New
Internationalist 379
June
2005
New
Internationalist 379June
2005
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100
Myths About the Middle East The premise of his latest book is brilliantly simple. Halliday takes 100 statements about the Middle East that ‘ everybody knows’ and then proceeds thoroughly to debunk the myths. The author tackles ‘facts’ such as the notion that the politics of the Middle East are governed by a set of rules peculiar to the region; that the Arabs are a ‘desert people’; and that the conflicts of the region are a continuation of a millennia-old struggle over ‘ holy land’. Halliday draws on an extensive array of source material as well as his own experience of the area in his quest to clarify and illuminate the truth. Covering cultural, social and historical fields, he inquires into the Iran-Iraq War, the US-led Gulf invasions, the Israel-Palestine conflict and much else. As an invaluable afterword Halliday compiles what he calls ‘A Glossary of Crisis: September 11, 2001 and its Linguistic Aftermath’. In this, he gives definitions – always insightful and often wryly humourous – of the terms that have come to dominate the global political debate in the last few years. For example, he defines ‘Assertive Multilateralism’ as ‘Neoconservative term for unilateralism’. Halliday wears his erudition lightly and writes in a splendidly direct manner, making 100 Myths About the Middle East an excellent antidote to the special interests and special pleading that constitute much of the discussion of the region. Rating
Comrades and Strangers: This book sets out with the admirable aim of demystifying the closed society of North Korea. The world should know more about this paranoid and isolated vestige of communism, if only because of its huge standing army and its nuclear weapons programme. Michael Harrold, as the first Briton to live and work in the country, would seem the ideal person to lift the veil of secrecy. In 1986, in response to a job advertisement, he travelled to Pyongyang and began work as an English language advisor on translations of the works of Kim Il Sung and his son, Kim Jong Il. It is sometimes difficult to see what attracted Harrold to North Korea; he admits he took the job on a whim, knowing little of the peninsula’s history or culture. It is even harder to see why (apart from inertia and a certain fondness for the Korean people) he stayed for seven years. His book is a wearying litany of stultifying days arguing over abstruse grammar in the Great Leader’s speeches and nights spent drinking and smoking in the hotel bars. The book is overlong and Harrold is exasperatingly coy about an (imagined?) love affair with a Korean girl. It comes as a relief when the author is unceremoniously thrown out of the country following a squalid, drunken fight in the street. All those years of translating turgid official prose has done nothing for Harrold’s own style, which is flat and humourless. Comrades and Strangers is a muddle and a missed opportunity to do justice to an important and timely topic. RATING
The Gruesome
Acts of Capitalism
As the basis for a quiz game or a source to settle serious arguments, this random collection serves as slightly perverse entertainment. It is proof that flaunting capitalism’s worst excesses can be fun. RATING
Palindromes
Aviva is 12 and wants a baby – someone who’ll always love her. She has sex with the son of family friends and becomes pregnant. At her mom’s insistence she has an abortion and soon after runs away. She turns up at the home of Mama and Papa Sunshine, fundamentalist Christians with a huge adopted family of unwanted and disabled children. Aviva finds love. Director Solondz’s earlier films Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness are funny, hardhitting satires on Middle America. Palindromes is a simpler, bleaker story, and perplexing – Solondz casts eight different children and adults as Aviva. Although tricksy, even weird, it works – the different actors reflect changes in Aviva. Abandoned after a sexual encounter, gawky white teenager Aviva becomes an adult African American woman – she’s older, wiser, more mature. In the final scene, a lonely nerdy character, who looks remarkably like Solondz, lectures Aviva that people are programmed by genes and chance and they don’t change. The film’s title suggests this – a palindrome reads the same when read normally or backwards, like ‘Aviva’. So is Solondz saying people are the same however we look at them, that fundamentally they don’t change? Aviva certainly ends up where she started, living at home with her comfortable, status-conscious family – and seeing the boy who made her pregnant. He now calls himself Otto – another palindrome. Yet Solondz casts 30-something Jennifer Jason Leigh, who’s been round the block a few times, as the final Aviva. Leigh’s presence suggests she’s bigger than suburban consumerism or desperate Christianity. Palindromes doesn’t offer Aviva much of a choice, but it’s grimly entertaining, intriguing, and challenging. RATING
Machuca In Santiago, Chile, 1973, during the Allende Government, an élite fee-paying secondary school, run by priests, offers free education to boys from a nearby shanty town. The priests’ initiative, opposed by many parents, brings together very different worlds. Gonzalo Infante’s parents are wealthy. At home he has his own room, full of books and toys, and a bicycle. Pedro Machuca lives with his indigenous Indian family in a single-room shack – he has only the clothes he stands up in. When Pedro is bullied, Gonzalo stands up for him and they become friends – until the coup when soldiers demolish Pedro’s squatter camp. Gripping, beautifully acted by non-professionals, Machuca is an original, illuminating perspective on social divisions in the Majority World. RATING
As an androgynous performance artist who sprang out of New York’s club scene, Antony (he lost the surname a long time ago) may seem an unlikely pretender to the tones of Nina Simone, but with I Am A Bird Now, the British-born singer is making an excellent go of it. With the Johnsons, an expandable group who take their name from Marsha P Johnson, the drag-queen and gay-rights legend, Antony has honed the music right down. If his untitled début 1998 album tended towards the florid, then Bird is poised and elegant. Antony’s subject matter – gender, loss, family – remains the same, but this time there’s a resilience and strength in his material that defines the true torch song. This is a rich album. Antony’s voice waivers between a Simone contralto and a fluting Jimmy Scott falsetto, but it also has its own hue. He gets to duet with his hero, Boy George, on the sumptuous ‘You Are My Sister’. Elsewhere, Rufus Wainwright, Lou Reed and new folkie Devandra Banhardt make sizeable contributions. The unusual is never distant on I Am A Bird Now, and it doesn’t come much closer than with an intriguing little spiritual, introduced with some Morse Code bleeps, titled ‘Free at Last’. The voice, if not the bleeps, belong to one Dr Julia Yasuda, who, if the press is to believed, is a female-identifying hermaphrodite mathematician from Japan. And why not? With songs like ‘Bird Gerhl’ or ‘Today I Am A Boy’, this album’s about transcendence and the Johnsons, whose orchestrations take their cue from an unadorned hymnal quality – reinforce this message. RATING
Naked
Nakedness, for dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah, is something akin to a state of absolute truth. ‘Dis is me, revolting in front of you / I’m not much but I give a damn,’ he chants on the epic poem that gives this album, the first one to move away from his habitual reggae backbeats, its title. To this end, Zephaniah has assembled a formidable array of musical collaborators to put their own rhythms to his words. Any album that brings together tabla player Aref Durvesh, Rick Smith, from the Underworld dance duo, and the great reggae bass player Dennis Bovell, deserves consideration, especially when it’s been knitted together by drummer and programmer Trevor Morais. The result is an album where words and music assume a perfect fit: ‘Naked’ is all electro, scattering beats; ‘Uptown Downtown’ is powered by a well-aimed staccato rhythm; while (for perversity’s sake) ‘Slowmotion’ has an intense, trancey feel – maybe its own plea that we take life at a different pace. Zephaniah’s words are no less hard hitting. Well known for his promotion of justice and tolerance, he unleashes a righteous anger in ‘Rong Radio’ which attacks media disinformation and its ultimate inhumanity. But he’s too smart to be seduced by the eternal rebel pose. Nowhere is this more apparent than on ‘Responsible’, a poem that tackles sexism, black history and gangster attitudes head on. And for those who need some help getting the message? Naked comes with 36 pages of lyrics, all illustrated by Banksy’s witty and subversive street art. RATING
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| © Copyright 2005 New Internationalist Publications Ltd. All rights reserved. |
Fred Halliday
has been a respected commentator on the Middle East for decades; his
Arabia Without Sultans remains deservedly a classic and recently he
has written perceptively about the 9/11 bombings in Two Hours That
Shook the World.
A package
of hard numbers encased in simple statements is all it takes in David
Lester’s The Gruesome Acts of Capitalism to make a powerful agit-prop
tool out of a small book. Like an unrelenting Michael Moore in print,
the type is crudely designed to make the numbers jump out. Readers
may end up seething at the corporations and sickened by celebrity-economics
after grazing this
little book. It’s not that easy to feel indifferent to the fact that the US has
bombed 22 countries since 1945, even if it wasn’t a country you were living in;
or that there are 500,000 slaves in Bangladesh. And it is even harder to stomach
the nasty facts of life close to home. For example, the average British wedding
in 2003 cost $96 per minute; 1.2 million women and girls under 18 are trafficked
each year, and that, while life expectancy in Britain rose from 71 to 78 years
in the last three decades, in Zimbabwe it dropped from 56 to 31 years. Whether
it is billions spent on birthdays, weddings and bombs, or lives lost to poverty,
poor medical care and low education scores, these are the statistics of a world
where equality has been forgotten in the celebration of excess. The sources of
these nuggets are mostly official and mainstream: they include the United Nations,
the
World Health Organization and the Worldwatch Institute.
I
Am A Bird Now
