Month: July 2002

“Some Arab poets are more popular than Adonis– Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet, for instance — but none are more admired. A pioneer of the prose poem, he has played a role in Arab modernism comparable to T. S. Eliot’s in English-language poetry. The literary and cultural critic Edward Said calls him “today’s most daring and provocative Arab poet.” The poet Samuel Hazo, who translated Adonis’s collection “The Pages of Day and Night,” said, “There is Arabic poetry before Adonis, and there is Arabic poetry after Adonis.”
Experimental in style and prophetic in tone, Adonis’s poetry combines the formal innovations of modernism with the mystical imagery of classical Arabic poetry. He has evoked the anguish of exile, the spiritual desolation of the Arab world, the intoxicating experiences of madness and erotic bliss, the existential dance of self and the other. But what defines his work, above all, is the force of creative destruction, which burns through everything he writes. “We will die if we do not create gods/We will die if we do not kill them,” he once wrote, echoing his favorite poet, Nietzsche.”

I remember how everyone in our Arabic class used to light up whenever we got to read an Adonis poem.  But since this is a <i>New York Times</i> piece, there is of course discussion of repression, fixed elections, fundamentalism (all of which are themes the newspaper is incapable of not bringing up when talking about the Arab world, regardless of the topic) and an insistence that Adonis’s secular views are “unpopular,” which seems to contradict everything else they say about him.
An Arab poet who dares to differ. (Site requires registration.)

Smile. The postman is watching you.

“The Justice Department is not saying much about the Terrorism Information and Prevention System — otherwise known as Operation TIPS — which is due to begin as a pilot program later this summer. Apparently the only public information about the program, in fact, is on a government Web site, which describes it as “a nationwide program giving millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others a formal way to report suspicious terrorist activity.” Operation TIPS will, in the pilot stage, involve a million workers, who, “in the daily course of their work, are in a unique position to serve as extra eyes and ears for law enforcement.” It will offer them “training . . . in how to look out for suspicious and potentially terrorist-related activity.” It will also provide “a formal way to report” that activity “through a single and coordinated toll-free number.” This description, which is essentially all we know about the program, poses more questions than it answers.”

What is Operation TIPS? from the Washington Post site.

Basically, 1 in 24 Americans could be used as “citizen-informants.” McCarthy would be proud.

Don’t mess with Nigerian women.
“The unarmed women holding 700 ChevronTexaco workers in a southeast Nigeria oil terminal agreed Monday to end their siege after the company offered to hire at least 25 villagers and to build schools and electrical and water systems. The women, some with babies tied to their backs, broke out into singing and dancing on the docks at the Escravos facility on learning of the agreement . But they said they would wait until the verbal agreement was put in writing and signed before leaving the Escravos facility.”
It’s strange to read about these oil companies’ involvement in places like Nigeria, where they have essentially replaced governments as colonial powers. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Amanda Ngozi Adichie of Nigeria, Florent Couoa-Zotti of Benin, Allan Kolski Horwitz of South Africa, Rory Kilalea of Zimbabwe, and Binyanvanga Wainaina of Kenya are finalists for the Caine Prize. I mention this prize because the chair of the jury is Ahdaf Soueif, whom I’m absolutely obsessed with, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, but that perhaps have to do with the fact that she wrote In the Eye of the Sun.

Anyway, here is the BBC article, via Moby Lives.

Update on July 16: Binyanvanga Wainaina won the Caine Prize. Congratulations to him.

In a potent sign of the proportions of the AIDS epidemic in Africa, the South African version of Sesame Street will introduce an HIV-positive muppet next fall:
“”Takalani Sesame” in South Africa is one of several locally produced versions of the children’s program. Egypt, Russia, Germany, Mexico and Spain, among other countries, all have shows modeled after the American “Sesame Street” that premiered in 1969. The South African show uses Muppets similar to the American characters of Big Bird, Elmo and the Cookie Monster. The South African Cookie Monster, for example, is called Zikwe. Sesame Workshop hasn’t revealed the new, HIV-positive character’s name, but it will be a girl Muppet who is an orphan, said Robert Knezevic, head of the company’s international division. In one script being developed, the character is sad because she misses her mother, he said. In another, the character is shunned by children who don’t want to play with her because she is HIV-positive, but the other Muppets rally around her.”
HIV-Positive Muppet on Sesame Street

Handy dandy list of civil liberties that have been lost since 9/11, from the Utne Reader.