The raw and the cooked

Kai, a fantastic writer known to some of us here, has a version of this piece in 14; he's been planning to expand it for years. Needs a high-level nudge to do so, perhaps even the promise of a fistful of mp3s of 1970s funk in return for his labour.

If Ntone can make him do it, there's a fantastic piece to be had on the next great economic power's last big secret.

Faustin and Studio Kabako

A review of the work from Festival of Lies to workshopping More...future with Flamme and Xuly (well documented via vids and such) - the Kabako project in Kin and Kisangani. Interview, Studio visit, something.


Studio Kabako Website

amaNdiya

amaNdiya article

Feels like a century ago - but maybe we revisit as entry point, the role of music vs pc-ness etc? In many ways, set the tone for "ordinary people" songs to re-come from Zuma's ANC - where now it's about who sings loudest - when you google this you get Zapiro's cartoons of Zuma...

Kwanele?

Race (or not) & "I don't want to sleep alone"

Two (possible) sideways perspectives: Joshua, a young poet and journalist from Bangalore, has a poetry/photo collaboration called "I don't want to sleep alone" which is nice and gritty, preview here. He also wrote a (tame) piece on looking black and not really knowing it - "Sometimes you have to use racism to your advantage" - available here, and could expand that into a family story, or at least the kind of story unfit to print in a family magazine like the one it originally ran in.

Bob Marley - anniversary of his death

The man who introduced reggae to a worldwide audience, Marley was a hero figure in the classic, mythological sense. From immensely humble beginnings, with talent and religious belief his only weapons, the Jamaican recording artist applied himself with unstinting perseverance to spreading his prophetic musical message across the globe. In 1980, on tour, Bob Marley and the Wailers played to the largest audiences a musical act had ever experienced in Europe. Less than a year later on May 11, 1981 Marley would die, only thirty-six years old.

The anniversary of Marley's death presents an opportunity to explore his legend or his musical legacy.

Women soljas

A lot of this is propaganda:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/5323140.stm

(SA army now giving self props for women soldiers vs rape in DRC).

But Ryan Lobo's photo-journalism piece in Chimu 14, a more personal take.

Dany Laferrière Interview

Still life bathed in warm light: a porcelain bathtub with claw feet, sumptuous white towels draped over the edge, a table set with a stack of books and a glass of red wine. A Monday night in May, and 400 people fill the darkness of Montreal’s Place des Arts’ Cinquième Salle, waiting for Dany Laferrière. He seems to glide onstage, slim, tall, impeccably dressed in a dark suit and a white shirt open at the neck — a gentleman writer or, as the French are saying, un grand écrivain.

Instant applause. They know him well, maybe too well. How as a penniless refugee from Haiti, he chucked his menial job to write a novel about a penniless Haitian refugee writing a novel about himself. A mythical summer in a sweltering apartment on rue St-Denis, drinking, womanizing, reading, writing about the meaning of it all, sure it would lift him out of poverty and obscurity. He took the manuscript first to Jacques Lanctôt, the former FLQ activist turned publisher, warning him to expect a bomb. And he was right.

To the monoculture of Quebec, caught up in the sovereignty debate, Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer offered an exhilarating mix of provocation and humour. Politics, too, but nothing to do with local obsessions. “In the scope of Western values,” the narrator announced, “white woman is inferior to white man, but superior to black man. That’s why she can’t get off except with a Negro. It’s obvious why: she can go as far as she wants with him. The only true sexual relation is between unequals.”

Published in 1985, it was an instant bestseller in Quebec. The translation by David Homel, How to Make Love to a Negro, came out a year later, drawing delirious reviews across Canada as well as in the UK and the US. And, as in the novel, life obeyed art. The author was invited on Denise Bombardier’s popular Radio-Canada TV show, leading to an avalanche of publicity, which he parlayed into a media career spanning the gamut from TV weatherman (a job he famously once performed naked) to talk show regular, literary columnist, and filmmaker. His second book, éroshima, found the author reading the Japanese poet Basho and enjoying sex with Japanese girls. A new book followed every year or so, always first person, in the same pithy style and often very funny — a chronicle of the life and times of a narrator everybody figured must be Dany Laferrière.

Excerpt from 'The Work of Art' by Marianne Ackerman. First appeared in Sept. 2010 issue of The Walrus.

La Chinafrique: Photography by Paolo Woods

These photos are excerpts from a larger series that appear in the book La Chinafrique available here

source

Emergency (Kenyan Web Comic)

Emergency is a web comic written and illustrated by Chief Nyamweya. Inspired by the need to present history in a form that is more accessible to everyday people, Emergency tells the story of the Mau Mau uprising.

A World War II veteran, Dedan Kimathi, returns home to try and rebuild a peaceful existence, but quickly finds himself forced toward the same violence he thought he'd left behind on the battlefield.

With his childhood friend Chege at his side, they shall soon discover that they aren't alone in this battle with the agents of the state.


Emergency Webcomic Promo Trailer from emergencywebcomic on Vimeo.

Emergency Website

Generations & the construction of identity

Generation, South Africa's longest running and most popular soap (is it viewed by many more than 4.9 million people daily) tracks the vicissitudes of black business people in the advertising and marketing fields. Themes of co-option into white capital, loss of concern for roots, gender discrimination, homophobia in the light of cultural expectations and so on drive a fairly standard family saga. It confronts the problems which arise from the post-1994 changes in social milieu, especially among the younger generation.
We re-watch Generations, from the first episode that aired on SABC 1 in 1994 to the present, exploring the character development, the fashions, the lifestyles and the underpinning ideology, to understand and interrogate its role in sustaining social-political life and relations, and in constituting the social-political self in post apartheid South Africa.

Generations website (get blow by blow summaries of each episodes)

There have been a view academic studies in this regard

Mediating the Neoliberal Nation: Television in Post-Apartheid South Africa by Sarah Ives
An analysis of South African television’s political economy as a “public theaters of late capitalism” that is tied up with notions of national belonging.

"Soap operas like Generations, South Africa’s most popular television show, depict a ‘modern,’ urban, world of Black upper-middle class business elites. The show, with its emphasis on the emerging Black middle- and upper-classes presumably made possible by the new elections, encapsulates the hope of the post-apartheid era. Generations’ website makes frequent references to the links between the show and the post-apartheid era. Generations, the website proclaims, “can proudly claim to have not only survived political and social changes during this exciting period, but also to have evolved in tandem with our nation from the birth of its democracy in 1994 to the present time.... Equality, in this discourse, is measured by being able to succeed in the ‘masculine,’ ‘Western’ business world. In Generations these goals remain unquestioned.”

Making meaning, making a home: students watching Generations by CATHERINE MARY O'SHEA JUNE 2004

And Watching Soap Opera by Miki Flockemannn in Senses of Culture : South African Culture Studies by Sarah Nuttall, Cheryl Ann Michael (Oxford University Press, 2000)

Roger Ballen

The backdrops in the photographs are filled with these eerie, surreal drawings and hanging wires – like something you’d find in Purgatory – is that something you staged? Or was it already there?

Nothing is staged. And nothing is already there. Everything is transformed through the camera. So what you’re looking at is not necessarily what’s there. The thing that’s there is the photograph. You’re seeing a photographic view of reality. Everything is transformed through my mind and through a camera. What you see is the photograph. The photograph, no matter what you do, is staged. You make a decision when and where to pull the trigger. There’s an act of subjectivity in every photograph.

source

Danticat on Aristide

Possible writer for Aristide interview

[Danticat] returns to Haiti every three or four months, most recently in January [2004] -- just before the beginning of this year's violence, which ultimately led to the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

"Things hadn't unraveled yet when I was there," Danticat says. "The demonstrations had started ... but you didn't know what kind of storm was coming. There were pro-Aristide demonstrations and anti-Aristide demonstrations. It was sort of going back and forth, and I couldn't tell how it was going to end."

Because her new novel and its attendant publicity tour coincided with Aristide's unseating, Danticat often finds herself, as a respected Haitian-American novelist whose subject is her native county, asked to explain and interpret what's going on. But, she says, the role of commentator ill suits her.

"I don't have any idea, and I'm not afraid to say that," she says. "I don't have the big picture -- first of all because I live here, and second because I'm a fiction writer. My best reaction is my fiction, and that takes some time and reflection and nuance."

Further, she says, she's incapable of the sound-bite assessment that is useful for journalists. "The situation is so complicated anyway, and I don't have the luxury of declaring somebody totally evil or somebody totally saintly. ... So I say I do not know."

source



"She recalls the 1991 coup against Aristide as shocking, "but people rallied". After college, she lobbied for his return while working as an intern for Demme... Danticat met Aristide in New York ("he was very charismatic") and again at the presidential palace in 1994, when she first went back to Haiti to work with Demme on a documentary about the priest's return. "He seemed to embody the pains of the poorest people of Haiti; people loyal to him were so loyal," she says. She was later associate producer on Benoît's film Courage and Pain (1996), testimony from Aristide supporters who survived torture."

Aristide's exile has left her with "very complicated feelings. I wish there could have been a mediated solution, in which those who voted for him didn't think their vote meant nothing. Now there's a wave of violence because they feel they have nothing to lose." As for the desired outcome, "it's not up to me, and certainly not up to the US and France to decide".

source

Festival to honour Girma Beyene

The 7^th edition of the Ethiopian Music Festival will be held from the 7^th to 17 May 2008 in Addis Ababa. Organized by the Alliance Ethio-Francise as a part of its centenary celebration and as a tribute to the Ethiopian pianist, composer and arranger Girma Beyene, the festival is expected to bring along renowned and young musicians.
Francis Falceto in his book Abyssinia Swing, a pictorial history of modern Ethiopian music describes Girma as one of a pioneering generation of artists that has a huge influence on the current Ethiopian music.
From the very beginning of the 1960’s and for some twenty years, he ranked among the Ethiopian musical scene’s most creative and prolific artists. He left precious few recordings behind him as a vocalist: it was above all as a pianist, organist, composer and arranger that Girma made his mark on what is today agreed to be the golden age of Ethiopian music. Throughout the heyday of Vinyl record production (1969-1978), the figure of Girma Beyene dominated the recording sessions. The then-privileged partner of Alemayehu Eshete, Girma innovated, through his simple and to-the-point playing, melding the lightness of pop into the ethos of a changing Ethiopia. Admired for his musical elegance, Girma none the less met one of the saddest fates in Ethiopian music. Though his countrymen still remember his charming voice and his knack for pop, they have totally forgotten his role and importance as an innovator.
Going into exile in the USA in 1981, Girma departed the Ethiopian music scene, sinking into the anonymous “Little Ethiopia’ of America’s East Coast.
According the Alliance booklet, there has been a renewed interest of late in the work and personality of Girma Beyene.International groups such as the Either/ Orchestra, the Daktaris, Le Tigre (Platante), The Ex, Badoum Band and Antibals have added some of Girma’s major compositions to their repertoires.
View programme in PDf here.

Okwui Enwezor's Archive Fever

Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art
International Center of Photography
New York, New York
January 18 - May 4, 2008

Enwezor: "…I want to make a distinction between curating within the canon and curating within culture."

Archive fever : uses of the document in contemporary art /
Okwui Enwezor [curator].
Gottingen : Steidl ; London : Thames & Hudson
May, 2008.
ISBN: 9783865216229 (pbk.)

Organized and written by renowned scholar and ICP Adjunct Curator Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever presents works by leading contemporary artists who use archival documents to rethink the meaning of identity, history, memory, and loss. Over the past thirty years, successive generations have taken wide-ranging approaches to the photographic and filmic archive. The works presented here take many forms, including physical archives arranged by peculiar
cataloguing methods, imagined biographies of fictitious persons, collections of found and anonymous photographs, film versions of photographic albums, and photomontages composed of historical photographs. These images have a wide-ranging subject matter yet are linked by the artists shared meditation on photography and film as the quintessential media of the archive. Artists in the exhibition include Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Zoe Leonard, Ilán Lieberman, Walid Raad, Thomas Ruff, Anri Sala, Fazal Sheikh, Eyal Sivan, Lorna Simpson, and Vivan Sundaram, among others.

Kwame Dawes in Jamaica - poet as journalist?

In early 2008 Kwame Dawes to Jamaica with assistance from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis
Reporting. The center's grants for AIDS journalism in the Caribbean are supported by the MAC AIDS Fund.

Dawes, who was raised in Kingston, is now the poet in residence at the University of South Carolina. He returned to Jamaica with a grant from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, hoping to draw attention to the country's growing HIV/AIDS crisis: the country's AIDS rate is nearly three times that of the U.S. and experts fear that it may soon become an epidemic.

The result of Dawes' efforts is a new form of journalism--a remarkable website called HOPE: Living & Loving with HIV in Jamaica. The site sets first person audio and video accounts by doctors and patients to the of Joshua Cogan.

In his poem Coffee Break, Dawes recounts a story told to him by one of the doctors at the center:

It was Christmas time,

the balloons needed blowing,

and so in the evening

we sat together to blow

balloons and tell jokes--

the cool air off the hills

made me think of coffee,

so I said, "Coffee would be nice,"

and he said, "Yes, coffee

would be nice," and smiled

as his thin fingers pulled

the balloons from the plastic bags;

so I went for coffee

and it takes a few minutes

to make the coffee

though I did not know

if he wanted cows milk

or condensed milk,

and when I came out

to ask him, he was gone,

just like that, in the time

it took me to think,

cows milk or condensed;

the balloons sat lightly

on his still lap.

See Bearing Witness: The Poet as Journalist here

and an interview with Dawes on the project here.