(People began to move to not-the-village Titanyen in November from Tabarre, Delmas, Cite Soleil, Cabaret, Santo and other places after they heard via SMS and radio that free land was available. Free land! For a first family home or an escape from a camp, who wouldn’t want to come?)

This Titanyen is a mass grave site. It is not where the earthquake memorial took place this year or last (that would be Mon St. Christophe), but rather it is where the dead are (and continue to be) buried en masse. There is still an open pit; when new bodies are dropped in, dirt from the towering mounds that surround the pit is pushed in to cover them. A few metal crosses remain from memorials past, some fallen forgotten in the rocky earth, among the last solemn physical reminders of what this place is.

Kijan rele zòn sa a? ”What is the name of this place?”

The answers were different each time I asked. The most popular, Titanyen, was the one that stuck. “No, I think this is Sous Pyant,” a few people said, recalling the name of the sulphur springs across the road and down the way. No one south of here seemed to want to claim the name Titanyen anymore; they had all taken on new names, baptized into their new lives. Someone had already tried to baptize this place, too.

“This is Bethlehem.” One man tried to convince me, showing off a hand-painted sign propped up on a hillside, but the name hasn’t gained much traction yet. Bethlehem. Birth place of Jesus, his saviour, and in keeping with the Biblical names taken on by his neighbours to the south. Bethlehem. Until the name sticks, adopted by a critical mass, the name Titanyen remains. Given the still-open grave, it seems fitting.

*

We are spoiled in the North/West by our expectation of hard and simple truths, boundaries, statistics, names, spellings. How big was the protest? How many dead? Who won the election? The most recent theme taken up by the international media has been this gem: Where did the money go?

Covering demonstrations is nearly always an exercise in managing manufactured appearances. So much is done for show, for influence and marketing power, but how do you report that the few hundred people that showed up with neat, pre-made protest signs in English at the anti-UN demo were actually bussed in and paid to attend by local politicians, narco traffickers and pro-army lobbyists? (Sometimes a three-for-one deal.) Is a protester still a protester if all he wants is some lunch?

My friend and colleague Maura O’Connor has a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review on the prickly dispute over the earthquake death toll that is worth a read. It astounds me, naïvely, still, how striving for accuracy in numbers can make you so many enemies. I’ve countered claims of overblown head counts by activists and journalists–claims of several thousand demonstrators at a protest when I see with my own eyes no more than several hundred–that has caused some friction, as well as one (so far) low-blow Twitter tussle. The idea that, by wanting to report a lower number, this somehow hurts “the cause.” But doesn’t reporting a flagrantly exaggerated number hurt credibility? And in the case of death or sickness counts–cholera, quake, or otherwise–cooking the numbers for political or financial reasons can have far graver consequences than a simple ego bruise. Choosing which numbers to report, and whether or not to include backstory details, isn’t always easy to navigate.

We measure the strength of movements and public opinion by how many bodies are in the street, with no distinction between the organic and the engineered. We also measure success in reconstruction, it seems, by similarly arbitrary numbers.

WHERE DID THE MONEY GO? Last week’s headlines, ledes and nut graphs screamed this question. An American reporter brought it up on a USAID teleconference, her delivery particularly indignant: where did all that money go? $10 billion pledged, $4.5 billion pledged, only half delivered, dispersed, spent, $155 per Haitian, $173 per Haitian, $200 000 for a country director salary, and people are still in tents, where did it all go?

Underlying much of this talk are a few major assumptions. The first, and most revealing, is that spending fixes things. The money that was pledged — Was it not enough? Was it too much? If all those billions of dollars had been spent, rather than just some of them, would Haiti be in top shape by now? There is no nuanced breakdown of how money is spent in a program, of how much is actually needed to deliver specific services or supplies. I’ve seen NGOs struggle with enormous AmCross grants, overwhelmed over how to spend tens- or hundreds-of-millions of dollars in a set period. Other programs, meanwhile, have languished for lack of financial support–not to speak of the chronically cash-starved state.

The money must be spent! Restricted funds, unrestricted funds, emergency response funds, development programme funds. There are submenus to be explored in this monetary breakdown, and sub-questions to pose. Stepping back further: What does the charity spending impulse reveal? What does the bang-for-your-donated-buck demand reveal? Pouring money into a fractured aid system and then being upset that bothersome problems like homelessness and poverty haven’t been solved after two years is a cocktail that gives me the worst kind of headache.

The self-directed resettlement and reconstruction happening in Titanyen struck me as extraordinary for a number of reasons, one of them being that it is not extraordinary at all. In the face of everything, in the face of mismanagement of funds and expectations, life must go on. People must eat. People must sleep. Some of the most striking personal stories I heard had little to do with the earthquake. The man who had his arms and head disfigured in a machete attack in Freres two decades ago. The woman who put her two children in an orphanage after her husband died, losing all contact with them after they were sold away in a German adoption years ago. At least, she thinks they’re in Germany. Information, she said, has been hard to come by.

Mines ahead, behind, to the left, to the right. Mines inside us. Mines in our sleepy, exhausted eyes, trembling and worried, trying to stay awake. Seeking out objects of death whose characteristic is that of never being seen—they wait their entire life and are born only for a second to die with you.

Move by day. Move by night. Eat cornmeal or eat nothing. Save the last can. Boil tea gathered from bushes. Cook in black pots in the earth plowed by tires. Eat the last can. Eat with your hands from flaking enamel plates. Fantasize about fresh water. Salivate salt. Shiver from the cold an hour after the moon rises. Suffocate from the heat an hour after the sun rises.Dream about a bed.Wake up with rats.Go to sleep with fear.

Disdain tears.

Avoid dogs.

Defecate in front of others. Bathe in the river, swim during the crocodiles’ siesta, keep away from snakes, dry your body with your hands, extract the shudders from your bones, cover your skin with filthy clothes. Vomit your own smell. Sleep in the open air, sleep on the alert, in transit, in abandoned houses, on mattresses of straw and lice, on blankets with holes and mange. Listen to the wind beneath the divan. Listen to the sound of leaves laughing as they scrape the cement on the ground.

DANGER MINES. Do not touch anything, tread on existing tracks, walk backward retracing your steps, the same steps, exactly, or —

On short breaks in the True North, I eat books. While in this imaginary world I slip in and out of others, good ones and bad ones, slogging through the dull and lapping up the delicious. I met the author of this one before I knew the words were his. Read them in our native Portuguese first, Baía dos Tigres, conversed in our adopted French, but reading an excellent English translation has brought it to life anew. It, as in death taste, death smell, mortality, but sinewy and vivid and locomotive. This is non-fiction.

“The problem is basically a political one… You say you’re on a journey, but there are various kinds of journeys, as you know. Is it to gather information?”

“No. It’s to meet people.”

“But you’re a journalist. People give information. A journalist investigates. You’re on an investigation.”

“No, I’m on a trip. That’s different. Working on my own. People tell stories. I’ve already said I’m not here for my newspaper. I’m not even interested in the peace process.”

“But later you’re going to write about this and make good money; it’s always like that with foreigners.”

I’m still so inspired and grateful, friend. I had to share.

“We live by stories, we also live in them. One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted — knowingly or unknowingly — in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.”

- Ben Okri

I’ve been thinking a lot these past two weeks or so about stories and storytellers, unreliable narrators, unreliable memories, and the purpose of conflict in a plot. An essay came out last week — maybe you saw? — about one person’s experience in Haiti that upset a number of people. I was one of them. Reading Thomas King’s The Truth About Stories has helped me understand my negative reaction. But we’ll get to King in a moment. First, that essay.

The crux of the piece is trauma and how one person dealt with it, but the context of Haiti (starting with graphs two and three, but really starting long before that) is what made many of us cry foul. I don’t need to reiterate why. The letter, which I did not write but supported enough to sign my name to, already covers these points.

I’ve been somewhat troubled by the sometimes vicious, mostly vapid back-and-forth on the topic. The arguments praising the author for being “brave”; the haughty, sneering references to her as a “parachute” journalist;  the claws-out attacks on the 36 signatories (among them, a highly respected Haitian author and several Haitian and foreign journalists, activists and researchers who have spent years or decades living in and writing about the country) for daring to question a victim of an ailment they likely have suffered from themselves; disputes over the veracity of the ugly Haitian context of the essay or whether the context even matters. Each side accuses the other of missing the point.

Also, I’m told that PTSD is a hot topic? And that calling someone a “liberal” is an insult? I wouldn’t know.

The point is not the trauma acquisition or recovery process. That is something personal. Everyone has a different threshold for this sort of thing, framed by their own upbringing, exposure to violence and relationship with pain, injustice, death. I’ve seen my friends break to pieces, lash out in anger, withdraw into themselves, drown their memories in alcohol and drugs. Many of them, to escape trauma, will simply occupy their minds with newer, fresher traumas, bouncing from difficult assignment to difficult assignment, layering horror upon horror. But the new images and stories and experiences don’t cancel out the old ones, do they?

(My own panic attacks, chest-gripping anxiety and crying fits have subsided over the past several weeks, thanks in no small part to two passports, plane tickets, and a six hour time difference. Temporary exile, a luxury that is still accessible to me. I wasn’t interested in talking to a therapist because, culturally, that would have felt very weird. I do have a support network, both on and off the island, but the back-home network, unless they’ve been in similar situations, often aren’t much help.

“You are so brave for going there,” they would say. It made me cringe, because there is absolutely nothing brave about it. Some of the people who expressed the most shock or admiration were Haitian friends who were either born in the diaspora or left as small children and never returned. The way they painted their motherland was stark. “You’re going to get kidnapped,” they told me, breathless, eyes wild with a brand of Ayiti paranoia I came to know well. “It is total anarchy. Please be careful.” And again, “you are so brave.”

We have strange ideas about what bravery is.)

Over a week later, I’m looking beyond the online fight-picking and feeling more thoughtful. I realize that, in part, my reaction is fed by frustration with so much of the shoddy, thoughtless, lazy journalism I watched pour out of Haiti in the first eight or nine months I spent there. People I consider my colleagues, both parachute-jumpers and long-haulers, have made bad judgement calls in how they describe Haiti, how they contextualize their stories, and in how they selectively — if at all — do their background homework. Countless journalists have published and aired stories that paint a Haiti that is far more dangerous and chaotic than it actually is. There are lots of examples. You have probably seen many of them, absorbed them, taken them as fact. I won’t even get into political coverage, or we’ll be here all night. There’s bad, sensational reporting everywhere, but Haiti seems to be spectacularly good at attracting this sort of thing.

I’ve been wondering through all of this, perhaps naively: what is the purpose of making Haiti sound worse than it is? Who benefits from making it come across as a war zone, or yes, a hellhole? Quite a lot of people, I would imagine. All of these stories mean something. They build something. People believe them. Each bad story props up the other, until a new, perceived version of Haiti is papered over the real one. Darkness.

In talking about stories, Thomas King starts by telling the one from which all the others spring: the creation myth. First, the story of the woman who fell from the sky. Second, the biblical creation story. He writes:

“So here are our choices: a world in which creation is a solitary, individual act or a world in which creation is a shared activity; a world that begins in harmony and slides toward chaos or a world that begins in chaos and moves toward harmony; a world marked by competition or a world determined by co-operation. And there’s the problem.”

From this central story, the one that frames our world and everything in it, stems the desire for dichotomies and battles. “We trust easy oppositions,” He says.

“Perhaps this is why we delight in telling stories about heroes battling the odds and the elements, rather than about the magic of seasonal change. Why we relish stories that lionize individuals who start at the bottom and fight their way to the top, rather than stories that frame these forms of competition as varying degrees of insanity. Why we tell our children that life is hard, when we could just as easily tell them that it is sweet. Is it our nature? Do the stories we tell reflect the world as it truly is, or did we simply start off with the wrong story?”

The desire for these masculine, arrow-shaped storylines [PDF] in our own lives — we are the heroes or heroines, pitted against a cast of cardboard villains — is problematic, it is dangerous, and it is very boring.

Perhaps this is what’s bothered me most. I am disappointed with these arguments because I am bored with the flat stories they are woven around. Bored with heroes, bored with villains, bored with black and white judgements, bored of these meaningless, echoing stories we absorb without question and then act out, me versus you, every day. It is so much easier to see a place like Haiti painted in ugly, unforgiving broad strokes than it is to contemplate it in shades of grey, orange, blue, red. It’s so much easier to choose sides in wars of personality. So much easier to enjoy conflict than to question its purpose in a plot. So much easier than challenging these stories. So much easier than telling, or listening, to new ones.

Ayiti yo pa vle wè a…

It didn’t rain the day of Michel Joseph Martelly’s inauguration. It didn’t rain the day after either. I would have remembered, I think. Rains are something that stick in my memory now, each downpour bringing with it a different rhythm, a different kind of destruction. I still remember the rains one Friday afternoon in September, how dark grey clouds curled across the sky, layering and pooling to turn it black. Winds whipped plants, trash, tarps and things in frenzied circles, ripping through fragile tents and makeshift wood-and-blue-plastic shelters, rain shooting down in heavy pellets to drown it all. I remember other rains in October that turned parts of Tabarre into a great, brown river, rushing and disappearing into the cracks and holes where pavement had collapsed.

The rains in May are different. The clouds come in more timidly, usually around late afternoon. They start in the mountains, drizzling down over Thomassin and La Boule first, crawling across the skies over Pétionville, until they reach the Centreville of Port-au-Prince, close to where I live. It rains most evenings, sometimes in the late afternoons. Water cascades from the sky in ribbons, though not for long, and not as aggressively as September. Not yet. On the days it doesn’t rain, the stickiness coats your skin, making it wet another way. It’s a wetness you carry with you, heavy, hiding under your clothes and trickling along the back of your neck.

Last week I marked eight months in Haiti. I’ve been quiet here, but not still. When I arrived, the election campaigning had not even begun. The first posters had not yet been pasted or hung, the first radio jingles not yet stuck in my ears, the already snarling traffic not yet crushed to a standstill by the first campaign tours, parties or parades. The walls, mostly bare for that brief two-week window, would soon have their cracks and stresses covered in blue, red, green and pink headshots of the candidates. Some walls were already dotted with spray-paint scrawl, like a never-ending news ticker: down with MINUSTAH, down with Préval, jen kore jen and fas à fas and other Wyclef slogans, pleas to Obama for help. Nou bouke, we’re tired. These gave way to messages about cholera, the provisional electoral council, and slogans and insults for the presidential hopefuls, by then whittled down to a tangled three and then a final two. “Give me my mother” battled it out with “Tèt kale,” the bald-headed slogan winning the ultimate battle: marketability. In the republic of logos, the best packaging wins.

Today it rained twice. First, mid-afternoon, while over a beer with a maybe-future Minister in the new administration, he told me he had predicted Martelly’s rise 15 years ago. “I said to my daughter in 1996,” he went on, his assertive enunciation carrying the softest of rolling French arrrrrrs, that Sweet Mickey was the only one capable of taking on Aristide and winning. Mickey had an organic connection to the people, he explained, because of his music.

It’s raining again now, rolling past with a purpose, thunder exploding over the building across the road. There is months of this to come, and storms, and after that, the hurricanes again. But for now the sticky heat has broken. The cicadas will be quiet tonight, and all over Port-au-Prince people will prepare for sleep on sheets and mattresses and ground that is very very wet.

I’ve been in Haiti two months now and all my writing is going elsewhere. Some of it is secret. Fais-moi signe if you want in, car j’suis pas complètement à l’aise sharing it publicly pour l’instant.

It goes on: mud cholera heat elections campaign parades sweat sun hurricanes rains rubble dust smoke fires blackness traffic roadblocks protests cabrit rice barbancourt ti-punch tarps camps wind shacks 4x4s mountains sea monsters markets bodies shotguns sweetness sunsets sunrises roosters radio crackle comedians kompa smiles whispers coo-cooing chouchouuu.

When I saw her last, one year ago this month, she mentioned she had been working on my wedding towel. Embroidering it by hand, painstakingly, while her eyes held up. But I don’t know, she shrugged, if you’re getting married any time soon.

“Well,” I asked her, “is the towel finished?”

No, she said. I’m still working on it.

“So am I,” was my reply. And she laughed.

I got word two days ago — she’s finished. Her eyes are failing, but the towel is done, embroidered, pressed, and ready for me to collect from her mountain-top-weathered hands.

Oh lordy.

I’ve been working almost non-stop since I got back to Toronto. The late shift suits me. I push off on my bike at around quarter past two, pedaling hard between hesitant cars and past red lights down down down. Shaw Street hills into Bellwoods and across Wellington, past condos and cops, past portly shirtless old men in socks, past couples lounging lazy in the grass, pedal pedal pedal.

All those weeks in wintry South Africa I couldn’t wait to come back to a warm summer. But I’m here now and I can’t feel the heat. Can’t feel the sun, can’t feel the stickiness, can’t feel it pressing on my skin, filling my lungs, creeping through my clothes, or trickling down my back. I can’t feel any of it.

The newsroom stays quiet on a summer Sunday eve. I try not to wander.

At the end of the night I walk though a dark, narrow alley to collect my lonesome bike. I don’t even see the shadows. Don’t see the blinking reds and greens at the intersections, don’t see the inky blackness between the full nighttime trees, hardly see other bikes and cars and people on the road. Hardly see the road. I don’t feel the darkness, don’t feel the breeze. Don’t feel the ache of my weakened thighs pushing uphill, don’t feel the moon in my belly. I don’t feel the sleeplessness that tugs on my eyes, don’t feel the exhaustion heavy on my shoulders. I’m up by five the next morning because my body doesn’t feel the time. All it feels is the past. Somewhere else, I would be waking up now. Somewhere else, this would make sense.

It was the word “prawns” that first caught my attention. Stumbling sleepy somewhere around about 2 am on a frosty night in Newtown, I thought I must be hearing things. But then there it was again on their lips, praaawns. They wanted to hit another club just not that spot “with all them prawns and snakeskin pointyshoe n***as.” Heh heh heh. Instead we went to an all-night eatery across town, where tipsy patrons jumped up on the seats to lead a few rounds of Shosholoza, the day’s futbol games looping on corner TV screens. They tried to get me to sing too, but I didn’t know the words.

And so I sat and reflected on why I was back in South Africa. On prawns and makwerekweres, the origins of idle hatred, living frustrations, bodies and borders, the chasms between us, and how far one person has to be pushed before they feel the need to break their brother.

I spent the past five weeks or so traveling from one end of South Africa to the other. The N1 highway starts in Beit Bridge, where Mzansi touches Zimbabwe, and ends 1,929 km later in Cape Town, bending toward the mingling Indian and South Atlantic oceans. The N1 is where the story starts for a lot of foreign nationals in the country. They cross the Limpopo river, by bridge or bush, and the N1 is on their lips. That’s the road that will take them to Joburg, jobs, a different life. It’s also the road on their minds when they look for a way out. An escape from harassment, from threats, and from the promise of violence. The N1 goes both ways.

I was lucky enough to work on this project alongside my wildly talented friend Dominic Nahr (fresh from a Magnum Photo nomination! Yea!), and am deeply indebted to the support of the Pulitzer Center in DC. Our first Pulitzer Center blog post from the northern border is here, with more dispatches appearing here as they come. It’s worth poking around my twitter for updates too.

I still have piles of interviews, notes and audio to go through and Dom has such striking photos to share, so please do check back in. This is an important story. It’s not about spoiling any Black Star-inspired unity myth, not about simple racism or throwing blame or a jobs-and-housing cause and effect formula. It’s the most human of stories: about movement, the tugging and shoving of bodies. It’s about skeletons from the past and a crisis of poverty. It’s about being at a breaking point — just before you, or your entire world, explodes.

I arrived in Jozi late on a Wednesday night, a trio of lovelies waiting for me at O.R. Tambo. The flags had just gone up, decorations for hundreds of thousands of anticipated guests, not yet arrived.

Guests of another sort are occupying my time here, though.

Hanging about Mzansi for another while. More to come.

But while I was abroad I felt the need to find out who I was and where my soul was. I chose to be a Haitian woman. I couldn’t see myself being forever a nigger in the United States, an immigrant in Canada, or a stranger in Europe. I felt the need to be a part of something. This couldn’t be the black cause in the United States or the immigration cause in Canada. It could only be the cause of the Haitian people. Thus, I decided to return to Haiti.

Myriam Merlet, The More People Dream

 

I talked to a friend the other night, far from his New Mexico home in Hong Kong, where he’s decided to stay for another year. “I’m quickly becoming a refugee from everything,” he said. “In a way, it’s a nice feeling.”

There is no comparing self-imposed exile, or self-controlled banishment, from the kind of displacement people affected by war, economic collapse, or natural disaster experience. They are on different planes, different planets. I am a different sort of migrant from my parents, me with my fancy degrees, languages, bank cards. But when you are removed, for whatever reason, your relationship with yourself, your past and your future changes. Plucked from a space where you don’t have to second-guess such things, second-guessing becomes everything. It’s in your air.

“I chose,” writes Myriam Merlet, “to be a Haitian woman.” She sought and found her soul in her native Haiti, where she passed decades later in that terrible January quake along with so many others. I am saddened to know that, were it not for that disaster and her death, I might not have found her words. Sadder still that there will be no more words.

I’ve reached the conclusion that one should just proceed, and to hell with the others. This means that I won’t play the game. It’s hard and frustrating because you find yourself alone. At times you question your sanity, your ability to function while being so different from others.

A tribute to Myriam, and to others who perished in the rubble, is here.

Six days after I moved to New York in August 2007, Debbie Almontaser — an educator, inter-faith worker, and founding principle of the city’s first dual-language Arabic public school, the Khalil Gibran International Academy — was forced out of her job. Her employers at the New York City Department of Education had succumbed to a months-long smear campaign led by the NY Post and a swelling group of critics who called themselves the Stop the Madrassa Coalition. Terrorist, radical, Islamist, indoctrinator. “Dhabah,” they called her, attempting to paint her and the others who helped guide the school as alien and enemy.

As this was happening, a very different story was developing. Arabic, the language under siege by those opposed to the dual-language academy, had become the fastest-growing language in the United States. According to a November 2007 report by the Modern Languages Association, there was a 127% jump in Arabic class enrollment between 2002 and 2006, pushing it into the number ten spot.

Almontaser’s case dragged on. After a painful stretch with no movement and no news, earlier this month, a gleam in the distance: the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that the New York City Department of Education had discriminated against Almontaser “on account of her race, religion and national origin” when they forced her to resign in 2007. Days later, the current principal stepped down.

I wrote about the Khalil Gibran saga over one year. Here’s an excerpt. Better brew some tea, it’s a hefty one.

* * *

“It’s called reproduction theory,” explained Michelle Fine, a distinguished professor of psychology and urban education at the City University of New York. Fine has been following the Khalil Gibran saga for months.

“Schools reproduce the dominant class formations, the dominant hatreds, the dominant exclusions,” she said. New York City has a long, rich legacy of small, themed schools — schools that reflect an increased desire for choice, for diversity of curriculum, and personalization. Three of New York’s public high schools already offer introductory Arabic as part of their general curriculum, and the specialized focus of Khalil Gibran International Academy was in keeping with that legacy.

“In the way that schools tend to reflect larger trends and culture, small schools tend to reflect some of the more progressive trends in the larger culture,” said Fine. “It seemed timely and important to have a school that was raising up issues around Arabs and Muslims, Muslims and Christians, Christians and Jews.”

The issues raised, however, were too controversial for Khalil Gibran’s keepers — the Department of Education and New Visions for Public Schools — to handle. Paranoia and racist stereotypes about the Arabic language trumped attempts to deliver on Khalil Gibran’s stated goal “to create bridges of understanding across cultural and other differences.” The DOE’s reaction to months of misleading, negative press undermined the very essence of the school.

“In retrospect, New Visions and the Board of Ed pulling their support should have been a surprise, but it wasn’t a surprise,” said Fine. “They get cold feet when they get attacked. But it was such a profoundly unethical move to not stand behind her, and in fact, to set her up to take the phone call, and then to basically give her a Sophie’s Choice — It’s you, or the school.”

December 6, 2007. Almontaser wore yellow on the afternoon she met Judge Sidney Stein of Manhattan District Court for his ruling. The courtroom was packed with fidgety bodies, some shifting with anticipation or nervousness, while others looked restless during the Judge’s long preamble. They had been waiting for months to hear the results of Almontaser’s lawsuit against the City and the DOE, and many were anxious to know if she might soon return to her post as principal of Khalil Gibran.

Stein’s answer to Almontaser’s allegations was long-winded, but unequivocal. The fact that she was on the telephone with a DOE representative during her interview with Post reporter Bennett, and the fact that she conducted the interview as a spokesperson for Khalil Gibran, made it clear that she spoke as part of her duties as an employee. Her definition of intifada, then — factually correct as it may have been — was not protected speech under the First Amendment, and made her subject to discipline by her employer. He denied her request for a new, unbiased application process for the position of principal.

Almontaser’s lawyer, Alan Levine, reacted immediately to Stein’s announcement. He asked both for the chance to appeal this decision, and asked that the DOE pause their hiring efforts until Almontaser’s case could be resolved. Levine and his client were granted the appeal, but the DOE made no attempt to stall their hiring plans.

A month later, Holly Anne Reichert was announced as Khalil Gibran’s newest principal — the school’s third — on January 8, 2008. Reporters immediately quizzed Reichert, an Arabic speaker, on the most pressing, most fundamental concern in heading this troubled school: the definition of the word intifada. Reichert reacted sharply to the word, and cautioned that it “should not be used frivolously, for example on a T-shirt.”
Reichert’s condemning response, it seems, was the correct one.

January 31, 2008, a brisk and sunny Thursday morning. Another day, another press conference, this time at the steps of city hall. Members of CSKGIA were present, but they certainly were not invited.

Stop the Madrassa and its offshoot organization, Citizens for American Values in Public Education, had organized what was their second press conference, and did so hot on the heels of a recent Khalil Gibran event where teachers, led by Sean Grogan, UFT Chapter Leader at Khalil Gibran, aired grievances and worries about the school’s future. Grogan and his peers decried the lack of leadership and organization at the school, criticized the DOE for failing to provide them with adequate space, resources, and called for a stronger commitment to the school, starting with the reinstatement of the principal who founded it. If Almontaser had defined the word “madrassa” to reporters, someone asked, would she have faced criticism for that at well?

At their own press conference days later, representatives from Stop the Madrassa called for the immediate closure of Khalil Gibran. Stuart Kaufman, a tall and ruddy-faced spokesman for the group, addressed the strange mix of reporters, CSKGIA affiliates, and Stop the Madrassa members gathered before him.

“Concern is spreading across the United States,” he boomed. “We created Citizens in Support of American Values in Public Education because of a demand that people are out there that don’t know what’s going on in their own school systems.”

A young woman with a notepad, her head covered by a warm toque, had a question. “Do you have the same feeling toward all other dual-language schools?”

“I personally feel that way, yes,” said Kaufman.

The woman pressed him further, asking if his dislike of the Khalil Gibran school had to do with its founders being of Arab decent. Kaufman denied this.

“No, because they’re radical Islamists,” he said. “I have nothing against people of Arab descent.”

The conversation became heated, and the young woman with the notepad climbed a few large city hall steps to stand next to Kaufman, and addressed the crowd loudly:

“I think what’s interesting is that, despite how weak the argument is, the Department of Education actually caters to these organizations. They’re the reason the school is in trouble right now! They’re the reason —”

Kaufman cut her off — “Now, we should find out who this lady is! Will you tell us who you are?”

Oh yes, she said. Mona Eldahry was her name — the co-founder of Arab Women Active in the Arts and Media, the community group responsible for the Intifada NYC t-shirts, and an active member of Communities in Support of Khalil Gibran International Academy.

“This is one of the founders of the Khalil Gibran International Academy!” Kaufman exclaimed. “So she has an agenda!”

The crowd protested — Eldahry had nothing to do with the founding or the design of the school, someone shouted. At this point the press conference disintegrated into small clusters of people: arguing, pontificating, asking questions, snapping photos, and documenting the fracas.

“They should be ashamed of themselves for the way they spoke today,” said Donna Nevel, a member of CSKGIA. “They’ve had one agenda, which is to have the school shut down. They’re using the problems at the school now as a pretext, to achieve their goal, and that goal is to shut down a school for one reason: because the language is Arabic. There are 60 or 70 dual language programs in New York City offering wonderful education — ”

“That’s a falsehood!” Kaufman, who had been listening from the sidelines, cut in. “We are not pushing for the shutdown of the school because it teaches the Arabic language. We are pushing for the shut-down of the school because of the people that we believe are behind it, and because of the concerns we have about the things that might be taught at the school. So do not, please, try to lay on us the concept of bigotry or anti-Arabic. We believe in teaching Arabic in the public schools.”

Nevel and Kaufman argued back and forth for several minutes, one imploring and the other defensive.

Off to the left, Irene Alter, a co-founder of Stop the Madrassa, shook her head. She didn’t understand why anyone would want to create an Arabic school in the first place.

“There has been no demand for it. In all honesty,” she said. “Most kids take Spanish. It’s one of the easier languages for them to master and it’s a beautiful language. That’s of course my prejudice because that’s what I teach! The letters are the same letters, it’s phonetic… Kids tend to go with things that are easier for them. This is the reality.”

Off to the right, a surreal exchange was taking place between a group of young women in hijabs and two older women critical of the need for an Arabic language school. Why not just learn the language in the streets, the way most other languages are learned, asked the first? The second, lipstick smeared across her front teeth, wanted to know — “What would happen if we would go to your country of origin, trying to impose our way of life, our religion, Christian, and our teaching onto you? Would we get our heads cut off or what?”

Almontaser was back in court on February 5, 2008, for her hearing at the United States Court of Appeals. Many of Almontaser’s most outspoken supporters, including Eldahry, Nevel, and Fine, filled the benches on her side of the court room — a section Fine jokingly referred to as “the bride’s side.” On the groom’s side sat Paul Frederick Marks, the attorney representing the defense.

Almontaser’s own attorney, Levine, did his best to convince the panel of judges before him that his client’s definition of “intifada” should not have been viewed as part of her official duties as principal. The judges, in the meantime, seemed more concerned with Marks’ side of the story. They wanted to know just one thing — what had Almontaser done wrong?

“Well,” said Marks, “she basically rendered an expression that was potentially disruptive to the operation of the school.”

The judges were unsatisfied with this answer, and pressed Marks further. The Post reporter did not accurately record what she said during the
interview, they said. If the press garbled her words, was it fair that she be punished?

Marks replied: “The potential for disruption did not cease with the publication of the Post article. That, you might say, was actually the beginning.”
But what, asked the judges, did she do wrong?

“She made statements that were inflammatory,” said Marks. “She started discussing ‘infitada’.” Marks struggled with the word, mispronouncing it perhaps out of nervousness, perhaps out of his unfamiliarity with the term.

“I had never heard of infitada before I started working on this,” confessed Marks. “I had to look it up on Google.”

“And when you looked it up,” asked one judge, “you found that her interpretation was precisely correct?” Marks said that yes, in fact, some of the definitions he found online matched the answers provided by Almontaser in her interview with the Post.

“You better not tell anyone what you found on Google,” said the judge, addressing Marks. “Your job may be in jeopardy here.”

Ryszard Kapuscinski, lonely in Lagos with “some sort of tropical infection, blood poisoning or a reaction to an unknown venom, and it is bad enough to make me swell up and leave my body covered with sores, suppurations and carbuncles,” fought his hot, sweaty affliction with Claude Lévi-Strauss. Ryszard quoted Claude, and now I quote both:

By whom or by what had I been impelled to disrupt the normal course of my existence? Was it a trick on my part, a clever diversion, which would allow me to resume my career with additional advantages for which I would be given credit? Or did my decision express a deep-seated incompatibility with my social setting so that, whatever happened, I would inevitably live in a state of ever greater estrangement from it? Through a remarkable paradox, my life of adventure, instead of opening up a new world to me, had the effect rather of bringing me back to the old one, and the world I had been looking for disintegrated in my grasp.

Then then he went back to Poland, where he no longer existed. Friends would pass him in the streets, looking quizzically at the apparition. What are you doing here, stranger? You’re supposed to be gone, off reporting from somewhere tropical, alive in your dispatches. Existing in abstract. He went away again and was revived.

Realness is a slippery eel.

Aprendió dos cosas, una en la calle, mientras tenía los ojos abiertos, y otra en su piso, cuando los cerraba para dormir: la primera es que hay hombres que sueñan con los labios; la segunda, que hay muchas formas de ver la luz, pero sólo una de estar ciego. Cuando murió, lloraron por él en cinco ciudades distintas.

El hombre que escuchaba, Benjamín Prado.

::

The stuff of documentary, the stuff of fiction.

With my eyes open, Toronto is fiction because there are many versions of it. They feel mostly unfamiliar. Madrid is documentary because, preserved in closed-eye memory, it has stayed intact — every street and haircut — for five years. New York is somewhere in between. Paris, I’m starting to forget. Canal-side afternoons, the périphérique as viewed from a speeding taxi on my way to work at 3:30 am, the moment at Chez Georges when the crowded cellar overwhelms with its heat and Piaf, the fussy bakers, the saggy dog with no knees, the thin man with no voice who’d pour me too-sweet Kir or espressos, the round bar, the greatest hidden gem on rue Ramey, knowing every inch of the metro, and the awkward clusters of foreigners who are just so excited to be there. I forget if I tried to remember.

Esta maldita ciudad. Estas malditas ficciones.

Killer of independence.

The lessons he carried out, cautionary tales illustrating the cost of freedom versus the value of it, have weighed heavily on my mind this past week.

For three decades, beginning in the 1960s, he was the patrol dog of Françafrique and beyond. He put his mercenary paws all over Benin, Gabon, Congo, Yemen, Nigeria, Iran, Zimbabwe, and his favourite target, L’Union des Comores. He’s doctored more coups and coup attempts than I have fingers and toes, generally with the backing of Western powers looking to protect their interests in the decolonized South. It was in France’s interest that the Comores be plunged into chaos and poverty post independence. It was in France’s interest that these newborn republics fail. Otherwise, what sort of message would that send to the remaining colonies? Colonies that, to this day, moodily accept overseas territory status and massive inequality, perhaps for fear that the alternative – independence – would leave them in much worse shape. Recent referenda in Martinique, French Guiana and Mayotte show that no, in fact, we do not all yearn to be free. Some would prefer to stay yoked, heads held above water, than drown.

Vive la mort, vive la guerre, vive le sacre mercenaire.

I wonder if Bob the Dog ever looked on Haiti and cursed himself for having been born too late. “A century and a half earlier,” he might have muttered, “and I could have put a clamp on that, too.”

Awful, awful, awful.

Just a quick peek-a-boo hello from me. I wanted to let you know that my little dot com portfolio is back in action. I scrapped the old templates and built anew. Much cleaner and very basic, due to aesthetic preference as much as my own impatience and limited HTML skills. Someday I will learn how to do fancy things with websites, or wavesites, or whatever next comes.

If you find anything that needs fixing, or have a killer job offer, fais-moi signe.

Five hundred bodies below my feet. Sun in my hair. Long clouds shoving their way across the huge northeastern sky.

As I scraped my palm along the grey rock, the back of my hand all yellow and sickly-looking from clenching, I thought of my generations. My grandmother, died November 1st not so many years ago. My grandfathers. Their parents, whose names I don’t know. Three and four and five generations back, complete mysteries, an empty space, blank faces and unknown names. I may never know my family’s histories, but I can imagine them. I closed my eyes, hoped I could honour the ones come before, and asked forgiveness of the ones come after.

Crunch crunch crunch for the dead. Autumn wind, gusting, took much of it away.

Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.

I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything observed. See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write — on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there.

But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.” … We are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.

It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.

[Again, Joan Didion.]

Every notebook I have kept since 2002, black hardcover blank paged deeply personal things, was lost in the post sometime in the last three and a half weeks. I’ve deluded myself thinking that they could still be on the way — just a little delayed is all, they’ll arrive tomorrow or the next day. But after three and a half weeks it’s time to give up that space on the book shelf I was holding empty for them. It’s time to fill that space with documents or magazines or other, softcover notebooks with quotes and statistics and hastily-scrawled scraps of stories in them. Not the hardcover ones. Not the black ones. Those are gone.

History is tidalectic, I tell myself. It’s not that I’ve lost those seven years — important years, when I lived in Madrid, in Sackville, in New York, in Paris. These past two months, compounded by having to pack up my things and move across the world again, have already been filled with loss. If life were shaped like an arrow, I would accept this as a defeat. But life is shaped like a tide. It rolls around and it roars, in and out with the cycles. Up and down. It will all come back to me somehow.

I was that person running to my gate, terminal 1 CDG, my limbs aching from sleeplessness and the weight of my carry-on. The bags tugged me down, wanted to coax me onto the floor, but my legs pushed forward. I heard my name echo over the loudspeaker three times, then four. The plane wanted to leave to Keflavik International without me.

Suspended in the air, or flying through some country-side highway, hours spent staring out of windows thinking and trying not to think. I said once that I only feel at home when I’m in motion, but I don’t know whether “home” or “motion” are the right words.

There is a certain comfort in long-distance travel. It’s not so much the act of being in transit, because the experience itself is very still, very removed. Suspended.

Emotional and physical exhaustion wore me down and I nearly cracked from the strain a few times along this last journey. Break-down from the build-up of so much. But here, in this in-between state, is neither the time nor place — it has no time and has no place. It is a reprieve. A distancing.

Maybe that’s what’s comforting about it. Emotional and physical distance, manifest. See me as I disappear.

.

Cristãos Novos, criptojudeus, and the indelicacies of the 15th century. It’s somewhat of an idle obsession.

As France’s economy slowed in subsequent decades, however, unemployment rose, and hasn’t dipped below 7% for the past quarter of a century. In recent years, the jobless rate for immigrants has been around twice that of non-immigrants. Now that France is in recession, the first jobs to go are often those filled by minorities.

…. [In Morocco] Life can be better than in France. Surveys show that in France, applicants for a job have around a third the chance of getting a reply if their name sounds Arab or African as they do with a more traditional French name.

France is not alone in wanting to ignore race and ethnicity as markers. “You are all French now,” the state says. “And Frenchness transcends race.” But when your skin, your name, and the way others treat you tell you otherwise, what are you to believe? The (neo-)colonizer / (ex-)colony tango makes navigation particularly tricky.

I’ve had a few 1st and 2nd Gen friends move “back” over the years. It started happening when I was still in grade school — Marisa was 12 when she left her parents in Canada to go live in Portugal — and I have conversations with friends, now in their 20s and 30s, who want to live closer to their roots. There are new opportunities for them in China, in India, in Italy, in Morocco, and at one time, in Zimbabwe.

I can’t say this is a recent trend, but I do know that the tug to go “back home” pops up at one time or another. Goodness knows it’s crossed my mind.

Europe has become underdeveloped due to acute economic and political crisis while Africa has experienced thriving development.

Olivier, an unemployed engineer, and Pauline, an unemployed teacher, are struggling to scrape by in France. They decide to migrate to the United States of Africa but are denied entry visas, and so try to sneak in by way of a smuggler.

Their lives are turned upside down as they face the grim realities of illegal immigration — arrest, detention, threat of deportation, economic exploitation, etc.

I don’t need to tell you how badly I want to see this film. It seems like fairly straight-forward satire, part of a table-turning “what if?” tradition of storytelling, but I’m still fascinated. Has anyone out there watched it?

One YouTube commenter points out that this scenario is already becoming reality, as many Portuguese wait overnight at the Angolan embassy for papers — but somehow I doubt my olive-toned bredren are being roughed up by Luandan police on arrival.

Your hotel is in a very bad area. The worst in Athens, our cabbie warned. “A lot of Pakistani,” he said. “It’s like Chinatown.” This was the first lesson in insider/outsider politics. Vathi Square was the outside — full of foreigners and all the ills that came along with them. Drugs. Prostitution. Violence.

First up was a week-long exploration of Greece, bouncing from Samos to Patras before finally settling in Athens for a few days. I met Iranians, Somalis, Palestinians, Afghans, and others who were living in immigrant detention centers, in port-side camps, and in overcrowded urban slums. Most of them had paid a fortune to smugglers and traveled for months for the chance to cross Turkey into Europe. For the chance to get roughed up by Greek police, to live in squalor, to risk their lives sneaking aboard freight carriers and ferries bound for other countries where they would again be roughed up, live in squalor, risk their lives, etc.

That was early April. Later that month, I was on another plane, south-bound via Dubai.

As I write this, I’m snug in a plane seat, flying right over the neutral zone. If I cup my hands around my head and press my face close up to the window, I can see stars. A carpet of stars I’ve never seen from these skies. Gaza is to my right, somewhere in the unseeable distance. Soon, we’ll fly over the horn. Then over Mozambique. Hours from now I’ll walk the streets in Johannesburg.

In Jozi, the details were different, but the story was the same — the unwanted masses, come to escape tyranny and torture, to escape poverty and disease, searching for that better life that so many of us are promised exists out there for us. But as foreigners, they’re classified as makwerekwere, not to be trusted, and subject to intense systemic and personal discrimination. They have settled into makeshift township slums and taken over entire sections of downtown Johannesburg, en masse, because there’s less danger of getting attacked if you’re in a group. Mozambicans, Zimbabweans, Swazis, different faces for the same makwerekwere.

Of course, the xenophobic attacks of last year were not entirely about xenophobia, but that element cannot be denied.

When you mix xenophobia with the desperation of locals suffering under joblessness and economic crises — particularly, in the case of South Africans, a long-time lack of access to basic services and housing — you get a recipe for disaster. And by no means is this restricted to Europe and Africa. This piece in the Wall Street Journal, about Immigrant VS Local job-hunting tensions in Tennessee, gave me chills when I read it today.

I’ve been writing about my experiences in both Greece and South Africa, and can’t stop thinking about the wider implications, the parallels, the patterns. I also can’t help thinking of the kids I grew up with and their families. Had they stayed behind a little longer in Zimbabwe, in Somalia, in Afghanistan, this might have been their fate. Had their luck been a little off, they could have found themselves in the arms of the Greek Coast Guard, or on the receiving end of a frustrated township mob.

But of course, there’s still time for all that. All we need is one spark — and right now there is no spark more potent than that of economic hardship and the competition for work.

(Boom.)

Un monde étrange avec son langage, ses musiques, son goût pour la violence, où l’on brûle les voitures après les avoir volées et où les centres commerciaux forment le décor et la cible les émeutes urbaines.

There’s something about assimilation that has always struck me as violent. It’s a colonization of self, isn’t it? No one is invading your territory, but as they welcome you onto theirs (reluctantly), a list of prerequisites comes attached. Speak our language. Adopt our dress. Bend your cuisine. Adhere to our norms.

I couldn’t tell you what it feels like to have one particular way of life or culture imposed, because it didn’t quite happen that way for me. Maybe if someone had told me how to behave, which flag to carry, which team to root for, I wouldn’t be so patchwork. Maybe I wouldn’t have felt adopted by so many peoples.

Le rejet par la société des enfants de la seconde génération immigrée peut conduire à l’apparition d’une nouvelle forme de communautarisme. Celle-ci est le fait de sujets socialisés par l’ecole qui ont adopté le genre de vie des jeunes de leur milieu social et de leur generation. Malgré cette intégration culturelle, se manifeste le sentiment d’une identité distincte, construite en réaction à l’expérience de la xenophobie. Le retournement du stigmate en revendication identitaire, le fait de s’affirmer avant tout Arabe ou “Black,” quand on est Français, et qu’on a établi tous ses repères dans la société française, s’apparente moins au retour à la difficulté de vivre simultanément la réalité de l’intégration culturelle et la ségrégation sociale.

The quotes are from “La peur des banlieues” by Henri Rey. It was one of the first books I read when I moved to France in September, and was a harsh and ugly introduction to the mentality behind segregation, laïcité (state-enforced secularism), class divides, and racism. I hated it, but I read the whole thing. It is about insiders and outsiders in the most literal sense — if you are a true and well-to-do Parisian, you live within the city’s borders; if you do not belong, you are banished to the outskirts. Ban-lieue, the lieue de ban, place of exile.

La peur des banlieues, c’est encore la peur de l’etranger et, pour être plus précis, de l’Africain, Arabe d’abord, Noire ensuite, même quand il est Français depuis quelques générations ou quant il vient des départements français d’outre-mer. Refoulés d’une histoire coloniale ponctuée d’épisodes tragiques, la crainte et le rejet de l’étranger marquent de leur empreinte une tradition, peur revendiquée mais coriace, de notre culture nationale.

I had never heard of the principle of laïcité before I moved to France. In a part of the world formerly dominated by the Church, it makes perfect sense — a separation of politics and public life from religion. But holidays still revolve around Christian feast days and saints, and on Sundays, the Lord’s day, you’d be hard-pressed to find too many points of commerce open beyond the most tourist-heavy districts. Pesky details! Under this principle of secularism, the people of France are protected from discrimination and religious oppression. Unless, of course, you’re Muslim. In which case, you, your scarf, your skin, your body are enemy number one.

One arm beckons in a show of welcome. The other holds a stick, in waiting, lest you forget where you belong. The borders framed by flesh and bone are the most complex of all.

Yesterday I saw a woman crouch between two parked motorcycles on my street, lift up her skirts, and pee.

This afternoon it was a little boy at a bus stop across the way. As his mother fussed with his baby sister, fastening the pink straps of her stroller, he unzipped the front of his pint-sized pants and peed onto the sidewalk. His four-year-old urine mixed with the rain.

City as toilet. Even with so many free public potties dotted throughout Paris, I’ve still seen more street peeing in my time here than anywhere else I’ve been in the western world.

Public peeing knows no race, no age, no class. It knows only desire.

The town’s hygiene workers have to clean an average 56,000 sq metres of urine-splashed surfaces per month — a figure that rises to 65,000 in summer.

The highest penalty for urinating in public was dealt to Pierre Pinoncelli, a Frenchman who was fined 45,122 euros (£31,400) in 1998 for relieving himself into artist Marcel Duchamp’s modern art urinal, called Fountain — said to be worth £1.9 million.

He described his “attack” as a surrealist act.
[Source]

Parisians have battled the public pipi for years. First, there were the pissoirs — open-air urinals, geared mainly toward male offenders. Next came the Sanisette — a multi-purpose, self-cleaning WC, mostly free and happily open for use by men, women, children, bums and tourists alike.

Yet despite their ubiquity, these public loos have not deterred even the most casual of urinaters. Paris is their turf, and it is there to be marked. They may not own their homes, have gardens or access to green spaces, but the sloped streets — yellow trickling downhill — are theirs.