The Hermeneutics of Shoes lol

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2008/12/14-1
"This is a farewell kiss, you dog!"

"All i can report is it is a size 10" - Bush on thrown shoes

See the comment section :D

"This was an early christmas present."

"Poetic justice."

"Finally an example of honest journalism."

"Somebody make a T-shirt commemorating this incident. I'll buy a dozen."

...
i'm sure there'll be a lot more to come, this is way too exciting haha

And in all seriousness, they are starting to analyze the "symbolic significances" in "Arab" culture of throwing shoes at Bush and calling him a dog lol
"Now people at home might be wondering what's the importance of the shoe... well, in Arab culture the sole of the shoes is considered an insult..." (watch the video)

Ghosh on xenophilia.....

http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20081222&fname=Amitav&sid=1

"If I am to think of what drew me to Egypt in 1980, it was, at bottom, the very impulse that I have been describing here – a kind of xenophilia, a desire to reclaim the globe in my own fashion, a wish to eavesdrop on an ancient civilizational conversation. Admittedly, this impulse could have taken me to many other places, but the opportunity presented itself at a time when I was just becoming aware of the ties that had once linked Yemen and China, Indonesia and East Africa – and most significantly for me, India and the Middle East."

The play of meanings....

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/magazine/07teasing-t.html?scp=1&sq=teasing&st=cse

"...teasing is a mode of play, no doubt with a sharp edge, in which we provoke to negotiate life’s ambiguities and conflicts. And it is essential to making us fully human..."

Masks and Silences

I just read one of the zapatista speeches, and i love how they put things:

"It would seem evident that masks conceal and silence quiets.
But the truth is that masks also reveal and that silences speak.
...

Yes, this is a country of masks and silences, I tell this to the sea, and she answers me, from behind her ski mask, with a silent gesture of paradox, which is more than eloquent, as she rolls up and guards the great plans.

But I tell you, and I tell myself, that there are masks and masks, and silences and silences."

and then he went on to talk about Masks and the Silence from above and the masks and the silences of those from below... and kopi kampung, this is what i was stutteringly trying to retell to you the other day:

"In order to supplant its lack of legitimacy with legality, the Mexican State (and not just the government) must carry out a complex surgical operation on the entire social order. That is, to eradicate the historical memory from the governed. And they try to do this by substituting the true history (in lower case), with the Official History (in upper case). And this Official History is not learned in books, rather it was created in the mental laboratories of postgraduates in foreign universities. Harvard, Oxford, yale, and the MIT are the modern "Founding Fathers" of the current Mexican leaders. And so the Official History comes from as far away as the indicators of economic growth, these have the constancy of a weather vane in the middle of a storm. (...) If constancy and pain and hard work are characteristic of the history of those from below, the ephemeral is the preferred place for the Official History. (...) This Official History has its mask."

uhm... i wonder why he didnt say the histories of those from below instead of "the history" (singular form despite in lower case)...

"Their" "choice" of "violence"

"... Y, al mismo tiempo, las enfermedades empezaron a acabar con los niños y con las niñas. De 1990 a 1992, no había niño, en la Selva Lacandona, que llegara a los cinco años. Antes de los cinco años, morían de enfermedades curables. No era el cáncer, no era el SIDA, no eran enfermedades del corazón, eran enfermedades curables: tifoidea, tuberculosis, y, a veces, una simple calentura era la que mataba a niños y a niñas menores de cinco años.

Yo sé que en la ciudad esto puede ser hasta una ventaja: mientras menos burros, más olotes, dicen. Pero en el caso de un pueblo indígena, la muerte de su niñez significa su desaparición como pueblo. O sea, en el proceso natural, los adultos crecen, se hacen ancianos y mueren. Si no hay niños, esa cultura desaparece.

La mortandad de los indígenas, de los niños y de las niñas indígenas, agudizó todavía el problema. Pero la diferencia que había aquí al resto de otros pueblos indios, es que aquí había un ejército rebelde, armado. Fueron las mujeres las que empezaron a empujar esto. No fueron los hombres. Yo sé que la tradición en México —los mariachis, Pedro Infante y todo eso— es que los hombres somos muy machos. Pero no fue así. Quienes empezaron a empujar: hay que hacer algo, ya no, y ya basta, fueron las mujeres, que veían morir a sus hijos y a sus hijas.

Empezó a haber una especie de rumor en todas las comunidades: hay que hacer algo, ya basta, ya basta, en todas las lenguas. Para entonces, ya estábamos también en la zona de los Altos. Y ahí teníamos dos compañeras que habían sido, y son todavía, la columna vertebral en ese trabajo: la finada Comandanta Ramona y la Comandanta Susana.

Por diversas partes empezó a surgir esta inquietud, esta molestia… Vamos a decirlo por su nombre: esta rebeldía en las mujeres zapatistas, que había que hacer algo. Nosotros hicimos lo que teníamos que hacer, entonces, que era preguntarle a todos qué íbamos a hacer. Hubo, entonces, en 1992, una consulta —sin televisión, sin gobierno del Distrito Federal, sin nada de lo que hay ahora—, y pueblo por pueblo se pasó y se realizaron asambleas —como ésta en la que estamos ahorita—. Se planteaba el problema. La disyuntiva era muy sencilla: si nos alzamos en armas, nos van a derrotar, pero va a llamar la atención y van a mejorar las condiciones de los indígenas. Si no nos alzamos en armas, vamos a sobrevivir, pero vamos a desaparecer como pueblos indios.

La lógica de muerte es cuando nosotros decimos: no nos dejaron otra opción. Ahora, después de catorce, casi quince años, nosotros —los que llevamos más tiempo aquí— decimos: qué bueno que no teníamos otra opción.

...."

(From recent speeches in August http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/comision-sexta/978)

Please bear with my best attempt to combine Google translator and my own :-)

"... And at the same time, the diseases started to break out on the boys and the girls. From 1990 to 1992, there was no child, in the Lacandon Jungle, that reached 5 years old. Before the age of five, they died of curable diseases. It was not cancer, not AIDS, not heart diseases, they were curable diseases: typhoid, tuberculosis, and sometimes it was a simple fever that was killing boys and girls under five.

(...) But in the case of an indigenous people, the death of their children means their disappearance as a people. That is, in the natural process, the adults grow older, they become elderly and die. If there are no children, this culture will disappear.

The mortality of indigenous peoples, of indigenous boys and girls, heightened the problem still. But the difference between here and the rest of other Indian peoples, is that here there was a rebel army, armed. They were the women who began to push this. They were not men. I know that the tradition in Mexico - mariachi, Pedro Infante and all that - is that men are very macho. But it was not so. Those who began to push: something must be done, and no, and enough, no more, were women, who watched their sons and daughters die.

There began to have some kind of rumor in all of the communities: something must be done, enough is enough, enough is enough, in all languages. By then, we were also in the area of the Highlands. And there were two companions who had been, and still are, the backbone in this work: the deceased Comandanta Ramona and Comandanta Susana.

(...) There was, then, in 1992, a consultation - without television, without government of the Federal District, with nothing of what is now -, and people by people came and assembled - the same way we are doing right now-. They posed the problem. The dilemma was very simple: if we raise in arms, we are going to defeat, but it will draw attention and will improve conditions for indigenous people. If we do not raise arms, we are going to survive, but we are going to disappear as Indian peoples.

The logic of death is when we say: they did not leave us another option. Now, after fourteen, nearly fifteen years, which took us more time here, we say: what good that we had no other choice..."

These words were echoing in my head when somebody in last Thursday's class commented that the Zapatistas chose violence to draw people's attention before using other means of communication (books, lectures, internet, etc.), the same comment i heard in my Latin American Politics class a year and a half ago,... If I was shocked and upset then, I am enraged and find it impossible to stay quiet now... but before I could respond, Khwaja was taking over, and he's pushing the same point a lot more eloquently, but somehow i haven't since been able to let that comment go.

They "chose" to take up arms? do we even have the slightest awareness of what they were going through before that? did we even see them, hear them, know that they existed??? They were "using" "violence"? What about the crushing violence that los pueblos indigenas have endured for centuries from imperial as well as state forces? What about the brutal violence that keeps sucking "natural resources" out of people's lands, bleeding Mother Earth? What about the kind of turning-blind-eyes-and-deaf-ears violence that let curable diseases kill children before they could live even five years?

"They chose to exercise violence..." Just casual like that. Care-less like that. Thoughtless like that. I'm not blaming the person who made the comment per se, but i certainly condemn the conditions in which some people not only have the luxury to entertain illusions of choice for themselves but also have the extravagant audacity to cast everyone else into their delusional/bogus morals of choice, i certainly want to knock down the structures that hides in the dark massive violences and brings to light all (and only) the counter-violences, the structures that celebrate and celebritize some lives while burying other lives into nonexistence, the structures that honor and memorialize some deaths while trampling over other deaths in ignorance and oblivion, the structures that perform all sorts of sacred rituals on some bodies while disposing other bodies as mere dirt and trash, the structures that shield and shelter some human beings at all costs... from other/their fellow human beings... :-((((

I know i shouldn't've been that surprised to hear sth like "they chose violence, they could've chosen to be peaceful"... after all, i am at a place where liberal comments like such are thrown around as often as campaigns to save the world are waged... maybe i'd get used to it or grow immune to it after being here long enough, after hearing all this nonsense frequent enough? i wish so... but until that immunity kicks in, i can only feel sad, and shocked, and hurt, and enraged, and wanting to fight back, como los pueblos dijeron: pelea, pelea con nosotros,
compañero/a
hermano/a
de la vida que vendrá.

Opening to Voices: sharing, suffering, selves...

Of all Ashis Nandy's amazing insights, here is one passage that means the world(s) to me:

"Openness to voices, familiar or strange, may well have to be the first criterion of the shared self which transcends nation-states, communities, perhaps even cultures themselves. A direct, sharp awareness of man-made suffering, a genuine empirical feel for it, may be the second."

I recently watched the film Bashu, the little stranger, and cannot even begin to express how much the story has been moving me. It speaks of shared selves, it hits your nerves so you cannot but be a little more acutely aware of suffering (and resilience and healing), it opens up voices and silences, it opens up the possibilities of strangeness and familiarity--it follows these realms as they fold into one another. A little stranger loses and finds a family.

Anyway, in the spirit of Nandy's quote, I opened a new list of links, "Voices" and posted the link to a small piece of Bashu's poetry, spoken in a voice i cannot and cannot and cannot understand, but that i can hear a little, understand a little, and that I feel drawn to listen to again and again. Some sacred part of myself, our shared self, feels its found a voice in his.

So, watch the clip, or better, watch the film and let me know how you feel, what you hear, ...

rereading Cohn

this is such a classic of dissecting "Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge." Kopi Kampung, it'd def. be benificial to take a quick look again at this and Hevia's English Lessons for ur paper.

Cohn's p. 162: "In the conceptual scheme which the British created to understand and to act in India, they constantly followed the same logic; they reduced vastly complex codes and their associated meanings to a few metonyms. If Indians wore shoes in the presence of sahibs, they were being disrespectful in the early 19th century. But to Indians, the proper wearing of slippers or shoes stood for a whhole difference in cosmology.

The European concepts of custom and superstition were a means to encompass and explain behavior and thought, and allowed the British to save themselves the effort of understanding or adequately explaining the subtle or not-too-subtle meanings attached to the actins of their subjects."

I'm sure there's a lot to be dissected about the grotesque translation (or ensnaring) of "alternative" forms of healing under the conceptual stares of modern medicine, about what is being "reduced vastly" when transported between two whole different systems of meanings, different cosmologies, different epistemological spaces, or what our Khwaja often calls different "underlying grammars" :-)

Even the language of calling what's different "alternative," i feel, already takes for granted a norm at the center, from which the "alternative" deviates/differs. Do we acknowledge also that what we are having - whatever system or ways of doing or ways of relating... - is also an alternative among millions possible, and unfortunately, a pretty impoverished one more often than not...?

"History"

It so happened that the night we had the Forum discussion on The Politics of Collective Memory: Making or Erasing History?, I came home and stumbled onto this marvelous short story by Galeano. With only a few words, he redefines history on such beautiful terms, i'm absolutely enamored:

Ventana sobre la historia universal
Hubo una vez que fue la primera vez, y entonces el bicho humano se alzo y sus cuatro patas se convirtieron en dos brazos y dos piernas, y gracias a las piernas los brazos fueron libres y pudieron hacer casa mejor que la copa del arbol o la cueva de paso. Y habiendose erguido, la mujer y el hombre descubrieron que se puede hacer el amor cara a cara y boca a boca, y conocieron la alegria de mirarse a los ojos durante el abrazo de sus brazos y el nudo de sus piernas.

Window on World History
Once there was a time that was the first time, and that when the human being rose up and his four feet became two arms and two legs, and thanks to the legs the arms were free and could build better houses than treetops or occasional caves. And having stood up, women and men discovered that they could make love face to face and mouth to mouth, and they learned the joy of looking into each other's eyes during the embrace of their arms and the knotting of their legs.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if history is filled with wondrous stories like this?

What Mother told me once

I lost my father when I was just two.
My mother, for my sake, chose not to wed again.
She'd grow mulberry trees,
raise silkworms, and weave cloth -
she reared me till I was grown up.
After some twenty years I still recall
that day when I was five.
It happened I told her a lie -
next day I feared she'd spank me.
But no, she just looked sad.
She hugged me, kissed me on the head:
"My son, before he closed his eyes,
your father said that all through life
you should remain sincere and true."
"Mother, what does it mean,
to be sincere and true?"
My mother kissed me on the eyes:
"My son, a man sincere and true
will laugh when, glad, he wants to laugh
will cry when, sad, he wants to cry.
If you love someone, say you love.
If you hate someone, say you hate.
Someone may not entice you with sweet words -
still, dont say hate when you feel love.
Someone may grab a knife and threaten you -
still, dont say love when you feel hate."

Since then, when some adult asked me,
"My boy, whom do you love the best?"
remembering what my mother told me once,
I would reply:
"I love best one who's true, sincere."
The person stared at me in disbelief
thinking, "He's just a parrot, that young boy."
But no, for what my mother told me once
impressed itself upon my brain, my mind
as if on some immaculate, virgin sheet
were drawn a crimson, bright red line.

Now I am twenty-five -
the orphan has become a writer since.
But what my mother told me once,
when i was five,
remains intact - a crimson, bright red line.
What at the circus tightrope walkers do
is quite a feat.
Yet harder is what writers do
who'll walk the path of truth through life.
If you love someone, say you love.
If you hate someone, say you hate.
Someone may not entice you with sweet words -
still, dont say hate when you feel love.
Someone may grab a knife and threaten you -
still, dont say love when you feel hate.

A writer, I shall write the truth
and speak the truth throughout my life.
No sugar and no honey of success
can bribe my tongue.
Thunder that crashes overhead
cant strike me down.
And if they grab my paper, seize my pen,
I'll take a knife and write on stone.

(1956)

Links

Hey guys, just posted some of our fave links... how do you like 'em? anything interesting u'd recommend to add?

i think i found this on wikipedia or somewhere:

bok: language of Star Trek spin-off creatures called the "Taelons." (Several web sites, none of his creation, are already devoted to the language, which, among other things, has no past or future tense, but relies entirely on moods of hope and nostalgia to express these specificities.)

i never much like star trek, but imagine how we would think if we used this language

hmmm

just came across this... does it anger you? a misreading of said? other comments?

"...Even in instances (such as Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized) when it has traced certain self-contradictions said to inhabit the imperialist mentality, writing under the postcolonialist dispensation has taken as its first commandment the premise of the monolithic, always self-consistent nature of imperialism. All the mechanisms of imperialist society, political, cultural, psychological, work in concert to reinforce and to rationalize domination: such is the assumption guiding this scholarly field. To inhabit imperialist society is virtually by definition to be blind to the cruel reality of imperial domination. That an imperialistic society could experience serious ideological instability—that its inner contradictions could be visible to itself and could interfere for that reason with its flow of business; that public media could be channels for resistance to the imperial enterprise—is not a possibility that postcolonial analysis in its usual forms is equipped to entertain.

Nor could this school of scholarly analysis ascribe any other character to any case of imperial dominion than that of malignancy. Imperialism and colonialism are always, in their every aspect, violent usurpation and enslavement, and are always, one again wants to say by definition, devoid of redeeming features other than their faculty of arousing emancipatory resistance to their own power. The benevolent humanitarian intentions expressed by many Victorian apologists... can only be taken in the postcolonialist perspective to exemplify colonialist bad faith in its pure form, to be nothing but the alibis and instruments of what Said identifies as the “Western... will to govern over the Orient” (95).

The twofold axiom on which this line of scholarly practice rests is that the will to domination is primordial and unchanging in the Western outlook and that imperialism and racism are one and the same thing. Thus Said, though he bitterly indicts that mode of ideologically saturated learning called “Orientalism” for its impulse to “strip humanity down to . . . ruthless cultural and racial essences” (36), bases his own compelling study of this impulse upon the dictum that “a white middle-class Westerner believes it his human prerogative not only to manage the nonwhite world but also to own it, just because by definition ‘it’ is not quite as human as ‘we’ are” (108). This dogmatic premise, which takes as its implicit corollary the dehumanization of the white Westerner himself and for which so much confirmatory evidence may be cited, has given rise to volumes of enlightening and indeed indispensable scholarly research since Orientalism appeared in 1979. If one somehow did not know it before, one certainly knows by now, and for good, that no serious study of imperialism is possible that does not proceed by way of implacably skeptical analysis of imperialists’ professions of high-mindedness and altruism. As the quid pro quo of its invaluable revelations, however, postcolonial critique must at every moment skirt the danger of becoming doctrinaire and absolutistic, and of falling as a result into a compromised condition in which all its findings may come to seem subject to a law of steeply diminishing intellectual returns. Those who value its insights should be, I have come to believe, its most severe critics."

Another gem from The Journey to the West

Next morning he began to learn from his schoolmates the arts of language and etiquette.He discussed with them the scriptures and the doctrines: he practiced calligraphy and burned incense. Such was his daily routine. In more leisurely moments he would be sweeping the grounds or hoeing the garden, planting flowers or pruning trees, gathering firewood or lighting fires, fetching water or carrying drinks. He did not lack for whatever he needed, and thus he lived in the cave without realizing that six or seven years had slipped by.

What a nice description of grad school....:-)

Hermeneutics in Journey to the West

Andy, you'll love this :D:

When the Patriarch heard this, he uttered a cry and jumped down from the high platform. He pointed the ruler he held in his hands at Wu-k'ung and said to him: "What a mischievous monkey you are! You wont learn this and you wont learn that! Just what it is that you are waiting for?" Moving forward, he hit Wu-k'ung three times on the head. Then he folded his arms behind his back and walked inside, closing the main doors behind him and leaving the congregation stranded outside. Those who were listening to the lecture were so terrified that everyone began to berate Wu-k'ung. "You reckless ape!" they cried, "you're utterly without manners! The master was prepared to teach you magic secrets. Why weren't you willing to learn? Why did you have to argue with him instead? Now you have offended him, and who knows when he'll come out again?" At that moment they all resented him and despised and ridiculed him. But Wu-k'ung was not angered in the least and only replied with a broad grin. For the Monkey King, in fact, had already solved secretly, as it were, the riddle in the pot; he therefore did not quarrel with the other people but patiently held his tongue. He reasoned that the master, by hitting him three times, was telling him to prepare himself for the third watch; and by folding his arms behind his back, walking inside, and closing the main doors, was telling him to enter by the back door so that he might receive instruction in secret.

a Tibetan quote

i got this from a pretty bad book about China/Tibet so i dont know how much is lost in translation, but the E version is interesting enough:

If the valley is reached by a high pass, only the best friends, or worst enemies, are visitors.

something from our last class that really stood out for me....

“It seems to me that the best art is political and you ought to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.”
Toni Morrison

...

Without giving you guys the context of how this sentence came up in our chat today, i'm curious about what you think of it :D

You are either the meat or the butcher.

i'll leave the contextualizing part for u ;-)

reading Multitude

ok, having heard high praises of the book from one of our fave gurus, i cant help but feel disappointed while trying to strain my eyes open @midnight now and constantly, albeit halfheartedly (nonbelievingly), keep telling myself "ok, may be sth deep is gonna hit me, sth deep is coming soon"...
It's page 50 and I'm still unhit. The deep remains unfound (or has yet to emerge?). either case, that's when i decided to go to our online adda and rave with you guys a little :-)

Admittedly, I may have judged the book too soon. Very possibly, the limit at p.50 speaks less to its quality and more to my very short span of patience and my high time-consciousness amidst all the homework i have. But also, having read so many fantastic p-c writers for the last few days, i feel sure enough that if the writing is "deep", u'd smell it, feel it, be struck by it, and even laugh or cry with it from the very first pages.

Take Ashis Nandy's article on secularism and tolerance for example: He begins with, "A significant aspect of the post-colonial structures of knowledge in the third world is a peculiar form of imperialism of categories. Under such imperialism, a conceptual domain is sometimes hegemonized by a concept of produced and honed in the West, hegemonized so effectively that the original domain vanishes from our awareness. Intellect and intelligence become IQ, the oral cultures become the cultures of the non-literate or the uneducated, the oppressed become the proletariat, social change becomes development."

See what i mean? :-))) How can you not wanna read on after that?
Whereas with Hardt and Negri, i gotta wade through passage after passage of virtually the same words only ordered slightly differently before sth interesting stands out. War, democracy, war, democracy, "A military and/or police power will be granted legitimacy as long and only as long as it is effective in rectifying global disorders - not necessarily bringing peace but maintaining order" (ahh, interesting!), war, democracy, war, nation, State monopolizes legitimate violence (ah, well put!), war, "traditional" war, new war, etc. To be fair, i think they do try to push us to rethink the most common, basic political concepts in order to build a new conceptual base for new possibilities (of coexisting, of living together, of democracy, of multitude...), but their analysis seems to me somehow still hovering around this space of being critical (being aware of empire and how violent the world is) and yet not quite grounded in understanding just how colonial and violent the world has loong loooooooooooong been. Like when they wrote "one might say that the world hasn't really been "at peace" since early 20th century" and then go on to talk about the periods of non-peace as the two World Wars, just what the fck does their "peace" mean? Sorry about the cursing guys, i do get uncontainably angry when people periodize "history" with perfectly blissful oblivion to colonialism. What does it mean to talk unaffectedly about "peace" when colonizers subjugated, mutilated, ravished, devoured, annihilated colonized bodies during "peace," or as Hardt and Negri put more revealingly, "at peace"? What is this sweetly invented "peace" people talk about today when all those verbs dwell well in present tense, perhaps only a little bit less visibly... uhm... actually, colonial violence has never been visible in the comprehensive peace-and-war chronicles of the colonizers, so "less visibly" is not the word; perhaps "better cloaked" is more apt. What kinda peace people can have - or can even construe - when their fellow beings are constantly fighting against imperialism, constantly at war with colonialism - of the body and of the mind. A very well-constructed peace to congratulate each other on, indeed, in which perhaps their fellow beings are not so much fellows, but more like ________ {you guys fill in the blank ;-)}

dont wanna end here abruptly but i gotta go. shall return soon, esp. since i'm supposed to read Hardt and Negri till p. 120 for next week :D

Yo soy una fiesta

that beautiful quote from Homi Bhabha can be our blog's description :-)

and this is something i recently read from Galeano's Walking Words (Las palabras andantes) and love it:

Ventana sobre el cuerpo
La iglesia dice: El cuerpo es una culpa.
La ciencia dice: El cuerpo es una máquina.
La publicidad dice: El cuerpo es un negocio.
El cuerpo dice: Yo soy una fiesta.

Window on the Body
The church says: The body is a sin.
Science says: The body is a machine.
Advertising says: The body is a business.
The body says: I am a fiesta.

Adda

"To be asked to write a foreword purely out of friendship is to be granted a rare and generous freedom. While the professional critic may squint at the work's brilliance, and the acolyte is often overcome by its aura, the friend approaches the work unburdened by the need to praise or blame. The spirit of friendship lives in the shadows cast by raised banners and gleaming standards, and in the midst of the cut and thrust of argumentation, friendship seeks out the unconditional voice of conversation. For conversation, as you might hear it among the Chatterjees and the Banterjees at a Culcutta adda, chooses to follow the improvisational over the instrumental. Wandering away from the "gravitational pull of any explicit purpose," the conversation transforms what is contingent, turning what comes up in the course of conversation into the sufficient grounds of a common, collaborative dialogue of interests and affiliations..."

-Homi K Bhabha in a forward to Chakrabarty's Habitations of Modernity