Michael Azar: The stranger, the mother and the Algerian revolution -- A postcolonial reading of Albert Camus

The stranger, the mother and the Algerian revolution: A postcolonial reading of Albert Camus
by Michael Azar
Eurozine

The purely existential themes of The Stranger hide Camus' critique of the discriminatory nature of French rule in Algeria. Yet Camus never entirely renounced the civilizing premise of colonialism. The reason lies in his relation to his mother, writes Michael Azar on the fiftieth anniversary of Camus' death.



In The Myth of Sisyphus Albert Camus seeks his own answer to the question that Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche have bequeathed to us: is it possible to live without God, without any hope of salvation as death looms? At first sight the outlook is bleak: we are, says Camus, thrust into existence as into an exile with no return. From the viewpoint of eternity, we are passions that can never be satisfied, cries that go unheard. Human beings and the world do not mix. He sums up man's tragic existence in one word: the absurd. It emerges from the fracture between the soul's desperate desire for clarity and the incomprehensibility of reality, the gap between our craving for meaning and the cold grave that awaits us. Camus understood early on that reason – the traditional weapon of philosophy – would always be powerless to address the futile, ill-fated game of existence.

Even so, the work essentially represents a manifesto for revolt and the ecstasy of life. It is a passionate revolt that answers the question of the meaning of life: if there is any raison d'être worthy of the name, it is born of a piece of trembling flesh. Desire, affection and generosity: these are the bread and wine of the mortal human being. Anyone who does not live to serve an immortal Creator must become a creator himself. The absurd man, as Camus calls his hero, transforms his days into a work of art, a defiant celebration of the battle which, as he knows from the outset, must eventually end in his death. Camus quotes Nietzsche: "It is not a question of eternal life but of being eternally alive."[1] It is the destiny of the absurd man to try to make something out of the nothingness, to grasp his life from death itself. Sisyphus shows us the way: happiness is the leap we make both with and in spite of our burden.

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Rajni Bakshi: A Choice of 9/11s

A choice of 9/11s
by Rajni Bakshi
Open Democracy

Whatever else may be beyond our control, we are all free to choose which 9/11 moves us most deeply.

It may well be the oddest date in history.

However much they dominate our present, the human missiles of 2001 don’t have a unique claim on 9/11.

It was on September 11, 1906, that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi first articulated the concept of ‘satyagraha’, non-violent resistance, at a public meeting in South Africa. His rigorous application of this philosophy over the next 40 years earned Gandhi the title of Mahatma – great soul. It also gave the modern world a powerful new political tool for dealing with conflict and hurt.

It was on September 11, 1893 that an Indian monk, Swami Vivekananda, was overwhelmed by a three minute standing ovation at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago. Reverberations of his appeal for universal brotherhood persist today beside the buzz of protest and counter-protest over Park51.

It was on September 11, 1609 that Henry Hudson became the first European to set foot on an island which natives called ‘Menatay’ – our present day Manhattan. Hudson’s landing, somewhere in the vicinity of today’s Ground Zero, was a precursor to European settlements and mass death of native populations.

A collage of all four 9/11s can potentially serve as a map quest – showing us different pathways to resolving the tussle between co-existence and conflict, faith and reason.

Reflecting on this combination of stories is one possible way of picking our way through the tangled web of complications triggered by the plans for a mosque at 51 Park Place in Lower Manhattan.

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Phoebe Bronstein: Man-Made Martyrs in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction -- Disturbing Manufactured Martyrdom in Paradise Now

Man-made martyrs in the age of mechanical reproduction: disturbing manufactured martyrdom in Paradise Now
by Phoebe Bronstein
Jump Cut



In the span of two days, two lifelong friends, Said (Kais Nashif) and Khaled (Ali Suliman), make the transition from car mechanics to suicide bombers. Their mission requires them to move undetected across the Israeli-Palestinian border and detonate two bombs in sequence in the city of Tel Aviv. Paradise Now (2005), written and directed by Palestinian-born Dutch director Hany Abu Assad, is set and shot on location in Nablus, a portion of the West Bank under Palestinian control. In combining fictional and documentary elements Abu Assad takes a cue from Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1967 film Battle of Algiers; and in a nod to Pontecorvo, Khaled even quotes a line from the paradigmatic film of the Third Cinema: “If we had airplanes, we wouldn’t need martyrs” (Rich).[1] [open endnotes in new window]

As a young Jewish woman, with a particularly religious extended family, I must first admit that I had my reservations about seeing (and later about writing on) a movie about Palestinian suicide bombers. I saw the film for the first time in 2005 in a New York art house theater. The movie had yet to gain ground in the United States and many people, myself included, knew little about it, save that it was a political thriller dealing with a hot-button issue. However, what is remarkable about this film, in a year when Stephen Spielberg’s film Munich (2005) premiered, is that Abu Assad refuses to engage in the melodramatic discourse that too often defines Israeli-Palestinian relations from the rhetoric of political news coverage to dinner-table conversations. According to Abu Assad this discourse often figures suicide bombers as either heroes and martyrs or villains and criminals. Instead, in Paradise Now Abu Assad works against these prevailing notions by revealing the construction and production of martyrdom. In this way, he calls attention to the incorporation of individual identities — that are neither good nor evil — into the collective identity of the Palestinian Resistance.[2] Abu Assad insists on a heterogeneous collective identity, all under the auspices of Palestine, which defies and subverts the dominant hegemonic ideologies that consistently stereotype and do violence to Palestinian identity.[3]

The Palestinian Resistance in the film both relies on the individual identity of its martyrs and on the construction of what Faisal Devji refers to as the “forging of the generic or universal Muslim,” a process both compelled and constructed by the media. By showcasing the production of the two men as martyrs instead of focusing on the violent back and forth of Israeli-Palestinian relations, Paradise Now presents an image of the Palestinian Resistance that subverts both the Resistance’s self-representation and Western media’s representation of it. By representing these tensions and suggesting a larger system outside of this violent back and forth of colonial/anti-colonial aggression, Abu Assad insists on a dialectical mode of thinking about, and a new image of, the Palestinian Resistance.[4] In this way, the film does not function to condemn the men, the Palestinian Resistance, or even Israel, but instead it condemns this cyclical system of violence perpetuated by both sides, the destruction reaped on the individual by the infrastructure of colonial and anti-colonial aggression, and the mediascape that compels and compounds that violence.

(Un)Spectacular violence: contextualizing the media, martyrdom, and Paradise Now

Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, pioneers of Third Cinema, argue in “Towards A Third Cinema” that systems of mass communication are akin to napalm, or in the 21st century perhaps weapons of mass destruction. Today, more than ever, these systems are all pervasive — from the Internet to television to Hollywood films — and so whoever controls and knows how to manipulate those channels holds incredible, potentially deadly power. However, Faisal Devji suggests in Landscapes of the Jihad that suicide martyrdom, particularly in the Islamic world, is a phenomenon compelled and constructed by the mass media, and so it makes use of those very same channels of mass dissemination through which oppression functions.[5] This phenomenon is alluded to in Paradise Now in the Resistance’s shooting of martyr videos and again when Said and Suha, his female friend and potential romantic interest, come across videos about both collaborators and martyrs for sale. By making use of the same channels of dissemination, the Palestinian Resistance remains locked in a violent conversation with the Western mass media in a type of colonial/anti-colonial struggle, where both sides produce and thrive on images of violence. This mediascape, which is reiterated time and again in political thrillers like Stephen Spielberg’s Munich or Peter Berg’s The Kingdom (2007), engages us emotionally rather than intellectually and discourages us as viewers from engaging critically with the films or issues represented, and so such media representations reiterate the “prevailing ideologies of society” (Hill 115).[6]

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Sam Aranke: Anti-Authoritarians and Decolonizing the Everyday

Anti-Authoritarians and Decolonizing the Everyday
by Sam Aranke
Friendly Fire Collective

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It was both the economic and the cultural that determined the colonial project. Colonialism refers to a historical moment where the “Oriental-European relationship was determined by an unstoppable European expansion in search of markets, resources, and colonies, and finally because Orientalism had accomplished its self-metamorphosis from a scholarly discourse to an imperial institution” . The cultural products that came out of this time crystallized into forms of knowledge that we rely on today—we can only think of the books we are required to read in school like Jane Eyre, the historical figures we are required to know like Christopher Columbus, or the references we have imbedded in our too-common cultural history (“the sun never sets on the British Empire”). This is the living residue of a colonial past that seems so far removed from our everyday experiences; but in reality, we are surrounded by these cultural legacies.

Thinking in terms of the postcolonial allows us to think through “difference” in a more productive way. Postcolonial scholarship often details the complexities of difference. Often this type of scholarship details the histories that we wish to ignore: from the complicated collaboration between native elite and colonial magistrates to the conflicted desire of many colonized subjects to imitate those that oppressed them. Or, (dare I say it), they even criticize Third World Liberation movements and figures, many of whom we often romanticize within our own movements. We can only think of Frantz Fanon in his early writings during decolonization in French-controlled Algeria or the more contemporary work of the Subaltern Studies Collective around British Colonialism in India. They demand that we critically negotiate between the history of the past and the history of the present. They ask for a more critical engagement with history—one that complicates our desires to simplify the totality of history in order to look at difference within our communities in a more generative way.

This is where anti-authoritarians come in. A struggle against hierarchy and capitalism is a struggle that accounts for these colonial legacies within our current postcolonial moment. In order to really dismantle the role of authority in our society, we have to look both internally, within ourselves, and externally, within our communities. “Difference” within our communities becomes more generative and nuanced, it is not a simple glossing of race, gender, sexuality, etc. Here, I mean that the way we even talk about difference within our political work needs to do two difficult tasks at once: 1) deconstruct the ways in which these differences are stabilized and 2) creating accountability within our communities in order to ensure a space where anti-authoritarianism is even possible. It requires talking about difference differently. This means transparently talking about and maintaining the complexities of difference as a social construction. In many ways, this means giving up the comfort of silence. Sometimes, this also means giving up the comfort of difference in order to destabilize its power and give evidence of its colonial origins. If we start to think of our work as decolonizing the everyday, then we can begin to think about how we are all subject to the overwhelming presence of colonial and neocolonial domination.

A thoughtful engagement with postcolonial theory could potentially give us a more complicated framework to address anti-authoritarianism. By complicated, I don’t want to suggest that things aren’t confusing and complex already. We are bombarded daily with the complexities of the current global order and the positions that it forces us into. I just believe that framing our analysis within the narrative of “decolonizing the everyday” opens up an entire set of possibilities. This type of framing forces us to deal with the contradictions, complexities, and difficulties of our various desires, interests, and identities as anti authoritarians. These are questions we grapple with everyday.

What would antiwar organizing look like if it started talking about the Military Industrial Complex’s infiltration of our minds and bodies as well as its global violations around the world? What if we started to realize that the war is already home and has been vis-à-vis patriarchy, racism, and homophobia? Or, what if we connected these various sites of war through the framework of the everyday colonial encounters that the current dominant system forces us to swallow, internalize, and re-enact? An active anti-authoritarianism confronts these internal forces of colonization and actively connects their origins with the presence of external colonial forces. If we work to break down these hierarchies within our minds, bodies, and communities than we will be sure to decolonize our lives. It is the living presence of various colonial histories that attempts to repress this vision. Thinking in terms of postcoloniality allows us to work with our complexities in a constructive way. Decolonizing our lives is working towards an active vision for a new world.

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Africa Today: Piero Gleijeses author of Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington and Africa 1959-1976

Africa Today (KPFA: Berkeley)

Piero Gleijeses author of "Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington and Africa 1959-1976" is interviewed on Cuba's policies with the African continent.

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Democracy Now: “Haiti: Killing the Dream”: Excerpt of Documentary on Centuries of Western Subversion of Haitian Sovereignty

“Haiti: Killing the Dream”: Excerpt of Documentary on Centuries of Western Subversion of Haitian Sovereignty
Democracy Now



To put the history of Haiti in context, we turn to the 1992 documentary Haiti: Killing the Dream produced by Hart and Dana Perry of Crowing Rooster Productions and narrated by Ossie Davis. In this excerpt, the film looks at the nearly twenty-year occupation of Haiti by US Marines beginning in 1915.

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Andrew N. Flood: Haiti - a history of intervention, occupation and resistance

Haiti - a history of intervention, occupation and resistance
by Andrew N. Flood
Anarchist Writers

As predictions for the death toll from the Haitian earthquakes rise over 200,000, ABC News have reported that planes carrying medical equipment and relief supplies are having to compete with soldiers for the valuable slots at Port-au-Prince airport which was taken over by the US military after the quake. Since the start of the great anti-slavery republican insurrection nearly 220 years ago, Haiti has been presented as a dangerous place incapable of running its own affairs and requiring foreign intervention. Yet the reality is its people were the first enslaved population to deliver themselves from slavery and also carried out what was only the third successful republican insurrection on the planet. The threat of this good example was rewarded with centuries of invasion, blackmail, the robbery of Haiti's natural resources and the impoverishment of its people. This articles summarizes that history of intervention and the resistance to it in order to put into context what is happening in Haiti after the quake.

This is not an academic exercise. The propaganda methods that were used during the Haitian revolution to frighten off support for the rebels from radical organisations elsewhere - like the London Corresponding Society - continue to be used to the present day. Right after the earthquake, Time Magazine was writing, "As Haitian and international officials try to coordinate an effective relief response to what is probably the worst disaster to ever hit the western hemisphere's poorest country, they'll need to be mindful of the human rats that come out of the capital's woodwork at times like these", under the scary headline 'Will Criminal Gangs Take Control in Haiti's Chaos?' Yet aid workers on the ground, in contrast, were reporting the stoicism and solidarity of the people in desperate conditions and even the UN Commander said the streets were safer than before the quake. An Irish doctor from Médecins Sans Frontières confirmed on radio that they were working in Cité Soleil were operating unguarded and unhampered inspite of the areas reputation. This idea of Haiti as riddled with (poor, black) terror gangs waiting to pounce on naive (white) visitors goes back to the rebellion and, in the context of the earthquake, is resulting in additional deaths, as has been made clear by a London Times' article titled 'Fear of the poor is hampering Haiti rescue.'

Conquest, slavery and resistance

Foreign intervention goes back to the time before the Haitian revolution. Haiti is the western 1/3 of an island which Columbus came across on his first voyage to the Americas and claimed for Spain, ignoring the fact it was already populated by an estimated 4-500,000 Taino people. He called the island Hispaniola, the people who lived there called it Haiti - the name that was restored when the republic was declared. Columbus had heard there was a lot of gold on the island so he left 39 of his crew there who built a fort with Taino help called La Navidad, the crew were ordered to explore the island and gather gold. He recorded that "I have ordered a tower and fortress to be constructed and, a large cellar, not because I believe there is any necessity on account of [the natives] .. I am certain the people I have with me could subjugate all this island … as the population are naked and without arms and very cowardly." However, when he returned the following year on his second voyage he discovered the fortress destroyed with the corpses of his men on the beach as the Taino population had risen up against them in response to mistreatment, which included the kidnapping of Taino women.

His second voyage included 17 ships and 1200 settlers and with this force Columbus demanded that every Taino over the age of 14 deliver a hawks bell full of gold every three months. If they failed to do so they had their hands cut off and were left to bleed to death. On or before 1511 a Taino Cacique (chief) called Hatuey left Hispaniola for Cuba with 400 others in canoes to warn the people that a Spanish expedition was under way to conquer them. Bartolomé de Las Casas the radical Spanish priest who had previously been a plantation owner in Hispaniola wrote that Hatuey showed them a basket of gold and jewels and told them "Here is the God the Spaniards worship. For these they fight and kill; for these they persecute us and that is why we have to throw them into the sea... They tell us, these tyrants, that they adore a God of peace and equality, and yet they usurp our land and make us their slaves. They speak to us of an immortal soul and of their eternal rewards and punishments, and yet they rob our belongings, seduce our women, violate our daughters." Hautey bust in CubaHatuey conducted a guerrilla war against the Spaniards before being captured and burned alive on February 2 1512. In 1522 another Taino Cacique led a revolt of as many as 3000 in the Bahoruco mountains on Hispaniola itself which forced a treaty from the Spaniards.

Within 30 years so many (up to 90%) of the Taino had been worked to death in the gold mines or died of starvation or disease that the Spanish started transporting enslaved Africans to replace them. This was the pattern across the Spanish-occupied Caribbean; according to Bartolomé de Las Casas "it was a general rule among Spaniards to be cruel, not just cruel, but extraordinarily cruel so that harsh and bitter treatment would prevent Indians from daring to think of themselves as human beings. As they saw themselves each day perishing by the cruel and inhuman treatment of the Spaniards, crushed to the earth by the horses, cut in pieces by swords, eaten and torn by dogs, many buried alive and suffering all kinds of exquisite tortures." The Tainos however were never completely wiped out, a couple of hundred survivors set up free settlements with escaped Africans in the mountains. The first significant insurrection of enslaved African also occurred in 1522 when Wolof people on the sugar plantation of Columbus's son rose with many escaping to the mountains after the rebellion. These 'Maroon' communities continued to resist the Spanish, by the 1530s Plantation owners had to travel in large armed groups. They referred to the communities as Cimarrones or 'wild animals', a striking similarity to Time Magazine's use of the term "human rats" for Haitians today.

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Katy Bolger: Fallout -- Cold War-era uranium mining leaves a poisoned legacy for the Navajo

FALLOUT
by Katy Bolger
Brooklyn Rail

Cold War-era uranium mining leaves a poisoned legacy for the Navajo

On the side of Gray Mountain in northeast Arizona, Lorraine Curley lives alone in a two-room concrete home. Her roof is tarpaper and tin, and her bathroom is a wooden outhouse 50 feet from her door. Living without electricity or water is a way of life for Curley; she has, after all, been restricted by the Bennett Freeze, a law enacted in 1966 that prevented 18,000 reservation residents from repairing their homes, or building new ones, until the freeze was lifted in May 2009.

Curley would like a new home, and she’s not picky: It doesn’t need to have electricity or running water—a floor and insulation would be nice.

“Maybe I’ll never see a home,” she said.

And at 79 years old, Curley is running out of time.

Curley is Diné, or Navajo, and like more than 180,000 others in her tribe, she lives on the reservation known as Navajo Nation, which spans a sprawling 27,000 miles stretched across Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. The land is also rich in highly sought-after natural resources, like coal and uranium, which has proven to be both a blessing and a curse. With its vast and breathtaking sandstone vistas and scrubby desert floor, the territory includes some of the prettiest land in America, but its people, scattered throughout, are some of the country’s most desperately underserved.

Because of its sovereign status, Indian territory is not regulated by federal environmental standards. In addition to oil and natural-gas drilling, the Nation was subjected to uranium mining from 1944 through 1986, when almost four tons of uranium ore was extracted for use in the arsenal build-up of the Cold War. It was mined without regard to the safety of the miners, the nearby residents, or even the mineral-rich land itself, resulting in the inevitable pollution of the air and water. As a consequence, the land they treasure so deeply has turned against the Navajo people, many of whom have developed severe health problems from drinking contaminated water and breathing contaminated air.

And then there’s the coal.

Since the mid-20th century, coal has been the primary source of energy for electricity-generating power plants around the world. Regardless of how it is measured, coal mining, and the process of converting coal into electricity, has proved to have a devastating environmental impact. Coal mining pollutes land and seeps into groundwater, while emissions from burning coal have been cited as one of the main sources of global warming. Currently, there are five coal mines on Navajo land, and two companies are fighting to open up two more—Black Mesa (which was closed in 2005) and Desert Rock.

Sithe Global, the multinational corporation looking to open Desert Rock, says the Navajo stand to make $52 million a year from the power plant, in addition to the income from new jobs. But in reality, with more than 90,000 people unemployed and thousands more underemployed, the Desert Rock plant will barely make a dent, offering jobs to just 300 workers. And although it is promoted as “clean coal,” a report by the Sierra Club estimates the emissions will poison the air, soil, and water forever with toxic chemicals including carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and solid waste containing cadmium, selenium, arsenic, and lead.

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With its wealth of natural resources, it would be easy to imagine the people of Navajo Nation are wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. But the tragic irony is that many are excruciatingly poor, having derived no profit, in personal terms, from any of the bounty of their land. There is a common misconception that the Navajo actually own the land on which they live, but in fact they don’t, which means they have no control, ultimately, over how it is managed, even though they have lived here for generations. Rather, it is held in trust by the U.S. government (or “in reserve,” thus the term “reservation”).

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That arrangement has kept the Navajo people in a form of patriarchal colonialism since 1868, when the first treaty was signed. Unable to manage the land themselves, they were at the mercy of the U.S. government and its agreements with industry.

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