A Practical Policy

Darah: The radicalisation of the Niger Delta political space has had its effect on the themes and rhetoric of works by the region’s writers, activist thinkers, and cultural mediators. I am currently working on a book of essays on Niger Delta literature as a follow-up to my recently edited anthology, Radical Essays on Nigerian Literatures: Volume I which appeared in 2008.

For the past 20 years or so, I have written passionately about the situation in the Niger Delta region. I have done so through the mass media and in public lectures and discourses. The common theme that runs through my interventions all these years is that a revolutionary process is unfolding in the oil-rich but economically and politically colonised Niger Delta. The manifestations of this political upheaval are more visible in the theatres of politics and movements of change or self-determination.

The vision and trajectory of these movements and actions are to promote a radical change in Nigeria’s political configuration so that the nations and peoples who are victims of local colonialism can emancipate themselves. The nations and peoples of the Niger Delta are determined to enjoy the freedoms and privileges that should flow from their resource endowment and strategic location in the world’s economy. My position is that the themes and idioms of this liberationist endeavour are reflected in the arts and literatures produced in the region. This address aims to highlight the manner this politics is reflected and refracted.

…

In his edited book, Before I Am Hanged: Ken Saro-Wiwa, Literature, Politics and Dissent (2004) Professor Onookome Okome observed that the “tales coming out of the Niger Delta are not evidence of dead dreams. Rather, they are examples of dreams which the suffering people are trying to make into reality”. From the genres and generations of literature that I have reviewed in this address, we can confirm our tentative judgement that the Niger Delta is both the locomotive of the Nigerian economy as well as the centre of gravity of the best traditions of the nation’s literatures and letters.

___________________________________________________________

Professor Darah is of the Department of English and Literary Studies, Delta State University, Abraka. This is a slightly revised version of the address he delivered at the 2008 Convention of the Society of Nigerian Theatre Artistes at the University of Benin.

Because intellectualism is for everyone and creativity is rebellious – at ZNet:

This is a call for the left and for revolutionaries to break with old paradigms of education and argument and to take art, or culture, seriously. To use it to wake people up, to communicate, to argue, to show people how beautiful that other world we are proposing, is.

The Play – prose poem by Alaa Kadhim al-Jabiri

“I beg your pardon my dear readers I did not mention the name of the play which is ‘The Mass Graves’.”

Emergency Clinic – poetry by Adrienne Rich

The Briefing – fiction by Arundhati Roy

Below are parts 3 and 4 of a six part section on James Wood’s April New Yorker article on George Orwell, “A Fine Rage.” The full version of “What Would Not Do To Say – The ‘Cleansing’ of George Orwell” will appear as part of an expanded version of “Fiction Gutted – The Establishment and the Novel” in paper form in the Liberation Lit anthology forthcoming this summer. The parts of “What Would Not Do To Say” that may be found only in Liberation Lit are “A Real Shove From Above”; “Establishment Innuendo”; “Moving Beyond Class Structure”; and “Valuing the Work of Orwell.” See below: “Establishment PR,” “The Sinister Fact,” and an appendix. [full article, all 6 parts, now available online] Continue reading What Would Not Do To Say – The “Cleansing” of George Orwell

by Mark Engler
ZNet / Foreign Policy In Focus

Tapping into a long tradition of politicized science fiction, the young, New-York-based filmmaker Alex Rivera has brought to theaters a movie that reflects in news ways on the disquieting realities of the global economy. Sleep Dealer, his first feature film, has opened in New York and Los Angeles, and will show in 25 cities throughout the country this spring. 

Set largely on the U.S.-Mexico border, Sleep Dealer depicts a world in which borders are closed but high-tech factories allow migrant workers to plug their bodies into the network to provide virtual labor to the North. The drama that unfolds in this dystopian setting delves deeps into issues of immigration, labor, water rights, and the nature of sustainable development.

Rivera’s film drew attention by winning two awards at Sundance–the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award and the Alfred P. Sloan Prize for the best film focusing on science and technology. Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan wrote of the movie, “Adventurous, ambitious and ingeniously futuristic, Sleep Dealer… combines visually arresting science fiction done on a budget with a strong sense of social commentary in a way that few films attempt, let alone achieve.” 

Rivera spoke with Foreign Policy In Focus senior analyst Mark Engler by phone from Los Angeles, where the director was attending the local premier of his movie.

Z Magazine Net Briefs – “Petitioning PEN”:

From penpetition.blogspot.com and kingwenclas.blogspot.com comes the news that PEN American Center in New York, an organization to protect and defend dissenting, outcast, and marginalized writers, has virtually shut out impoverished writers. The centerpiece of the PEN American Center is its gala, which occurs every year in late April. The funds are raised by wealthy attendees—$766,625 gross receipts in 2007. (Tickets are usually in the neighborhood of $1,000 a head.) The expense to hold this swanky aristocratic affair was $247,773 in 2007. PEN holds other literary affairs every year—such as the International Writers Festival, staged at the mind-boggling expense of $536,005. PEN promotes its festival as an “answer to American cultural insularity.” Of the $111,000 monetary awards to individual writers in 2007, the top three were: $40,000 to Philip Roth, who’s published by both Houghton-Mifflin and Random House; $35,000 to Columbia professor Janna Levin, published by Alfred Knopf; $10,000 to James Carroll, published by Houghton-Mifflin. By giving grants to authors who should be fully paid by their giant publishers, PEN American Center is in effect subsidizing billion-dollar book conglomerates. Various writers are petitioning PEN, asking people to sign the following:

“We the undersigned petition PEN American Center in New York to democratize their organization by appointing, as Trustees, not solely writers who are entwined with book companies owned by media monopolies. This includes writers who’ve dissented against the established U.S. literary mainstream. We ask all writers, from all backgrounds, to sign this Petition, including current PEN members and Trustees, in the interest of realizing the PEN mission, voiced by PEN’s Larry Siems, of ‘bridging intellectual chasms and cultural divides’.”

A Writer’s Violent End, and His Activist Legacy – by Patricia Cohen, NYT:

[Ken] Saro-Wiwa, a popular author who helped create a peaceful mass movement on behalf of the Ogoni people, was executed in November 1995 along with eight other environmental and human rights activists on what many contended were trumped-up murder charges. His body was burned with acid and thrown in an unmarked grave.

PEN, an international association of writers dedicated to defending free expression, along with Guernica, the online literary magazine, sponsored the panel with Mr. Patterson, Mr. Ndibe and Ken Wiwa, Mr. Saro-Wiwa’s son, to discuss Mr. Saro-Wiwa’s literary and political legacy.

Fourteen years have passed. General Abacha has died, and Mr. Saro-Wiwa has had a proper burial, but the circumstances surrounding the nine executions, along with related incidents of brutal attacks and torture, are getting another hearing. This month the Wiwa family’s lawsuit against Royal Dutch Shell over its role in those events goes to trial in federal court in Manhattan.

“We feel that Shell’s fingerprints are all over,” Ken Wiwa told the audience. “Clearly Shell financed and provided logistical support.”

Among the accusations are that Shell employees were present when two witnesses were offered bribes to testify against Mr. Saro-Wiwa, said Jennie Green, a senior lawyer at the nonprofit Center for Constitutional Rights, which is representing the family. She said Mr. Saro-Wiwa’s brother Owens has also stated that Shell’s managing director, Brian Anderson (now retired), told him, “If you call off the campaign, maybe we can do something for your brother.”

Under American law you don’t have to be the one who “tightened the noose” to be found guilty, Ms. Green said.

…

During his imprisonment Mr. Saro-Wiwa said that he often envied Western writers “who can peacefully practice their craft.” Yet he also recognized that wasn’t his path. As he wrote in 1993, “The writer cannot be a mere storyteller, he cannot be a mere teacher; he cannot merely X-ray society’s weaknesses, its ills, its perils, he or she must be actively involved shaping its present and its future.”

See also: Ten Years On, Nigeria’s Ogoni Minority Mark Saro-Wiwa’s Death

The man with the Mau Mau spirit
Remembering Bantu Mwaura

Shailja Patel

Pambazuka News

Poet and performer Shailja Patel celebrates the life of Bantu Mwaura (1969-2009) – Kenyan artist, activist and academic – through a series of reminiscences about what he meant to different people. Mwaura, husband of Susan and father of Makeba and Me Katilili, died on 26 April. ‘He was expression without hindrance; the way Africa used to be. He left behind power and energy; people speaking. In his dreadlocks and movements and smile and dress, Bantu carried an entire people.’]

‘It’s what we do at a very determined individual level that changes what happens in whatever field we work in.’
Bantu Mwaura, interviewed by Doreen Struahs and David Paul Mavia, 2006

‘Nothing was usual about him. He stirred people to thought. You could not ignore his presence and sense of things. A level of responsibility of the highest order. A passionate desire to think clearly and to be useful to all. A certain level of service; when I saw him I felt things were being taken care of, in freedom and resistance so powerfully merged. You would be tempted to ask him, which goddess asked you to do things this way? We should follow her ways.’
Philo Ikonya, president, PEN (Kenya chapter)

‘See, Bantu was not just all argument; he was a complex human being with an even more complex personality that perhaps society saw too harshly, or chose to not to see at all, because what he said disturbed us.’
Mbugua wa-Mungai, Ohio State University, Centre For Folklore Studies

The first time I met Bantu Mwaura, a few years ago, he showed me, unprompted, his cellphone display: A photo of his wife, Susan, and two children. When he told me his daughters’ names: Makeba (after Miriam Makeba) and Me Katilili (Kenyan woman who led her Giriama people in armed struggle against the British in 1913), I teased him: ‘No pressure there, huh? No burdens of history on two gorgeous children?’
He laughed, his face alight with love and pride in his family.

The burdens of history caught up with Bantu Mwaura four days ago. We still do not have a definitive, trustworthy account of how he met his death. Kenyan press reports that his body was found on Monday morning, on a path of the Nairobi housing estate where he lived. An autopsy was carried out on Tuesday, where a pathologist from the Independent Medico-Legal Unit (a Kenyan human rights organisation) was present alongside the government pathologist. The certified cause of death was ‘chemical poisoning’. I am told that ‘investigations continue’ into how the poison was administered – and by whom.

Bantu’s voice unspools in my head as I write this. With all his fierce righteousness, honest rage, passionate scholarship, loathing of hypocrisy, love of true art, uncompromising rigour of standards, commitment to making good work, activist power, courage of spirit, and largeness of heart. Continue reading Remembering Bantu Mwaura – by Shailja Patel

See Shelley Ettinger’s May Day themed short story “Herb and Leo Are at It Again” at Liberation Lit: on unions, organizing, immigration, and friendship… See also recent cartoons by Marina Weidemanne and others by Carol Simpson.

Which Side Are You On?
Rebel Diaz

Which Side Are You On?
Dropkick Murphys

Which Side Are You On?
Natalie Merchant

Which Side Are You On?
Billy Bragg

Which Side Are You On?
Pete Seeger

Which Side Are You on?
Florence Reese
(“an American social activist, poet, and folksong writer. Born in Sharps Chapel, Tennessee the daughter and wife of coal miners, she is best known for the song, “Which Side Are You On?“ written in 1931 during a strike by the United Mine Workers of America in which her husband, Sam Reece, was an organizer.”)

Come all of you good workers,
Good news to you I’ll tell,
Of how that good old union
Has come in here to dwell.

cho: Which side are you on?
     Which side are you on?
     Which side are you on?
     Which side are you on?

My daddy was a miner,
And I’m a miner’s son,
And I’ll stick with the union,
Till every battle’s won.

They say in Harlan County,
There are no neutrals there.
You’ll either be a union man,
Or a thug for J.H. Blair.

Oh, workers can you stand it?
Oh, tell me how you can.
Will you be a lousy scab,
Or will you be a man ?

Don’t scab for the bosses,
Don’t listen to their lies.
Us poor folks haven’t got a chance,
Unless we organize.

 

Interview and song – video

Detroit video tribute

 

Joe Emersberger’s story Segundo’s Revenge is an accomplished and valuable story. It’s artistic and readable, informative and educational. Though pointed and factual in urgent ways, it exhibits as well ambiguity of life and art. The story exemplifies quality propaganda and quality art, which writers on the left have sometimes noted can coexist well, contrary to what liberals and conservatives often decry or dismiss. Stories are invariably propagandistic or political in various ways. What makes Segundo’s Revenge special for progressive social change is that it works both as propaganda and as art, both implicitly and explicitly. Liberal works often function as propaganda mainly implicitly, though sometimes explicitly in part. Liberals often claim that overt propaganda is neither desirable nor aesthetic.

 

Not all art needs ambiguity to be aesthetic – this story happens to have it as a secondary or tertiary feature, some might argue primary. Segundo’s Revenge is artistic as well beyond ambiguity; for one, it is aesthetic in ways directly tied into the norms of the story and its structure – about which a great deal could be shown. Overall, the story is full of life, an end in itself, and a great tool. Paradoxically, the story’s utility both enhances the art (including the aesthetics) and makes the art often disappear in the face of its normative and educational power. Segundo’s Revenge is complex but simple. It is a pointed and purposeful and agitating creature, a remarkable work of art and education, both welcoming and working. Continue reading On liberatory fiction and “Segundo’s Revenge” by Joe Emersberger

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in his critical work Decolonising the Mind (1986) below. His masterpiece novel Wizard of the Crow (2006) goes hand in glove with it. Wizard of the Crow is the equal of any of the Victorian novel greats.

In the Preface of Decolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ notes:

“Inevitably, essays of this nature may carry a holier-than-thou attitude or tone. I would like to make it clear that I am writing as much about myself as about anybody else. The present predicaments of Africa are often not a matter of personal choice: they arise from an historical situation. Their solutions are not so much a matter of personal decision as that of fundamental social transformation of the structures of our societies starting with a real break with imperialism and its internal ruling allies. Imperialism and its comprador alliances in Africa can never never develop the continent.”

The University of Iowa is home to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, one of the leading, or the leading, graduate creative writing centers in the US, nationally and internationally renowned. But let’s consider all the creative writing programs across the US and the faculty and grad students, and let’s think of all the literary journals, and let’s consider in addition all the novelists in the US, and the publishers. How many explicit investigative novels about the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, for example, have been written? And published? How many have been taught? Virtually none. The novel is a popular vehicle. The US conquest of Iraq, of greater Oila, is one of the great crimes and calamities of the time for which the US is responsible. Academics, intellectuals have an obligation to solicit, foster, produce, publish, teach, and otherwise disseminate such work. Essentially, they don’t. That’s a culture that is complicit.

Historian Paul Street recounts in “Cowardice Pays: Reflections on Academic Abdication and a Paul Krugman Lecture in Iowa City“:

“Academic co-optation” is not just a “cynical” radicals’ fantasy. It really exists across the middle and upper reaches of “higher-education,” where engaged radical sentiments and activism are commonly seen as naïve and un-professional and where cowardice can pay quite handsomely. And if it can explain the conservatism and indifference of state university professors deep in the heartland, imagine how far it can go with a heralded, Nobel Prize-winning Princeton academic who also holds down cherished column space at the nation’s leading newspaper of record?

Brute realism – not the end all be all in art but sometimes useful:

“Matteo Garrone’s “Gomorrah” – The Mafia Without Moralizing” by Kim Nicolini via Counterpunch, excerpted:

Shot on location with non-professional actors and stories based on actual events, Gomorrah brings the Mafia Myth down to its ugly reality. The film integrates a number of stories: thirteen-year old Toto, who is being recruited by the mafia; Don Ciro, who delivers money to families of imprisoned mob members; Marco and Ciro, two young men who worship Scarface; Pasquale the tailor who works in a mob-run sewing factory; and Roberto who facilitates the mafia’s exploits in waste management. Through these intersecting stories, their relation to the environment in which the movie is filmed, and the spare cinematography, Gomorrah shows the dark, gritty underbelly of capitalism and its relation to organized crime. There is nothing flashy here: no artful montages like the famous baptism scene in The Godfather, no self-reflexive storytelling like we get in Goodfellas. What we get instead is brutally claustrophobic documentary realism that refuses to distance us from the ugliness that plays out on the screen. Continue reading Brute Realism: Exposing Myth

At Stanford – the announcement – more info at press page – includes the familar quote on politics in lit by Stendhal, with discouraging implications  that are belied by the quote continuation, which is virtually never noted  – see below, excerpted from Fiction Gutted – The Establishment and the Novel, Part Four: Continue reading “Politics and the Novel” conference

 

From The Vassals Handbook – Lesson  sixteen – Profit U

 

So I wrote a speech to end all speeches for our beloved President of the Incorporated Estates of Earth, Al O’Toole. He delivered it to the rebels. It did not go over well. I am not surprised. The truly intransigent cannot be reached. We go through the motions, as required.

I must admit I was underwhelmed by my meeting with the President of the IEE. It made me think I am not the right man for the job of Official Sloganeer. I longed to return to my first true love: teaching. I recalled fondly my years of joy as Terminator of History at Rockview Terminal. Who knows what connections exist between our thoughts and the actions of the universe? About that time I was offered the Presidency of the newest university on earth: Profit U. Good ole PU.

PU is founded in this time of psycho-socio-economic crisis with the intent of restoring faith in the system of the IEE. I accepted the Presidency of PU, stipulating that I continue work on the epic in progress, the how-to book for good loyal consumers of the IEE, The Vassals Handbook. The Executors Board of PU readily agreed. IEE President Al O’Toole wished me well and said he would sign up for a distance learning course if I were to lead one. Of course I promised to come up with something. So here I am, newly installed as the first President of PU. The school cheers ring in my ears. Let’s go PU! Here we go PU! We Are PU! We’re Number One! PU! Number One!

PU! PU! PU!

The rosy-fingered dawn of the new day breaks at PU.

Profit U. We are tasked to challenge Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the other greats for intellectual and moral supremacy in the IEE. We are charged by the leaders of the IEE to take on their traditional roles as the bastions of all that is wise and good. We are charged to lead the IEE through crisis high and low. What ambitious young man or woman would not want to attend PU? The question answers itself.

 

 

“In a word, the revolutionary critic does not believe that we can have art without craftsmanship; what he does believe is that, granted the craftsmanship, our aim should be to make art serve man as a thing of action and not man serve art as a thing of escape. 

– V. F. Calverton (George Goetz), The Liberation of American Literature

 

James Wood opens his essay “The Tunnel,” a review of John Wray’s novel Lowboy, by claiming:

“Fiction is at once real and imaginary. Not real at one moment and flickeringly illusory the next, like the fading pulse of a dying man, but both at once, as if a ghost had a pulse. Fiction is one giant pseudo-statement, a fact-checker’s nightmare. Like one of our own lies, it can be completely “wrong” about the world and yet completely revelatory – completely “right” – about the psychology of the person issuing the error. Thus, one of fiction’s most natural areas of inquiry, from Cervantes to Murakami, concerns states of confusion, error, or madness, in which a character’s crazy fictions become intertwined with the novel’s calmer fictions, and the reader’s purchase on the reliable world becomes intermittently tenuous.”

Wood’s emphasis here – a kind of tautological claim, that the very nature of fiction “at once real and imaginary…as if a ghost had a pulse” acts to produce in readers an “intermittently tenuous purchase on the reliable world” – functions to misrepresent or mask his implied observation that fiction as a curious mix of fact and make-believe allows readers a mostly reliable grip on the world, even when involving a character who also mixes fact and make-believe.  Continue reading The Vitiation of American Literature

Some roundup comments on establishment and liberatory fiction – The Kindly Ones, 2666, Les Miserables, Wizard of the Crow… Continue reading Stars of the Lit World