ourselves. I really understand now, how much there is that I don't know about and don't understand. And the only way to learn is to continue to educate myself. I have my diploma from the University of Michigan sitting in a drawer in my room at my parents' house. Perhaps one day I'll get a frame for it and hang it. But really, how much was that diploma worth? How much does it actually mean to me? Going to college empowered me and taught me that I need to continue learning. And going to college is a rare privilege that few in this world have. So I respect my time at Michigan and I'm grateful for it. But it doesn't put me above anyone else, nor should anyone think so.

As someone who became less and less attuned to classroom-based learning as I got older, perhaps that's why I have my diploma sitting under a bunch of folders in a drawer. Maybe that's why I'm excited more than ever about educating myself, after my formal education has ended. Maybe this means that, the university system isn't for everyone. So I think that a right to education should encompass many different kinds of education, and not shove the academic system in someone's face. Now: I enjoy reading books, outside of class. I like going to lectures, outside of class. I like doing group discussions, outside of class. In university? I hardly ever did my readings, was late to class if I even showed up, and if I did half the time I couldn't focus, took awful notes, and I didn't want to engage in group discussions because I was never prepared and I was always annoyed at being one of the few people of colour in the room, and often the only one.

Anyway...I enjoy educating myself now.

where are the Muslims?

Earlier today I was at the NYC Grassroots Media Conference. I was only able to attend one workshop and had to table the rest of the time, but I enjoyed myself and met all sorts of interesting people. Over the last couple years or so I've gained a strong perspective that independent media is vital and crucial, and that more people from marginalized communities need to make such media. Going to this conference gave me more insight and knowledge into what other people are doing in the broader alternative independent media movement, especially with what's going on in NYC.

When I go to these kinds of progressive spaces, of which I hope to go to more, I find that I'm usually the only visible Muslim, if not the only Muslim or one of the very few Muslims. So what did I see today at the NYC GMC? All sorts of people from all sorts of communities, which is fantastic. But as far as Muslims, I only met one other Muslim, and I was perhaps the only visible Muslim. My guess is that there weren't more than a handful of Muslims present at the conference, if even that.

I find this to be really frustrating. First and foremost, the alternative media movement is extremely relevant to the Muslim community, and Muslims need to be a part of it. Media has the most influence in our society today. It is all about cause and effect. For example with Muslims, for many years and especially in the last 8 years, Muslims have been vilified, defamed, misrepresented, and stereotyped in mainstream media - in all media. Come on, we know this. Talk radio, national TV news, local TV news, newspapers, crazy right-wing websites, movies, etc etc - the list goes on, and on and on. My classic example is Glenn Beck who used to be on CNN, primetime every weeknight at 7pm, and is now on Fox. Beck is the kind of guy that convinces ignorant TV viewers that Muslims are Islamofascists - and he had a prime spot on CNN.

Then you look at the alternative media movement. The folks doing this kind of work understand the misrepresentation and stereotyping of people of colour, including Muslim folks, and their work aims to rightly represent these communities to counteract the damage done by mainstream media. The alternative media movement aims and wants to accurately represent Muslims! So why the hell aren't more Muslims engaged in this kind of work? Why is it that I saw very few Muslims today at this conference, when many of the media groups present at the conference discuss Muslim communities and Muslim issues?

This is part of a bigger issue of Muslims groups and institutions not being involved or connected with the wider progressive movement. The true progressive movement talks about Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, Kashmir, Chechnya, and so on and so on. What about domestic issues? The prison system, Guantanamo, labour rights, immigrant rights, institutionalized poverty and racism and cleavages, all affect Muslims as well. My point is that the progressive movement is engaged with issues that directly affect Muslims. Therefore there is a crucial need for Muslims to become involved with these groups or at least to connect with them, to work together. Note, I'm only discussing spaces that have people of colour at the forefront.

I'm tired of Muslims only talking to themselves. We're such an insular and fragmented community. We need to connect to those who are already looking out for us.

In terms of looking forward, I'm going inshallah to the Allied Media Conference July 16th-19th in Detroit. I hope that Muslims turn up.

Obama-rama

From Representations of the Intellectual by the late great, Edward W. Said.

page 107:
"I had certainly become used to being peripheral, outside the circle of power, and perhaps because I had no talent for a position inside that charmed circle, I rationalized the virtues of outsiderhood. I could never completely believe in the men and women, for that is what they were after all, just men and women - who commanded forces, led parties and countries, wielded basically unchallenged authority. Hero-worship, and even the notion of heroism itself when applied to most political leaders, has always left me cold..."

I put this up here because this passage made me think right away of course, of Mr. Barack Obama. I wonder what Said would have said about him...

Malcolm's example

For the friends who actually read this from time to time:

Sakina - yes, I will send your photos soon. Sorry, I honestly keep forgetting.

Well I am in New York now and have been here for about 3 months or so. This has been an extended transition period for me and now I'm really ready for things to start coming together so that I can get settled. But as we all know things don't always work out how we plan them and so we have to be patient and just keep trying. Plus, its the worst economy since the Depression, and that doesn't help anyone. I have to say though, when I get on the train and I see a white guy with a briefcase and an expensive suit, and the train is in lower Manhattan, I can't help but think that he's one of those evil bankers who caused this whole mess in the first place, which as usual, hurts the poorest of the poor the most. I once saw a homeless black guy start insulting this kind of guy, and in my head, I egged him on. 'That's right, tell him off!' Though it was more vulgar than that.

In other news its pretty great to be here in NY, mostly because of the filmmaking...thing. Is it a career? Well I hope it will be. I think this is a good place for me to be in, to do what I want to do, iA. All sorts of people are here, including a lot of very creative people, and its cool to make these connections and to continue learning. NY is also a place where tons of things get screened, and despite all my apprehensions about Google, I made a Google calendar of NY film screenings. Damn Google.

On the family front one of my brothers is in Turkey with his wife, and my other brother is going to visit them. I really wish I could go. Their pictures, emails, and blog posts are all really interesting and engaging and I can tell they're learning a lot from their experience abroad already.

I reread the Autobiography of Malcolm X. I first read it when I was 15 or 16. Man, it was a huge eye-opener then. That's the amazing and consistent power of that book. It has educated millions of people. This time, reading it for the 2nd time, I felt like I got to know Malcolm all over again. Since I already knew his story and his viewpoints on the black struggle, this time I was really fascinated by his personal character. One of the things that truly inspired me is that Malcolm was an incredibly smart man, with an eighth grade education. He became immensely intelligent and well-versed on innumerable issues because he practically read the whole prison library while in prison.

Specifically, there's a passage where he talks about China, and the history of China with Britain and the Opium Wars, and how China was then being presented in the 1960s' as the great evil Red China state (which still continues - coverage of Beijing Olympics anyone?). Malcolm analyzed how China, which had been oppressed by the West (Britain) for ages, was now seen as a major threat, mainly because of economics (funny how some things don't change). This passage really illustrated to me the depth and diversity of Malcolm's knowledge - and he gained all of it from reading books. Which has inspired me more than ever, to read as much as possible. Today I went to the library and instead of having a book in mind, I knew that now I could go to almost any section and pick a book, because I want to learn as much as possible. Everything is connected - as Malcolm knew and demonstrated.

I feel like its a blessing to have read his autobiography while in New York. I went to Harlem a few times and recognized some of the places that are mentioned in the book. I always just stand still and stare at the building or down the street, to take a moment and think about the history of the place and I'd imagine Malcolm walking down the street, entering a building, talking to people. Its awesome to be around these places that are mentioned in a book that you have in your bag. St Nicholas Avenue, the Apollo Theatre, 125th Street...the Audubon Ballroom. I also once passed Mosque Number 7, and again froze...

I got to meet Malaak, one of Malcolm's and Betty's youngest daughters, in February with Nura. Of course we were both completely floored and giddy, and we had a great time with her. It was astonishing to be in her presence, but she really comes off as being just like any other person, and is very warm and funny. I might attempt to put up my very brief interview with her online on this blog. Malaak was at a media conference I attended in DC, and this conference was specifically just for Muslims in media. I remember sitting there and she happened to pass by me after we all did our intros. She stopped, turned, and said "I want to talk to you" (it was because of the film festival). I saw her father's face in hers. Of course I was completely amazed and surprised that one of Malcolm's and Betty's daughters would want to talk to me of her own motivation.

Malcolm - we owe you so much.

That's it for now.

Watchmen = waste of time

Allow me to clarify, the only reason I saw this piece of rubbish was to hang out with my brother, who for some reason decided that this film was a must-see and worthy of buying tickets for beforehand.

So I went and watched it, not knowing anything about it before today. The only thing I had seen about the film were the film posters pasted up around town - everywhere. I'm not a filmmaker who's a film buff and cares to make the effort about what films are coming out, nor do I care to be. Especially when it comes to stuff from Hollywood.

So today I spared a minute to watch the trailer and really wasn't impressed. There were lots of explosions, flying things, and blue and green. That's the thing I remember the most about this film - all the blue (and the green? or maybe the yellow).

Speaking of trailers how about this: three trailers back to back in the cinema, before The Watchmen, and they were all the same - flying things, explosions, blood, guns, robots/superheroes/some other shit. Aaah, so typical! Just the same, mindless, brainwashing rubbish.

As was the Watchmen film. Oh I'm sure people love it because of the graphic novel and the 'big themes' the film is trying to touch upon - but I don't care. I see it as basically 2 and a half hours of blood, guts, guns, a creepy blue man who needs some clothes, stupid costumes, and people beating each other up or getting shot. Speaking of which, its not ok to show protesters getting shot and then just say, the killer understands how messed up the world is and that's why he kills innocent people, because its a joke. What the hell was that??

So that part and some other parts of the film were extremely disturbing and hegemonic. All the more reason why I hate Hollywood and the films that come out of that awful industry. Hollywood is so good at churning out the same rubbish again and again, repackaging it, selling it, and making tons of money off of it. Just how many comic book films have been made in the last decade? Probably a couple dozen, and I've seen maybe about 3 or 4, and the only ones that I like are the Batman films (respect to Christopher Nolan). I know the rest aren't worth my time, as well as most of the films that come out from those giant studios.

On top of that - this film is definitely not for kids. Its an R rating, and I can't remember the last time I saw an R-rated film like this. I was able to get into R-rated films as a teenager but they weren't anything like this. I really wonder why that guy who bought tons of popcorn would bring his kids to this film. I diverted my eyes during the cheesy and unnecessarily graphic love scenes by texting. I'm not asking for censorship or anything, but don't let kids watch the film. But of course, why would the cinemas or studios care? They make more money by letting kids watch it.

The only good thing I liked about the film was Matthew Goode. I like his previous work. But the blonde hair definitely didn't work for him.

The Watchmen gets a big 'booo' from me.

Peace