WORK

...because monday was "labour day" & because the studio sessions have such a genuine quality to them & because the capitalist wheel never stops spinning & because i've never thought about music in such specific terms

Duty and Unity: On the Form and Function of Labour in Bob Marley’s “Work”

As a pioneer in the development of the reggae aesthetic, Bob Marley is often credited with injecting the fresh cultural and nationalist product of the newly independent Jamaican state into the worldwide mainstream. However this has created a cult-like consumption of the music even penetrating the academia, as reflected in the sparse scholarship dealing with his musical canon as serious works of lyrical, poetic, and pedagogical value. There exists a large body of literature dealing with Rastafarianism generally and Marley’s engagement with this anomalistic spirituality, but with the exception of some of his better-known songs such as “One Love”, “No Woman No Cry”, and “Redemption Song”, there is a lack of critical writing addressing most of his poetry. For this reason I will be exploring in more depth the song “Work” from Uprising (1980), the last album released by Bob Marley and The Wailers before Marley’s death in 1981, a song which is relatively obscure and who’s structure is “simple” in contrast to much of Bob Marley’s work. By approaching this song as both a reggae-infused version of the labouror/ prisoner’s chant, and a musical spiritual-sermon of sorts, I hope to engage in a conversation dealing with the complex shift of tone in Marley’s aesthetic, particularly at this climactic time for him personally and for Jamaican culture at large. In working within the limits of this paper’s length, I will therefore focus on the repetitive value and deceptive simplicity of the song’s lyrics in regards to their poetic appeal. As this is a performed piece of literature (i.e. a song), I will also briefly link these ideas to some of the sonic features, including the rhythm, tempo, and vocals. By doing this analysis I hope to gain some more insight into the piece’s overall tone as a dismal commentary on the futility of the “work” (required of “Jah’s people”), and the prospective reward offered by this endeavor—a commentary, contradictory as it were, of a lower-class musician turned spiritual leader made acutely aware of his own lingering mortality.

By the time Uprising had been released, reggae music had come to develop as a globally recognized musical genre deeply associated with pioneering figures like Bob Marley—its Rastafarian influence and association with liberationist movements built on principles of self-reliance and self-confidence worked to create a cultural niche for a society whose ancestors’ own cultures were purposefully omitted and obscured. This sense of communal independence and the utilitarian work ethic required to sustain it is evident in the song’s opening lines, “We Jah people can make it work/ Come together and make it work, yeah!” Marley calls out to the listener—immediately compelling a tone of unity and duty. The singer then repeats “We can make it work” (x2), a sense of agency cast in urgency (the lyrics themselves as well as their repetition) made immediately comprehensible in the first bars. The idea of agency relates to the song’s subjectivity and begs the question of who the “We” being invoked are, a topic which requires its own discussion and therefore cannot be paid the attention it is due in this paper. I will comment, however, that in implicating himself—a best-selling, world-famous, infamously mixed-race artist—with this “We”, Bob Marley relocates the song from a place of worker’s anthem to a transcendent position whose meaning may not be so visceral—this “We” has more in common than just lifestyle and class or social status.

The musical background coincided with the political scene in Jamaica at the time, one centred on the region’s Socialist craze of the mid-20^th century and reflected in the names of leading political parties such as the JLP, or Jamaican Labour Party. This sort of context is amplified by the reality of Jamaica’s historical development as a slave colony, a dismal narrative that is invoked by the spirit of labour ringing through the economically-unstable island nation, predominantly composed of wage-laborours (Hodges, 2005). Bob Marley notoriously referred to his music as ‘the people’s noise’, or some variation of this, and it therefore follows that much of his music would reflect the day-to-day routine of much of the island’s population. This sense of the circuitousness of history, paired with the strong ethos of labour in modern Jamaica, is reflected in the stanza that follows. By counting down days, Marley invokes the tradition of the worker (or prisoner’s) chant, which plays into the piece’s thematic significance of the futility of the labour needed to ‘keep the wheels spinning’.

By universalizing this, Marley reminds the reader that such a task is ongoing and exhaustive—a function that parallels the mood of desperation created by the repetition from the preceding bars. The dignity of the work bestowed on “Jah people” from the first line seems to be negated or at least undermined by the “countdown bars”; despite the level of collaborative effort that may be required, it all seems futile, Sisyphean in the sense that it will always be “for the next day” and the next and the next and so on. This is highlighted by the final line of the stanza, for even when there is but “one day to go”, the work is far from over, as: “Every day is work—work—work—work—work!”. By singing the “work” notes specifically to the down-beat of the tempo, the music emphasizes the dismal mood captured by the repetition of that word. In watching a live in-studio performance of the song, one can sense the shifts in the grain Marley’s voice as he sings the countdown—notably missing from this portion of the song are the colourful ad libs (the “woy-ah-ya-ya”s and “ooh”s which play a crucial role in Marley’s sound specifically and in reggae’s reliance on what Kamau Brathwaite calls “national language” (Brathwaite, 1984). When one considers the fatigue of constant touring and recording and Marley’s declining health due to cancer, this sonic shift takes on more personal meaning.

In fact, the song’s turning point can be located after this initial countdown segment. Rather than entirely give way to the despair of unending labour, the doubling or mirror effect of the “We can make it work” imbues Marley with the same sense of insistence it did earlier, but is now made more functional because it follows the chant-like anthem of the worker’s countdown. In other words, the sense of over-simplfication and futility acts as a reminder of how imperative the task at hand is, and Marley convinces the listener that all of the efforts will mean that we can make it work (repeated again, in case some are still non-believers). The simplicity and uniformity of the song’s basic rhythm is then challenged with the guitar solo that follows, a break from the slow, down-beat rhythm heavily concentrated in the bass and drum instrumentals of the music. Once again the “We” that is being invoked is emphasized both vocally and rhythmically with a longer beat count.

The temporal and spatial distance provided by the countdown in between—which itself acts as a device of paradox, for what is the “it” being made to “work” if the process is perpetual and circuitous—also adds another layer of meaning and tone to this doubling. As with the song’s opening Marley calls on the listener to involve him or herself into the active process through a sense of duty, but now he must also confront the task of convincing the ‘workers’ that their efforts are not only worthwhile, but necessary to the functioning of a sovereign and autonomous socio-political entity on one hand, and an infinite spiritual salvation for the individual on the other. This sense of mission and spiritual duty vested in unity of “Jah people” is very much in tune with the body of music created by Bob Marley and The Wailers, especially in these later periods. However, “Work” is different from some of these songs not only in its relative lack of complex poetical and rhetorical devices, but because of less incendiary lyrics and tone.

It is then understandable why the stanza that follows is yet another repetition of the first stanza, contributing to the song’s overall deceptively simple structure and reflecting the tone of urgency, calling-on, and reassurance. After providing a somewhat clearer understanding of all that rests on this critical duty, Marley reverts back to the countdown form for the song’s final stanza. This time, the sense of repetition and doubling helps remind the ‘worker’ (i.e. the audience, who is implicated in the ‘process of labour’ as both listener of the music and recipient of spiritual and pedagogical sermon) also works to reinforce the urgency. As reflected in Bob Marley’s personal (and by now, fleeting) life, it is precisely because of how important the metaphorical “next day” is that all of this labour must be performed. This layer of meaning is also represented in the texture of the final verse, like when the melody begins to stray and display an improvisation as he sings, “Say we got, one day to go now/”. In a further instance of ‘impromtu’ musical variation, here we are reintroduced to Marley’s well-known vocal “ad-libbing” techniques, the “oooh-ooh-ooh” found near the end and the ‘wotcha”, etc., which convey a wide meter of feelings which range from fatigue, overworkedness, and anguish to commandeering, elation, and euphoria–elusive emotion impossible to capture with such vivacity in the lyrics and instrumentals themselves.

The final lyric of the song provides its own wealth of insight, as Marley ends the song with “If you aint got nothing to do/…./We got some work for you”—retaining his position as both labour and spiritual leader, as one who has the authority to assign “work” to the idle. It is worth noting here the importance of the background context in fully comprehending the discourse of mission in Marley’s music. A quick scan through the lyrics reveals that the nature of the “work” Marley alludes to is never explicitly stated in the lyrics. The “work” that he seems to refer to is found throughout the messages in his musical canon, as well as the personal example he provided through his own practices. In recalling the far more circulated “Redemption Song” from the same album, the tasks that are required of “Jah people” are not like the material tasks challenging the labouror, for “redemption is not simply destiny. It is work—redemption works—that is the product of dispersed networks of belonging that bind us as people.” (Hill, 2010). In fact, the “work” seems to be intentionally obscured and therefore open to interpretation, such as in the final stanza when the countdown has reached “one day to go”, and just as the singer begins “working for—“, he is cut short and the listener is forced to do his or her own work to fully engage in the song and it’s meaning. 

WORKS CITED

Brathwaite, Kamau. History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. London: New Beacon, 1984.

Hill, Robert A. "Redemption Works: From “African Redemption” to “Redemption Song”." Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas 43.2 (2010): 200-07.

Hodges, H. "Walk Good: West Indian Oratorical Traditions in Bob Marley's Uprising." The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 40.2 (2005): 43-63.

Marley, Bob. "Work." Uprising. Bob Marley & The Wailers. Tuff Gong/Island Records, 1980. Recording.

(ORIGINALLY SUBMITTED IN 2014)

On Ignorance, Self-Perception, and the Other in Tao Lin's Taipei

 

Recently, I was inspired to revisit Tao Lin's hi-def drug-infused yet sobering novel Taipei. I first read this book when it was released to mixed reviews in 2013, for an English course on the contemporary American novel (I think?). While it was insufferable at first, its fragmented style and alienated/alienating protagonist Paul slowly grew on me and I ended up writing an essay inspired by it. 

Here's a version of the 2013 essay I submitted--hopefully this persuades you to read it, rather than the opposite:

Knowing Lots of Nothing: 

On Ignorance, Self-Perception, and the Other in Taipei

It is said that we live in the so-called Information Age, a time in which conceivably, digital technologies have furnished us with the ability to send and receive all sorts of information instantaneously and across borders. This transcendence of data is further sustained by the travel technologies available to help in our physical mobilization and transition from point A to point B. While these technologies seem on the surface to enhance our ability to understand the world around us, they often undermine our ability to understand the complex dynamics involved in our social interactions, our immutable interiority, and our memory as a guide. This theme of conscious ignorance is one which has been visited in Tao Lin’s 2013 novel Taipei. I will suggest that the protagonist Paul’s own ignorance stems precisely from the wide, unlimited, and multifaceted availability of sources of information that is within his reach. I will be exploring how Paul’s overabundant epistemological access has denied him the ability to know how to read emotions of his own and others, thus creating a sense of self-alienation, which is only remedied through a trip to Taipei.

Paul is mainly tuned out, or ignorant, to the emotional status of the individuals he is closely involved with. The reader is bombarded with this incapacity several times within the first encounters: Paul is “unsure what he felt exactly” with Michelle (Lin, 4; 9; 10; etc.). It is only through reading into text messages and checking on updated Facebook and Twitter statuses that Paul comprehends how his friends and loved ones feel towards him. In the midst of an argument with Michelle, “Paul felt himself trying to interpret the situation, as if there was a problem to be solved, but there didn’t seem to be anything, or maybe there was, but he was three or four skill sets away from comprehension, like an amoeba trying to create a personal webpage using CSS” (Lin, 10)— his inability to comprehend parallels his “expert” knowledge of the digital world, as evident in his lexicon. He is only able to know where his friendships with Kyle, Gabby, and the rest stand once they have “unfollowed” or “de-friended” him on the social media platforms (Lin, 30), and can only grasp his own disinterest in pursuing romance with Laura upon scrutinizing their email correspondence (Lin, 50; 53).  But such unconventional methods of reading others also provides much room for misreading. As Andrew Martin writes in The Knowledge of Ignorance, this “allows or demands a response, an interpretation, a judgment. Thus the text is not unassailable, not self-evident or self-sufficient, but just as vulnerable to attack as the author. The reader is always a latent misreader, critic, enemy; his weapons are misattribution, distortion, and misinterpretation.” (Martin, 43).

Such mediation of emotional (un)knowingness can be traced further back in Paul’s life: in 3rd grade he soon realizes that "90-95%" of people he encounters will be/are "separate and unknowable"; in middle-school his inability to interpret or know how to respond to being antagonized is then misinterpreted as feeling "too cool" to react by the other kids; and by freshman year he has resigned to remaining silent, all but losing his ability to know how to react to emotional and social stimuli (Lin, 39-40). As Audrea Lim writes, Taipei “is a depiction of the alienated subject in a personality-driven world where social signals and media messages are so complex…Again and again, Paul is driven to despair by ordinary social reality…” (Lim, 2013).  Ian Samson corroborates, comparing Tao Lin’s novel to the likes of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” in its “desperate desire to connect”, that the “novel dwells on the meaning of disassociation and self-exile.” (Samson, 2013).

Confined within this digitized system of self expression through proxy, Paul is prevented from understanding in any clear or cohesive sense his own feelings and emotive responses, and increasingly goes “without knowing why” he feels depressed (Lin, 53). In one culminating instance, Paul experiences a new feeling which he struggles to describe: a “sadness-based fear, immune to tone and interpretation, as if not meant for humans…Sometimes it was less of a feeling than a realization that maybe, after you died, in the absence of time, without a mechanism for tolerance, or means of communication, you could privately experience a nightmare state for an eternity.” (Lin, 56). The inability to read the emotional status of others (without literally reading it online) is inextricably linked to Paul’s ignorance about his own state, for “…one cannot know the ‘I’ except through the other, but this kind of knowledge is itself a kind of nescience…the problem  of other minds is not just the problem of other minds, but also the problem of my own mind…my mind is itself other to itself.” (Bennett, 111).

Paul’s knowledge of how to perform his individual “human” and/or social functions is therefore also heavily mediated, through the plethora of drugs that he frequently uses on the one hand, and largely through the digital media which he is perpetually involved in on the other hand. Paul is always in a state of confusion whenever he begins to interrogate his own interiority, and the thoughts he has (which are Lin highlights through the use of quotation marks) reflect this state of inner conflict; he is “completely lost” (Lin, 19), “lost in the world” (Lin, 7), “grateful to exist” (Lin, 248). On the one hand, Paul is almost vaporous: he is all interiority. At one especially alienating point, “Paul could sense the presence of a metaphysical distance from where, if crossed, he would not be able to return…” and “realized he was (and, for an unknown amount of time, had been) rushing ahead in an unconscious, misguided effort to get away from where he was: inside himself…” (Lin, 202-205). This is also marked by the endless flow of inner and outer dialogue he steers. As Samson writes, Paul is “continually aroused but perpetually dulled…(a) style in which fragmented thoughts follow narcissistic flights of fancy, with an underlying tone of desperation and despair. Paul has nothing much to say, but he says it anyway…” (Samson, 2013).

            At the same time, this acute and intensely self-conscious interiority sits alongside Paul’s inability to comprehend a concrete reality and is exhausted by the digital technologies visited earlier, as well as his self-narcotization.  Referencing Michel Foucaut’s theory of “technologies of the self”, Lim writes: “Drugs can help us to adapt, to be more productive, and even to excel within our circumstances, to make our lives more bearable, and in some cases, to radically reconfigure our subjectivity, if not the world. In Taipei, drug use is less about changing the world than it is about adjusting to it.” (Lim, 2013). Paul’s most basic function of locating his spatial and temporal existence in a concrete reality is greatly hindered throughout the text, perhaps as a byproduct of his frequent trysts with opioids, stimulants, and every drug in between: “his affectless tone is especially unsettling when applied to drug experiences.” (Lim, 2013). The ‘drug fight’ episode in which he and Erin have a logic-based argument on the effects of cocaine and Paul cites literature as proof demonstrates this disaffected attitude as well as a sense of conscious, or intentional ignorance (Lin, 157-8; 219). When asked by Erin how he knows, he responds “based on what I know, from things I’ve read and experienced, about tolerance…” and when Erin suggests that past experience doesn’t necessarily correlate to future outcome, Paul says conclusively: “’I’m not trying to argue with you, based on what I know’…aware it was funny to qualify ‘I’m not trying to argue with you’ with ‘based on what I know’, but not feeling humoured.” (Lin, 219).

Paul and the others traverse all across America and beyond, and much like the Vernian technique Martin writes of, “the ubiquitous images of multiplication and division (geo)graphically narrate the fragmentation of the matter and media of science…(they) signify the fragmentation of the classical configuration of the rational, Newtonian universe, encompassed by a unifying framework of knowledge…” (Martin, 176). Though perpetually in transit, Taipei takes on an important dynamic as the realm in which the typically unknown can be made knowable to Paul, where he can locate markers that orient him towards the directions of understanding. On his final visit, Paul believes that “if a place existed where he could go to scramble some initial momentum, to disable a setting implemented before birth, or disrupt the out-of-control formation of some incomprehensible worldview, and allow a kind of settling, over time, to occur…it would be here.” (Lin, 164). While there Paul reflects on a neon sign that “conveys “too much information”,  leading him to muse on how technology has lost its enchantment for him,  that “technology had begun for him to mostly only indicate the inevitability and vicinity of nothingness…Technology, an abstraction, undetectable in concrete reality, was accomplishing its concrete task… by way of an increasingly committed and multiplying workforce of humans, who receive, over hundreds of generations, a certain kind of advancement…in exchange for converting a sufficient amount of matter into computerized matter for computers to be able to build themselves…” (Lin, 166-7). This feeling of accessing this latent, hidden transcendental wisdom is sharpened by the fact that even Las Vegas, famed for its bright lights, neon signs and related symbols failed to speak to Paul; Taipei  is the locale in which Paul undergoes his epistemological transformation, thus leading up to that last moment of nirvana.

Post-Taipei, Paul and Erin “start to love each other more…They find themselves doing things, rather than merely watching things…life is changing from the aesthetic to the ethical.” (Martin, 2013), or even from the digital to the actual. It is when he has returned from Taipei and is with Erin that Paul experiences his moment of heightened awareness versus hyper-awareness, enhanced on the one hand by the corporeality of laying with the character he has come closest to genuineness with and on the other a sense of metaphysical communion with beings in general. For Paul, caressing Erin’s back “gradually felt like his only method of remaining in concrete reality, where he and Erin, and other people, shared a world… Paul began to discern his rhythmic petting as a continuous striving to elicit certain information from Erin by responding or not responding to her rhythms, in a cycle whose goal was to produce momentary equilibrium…he felt able to instantly discern changes in her physiology, which in entirety began to seem like an inconstant unit of unique, irreducible information…that was continuously expressed and that bypassed the parts of them that allowed for deliberation or perception or intuition, beginning and ending in the only place where they were exactly together, undifferentiated and unknowable, but couldn’t, in their present form, ever reach, like a thing communicating directly with itself, rendering them both irrelevant.” (Lin, 243-4)

Memory, and more specifically the failure of memory to produce or enhance “usable” knowledge is one which figures heavily in Taipei. Memory at its most basic function is as a record of experience, a holder of the places, times, and moments one has undergone, and presumably learned from. But what happens when such memory is fragmented, lacking, or even inaccessible? Both texts confront such questions openly. In Taipei, Paul’s memory at times seeps into his perception of present reality, but for the most part, eludes him whenever he attempts to revisit it, like an unfamiliar book he is reading for the first timr (Lin, 18; 201; 228; 246-7; etc) .

Thus, as we have seen throughout Taipei, the realm of knowledge is an abstract one difficult to locate and even more difficult to adequately exist in, for it is formless and ever-evolving. The realm of ignorance, then is just as difficult to locate or perceive if one exists in it. It is a paradox of sorts, for if one knows that they do not know, is this not actually closer to knowing? Lin confronts these ideas head on by positioning Paul in between both realms, where Taipei provides the time and space for a more “enlightened” perception of Self and Other.

Consulted Works

Bennett, Andrew. Ignorance: Literature and Agnoiology. Manchester, UK: Manchester UP, 2009. Print.

Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1982. Print.

Lim, Audrea. "The Drugs Don’t Work: Tao Lin’s “Taipei” and the Literature of Pharmacology." LARB. Los Angeles Review of Books, 19 June 2013. Web. Nov. 2013.

.

Lin, Tao. Taipei: A Novel. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 2013. Print.

Martin, Andrew. The Knowledge of Ignorance: From Genesis to Jules Verne. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire: Cambridge UP, 1985. Print.

Martin, Clancy. "The Agony of Ecstasy: ‘Taipei,’ a Novel by Tao Lin." The New York Times Online. The New York Times, 28 June 2013. Web. Nov. 2013.

.

Nehamas, Alexander. Nietzsche, Life as Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985. Print.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Walter Arnold. Kaufmann, and R. J. Hollingdale. The Will to Power. New York: Vintage, 1968. Print.

Sansom, Ian. "Taipei by Tao Lin – Review." The Guardian UK Online. The Guardian, 4 July 2013. Web. Nov. 2013. .

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Making Myths Out of Massacres: on Rabaa & the challenges of mourning

"Right there. That's where it happened."

I follow Mohamed's nod, trying to take a long look at the somewhat distant cluster of buildings, fruitlessly searching for a minaret or anything to indicate the presence of a mosque. Our van defiantly lurches ahead, the image disappearing behind us before I can register any meaningful details. 

It's 2014 and our biennial family trip to Egypt is coming to a close as we drive through Madinet Nasr. Mohamed, the young man hired to drive us (and our growing pile of belongings) around the country for the summer, expertly navigates the full van through traffic. Polite and soft-spoken, he hasn't said much for the whole trip, even during the endless drives to the Red Sea a few weeks earlier when he brought a friend to accompany him. Sometimes I catch his spectacled gaze in the rear-view mirror, though it never seems prying.

"Atee3a! To hell with them!" my mom proclaims with uncharacteristic crudeness from the row furthest back. "They were going to bring down the whole country."

By "they", she is referring to The Muslim Brotherhood, who seem to have re-assumed their position as Voldermort-like sources of death and destruction in the psyche of people like my mother and father, whose mere mention by name proves too mention. "They" also happen to include Mohamed, who has just pointed out the Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque to our left. I stare at his face in the rearview mirror, looking for anything, even a flinch, but Mohammed's eyes stay glued to the road, unchanging. I feel a tinge of shame for my mother and after fighting back the urge to react to such a harsh display, I feel the shame for myself.

This is the way it has always been whenever my parents, relatives, or their friends refer to the Brotherhood (or whatever conveniently constitutes that category at the time). They are not unlike many Egyptians, and many more diasporic Egyptians whose allegiance is inextricably tied to a regime that plays into their fear of instability and promises to deliver that rare, depleted regional resource, security--even as it actively compromises the safety of those it pretends to protect. Indeed, even if this allegiance compromises more important things, like their moral standards.

Just one month prior to this, on the cusp of the one year anniversary of the deadly dispersal, another moment of (imagined?) tension surfaced during a drive with Mohamed. Human Rights Watch had just released their controversial report on "The Rab’a Massacre and Mass Killings of Protesters in Egypt", forcing open the wound that had been callously bandaged by those crafting the narrative for people like my parents. It wasn't surprising to see the immediate reaction to details about the mass murders, to watch the reactive denial of eyewitness accounts and registered figures. It wasn't surprising but it was disheartening. Throughout the discussion happening between my cousins and parents and the accompanying friend in the passenger seat, I kept looking to Mohamed for a response. He said nothing and drove.

Perhaps I am just projecting all of these expectations on Mohamed. Maybe all those conflicting ideologies packed into one van isn't such a big deal after all?

We learned of Mohamed's affiliation with the Brotherhood during the first ride we shared with him. When the driver hired to take us to Alexandria didn't show up several hours after he was scheduled to, my cousin offered to send a trusted friend with a van to help us out of the predicament. My mother seemed to pause, considering her options as she heard the name, but it was the day before Eid and she must have realized it was either Mohamed or missing out on Alex. A tall, stocky young man with a light beard and big glasses showed up within the hour, whisking our heavy bags into the large white tourist van that would become our main means of transport for the remainder of our stay. I don't remember the exact conversation that lead to the revelation of his association with the group, but I do remember it being a hot topic of conversation in the apartment that night. Eventually no one spoke about it at all.

Maybe that's why it was so easy to blindly deny the tragic reality and to propagate the regime's narrative right in his face.

I remember casually reading through the HRW report over a light breakfast and carrying on with my day, only remembering it if it popped up on my Twitter timeline. I was horrified by the flagrant brutality, but I was looking for something more tangible than shock. That overwhelming spate of grief I sought eluded me. Had I too become desensitized to "them"?

All sorts of thoughts are interrupting themselves in my head as we pull further away from Rabaa. The cacophony of chatter surrounding me fades into the background. I am being pulled by that same feeling that gripped at me as I walked through Midan el Tahrir months earlier, my first visit since the events of 2011. It is like a combination of grief and guilt, made heavier by the need to repress it. By the pressure to participate in the active denial of these realities. Or worse yet, to partake in the delusion that such loss, such taking of life, is ultimately inconsequential.

I turn my head all the way back to squint at the site, but by now all I can see are the massive military buildings in the horizon as Mohamed drives on.

"#TorontoStrong", Sometimes: On collective grief & who has access to it

This morning I woke up to a torrent of tweets and news stories about the mass shooting that happened last night on Danforth Rd. here in Toronto. A now (alarmingly) familiar formula was followed which included the deployment of the #TorontoStrong hashtag, the obsessive eagerness to (erroneously) quantify the number of victims in real time, and the rallying cries for unity by politicians and police chiefs. But while all these measures have come to constitute what we may now consider "normal"--a disturbing realization in and of itself--at the heart of this collective grief is a specific kind of mourning reserved for certain spaces (and their populations). This is reflected in euphemistic claims about how "safe" the neighbourhood continues to be, and in comments such as that of Andrea Horwath in city hall this morning:

"This tragedy does not reflect the Danforth, the city, or the province." 

There are several ways we can analyze such statements. For example, we can argue about how such incidents do in fact reflect the community, the parts of it that we avert our eyes from. Though it may be too early in this moment, we can look more and more at the bigger picture on mental health and access to guns, for example. Perhaps this sort of public grief is rooted in a self-centred empathy: the belief that innocent people should not face such untold tragedy represents our anxieties about such tragedy being visited upon us, or those we love. On the other hand, we can commend such a view for challenging the tendency to conflate an individual's actions with their entire neighbourhood, community, family, environment. The issue is that this nuanced discursive approach is only applied to specific narratives and neighbourhoods.

During a time of heightened fear--and fear-mongering--around what has been called "The Summer of The Gun 2.0", there has been no shortage of news covering what is often presented as a spike in gun violence, and the defaulted to "gang violence". Upon landing at the airport a few weeks ago, the first jumbo TV screen I noticed carried story after story about a string of shootings that had occurred while I was gone. Headlines scream alarmist claims like "Toronto homicide rates higher than NYC", and almost every public conversation involves a debate around the need to deploy (and employ) more police. 

As ultimate example of the way these tragedies are collectively handled, Community Safety and Corrections Minister Michael Tibollo was recently quoted as saying,

  "I went out to Jane and Finch, put on a bulletproof vest...visiting sites that had previously had bullet-ridden people killed in the middle of the night..."

If the rallying cries to remember that the Danforth community (a.k.a "Greektown") is transcendent of such violent tragedy represents much-needed relativism, then comments and actions such as those of Tibollo represent a negligent essentialization.  Rather than share in the grief of a community already affected by unimaginable loss and direct trauma, they are subjected to further stigmatization, even to blame. These environments are to be targeted for strategic intervention, and at the very least, to be handled separately and carefully with gloves--or a bullet-proof vest. It's as though the neighbourhood's inhabitants are deserving of, responsible for, or to be held guilty for the tragedy that unfolds right around them. Not only does this problematic view assume the inherent criminality of some spaces, it is a faulty logic that obscures structural dynamics of inequality that transcend a neighbourhood's boundaries.

Everytime I skim a major publication's coverage, or read what another politician said, it feels like 2005 all over again--the original "Summer of The Gun". As a result of those events and the way they were portrayed, I watched the neighbourhood I grew up in specifically, and the surrounding region (shoutout to Scarborough) become entangled in a targeted intervention that did little more than stigmatize it and solidify all the stereotypes that served as part of the mythology that forms our space(s).

Guaranteed Basic Income

Free Lunch Sociey trailer


I watched this engaging documentary on my return flight and I've been thinking about its contents ever since. Free Lunch Society explores the idea of a guaranteed basic income: a payment made to individuals that ensures a minimum income level, regardless of employment status. It features discussions among economists, political scientists, sociologists, and other -ists about its advantages  and disadvantages. Interspersed in the debates is a collection of archival footage, including Martin Luther's resistance struggle against President L.B.J's "war on poverty".

 The film provides a good introduction and presents the idea as a realistic possibility—highlighting different communities that have already experimented with the concept—rather than a romantic radical fantasy. In fact, the Ontario government just finished the first phase of a basic income pilot project in Hamilton, with plans to launch in Brantford, Brant County, Lindsay and Thunder Bay.

bad at comforting

I held my mother as she cried today. I sat next to her on the couch and reached my arms all around, expecting her to brush me away as usual. She didn't, and in those moments her body felt so much smaller than mine. The numbness which I had been cloaking myself with against the all day attacks suddenly cracked. As it slipped away I felt a raw anger pointed at our attacker--the source of mom's tears.
I leaned in and squeezed tighter the harder she sobbed, the more she apologized for what she could've, should've, would've done to put an end to all this. For a second I let myself imagine that I was transferring my numbness, that perhaps in exchange for her pain I could loan her some of my indifference. But in this equation, it was only the misery that had been multiplied.

I've always felt unskilled when it comes to providing comfort in times of grief; I freeze, I get awkward. I either cant't say the right thing or say too much. That in turn makes me feel more guilty. But no matter what, there are few worse feelings than watching your mother fall apart and knowing there's nothing you can do to stop it.

Dis(tress)patches from the Archives

I have this habit of thinking in third person.

“As she adjusted some more books on the shelf, the framed picture caught her attention and she wondered how it could ever be that her eyes had once looked so bright and innocent.”

I don’t know when it started, but sometime during my coming up I began to describe the situations around me as they unfolded—to myself, in my own head, as a witness.

I think it developed from all the books I read. I think it developed as a necessary device for a kid who always spent more time in her head than out.

Now, I think it’s a coping mechanism, or a subconscious escapism. Either way, it somehow gives me a momentary disassociation, or perhaps a hyper-association that quickly displaces the me.

“She shut the door behind her and scampered to her bed, a sense of defeat in each step. The warm damp air of another summer night flowed through the window and she knew she would somehow have to force herself to sleep. She lay in the soft lump of her blankets distracted by thoughts of just how many crickets chirped from below…”

I write this way too. Even when I tell my stories, sharp memories that still make me feel the way they did when they happened. Sometimes I wonder if even my tendency to turn my “I”s into “she”s and “we”s is not a good enough disguise. Its like maybe I don’t know how to belong to a story in a way that doesn’t betray it. That doesn’t betray me.

“A loud, clunky bang below suddenly seized the moment, and her eyes darted up from the page. Heart banging out of her chest, the book fell to the floor as she stood up to throw herself against the door.”

Truth be told, I don’t even want to be in the stories.

(2014)

Talk like an egyptian... Or Walk

"This is Christine, my Egyptian friend!"

It's an introduction I have heard since I was a little girl. Since that age when kids started to get wind of the world outside of their home, school, neighbourhood, city; when they've started to absorb the mythology handed down to them through TV and parents/caregivers. It's the preface that prepares me for the inevitable questions about riding on camels, or the incredulous remarks about the corpses of others (i.e mummies).

"Egypt, I've always wanted to visit," the gentleman declares with a  smile.

Ah yes, one of the most common reactions I get, which notifies me right away that the person who has made this claim has clearly never visited--or even spoken to anyone who has.

"...the pyramids, how are they? I've always been amazed by them..."

And I have always been amazed by how unimaginative people's references are as soon as they hear mention of a place they've only ever heard about in mythical ways. I give in, stitching together an equally generic response--replete with cheesy pun--about how no matter how many times you see them, they never get old.

"I've been everywhere--from Sri Lanka to Jordan to Samoa--but Egypt and The Serengeti are still on my list."

At this, my interest returns. Surely someone this well-travelled, with enough familiarity of places the average Canadian snowbird wouldn't normally consider, might have a slightly more nuanced view than that offered by movies like The Mummy.

"Do you speak the language?"--and before I could answer-- "Say something in egyptian!"

I pause and consider my options. It would be so much easier to let this man babble on about the mythical Egypt he has seen in movies, and besides, I'm starting to grow weary. Acting as ambassador to a place I myself am hardly familiar enough with is tiring. Being "the first (second, or third) Egyptian I've ever met!" is diminishing. I don't want to perform the "subaltern stereotype squasher" role into perpetuity. But a huge part of me understands that staying quiet and letting the lazy stereotypes get swapped around is fraught with its own dangers.

***

Earlier, a friend of a friend is delighted to learn that I have just returned from Cairo.

"My mom is going there with a bunch of her friends in a few months. I'm so jealous."

I smile and say something in agreement. I imagine what it would be like if my own mother did things like travel the world with her friends. The idea comforts me, though I know the likelihood of it playing out in reality is slim.

"...Yeah they're going on a whole tour of the area. Jordan, Egypt, Jerusalem..."

The warm thought bubble suddenly bursts and I find myself biting back the urge to launch into a diatribe about the Israeli occupation. I stay quiet, and the shame from that nestles itself into the heart of my conscience, where it resurfaces in this moment of exchange.

***

I am in the middle of correcting this man, of explaining the difference between Egyptian and Arabic, of clarifying that I am not a Muslim and that not all Egyptians are, of debunking his cartoonish version of a vivid place fresh in my memory, when he says it:

"Can you walk like an Egyptian?'

***

Dis[tress]patches

The uncertainty of it all is the most stressful part.

You could be in the clutches of a deep, comfortable sleep when the terrifying shrieks yank you right back. The screaming is soon accompanied by wailing and for a brief, dizzying moment you wonder if perhaps you haven't awoke at all. Perhaps you have been thrust into a nightmare; except somewhere in your consciousness you recognize this brand of chaos. You try to ignore it at first, try to shut your eyes and even put a pillow over your head. This pathetic attempt at disassociation only makes the swelling combination of foolish curiosity and illogical guilt grow larger. Soon they have taken full control of your body--you are up and reaching for the controls on the tower fan, switching off the liberating gusts of cool air and sonic relief. Now you can make out the ramble more clearly. Curse words are hurled in a  staccato, rapid-fire assault at no target in particular. You swallow back a clod of misplaced guilt, the kind that witnesses to traumatic events and survivors are left with, despite knowing they could have done nothing to alter destiny. You know better than to step into the line of fire. Besides, all desire to perform the noble sacrificial lamb role have evaporated over time and have been replaced by a collective resentment. There's nothing you can do but save yourself, you try to repeat to your distracted mind. The booming thumps of footsteps made heavy with rage get louder--it's coming for you. You throw your full weight behind the door--and your faith in its ability to keep the threat at bay...

Insomniac Soliloquies to Self

it's 4 am and i find myself wide awake, twisting from side to side as though the furtive movements will eventually tire me out before finally giving in and sitting up. i turn on the lamp next to my bed--touch activated, a novelty in the 1980s it clearly dates to--and reach for my phone and the book I am halfway through reading. of course, this is purely for symbolic purposes, or maybe an incorrigible habit i adopted before my phone became an extra limb.

after distractedly shuffling through a montage of facebook videos-- old couples on vacation, white people calling the cops on black people for absurd reasons, a vice video about something to do with a fake fashion show (or restaurant, or drug, etc.)...

suddenly i am fixated by the image of a boy, no older than 14, whose hands are expertly binding together slats of timber using what appears to be a natural twill of some sort. he builds a cylindrical wall around a hole he has already dug out, his hands moving efficiently and gracefully, creating the perfect structure. with the miracle of time-lapse he soon creates a wheel out of hollow logs carefully woven together, and a mechanism attached to the wheel which allows for several "cups" to successively dispense water from the water reserve below. voila-- a well.

thinking about this boy's masterful use of hands, the aptitude with which he designed and created this whole thing machine before my very eyes, i hear that tormenting voice in the back of my head and i start to wonder. if a 5 minute time-lapsed video of my skill was to be made, what would it show? beyond the soup of cliche resume points, like "team player" (am i really?), or "excellent communication skills" (they're okay), what real skills do i have?...

somewhere between wondering what college program i can quickly enroll in to overcome this, and blaming my parents for not forcing me to study something more tangible, more valued in "the real world", i slip back into sleep mode...

Hello, Again...

It's been exactly one week since I came back from my short trip to Cairo.

While away, I

• saw more sides to the city (I once thought I knew intimately) than I have in my decades of going back combined
• fell in love with Cairo
• drank more 3aseer asab (sugarcane juice) & street food than I ever thought my stomach could handle
• experienced freedom there in ways I have never been able to--at times it felt borrowed, or too good to be true
• fell out of love with Cairo
• remembered what it was like to want to write, instead of feel guilty over the fact that I should want to write but have no desire to
• didn't get to see the pyramids, but came to peace with the fact that they've been there for at least a few thousand years, and will likely be there when I return...

In the week since I have been here, I

• caught a bad cold that was probably not as bad as it seemed, but seemed to conveniently match my mood since returning
• finally received my delayed luggage--though, truth be told, I was low-key hoping I would never have to see it again (i.e. deal with more clothes than I already have)
•  have felt more compelled than ever to regularly write, and perhaps return to the blog world
• thought about all of the ways I can get back out of this city
• come to terms with the reality that Toronto isn't all that bad after all, and I should probably work on changing my perspective

So let's give this thing another try, shall we?

The Airplane Boys: Born to Be VISUALS

BORN TO BE

The Airplane Boys

Director, Editor and D.O.P: Warren Credo

Produced by Stampede Management

Styling and Still Photography: Justin Create

Production Assistance: Justin Li, Kyle Credo, Kenny Enrera, Brian Nagallo, Jamie Fernandes and Chris Drakes

I was actually awed by the sheer art of this film. Amazing video for a great song off of The Airplane Boys' "Where Have You Been" tape.
Enjoy!

Download it at:
http://www.theairplaneboys.com/

The Sacred Oath of un-Hurt

I can almost see the words spewing out of my mouth before I can even stop and think about them first. The strange combination of anger, unchecked emotion, and a spiritual exhaustion that can only come from years of bottling everything up. Accusations come flying out, and my unjust unappreciation takes centre-stage. The messages become muddled into one long torrent of bitterness. They cease to make sense, cease to even be true, but what do I care-- I just want their crushing impact to be felt.
How could you look someone in the eye who you love and deliver stab after stab to their soul? Simple: by consciously trying to avoid listening to the own vile messages escaping your mouth.
How could you pretend their quickly appearing tears mean nothing, instead choosing to dismiss them as reflections of your own hurt and angst?
Most importantly, how could you bear the weight of defeating one of the only people in the world who's ever cared for you. The person who has had your back, even when you found yourself spineless. The person who watched from afar, but never too far, allowing you to be who you are, and then loving you for it.
How could you betray the most sacred oath made in a relationship between two broken people who found in eachother their own missing pieces: the promise you each took never to do to eachother what others had already done far too often...

How do you regain the sense of lost love and trust, if you ashamedly cower in your own solitude, trying in vain to convince yourself that you don't need them anyway...