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A Continent for the Taking

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to… read more

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Commentary & Reviews · Interviews

Copyright The New York Times

If this were a perfect world, everybody would see the photographer James Nachtwey’s astonishing shows at the United Nations and at 401 Projects in the West Village.

Medics with a wounded marine in Iraq, included in “The Sacrifice,” a show at 401 Projects in the West Village.

Sadly, as Mr. Nachtwey knows, this isn’t a perfect world, a point he brings home in the work shown here. “Inferno,” the title of a 1999 book of the photographs he shot in Kosovo, Rwanda and other hellholes, aptly describes the horror in these two exhibitions.

For years, in Time magazine and elsewhere, he has demonstrated the good uses to which art can be put. Since 2000, he has crisscrossed Southeast Asia and Africa, documenting the resurgence of tuberculosis related to the global AIDS epidemic. (The show at the Visitors Center at the United Nations was timed to coincide with World TB Day last Saturday.) He has also photographed the war wounded in Iraq, where he himself was injured by a grenade a few years ago, and traveled with Medevac units to field hospitals and emergency rooms.

The series of Iraq pictures, some of which were first published in National Geographic, are called “The Sacrifice.” The title refers to the medics and physicians who treat everyone, including wounded insurgents. The insurgents are given goggles so they can’t see and later seek out to kill the Iraqi translators helping the medics, for which reason Mr. Nachtwey doesn’t photograph translators. He does photograph an Iraqi child mangled in a suicide attack: the boy is screaming beneath his oxygen mask.

The title also refers to American soldiers whose work daily forces them to play Russian roulette with roadside bombs, soldiers regularly sacrificed in the war. Mr. Nachtwey devised a collage of photos (grainy, black-and-white, shot under the fluorescent glare of military trauma centers) suggesting the choreographed chaos in which American doctors tend to failing patients. The last of the pictures, a mordant coda, shows a dead soldier on a gurney under a blanket, a chaplain’s arm reaching into the frame and holding up a dog tag.

It matters not a little that Mr. Nachtwey is such an artful composer of images, that his work, although almost too painful to look at, is so graphic and eloquent. He snaps a picture just at the moment that the arms of rushing, dodging medics trading scalpels and scissors form a perfect zigzag of thrusting lines ending with a nurse pressing a fist into a patient’s head wound — the punctum of the image, to borrow Roland Barthes’s term. The nurse’s gesture has a strangeness that carries something of the quality of grace.

He finds the same encapsulating detail, concentrated by simple geometry, in a photograph of two doctors. (You just see their arms.) They’re gingerly examining the spine of a rail-thin woman with AIDS; she is sitting on the floor and facing away from Mr. Nachtwey so that only her bare left foot, leathered, turned toward the camera, reveals her advanced age. One of the doctors presses his index finger into her back — another memorable motion, subtly conveying care and dignified by the stately, condensed order of the picture.

Beauty is a vexed matter in scenes of suffering, cruelty and death. The difference between exploitation and public service comes down to whether the subject of the image aids the ego of the photographer more than the other way around. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Along with bravery and perseverance, Mr. Nachtwey’s pictorial virtue makes him a model war photographer. He doesn’t mix up his priorities. His goal is to bear witness, because somebody must, and his pictures, devised to infuriate and move people to action, are finally about us, and our concern or lack of it, at least as much they are about him and his obvious talents.

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Posted at 6:27 PM · Comments (0)

An Interview with Garry Winogrand

Copyright Barbara Diamonstein

Garry Winogrand is one of the most important photographers at work in America today. His sophisticated snapshot-aesthetic pictures celebrate ordinary events, and transform them with precise timing and framing into astute visual commentaries on modern life.

Barbaralee Diamonstein: Garry, the New School is not unfamiliar ground to you. As I recall, you studied here for a short time in the early part of your career.

Garry Winogrand: Yes. It might have been 1949.

D: You began to photograph just at that period when you were less then twenty years old. How did it all begin?

W: Cameras intrigued me.

D: You started out studying painting, though, didn’t you?

W: Yeah, well, cameras always were seductive. And then a darkroom became available, and that’s when I stopped doing anything else.

D: How does a darkroom “become available”?

W: There was a camera club at Columbia, where I was taking a painting course. And when I went down, somebody showed me how to use the stuff. That’s all. I haven’t done anything else since then, It was as simple as that. I fell into the business.

D: You started out supporting yourself with commercial work — advertising photography and such things.

W: Yes, and magazine work, industrial work. I was a hired gun, more or less.

D: Why did you decide to give all that up?

W: I enjoyed it until I stopped. You could travel and get around. I can’t really explain why, I just didn’t want to do it anymore.

D: That wasn’t very long agoà

W: Well, it was 1969 when I got out of it, more or less.

D: And then you turned to teaching, as well as your own work?

W: Well, it was strange, because the phone rang and a teaching job turned up that sounded interesting. And I always did my own work. The Animals and a lot of Public Relations were done while I was doing commercial work.

D: When you refer to Public Relations, you’re really talking about the title of a book that describes a very extensive body of material you started in 1969 on a Guggenheim Fellowship. During that period, you decided to photograph the effect of the media on events. And you studied ritual public events that very often were planned for the benefit of those who were recording them. What did you find out about that period, and what were you trying to tell us in your photographs?

W: I don’t think anything happens without the press, one way or the other. I think it’s all done for it. You saw it start, really, with Martin Luther King in Birmingham. He did the bus thing. And I don’t think anything that followed would have happened if the press hadn’t paid attention. As far as my end of it, photographing, goes, all I’m interested in is pictures, frankly. I went to events, and it would have been very easy to just illustrate that idea about the relationships between the press and the event, you know. But I felt that from my end, I should deal with the thing itself, which is the event. I pretty much functioned like the media itself.

D: But weren’t you the media then?

W: I was one of them, yeah, absolutely. But maybe I was a little slyer, sometimes.

D: How so?

W: Well, at times people in the press were also useful to me, you know.

D: As subjects?

W: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

D: I’m reminded of a picture of Murray Kempton and Norman Mailer in that series at Mailer’s 50th birthday party, that has been widely reproduced and discussed in critical essays. Are any of those events ever held just for fun or for the sheer relief of the participants? Are they always done to promote an idea, a cause, a person, or a product?

W: In my experience, I think it’s the latter. I mean, people are going to have a good time, you know. One can go have a good time at these big openings in museums. And people go to have a good time. But the thing has another purpose.

D: What is the larger purpose?

W: In the case of museums, it’s always got to do with money, people who donate and things like that. And I believe a certain kind of interest has to be demonstrated. The museums want large crowds coming to the shows — it’s the same thing. It’s hype. Absolutely. But there’s nothing evil about it.

D: Are you really saying that it’s marketing?

W: A lot of it is. And then, of course, you have politics, the Vietnam war and all that monkey business. There are all kinds of reasons. At every one of those demonstrations in the late Sixties about the Vietnam war, you could guarantee there’d be a series of speeches. The ostensible purpose was to protest the war. But then somebody came up and gave a black power speech, usually Black Muslims, then. And then you’d have a women’s rights speech. It was terrible to listen to these things.

D: How was it to look at?

W: Well, it was interesting; it’s an interesting photographic problem. But if I was doing it as a job, I think I’d have to get paid extra. If I ever hear “Power to the people” again, I’llà I just found out that John Lennon wrote that song, “All we are saying is give peace a chance.” I couldn’t believe it. I thought it was terrible; I hated that song. They used to bring out the Pete Seeger wind-up toy to sing it. Tiresome.

D: I hope that what I’m going to bring up won’t be tiresome for you, tooà The term “street photography” and your name have been synonymous for quite some time. But the streets are not the only place where you’ve worked over the last twenty-five years or so. You’ve worked in zoos and aquaria, Metropolitan Museum of Art openings, Texas rodeos. There must be some common thread that runs through all of your work. How would you describe it?

W: Well, I’m not going to get into that. I think that those kind of distinctions and lists of titles like “street photographer” are so stupid.

D: How would you prefer to describe yourself?

W: I’m a photographer, a still photographer. That’s it.

D: If you don’t like “street photographer,” how do you respond to that other ætiresome phrase’, “snapshot aesthetic”?

W: I knew that was coming. That’s another stupidity. The people who use the term don’t even know the meaning. They use it to refer to photographs they believe are loosely organized, or casually made, whatever you want to call it. Whatever terms you like. The fact is, when they’re talking about snapshots they’re talking about the family album picture, which is one of the most precisely made photographs. Everybody’s fifteen feet away and smiling. The sun is over the viewer’s shoulder. That’s when the picture is taken, always. It’s one of the most carefully made photographs that ever happened. People are just dumb. They misunderstand.

D: That’s an interesting point, particularly coming from someone who takes — or rather, composes and then snaps— lightning-fast shots.

W: I’ll say this, I’m pretty fast with a camera when I have to be. However, I think it’s irrelevant. I mean, what if I said that every photograph I made was set up? From the photograph, you can’t prove otherwise. You don’t know anything from the photograph about how it was made, really. But every photograph could be set up. If one could imagine it, one could set it up. The whole discussion is a way of not talking about photographs.

D: Well, what would be a better way to describe that?

W: See, I don’t think time is involved in how the thing is made. It’s like, “There I was 40,000 feet in the air,” whatever. You’ve got to deal with how photographs look, what’s there, not how they’re made. Even with what camera.

D: So what is really importantà

W: Is the photograph.

D: àis how you organize complex situations or material to make a picture.

W: The picture, right. Not how I do anything. In the end, maybe the correct language would be how the fact of putting four edges around a collection of information or facts transforms it. A photograph is not what was photographed, it’s something else.

D: Does it really not matter what kind of equipment you use?

W: Oh, I know what I like to use myself. I use Leicas, but when I look at the photograph, I don’t ask the photograph questions. Mine or anybody else’s. The only time I’ve ever dealt with that kind of thing is when I’m teaching. You talk about people who are interested in “how.” But when I look at photographs, I couldn’t care less “how.” You see?

D: What do you look for?

W: I look at a photograph. What’s going on? What’s happening, photographically? If it’s interesting, I try to understand why.

D: And how do you expect the viewer to respond to your photographs?

W: I have no expectations. None at all.

D: Well, what do you want to evoke?

W: I have no ideas on that subject. Two people could look at the same flowers and feel differently about them. Why not? I’m not making ads. I couldn’t care less. Everybody’s entitled to their own experience.

D: You describe very complex relationships photographically, in a very sympathetic way, but a very humorous one. Often you do that with juxtaposition, whether in zoos or rodeos or museum celebrations. Let’s talk about your animal project. There, as in so much of your work, juxtapositions and gestures that usually pass unnoticed are very significant. You find them worth recording. Here you were, a city boy, how did you come to do a project that involved spending so much time in zoos? Do animals interest you that much?

W: Well, zoos are always in cities. Where else can they afford them, you know? When I was a kid in New York I used to go to the zoo. I always liked the zoo. I grew up within walking distance of the Bronx Zoo. And then when my first two children were young, I used to take them to the zoo. Zoos are always interesting. And I make pictures. Actually, the animal pictures came about in a funny way. I made a few shots. If you could see those contact sheets, they’re mostly of the kids and maybe a few shots where I’m just playing. And at some point I realized something was going on in some of those pictures, so then I worked at it.

D: Consciously?

W: Yes. Then at some point I realized it made sense as a book. So that’s what happened.

D: How important are humor and irony in your work?

W: I don’t know. See, I don’t get involved, frankly, in that way. When I see something, I know why something’s funny or seems to be funny. But in the end it’s just another picture as far as I’m concerned.

D: When you looked at those contact sheets, you noticed that something was going on. I’ve often wondered how a photographer who takes tens of thousands of photographs — and by now it may even be hundreds of thousands of photographs — keeps track of the material. How do you know what you have, and how do you find it?

W: Badly. That’s all I can say. There’ve been times it’s been just impossible to find a negative or whatever. But I’m basically just a one man operation, and so things get messed up. I don’t have a filing system that’s worth very much.

D: But don’t you think that’s important to your work?

W: I’m sure it is, but I can’t do anything about it. It’s hopeless. I’ve given up. You just go through a certain kind of drudgery every time you have to look for something. I’ve got certain things grouped by now, but there’s a drudgery in finding them. There’s always stuff missing.

D: You sold your very first work to the Museum of Modern Art. How did Edward Steichen come to know your work?

W: I had an agent. When Steichen was doing “The Family of Man”, I went up to the office one day. I think Wayne Miller, who assisted Steichen with “The Family of Man,” was up there and pulled out a bunch of pictures. So I got a message: “Take these pictures, call Steichen, make an appointment and take these pictures up there.” And that’s how I met him.

D: Did the museum buy any?

W: Yes, they bought some for that show.

D: How many did they buy? That was about 1960.

W: I don’t remember.

D: Do you remember how much they paid for them?

W: Ten bucks each. Nobody sold prints then and prices didn’t mean anything. In terms of earning your living, it was a joke.

D: Did you ever expect the public to celebrate the works of photographers either aesthetically or economically?

W: No. First of all, I don’t know if they’re celebrating. But yeah, I’m shocked that I can live pretty well, or reasonably, or make a certain amount of my living, anyway, off of prints. I guess it’s nuts. I don’t believe in it. I never anticipated it; I still don’t believe it.

D: How do you explain the current rise of interest in photography ?

W: Oh, I’m sure some of it has to do with taxes, tax shelter things. There are all kinds of reasons. There are people who like photography; there are people who are worrying about what’s going to happen with the dollar. They want to get anything that seems hard. I don’t know, but I think it’s got to do with economics. Now and then you get somebody who buys a picture because he likes it.

D: What about all those young people who are so interested in photography?

W: They don’t buy pictures. Young people don’t have money to buy pictures. I don’t really have any faith in anybody enjoying photographs in a large enough sense to matter. I think it’s all about finances, on one side. And then there are people who are socially ambitious. If you go back aways, the Sculls, for instance, had a lot of money and they were socially ambitious. If you get an old master, it’s not going to do you any good socially.

D: Besides, you can’t get enough of them.

W: And likewise even French impressionists. So the Sculls bought pop. It was politics, and they moved with it. And I think that could be happening, to some degree, with photography, too. It doesn’t cost as much to do it, either.

D: Then you don’t have much faith in the longevity of the surge of interest, either economic or aesthetic, in photography. Do you see it as something typical of this moment?

W: I don’t know what you mean by aesthetic.

D: Well, we’re assigning the surge of interest to economic reasons, rather than the fact that more and more people think of photography as a legitimate art form.

W: I don’t care how they think of it. Some of these people are acquiring some very good pictures by a lot of different photographers.

D: For whatever motivationà

W: Right. Who cares?

D: But if their interest is economically engendered, then photography could be a short term pursuit.

W: Possibly. I’ll take one day at a time; that’s enough! I have no idea what’s going to happen. Who knows — if they can’t afford to buy a boat, maybe they buy a print. Who knows what happens with their buck?

D: When I was taking your photograph earlier today, with well-intended whimsy I tilted my camera in an attempt to make my own Winogrand. From what I understand, that’s not how it’s done. What is the meaning of the horizontal tilted frame that you often use? And is your camera tilted when you make the picture?

W: It isn’t tilted, no.

D: What are you doing?

W: Well, look, there’s an arbitrary idea that the horizontal edge in a frame has to be the point of reference. And if you study those pictures, you’ll see I use the vertical often enough. I use either edge. If it’s as good as the vertical edge, it’s as good as the horizontal edge. I never do it without a reason. The only ones you’ll see are the ones that work. There’s various reasons for doing it. But they’re not tilted, you see.

D: How do you create that angle, then?

W: You use the vertical edge as the point of reference, instead of the horizontal edge. I have a picture of a beggar, where there’s an arm coming into the frame from the side. And the arm is parallel to the horizontal edge and it makes it work. It’s all games, you know. But it keeps it interesting to do, to play.

D: There is another photograph that has an arm coming in from that edge, in almost Sistine Chapel fashion. That arm and the hand on the end of it are feeding the trunk of an elephant.

W: Oh, you mean the cover of the animal book. That has nothing to do with what I’m talking about now. It’s just that I carry an arm around with me, you know. I wouldn’t be caught dead without that arm!

D: Has teaching affected the way you take photographs?

W: I really don’t know.

D: Do you learn a great deal from your students? Do you have any new ideas, any reactions to their reactions?

W: No, the only thing that happens when I’m teaching is that I hope there are some students out there in the class who will ask questions. Teaching is only interesting because you struggle with trying to talk about photographs, photographs that work, you see. Teaching doesn’t relate to photographing, at least not for me. But now and then I’ll get a student who asks a question that puts me up against the wall and maybe by the end of the semester I can begin to deal with the question. You know what I mean. It’s not easy.

D: Several years ago a student did ask you which qualities in a picture make it interesting instead of dead. And you replied with a telling statement describing what photography is all about. You said you didn’t know what something would look like in a photograph until it had been photographed. A rather simple sentence that you used has been widely identified with you, and that sentence is: “I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.” That was about five or six years ago. And I know there are few things that displease you more than being bored. So I would hope that you have since amended or extended that idea. How would you express it now?

W: Well, I don’t think it was that simple then, either. There are things I photograph because I’m interested in those things. But in the end, you know what I’m saying there. Earlier tonight, I said the photograph isn’t what was photographed, it’s something else. It’s about transformation. And that’s what it is. That hasn’t changed, largely. But it’s not that simple. Let’s put it this way — I photograph what interests me all the time. I live with the pictures to see what that thing looks like photographed. I’m saying the same thing; I’m not changing it. I photograph what interests me. I’m not saying anything different, you see.

D: Well, what is it about a photograph that makes it alive or dead?

W: How problematic it is! It’s got to do with the contention between content and form. Invariably that’s what’s responsible for its energies, its tensions, its being interesting or not. There are photographs that function just to give you information. I never saw a pyramid, but I’ve seen photographs; I know what a pyramid or a sphinx looks like. There are pictures that do that, but they satisfy a different kind of interest. Most photographs are of life, what goes on in the world. And that’s boring, generally. Life is banal, you know. Let’s say that an artist deals with banality. I don’t care what the discipline is.

D: And how do you find the mystery in the banal?

W: Well, that’s what’s interesting. There is a transformation, you see, when you just put four edges around it. That changes it. A new world is created.

D: Does that discreet context make it more descriptive, and by transforming it give it a whole new layer of meaning?

W: You’re asking me why that happens. Aside from the fact of just taking things out of context, I don’t know why. That’s part of a mystery. In a way, a transformation is a mystery to me. But there is a transformation, and that’s fascinating. Just think how minimal somebody’s family album is. But you start looking at one of them, and the word everybody will use is “charming.” Something just happened. It’s automatic, just operating a camera intelligently. You’ve got a lot going for you, you see. By just describing well with it, something happens.

D: There are a number of photographers who have things happen in their work that you have responded to over an extended period of time. Whose work have you found was of importance to, or influenced, yours?

W: Well, we could talk about hope, that’s all. I hope I learned something from Evans and Frank andà I could make a big listà

D: In what way did they inform your work, your vision, or your life?

W: I’ll just talk about Evans’ and Frank’s work. I don’t know how to say easily what I learned. One thing I can say I learned is how amazing photography could be. I think it was the first time I was really moved by photographs.

D: Did you know Walker Evans?

W: No, not really. We weren’t friends.

D: Cartier-Bresson and Kertesz?

W: I met Bresson once in Paris. Kertesz I probably know a little better. But I’m not friends with those people. I’m not friends with Robert. I’ve known Robert for a long time.

D: But you are closely associated with a number of contemporary photographers, your contemporaries.

W: Oh sure. Lee Friedlander, Tod Papageorge.

D: Tod Papageorge, a first rate photographer in his own right, was the curator of an exhibition of yours called “Public Relations.” How did that come about, that one photographer not only is the curator of another’s exhibition, but also writes the introduction to his work?

W: Ask John Szarkowski. It wasn’t my idea. I mean, he did ask me if it was okay with me, and I was delighted.

D: Did you all stalk the streets together?

W: No, we don’t work together. We might meet for lunch or something, and maybe happen to saunter around a bit in the process. But we don’t do expeditions.

D: Just exhibitions. In 1967 your work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, with Lee Friedlander’s and Diane Arbus’. Do you feel that the three of you were a likely combination? Or were there important differences? Were you part of the same school?

W: Oh, we’re all radically different. John gave the show a title “New Documents”, and there was a little bit of written explanation. I would go by that. I don’t remember what was written, though.

D: Has the Museum of Modern Art been very influential in your own career?

W: I don’t know. I mean, it doesn’t have anything to do with what I do. Probably has made some differences in my sales, I wouldn’t be surprised. Again, you have to ask other people, because I don’t have a measuring device. There are photographers whose shows I try to make it my business to see, if I’m in the city. There are photographers I have no interest in at all.

D: Tell me about the ones that interest you.

W: Tod or Hank Wessel, Bill Dane, Paul McConough, Steve Shore. Robert Adams, for sure. I’m ready to see what they do. Nicholas Nixon, also, I would make it my business to see. There’s a lot of people working reasonably intelligently.

D: How important is that much criticized aspect æof photography — the mechanical, duplicatable printing aspect — to the quality of the work? How much time do you spend in your darkroom? Do you develop your own work?

W: I develop my own film. And I work in spurts. I pile it up.

D: How far behind are you?

W: There’s two ways I’m behind, in developing and in printing. It’s not easily measurable. I’m a joke. That’s the way I am; I mean, that’s just the way I work. I’ve never felt overwhelmed. I know it gets done.

D: Do you have any assistants who work with you?

W: Well, I have a good friend who’s a very good printer. And he does a certain amount of printing for me. I do all the developing. If somebody’s going to goof my film, I’d better do it. I don’t want to get that mad at anybody else.

D: How often does the unexpected or the goof happen when you work? And how often does it turn out to be a happy surprise?

W: I’m talking about technical goofs. I’m pretty much on top of it. The kind of picture you’re referring to would have to be more about the effects of technical things, technical phenomena, and I’m just not interested in that kind of work at all. I’ve goofed, and there’s been something interesting, but I haven’t made use of it. It just doesn’t interest me.

D: Are there any of your photographs that you would describe as being key in the development and evolution of your work?

W: No, I don’t deal with them that way either.

D: How do you deal with them?

W: I don’t know. I don’t go around looking at my pictures. I sometimes think I’m a mechanic. I just take pictures. When the time comes, for whatever reason, I get involved in editing and getting some prints made and stuff. There are things that interest me. But I don’t really mull over them a lot.

D: Well, what interests you the most? What’s the most important thing to know about your work?

W: I think there’s some stuff that’s at least photographically interesting. There are things I back off from trying to talk about, you know. Particularly my own work. Also, there may be things better left unsaid. At times I’d much rather talk about other work.

D: Your work, particularly in Public Relations, has often been compared to the work of that master press photographer, Weegee. Do you see any comparisons or similarities?

W: No, I think we’re different. First of all, he dealt with very different things. I don’t know who makes that comparison. It doesn’t make sense to me at all.

D: Tell us about your new book.

W: It’s called Stock Photographs. It was done at the Fort Worth livestock show and rodeo. I was commissioned to shoot there by the Fort Worth Art Museum for a show. You shoot one year and the show is the next year, when the rodeo is in town. It was a big group show. I was the only photographer. There was a videotape guy and some sculptors: Red Grooms, Rauschenberg, Terry Allen. I think I hung some, I forget, sixty or so pictures in the show. And at the opening, somebody asked me if I was going to make a book out of it. And I knew I wouldn’t. I mean, if I was going to make a book, I’d want to shoot more. You know, you do a book, and you want it to be a crackerjack of a book. Anyway, this person gave me the idea, the next year I went and did some shooting, and then the following year I did some more. And that was it. I probably shot a total of fourteen days, give or take.

D: You were teaching in Texas then, so you had some familiarity with cowboys and the West. It’s been said that those rodeo pictures don’t tell very pleasant truths. The image of the cowboy hero is somewhat deflated. Was that your intent?

W: My intention is to make interesting photographs. That’s it, in the end. I don’t make it up. Let’s say it’s a world I never made. That’s what was there to deal with.

D: But one does select what one photographs, and what one doesn’tà

W: Well, if you take a good look at the book, it’s largely a portrait gallery of faces — faces that I found dramatic. And some of those turned out to be reasonably dramatic photographs. But that’s all it is, I think. They’re in action; there’s people dancing. Plus some actual rodeo action and some other animal pictures, livestock stuff. That’s the way we’re living. It’s one world in this world. But it’s not coverage; it’s a record of my subjective interests.

D: There is another record that you made of one of your interests, at least at the time! I’m referring to the book on women. How did you assemble that collection?

W: It’s the same thing, you know. I’m still compulsively interested in women. It’s funny, I’ve always compulsively photographed women. I still do. I may very well do “Son of Women are Beautiful.” I certainly have the work. I mean, I have the pictures if I wanted to try to get something like that published. It would be a joke.

D: Do you intend to?

W: No. That’s all we need, another book like that! The thing that was interesting about doing that book was my difficulty in dealing with the pictures. When the woman is attractive, is it an interesting picture, or is it the woman? I had a lot of headaches with that, which was why it was interesting. I don’t think I always got it straight. I don’t think it was that straight, either. I think it’s an interesting book, but I don’t think it’s as good as the other books I’ve done.

D: Which book did you enjoy most? Are there any projects that were more satisfying to you, while you were putting them together or when they became public, in books or exhibitions?

W: No. I enjoy photographing. It’s always interesting, so I can’t say one thing is more fun than another. Everything has it’s own difficulties.

D: When Tod Papageorge was the curator of one of your exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, he observed that you do not create pictures of significant form, but rather of signifying form. What does that phrase mean?

W: I think that’s what photographic description is about. That’s how a camera describes things.

D: Throughout your work, there is a narrative voice, and an active one at that. Do you agree?

W: I generally deal with something happening. So let’s say that what’s out there is a narrative. Often enough, the picture plays with the question of what actually is happening. Almost the way puns function. They call the meaning of things into question. You know, why do you laugh at a pun? Language is basic to all of our existences in this world. We depend on it. So a pun calls the meaning of a word into question, and it upsets us tremendously. We laugh because suddenly we find out we’re not going to get killed. I think a lot of things work that way with photographs.

D: In much of your work you’ve described contemporary America. Do you find any recurring themes, or any iconography that either engages your attention or should engage ours?

W: Well, you said it before, women in pictures. Aside from women, I don’t know. My work doesn’t function the way Robert Frank’s did.

D: What are you working on now?

W: I’ve been living in Los Angeles and photographing there. That’s it.

D: Any particular subject matter?

W: No. I’m all over the place. Literally.

D: And then you’re going to look at those contact sheets and realize once again that the work comes together — as a book, or something elseà

W: I really try to divorce myself from any thought of possible use of this stuff. That’s part of the discipline. My only purpose while I’m working is to try to make interesting photographs, and what to do with them is another act — a later consideration. Certainly while I’m working, I want them to be as useless as possible.

D: What made you move to Los Angeles?

W: I wanted to photograph there. But I’ll come back to New York. I think I’ll start focusing in more on the entertainment business. I have been doing some of that already, all kinds of monkey business. But I’m all over the place, literally.

D: When you say the entertainment business, do you mean things that relate to movies?

W: Yes, movies. You know, the lots, et cetera.

D: Rather than the “stars”?

W: Whatever. I may very well move in. I just don’t know. I can’t sit here and know what pictures I’m going to take.

D: Is environment — location — a very important influence on your photographs?

W: Well, Los Angeles has interested me for a long time. I was in Texas for five years, for the same reason. I wanted to photograph there. And the only way you can do it is to live there. So I’m living in Los Angeles for a couple of years. I’ve been a gypsy for quite a while. It’ll come to an end. I’m going to come back to New York. I’m a New Yorker. Matter of fact, the more I’m in places like Texas and California, the more I know I’m a New Yorker. I have no confusions. About that.

D: We’ve talked about the influence of people like Walker Evans and Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, of course, on your work. How would you contrast your work to theirs?

W: I wouldn’t. We’re different, I think. With Evans, if nothing else, it’s just in terms of the time we photograph. And my attitude to a lot of things is different from Evans’. Let’s say I have a different kind of respect for the things in the world than he does. I have a different kind of seriousness. This might be misunderstood, but I certainly think that my attitude is different. And generally the cameras I use, and how I use them, are different. The things that he photographs describe a certain kind of exquisite taste. And let’s say the things I photograph may describe a lack of that. You know what I mean? He was like a very good shopper.

D: And you?

W: I think the problem is different. I was thinking about him and Atget. The things they photographed were often beautiful, and that’s a hell of a problem, to photograph something that’s beautiful to start with, you see. The photograph should be more interesting or more beautiful than what was photographed. I deal with much more mundane objects, at least. I don’t really; actually, I deal with it all. I can’t keep away from the other things, but I don’t avoid garbage.

D: Do you think that some of those mundane objects are a holdover from your early commercial work?

W: No, no, I don’t.

D: You worked in advertising for a long while. Did that influence your work?

W: I doubt it. I mean, I was able to work with two heads. If anything, doing ads and other commercial work were at least exercises in discipline.

D: Would you advise a young photographer who had to earn a living to turn to teaching or to commercial work like advertising?

W: You’d have to deal with a specific person. There’s all kinds of people teaching who don’t do anything worth a nickel. Likewise in advertising. Then there are some people who do get it together, so I wouldn’t make any generalizations. You know if a specific person was asking me such questions, I might think I could tell well enough to say. Or I might say nothing. I don’t know.

D: What general advice would you give to young photographers? What should they be doing?

W: The primary problem is to learn to be your own toughest critic. You have to pay attention to intelligent work, and to work at the same time. You see. I mean, you’ve got to bounce off better work. It’s a matter of working.

D: Do you photograph every day?

W: Just about, yes..

D: But you don’t develop every day?

W: Hell no! No way.

D: John Szarkowski called you the central photographer of your generation. That’s very high praise.

W: Right. It is.

D: But it’s also an enormous burden.

W: No, no problem at all. What has it got to do with working? When I’m photographing, I don’t have that kind of nonsense running around in my head. I’m photographing. It’s irrelevant in the end, so it doesn’t mean a thing. It’s not going to make me do better work or worse work as I can see it now.

D: Did you ever expect your life to unfold the way it has?

W: No, of course not. I mean, it’s ridiculous. I had no idea. How can you know?

D: What did you have in mind?

W: Surviving, that’s all. That’s all I have in mind right now.

D: Flourishing, too?

W: That’s unexpected. But I’m surviving. I’m a survivor. That’s the way I understand it.

D: What are you going to do next? Do you have any exhibitions or books planned?

W: No, nothing cooking, not at the moment. Just shooting, that’s enough. It’s a lot of work organizing something, whether it’s a show or a book, and I don’t want to do it every day.

D: You have enormous curiosity that propels you from one project to the other.

W: I don’t think of them as projects. All I’m doing is photographing. When I was working on The Animals, I was working on a lot of other things too. I kept going to the zoo because things were going on in certain pictures. It wasn’t a project.

D: Do you think that’s the way most photographers work?

W: I don’t know. I know what happens. I have boxes of pictures that nothing is ever going to happen to. Even Public Relations. I mean, I was going to events long before, and I still am.

D: Have you ever had any particularly difficult assignments or photographic moments?

W: No, the only thing that’s difficult is reloading when things are happening. Can you get it done fast enough?

D: You obviously have some secret because you are known as the fastest camera aroundà

W: Well, I don’t know if I’m really the fastest. It doesn’t matter. I don’t think of it as difficult. It would be difficult if I were carrying something heavy, but I carry Leicas. You can’t talk about it that way. I’m not operating a shovel and getting tired.

D: You said earlier that you sometimes think of yourself as a mechanic. Do you also think of yourself as an artist?

W: I probably am. I don’t think about it, either. But, if I have to think, yeah, I guess so

Posted at 4:49 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Financial Times

March 28 2007

This is my last Asia column before I have to retire shortly from the
Financial Times, after 39 years. It is an irresistible opportunity to
draw together some lessons and impressions gathered while covering the
region and to explode the odd myth. I shall also hazard a few
predictions.

First, not all east Asia is an economic miracle: today, it is
overwhelmingly a China story. China has generated more than half the
growth in developing Asia, including India, this century. A
surprisingly large number of other countries have performed
disappointingly. Japan, the region’s largest economy, is still re-
emerging from its lost decade. South Korea, the third largest, is
floundering. Taiwan and Thailand are performing well below their
potential.

Second, China has no grand master plan. Its one constant is the
Communist party’s ruthless dedication to keeping its monopoly on power.
In practice, the leadership’s claim to political legitimacy hinges on
its ability to keep living standards rising for as many people as
possible. The pursuit of that goal is essentially pragmatic and based
on trial and error. That is a prudent choice, the political equivalent
of portfolio theory, when, as is so often the case in China, there are
so many unknowns, even to those in power. The biggest of all is where
economics will ultimately drive the country politically.

Two other factors make governing China a tightrope act. One is the
centre’s never-ending struggle to control headstrong local officials,
who have taken all too literally the injunction to enrich their regions
– and themselves. The other is the growing influence of vested
interests that have asserted themselves more strongly under a less
radically reforming leadership. Lobby politics is now at least as
important in shaping policy in Beijing as in Washington, which is why
it is often hard to read.

Third, economics rules Asian diplomacy. In a region riven by mistrust
and age-old hostilities, the interdependence created by trade and
investment – particularly in the form of cross-border production
networks – is the most powerful underpinning of stability. However
great their political differences, Asian countries have not let these
threaten their common pursuit of export-led growth. Given the limited
diplomatic options, one can only hope that economic logic continues to
prevail and that Asia does not suffer the same fate as Norman Angell’s
prediction in 1913 that European countries had become economically too
intertwined ever again to wage war against each other.

Fourth, it will be a long time, if ever, before Asia forms a closely
integrated economic bloc. In addition to mutual suspicions between
nations, rivalry for regional influence between China and Japan – and
probably, in time, India – will make meaningful agreements hard to
achieve. Furthermore, the institutional co-operation that deeper
integration would require is frustrated by Asian governments’ jealous
defence of sovereignty and the weakness of many of their domestic
institutions.

Fifth, the importance of Chinese “soft power” is overrated. Most of
Beijing’s diplomatic overtures around the world are driven first and
foremost by economic need, above all its quest for secure supplies of
energy and raw materials. That it has stolen a march on the US is due
more to Washington’s neglect than to Beijing’s undoubted political
marketing skills.

Truly effective soft power is based on the projection of intrinsically
appealing national ideals, principles and values. However wantonly the
Bush administration has squandered those assets, I suspect most Asians,
given the choice, would still opt for the – tarnished – American dream
over the harsh constraints, relentless materialism and spiritual
poverty of contemporary China.

Sixth, Europe is irrelevant in Asia, except as a market and a producer
of luxury goods. Those in Europe who envisage Asia basing its future
development on the European “model” delude themselves. The only
European models that Asia would like to embrace are to be found on
catwalks.

Seventh, the west should moan less about manufacturing going east.
Manufacturing is what you do if your only alternative is eking a living
from the soil, or what lies beneath it. Automation is making it less of
a job creator, competition is brutal and the really big money lies
elsewhere, in product design, marketing and branding. That is why, from
China to India, companies yearn to graduate beyond mere metal-bashing.

Eighth, denying free expression is wrong economically, as well as
politically. Most Asian governments dream of creating “knowledge”
societies capable of fundamental innovation. However, severe setbacks
such as Korea’s faked human cloning scandal show how far they have to
go. It is telling that almost all Asian-born Nobel scientific laureates
have been honoured for work done in the west.

Genuine innovations are often serendipitous and rudely challenge the
established order. But even in countries where repressive regimes do
not punish such behaviour, hierarchical attitudes and traditions of
deference often breed intellectual conformism. Changing that will take
far more than big research budgets.

In the past 28 months, this column has given me the ultimate
journalistic privilege, a ringside view of history in the making. It
has been stimulating, often surprising, sometimes amusing and always
fun. I have frequently benefited, too, from the wisdom of readers. Some
have become friends. I wish them all, and Asia, well.

Posted at 4:31 PM · Comments (0)

A brief except from an excellent and lengthy piece published by the New York Times.
Copyright The New York Times

I first met Angelo at a meeting of the group in mid-January. (I was given permission to sit in on the condition that I not divulge the participants’ last names.) The meeting took place in the bright, cheerfully decorated back room of a community mental-health center in North Finchley, an affluent, grassy suburb in the northern reaches of London. The gathering was small but eclectic. In addition to the group’s facilitators — Jo Kutchinsky, an occupational therapist, and Liana Kaiser, a social-work student — five men and women assembled in a circle of bulky wool-knit chairs around a worn coffee table. Besides Angelo, there was Stewart, a young, working-class Londoner with a shaved head and a hoop earring; Jenny, an affable woman in her 50s who spoke of her fondness for arts and crafts; Michelle, a heavyset woman who dominated the session with her forceful opinions; and David, a 60-something man with a thick gray beard and a pageboy haircut who slumped in his seat and dozed throughout much of the meeting.

Angelo was the newest member of this group — it was his third visit — and he did not seem inclined to participate fully. When Kutchinsky opened the meeting by asking each member to discuss the previous week’s experience hearing voices, he softly mentioned that his voices made it difficult to read, then quickly ceded the floor. What followed was sometimes painful. Stewart in particular was visibly agitated. His hallucinatory life, as he described it, was chaotic and irrepressible. He heard voices pleading to him for help; he heard the voices of strangers; he heard the voice of his father. Sometimes he heard the voices of military commandos, who offered to defend him against this confusion. “I haven’t been well for a long time,” he said glumly. Yet most of the members spoke of their voices in the way that comedians speak of mothers-in-law: burdensome and irritating, but an inescapable part of life that you might as well learn to deal with. When David’s name was called, he lifted his head and discussed his struggle to accept his voices as part of his consciousness. “I’ve learned over time that my voices can’t be rejected,” he said. “No matter what I do, they won’t go away. I have to find a way to live with them.” Jenny discussed how keeping busy quieted her voices; she seemed to have taken a remarkable number of adult-education courses. Michelle expressed her belief that her voices were nothing more exotic than powerfully negative thoughts. “Negative thoughts are universal,” she said. “Everyone has them. Everyone. What matters is how you cope with them: that’s what counts.”

I had trouble gauging Angelo’s reaction throughout these testimonies, so afterward I pulled him aside and asked him what he thought. “It’s interesting to hear people’s stories,” he said. “Before I started coming, I hadn’t realized just how long some people have suffered. I’ve heard voices for six years. Some people have heard them for 15 or 20. It’s amazing.” I asked him if this knowledge reassured or frightened him. “It’s a bit scary, in a way. I think, I could be this way for a long time.” Still, he appeared to appreciate the camaraderie. For years, he had been socially isolated. He spends most of his time with his parents and a sympathetic older sister. His neighbors know only that he is “off work.” It was comforting, he said, to speak at last with people who understood.

The meeting that I attended in London is one of dozens like it affiliated with a small but influential grass-roots organization known as Hearing Voices Network. Based in Manchester, Hearing Voices Network (H.V.N.) has since its inception, in 1991, developed a range of services related to the phenomenon known as auditory hallucination: a hot line for people who suffer from the experience, a series of educational workshops for mental-health professionals and 170 support groups across Britain, with more in development. H.V.N., which openly challenges the standard psychiatric relationship of expert physician and psychotic patient, might be said to take the consumer movement in mental health care to its logical endpoint. Although H.V.N. groups meet in a variety of settings — from psychiatric wards to churches to the organization’s headquarters — all must be run by, or there must be active plans for them to be run by, voice-hearers themselves. What’s more, H.V.N. groups must accept all interpretations of auditory hallucinations as equally valid. If an individual comes to a group claiming that he is hearing the voice of the queen of England, and he finds this belief useful, no attempt is made to divest him of it, but rather to figure out what it means to him…

Click to read more

Posted at 11:25 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: March 27, 2007

CHONGQING, China, March 23 — For weeks the confrontation drew attention from people all across China, as a simple homeowner stared down the forces of large-scale redevelopment that are sweeping this country, blocking the preparation of a gigantic construction site by an act of sheer will.

Chinese bloggers were the first to spread the news, of a house perched atop a tall, thimble-shaped piece of land like Mont-Saint-Michel in northern France, in the middle of a vast excavation.

Newspapers dived in next, followed by national television. Then, in a way that is common in China whenever an event begins to take on hints of political overtones, the story virtually disappeared from the news media after the government, bloggers here said, decreed that the subject was suddenly out of bounds.

Still, the “nail house,” as many here have called it because of the homeowner’s tenacity, like a nail that cannot be pulled out, remains the most popular current topic among bloggers in China.

It has a universal resonance in a country where rich developers are seen to be in cahoots with politicians and where both enjoy unchallenged sway. Each year, China is roiled by tens of thousands of riots and demonstrations, and few issues pack as much emotional force as the discontent of people who are suddenly uprooted, told that they must make way for a new skyscraper or golf course or industrial zone.

What drove interest in the Chongqing case was the uncanny ability of the homeowner to hold out for so long. Stories are legion in Chinese cities of the arrest or even beating of people who protest too vigorously against their eviction and relocation. In one often-heard twist, holdouts are summoned to the local police station and return home only to find their house already demolished. How did this owner, a woman no less, manage? Millions wondered.

Part of the answer, which on meeting her takes only a moment to discover, is that Wu Ping is anything but an ordinary woman. With her dramatic lock of hair precisely combed and pinned in the back, a form-flattering bright red coat, high cheekbones and wide, excited eyes, the tall, 49-year-old restaurant entrepreneur knows how to attract attention — a potent weapon in China’s new media age, in which people try to use public opinion and appeals to the national image to influence the authorities.

“For over two years they haven’t allowed me access to my property,” said Ms. Wu, her arms flailing as she led a brisk walk through the Yangjiaping neighborhood here. It is an area in the throes of large-scale redevelopment, with broad avenues, big shopping malls and a recently built elevated monorail line, from whose platform nearly everyone stops to gawk at the nail house.

Within moments of her arrival at the locked gate of the excavated construction site, a crowd began to gather. The people, many of them workers with sunken cheeks, dressed in grimy clothes, regarded Ms. Wu with expressions of wonderment. Some of them exchanged stories about how they had been forced to relocate and soothed each other with comments about how it all could not be helped.

From inside the gates a government television crew began filming.

“If it were an ordinary person they would have hired thugs and beat her up,” murmured a woman dressed in a green sweater who was drawn by the throng. “Ordinary people don’t dare fight with the developers. They’re too strong.”

Earlier this month the National People’s Congress passed a historic law guaranteeing private property rights to China’s swelling ranks of urban middle-class homeowners, among others. Some here attributed Ms. Wu’s success to that, as well as her knack for generating publicity.

“In the past they would have just knocked it down,” said an 80-year-old woman who said she used to be a neighbor of Ms. Wu’s. “Now that’s forbidden, because Beijing has put out the word that these things should be done in a reasonable way.”

Between frenzied telephone calls to reporters and city officials, Ms. Wu, who stood at the center of the crowd with her brother, a 6-foot-3 decorative stone dealer who wore his brown hair in jheri curls, stated her case with a slightly different spin.

“I have more faith than others,” she began. “I believe that this is my legal property, and if I cannot protect my own rights, it makes a mockery of the property law just passed. In a democratic and lawful society a person has the legal right to manage one’s own property.”

Click to read more

Posted at 1:57 PM · Comments (0)

My work from Shanghai is featured in the March issue of Photo China magazine, which has published 10 of my images from “Disappearing Shanghai”. Click to read more

A quality printing of the catalog of this show, which made its solo debut in Berlin last October is available for $15, plus handling: Click to see some of the images

and here, in on Italian website that featured my work: Click to read more

To order, contact me at globetrotter@howardwfrench.com.

Posted at 11:44 PM · Comments (1)

March 16, 2007

LONDON - Another Africa film - this time the riveting “Blood Diamond”, last month the superbly acted “Last King of Scotland”, and “Out of Africa” still vibrates in my mind ten years later. But am I alone in being rather cross when my 16 year old daughter asks me yet again, “Is Africa really like that?”

I tell her part of Africa WAS like that. Some of it, a diminishing portion of this vast continent, is still like that. But most of it never was and today it certainly is not.

I have covered war and revolution in Africa. I have seen political opponents hung from the bridges of the main thoroughfare in Conakry. I have been falsely imprisoned in Sierra Leone. I have lived for months the village life in Lesotho and Tanzania. I walk the streets of Nigerian towns at night (parts, but not all, of Lagos excepted). But I have very rarely been afraid - perhaps only when travelling on some dilapidated Nigerian airline like the one that crashed shortly after I disembarked in Port Harcourt last year.

Africans are usually the most courteous, hospitable, forgiving and cheerful of all the peoples I have met on God’s earth. And now I rejoice mightily when I see the old continent, so beset by inhospitable terrain, demanding climate, poor soils, the legacy of the slave trade, self-interested colonialism and imperialism and, in the south, apartheid, really beginning to move forward economically and politically. Indeed, I have to confess that aspects of colonialism and the missionary activity that accompanied it put down some rather good foundations and Africa has only learnt to progress when it stopped fighting the shadows of the white man and started to work with him rather than against him.

It is all going very fast yet most people still seem blissfully unaware of what is apace. But turn to the December issue of “Finance and Development”, the periodical of the International Monetary Fund, and read Michael Klein, chief economist of the International Finance Corporation: “When the history of the 21st century will be written, it may become clear that Africa today is where East Asia was in the late 1950s - just about to surprise the world”.

He argues that economists now believe that the majority of African countries have a good chance of achieving annual growth rates of 10%, like India and China. “Thus it is conceivable that Africa could, on average, reach the income level of recent entrants to the European Union by 2050. Were this to happen, today’s children in Africa would leapfrog all history’s stages of development in a lifetime.”

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, dead in the water for so long, weighed down by the rocks of malign dictatorship and corruption, now hums with economic activity and democratic exuberance. On the other side of the continent Tanzania, for so long a failed Christian socialist experiment - kind but dirt poor was the best way to describe it - has now embraced capitalism, albeit a version with a human face, and is experiencing such rapid growth it has the tax revenue to spend on the things that the socialists only dreamed of - a school and clinic in every village.

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Cocoa and coffee? Yes, it continues. But in recent years the much more profitable cut-flower and fresh fish business in Kenya and Uganda with overnight flights to Europe has blossomed. “Nollywood”, the Nigerian film industry, has overtaken both Hollywood and Bollywood in the number of films produced each year. It provides jobs for a million people.

Productivity, that key to economic progress, is improving fast. According to the IMF, African textile and garment firms are almost as productive as Chinese ones on the factory floor. Economic reform involving privatisation, bank shakeouts, business registration and trade liberalisation is common almost everywhere. Tanzania and Ghana were in the world’s top ten reformers last year. This is why foreign direct investment has increased from $12 billion in 1980 to well over $100 billion today. Investors seem particularly confident in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Madagascar, Mozambique, Tanzania and Uganda. In Nigeria, Mittal is resuscitating the old giant Soviet-built steel works. Virgin has essentially taken over the role of the old, moribund Nigerian Airways. Chinese motorbike manufacturers are churning out thousands of machines and still can’t meet demand. Two storey houses now dominate the towns- you have to go out into the remoter villages to find a traditional mud hut.

There is still much to do - why not stop grumbling about Europe and the U.S. blocking the Doha ground and simply reduce trade barriers on a non-discriminatory basis by opening domestic markets to all African trading partners?

This year I am taking my daughter to Africa to see for herself.

Copyright © 2007 Jonathan Power

Posted at 10:53 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Bookforum

In early April 1968, Ralph Ellison took part in a literary festival hosted by the University of Notre Dame, where he joined the likes of Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, and William F. Buckley Jr. on the program. When he took the stage on the evening of the sixth to deliver his remarks, the moment could not have been more charged. The nation was in crisis: Two days earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated; across the country, cities had exploded in scenes that seemed uncannily to mirror the apocalyptic final sections of Invisible Man, still one of the handful of truly indispensable American novels. But there would be no resounding statement or mournful eulogy; instead, Ellison talked about the function of the novel in American democracy.

It was a signature Ellisonian gesture, perhaps too modest for the hour, but forceful in its way. Fifteen years before, he had put his invisible man down a hole in an attempt, he said in his 1953 National Book Award speech, “to return to the mood of personal moral responsibility for democracy which typified the best of our nineteenth-century fiction.” Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, as intellectuals and writers clenched their fists and took to the barricades, Ellison appealed hopefully to America’s literary past as a way to transcend the country’s racial fractures and ferocious contests of identity.

His stubborn faith in that tradition was breathtaking. Some were baffled by what they saw as his scholarly aloofness; others were outraged. (During his life, he was accused of all kinds of things: of not writing protest fiction à la Richard Wright, of being too cozy with whites, of spurning the civil rights movement.) But to Ellison, being engaged did not mean marching in the streets. Operating in the higher frequencies of culture, Ellison, in scores of essays and talks, commemorated the synthetic genius of the American vernacular style and the moral vision of a cherished group of writers—Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Stephen Crane—who both nourished his growth as an artist and provided the seeds for democratic renewal. Whatever America’s social and political strain, the work of Ellison’s literary heroes pointed beyond the impasse. “These writers,” he said, “suggested possibilities, courses of action, stances against chaos.”

As essayist, cultural theorist, and novelist, Ellison would return again and again to these concerns. And the trajectory of his life—his Oklahoma boyhood, his passage to the Deep South as a student at the Tuskegee Institute and then northward to Harlem during the ’30s, his toil on his masterpiece, his literary celebrity and legendary failure to complete a second novel—is itself a remarkable, contradictory study in courses of action and possibilities, many realized, others unfulfilled.

Given that Ellison published only one novel in his lifetime, the amount of material confronting his would-be biographer is enormous. One could write a book on just the particulars of the years leading up to Invisible Man, when the young writer was a disciple of Richard Wright and active in Harlem’s communist literary circles, as Lawrence Jackson did in Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius (2002), an intellectually rigorous first attempt at an Ellison biography. Still, that approach has a way of letting the triumph of Invisible Man blot out other achievements. Ellison died in 1994, and he published many of his greatest essays in the decades after his literary debut, all the while trying to harness the unruly pages of his second novel. With Arnold Rampersad’s Ralph Ellison: A Biography, Ellison now has a life in full, though perhaps not the one he deserves.

Rampersad, a respected scholar of black literature and the author of a definitive, two-volume biography of Langston Hughes, casts Ellison in a tragic light, as a man, unmoored by personal instability, whose hard-won literary integration came at the expense of his aesthetic vision and whose prickly views on other black political and cultural figures cost him dearly. “That critical instinct,” writes Rampersad of Ellison’s fierce intellectual bravado, “freed him to ascend, without inhibition, the heights of the Euro-American artistic and intellectual tradition (but it may well have been a decisive factor in his eventual decline as an artist, because it took a toll on his imagination and morale.)”

Ralph Waldo Ellison could be downright arrogant, but, as he saw it, his choice of inheritance was never an either/or proposition. Hybridity was his natural inclination, his birthright. Growing up in Oklahoma City, where he was born in 1913, sharply honed his creative outlook. Though his father died when he was three and his mother toiled as a domestic worker, Ellison looked back fondly on his years in Oklahoma—”the Territory,” as he called it, in homage to Twain and to the region’s freewheeling mixture of black, Indian, and white idioms. Segregation was a reality, and Tulsa saw some of this country’s worst antiblack violence, but Jim Crow had not set hard. (For descendants of freed slaves, Oklahoma was a “territory of hope,” Ellison wrote.) A trumpeter in his high school band, Ellison came at writing through music—this would form a central connection in his aesthetic. As a young man, he bopped around Oklahoma City’s thriving blues and jazz scenes and soaked up black church music, tutoring himself in a free-for-all of conflicting styles.

Against Ellison’s almost nostalgic regard for this time, Rampersad stresses his angry vulnerability and poverty, which would prick at him when he attended Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute on a music scholarship. Ellison chafed at the school’s provincialism and battled with his teachers, but his transformation from musician to writer had begun. A librarian became a mentor. Steeped in black musical and literary traditions, Ellison pointed out again and again in his writings that Twain, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, Malraux, Hemingway, and T. S. Eliot were no less decisive in his formation. Like the narrator of Invisible Man, Ellison was a specialist in perception; he had a gift for seeing around corners. He wanted the hidden connections between styles revealed. For Ellison, there was only a short distance between jazz and “The Waste Land.”

A search for a summer job led the chronically hard-up Ellison to Harlem in 1936—he would not return to Tuskegee—and into the hubbub of big-city life. There, Ellison met Wright (an encounter brokered by Langston Hughes), who would prove a major influence. Wright, who headed up the Daily Worker’s Harlem bureau, encouraged Ellison to review books, steered him to the ferment of left-wing politics and black cultural nationalism, and got him a gig with the New York City Federal Writing Project researching black life. Drawn into the orbit of the Communist Party, Ellison became, at least outwardly, a rather doctrinaire Stalinist and began contributing to the communist weekly the New Masses, where he published some of his first efforts in criticism and social commentary.

Later, Ellison’s feelings toward Wright would be marked by an ambivalent respect, but Wright’s impact on him was profound. In Wright, he found a kinsman. “Hating racism, both men were also haunted by what would soon be called a sense of existential chaos in life,” notes Rampersad. “Both were hungry for fame, in love with art and ideas, and adoring of Western learned culture. Both Wright and Ellison admired and yet had also grown more and more critical of black culture. They had become especially disdainful of its political and religious leaders.”

More than 1940’s Native Son, which Ellison praised, the publication of Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices in 1941 hit him with the force of dynamite. A documentary hymn to black America, it unleashed a torrent of powerful emotion in Ellison. To Wright in the year of its release, he confessed bitterness and rage in a letter of searing frankness: “I know those emotions … which tear the insides to be free and memories which must be kept underground, caged by rigid discipline lest they destroy, but which yet are precious to me because they are mine and I am proud of that which is myself.”

It’s an extraordinary statement, dipping low, rising into a Whitmanesque crescendo, bursting with many of the themes Ellison would pour into his essays and fiction. (It’s almost a prophecy of Invisible Man.) Discipline was a key concept for Ellison, referring both to the techniques imposed by the artist, who must master and shape his materials, and to the carefully modulated repertoire of attitudes Ellison saw in black life. These different psychological registers—ironic, forbearing, indifferent, mocking, contemptuous—formed a protective bulwark against political and social oppression.

From the mid-’40s onward, charged by Wright’s example, Ellison would spin out considered (if sometimes pedantic) essays on black culture and begin his turn toward Invisible Man. In “Richard Wright’s Blues,” an appraisal of Black Boy, and in other pieces, Ellison elaborated a wide-ranging theory of black life that went beyond racial cheerleading. America’s racial predicament could never be reduced to a simple equation of white oppression = black suffering. For the pragmatic Ellison, it was important to acknowledge the way black people, despite this predicament, had built a fully human culture that most whites either diminished (he jabbed at well-meaning whites who subscribed to the “‘Aren’t-Negroes-Wonderful?’ school of thinking” that reduced blacks to simple, happy primitives) or refused to see at all. “Men have made a way of life in caves and upon cliffs,” he wrote in 1944. “Why cannot Negroes have made a life upon the horns of the white man’s dilemma?” In a whole range of black cultural expression—jazz, blues, Negro spirituals—Ellison located a certain paradoxical freedom “implicit in the Negro situation.” For both him and Wright, the blues, “an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically,” were a way of getting beyond the tempting certainties of communism.

At the same time, he put American culture on the couch. Lamenting the white denial of Negro humanity, Ellison began to develop a powerful countermyth to the narrative of white supremacy. From 1776 to 1876, “there was a conception of democracy current in this country that allowed the writer to identify himself with the Negro,” he wrote, invoking a pantheon of his heroes—Whitman, Twain, Emerson, Thoreau. (For Ellison, Huck’s raft symbolized a lost racial fraternity.) Only after the tawdry betrayal of Reconstruction “was the Negro issue pushed into the underground of the American conscience and ignored.” As a result, America had become a “nation of ethical schizophrenics,” unable to deal with its racial situation, a vital segment of its humanity cut off, anesthetized by a steady drip of “hypnotic ritual and narcotic modes of thinking.” Despite all this, Ellison found—or made up—a homegrown tradition he could identify with. He wanted to find a place in the total American scheme, a project that would become his lifework.

All this feverish speculation spurred Ellison’s growth as a writer of fiction. Indeed, the publication of Invisible Man can be seen as the explosive culmination of a decade’s worth of theorizing and emotional turmoil. Whatever his ideological fervor—his zeal was, in part, a career move—Ellison never fully submitted to the rigid categories of Marxism and black nationalism. Always seeking to make connections between traditions, Ellison imbibed the tricks of modernism. Taken with the aesthetics of surrealism, he made an advance toward fulfilling his vision in “King of the Bingo Game” (1944), probably his best short story. In this harrowing study of bewilderment in the city, a black migrant from the South who chances everything in a bingo parlor sees his luck turn viciously against him. “You’ve written some kind of crazy thing there, man!” Wright told him. Still, for all his admiration of his mentor, Ellison did not want to follow the elder writer’s path in his own attempt at a novel…

See the link below for the entire article.

Posted at 11:20 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune

Howard W. French
Published: March 23, 2007

SHANGHAI: Terrified by the prospect of a world where one third or more of its people are elderly, Chinese intellectuals have issued the first murmurings of a broad reappraisal of one of the most sweeping government measures of modern times, this country’s “one-child policy.”

Placing such a momentous policy on the agenda has not been easy, and one can readily understand why. Already twice in its brief history in power, the Chinese Communist Party has invested its prestige and authority in truly epochal shifts in population policy, with one move representing nothing less than an abrupt about- face from the other.

A proper dictatorship of the proletariat would like to preserve as much of an air of infallibility as possible, but that has become increasingly difficult with China and population matters.

Obsessed with national strength, Mao Zedong equated population with power, and in the 1950s, in a move heavy with consequences for all of humanity, called for Chinese people to go forth and multiply. “We should break down the superstition that it’s disastrous to have many people or disastrous to have less land,” Mao said, speaking at a conference in Chengdu in 1958.

Moments later, as if for emphasis, he added, “At present, we still lack people.”
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By a good distance, China was already the world’s most populous nation. In the space of a mere two decades, however, the enthusiastic response to the chairman’s call saw the country’s population increase by more than 50 percent, reaching 998 million in 1980. That was the year that the one-child policy took effect.

With pressures on the land, resources and housing spiraling out of control and Mao gone, the government scrambled to put the brakes on, applying a near-blanket birth control policy, the likes of which mankind had never seen.

The one-child policy can be said to have worked, indeed worked very well. Paradoxically, it can also be said to have been something of a failure, perhaps even a monumental failure. This is for having produced unforeseen or at least unavoided side effects that China will struggle with for decades to come and that could conceivably extinguish the economic miracle that we have grown accustomed to witnessing.

In the latest twist, however, there are signs of hope for both China and for the world. In the margins of the recently completed Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, or congress, 29 Chinese political advisers spoke out against the one-child policy, calling for it to be abolished because of the looming age trap that it has set for the country.

Whatever the outcome, this represents progress compared with a time when Mao alone was able to launch huge movements at great cost to the Chinese people and to humanity, or even to the about-face of the one-child policy, which was carried out without public debate.

The point is that with matters so consequential, no nation can afford to forgo a real conversation. Governments, of course, are not infallible, and when mistakes are made over population, whether because of ego or ignorance, their effects tend to linger disastrously, spawning conflict, famine and, perhaps worst of all for a world that suddenly seems to have awakened to the issue, environmental devastation.

Indeed, this is China’s lesson to the world at a time when the fuse is fast burning down on a new population bomb arguably even more frightening than the Chinese one of the 1960s.

Consider Africa, for example. With the same alacrity that is driving its own development, China is building huge bridges to Africa, epicenter of the coming explosion.

The Chinese arrive with money to invest and with a gigantic appetite for Africa’s natural resources. What they don’t arrive with much of is advice, or even overt expressions of concern, for the continent’s many problems, with arguably none more pressing than its galloping demographics.

In the name of a policy of “noninterference,” China is locked in a see- no-evil approach to Africa, and this has the makings of a huge loss of opportunity for all concerned.

If demography is destiny, for Africa the numbers tell a haunting story. Between 1960 and 2020, the continent’s population will have increased more than sixfold, roughly matching China’s population today.

It is when one considers individual countries, however, that one’s head begins to spin.

According to United Nations projections, Nigeria, which has not conducted a proper census in more than a generation, will add more than 50 million people between 2005 and 2020. By 2050, Africa’s most populous country, a nation that is half again the size of Texas, will have 288 million people, or about the same number as the United States.

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Posted at 11:26 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright Slate

March 21, 2007, at 6:47 PM ET

Illustration by Robert Neubecker. Click image to expand.On Saturday, Taliban guerrillas punished a group of Afghan truck drivers suspected of collaborating with U.S-led troops by chopping off their ears and noses. Can the victims still hear and smell?

Yes, but with more difficulty. The outer part of your ear, known as the pinna, funnels sound into your ear canal, like a megaphone in reverse. If someone cut it off, everything would sound quieter. (A wound that scabbed over would make the sound suppression more severe.) The pinnae also tell you where sounds are coming from: The ridges and grooves shape sound waves differently depending on where the sound originates. As a result, the brain learns to associate certain amplification patterns with certain directions. So, if you lost your ears, you might be able to tell what music you’re hearing, but not where the speakers are.

For the entire article, please see the link below.

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I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Kap, who I got to know a bit in Berlin a couple of years ago,’ these last few weeks. Have been rereading a lot of his stuff, too.
Some of the stuff, reread many years after the initial discovery of this writer, have been a bit of a letdown (cf. The Soccer War). I feel his later works border at times on the atrocious. And I’ve felt deeply ambivalent about the way he has made light of the facts writing about Africa here and there, and nowhere more so than in this book. One couldn’t get away with that writing about, say, Eastern Europe, and keep one’s reputation intact. Africa, though, has always been a special case.

Having said that, even it is not, strictly speaking, journalism, or history, or whatever, The Emperor is great in long, sustained bites. Take this, and then buy it and read it for yourself:

An empty envelope! Mr. Kapuchitsky, do you know what money means in a poor country? Money in a poor country and money in a rich country are two different things. In a rich country, money is a piece of paper with which you buy goods on the market. You are only a customer. Even a millionaire is only a customer. He may purchase more, but he remains a customer, nothing more. And in a poor country? In a poor country money is a wonderful, thick hedge, dazzling and always blooming, which separates you from everything else. Through that hedge you do not see creeping poverty, you do not smell the stench of misery, and you do not hear the voices of the human dregs. But at the same time you know that all of that exists, and you feel proud because of your hedge. You have money; that means you have wings. You are the bird of paradise that everyone admires.

Can you imagine, for instance, a crowd gathering in Holland to look at a rich Dutchman? Or in Sweden, or in Australia? But in our land — yes in our land, if a prince or a count appears, the people run to see him. They will run to see a millionaire, and afterward they will go around and say ‘I saw a millionaire.’ Money transforms your own country into an exotic land. Everything will start to astonish you — the way people live, the things they worry about, and you will say, “No, that’s impossible.” Because you will already belong to a different civilization. And you must know this law of culture: that two civilizations cannot really know and understand one another well. You will start going deaf and blind. You will be content in your civilization surrounded by the hedge, but signals from the other civilization will be as incomprehensible to you as if they had been sent by the inhabitants of Venus. If you feel like it, you can become an explorer in your own country. You can become Columbus, Magellan, Livingstone. But I doubt that you will have such a desire. Such expeditions are very dangerous, and you are no madman, are you? You are already a man of your own civilization, and you will defend it and fight for it. You will water your own hedge. You are exactly the kind of gardener that the Emperor needs.

Posted at 11:34 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Economist

AT SOME point in his career—neither date nor time being important—Jean Baudrillard took a large red cloth, draped it over a chair in his apartment, and sat on it. He may have smoked or thought for a while, or scratched his nose; a large, doughlike nose, supporting glasses. He then got up, leaving an impression of his body behind. The image pleased him: so much so, that he took a photograph.

Since he made no comment on the event (beyond the fact that the chair was later broken), the exact details are conjectural. But by putting the cloth on the chair, and sitting on it, Mr Baudrillard added to the plethora of signs, objects and symbolic acts that made up, in his philosophical system, the whole woof and warp of the 20th century. By getting up, he left behind a “simulacrum” of himself: the truth, as he teasingly put it, that hid the fact that there was no truth there. And by photographing the chair he made it “hyperreal”: an image, which could be reproduced unendingly, of an object that claimed to have meaning and, in fact, had none.

Then he went to lunch.
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Pourquoi pas? When a simulacrum is also a French philosophe, perhaps the most popular of recent decades, he needs a bottle of Merlot from time to time. And since he spent his days considering the seductive power of images and objects, it was fun to observe that he himself had such a power over the woman in the butcher’s who wrapped up his foie de veau, just because she had seen him on television.

Whether Mr Baudrillard’s world was utter nonsense, or whether it was a profound critique of a consumerist civilisation drowning in its own meaninglessness, was a matter for lively debate. Many of his French colleagues found him too much: noisy, mischievous, attached to no school (though he had sat at the feet of both Henri Lefebvre and Roland Barthes in his feverish years at Nanterre, when teaching had been interrupted by clouds of tear-gas and cobblestone-throwing). He said things that got him into trouble. His enthusiasm for the événements of 1968 painted him as a man of the Left, where philosophes belonged as naturally as fish in water; but Mr Baudrillard later broke with Marx, and called him a conservative. What he meant was that both communism and capitalism made human existence a matter of production and exchange, while he preferred to stress its symbolic side.

In any case, in his world, both the liberal and the communist narratives of history had collapsed. “The end of history” was no longer universal capitalism and democracy or the victory of the proletariat. It was summed up for Mr Baudrillard by a lone man jogging, oblivious to his surroundings, hearing only the music of his own sound-system and aware only of the statements he himself was making: health, fashion, endurance. He was running straight ahead, but with no end in view.

Posted at 7:52 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times
By Howard W. French
March 20, 2007

SHANGHAI: When Chen Rui reached 50, the retirement age for women here, she immediately did what millions of people of her generation have begun doing: She scrambled to find a new job.

While second careers are common in the West and are often embraced as a chance to satisfy long-held ambitions, for huge numbers of Chinese city dwellers like Chen, a widow and career accountant, eking out another decade or two of paid work is more a matter of survival.

In this sense, Chen is anything but alone.

The proportion of elderly people is growing faster in China than in any major country, with the number of retirees set to double between 2005 and 2015, when it will reach 200 million. By midcentury, 430 million people — about a third of the population — will be retirees. That increase will place enormous demands on the country’s finances and could threaten the underpinnings of the Chinese economy, which has thrived for decades on the cheap labor of hundreds of millions of young, uneducated workers from the countryside.

Changes in China’s population structure are taking place hand in hand with changes in the structure of the family. The country’s so-called one-child policy, which began in 1980, means that, beginning with the current generation of young adults, couples will face the stark task of caring for four parents through old age. By the same token, the ratio of workers to retired people will decline from about six to one now to about two to one by 2040.
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Of course, raising the retirement age from the current 50 to 55 for women and 55 to 60 for men to bring them more in line with international norms would ease a substantial amount of pressure on the pension system. But raising the retirement ages presents another set of problems for the government, social security experts here say.

Last year, for example, 4.13 million young Chinese graduated from universities, and fully 30 percent of them are still unemployed.

Unemployment is high among non- university graduates, as well. Prolonging employment for older workers would make this predicament worse, possibly with volatile consequences.

Meanwhile, breaking a lifelong promise and abruptly extending the retirement age would create another large class of malcontents. As a result, the government has been unable to reach a consensus on how to handle the problem, which is leaving people like Chen in an increasingly difficult position.

Like most women her age, Chen is the mother of a single child, a legacy of stark population control policies introduced in 1980, which means that with only a skimpy state pension and one child to help her out she must fend for herself in her old age.

“I’m saving money for my daughter’s dowry and for myself when I get old,” said Chen, who now works in a small trading firm along with several men. “My daughter promised to take care of me after she gets married, but I don’t want to burden a young couple. Anyway, it’s not easy for two young people to take care of four old parents.”

The bind that China finds itself in takes form in an often-posed question: Can the country grow rich before it grows old? Increasingly, experts here say the answer, which also has huge implications for the global economy, appears doubtful.

In its rush to modernize, China has rebuilt its economy, opening up to foreign investment, privatizing state- owned industries and greatly expanding higher education — 70,000 engineers earn graduate degrees each year, for example.

Under China’s sweeping pro-market reforms, since the 1990s millions of workers have been laid off from money- losing state enterprises. The state’s obligations to these workers for their so- called “legacy pensions,” together with more recent obligations under the newer, market-oriented retirement system, amount to over $1.5 trillion, according to the World Bank.

“I think that most people have not realized how tough the situation will become,” said Li Shaoguang, director of the Institute of Social Security at the School of Public Administration at Renmin University of China, in Beijing. “We’re already aware that the percentage of old people in our population is large and is growing fast, so in order to pool more people in the system to pay for current retirees, the government is trying to include more migrant workers in the system. This could alleviate pressures now, but it also means that you will have larger pressures to face when the migrant workers grow old.”

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Posted at 9:10 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright - The Wilson Quarterly

By Christopher Ross. Da Capo. 262 pp. $­26

The declaration last year by Japan’s new prime minister that he intends to rewrite his country’s constitution, which renounces war, came too late for Yukio Mishima. The ­world-­famous writer resented the pacifism imposed on his country after World War II and wanted Japan to turn aside from what he saw as its drift into Western decadence. In the end, he sacrificed his life for the cause. On November 25, 1970, after a botched attack on a Japanese defense base, he committed ­seppuku—­ritual suicide with a ­sword.

In the eyes of many, Yukio Mishima (the pseudonym adopted by Kimitake Hiraoka, b. 1925) was a ­right-­wing fanatic and a national embarrassment. But he was also a phenomenally talented and prolific writer, three times nomin­ated for the Nobel Prize, whose novels and plays still fascinate Western audiences. The very day he committed suicide, Mishima mailed his publisher the final pages of the fourth book in his epic tetralogy The Sea of Fertility, a work of historical fiction that blends the brutal drive for ­self-­destruction with the beauty of ­reincarnation.

The history that has intervened since Mishima’s death makes him ripe for a re-evaluation, but such is not the project of Christopher Ross, an adventurer whose previous book narrated his experience working as a London tube station assistant. Instead, he has written an entertaining ­mash-­up of a biography that blends elements of travelogue, memoir, and martial arts manual, illuminating some of the mysteries of Yukio Mishima, Japan, and, of course, Christopher ­Ross.

Mishima admired the traditional values he saw embodied in the samurai, who disap­peared along with Japan’s feudal system, and he strove to imitate these warriors. But if Mishima styled himself a samurai, he was a strange one: a sickly and effete child who eventually developed a ­well-­muscled physique, a preening celebrity who courted the spotlight, a homosexual who lived with a wife and children. Above all, he desired to become famous and to die ­heroically.

His ­death—­whether heroic or ­not—­is what inspired Ross’s search for Mishima’s legacy. But though Ross comes across as clever and worldly, he lacks the requisite nihilism. And he can’t keep from inserting himself into Mishima’s story, as when he disrobes and descends into a torture chamber to meet someone whom he believes to have been one of Mishima’s lovers. (He discovers that the man had instead been conscripted to witness Mishima pretend to commit ritual suicide, a variety of ­role-­playing Mishima found immensely arousing.)

Because Ross is such a charming rogue, we don’t mind that he never decides if the book is about Mishima or himself. Or that he can’t refrain from digressions into the comically ­obscure—­metallurgical arcana, say, or the ways a human body can be dismembered. The book gains traction when Ross focuses on his search for the antique sword that Mishima used to kill ­himself.

At last, a mysterious phone call reveals its whereabouts. But succeeding in his quest leaves Ross cold. When he sees the sword, he writes, “I am no longer thinking of death.” And this is where he and Mishima part ways. For a short time, however, Ross grew very close to his protagonist. We know because he tells us that while he was writing this book, he was stricken with severe pains in his abdo­men, pains he eventually realized were the pangs of a phantom ­seppuku.

Posted at 2:53 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Japan Times

Sunday, March 11, 2007

MEDIA MIX

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s refusal to apologize anew for Japan’s sex-slave policy during World War II has a different meaning in Japan than it does abroad. The issue has come around again because the U.S. Congress is considering a resolution to demand that Japan clearly accept responsibility for the policy. Abe has said the government will stand by a 1993 apology issued by then Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono, but has stressed that there is no evidence that the Japanese military “used coercion” to force women into frontline brothels.

Overseas, Abe’s remarks made headlines and has provoked anger from those who say that the Japanese government has yet to own up to the sex-slave policy and is backtracking into denial. In Japan, Abe’s remarks have been buried in articles about Diet business or stuck at the end of TV news reports. The media see them as part of a strategy for Abe to appear more assertive in response to weakening public support for his administration.

These reports rarely address the sex-slave issue itself. The Japanese media continue to use the euphemism “comfort women” to describe the sex slaves and have generally stopped discussing it as anything except a point of historical contention between Japan and certain groups outside of Japan. To the Japanese public it’s a nonissue.

Abe can split hairs over the definition of “coercion” and claim that there is no evidence of government involvement in the forced recruitment of sex slaves because he knows the local press won’t challenge him. During that famous mock tribunal held in Tokyo in 2000, where international legal experts put the wartime government on trial for its sex-slave policy, plenty of testimony and evidence was given to show that the government had indeed forced women from Korea, Taiwan and other Asian countries into frontline brothels. But that episode has since been turned into an entirely different matter of coercion — one having to do with whether or not the ruling party put pressure on NHK to water down its coverage of the tribunal. In other words, it was turned into a local issue.

Knowing what it knows about the behavior of soldiers and the suffering of innocents during wartime, the world looks upon Abe’s remarks as being cold and cynical since they intensify the pain and humiliation of the surviving sex slaves, who couldn’t care less about the semantics of “coercion.” The Foreign Ministry has said that Abe’s remarks were “incorrectly conveyed” to the world and will attempt to educate the overseas media on “the real meaning of Japan’s position.” This transparent stab at spin control will fail because, in the end, Abe cares less about what the world thinks than about what his supporters think. And the media is willing to go along with it.

That’s because media companies are squeamish about anything having to do with Asian females. The popular TV Tokyo variety series, “The Wife is a Foreigner,” enthusiastically celebrates the assimilation of non-Japanese women into Japanese life — just as long as they aren’t Korean, Chinese, Filipino or Thai. Those four nationalities together represent the vast majority of expatriate wives in Japan, but for some reason they never appear on the program. Are they not “foreign” enough?

These women now constitute substantial minorities, but minorities tend to become invisible when the government pushes the idea that Japan is one big happy “homogeneous” family. For years the United Nations has been pressuring the Japanese government to conduct a survey of its minority women to find out how they fare in Japanese society, but it hasn’t.

It fell to nongovernment organizations to carry out the survey, and they found, unsurprisingly, that so-called “compound discrimination” against minority women in Japan is profound. Poverty, unemployment, domestic violence and divorce are higher among minority women than among women in the general population.

This survey did not target foreigners, but rather Ainu, Burakumin and Koreans who were born here. According to one of the NGOs interviewed by the Asahi Shimbun, these women “don’t make their problems heard because they’re afraid of attracting attention to themselves” as members of minorities.

So if women who have lived here all their lives and know only Japan can still feel like outsiders due to some arbitrary aspect of family heritage, how do Asian expatriate women feel? It’s difficult to know. Unless they are involved in lawsuits or crimes, they rarely get mentioned on TV or in periodicals. If there are any tarento of mixed Japanese-Asian parentage they don’t publicize the fact; or, at least, they don’t about it as readily and often as superstar tarento like Eiji Wentz or Becky talk about their Japanese-Western parentage.

Asian women in Japan, whether or not they are married to Japanese men, still evoke unpleasant associations, starting with military sex slavery and continuing with trafficking and sex tourism, issues that have also drawn the world’s condemnation. These associations are by no means dispelled when Abe denies government involvement in the sex-slave business, but in the end his denial mainly reinforces the feeling that he values political expediency over everything, especially given his famous support for the families of North Korean abductees.

Last May, when Shigeru Yokota visited South Korea to meet the mother of the North Korean husband of his abducted daughter Megumi, he was also invited to meet former sex slaves. In a letter to Yokota, a South Korean politician, perhaps advancing his own agenda, sympathized with Yokota’s suffering and said Yokota could gain incalculable goodwill from the Korean people if he acknowledged “the thousands of Megumis” who were kidnapped during Japan’s colonial rule. For whatever reason, Yokota didn’t meet with any sex slaves. Somebody assumed it wasn’t in his interest, or Japan’s.
The Japan Times
(C) All rights reserved

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Copyright The New York Review of Books

September 8, 2004

In the newspapers and on television, the tide of bad news from Africa rises again. Once more, the tiny butcher-bird of Rwanda is pecking at the eyes of the dying elephant which is the Congo. Once more, concerned white reporters crouch by emaciated babies, as the camera zooms in on the victims of the ethnic cleansing, massacre, and starvation which are obliterating the people of Darfur.

We in the rich world have grown used to these images, and now we are hooked on them. It is almost as if we require them. Since the first European contact, Africa has been mined for its gold, its diamonds, its oil and cash crops, its slaves and its wildlife, its copper and its hardwood. Now the raw material most demanded is fuel for the stoves that keep our shock and compassion warm: AIDS, famine, Ebola, mass murder, war, and again war. The old Kenyan intellectual Ali Mazrui once said to Howard French: “Where Africa is concerned, there is a constant search for tragedy with a new face; it’s like, what else is new in genocide?”

It is better to be angry than to be sorry. But angry with whom? With the appalling political leaders that Africa so often (but not always) throws up? With the governments of Europe and America which so often can be seen to have helped those leaders into their palaces, overlooking their cruelty and corruption for the sake of strategic or economic advantage? With the vanished colonial regimes, which left to the Africa frontiers that remain an invitation to ethnic cleansing? With the social engineering that cemented loose ethnic groupings into fiercely nationalistic “tribes”? With the examples of vast inequality in land and wealth that led to instant corruption in political elites?

It has to be said, though, that sustained political anger is still rare in Africa. Years ago, a white radical working to subvert the apartheid regime in South Africa said to me: “The most disastrous trait of ordinary African people is their infinite capacity for forgiveness, their sheer inability to keep up resentment.” He gave a wry smile. He knew what a European remark that was, and he loved that very characteristic which was making his struggle harder. Much later, the common people of his country awed the world when they overthrew their oppressors and then asked them only for repentance. At that time, a black girl working in a Cape Town restaurant complained to me that the local police would not admit which of them had murdered her brother. “If I don’t know who he is,” she went on, “how can I forgive him?”

Howard French lived in an Africa whose wrongs are not ripe for absolution. H would like the rest of us to share his anger at what is happening in Africa and what i being done to it. And he is right, especially in the swathe of the continent he know best, which is West Africa and the Congo basin. For many years, he was the New York Times man there and his reports, even in the sober style required by the Times, drew much admiration. American administrations knew that he was telling them true things that they did not want to hear. Other experienced journalists who worked in the region respected him deeply.

He was apparently not an easy man to know. But his African contacts and his political instincts were envied. And (I take this from old Congo hands in the press) he had two other advantages. He spoke excellent French, unlike most other American correspondents. And he had rare courage. It takes something exceptional to follow the Howard French principle: never pay when threatened and never give away your possessions, even on the frequent occasions when some screaming, doped-up teenager in tattered uniform is shoving a Kalashnikov muzzle into your face. Once, he confesses, he did surrender something he cared about. It was in Liberia, only hours before a coup d’?tat, and the roadblock soldiers were demanding food. Howard French gave them The New York Review of Books instead, because he had finished reading it. At once, the barricades were pulled aside.

He is evidently a complicated, unusual man. Howard French’s African-American parents moved early in his life to Abidjan, capital of the Ivory Coast, where his father worked for the World Health Organization. He was seventeen years old when he first went to visit them, and it was in West Africa ?still, as he admits, “his” Africa? that he learned fluent French and began his experience of the continent. There is a beautiful, gently comic account here of his first journey when, with his brother, he set out by train, bus, and collective taxi to reach northern Mali. The two boys, with their big Afro hair and jeans, puzzled the Malians, but they pressed on and finally reached the Dogon country, a barren land of plains and cliffs where the Dogon people have contrived to maintain their old way of life.

At this early point in the book, Howard French makes a fundamental statemen about Africa. He puts it in the form of a question, which may even have occurred t him then as a backpacking American teenager but which is now the “question tha haunts me.” He asks

If the Dogon, a smallish ethnic group with modest lands, could win the struggle to keep their culture and identity intact in the midst of persistent encroachment by outsiders, what might Africa have become if larger, even better-organized ethnic groups had been afforded the geographical space or other means to resist foreign domination? I have in mind ancient kingdoms like Kongo in Central Africa, or Dahomey and Ashanti in West Africa, just three out of numerous examples of African peoples who created large, well-structured states, with codified legal systems, diplomats and many other kinds of bureaucrats, and a range of public services from customs to mail delivery. One can easily imagine proto-states like these taking their places among today’s modern nation-states, if only they had been given the opportunity to develop. Instead…they were willfully and utterly destroyed, as were invaluable cultural resources and much of Africa’s self-confidence.

This is the right question, asked in the right way. It’s not, of course, the first time it has been put. Prophets of the old anticolonialist generation, such as Basil Davidson (whom French quotes), asked it too. But French revives it at just the right time, when most of the rich world assumes that Africa carries a disaster gene and when Europeans, especially, are wallowing in a bath of ill-informed nostalgia about the “benevolent” impact of their colonial empires on indigenous peoples. Another virtue of French’s version of this question is that it’s dynamic rather than sentimentally static. He does not assume that these societies could or should have been preserved unchanged. Instead, he is suggesting that they were capable of entering the torrent of nineteenth- and twentieth-century transformation on their own terms, with a fair chance of survival.

Finally, Howard French is tentative about this fateful “as if,” and he is wise to be so. Africa has been developing organized state-forms for at least six hundred years, but it is a big step to conclude that state formation was the most important feature of Africa when it was faced with modernization and outside contact. And one counterfactual question generates another. Most people on the continent did not inhabit highly structured polities such as medieval Mali or nineteenth-century Buganda, which were the exception rather than the rule. Instead, most of them lived in a multitude of smaller, less organized or defined societies. What would have been their fate as those “proto-states,” often hotly militaristic, set out on their own track to “catch up” with industrialized Europe and America?

This theory of disrupted progress underlies French’s approach to what he saw heard, and reported during his years in Africa. He is not short of loathing for some o the dictators and warlords he encounters, from General Sani Abacha in Nigeria to th late Laurent Kabila in Congo. But the evil they represent is ultimately an import, th infection after the unhealed fracture inflicted by the impact of colonization. It is not th subsequent exploitation or white settlement that did the damage; they merely inflame and perpetuated the severance of Africa from its natural political development

Above all, for French, it is the disastrous mistakes of United States policy in Africa that have prevented recovery. He does not make the US directly responsible for the horrors of recent decades. But

it would be dishonest to pretend that there is no link between what has perhaps been the least accountable and least democratically run compartment of America’s foreign policy?African affairs?and the undemocratic fortunes of the continent.

These blunders began in the cold war. In 1960, America covertly sponsored the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and later supported the rebellion of Jonas Savimbi in Angola against the “communist” government. In both cases, an entire country was condemned to years of devastating and unnecessary civil war. But the mistakes persisted after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as the Clinton administration?claiming to foster an “African Renaissance”?backed one authoritarian monster after another, among them Mobutu and Kabila in the Congo and Abacha in Nigeria. An insincere philosophy of “disengagement” from direct interference did not conceal Washington’s share of responsibility for the catastrophes that ensued.

Liberia, home of “one of Africa’s liveliest peoples,” lost 200,000 out of a population of 2.6 million in a series of atrocious civil wars. French saw much of this at first hand. This tiny country, which America had helped to found, became a cold war base for strategic airfields and signals intelligence. Ruled after 1980 by the abominable Master Sergeant Samuel Doe, it became the biggest recipient of American financial aid in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa.

Doe was eventually dismembered alive in front of a video camera by a rival in 1990. The subsequent blood-bath brought the warlord Charles Taylor to power in 1995, but the fighting went on in spite of the arrival of a Nigerian peacekeeping force. In 1996, Monrovia, the capital, exploded again into an orgy of killing and looting, shortly after Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had visited Liberia (or at least the secure areas of the airport) and told Liberians that “the civil war is your war.” French found streets littered with corpses. Wash-ington, he reflected, had unwittingly “helped grease the path of Africa’s first republic towards another, far more ignominious, record: the world’s first failed state.”

But this book is much more than indictments. Howard French decided to go bac to Africa as a journalist “because I wanted to dig into the kinds of stories abou African people and culture that do not often get told.” The demands of breaking news in the times of the Rwanda genocide and Africa’s “first world war” in the Congo made that hard for him. And ye so many loves…kept me going here: the beauty and the unfussy grace of the people, the food?yes, the food?music rich beyond comparison, the sheer immediacy of human contact….

In one memorable chapter, he describes how he went in search of the novelist Sony Labou Tansi in “Congo-Brazzaville,” the collapsed but once Frenchified republic north of the great river. Tansi, “Congo’s greatest writer, a man whose brave satirical fiction had subverted dictatorships throughout the region,” had plunged briefly into ethnic politics on behalf of his own Bakongo people. Then AIDS grasped him and his wife. After vain treatments in Paris, he had returned home and vanished up-country to die.

French set out to find Tansi, beginning a long, meandering journey through mud and jungle, following one false trail after another, traveling by car, canoe, and finally on foot across a land whose roads had melted into sandy ruts and bush. In the end, in a remote huddle of mud huts, he discovered him. Half-crazed and close to death, he was in the care of a white-robed prophetess who spoke in Pentecostal tongues. For Tansi, she was the reincarnation of Dona Beatrice, the eighteenth-century saint and seer of the Bakongo nation who had been burned for heresy on Portuguese orders. French saw that Tansi understood his priestess to be the living resurrection of his “Kongo,” for which he had struggled for so many years. “You must understand why I am feeling better now. I am home at last. Finally I am in my own land.” Two weeks later he was dead.

The hope French places in the survival of African culture pervades what he writes about Mali, the land he had fallen in love with as a young backpacking stranger. Here, in 1995, he found a democracy. Alpha Oumar Konar?, an archaeologist and the president, had overthrown a dictatorship at the head of a “citizens’ movement” of students, labor leaders, and the mothers of the military regime’s victims. (So much, reflects French, for the theory that a democracy can only be built by a developed middle class.) Konar? moved easily among his people with the minimum of security. There were huge problems, he told French. Locusts were massing, there was unrest among the Touareg nomads, half the population was unemployed, and the West overlooked Mali in its eagerness to fund kleptocratic monsters like Mobutu in Zaire. But French found that the Malians were proud of a freedom they felt they had won by themselves. For him, this was a precious example of an African society which had survived that sever-ing trauma of colonialism and had kept a sense of historic identity intact. “Mali…had become one of a select group of African countries that had succeeded in cobbling together its own cultural space….”

To reassure himself, Howard French headed north in Mali. He stood in awe before the vast mosque of Djenn?, “the world’s largest earthen structure,” and remembered the taunt of a colleague who had asked: “Have Africans ever produced anything more than mud huts?” This was a building which could stand comparison with any cultural monument in the world. (See illustration on page 37.) From the mosque, he went on to the mile-long mound of Djenn?-Jeno, the site of a fabulously wealthy trading city where perhaps 20,000 people had lived in the eleventh century. President Konar? himself had worked there, with the American archaeologists Susan and Roderick McIntosh (who are still appealing to the world to help stop the looting of the city’s figurines, pottery, and metalwork, and the laundering of this irreplaceable heritage through the art salesrooms of the world). Much moved, French writes:

In a world where the achievements of Africans get scant recognition, Djenn?-Jeno’s archaeological treasures resonate with the message that the people of this continent are capable of great things, and indeed always have been.

But the central theme of his book is his experience of the Congo, the colossal territory at the center of the continent which dissolved under his eyes into chaos and misery. French provides a brief, bitter summary of its story. In the nineteenth century, as the “scramble for Africa” developed, Leopold II of the Belgians fooled the rest of the world into giving him personal control of the entire Congo basin, from the Atlantic almost as far east as the Great Lakes. He promised to run it as a free trade zone, devoted to the repression of the Arab slave trade. In practice, it became his own private estate, plundered for its ivory and wild rubber by a regime which relied on state terror to extract its wealth.Nobody will ever know the human cost, but some historians calculate that the population had dropped by ten million by the time Leopold was forced to hand the Congo over to the Belgian state in 1908.

There followed fifty years of harsh colonial rule, during which the Belgians made no attempt to train an African elite to succeed them. When nationalist protest exploded in 1960, the Belgians abandoned the Congo almost overnight. Patrice Lumumba, the only leader who might have held the place together, was kidnapped and murdered with American and British connivance, while Western governments encouraged the secession of the wealthy mining province of Katanga. The Congo, renamed Zaire, was entrusted to the safely anti-Communist Mobutu Sese Seko, who ruled it for thirty-six years under the most monstrous and unscrupulous kleptocracy Africa had yet seen.

Howard French encountered Zaire in the mid-1990s, in Mobutu’s last years. Th dictator was dying of cancer, spending much of his time with his court in the Bea Rivage Hotel on Lake Geneva at a cost of $16,000 a night. In Kinshasa, his capital there was growing political unrest, but also fear for the future. A thousand miles to th east, a puzzling little rebellion had begun, as an army of boys with smart Wellingto boots and AK-47s marched about the rain forest. People said they were th Banyamulenge, an insignificant ethnic minority

It turned out that they were the vanguard of Zaire’s destroyers. The genocide in Rwanda, when some 800,000 mostly Tutsi people became the victims of planned extermination by their Hutu neighbors, had taken place in 1994. The outside world, which had done almost nothing to stop it, now settled down to bewail its own guilt and offer support to the Tutsi survivors. But the madness which had driven the genocide was still burning, and the flames were moving westward.

Howard French was a witness to the appalling second act of the Rwandan tragedy which now followed. Outside Africa, few people even today understand the connection between the genocide and the Congolese wars that followed, and it is a pity that French does not provide a fuller analysis of the 1994 disaster itself. What cannot be ignored is that the Tutsis were out for revenge. Hundreds of thousands of Hutus, many of them participants in the massacres, had fled across the border into Zaire. Not without good reasons, the Rwandan Tutsis accused them of forming new armies in the refugee camps. Some NGOs refused to work in refugee camps dominated by Hutu gangs. The Tutsis crossed the border to crush the Hutus.

The “Banyamulenge rebellion” was a mere cover story. Its troops turned out to be units of the “Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo,” led by the veteran Congolese troublemaker Laurent Kabila. But his leadership, too, turned out to be largely fiction. Throughout the campaign that immediately followed, real control stayed in the hands of the Rwandan commanders. French disarmingly admits that he too was fooled at first. When he realized what was going on, “I felt a deep, physical sense of embarrassment at my own ignorance.”

As Kabila’s forces advanced, capturing one city after another, the Hutu refugees fled into the forests. They knew what the Tutsis would do to them. In late 1996, French flew with Sadako Ogata, the UN high commissioner for refugees, to Kisangani and to a temporary camp at Tingi-Tingi where 150,000 desperate Hutu fugitives begged in vain to be rescued. But slaughter followed slaughter. A Zairian friend said to French:

Anyone who follows the itinerary of the rebels knows that this is a campaign to exterminate the Hutu refugees…. Those who suffered a genocide are committing one in their turn.

At the end of the year, Mobutu returned to Kinshasa in scenes of ecstatic welcome. But he was finished. The United States, which had armed and bankrolled Mobutu for so many years, now decided that change was inevitable and began to make contact with Kabila as his armies approached Kinshasa, murdering Hutu men, women, and children as they came. On May 17, 1997, Mobutu bolted. The next day, French went to watch Kabila’s men enter the city down almost empty streets. “We headed for Avenue 30 Juin, the city’s weed-filled Champs-Elys?es. The only other people about were glue-addicted street children….”

What followed was only an exchange of old tyranny for new. Soon war resumed, this time on an international scale, as Laurent Kabila fell out with the Rwandans and other African states pitched in on different sides of the conflict. In the six years after 1996, 3.3 million people died in these wars, about four times the toll of the original Rwanda genocide. Howard French always detested Kabila (who was to be assassinated in 2001), referring to him as “a frontier bandit and small-time terrorist” with a “braggadocio strut [that] seemed straight out of the South Bronx.” But his real anger throughout this book, above all over the fate of Zaire/Congo, is aimed at American policy and its makers.

He argues that the Clinton administration, which had downplayed the Rwand disaster as it took place and even avoided the use of the word “genocide” to describ it, became demoralized by guilt and a sense of failure as the truth emerged. I Washington, the most popular source of information was the New Yorker journalist Philip Gourevitch, whose powerful book on the genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (1998), compared the cause of the Rwandan Tutsis to the “survival struggle” of Israel. The comparison was false, but unnerving. The administration now fell into the fatal American habit of reducing complex struggles to “good guys” and “bad guys,” and tilted decisively toward supporting whatever the “good guy” Tutsis undertook.

In French’s opinion, Gourevitch has a lot to answer for. As the Rwandan invasion of eastern Zaire began, he

played an important role in selling Laurent Kabila in Washington, ironically by restoring him to the Lumumbaist tradition of respectable nationalism. In his writings, Gourevitch curiously airbrushed the old Congolese highwayman and mountebank, minimizing his ideology and avoiding unpleasant details of his dodgy past.

Howard French goes on to accuse Gourevitch of playing down the reported massacres of refugees committed by Kabila’s soldiers as they advanced across Zaire, and of ridiculing United Nations efforts to investigate the killings. Even allowing for a foreign correspondent’s natural resentment of visiting star correspondents who have a president’s ear, these are serious charges.

By now, in the early summer of 1997, the administration had anointed Laurent Kabila as its next “good guy” in Zaire. Mobutu had to go. Bill Richardson was sent to Kinshasa as President Clinton’s special envoy. “You are out!” he told Mobutu. “Do you want to leave with dignity or as a carcass?” Then he went to see Kabila in the bush, and reported that he was “a street-smart, charismatic person with a quick intelligence.” Next, his plane with the press party made for Kisangani. A few miles down the road, Alliance troops were butchering the inhabitants of one of the last refugee camps and burning the corpses. But there was time only for a photo opportunity. A refugee woman was found clutching a sick baby. She was persuaded to let the caring American visitor hold it. Richardson put out his arms, but in that instant the baby died. As French puts it in his economical way, “It took us all a few minutes to gather our composure….”

It was the Clinton administration’s slogans, its constant, chirpy insistence that it had a policy when in reality it had none, that infuriated Howard French. “African solutions to African problems,” or “America has no vital or strategic interests in West Africa,” or “Trade Not Aid”?what did all that mean? To him it meant “an exercise in moral bankruptcy arguably more crass and even more complete than the failure to stop the Rwandan genocide.”

The United States seemed to be in denial about its own influence in the region French especially resented the “African Renaissance” rhetoric from the Stat Department, which seemed to be anointing a row of one-party tyrants as embry democrats. When Madeleine Albright came to Kinshasa in December 1997 to let th world see that Kabila had America’s blessing, French turned down an invitation to fl with her on an “African Renaissance” tour. “I had seen…too many hollow slogans an broken promises to be cooped up in a small airplane and slathered in spin.

His dislike of Madeleine Albright has an almost physical edge, as he pelts her with adjectives. She had “hawkish eyebrows, immediately on the defensive,” “she was arch,” “she was rambling, almost incoherent.” In the end, he was able to hit her where it hurt. At her joint press conference with Laurent Kabila, French primed a colleague to ask a deadly question.If America was happy with Kabila’s commitment to democratic rights, then what about the fate of the opposition politician Zahidi Ngoma, who was being beaten and tortured in prison? As French guessed, Madeleine Albright had never heard of the case. But Kabila exploded with rage, shouting that those who tried to divide the people would all be arrested. The conference ended in disaster; Albright was humiliated, and French, without expressing open self-congratulation, reckons that from that moment the American investment in the Kabila regime began to wane.

This scene is exhilarating for its frankness. And yet it reveals the only weakness of A Continent for the Taking, which is otherwise a triumph of passionate reporting. The wrath of journalists (speaking as one of them, who has also seen some death and much evil) can be one-dimensional. There is generous rage at those who do terrible things, and at those in distant seats of power who allow such things to be done and then lie about them. But other fallible human beings have to devise policies and try to make them work in the teeth of all the storms of human misery and baseness that strive to blow them down.

The Clinton team was ignorant and arrogant about Africa, and frequently hypocritical. Its policies in West Africa and the Congo made nothing better, and some things worse. Nonetheless, I wish that French had made clear, on the basis of his impressive empathy and experience, what was the alternative line that the administration?any American administration? should have taken and should be taking now. His point about the historical severing of African political development is well worth making, and so is his complaint that modest democratic achievement in places like Mali went unrewarded and unrecognized. But how should these perceptions be translated into action by a superpower? There has to be an answer to that question. Howard French has not provided it, but any future American leadership which takes Africa seriously will have to do so. If it tries to prepare an answer, this book should be the first item on its reading list.

Copyright � 2004 NYREV, Inc.

Posted at 11:21 AM · Comments (0)

[Editor’s note: An intriguing, if overly long piece from an unlikely enough source, and this follows the generally vapid, media generated debate of a few weeks ago about Obama’s “blackness”. The author reveals his own biases at least as much as he illuminates other. The references to Updike’s The Coup, a much overlooked novel, are particularly interesting.]

Copyright The American Conservative

Although he presents himself as a healer of differences, the presidential candidate’s own racial struggle paints a conflicted portrait.

When Charles de Gaulle paid his first visit to embattled French Algeria after taking power in 1958, he stepped up to the microphone in front of a vast throng of Europeans and Arabs torn by murderous hostilities, stared out at them, and simply announced, “I have understood you.” The crowd exulted. Christians and Muslims alike broke into grateful tears. De Gaulle understands us! What more do we need?

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has yet to attain that level of oracular ambiguity, but his bestseller The Audacity of Hope shows this wordsmith’s facility at eloquently restating the views of both his liberal supporters and his conservative opponents, leaving implicit the suggestion that all we require to resolve these wearying Washington disputes is to find a man who understands us—a reasonable man, a man very much like, say, Obama—and turn power over to him. The politician has elicited such fervor among many white voters that Slate.com’s Timothy Noah runs a regular feature entitled “The Obama Messiah Watch” quoting “gratuitously adoring” articles. (Blacks have tended to be relatively more level-headed about him.)

Early in his run for the U.S. Senate in 2004, Obama’s pollsters discovered that women loved him, especially nice white ladies who like personalities more than politics and definitely don’t like political arguments. Why can’t we all just get along?

Obama has molded himself into the male Oprah Winfrey, the crown prince of niceness, bravely denouncing divisiveness, condemning controversy, eulogizing unity, and retelling his feel-good life story about how he, the child of a black scholar from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas, grew up to be editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Gaullism worked out fairly well in France, and so might Obamaism in America. His opposition in 2002 to invading Iraq was sensible and forcibly stated. And Obama was a broadly respected Illinois state legislator from 1997-2005 because he searched out minor good government issues and forged bipartisan alliances with technocrats in the Republican ranks. But a president can’t pick and choose his issues with the exquisite selectivity Obama displayed as a backbencher—especially not with judicial nominees. So his record as chief executive would likely prove far more liberal.

As we’ve seen with George W. Bush, however, pre-election platforms, such as Bush’s promise to pursue a “humble” foreign policy, matter less than the inner man. Obama is a particularly complicated personality, so he, and the country, deserve a more frank analysis than he has received thus far at the hands of a starstruck press.

Beneath this bland Good Obama lies a more interesting character, one that I like far better—the Bad Obama, a close student of other people’s weaknesses, a literary artist of considerable power in plumbing his deep reservoirs of self-pity and resentment, an unfunny Evelyn Waugh consumed by indignation toward his own mother’s people. He has been hiding out on the bestseller lists for the last two years in his enormously revealing, but little understood, 1995 “autobiography”—a more accurate term might be “autobiographical novel”—Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.

When Obama briefly surfaced in the media in 1990 as the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review, Random House handed him a book contract. Originally, he intended to write a disquisition on race relations, but the puerility of his theorizing discouraged him. He turned instead to writing about what he finds truly fascinating: his relatives and himself.

Obama’s gift for restructuring the past into emotionally and aesthetically satisfying patterns made for an uneasy hybrid of fact and fiction, with composite characters, clearly made-up dialogue, and even preposterous dream sequences. Recently, the Los Angeles Times revealed that the tale of his one triumph during his four years as a young ethnic activist in Chicago—getting asbestos removed from a public housing project—excluded all mention of the veteran local agitator, Hazel Johnson, who might deserve more of the credit.

Nonetheless, Dreams is an impressive book. The abstract lessons he claims to draw from his life aren’t memorable, sapped as they are by the pervasive insincerity about race that America demands of its intellectuals, but Obama has a depressive’s fine eye for the disillusioning detail. His characters, real or synthetic, are vivid, and he has an accurate ear for how different kinds of people speak. The book’s chief weakness is that its main character—Obama himself—is a bit of a drip, a humor-impaired Holden Caulfield whose preppie angst is fueled by racial regret. (Obama has a knack for irony, but of a strangely humorless flavor.)

Why haven’t many grasped the book’s essence? First, Obama’s elegant, carefully wrought prose style makes Dreams a frustratingly slow read, which may explain why the book was remaindered in 1995, and why so few of the many who have purchased it following his famous keynote address at the 2004 Democratic convention appear to have read much of it.

Second, the plot isn’t that interesting: his first three decades are too lacking in incident to make a page-turning story. Obama has led a fairly pleasant existence, with most of its suffering and conflict taking place within his own head as he tries to turn himself into an authentic angry black man.

Third, there is the confusing contrast between the confident, suave master politician we see on television and the tormented narrator of Dreams, who is an updated Black Pride version of the old “tragic mulatto” stereotype found in “Show Boat” and “Imitation of Life.”

Which Obama is real? Or is that a naïve question to ask of such a formidable identity artist? William Finnegan wrote in the New Yorker of Obama’s campaigning: “… it was possible to see him slipping subtly into the idiom of his interlocutor—the blushing, polysyllabic grad student, the hefty black church-pillar lady, the hip-hop autoshop guy.” Like Madonna or David Bowie, he has spent his life trying on different personalities, but while theirs are, in Camille Paglia’s phrase, sexual personae, his specialty is racial personae.

Fourth, his is “a story of race and inheritance,” two closely linked topics upon which American elites have intellectually disarmed themselves. In an era when fashionable thinkers claim that race is just a social construct, Obama’s subtitle is subversive. Although his expensive education—prep school, an Ivy League bachelor’s degree, and then a Harvard professional diploma—has not equipped him with a conceptual vocabulary adequate for articulating the meaning behind his life’s story, the details deliver a message that white intellectuals have all but forgotten: the many-faceted importance of who your relatives are.

A racial group is a large extended family, and Obama’s book is primarily about his rejection of his supportive white maternal extended family in favor of his unknown black paternal extended family.

For the few willing to read all 442 pages, he offers important testimony about the enduring glamour of anti-white anger. It’s a bitter counterweight to the sunny hopes so widely invested in his candidacy as the man whose election as president would somehow help America finally “transcend race.”

In reality, Obama provides a disturbing test of the best-case scenario of whether America can indeed move beyond race. He inherited his father’s penetrating intelligence; was raised mostly by his loving liberal white grandparents in multiracial, laid-back Hawaii, where America’s normal race rules never applied; and received a superb private school education. And yet, at least through age 33 when he wrote Dreams from My Father, he found solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against his mother’s race.

Even his celebrated acceptance of Christianity in his mid-20s turns out to be an affirmation of African-American emotional separatism. As I was reading Dreams, I assumed that his ending would be adapted from the favorite book of his youth, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which climaxes with Malcolm’s visit to Mecca and heartwarming conversion from the racism of the Black Muslims to the universalism of orthodox Islam. I expected that Obama would analogously forgive whites and ask forgiveness for his own racial antagonism as he accepts Jesus.

Instead, Obama falls under the spell of a leftist black nationalist preacher, Jeremiah A. Wright, who preaches African-American unity through antipathy toward whites. Reverend Wright remains a major influence on the presidential candidate. (The title of Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope, is borrowed from one of Wright’s sermons.) Ben Wallace-Wells notes in Rolling Stone: “This is as openly radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from, as much Malcolm X as Martin Luther King Jr.”

The happy ending to Dreams is that Obama’s hard-drinking half-brother Roy—“Actually, now we call him Abongo, his Luo name, for two years ago he decided to reassert his African heritage”—converts to teetotaling Islam.

Although the biracial Obama is frequently lumped with the multiracial golfer Tiger Woods as evidence of the socially healing power of interracial marriage, their attitudes are quite different. Woods turned down Nike’s suggestion that because African-American celebrities are so popular today, he should identify himself solely as black. He didn’t want to disown his mother. Woods instead calls himself black and Thai, or, at times, “Caublinasian,” in tribute to his Caucasian, black, American Indian, and Asian ancestors.

From the age of ten onward, though, Obama desperately wants to be black: “I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant.” Honolulu’s paucity of African-Americans means he has to learn to be black from the media: “TV, movies, the radio; those were places to start. Pop culture was color-coded, after all, an arcade of images from which you could cop a walk, a talk, a step, a style.”

He cherishes every cause for complaint he can discern against white folks. He is constantly distressed at being half-white. Obama says he “ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of twelve or thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites,” even though he surely realizes that his media-sensation status stems from how much white people love highly accomplished blacks who speak with white accents. He wouldn’t be a serious candidate for president at age 45 if he weren’t part black.

Obama’s teenage self-consciousness is perpetually crucified by contact with stereotypes about blacks. When his grandmother wants a ride to work because the day before, while awaiting the bus, she was threatened by a black panhandler, he is outraged—at his grandparents. “And yet I knew that men who might easily have been my brothers could still inspire their rawest fears.” In high school, he gets upset when “a white girl mentioned in the middle of conversation how much she liked Stevie Wonder; or when a woman in the supermarket asked me if I played basketball; or when the school principal told me I was cool.”

The great irony of the book is that so many of the stereotypes about African-Americans and Africans turn out, in his troubling experience, to be true—which doesn’t make Obama happy at all: “I did like Stevie Wonder, I did love basketball, and I tried my best to be cool at all times. So why did such comments always set me on edge?” (When he moves to the South Side of Chicago, he eventually discovers that, like his grandmother, he’s sometimes scared of black males on the street, too.)

Even the seemingly unique marriage of Obama’s parents turns out to be a stereotype, one that was eerily paralleled in John Updike’s 1978 novel about a hyper-intellectual African dictator, The Coup.

The year before Obama’s birth in 1961, his Kansas-born mother Ann Dunham, an 18-year-old student at the University of Hawaii, may have wed fellow student Barack Hussein Obama Sr. Just like Updike’s narrator, Felix Ellellou, who bigamously marries a white Midwestern co-ed at their American college in 1959, the senior Obama already had a wife back home in an African village. Obama writes, “In fact, how and when the marriage occurred remains a bit murky, a bill of particulars that I’ve never had the courage to explore.”

Upon graduation, his father was offered a generous scholarship by the New School for Social Research in New York City that would have paid for his family to come with him. Instead, wanting the most famous diploma, he chose Harvard’s scholarship offer, even though it provided only for him. And so he abandoned the little boy who would grow up idolizing him from afar.

Just as Updike’s Ellellou returned from America to embark on a governmental career in Africa, where he added two more wives to his collection, Obama’s polygamous pop went back to Kenya. Obama Sr. took up again with his first wife, married another white American woman, and added a mistress, eventually siring approximately eight children by four women. (The precise number of his offspring remains uncertain as some of his potential heirs long litigated each other’s true paternity in probate court.)

Obama’s mother married an Indonesian student, and when he was six, they moved to Jakarta. In his account, she was shocked to discover how her new husband reverted to chauvinist Indonesian ways as soon as he left America and that Indonesia was a nasty right-wing dictatorship (although the latter doesn’t jibe with her spending much of the rest of her life in that country). She divorced and sent 10-year-old Barack to live with her parents in Honolulu, while she and his half-sister stayed, off-and-on, in Indonesia.

Despite Obama’s relentless efforts to mold himself into an African-American, his overwhelmingly white upbringing is apparent in his coolly analytical depiction of his mother, a portrait that most black men would find disrespectful. To Obama, his mother is a Kumbaya-era liberal. I suspect he feels that she messed up her life due to naïve faith in Third World countries and Third World men; but if she had been wiser, where would he be? This is one of life’s conundrums that’s hopeless but not serious, and yet Obama can’t help being serious about himself.

Years later, when he’s working on Wall Street, he’s creeped out by his visiting mother’s insistence on seeing her favorite film, the 1959 Brazilian art-house classic “Black Orpheus.” He belatedly realizes that his very fair-skinned mother is sexually attracted to dark men. He pompously intones, “The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.”

Wallace-Wells mentions in Rolling Stone:

There is an amazingly candid moment in Obama’s autobiography when he writes of his childhood discomfort at the way his mother would sexualize African-American men. ‘More than once,’ he recalls, ‘my mother would point out: “Harry Belafonte is the best-looking man on the planet.”’ What the focus groups his advisers conducted revealed was that Obama’s political career now depends, in some measure, upon a tamer version of this same feeling, on the complicated dynamics of how white women respond to a charismatic black man.

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Copyright South China Morning Post

Thursday, March 15, 2007

You look at the figures and you think: “That’s impossible.” Uganda had about 7 million people at independence in 1962, and in only 45 years it has grown to 30 million. By 2050, just over four more decades, there will be 130 million Ugandans, and it will be the 12th biggest country in the world, with more people than Russia or Japan. Its population will have increased 18-fold in less than 90 years.

Many people think that population growth is no longer a problem, and everybody somehow knows that it is politically incorrect to talk about it. Back in 1968, when Paul Ehrlich terrified everybody with his book The Population Bomb, it was seen as the gravest long-term threat facing the human race. But now it scarcely gets a mention, even in discussions on climate change - as if the number of people producing and consuming on this planet was irrelevant to the pressure on the environment.

True, the population explosion has gone away in large parts of the world, in the sense that most developed countries now have birth rates well below replacement level (2.1 children per woman): the global average, including the developing countries of Asia and South America, is now down to 2.3 children. That’s pretty impressive, given that it was 5.4 children per woman as recently as 1970. But there remains the problem of what you might call “inertial growth”.

My own mother had five children, which was not seen as at all unusual at the time. In the next generation of our family, by contrast, the birth rate has dropped to 2.0: we five brothers and sisters and our five spouses have had a total of just 10 children. But that doesn’t mean that our population boom stopped.

It would have if we had just spawned and died, but we insisted upon living on after our children were born. In fact, we’re all still here, although the first grandchildren are already starting to appear - so where there were once 10 of us, there are now 23. It takes two full generations at replacement level before the population finally stabilises.

That process accounts for about half of the anticipated population growth in the next 40 years, which will raise the total number of people on the planet from 6.5 billion to about 9 billion. But the other half of the growth comes mainly from Africa, already the poorest continent.

This may explain why it became politically incorrect to talk about population growth around 25 years ago. Nine of the 10 countries with the highest birth rates are African (the other is Afghanistan), and it seemed uncomfortably like pointing the finger at the victim. But runaway population growth is a big factor in making so many Africans victims, and it doesn’t help to stay silent about it.

Sometimes the steadily worsening ratio of people to resources just causes deepening poverty, as in Nigeria, whose population by 2050 will reach 300 million. That is the same as the current population of the United States, but Nigeria, apart from being virtually without industry, does not have one-tenth of the natural resources of the US. If those 300 million people live at all, they will live very badly.

Africa, which accounted for only 8 per cent of the world’s population in the 1960s, will contain almost a quarter of the world’s (much larger) population in 2050.

Uganda’s birth rate is seven children per woman, little changed from 30 years ago. Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, believes that his country is underpopulated, and told parliament last July: “I am not one of those worried about the population explosion. It is a great resource.” He has done many good things for his country, but this one blind spot could undo them all. And he is far from alone.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

Posted at 10:37 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Financial Times

February 16 2007

I am on the train to Bristol to meet Martin Parr, a photographer whose brilliantly coloured images of vulgarity and the hyper-consumerism of the modern age have made him one of the leading names in his field. So I am mindful that he may have a nasty surprise in store for me when it comes to his choice of lunch venue. Sure enough, it has crossed his mind.

“I wanted to take you to McDonald’s,” he says breezily. “Just for the hell of it. I am sure no one has asked to be taken there.” But instead we are in a cosy, wintry pub in the highly desirable Clifton area of the city, for which I am grateful.

“I thought it was a great idea. But you have come all the way from London,” he relents, with the utmost reluctance.

Nothing would be more typical of Parr than to plan an ironic repast amid the sachets of ketchup and wolfing hordes of Britain’s hungry high-street shoppers. Some of his most striking photographs are taken in chip shops and fast-food outlets, portraits of a nation indulging cheerfully in systemic malnutrition.

The Albion pub, on the other hand, is buzzy with middle-class gentlefolk, modest appetites and smooth manners. Parr has lived in the city for 18 years, not far from this pub, and says that he enjoys the air of anonymity. “When I am in London, all I do is mix with other people in the arts,” he says, making it sound like a grim sentence.

He chooses the mackerel pate and the confit of duck, and I copy him, which makes him laugh. Parr has an appropriately comic-book laugh - “Ha, ha, ha!” - that he deploys whenever he senses a moment of awkwardness or absurdity, which is often.

He has been a part of the Magnum collective of photographers for nearly 20 years, and I ask about the well-chronicled problems that surrounded his application to join. “It was the biggest controversy they had ever had about a new photographer,” he says with palpable pride.

I ask what the problem was. “I was one of the first to break that humanist tradition that was so strong in the previous generation. They thought I was exploitative, cynical, even fascist. All kinds of words were used. But you should ask them.”

But he was a kind of humanist himself, surely? “That’s the irony. I do the things I do because I am interested in people. I do accept that photography is to a degree exploitative. But I quite like controversy. It doesn’t do you any harm. In any case, what is so controversial about walking into a supermarket and taking photographs, as opposed to photographing a war in Afghanistan or Gaza?”

Parr’s photographs address their own conflicts, observing, in the words of the catalogue that accompanied his major retrospective at the Barbican in 2002, the “myriad of social ills” that have inflicted themselves on Britain over the course of his 54-year lifespan: “the loosening of community ties, the mass embrace of consumerism, the manic pursuit of leisure and global tourism, the vanity fair of the English middle class and the phantasmagoria of the sub-class that emerged… during the 1980s”.

But Parr says he regards himself as a “European photographer, working in Europe”, much better known in France, Germany and Italy than in his native land. He is just about to go to Luxembourg for the first time, to fulfil an assignment. “I expect it to be comfortable, wealthy, maybe a bit boring.”

Surely there is no such thing as boring to a photographer like him? “Of course not,” he retracts instantly. The veneer of irony that exists in his photographs is also constantly present in Parr’s conversation, making it hard to know what he really thinks about anything….

….I wasn’t going to, but whatever. I say that I found his The Last Resort series of photographs from the early 1980s, showing families sunbathing amid hideous backdrops of leaden skies, cranes and caterpillar trucks at the Merseyside resort of New Brighton, deeply depressing.

“I like the fact that the families are having a good time, despite the [fact that they are in a] decaying, litter-strewn resort. People said it was exploitative of the working class. But it was shown in Liverpool and there was hardly a murmur - they know what New Brighton is like. The minute it came to London, there was this big kerfuffle about it because it offended middle-class people like you.”

But the people in the photographs are frequently grotesque, I counter.

“I don’t know how you can say they are grotesque. Are you saying poor people are grotesque? I am rather shocked. That’s a very un-PC thing to say.”

They are ugly and overweight, I say.

“I don’t go looking for ugly and overweight people. That would be a cheap laugh. They are normal people. Look around this pub, and there are ugly and overweight people. I am very careful about that. Of course I am being subjective and selective, creating my own form of fiction.”

Why the obsession with tacky seaside resorts?

“I like this metaphor of England slowly fraying at the edges. The idea of England in decline is very attractive.”

Why?

“Decline is so much more interesting than success. And decline photographs very well. We are surrounded by propaganda, interviews with glamorous people and so on. They have their own agenda. Decline, or something going downhill, is automatically more interesting to me.”…

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Copyright The International Herald Tribune

Monday, March 12, 2007

NEW DELHI: Late morning in the Pahar Ganj neighborhood, and the narrow lanes heave with movement. Cross-legged on the pavement, four men bind books in red leather; across the road a man sells pomegranates and fresh green coconuts; the woman next door deals in glass marbles and wooden spinning tops; nearby, gulab jamuns — balls of dough soaked in syrup — are frying in a vast vat of boiling oil.

It is a scene much-photographed by backpackers to India, who stay in Pahar Ganj’s cheap hotels, a stone’s throw from the New Delhi railway station at the heart of the capital. But the city authorities view this thronging, vibrant stretch of land as the embodiment of everything that is wrong with the city.

A new government vision document for the capital, the Delhi Master Plan, proposes that area be demolished and be replaced by high-rise apartment blocks.

Delhi is bursting and the only way is up. If Baron Haussmann’s plan for transforming Paris lay in replacing crowded lanes with wide, unbarricadable boulevards, India’s minister of state for urban development, Ajay Maken, dreams of creating new space to house the city’s exploding population by growing vertically.

His Master Plan 2021, which took effect last month, sets out a recipe for transforming India’s capital into a “world-class city,” guided by three priorities: obliterating the slums, taming the traffic and importing a Manhattan skyline. On the surface, this dense 200-page document, filled with annexations on sewage systems and arterial road routes, is a dry piece of officialese. But beneath the small print, it is a brave attempt to tackle an urgent problem: how do you transform a chaotic, traffic-choked, churning city into a “global metropolis” worthy of representing India’s ambitions to become the next Asian superpower?

As it is, Delhi is a planner’s nightmare. Go beyond the carefully laid-out, green showpiece terrain of New Delhi — home to the prime minister, the city’s elite and the best hotels — and there is architectural anarchy.

The government estimates that around 60 percent of the city’s 15 million inhabitants live in homes that are illegal — in slums, in unauthorized developments or in unplanned and unsafe buildings.

Because these areas do not officially exist, they have no safe water supply, no legal electricity system and no proper sewers. Resourceful residents have made do: artfully siphoning water from the mains, risking their lives to sling wires onto nearby electricity pylons to steal power. The city’s central water and power supplies are barely able to cope with this extra, invisible demand; most areas receive water for just a couple of hours a day, forcing residents to stock up with buckets when they can, while extended power outages occur daily.

Since these were unplanned settlements, no good roads were ever built for them. Now their inhabitants, who are growing rapidly richer with India’s economic boom, are trading in their bicycles for motorbikes, or upgrading their motorbikes for cars. Last year car sales rose across India by 24 percent. Traffic in the capital is growing thicker and more perilous.

The Ministry of Urban Development has concluded that if 60 percent of the people in the city are living outside of the law, then the problem lies with the law itself. With a stroke of a pen, the new plan legalizes the homes of around three and a half million people, who have until now lived in fear of seeing their homes knocked down. Areas deemed dangerous will be redeveloped and the city’s roughly two million slum dwellers will be rehoused, many of them in the new, tall developments.

“To be a world-class city we need to have good quality housing,” Maken said in an interview in his office in an upmarket part of Delhi where power cuts are rare and the water supply is good (although wild monkeys dance on the cars of officials outside, resistant to all campaigns to banish them).

Since the 1950s, successive governments have restricted housing construction to one state body, the Delhi Development Authority. But this organization failed to keep pace with spiraling demand, and as a result, newcomers to the city have been forced to build for themselves illegally.

Maken has concluded that the state- backed system has proved disastrous, and the new plan (the third drawn up for the city since 1962) allows private developers into the housing market for the first time.

To give these developers an incentive, the plan abolishes restrictions on tall construction, in all but a few historical areas. Building upward is a radical solution for a city where height restrictions keep most buildings at tree level. But, since the government has been unable to stop the annual arrival of around half a million migrants driven by rural poverty, it now says radical action is necessary. By 2021 the capital’s population is forecast to rise to 23 million, and the masses must be housed somehow.

“We will have more open spaces and more high-rise buildings,” Maken said. “The skyline of the city will change. People will no longer be forced to live in narrow lanes in subhuman conditions. You can’t convert the whole of Delhi into Manhattan; but some parts will go that way.”

Delhi has no alternative, he said.

“There’s no way that we can remove these millions of people, living in illegal constructions, from Delhi. And we shouldn’t do it,” he said. “They are the people who are working as maids, building the metros, driving the rickshaws; they are essential service providers for the community.”

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VS Naipaul always considered himself a writer of the imagination, but increasingly found he wanted to engage with history and the wider world. What better place to start than his ancestral land of India?

Saturday March 10, 2007
The Guardian

Kerala
Still lives … making serene progress along Kerala’s rural waterways.

I thought when I began to write that I would do fiction alone. To be a writer of the imagination seemed to me the noblest thing. But after a few books I saw that my material - the matter in my head, the matter in the end given me by my background - would not support that ambition.

The ambition itself had been given me by what I knew of the great 19th-century novels of Europe, or what I thought I knew of them. I put it in that cautious way because, before I began to write, I actually hadn’t read a great deal. I saw now - something I suppose I had always sensed but never worked out as an idea - that those novels had come out of societies more compartmented, more intellectually ordered and full of conviction than the one I found myself in. To pretend that I came out of a society as complete and ordered would in some ways have made writing easier. The order I am talking about is, simply, the order, the fenced-in setting, that underpins the television situation comedy. The rules of the fenced-in world are few and easily understood; the messy outside world doesn’t intrude to undo the magic. I could have tried to write like that. But I would not have got very far. I would have had to simplify too much, leave out a lot. It would have been to deny what I saw as my task as a writer.

I had to be true to my own world. It was more fluid, harder to pin down and present to a reader in any accepted, 19th-century way. Every simple statement I could make about myself or my family or background had to be qualified in some way.

I was born in 1932 on the other side of the Atlantic in the British colony of Trinidad, an outcrop of Venezuela and South America. It was a small island, essentially agricultural when I was born (like Venezuela, it had oil, which was beginning to be developed). It had a racially mixed population of perhaps half a million, with my own immigrant Asian Indian community (finely divided by religion, education, money, caste background) of about 150,000.

I had no great love for the place, no love for its colonial smallness. I saw myself as a castaway from the world’s old civilisations, and I wished to be part of that bigger world as soon as possible. An academic scholarship in 1950, when I was 18, enabled me to leave. I went to England to do a university course with the ambition afterwards of being a writer. I never in any real sense went back.

So my world as a writer was full of flight and unfinished experience, full of the odds and ends of cultures and migrations, from India to the New World in 1880-1900, from the New World to Europe in 1950, things that didn’t make a whole. There was nothing like the stability of the rooted societies that had produced the great fictions of the 19th century, in which, for example, even a paragraph of a fairytale or parable by Tolstoy could suggest a whole real world. And soon I saw myself at the end of the scattered island material I carried with me.

But writing was my vocation; I had never wished to be anything but a writer. My practice as a writer had deepened the fascination with people and narrative that I had always had, and increasingly now, in the larger world I had wanted to join, that fascination was turning into a wish to understand the currents of history that had created the fluidity of which I found myself a part. It was necessary for me as a writer to engage with the larger world. I didn’t know how to set about it; there was no example I could follow.

The practice of fiction couldn’t help me. Fiction is best done from within and out of great knowledge. In the larger world I was an outsider; I didn’t know enough and would never know enough. After much hesitation and uncertainty I saw that I had to deal with this world in the most direct way. I had to go against my practice as a fiction writer. To record my experience as truthfully as possible I had to use the tools I had developed. So there came this divide in my writing: free-ranging fiction and scrupulous non-fiction, one supporting and feeding the other, complementary aspects of my wish to get to grips with my world. And though I had started with the idea of the nobility of the writer of the imagination, I do not now rate one way above the other.

In the practising of this new way I had to deal first of all with my ancestral land, India. I was not an insider, even after many months of travel; nor could I consider myself an outsider: India and the idea of India had always been important to me. So I was always divided about India, and found it hard to say a final word. In all I have written three books about India. They are non-fiction, as they had to be, but they are as personal and varied and deeply felt as any work of fiction could be. India: A Million Mutinies Now was the third. It was written 26 years after the first. It had taken the writer all that time to go beyond personal discovery and pain, and analysis, to arrive at the simple and overwhelming idea that the most important thing about India, the thing to be gone into and understood, and not seen from the outside, was the people.

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I think I have a new favorite album.
I’ve been listening to Billie all of my life. Somehow I’d never heard this album. Yes, I knew most of the tunes, and indeed some of these renditions, but this collection itself had escaped me, and hearing it end to end I feel like I’ve rediscovered an old, brilliant friend, captured at the very height of her poignancy.
The recording quality is fantastic, as are the accompaniments, especially, although not exclusively by a magisterial Ben Webster. Hear track 3, Ill Wind, and just shiver.
This album is a must own.

Posted at 11:36 PM · Comments (1)

Copyright Spiegel

A polyglot public letter writer in Ho Chi Minh City bridges different worlds — connecting people across the planet with his fountain pen. His profession may be dying, but in his 60 years on the job, he has created many marriages.

Letter writer Duong Van Ngo: “Love usually wanes between the continents.”
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Fiona Ehlers / DER SPIEGEL

Letter writer Duong Van Ngo: “Love usually wanes between the continents.”
The main post office in Ho Chi Minh City is close to the Saigon River in the quieter part of town, where skyscrapers don’t yet jut into the clouds and where no mopeds buzz over the streets like swarms of hornets.

It lies across from Notre Dame cathredral and is housed in an old colonial building from 1886. It looks like the old market halls of Paris, painted apricot, with electrical fans humming between ornamental pillars and spots of sunlight falling through a window in the roof. It’s a timeless place — the most beautiful post office in all of Asia.

Duong Van Ngo, a wiry 77-year-old man, parks his bicycle in the shadow of the sycamore trees, whose trunks are painted white as if they were wearing gaiters. He greets the post card vendors and shuffles through the archway with the station clock. It’s eight o’clock on a muggy February morning, the start of his workday.

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Ngo sits down at the end of a long wooden table underneath a mural of Ho Chi Minh. He produces two dictionaries and a directory of French postal codes from his briefcase. Then he slips a red armband over his left sleeve to make sure he’s recognized immediately. He sets up his sign: “Information and Writing Assistance.”

The first person to come to his stand is a man from the Mekong Delta. He’s got a letter with him, addressed to a businessman from Europe. He’s his chauffeur, and he’s been driving him to business meals and meetings for a year. He asks in writing if the man can get him health insurance and asks for a $200 advance. Ngo translates the letter into English. “Dear Sir,” he writes with his fountain pen, “might I politely request, sincerely yours.” Or would it better to say “affectionately”? No, that’s too intimate. The man hands him a bill. Ngo slips it between the pages of his dictionary without ever looking at it.

Ngo is a mediator between worlds — a professional letter writer of the sort that used to exist in the old days. He chooses each word carefully, formulates cautiously, polishes the style of the letter. He knows how important words are and what harm they can do. Ngo doesn’t just translate. He bridges the distance between people, advises and comforts them, discreetly and with perfect attention to form.

Ngo has worked at the post office since he was 17. He says he never missed a day of work, not even during the wars. He speaks the languages of the former occupiers fluently to this day. He learned French in school and English from American soldiers.

The second person to come to his stand is a young woman with red lipstick, long gloves and a little hat to shield her from the sun. She hands Ngo her Nokia mobile phone and shows him some text messages. They’re written in French and sound romantic. Ngo translates spontaneously: “When I come and visit you, you’ll show me Vietnam and teach me your language, I can hardly wait.” The woman smiles with embarrassment. She met the Frenchman via a contact Web site on the Internet. Tomorrow she’ll come back and compose an answer with help from Ngo.

The women at the service counters call him the man who writes love letters. He’s set up many a marriage, they say, and he’s a poet. Well, says Ngo, “maybe two or three marriages. Love usually wanes between the continents, what with two languages, two cultures — you know. It’s not so easy.”

Ngo has heard thousands of such stories, some beautiful and others tragic. He searched for the children of US soldiers and relatives of Vietnamese citizens who escaped as boat people after the war. He’s witnessed much suffering. He’s not giving any details. His customers pay him for his silence.

Sometimes Ngo receives mail himself. The thank you letters arrive from all over the world and they are addressed to “Letter Writer, Main Post Office, Saigon.” Ngo never receives e-mails. He hates computers and mobile phones, too. “Words that come from a machine have no soul,” he says, adding that people who use such machines have lost all politeness and sense of proper style. During his lunch break, Ngo walks along the street where Vietnamese who live abroad sit in cafes wearing large sun glasses. They’ve arrived for the New Year’s celebrations. They order latte macchiatos as sprinkler systems spray cool water vapor on their faces. Ngo orders noodle soup at a food stall.

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Japanese tourists arrive in the afternoon and photograph him as if he were a fossil in a museum. The ladies at the post office counters staple the pages of faxes together and chat. In the middle of it all, new customers wait to be helped at Ngo’s desk. They hand him their address books, as well as parcels for their relatives overseas. “Vitogo,” says a woman who works in the market and wears a rice straw hat. “The street is called Victor Hugo,” he says and rolls his eyes briefly, “like the famous writer.” He writes the address on the shipping ticket.

Would Ho Chi Minh up there on the mural have liked what he does — “connecting people” via his fountain pen? Ngo smiles. Politics, he says, is outside his province. He says he used to be observed by the police because he was suspected of betraying secrets to enemies of the state. Thankfully, that’s over, he says. Today, Ngo adds, Vietnam has gone global and the world has become a complex and unpredictable place. This also means that there is greater demand for his work these days than there used to be.

Ngo is now the last letter writer in the city formerly known as Saigon. The penultimate one, his colleague Lieng, died 10 months ago and was not replaced. Ngo thinks the world could use more people like Lieng and himself.

Alas, he says, “It just doesn’t want to pay the money for us any longer.”

Posted at 6:11 PM · Comments (0)

This guy, Dante Stella, is one of my favorite photography writers. His site, which is a real treasure trove, has been inactive for a long time. It’s just come back up, and that’s great news for anyone who wants to know more about camera and craft.

Click to read more

Another favorite site is:
The Online Photographer, by Mike Johnston.
Click to read more

There’s also Petteiri’s Pontifications:
Click to read more

Finally, there is Sean Reid’s site, which is great, and has only been placed last here because it is a pay site for subscribers only.

Click to read more

Posted at 5:45 PM · Comments (0)

DEVELOPMENT A Khartoum government that attracts world opprobrium over
Darfur atrocities intends to displace 50,000 other citizens in a project
to boost its economy. Hydropower is again prompting controversy, writes
Andrew England. Beneath, William Wallis assesses the archaeological
fall-out.

Sudan will harness the Nile but widen conflict

Copyright The Financial Times, March 9, 2007

For some months, Hassan Ahmed Omar suspected he was being trailed by
Sudan’s feared security agencies. One December evening his fears were
confirmed at a friend’s wedding party. An agent butted in on the
celebrations, told him he was “wanted” and escorted him to a car
outside. He was taken to an office in Khartoum where he says a six-month
saga of imprisonment, interrogation and occasional beatings began.

Mr Omar’s transgression was to be associated with a campaign against
Khartoum’s $2bn (£1bn, €1.5bn) hydro­electric dam project on the fourth
cataract of the Nile. The project is the largest of its kind under way
in Africa and, when completed in 2008 or 2009, should produce 1,250
megawatts, doubling Sudan’s electricity generation.

Sudanese officials say building the dam is crucial to development as the
country’s economy expands, on the back of oil revenues and rising
investment from Arab states. Not only will it provide electricity for
industry but it will also create a 170km-long reservoir that will help
irrigate desert terrain, they say.

Yet for many, such as Mr Omar, the Merowe dam has so far brought grief,
becoming the latest in a long line of contentious schemes around the
world that call into question the benefits of hydroelectric power. It
will displace up to 50,000 people and flood areas rich in archaeological
sites, some dating back to the Stone Age. Unease about the dam is also
fuelled by Khartoum’s poor human rights record and its failure in the
past to distribute the benefits of development equitably.

This is compounded by the involvement in the dam of a German company
blacklisted by the World Bank for alleged corruption on another African
project – and of companies from China, which has close ties to Khartoum
and helped develop Sudan’s oil industry. It has played an important role
in supporting the government during the past decade while other nations
have attempted to bring Khartoum to book over atrocities in Darfur and
southern sudan.

Mr Omar, aged 39, was one of four members of a committee representing
the Manasir tribe who were detained from December 2004 to the end of
June 2005. The men were released without being charged but are prepared
to square up to the government again.

“We feel this state is a terrorist state … it started the problem
and does not want to solve the problem, therefore we expect there will
be a confrontation with the state any time,” Mr Omar told the Financial
Times. “We feel our tribe is being targeted by the state. We believe
they want our land and are displacing the community for it.”

In sub-Saharan Africa the shortfall in electricity remains a key
obstacle to development. Three out of four households do not have access
to power. Excluding South Africa, installed generation capacity is only
20,000MW, roughly equivalent to that of Poland, according to the World
Bank. Africa uses a meagre 5 per cent of its hydro­electric potential,
compared with 40 per cent in Asia and 80 per cent in Europe, the
Washington-based institution says.

The solutions, however, are rarely straightforward. In the late 1990s,
as the debate surrounding dams mounted, the World Bank and the World
Conservation Union set up the World Commission on Dams to conduct a
review into large dams and propose guidelines for future
decision-making. In 2000 the commission released its report, saying dams
had made a “significant contribution to human development”.

But it added that in too many cases an “unacceptable and often
unnecessary price has been paid to secure those benefits, especially in
social and environmental terms, by people displaced, by communities
downstream, by taxpayers and by the natural environment”. It added:
“Lack of equity in the distribution of benefits has called into question
the value of many dams in meeting water and energy development needs
when compared with alternatives.”

To build its dam, the Sudanese government is providing $575m and
receiving nearly $1bn from Arab states and lending institutions,
according to a government website. The government is also receiving
$520m in financing from China, the main player in the country’s oil sector.

China itself has one of the more questionable records when it comes to
dam construction. The $25bn Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze River has
drawn criticism over corruption, the resettlement of more than 1m
displaced people and the environmental impact. In Africa, Chinese banks
and companies are involved in dam projects in at least six countries,
according to the International Rivers Network, a US-based advocacy group.

Peter Bosshard, policy director at the rivers group, maintains: “If
China continues to neglect international environmental and human rights
standards in the projects it funds, poor people around the world will
see it as an exploiter rather than the partner it could be.”

Germany’s Lahmeyer International, which is acting as consultant on the
construction at Merowe, has also been tainted by controversy. Last
November, the World Bank sanctioned the group because of “corrupt
activities” in connection with a multi-billion-dollar water transfer and
hydroelectric project ordered by the governments of Lesotho and South
Africa, making it ineligible for Bank-financed contracts for seven years.

Its role in the Merowe project has also attracted criticism, with Eawag,
a Swiss federal aquatic research institute, saying Lahmeyer’s
environmental impact assessment report “was far from meeting European or
international standards”. Eawag’s 2006 review of the report said no
serious attempt was made to use “the vast scientific knowledge base on
the effects of large dams”. It concluded that the dam would draw
sediment and that it was likely to lose more than 30 per cent of its
capacity over the next 50 years.

The dam was once a dream for the Manasir, Amri and Hamadab tribes who
for centuries have survived growing dates, wheat, beans and sorghum on
narrow strips of fertile land that straddle the Nile banks around the
Merowe area where the river loops south before returning north towards
Egypt.

It is a tough existence: the land is rocky and harsh and there has been
little development in the area, which lies 350km north of Khartoum. Most
houses are traditional huts made of mud and many lack electricity.

Talk of a dam in their area has been doing the rounds since the 1940s,
when Sudan’s Anglo-Egyptian rulers discussed the possibility of the
project as a means to control floods in the Nile valley. It did not get
off the ground and in the 1960s Gamal Abdel Nasser built the Aswan High
Dam, which enables Egypt to regulate the Nile’s flow from the Sudanese
border. That project displaced some 90,000 people, mainly Nubians,
including Sudanese living in the border region.

Still, successive Sudanese governments continued to tout the idea of the
Merowe dam, while the Manasir and others waited expectantly. For them,
the idea of a massive project on their doorstep had generated dreams of
prosperity, even inspiring songs, with choruses along the lines of “God
bring us the dam”. But once the project finally moved from drawing
boards to the ground, frustration surfaced. Rather than being able to
settle on the shores of the reservoir and gaining access to irrigated
land, the government decided those living in the area should be
resettled to villages it is building in the desert, in some cases more
than 40km from the Nile.

Around 800 families of the Hamadab community – less than 10 per cent of
the total number of people being relocated – were resettled in 2003.
Last August, just under half the Amri were relocated – they claim
forcibly – when dam authorities flooded their area, affecting scores of
homes.

Just three months earlier, hundreds of Amri had held a meeting in the
compound of a school to discuss the resettlement. They wanted to bar the
dam authorities from carrying out a survey, because they were unhappy
with the land and number of new homes being made available. But they
ended up in confrontation with security forces, who fired on the crowd
and killed three people.

A police statement accused the villagers of “harassing” police and
throwing stones at them. “The police regret the death of the three
people and pray to Allah to accept them,” the statement said. The Amri
insist the security forces fired without provocation. After that
incident, followed by the flooding, the partial resettlement took place.

“People were left with no option. The dam authority started with people
who wanted to go and this undermined the will of those who wanted to
stay,” says Abdulmuttalab Hadallah, a member of the Amri committee.
“Seventy per cent of the people did want to go. They would have been
happy to move if all the services had been in place and they had been
able to farm.”

Unlike the Manasir, members of the Hamadab and Amri say they would be
content to relocate if they felt they were provided with decent farming
land and adequate compensation. But Mr Hadallah complains that little of
the new desert land is arable, despite promises of irrigation schemes,
and accuses the government of failing to provide the services they need
to settle there. “For those who have been moved we are trying to push
the government to improve the situation, for the other half they will
not move unless we get all the entitlements,” he says.

A member of the Hamadab in Khartoum also has complaints, saying that
while the new concrete houses – which have electricity and water – are
decent, there has been little support to help the community settle down.
“There was no local participation in selecting resettlement areas –
people have no trust in the government,” he says. “There are no
institutions to manage the transfer of life: even the money they get for
compensation they don’t know how to use effectively.”

The Dams Implementation Unit refused to grant the FT the necessary
permit to visit the dam site or the resettlement areas. Nor were
officials from the unit made available to talk, in spite of a formal
request. However, Abdulhalim Aimutaafi, Khartoum’s governor, was happy
to share his views.

“They had the deal of their lives,” Mr Aimutaafi says of the relocated
communities. The authorities “give them big pieces of land; they build
new houses for them. You know the resettlement programme is costing 25
per cent of the dam costs – more than $500m. But people always know that
when there’s a new development project they have to scream at the
government to get the maximum and this is what they did. It’s a
political game.”

He says electricity consumption in Khartoum alone is already heading
towards 1,000MW, with demand rising by more than 20 per cent a year and
the prospect of rationing this year. Merowe, he says, can be the
catalyst for future development.

“If you want to generate 1,000MW from thermal generators … you need
4,000 tonnes of fuel a day: this is $2m a day,” he says. “If you use
that money in the right way you can build a dam every year, so this dam
is going to be the start of the chain of development of dams for the
future. This is the value to the Sudanese economy.”

But conspiracy theories abound that the government plans to sell the
local land around the dam to large-scale investors – even the Chinese.
There is no hard evidence to support the rumours, but those accessing
the Dams Implementation Unit’s website are welcomed by a picturesque
scene of the sun setting over palm trees and a large lake, surrounded by
high-rise buildings rather than small dwellings.

Left mulling their next move are the Manasir, who represent more than 60
per cent of those the government wants to relocate. Last June, they
reached an agreement with state authorities under which an independent
study is being carried out into the viability of the Manasir being
resettled in six locations around the reservoir. It will then be up to
the irrigation and agriculture ministries and Nile State authorities to
make a decision on whether to accept the proposals.

If they agree it could ward off further confrontation. But the two sides
remain deeply distrustful. During a recent meeting of the Manasir’s
committee, tempers frayed as its members haggled over the best course of
action, raised voices only dying down after the muezzin’s call to
prayer. At the close, they agreed to implement the first phase of an
“emergency plan”, which entails the Manasir unilaterally building six
new sites around the reservoir – and being prepared to fight.

Initially, they will set up camps and provisions at the sites while
waiting for the authorities’ response to the survey’s findings,
committee members say. “If they try to resettle us by force we will
resist and fight,” says Mohamed Abdullah, one of them. “To die on your
land is better than to be defeated and compelled to leave.”

It is unclear how much of the Manasir’s talk is bluster. Mr Abdullah, an
affable 63-year-old retired civil servant, seems an unlikely candidate
for a rebellion. But Sudan is no stranger to conflict and Manasir
committee members insist they are not bluffing. They even claim that
some of their community’s younger men went to neighbouring Eritrea in
2004 to train with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, a former rebel
movement that fought a decades-long civil war in southern Sudan.

“Electricity and a house? What use is it if it is in the desert?” Mr
Abdullah asks.

(Box)

A RACE AGAINST TIME TO UNEARTH CLUES TO THE PAST

By the time the dam at Merowe in northern Sudan reaches its final height
of 60m some time in late 2008, thousands of years of Sudanese history
will already be drowned under the waters of the Nile, write William
Wallis and Andrew England.

Among remnants of cemeteries, towns, pyramids and monasteries buried
under desert sands and among rocky islands in the river are clues of the
role Sudan’s ancient Nilotic cultures played in civilisations that at
one point stretched through Egypt as far as Palestine.

The irony, readily acknowledged by archaeologists, is that the dam
itself has focused attention on the area in an unprecedented way,
bringing to light its significance during a five-year race against time.
Teams from across the world have scrambled to the remote and harsh
terrain in the 170 sq km area that will eventually be submerged,
gathering artefacts that date back as far as 150,000 years.

There is nothing as dramatic to capture the public imagination as Abu
Simbel – the temple that helped galvanise archaeological rescue efforts
when Egypt built the Aswan dam in the 1960s and that was eventually
moved by Unesco into the desert. But archaeologists say the richness of
past cultures discovered so far has revolutionised the understanding of
an area that until then was considered peripheral to the great African
civilisations of the Nile.

While they lament the speed at which excavations have had to take place
– and the inevitability that important chapters of Sudan’s past will be
hidden – some also recognise that without the dam they might not have
been there at all.

“There is no doubt that we have been able to raise more money and do
more intense work than we would have done were it not for the Merowe
Dam. But the bad side is that when the water is flooded, it’s gone
forever,” says Derek Welsby, Sudan expert at the British Museum, who has
led some of the digging.

There has been sporadic talk of building a hydroelectric dam at Merowe,
some 350km north of Khartoum at the fourth cataract of the Nile, for
more than half a century. But the Sudanese government’s status as an
international pariah during the 1990s, when it was harbouring Osama bin
Laden and fighting a civil war in the country’s south, put plans on
hold. By the time the government started turning talk into reality in
2002 – partly thanks to its strengthening ties with China – most
archaeologists were caught unawares.

A campaign launched by Sudan’s own National Corporation for Antiquities
and Museums changed that, bringing together teams from 14 countries in
what is the country’s largest excavation project. Salah Ahmed, fieldwork
director for the corporation in Khartoum, says the work will provide “a
real representative idea about the history of the region”.

Some local activists, however, are less happy with the results. In the
past year they have sent teams of archaeologists packing, most recently
preventing a German group from digging on one of the many islands within
the Nile that turn out, against previous expectations, to have been
inhabited thousands of years ago.

Among other grievances, the activists claim that the government has
failed to honour an agreement to build a museum in the area. Some local
groups also appear to believe that if they can stop the archaeologists,
they will also be able to halt the building of the dam.

As it continues to go up in the coming months, however, the waters will
begin to rise with it. By then the villagers will themselves be forced
to move and the evidence their forebears left behind will be gone.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

Posted at 11:28 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune

Howard W. French
Published: March 8, 2007

SHANGHAI: Imagine a world where Germany denied the Holocaust, the United States denied the slaughter of Native Americans and Europe denied organizing its immensely profitable and centuries-long trans-Atlantic trade in African slaves.

Why would they bother? Presumably because they thought cleaning up these dark blots on their past would boost their self-esteem, enhance patriotism and raise their stock in the world.

Close your eyes, spin on your toes three times and reopen them to behold a world where precisely this sort of thing goes on: today’s East Asia.

In many respects, this region has been a guiding light for the rest of the world in the past three decades or so, building strong global economies, providing near-universal education for its people and lifting huge numbers of citizens out of poverty.

As we were reminded in the past week, however, a more honest and sophisticated attitude toward history has not been one of the bright spots.

For there was Japan’s new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, insisting “there is no evidence to prove there was coercion” of the 200,000 or so Asian women who historians say were pressed into sexual servitude for Japan’s imperial army.

Trying to explain how this might be, members of Abe’s governing Liberal Democratic Party made what they thought was a helpful suggestion. “Some say it is useful to compare the brothels to college cafeterias run by private companies, who recruit their own staff, procure foodstuffs and set prices,” said Nariaki Nakayama, leader of a group of 120 Japanese lawmakers who want to rescind a 1993 official declaration acknowledging the imperial army’s exploitation of what are euphemistically called “comfort women.”

“To say that women were forced by the Japanese military into service is off the mark,” Nakayama continued. “The issue must be reconsidered, based on truth, for the sake of Japanese honor.”

Honor and history, as we can see, make poor bedfellows, with the typical result that both end up suffering.

The comfort women comments emanating from the Japanese political class brought a rare rebuke from the country’s closest ally, the United States, in the form of a statement by John Negroponte, the deputy secretary of state, who during a visit to Tokyo said “the forced mobilization of comfort women is the most deplorable act of the war.”

Even North Korea managed to hitch a ride on the high road on this issue. Korean women constituted perhaps the largest group of wartime sex slaves, and Japanese obfuscations are particularly resented on the Korean Peninsula. A North Korean group that calls itself the Measure Committee for Demanding Compensation to “Comfort Women” denounced Abe as “the grandson of a Class A war criminal,” which in fact he is, and said that as such, Abe is “obliged to more straightforwardly and sincerely reflect on the past crimes of Japan than anyone else, and settle them.”

The response of the Chinese government, to its credit, has been carefully measured throughout this flap. China and Japan have been enjoying a tentative détente under Abe, following the bitterness of the Koizumi years, when the former Japanese prime minister made regular pilgrimages to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, where Class A war criminals are honored, along with the souls of all of the other fallen soldiers from Japan’s modern wars.

“History, in my view, is a strong progressive force,” China’s foreign minister, Li Zhaoxing, said at a news conference in Beijing on Tuesday. “It should not become a burden to the progression of peace.”

Unfortunately, that is precisely what it has been doing in this part of the world, where the wounds and fissures of World War II and of the Cold War have been much slower to heal than they have been in the West.

The reasons for this are, of course, complex. Korea remains divided in two. China remains authoritarian, still ruled by a Leninist party, even as it becomes increasingly capitalist. And Japan, having failed to integrate Asia by force of arms, has remained largely alienated from its own continent, clinging out of misplaced pride to a distorted and self-defeating picture of the past.

People everywhere want to feel good about themselves, and for many countries an accretion of national myths, often laid down over centuries, helps make this possible. East Asia’s two big powers, Japan and China, share more than either would care to acknowledge in this regard, taking this process one big step further, through the promotion of what each calls “patriotic education.”

Abe arrived in power after a lengthy association with this current of nationalist politics. Though they would never admit it, what he and his allies have been striving for is something that has long existed in China, an airbrushed version of history that leaves little room for anything cruel or embarrassing.

Click to read more

Posted at 9:02 AM · Comments (2)

Una historia morena.
Cuba channeled through the Congo River Basin = glorious stuff.
Sam Mangwana is an rumba king. Can you listen and sit still?

Posted at 11:20 PM · Comments (0)

This album just goes from strength to strength, with terrific orchestration and, what else, killer guitar work from Carlos. Nothing is forced. All just right.
It also has the merit of bringing back memories of hot summer nights in high school, hanging at John’s house, or better, at Melanie’s.

Posted at 11:08 PM · Comments (0)

The cycles of life in a shaded, secret garden, deep, rich soil. Insoluble mystery in the air.

Posted at 6:29 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright IDG News Service

The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned on Tuesday.

The council chose an unfortunate anniversary to publish its decision approving the law, which came exactly 16 years after Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King were filmed by amateur videographer George Holliday on the night of March 3, 1991. The officers’ acquittal at the end on April 29, 1992 sparked riots in Los Angeles.

If Holliday were to film a similar scene of violence in France today, he could end up in prison as a result of the new law, said Pascal Cohet, a spokesman for French online civil liberties group Odebi. And anyone publishing such images could face up to five years in prison and a fine of €75,000 (US$98,537), potentially a harsher sentence than that for committing the violent act.

Senators and members of the National Assembly had asked the council to rule on the constitutionality of six articles of the Law relating to the prevention of delinquency. The articles dealt with information sharing by social workers, and reduced sentences for minors. The council recommended one minor change, to reconcile conflicting amendments voted in parliament. The law, proposed by Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy, is intended to clamp down on a wide range of public order offenses. During parliamentary debate of the law, government representatives said the offense of filming or distributing films of acts of violence targets the practice of “happy slapping,” in which a violent attack is filmed by an accomplice, typically with a camera phone, for the amusement of the attacker’s friends.

The broad drafting of the law so as to criminalize the activities of citizen journalists unrelated to the perpetrators of violent acts is no accident, but rather a deliberate decision by the authorities, said Cohet. He is concerned that the law, and others still being debated, will lead to the creation of a parallel judicial system controlling the publication of information on the Internet.

Posted at 9:46 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright ZNet

Chalmers Johnson: “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic”
by Chalmers Johnson and Amy Goodman ; Democracy Now; March 07, 2007

AMY GOODMAN: Today, we spend the hour with the former CIA consultant, distinguished scholar, best-selling author, Chalmers Johnson. He’s just published a new book. It’s called Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. It’s the last volume in his trilogy, which began with Blowback, went onto The Sorrows of Empire. In those two, Johnson argued American clandestine and military activity has led to unintended but direct disaster here in the United States. In his new book, Johnson argues that US military and economic overreach may actually lead to the nation’s collapse as a constitutional republic.

Chalmers Johnson is a retired professor of international relations at the University of California, San Diego. He’s also president of the Japan Policy Research Institute. He’s written for a number of publications, including the Los Angeles Times, The London Review of Books, Harper’s magazine and The Nation. In 2005, he was featured prominently in the award-winning documentary, Why We Fight. Chalmers Johnson joined me yesterday from San Diego. I began by asking him about the title of his book, Nemesis.

CHALMERS JOHNSON: Nemesis was the ancient Greek goddess of revenge, the punisher of hubris and arrogance in human beings. You may recall she is the one that led Narcissus to the pond and showed him his reflection, and he dove in and drowned. I chose the title, because it seems to me that she’s present in our country right now, just waiting to make her — to carry out her divine mission.

By the subtitle, I really do mean it. This is not just hype to sell books — “The Last Days of the American Republic.” I’m here concerned with a very real, concrete problem in political analysis, namely that the political system of the United States today, history tells us, is one of the most unstable combinations there is — that is, domestic democracy and foreign empire — that the choices are stark. A nation can be one or the other, a democracy or an imperialist, but it can’t be both. If it sticks to imperialism, it will, like the old Roman Republic, on which so much of our system was modeled, like the old Roman Republic, it will lose its democracy to a domestic dictatorship.

I’ve spent some time in the book talking about an alternative, namely that of the British Empire after World War II, in which it made the decision, not perfectly executed by any manner of means, but nonetheless made the decision to give up its empire in order to keep its democracy. It became apparent to the British quite late in the game that they could keep the jewel in their crown, India, only at the expense of administrative massacres, of which they had carried them out often in India. In the wake of the war against Nazism, which had just ended, it became, I think, obvious to the British that in order to retain their empire, they would have to become a tyranny, and they, therefore, I believe, properly chose, admirably chose to give up their empire.

As I say, they didn’t do it perfectly. There were tremendous atavistic fallbacks in the 1950s in the Anglo, French, Israeli attack on Egypt; in the repression of the Kikuyu — savage repression, really — in Kenya; and then, of course, the most obvious and weird atavism of them all, Tony Blair and his enthusiasm for renewed British imperialism in Iraq. But nonetheless, it seems to me that the history of Britain is clear that it gave up its empire in order to remain a democracy. I believe this is something we should be discussing very hard in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: Chalmers Johnson, you connect the breakdown of constitutional government with militarism.

CHALMERS JOHNSON: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the signs of the breakdown of constitutional government and how it links?

CHALMERS JOHNSON: Well, yes. Militarism is the — what the social side has called the “intervening variable,” the causative connection. That is to say, to maintain an empire requires a very large standing army, huge expenditures on arms that leads to a military-industrial complex, and generally speaking, a vicious cycle sets up of interests that lead to perpetual series of wars.

It goes back to probably the earliest warning ever delivered to us by our first president, George Washington, in his famous farewell address. It’s read at the opening of every new session of Congress. Washington said that the great enemy of the republic is standing armies; it is a particular enemy of republican liberty. What he meant by it is that it breaks down the separation of powers into an executive, legislative, and judicial branches that are intended to check each other — this is our most fundamental bulwark against dictatorship and tyranny — it causes it to break down, because standing armies, militarism, military establishment, military-industrial complex all draw power away from the rest of the country to Washington, including taxes, that within Washington they draw it to the presidency, and they begin to create an imperial presidency, who then implements the military’s desire for secrecy, making oversight of the government almost impossible for a member of Congress, even, much less for a citizen.

It seems to me that this is also the same warning that Dwight Eisenhower gave in his famous farewell address of 1961, in which he, in quite vituperative language, quite undiplomatic language — one ought to go back and read Eisenhower. He was truly alarmed when he spoke of the rise of a large arms industry that was beyond supervision, that was not under effective control of the interests of the military-industrial complex, a phrase that he coined. We know from his writings that he intended to say a military-industrial-congressional complex. He was warned off from going that far. But it’s in that sense that I believe the nexus — or, that is, the incompatibility between domestic democracy and foreign imperialism comes into being.

AMY GOODMAN: Who was he warned by?

CHALMERS JOHNSON: Members of Congress. Republican memb—

AMY GOODMAN: And why were they opposed?

CHALMERS JOHNSON: Well, they did not want to have their oversight abilities impugned. They weren’t carrying them out very well. You must also say that Eisenhower was — I think he’s been overly praised for this. It was a heroic statement, but at the same time, he was the butcher of Guatemala, the person who authorized our first clandestine operation and one of the most tragic that we ever did: the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 for the sake of the British Petroleum Company. And he also presided over the fantastic growth of the military-industrial complex, of the lunatic oversupply of nuclear weapons, of the empowering of the Air Force, and things of this sort. It seems to be only at the end that he realized what a monster he had created.

AMY GOODMAN: Chalmers Johnson, author of Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. We’ll come back to him in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: As we return to my interview with Chalmers Johnson — his new book, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic — I asked him to talk about the expansion of US military bases around the globe.

CHALMERS JOHNSON: According to the official count right now — it’s something called the Base Structure Report, which is an unclassified Pentagon inventory of real property owned around the world and the cost it would take to replace it — there are right now 737 American military bases on every continent, in well over 130 countries. Some apologists from the Pentagon like to say, well, this is false, that we’re counting Marine guards at embassies. I guarantee you that it’s simply stupid. We don’t have anything like 737 American embassies abroad, and all of these are genuine military bases with all of the problems that that involves.

In the southernmost prefecture of Japan, Okinawa, site of the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, there’s a small island, smaller than Kawaii in the Hawaiian islands, with 1,300,000 Okinawans. There’s thirty-seven American military bases there. The revolt against them has been endemic for fifty years. The governor is always saying to the local military commander, “You’re living on the side of a volcano that could explode at any time.” It has exploded in the past. What this means is just an endless, nonstop series of sexually violent crimes, drunken brawls, hit-and-run accidents, environmental pollution, noise pollution, helicopters falling out of the air from Futenma Marine Corps Air Base and falling onto the campus of Okinawa International University. One thing after another. Back in 1995, we had one of the most serious incidents, when two Marines and a sailor abducted, beat and raped a twelve-year-old girl. This led to the largest demonstrations against the United States since we signed the security treaty with Japan decades ago. It’s this kind of thing.

I first went to Okinawa in 1996. I was invited by then-Governor Ota in the wake of the rape incident. I’ve devoted my life to the study of Japan, but like many Japanese, many Japanese specialists, I had never been in Okinawa. I was shocked by what I saw. It was the British Raj. It was like Soviet troops living in East Germany, more comfortable than they would be back at, say, Oceanside, California, next door to Camp Pendleton. And it was a scandal in every sense. My first reaction — I’ve not made a secret of it — that I was, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, certainly a Cold Warrior. My first explanation was that this is simply off the beaten track, that people don’t come down here and report it. As I began to study the network of bases around the world and the incidents that have gone with them and the military coups that have brought about regime change and governments that we approve of, I began to realize that Okinawa was not unusual; it was, unfortunately, typical.

These bases, as I say, are spread everywhere. The most recent manifestation of the American military empire is the decision by the Pentagon now, with presidential approval, of course, to create another regional command in Africa. This may either be at the base that we have in Djibouti at the Horn of Africa. It may well be in the Gulf of Guinea, where we are prospecting for oil, and the Navy would very much like to put ourselves there. It is not at all clear that we should have any form of American military presence in Africa, but we’re going to have an enlarged one.

Invariably, remember what this means. Imperialism is a form of tyranny. It never rules through consent of the governed. It doesn’t ask for the consent of the governed. We talk about the spread of democracy, but we’re talking about the spread of democracy at the point of an assault rifle. That’s a contradiction in terms. It doesn’t work. Any self-respecting person being democratized in this manner starts thinking of retaliation. Nemesis becomes appropriate.

AMY GOODMAN: Chalmers Johnson, there have been major protests against US military bases. Recently in Vicenza in Italy, about 100,000 people protested. Ecuador announced that it would close the Manta Air Base, the military base there. What about the response, the resistance to this web of bases around the world?

CHALMERS JOHNSON: Well, there is a genuine resistance and has been for a long time. As I say, in the case of Okinawa, there’s been at least three different historical revolts against the American presence. There’s collaboration between the Japanese government and the Pentagon to use this island, which is a Japanese version of Puerto Rico. It’s a place that’s always been discriminated against. It’s the Japanese way of having their cake and eating it, too. They like the alliance with America, but they do not want American soldiers based anywhere near the citizens of mainland Japan. So they essentially dump them or quarantine them off into this island, where the population pays the cost.

This is true, what’s going on in Italy right now, where there is tremendous resistance to the CIA rendition cases. That is, kidnapping people that we’ve identified and flying them secretly to countries where we know they will be tortured. There’s right now something like twenty-five CIA officers by name who are under indictment by the Italian government for felonies committed by agents of the United States in Italy. And, indeed, we just did have these major demonstrations in Vicenza. The people there believe that with the enlargement of the base that is already there — I mean, this is, after all, the old Palladian city, a city of great and famous architecture, that they would become a target of terrorism, of numerous other things.

We see the resistance in the form of Prime Minister Zapatero in Spain, that he promised the people that after he came to power, he would get out of Iraq, and he was one of the few who did deliver, who does remember that if democracy means anything, it means that public opinion matters, though in an awful lot of countries, it doesn’t actually seem to be the case. But he has reduced radically the American military presence in Spain.

And it continues around the world. There is a growing irritation at the American colossus athwart the world, using its military muscle to do as it pleases. We see it right now, that people of the Persian Gulf are not being asked whether or not they want anywhere between two and four huge carrier task forces in the fifth fleet in CENTCOM’s navy in the Persian Gulf, and all of which looks like preparation for an assault on Iran. We don’t know that for certain by any manner of means, but there’s plenty enough to make us suspicious.

Then you look back historically, probably there is no more anti-American democracy on earth than Greece. They will never forgive us for bringing to power the Greek colonels the in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and, of course, also establishing then numerous American military enclaves in Greece until the colonels themselves finally self-destructed by simply going too far.

And the cases are ubiquitous in Latin America, in Africa today. Probably still the most important area, of course, of military imperialism is the opening up of southern Eurasia, after it became available to foreign imperialistic pressure with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Many important observers who have resigned their commissions from the Pentagon have made the case that the fundamental explanation for the war in Iraq was precisely to make it the new — to replace the two old pillars of American foreign policy in the Middle East. The first pillar, Iran, collapsed, of course, with the revolution in 1979 against the Shah, who we had installed in power. The second pillar, Saudi Arabia, had become less and less useful to us, because of our own bungling. We put forces, military forces, ground forces, an air force, in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War in 1991. This was unnecessary, it was stupid, it was arrogant. It caused antagonism among numerous patriotic Saudis, not least of whom, one was our former asset and colleague, Osama bin Laden — that Saudi Arabia is charged with the defense of the two most sacred sites in Islam: Mecca and Medina. We ought to be able to do this ourselves without using infidel troops that know absolutely nothing about our religion, our country, our lifestyle, or anything else. Over time, the Saudis began to restrict the use of Prince Sultan Air Base outside Riyadh. We actually closed down our major operations headquarters there just before the invasion of Iraq and moved it to Qatar.

And then we chose Iraq as the second most oil-rich country on earth, and as a place perfectly suited for our presence. I think many people have commented on it, Seymour Hersh notably, but I think, importantly, one of the reasons we had no exit plan from Iraq is that we didn’t intend to leave. And certainly the evidence of it is the now series of at least five very, very large, heavily reinforced, long double runways, five air bases in Iraq, strategically located all over the country. You can never get our ambassador, the Department of Defense, the President, or anybody to say unequivocally we don’t intend to have bases there. It’s a subject on which Congress never, ever opens its mouth. Occasionally, military officers — the commander of Air Force in CENTCOM has repeatedly, in his sort of off-hand way, when asked, “How long do you think we’ll be here?” and he usually says, “Oh, at least a decade in these bases.” And then, we continue to reinforce them.

Now, then, we’ve tried to build bases in Central Asia in the Caspian Basin oil-rich countries that were made independent — not in any sense democracies — made independent by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. We have now been thrown out of one of them for too much heavy-handed interference. And the price of our stay in Kyrgyzstan has quadrupled, much more than that actually. It’s gone from a few million dollars to well over $100 million. But we continue to play these games, and they are games, and the game is property called imperialism.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Chalmers Johnson. Now, Chalmers Johnson, you were a consultant for the CIA for a period through Richard Nixon, starting with Johnson in 1967, right through 1973. And I’m wondering how you see its use has changed. You talk about, and you write in your book about the Central Intelligence Agency, the president’s private army.

CHALMERS JOHNSON: I say, at one point, we will never know peace until we abolish it, or, at any rate, restrict what is the monster that it’s grown into. The National Security Act of 1947 lists five functions. It creates the Central Intelligence Agency. It lists five functions for it. The purpose, above all, was to prevent surprise attack, to prevent a recurrence of the attack, such as the one at Pearl Harbor. Of these five functions, four are various forms of information-gathering through open sources, espionage, signals intelligence, things of this sort. The fifth is simply a catchall, that the CIA will do anything that the National Security Council, namely the foreign affairs bureaucracy in the White House attached directly to the president orders it to do.

That’s turned out to be the tail that wags the dog. Intelligence is not taken all that seriously. It’s not that good. My function inside the agency in the late ’60s, early ’70s was in the Office of National Estimates. My wife used to ask me at times, “Why are they so highly classified?” And I said, “Well, probably and mostly, simply because they’re the very best we can do, and they read like a sort of lowbrow foreign affairs article.” They’re not full of great technical detail and certainty nothing on sources of intelligence.

But as the agency developed over time, and as it was made clear to the president, every president since Truman, made clear to them shortly after they were inaugurated, you have at your disposal a private army. It is totally secret. There is no form of oversight. There was no form of congressional oversight until the late 1970s, and it proved to be incompetent in the face of Iran-Contra and things like that. He can do anything you want to with it. You could order assassinations. You could order governments overthrown. You could order economies subverted that seemed to get in our way. You could instruct Latin American military officers in state terrorism. You can carry out extraordinary renditions and order the torture of people, despite the fact that it is a clear violation of American law and carries the death penalty if the torture victim should die, and they commonly do in the case of renditions to places like Egypt.

No president since Truman, once told that he has this power, has ever failed to use it. That became the route of rapid advancement within the CIA, dirty tricks, clandestine activities, the carrying out of the president’s orders to overthrow somebody, starting — the first one was the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953. It’s from that, the After Action Report, which has only recently been declassified, that the word “blowback” that I used in the first of my three books on American foreign policy, that’s where the word “blowback” comes from. It means retaliation for clandestine activities carried out abroad.

But these clandestine activities also have one other caveat on them: they are kept totally secret from the American public, so that when the retaliation does come, they’re unable ever to put it in context, to see it in cause-and-effect terms. They usually lash out against the alleged perpetrators, usually simply inaugurating another cycle of blowback. The best example is easily 9/11 in 2001, which was clearly blowback for the largest clandestine operation we ever carried out, namely the recruiting, arming and sending into battle of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union during the 1980s. But this is the way the CIA has evolved.

It’s been responsible for the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile and bringing to power probably the most odious dictator on either side in the Cold War, namely General Augusto Pinochet; the installation of the Greek colonels in the late ‘60s and early ’70s in Greece; the coups, one after another, in numerous Latin American countries, all under the cover of avoiding Soviet imperialism carried out by Fidel Castro, when the real purpose was to protect the interests of the United Fruit Company, and continued to exploit the extremely poor and essentially defenseless people of Central America.

The list is endless. The overthrow of Sukarno in Indonesia, the bringing to power of General Suharto, then the elimination of General Suharto when he got on our nerves. It has a distinctly Roman quality to it. And this is why I — moreover, there is no effective oversight. There are a few, often crooked congressmen, like Randy “Duke” Cunningham, who are charged with oversight. When Charlie Wilson, the congressman, long-sitting congressman from the Second District of Texas, was named chairman of the House Intelligence Oversight Committee during the Afghan period, he wrote at once to his pals in the CIA, “The fox is in the henhouse. Gentlemen, do anything you want to.”

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Copyright The Chronicle of Higher Education

Shanghai

January 27, 1971: “If we dedicate all our lives to the socialist revolution, letting the Communist Party and the People decide how we can make the most of our time, our futures are sure to be affluent. Thinking of this, how can I possibly feel blue?”

Jingbei Hu winces now when he reads that, recognizing how that “socialist revolution” led to the murder of countless scholars and the shuttering of many schools. Still, he is determined to share the words he wrote in his diary with anyone willing to read them. Now an economics professor at Tongji University here, his goal is to show how the Communist government bent his will during the Cultural Revolution, more than 35 years ago.

“If we don’t work on this problem, on understanding how this brainwashing occurred, we will have another Cultural Revolution,” Mr. Hu says while eating dinner in a student restaurant at Tongji. He is a wiry man who finishes every scrap of the oversized portions then eats the leftover pizza on others’ plates.

Through a fellowship, Mr. Hu spent January and February at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution doing research for a Chinese-language book that will examine the impact of Communist ideology on Chinese children. In the long term, he hopes, his research will help pave the way for greater tolerance and freedom in China.

But in the meantime, Mr. Hu has put online the diaries he kept as a teenager during the Cultural Revolution — diaries that he now compares to those kept by Hitler Youth members in Nazi Germany. And he is on a personal mission to understand how, as a young man of 18, he was so absolutely convinced that Mao Zedong was a hero worth putting all his faith into.

January 28, 1971: “Our great leader Chairman Mao is the greatest contemporary Marxist Leninist, the greatest mentor of the Proletariat, the greatest leader of people in the world, the greatest general of the Union Army of Peasants and Workers, the greatest captain of the revolutionary ship, the reddest sun in our hearts.”

During the Cultural Revolution, which lasted from about 1966 to 1976, Mao organized the youth of the country into squads of Red Guards and urged them to attack intellectuals and “bourgeois things.”

The Chinese education system fell into chaos during the latter years of Mao’s rule. In 1968, Mr. Hu, like millions of other young Chinese of the era, was sent to a commune in the countryside of Jiangsu, a province in central China, where he worked and lived as a peasant. He was 15 and had finished only half a year of middle school. Now he spent his time lugging manure, fertilizing cabbage, and writing in his diary about the benefits of such physical labor, both to himself and to the country.

February 2, 1972: “My brother, my sister, and I were sent to the pasturing areas, farms and villages, separately in 1968 as part of the ‘Urban Youth Going to the Countryside’ movement. My father was sent down to a village in Pudong, Shanghai. We split for the Revolution. Even though we miss each other much, and our parents miss the three of us very much, … we need to guide them through this, making them realize that the welfare of the Revolution outweighs personal benefits … .”

Mr. Hu lived in the rural area for nearly 10 years. But writing in his diaries kept his intellect alive. Sometimes he would structure the entries like short, analytical essays. He sought out copies of old textbooks to teach himself math, physics, and chemistry.

Many Chinese teenagers during the Cultural Revolution were similarly motivated, notes Merle Goldman, an associate of the John K. Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University. “A lot of people from that era were, literally, self-taught,” she says. “It has a lot to do with Confucian values of hard work and education.”

By 1978 the Cultural Revolution had ended and Mao had died. Mr. Hu, 25, was given the chance to take university entrance exams. Despite not having been inside a classroom for more than a decade, he passed easily.

He went to Nanjing University and studied economics. He traveled, even living in Germany for several years. There he found the people to be much more open about discussing the Nazi era than the Chinese were about discussing the Cultural Revolution. Gradually Mr. Hu became an intellectual who had little in common with the boy who had so earnestly labored and kept diaries extolling the benefits of the Revolution. He never repudiated that boy and his diaries — he simply grew up and moved on.

Last summer, though, Mr. Hu was traveling through a mountainous area of Hunan province when, in a dim room of a peasant household made darker by smoke, a small girl told him that she used the kitchen table to study and write.

Memories of his own years living in the countryside and writing at a table in a hovel rushed back to him. He reread his diaries and tried to get them published, but failed because of official restrictions on what can be published about the Cultural Revolution. He has put part of the diaries online and hopes to post the remainder soon.

At Stanford he had access to books and materials about the Cultural Revolution that are not available in China. His plan is to write his book for the young people of China. They are the ones who have time to change if they learn to ask questions, he says: “In Chinese schools, the conventional wisdom is that people shouldn’t ask, they should simply take. Many, many students can’t think for themselves. That’s a huge problem.”

February 7, 1972: “The article ‘Study Hard, Try to Change Your Perspectives’ in the Red Flag magazine … inspired me a lot and helped me sort out some confusion. From now on, I will try to bring my studies to another level, and will pay extra attention to the five philosophical works of Chairman Mao.”

At Stanford this winter, Mr. Hu spent most of his time reading and thinking. He is compiling lists of ways the Communist government has been able to inculcate its young people — from his own youth, during the Cultural Revolution, to the present day. No. 1: Propaganda. No. 2: Media. No. 3: Education.

“From the first day of school,” he says, “we were taught that we should be students for the Communist Party.”

The children of China today have more opportunity than the young people of his own era, Mr. Hu says. The schools are open and a booming economy provides college graduates with more career possibilities. The Shanghai of skyscrapers, international visitors, and luxury restaurants and shops is like no place in the China he grew up in.

But while the buildings expand, the space for discussing politically sensitive topics is, if anything, contracting.

“It’s very hard to get a public discussion going about the Cultural Revolution and what happened,” says Boston’s Ms. Goldman. “It will change when they get a leadership that will face up to what happened, but the present leadership has no desire to face up to that.”

Ordinary people, too, lack interest in analyzing their history, she says. “The Chinese have been so deprived for so long of economic well-being. … Political issues are of secondary importance right now.”

Mr. Hu, though, says that at some point he stopped worrying about how the Chinese can become rich. Instead he has become preoccupied with how they can become good. As he did 35 years ago, he looks to his diaries for the answers — but now with a far different end in sight.

January 29, 1972: “A single spark can start a prairie fire” (the title of one of Mao’s essays).

Many Chinese people mistakenly believe that they can detach themselves from the past, Mr. Hu says. So he’s putting his own past front and center, hoping that someday, reading the words of his diary will elicit a collective wince, questioning, and, finally, a reckoning.

Sarah Carr reported from China for five weeks this fall through an International Reporting Project fellowship.

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Copyright Time Inc.

When midnight at last arrived on March 6, 1957, church bells sounded across Accra. The crowds, who had filled the city streets with the hum of celebration and hope, pushed into the square outside Parliament and cheered as Britain’s Union Flag was lowered, and the green, gold and red colors of the new nation of Ghana were hoisted in a light breeze. In a nearby polo ground, Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah broke into dance and then spoke of a dream finally realized. “Today, from now on, there is a new African in the world,” he declared. “At long last the battle has ended. Ghana, our beloved country, is free forever.”

In Fodome, a small village in the eastern Volta region of the new nation, 22-year-old Kwame Deh and his family and friends gathered around a radio and listened through crackling static. “I felt very happy,” remembers Deh. “The future was ours.”

All births are incredible moments, but some are more momentous than others. When the citizens of the British colony of the Gold Coast gathered to witness the founding of their new nation a half-century ago, they carried not only their personal hopes and fears but the aspirations of a continent. As the first colony in sub-Saharan Africa to break away from its foreign master in the post-1945 era of independence, Ghana became the symbol of a land throwing off its shackles, the first breeze in what British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan would later dub “the wind of change.” “The independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent,” said Nkrumah that night.

Fifty years on, Ghana remains an uncannily accurate measure of Africa’s successes and failures; its ambitions and broken dreams. Beginning a pattern that would repeat itself in other African states, the optimism of independence gave way to unrest, militarism and economic decline. As elsewhere, though, Ghanaians have struggled back, rebuilding their country, renewing their democracy and securing fresh reason to hope. That rise and fall and rise again has given many Ghanaians — and many Africans — a more realistic understanding of what it will take to develop their continent’s fragile fortunes than they had in the first flush of freedom. And it has left them with a deep appreciation of basic principles that others take for granted: stability, democracy, jobs.

This is the story of one family — three generations of Ghanaians — who have experienced the struggles and triumphs that define Africa’s first 50 years. In many ways, the Dehs — Kwame, Suzzy and Delight — are unremarkable, average. But in their incredible ability to keep mining Africa’s most precious resource — optimism — they are extraordinary. Just like Africa itself.

HOPE AND FRUSTRATION
Linus Kwame Deh was born on the floor of a mud hut. His parents divorced before he reached school age, and it was his father — a bricklayer and farmer — who raised him. Kwame means Saturday, the day he was born; Linus is his Christian, or colonial name. At school, in the lush hills of the Volta region — an area that had originally been colonized by the Germans, but later came under British rule — the young Kwame sang God Save the King and saluted the British flag. “That’s the training for discipline,” remembers Kwame, now 72. Along with discipline, the British brought some measure of modernity to Ghana — schools, hospitals — but from a young age Kwame sensed that “they would not open up development how we wanted it. They were our colonial masters.”

Kwame is sprightly for his age. When I first met him in April last year, he was wearing loose-fitting gold-colored trousers, a gold shirt and a small gold skullcap all made from the same embroidered fabric. He welcomed me into his modest rented home on the eastern edge of Accra, pumping my hand with the energy and strength of a man 20 years younger. The inside walls of his living room were painted electric blue, and a gold vase of plastic flowers sat on the coffee table. There was a small television in the corner, and a telephone that mewed like a cat when someone rang. More than once on my visits in April, and again last August, Kwame repeated an adage that an old schoolteacher of his had used: there is no such thing as African time. “There is no store in the world that sells an African watch or an African clock. We all use the same clock,” he told me. “And yet Africans use African time as an excuse. We have to be serious.” Overhead, a fan chopped through the humidity. “According to my age,” said Kwame as I was leaving at the end of that first visit, “I have to speak the facts.”

After leaving school, Kwame trained as a sculptor. Working off a photo supplied by grieving relatives, he would mold the face of a mother or father or child for their gravestone, or craft statues of Mary, Jesus and the saints for the many churches that were springing up across the country. Traveling from village to village, Kwame discovered a curious thing: people in the Volta region were underwhelmed by the idea of independence. Fearing that Ghana’s bigger tribes would discriminate against them, many Voltans wanted independence to come in stages, or even the chance to secede altogether. Tribalism, which would later rear its ugly head in places such as Nigeria and Rwanda, was already shaping postcolonial Africa.

Kwame himself longed for freedom. “I knew independence was very important for this country,” he told me. “We needed jobs and employment to come to Ghanaians, to black people. The top administrative level was taken by the British.” It wasn’t just the colonial authorities Kwame chafed under. Around the time of independence, his father and stepmother chose a girl for him to marry. “But I didn’t like her. You know, we didn’t love each other,” he says. Kwame started wooing Theresa Afue, another girl in the village, instead. Within months they had married, eager to begin their lives together in a country that was finally free.

Ghana’s early years were full of energy and excitement; many parts of newly independent Africa were far richer and better developed than the countries that would later become Asia’s tigers. In the late 1950s, Ghana’s per capita gdp was equivalent to South Korea’s; today it is around $550 compared with South Korea’s $16,000. Nigerians still lament that they once had a massive palm oil industry but that Asian countries such as Malaysia, which were better run and less corrupt, have long overtaken them.

Nkrumah embarked on an ambitious program, building schools, houses, roads, a new port, factories. Ghana, its new leader argued, must be weaned off trade and investment from Britain and the other colonial powers. The construction industry boomed. Kwame got a job with the state housing corporation, building barracks for the army. “People were happy, more people were learning trades, schools were opening all over the place, we were feeling fine.” In 1961, he and Theresa had Suzzy, the first of four girls. Kwame began spending long periods away from home, working on houses for those displaced by the massive Volta dam hydroelectric project, another of Nkrumah’s grand schemes. “Life was still difficult,” he remembers. “But you were working and getting some money.”

But Nkrumah’s policies came at a high price. Industrialization cost millions and the government neglected cocoa, Ghana’s traditional export crop, which brought in most of the foreign exchange. As Ghana’s economy began to fall apart, Nkrumah seemed more interested in pan-Africanism than the minutiae of government. He became isolated, paranoid and dictatorial. In 1964, in a move that would be repeated by other African leaders in the decades to come, Nkrumah declared Ghana a one-party state and himself leader for life. The early optimism was gone, replaced by a deep sense of disappointment and lost opportunity. “There were a lot of problems,” Kwame says. “People were getting hungry. Nkrumah was looking to the East for help. He kept paying everyone’s salaries, but things were not working how he planned.” In early 1966, with the President on a visit to China, soldiers seized power. “We all waited to see if the military could do a better job than the politicians,” says Kwame.

They could not. For the next two decades Ghana was wracked by instability and economic mismanagement. A revolving cast of military leaders left people with little faith in their government and no chance to change things. It was a cancer eating the entire continent: beginning with the first successful coup in sub-Saharan Africa in Togo in 1963, there were at least 200 attempts to seize power in Africa over the following four decades, 80 or so successful. Bitter civil wars erupted, some of them tribal struggles for natural resources, some of them fueled by foreign powers. In the 1967-70 civil war in Nigeria, Ghana’s regional neighbor, a million died. By the 1970s, Africa had become one of the hottest fronts in the cold war. Both superpowers propped up dictators and forced their economic policies onto their struggling clients, both stoked corruption and graft, and both fueled internal struggles such as the hellish wars that followed independence in Portugal’s colonies of Mozambique and Angola. “We had lots of fears. There was no freedom of speech,” says Kwame, about the time of troubles. “You go about and you see the army. The economy was getting worse.” By the late 1970s, Ghana was a mess: a drought had pushed up food prices, jobs had disappeared. “Bribery and corruption is all over the world, but where it is too glaring it kills the economy,” says Kwame, who moved his family to Accra and opened a small construction company. The hopes of independence had vanished.

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I’m back home, yes, in Shanghai, after a week-long trip to the States that included a very quick stop in New York and a few days as a Regent’s lecturer at Berkeley. It was freezing in New York and very rainy in the Bay area.

The trip was great, though, for a few reasons. I saw the Henri Cartier-Bresson show at the ICP in Manhattan, which was fantastic. I went to the top of the Empire State Building, a touristy thing that I’d never done before and found, almost guiltily, that I enjoyed. I went to a Jazz club in Brooklyn with Janet to see Buyu Ambroise, a fantastic emerging saxophonist I’ve been following for the last few years. Click to read more . Buyu’s latest CD, Marasa does not seem to be available on Amazon. :-(

I also picked up my new camera, the Leica M8, which I bought in order spend less money on film and less time on scanning it. This camera, which has had some famous teething problems, works for me. The format is small and discreet — ideal for documentary work — and the file quality is among the best that exists among digital cameras. Call me lucky, but I’ve experienced none of the glitches so far.

You can find some early samples of my work with it, as well as other recent stuff:

Click here.

I will still shoot film, by the way, just not as much. The image entitled “I Beg,” found at the Flickr link above is a good reason why the Rolleiflex and Ilford B+Ws won’t be retired just yet.

I gave a few talks at Berkeley, on China, Japan, Africa and photography, and really enjoyed the interaction with the students, and was treated very well by the J-school faculty, too. I even got to see my brother JB a few times. He lives in exile from the East Coast, in Oakland.

I got back to Shanghai in time to walk the streets over the weekend, taking more pictures of the neighborhoods that have become my haunts these last two years and was really jarred by what I found. Anyone who follows this space will be familiar with my “Disappearing Shanghai” photographs, and with the show and catalog of the same name.

A week away was a stunning reminder of the pace of change here, though, with two of my favorite and most frequented neighborhoods having been all but razed in that space. I stumbled into them unprepared for what I would find, and filled with a tremendous sense of loss.

I’ll eventually post a new gallery here of the last days of some of these places. In the meantime, the pictures that are already posted here, and my catalog must stand as m homage. I was asked by a Chinese student at Berkeley, which showed my work, why I display these kinds of images. “What is the meaning of these pictures,” he said, with more than a faint air of challenge. The answer is that what I have found here is a distinctive urban civilization and way of life that is passing into extinction. In my small way I want to be a witness.

Fine art prints of my China black and white work are available. Details upon request.

Posted at 6:06 PM · Comments (1)

I’ll read anything by this author, and by now have read just about everything he’s published. This is one of his best. Much more can be found about him by searching on this site.

Posted at 5:56 PM · Comments (0)

Pomfret demonstrates how to avoid the ghetto of books by foreign correspondents on China with his highly original and very engaging account of life in the country, from college exchange student in the early, tentative days of opening between the US and China, through Tiananmen and up to the present. The book focuses on the real lives of the fellow students he met and befriended at Nanjing University and thus avoids being a much narrower account of discovery.

Posted at 5:50 PM · Comments (0)

One of a spate of strongly argued recent books on China (Jim Mann’s comes first to mind) that speaks of the world that is being remade by China’s rise, analyzes the prospects for all concerned and comes to very different conclusions.

Hutton, whose mastery of his subject matter and broad reading, are evident from the first page, makes a very strong case for overcoming narrow national imperatives and striving for further integration of China into the global system. The author, who is British, has particularly interesting things to say about nationalism in both its Chinese and American flavors.

Posted at 5:44 PM · Comments (0)

An “erotic memoir,” and a bit of a departure for me, written by a former classical dancer. It’s a thin work that mixes stretches of surprisingly good writing with moments of purple excess and somewhat strained wordplay. One is left at the end with a feeling of sadness for this woman, not because of her physical preferences, but because of a sense of emptiness and desperation that seems to pervade her life.

Posted at 5:36 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Guardian Unlimited

We think we know Monet’s work, and he encouraged the idea of his painting as ‘impulsive, unrehearsed creativity’. But his painstaking early drawings in chalk and pencil are a fresh revelation of his skill, says AS Byatt

Saturday March 3, 2007
The Guardian

Monet: View of Rouen, 1872
‘Impressions registered on my retina’ … Monet’s View of Rouen in 1872

We think of Monet’s work as a revelation of colour, from the perception that shadows are purple to the display in his Giverny garden, as described by Octave Mirbeau: “On either side of the sandy path, nasturtiums of every hue and saffron eschscholtzias collapse into dazzling heaps. The surprising fairytale magic of the poppies swells on the wide flower beds, covering the withered irises; it is an extraordinary mingling of colours, a riot of pale tints, a resplendent and musical profusion of white, pink, yellow and mauve, an incredible rolling of blond flesh tones, against which shades of orange explode, fanfares of blazing copper ring, reds bleed and flare, violets disport themselves …”

Monet himself encouraged the idea of his work as “impulsive, unrehearsed creativity”, notations of colours in front of the motif. He denied the importance of drawing in his practice. As a very young man, he became known as a caricaturist, but these works seem unrelated to any of his later interests. He worked briefly as a student in the studio of Charles Gleyre, whose teaching was “founded on drawing” and who set his students to drawing studies of nudes, from living models, remembering the forms of the antique. Monet found this unendurable and complained that Gleyre was soulless. “I saw it all. Truth, life, nature, all that which moved me, all that which constituted in my eyes the very essence, the only raison d’être of art, did not exist for this man.” He abandoned the course. He found what he needed watching Eugène Boudin painting in the open on the Normandy coast.

Behind this taking up of positions is a complex argument about which is more important and fundamental to art, drawing and the perception of line, or painting and the perception of light and colour. In the eyes of painters like Ingres and theorists like Charles Blanc, drawing was the primary way of recording the visible world. Blanc wrote that “form is absolute” whereas “colour is relative” and “the superiority of drawing over colour is written even in the laws of nature”. The young Degas visited the ageing Ingres in his studio in 1855 and was told to “Study line … draw lots of lines.” Degas was to tell his own students the same thing, though he was later described “as making war on drawing with the weapons of draftsmanship”.

The percipient Baudelaire, in his criticism of the Salon of 1846, praises Delacroix as “the only artist today whose originality has not been impaired by the cult of straight lines”. “From Delacroix’s standpoint, the line does not exist; for however fine it be, a teasing geometrician can always suppose it thick enough to contain a thousand others; and for colourists, who seek to render the eternal restlessness of nature, lines are, as in the rainbow, nothing but the intimate fusion of two colours.”

The exhibition, The Unknown Monet, at the Royal Academy, is indeed a revelation, both of Monet’s skill with materials like black chalk, crayon, pencil and pastel, and of the way he translated what he saw into marks on paper and canvas. It opens with the unexpected caricatures and a series of landscape drawings done in the 1850s on the Normandy coast and in Paris. There are drawings for paintings - such as the projected and abandoned large Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, and pastels done both in London and in Etretat in mid-career. There is an interesting section on drawings made from paintings - by Monet himself and by others - as the basis for illustrations in journals. And there are the sketchbooks from the Marmottan, with notations for works including the Water Lilies

Cézanne famously said that Monet was just an eye - “but what an eye!” He also said that Monet had “that great ability, he looks, and straight away, draws in proportion, he takes something from here, to put it down there; that’s a gesture of Rubens.” And Degas told Sickert: “Everything Monet does is always vertical, straight away, while I take such trouble and it’s still not right.” Monet’s early drawings of the coast of Normandy record rock formations, clusters of buildings, shapes of boats and rigging, the movement of choppy water and clouds in the wind, with soft lines and strokes of black chalk, or fine, busy lines done with pen and ink. We are told how he walked and walked this familiar land, stopping to record, in his sketchbook, a vantage point, a place from which to see the Manneport or the cliff edge in a different way. There is a sense in which the drawings are a record of continuous vision, continually changed and adjusted, which would naturally lead to the conception of the precise, changing visions of the series paintings of stooks and of the light playing on the architectural lines of Rouen cathedral.

Monet seems to have offered works in pastel for sale in 1874, but not after that. As the Royal Academy catalogue points out, an artist using pastel draws and colours in a single act - a pastel makes a line of colour, which can then be reinforced or smudged, or worked over. Boudin contributed to the 1874 exhibition, and he, too, included pastels and watercolours as well as oils. More than 10 years earlier, Baudelaire had singled out Boudin’s pastels, calling them “prodigious enchantments of air and water”. Study of Monet’s works in pastel has shown, surprisingly, that they are not studies related to paintings, but independent works, and that - apart from a late group made in London when his painting equipment had failed to arrive - all but one are studies of the rural and coastal scenery of north-western France, in which he grew up. There are some strikingly beautiful works - Nightfall, Twilight After the Rain - made in the 1860s. These record air, light and weather, in long, wide skies above a low horizon, with an exiguous scribbled bush, or a sketched indication of a distant roof. They are rich with varied blues, dove colours, cloud-shapes linear, or angular, clotted or flowing, using the thickness and transparency of the grainy surface to record the changing atmosphere in changing ways. There are also some striking pastels of the 1880s, showing the shadowy forms of the cliffs at Etretat, both solid and ghostly in the smeared chalky medium. One reduces the bulk of the Manneporte to an almost two-dimensional, shadowy proboscis arched over dark earth.

London, Monet said, needed to be seen in winter, with the fog, “because without the fog, London would not be a beautiful city. It is the fog that gives it its marvellous breadth. Its regular, massive blocks become grandiose in this mysterious cloak.” The London pastels of 1901 show Charing Cross bridge and Waterloo bridge and the Thames enveloped in silky, swooping silver-greens and greys, or misty shadowy mauves, pinks and creams, or suddenly solid and gleaming with many blues with frills of white cloud and streamers of blue smoke from blue chimneys on a buff paper. The catalogue points out that the visionary Charing Cross Bridge “is both majestic and delicate, almost seamlessly merging a wide spectrum of hues and even introducing fine lines of pure colour - such as the blues on the bridge - as part of the principal design.”

What Monet wanted to do, he told two Norwegian interviewers in 1895, was to “paint the air in which the bridge, the house and the boat are to be found - the beauty of the air around them - and that is nothing less than the impossible”. “To me, the motif is an insignificant factor; what I want to reproduce is what lies between the motif and me.” One of his most wonderful paintings of air is Vétheuil in the Fog, a vision of the apparition of a pallid village through veils of mist across a river. It was rejected by its original buyer, the singer Fauré, who said it was “all white” and “had not enough painting on it”. Monet kept it for the rest of his life.

Michel Butor, in a brilliant essay on Proust’s imaginary works of art, finds a reference that he applies to this painting in his early writings Jean Santeuil. Monet, says Proust, paints neither what one sees, because one can see nothing, nor does he paint what one cannot see - he paints the fact that one can’t see, the fact that the eye can’t make out the world.

I have always associated this paradoxical capacity and incapacity to see what is there with what is one of the most frightening and beautiful paintings I know - Monet’s picture of his first wife, Camille, on her deathbed. Her face is visible, her features darkly smudged in, her upper lip lifted from her teeth. She is disintegrating into a swirl of dashed linear colours, ghostly white and a yellow that is also in her skin, veils of ice blue and swirls of dark, empty shadow, a bridal veil, a shroud, the suggestion of a ribbed emptiness. Monet said that, as he sat beside her, he became absorbed in the “coloured gradations which death was imposing on her motionless face”. He painted yet another serial vision of change in air and light.

An important part of this exhibition is devoted to various methods of reproducing works of art, in lithograph, or by a method called “gillotage”, used before photography, in which the image was copied or drawn in thick, waxy, etchant-resistant ink on to ribbed paper, and etched on a zinc plate. Monet in Giverny procrastinated with drawings for Durand-Ruel’s L’Art dans les Deux Mondes. “It may seem like nothing,” he wrote, “but it frightens me a great deal, because I am so maladroit with white and black, and I am so absorbed with what I am doing that I am not able to do anything else.” He reproduced images from his own paintings, accompanied by critical writings by Mirbeau. As the catalogue points out, both men were charged with the same task: translating an impressionist painting into an entirely different language, a language of black and white, lines of text and lines of black crayon. They translated the airy painting Woman With a Parasol (Camille in 1886), in which the woman’s veiled face is in the green shade of a parasol against the sky, full of what Wallace Stevens called “brushy clouds brushed up by brushy winds”. (He was writing about weather by Frans Hals.) Sunlight is pink and mauve-grey on her creamy skirt. The Unknown Monet has a black chalk drawing of this figure on Gillot paper by Monet, and a reproduction of the thicker, darker, gillotage as it appeared in the journal. Mirbeau wrote that there were “no arabesques, nothing but simple, straight, fleeting lines of extraordinary elegance, of truly masterly and surprising purity and sensitivity and breadth of drawing. These are exquisite landscapes, this woman’s supple body, and this dress made of an unidentifiable fabric of fused reflections, gentle shadows, and vivid light.”

Even more complicated and striking are the repetitions and contrasts in the versions of The Côte Sauvage, an image of wild seawater swirling round black rocks, on the Breton coast. The painting in the Musée d’Orsay is a whirl of flickering brushstrokes, the black gnarls of the rock, the blue and white churning of the flecked sea surface. There is an 1890 drawing in black crayon of the same scene, with the brushstrokes replaced by dashing crayon marks, linear and energetic, making the surface light and dark as they cluster and disperse. There is a gillotage after a drawing by Monet, which thickens and schematises the denotation of wave crests, and outlines rather than building up the edges of the rock-forms. There is a lithograph by William Thornley, printed in black on olive-toned chine applique, part of a series made by this artist, which solidifies the rock forms, and takes much of the nervous and impulsive energy out of the dashing water. It looks - in the reproductions I have seen - curiously Japanese. Taken together, they made me think very hard about the multitude of ways in which one can record the temporary and transient forms of water, and the solid edges of rocks. I went back to look at Hokusai’s Great Wave Off Kanagawa, to see whether he used lines or colours. He used both - parts of his wave have the edges waves do have, formalised and arrested, but parts have the smooth coloured texture of water.

The sketchbooks preserved in the Musée Marmottan contain around 25 studies from the later years of Monet’s life, which can be directly related to the triumphant water lily paintings. Monet claimed that he painted in front of the ponds, recording “the impressions registered on my retina”. He certainly painted out of doors - several canvases at a time, according to some accounts - though he also worked in his studio. The water lily drawings are sketchy, abstracted swirls, which seem to relate to the design of the forms and movements of the canvases, either recording a rhythm of lily-pad ovals against a meandering line representing water, or light on water, or very roughly planning out the vertical and horizontal structures of these works without formal edges. There are rough, pencilled, horsetail twists that denote the hanging willow foliage and its reflections. There are ghostly ovals and hinted rims in black crayon on blue-green paper. The superimposition of oval on swirl suggests depth in these slight drawings, as it does in the large canvases.

These almost vanishing images are very moving. They are the faint record, in linear form, of the brain and the eye ordering what is, in plant and water, and will be, in paint on canvas, a shining complex web of light and matter. Line and colour come together in a painting of Water Lilies, made in 1917-19, which is unusual in being made up of coloured lines, of what the catalogue calls “a mesh of agitated, brightly coloured threads, or slashes, made with a brush”. They are, in a sense, Delacroix’s fused lines of colour in the rainbow, moving colour in light, caught as form in brushed lines, at one moment, or a series of moments, in time.

· The Unknown Monet is at the Royal Academy, London W1, from March 17 until June 10. Details: 020-7300 8000.

Posted at 11:36 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Financial Times
Arthur Kroeber, Managing editor, China Economic Quarterly
Published February 26 2007

People in the rich world perturbed by China’s rise spend a great deal of time these days consoling themselves with a political fantasy. China’s economy may be growing fast, the argument goes, but unless that growth is matched by political reform – specifically, the adoption of Western-style democracy – then economic progress will grind to a halt.
This argument has plenty of what the music business calls crossover appeal. The yellow-peril school of Chinaphobes like it because it enables them to forecast the imminent collapse of a sclerotic state unable to manage the dynamic forces it has unleashed. Idealists, of either the liberal or the neo-conservative persuasion, find it validates their view that evolution towards an Anglo-American style capitalist democracy is the inexorable course that all nations must follow, failing which they must stagnate or collapse.

Few seem willing to accept the possibility that the Chinese party-state will manage to keep rapid economic growth going for a long time, while reforming the political system only slowly and on terms dictated mainly by Chinese culture and bureaucratic history – not on Western, and particularly not on Anglo-American lines. Yet for anyone who cares to analyse China on the basis of empirical evidence, rather than appeals to bogus axioms of political development, this seems the most likely outcome for China in the next two decades.
The China-must-reform-as-we-say-it-must fantasy has been most clearly articulated by two recent books. China’s Trapped Transition, by Minxin Pei of the Carnegie Endowment, claims that corruption has so overwhelmed the Chinese state that it is rapidly losing the capacity to deal with all sorts of social problems. The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century, by Will Hutton (reviewed by Martin Wolf in the FT on February 2), asserts that “the Chinese economy and the Chinese Communist Party are in an unstable halfway house” between socialism and capitalism, and that the party must surrender its monopoly on power – soon – or risk economic collapse.
Both books, not to mention legion other critics, are right to point out that China faces a staggering array of problems: corruption, income inequality, water shortages, environmental degradation, the potential for epidemic disease and so on.
But where these books and the legion other critics go spectacularly wrong is in their assessment of the Chinese party-state as “sclerotic,” “rigid,” “unresponsive” and so on. The Chinese party-state has many exceedingly repulsive aspects, and certainly uses ruthless repression as one of the tools of governance. But if for no other reason than an interest in self-preservation, it is responsive to all manner of ills. Critics’ underestimation of the party-state’s ability to identify and address problems is a severe failure that leads them into erroneous diagnosis.
Listing all the evidence would take a book at least as long as Mr Hutton’s, but here is a sampling.
General state capacity? A decade ago government revenues were 10 per cent of GDP, a pathetic figure, and many economists doubted whether the government would be able to muster the resources to deal with any of its problems. Today revenues are around 20 per cent of GDP, and China runs one of the tightest and most prudent fiscal policies in the developing world.
Corruption? There is no question that corruption is widespread in China. It is also true that corruption in China has generally been of the lubricating rather than the destructive kind: it more resembles the monumental corruption of America’s late 19th-century Gilded Age, which was a concomitant of rapid economic growth, than the kleptocratic, zero-sum corruption that has destroyed many African countries. The decision to keep much of the economy in the hands of state corporations run by an increasingly professionalised cadre of technocrats, though much derided by free-market purists, was also in part a conscious attempt to avoid the growth of a private tycoon elite – as in Latin America or south-east Asia – that could capture the political system and use it to protect their own privileges rather than to foster broad development goals. The two most dangerous corruption clusters of the past decade were both smashed. Massive smuggling in the mid-1990s was brought under control by a fierce enforcement campaign and more sensible tariff policy. The Shanghai land-grab of the past few years, which saw a handful of property developers and officials profit obscenely from the eviction of ordinary people from their homes, ended last fall with the incarceration of the city’s party boss. In the past year Shanghai was the only major Chinese city in which property prices declined.
Income inequality? The government has decided that in a large fast-growing country, equality of outcomes is hard to achieve but ensuring equality of opportunity is a state responsibility (Anglo-American hearts ought to be warmed). To widen opportunity it has invested huge amounts in education, quadrupling the number of university graduates in the past five years, and launching a program for free public education through grade nine in the poorer inland provinces. By 2015 nine years of free public education should be standard throughout the country, and by 2020 the hope is to have 85 per cent of the population with at least a high-school education. The target may not be reached but its very existence belies the idea of a jack-booted state fearful of the future.
Health care? Thanks to the SARS and bird-flu scares, people love to talk about how epidemic disease is a heartbeat away from devastating China. Yet thanks to SARS and bird-flu, there has been a dramatic change in how the government deals with epidemic diseases. Before SARS, China denied it had an AIDS problem. After SARS, it launched a major campaign to contain the epidemic. China’s record on controlling AIDS is far superior to that of India. Progress against tuberculosis – a far more important epidemic than AIDS, with 1.3m new cases every year – has been even more impressive. Between 2002 and 2005, the proportion of TB cases detected by China’s public health service soared from 30 per cent to 80 per cent, and 90 per cent of cases were successfully treated.
Environment and resource efficiency? Here progress has been achingly slow. But take a look at the leadership of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), which is by far the most powerful economic policy body. A few years ago this very technocratic organisation pooh-poohed environmental and resource-efficiency concerns. Today, four of the agency’s five vice-ministers are tasked with environmental and energy issues. One of them was until recently the environment minister. This suggests a clear impetus towards better environmental management in the next decade.
Governance? People who think the party is just a bunch of old people sitting tight and clinging to outmoded ideas should check out what President Hu Jintao has done to local governments in the past year. Nearly 200,000 officials have been shifted around and promotion preference has been given to younger officials with experience dealing with poverty and rural development issues. The new generation of provincial leaders promoted by Mr Hu is on average five years younger than the existing provincial leadership, and almost none of them have the engineering degrees so beloved of the old Communist Party. Instead they studied economics, management, history and law. Age and term limits – all introduced under Mr Hu’s watch – mean that it is now virtually impossible to hold a senior position in the central government past the age of 70, or at the local level past the age of 65.
None of this is to argue that China has the best of all possible governments, simply that foreign observers have a dismal track record of underrating the resourcefulness and resilience of the Chinese party-state. As someone who has lived and worked in China for the better part of the last 20 years, I fervently hope that the nation progress sooner rather than later towards a more open, tolerant, pluralist society. But wishing for something does not make it so, and on the evidence of recent years the Chinese state is fully up to its self-appointed task of running an economy at full-throttle while conducting limited political and governance reforms in its own way and at its own pace. The world had better get used to the idea that China can steer its own course, and that we may just have to live with it as it chooses to be, not as we would like it to be.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

Posted at 8:51 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

March 2, 2007

The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts
By Milan Kundera; Translated by Linda Asher

168 pages. $22.95. HarperCollins Publishers.

By Russell Banks
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Milan Kundera (who writes these days in French) is perhaps the best, certainly the best-known, Czech fiction writer since Kafka (who was arguably more German than Czech anyway). This is his third book-length meditation on the novel, all three translated with precision and grace by Linda Asher. And while there is a fair amount of overlap and repetition in “The Curtain,” “The Art of the Novel” (1988) and “Testaments Betrayed” (1995), it’s due more to the consistency of Kundera’s approach to reading and writing fiction and the persistence of certain literary preferences and prejudices — his literary values — than to an inability to move on. It’s also due to his belief that reading and writing novels, from Cervantes to Rushdie, is a way of thinking that is essential for a coherent moral understanding of human nature and circumstance.

“The Curtain” is constructed much the same as its predecessors: a loose sequence of separately titled, more or less topically focused reflections that are each in turn broken into smaller segments with titles like “The Multiple Meanings of the Word ‘History’” and “Maximum Diversity in Minimum Space.” There is no formal argument to it, no narrative or plot, no overt organizing principle tying the segments and sequences together.

In Kundera’s hands, however, the bagginess of the form is appropriate. The book’s aphoristic, often flatly declarative style (Kundera has strong opinions on everything, from E.M. Cioran’s youthful flirtation with fascism to the difference between foolishness and stupidity) allows for an elegant, personalized integration of anecdote, analysis, scholarship, memory and speculation. This is not strictly or even loosely speaking literary criticism; nor on the other hand is it merely a meander through the mind of a philosophically inclined novelist.

Kundera himself tells us how to read his book: “A novelist talking about the art of the novel is not a professor giving a discourse from his podium. Imagine him rather as a painter welcoming you into his studio, where you are surrounded by his canvases staring at you from where they lean against the walls. He will talk about himself, but even more about other people, about novels of theirs that he loves and that have a secret presence in his own work. According to his criteria of values, he will again trace out for you the whole past of the novel’s history, and in so doing will give you some sense of his own poetics of the novel.”

Not surprisingly, then, reading “The Curtain” is like spending a long desultory afternoon into the evening sitting over coffee and cigarettes in a pleasant café listening to Milan Kundera hold forth on history, literature, music, politics, large countries versus small, East versus West, the lyric versus the novelistic, Paris versus Prague and so on into the night. One has the impression that Kundera, at least on the page, is a fabulous talker and not an especially good listener. But he is 78 now, and he has lived through the military occupation and liberation of his country twice and has endured more than three decades of exile; he has written at least three of the most admired novels of our time, “The Joke,” “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” plus another half-dozen books of fiction. Kundera’s opinions, reflections, memories and desires are well worth listening to.

Besides, he is one of the most erudite novelists on the planet. Not since Henry James, perhaps, has a fiction writer examined the process of writing with such insight, authority and range of reference and allusion. For instance, while analyzing Tolstoy’s description of Anna Karenina’s suicide, he notes in a tossed-off, parenthetical aside: “Stendhal likes to cut off the sound in the middle of a scene; we stop hearing dialogue and start to follow a character’s secret thinking,” which leads him to speak of Anna’s last thoughts: “Here Tolstoy is anticipating what Joyce will do 50 years later, far more systematically, in ‘Ulysses’ — what will be called ‘interior monologue’ or ‘stream of consciousness.’”

Which in turn leads him to observe that “with his interior monologue, Tolstoy examines not, as Joyce will do later, an ordinary, banal day, but instead the decisive moments of his heroine’s life. And that is much harder, for the more dramatic, unusual, grave a situation is, the more the person describing it tends to minimize its concrete qualities. … Tolstoy’s examination of the prose of a suicide is therefore a great achievement, a ‘discovery’ that has no parallel in the history of the novel and never will have.” End of parenthesis.

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Posted at 10:07 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: March 4, 2007

SHANGHAI, March 3 — Qin Fangyi’s religious moment came after a walk in the pouring rain two years ago to a nunnery for a ceremony that her mother had urged her to attend.

Ms. Qin’s mother converted to Buddhism two years earlier despite her husband’s open hostility to religion, and quietly nudged her daughter into having a look for herself.

“I got there at about 8 a.m. and was told the ceremony was delayed by an hour,” said Ms. Qin, a 21-year-old design student. “At about 8:55, all of the sudden the sky grew clear and the sun came out and people began cheering and screaming that the real Buddha was about to appear in the sky. Although I didn’t see the Buddha myself, I was amazed, and I began to feel the power of God.”

Ms. Qin’s story, although unique in its details, has an ending that is fast becoming commonplace, as Chinese by the tens of millions shed decades of state-imposed atheism. The phenomenon has gained momentum so fast that it appears to have taken the government by surprise.

A recent poll by East China Normal University estimated that 31.4 percent of Chinese 16 or older are religious, putting the number of believers at roughly 400 million.

In recent years, official estimates have placed the number of believers at around 100 million, but the fact that the new survey’s results were not only made public but were also reported by the government-controlled Chinese news media suggests that the survey has been given at least some official credence.

Perhaps the most popular time of the year for Chinese to engage in public worship is the traditional Chinese New Year, which began last month. Buddhist and Taoist temples, in particular, overflowed with visitors who prayed for ancestors or the health of their own households.

As Ms. Qin spoke on the eve of the holiday at the Jade Buddha Temple in central Shanghai, scores of worshipers strolled through the temple complex. Many were well-dressed office workers who often seemed uncertain about how to act as they entered the central pavilion and bowed or knelt in prayer.

Many other visitors were older Chinese who may have privately clung to their religion through decades of official hostility. Some accompanied grandchildren, tutoring them in the rituals of prayer as they worked their way around the pavilion, with its giant golden Buddha.

Others, meanwhile, burned thick clutches of incense in the temple’s large, open courtyard, bowing to the cardinal points of the compass and then depositing the burning sticks in huge iron urns.

“There was no way for me to do this with my own daughter,” said Zhang Li, 62, who escorted her smiling granddaughter through the complex, stopping here and there for prayer. “The temples were closed, and this sort of thing simply wasn’t allowed.”

Official attitudes toward religion have gradually loosened in China in recent years, enabling the resurgence of popular belief. Places of worship for the five officially recognized faiths — Buddhism, Taoism, Catholicism, Protestantism and Islam — have been restored or built anew, and public worship allowed again amid signs that the government sees limited religiosity as a useful component of its drive to build what it calls a “harmonious society.”

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Copyright The Japan Times

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe reiterated Thursday that there was no evidence of coercion by Japan’s wartime government in using women across Asia as sex slaves.

“There has been debate over the question of whether there was coercion … but the fact is, there was no evidence to prove there was coercion as initially suggested,” Abe told reporters Thursday. “That largely changes what constitutes the definition of coercion, and we have to take it from there.”

Abe was responding to a recent U.S. congressional resolution calling for Japan’s leader to “formally acknowledge, apologize and accept historical responsibility” for using “comfort women” — the Japanese euphemism for thousands of women forced into sexual servitude for Japanese soldiers across Asia in the 1930s and 1940s.

A group of lawmakers in Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party are also moving to downgrade Japan’s 1993 statement by then Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono that Japan’s wartime military was directly and indirectly involved in setting up and operating brothels and recruited women with coercion sometimes.

Japanese leaders have repeatedly apologized, including former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who said in 2001 that he felt sincere remorse over the comfort women’s “immeasurable and painful experiences.”

Since taking office in September, Abe himself has pledged to honor the 1993 statement by Kono. However, he told a Diet session in October that there was no evidence to prove there was coercion “in a narrow sense” in the way the women were brought to the frontline brothels.

But many LDP members who seek to whitewash Japan’s wartime atrocities have long attacked the 1993 statement by Kono, who is now speaker of the lower house.

Three women who said they were gang raped and tortured at the hands of Japanese soldiers during the war and endured a lifetime of mental and physical scars testified in February in written statements at a hearing of the U.S. House Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific and the Global Environment.

Posted at 12:53 PM · Comments (0)

Great stuff by James Fenton on the fall of Saigon, John Simpson, Le Carre and more. The opening chapter, The Soccer War, which helped make a name for the recently departed Ryszard Kapuscinski, lacks some of the charm I found in it when I first read it many years back. I’m looking forward to re-reading The Emperor and Shah of Shahs.

Posted at 12:37 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Tom Plate

SINGAPORE — The irrepressible Mohammad Mahathir, while still enthroned as Malaysia’s long-reigning prime minister, once muttered something to the effect that people do not have the right to know everything and that it won’t exactly kill them if they don’t. This cavalier attitude toward freedom of information — so revered in the West — is of course not unknown in Asia.

But Mahathir was no dope. As the information-technology revolution unfolded in front of our eyes, he became one of the first of Asia’s leaders to recognize the importance of timely economic and political information in the context of the country’s development.

The problem for Asia’s leaders who pined for continued economic growth was thus how best to square the need for information with the desire to maintain governmental control of it. These days, that problem seems increasingly dramatic in China — with its system of surveillance that overhangs everything like an oppressive rain forest.

In recent university and media appearances, I have been struck by how worried many people are about China. Goodwill and high hopes for the world’s most-populous state are evident almost everywhere. But, increasingly, doubts about the wisdom of the central government’s public-information policies cross the face of questioners. People wonder how China can possibly move forward if its media policies are heading backward.

Recently, a lively group of students and professors at famed Nan-yang Technological University here in Singapore were assembled to discuss contemporary media issues. The range of students’ interests was sweeping, but one was especially struck by a particular student’s question.

This bright student from mainland China wondered how one can be hopeful about China if its media policies are not evolving in pace with its economic and global ambitions.

The premise of her question was right on point. China’s media policies do seem to be undergoing a back-to-the-future directional change. As a recent review of “China’s Media & Entertainment Law” put it: “A few years ago, it was possible to talk about a combination of liberalization and censorship in the Chinese media industry. Now the story is more about censorship and a variety of other restrictions as the Chinese government seeks to reassert control after a period of rapid change.”

The review was deftly penned by James Paradise, a UCLA Ph.D. candidate in political science and a former journalist at AsiaMedia (www.asiamedia.ucla.edu). The book under scrutiny was a collection of essays, some written authoritatively by Chinese government officials. Paradise quotes this from the authors themselves: “In mid-2005, the PRC government suddenly tightened the reins on China’s media sectors, slowing and in some ways reversing its recent liberalization of the television industry … [These changes] coincided with the turnover of top SARFT [State Administration of Radio, Film and Television] officials.”

It appears China is unembarrassed about official directional change in its media policy that might bring back at least some of the distress-making features of the bad old days of Mao. Maybe my Western preoccupation with issues of media freedom and information access is, in reality, foolishly parochial.

Two twinges, though, make the genuine anguish of the student from the mainland more than academic. One comes from the vivid recollection of economic development in other parts of Asia that gave rise to an increasingly monied and assertive middle class. That profound sociological development forced governments to lighten up on media control. The result was to spawn, with dizzying rapidity, near-modern economies that were suddenly wildly competitive globally.

Hong Kong, with as vigorous a media environment as anyone, sits proudly atop Asia’s list of leaders in per-person income. Behind this Special Administrative Region of China are media-lively South Korea and Taiwan. To be sure, Singapore tops them both, and sports a media system that can only be described as unique (controlled but high-quality). But this little gem of a city-state cannot be compared to anything or anyone else.

Perhaps China is incomparable at the far other end of the country-size spectrum. In its totality, its economy chugs in as one of the world’s largest overall but not per capita. And so the question is whether a restrictive media policy will permit it to rise to the level of South Korea or will push it down in the other direction.

In reducing media freedoms, China’s leaders may be putting at risk its long-term chances of continued success. That, in any event, is the billion-person question that has so many people in Asia worried.

UCLA professor Tom Plate, a veteran U.S. journalist, has been visiting Asia to promote his new book, “Confessions of an American Media Man.”

2007, Tom Plate

Posted at 12:27 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The San Francisco Chronicle

The 22-year-old author of a column titled “Why I Hate Blacks” in the regional newspaper AsianWeek has been dismissed, and the paper’s editors said Wednesday that they suffered “a serious lapse in editorial judgment” when they published his column.

Editor at large Ted Fang said Wednesday at a news conference organized by the San Francisco branch of the NAACP that Kenneth Eng, who lives in New York, will not write again for the free weekly.

“The failing of our editorial process in allowing this piece to go forward was an insensitive and callous mistake that should never have been made by our publication,” Fang said.”As a publication whose motto is (to be) the voice of the Asian American community, we are humbled and overwhelmed at reader response not only chastising our editorial process but strongly urging our paper to sever all ties to this contributor.”

Eng, a regular contributor who wrote roughly every two weeks from November until this week’s edition, offered in the column “a list of reasons why we should discriminate against blacks.”

He called himself an “Asian supremacist” in another of his columns, which ran under the label “God of the Universe.”

Some of the paper’s critics have said the editors who approved this week’s column should be held accountable for its contents, but Fang has so far refused to address the subject.

“We think the editor responsible for green-lighting the column should be removed,” said Keith Kamisugi of the Equal Justice Society, one of the sponsors of a petition demanding that AsianWeek terminate Eng, counter the column in print and review its processes.

“Removing Eng was a small part of the problem. We are looking for journalistic responsibility at AsianWeek,” he said.

The newspaper’s editor in chief, Samson Wong, did not attend the news conference, which brought leaders from various civil rights and faith-based organizations together both to condemn the column and to discuss improving race relations in the city.

Another conversation on the column is planned Friday, when New America Media, a national coalition of ethnic media outlets based in San Francisco, has invited community leaders to discuss the media’s role in fostering greater understanding between Asian Americans and African Americans.

Some Asian American leaders are upset the meeting was planned so quickly. Several groups asked in a letter sent Wednesday on Equal Justice Society letterhead that the meeting be postponed to allow more people to get involved and to ensure the discussion centers on the damage done by the column.

Amos Brown, the leader of the San Francisco branch of the NAACP, will be out of town for the meeting but explained his feelings during the news conference Wednesday.

“I hope we will go forth seizing the opportunity to do a better job of racial relations and interfaith and intergroup activities,” Brown said. “We are not here to castigate anyone, we are simply here to say we have a problem in the human family in San Francisco.”

Dan Daniels, a representative for the California branch of the NAACP, said he was appalled by the column and said it indicates there is still a need for the civil rights organization.

He said the column, published Feb. 23 in the free weekly, was grounds for firing and applauded the editors’ decision to let Eng go.

“Racism is very much alive and well,” said Doris Ward, a former San Francisco supervisor and city assessor, who also spoke. “All of us here are responsible for doing something.”

This wasn’t Eng’s first inflammatory piece, but it is the only one Fang acknowledged he was mistaken to publish.

When asked why he allowed Eng to continue writing for the paper after producing columns titled “Why I Hate Asians” and “Proof That Whites Inherently Hate Us,” Fang would say only that the editorial decision process is under review.

Brown called the column a “fluke,” commended Fang for attending the meeting and accepted his apology for printing the racist words.

He said he hoped to find a way to reach out to Eng and teach and inform him.

Eng could not be reached for comment.

The meeting sponsored by New America Media is set for 10 a.m. Friday at the Chinese American Citizens Alliance, 1044 Stockton St.

E-mail Leslie Fulbright at lfulbright@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page B - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Posted at 7:17 AM · Comments (1)

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