immigration test

Federal immigration authorities redesigned the 100-question test that's a part of the process of becoming a naturalized American citizen. Granted it's been a few years since I've gotten reacquainted with our dear old Constitution, but I think my chances of naturalizing today would be slim! Test yourself:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/Ten_Questions.pdf

time to start freaking out

The Center for Global Development has issued an extensive body of research on the effects of global warming on agricultural productivity. Long-term effects are scary. Developing countries, especially those around the equator where temperatures have already reached or surpassed the threshold for crop tolerance, face sad consequences. India's productivity may drop 30-40% by 2080, Sudan 56%, Senegal 52%. Southern areas of China and the US may see a reduction in yields of about 25-35%. (the full report can be found at: http://www.cgdev.org/content/publications/detail/14425).

We get a little programmed to disregard the troubling but pretty mundane forecasts like "increasing draught and heat waves," (it's like most statistics, they just fail to carry much of a punch). But late summer at sea level between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, without AC ... it's a ugly prospect. (That's most of Central and South America, Africa, India, and Southeast Asia, hot tamales!)

Photo Griots

"In January 2005, the Visual Griots inaugural workshop engaged 22 dynamic sixth graders from Mali in an exploration of the powerful “voice” of photography. An expert team of Malian and U.S. photographers guided the students through camera basics to use their new-found skill to honor the people and traditions of their village. Students took ownership of the project and created a body of work that demystifies the African village and brings forth the important elements of their lives."

The following link is a slideshow of work by Malian youth participating in the Academy for Educational Development program; wow!! really beautiful vision and quality:
http://www.aed.org/visualgriots/exhibit/index.htm

Au Senegal! How little credit we give to memory of the senses. Our sense of smell is, supposedly, that most strongly connected to memory - how true this is. I had forgotten the faint smells escaping the women’s kitchens and the incense that wafts from their bedrooms, the dusty, wooly goats, the way the breeze off the ocean is clogged with diesel fumes, and after the rains, the wet earth smell mixes with whatever else mingles in the sandy roads. It would be a lie to say I didn’t panic, somewhere between Madrid and Dakar, surrounded by so many incomprehensible tongues, and it was the first time I asked myself, what am I doing??? (I saw the magnificent Sahara from the sky for the first time! It looks not like sand, but like very rocky terrain, where giant boulder-like formations cast strange dark shadows, breaking up an otherwise desolate and monochromatic landscape. This is what I caught from quick glances over a leathery old man in the window seat.) Whatever nervousness I had was calmed on the ground. It was good to be back, at least I can say, it smelled the same. Our taxi moved down the long airport road at about a mile an hour, penetrating hundreds of men, women, and children dressed in long white garments, going to or coming from their masjid (we were in a largely Lyon area; Lyon is a sect of Sufism). Kind of surreal, then again, a lot of things have been seeming like that ....

It’s weird when you spend some time, six weeks, in a place, and you get into a little groove, and coming back, you think you’ll fall right back into place, but you don’t. It’s a funny feeling being somewhere so familiar and foreign at the same time. That’s why it was great to see my host family. We were all so happy! Lots of shrieking and laughing over photos. Well truth be told, my brothers didn’t really pay me much attention, nothing new there. It was terribly sad leaving them last summer because of course I didn’t know when I would see them again. I arrived during Ramadan which is a really interesting time to be here, observing everything. Everyone seems a little tired, it’s so straining on the mind and the body (and unfortunately many people who fast are already poorly nourished), but it is also very rewarding spiritually. Fasting would be hard to do on your own; I think it would not feel as special if you didn’t have a family to break fast with every night. In Senegal, there is a funny balance within the society where people are very, very pious Muslims, but religion is at the same time relaxed. Or else, religion is not so disconnected from life-as-usual as it is in America ...... well but that’s a whole other story ...

The people at work are wonderful, and I’ve had a good time getting to know some other volunteers. Everyone has an endless amount of stories to share, also opinions, ideas, friends, food... Right now I am living and working in Yoff, a little on the outskirts of Dakar. This weekend I should be moving to Thies, where the main Tostan office is located. I’m ready to jump into work, but things in Senegal operate at a different pace; as they say waiting is like the national pastime. Nonetheless I will be sad to leave this dear, wacky city with its rooftop reggae, its funny mishmash of keur coiffures, sidewalk marabouts, junky animated car rapides .....

In the meantime I’ve been trying to get Wolof - something I regretfully didn’t do so much of last year. I think the idea of comprehending something so obscure in the span of six weeks seemed a next to impossible, but now all I want to do is hear it and decipher it. Ndank ndank ... slowly but surely.

some days you can't help but feel very blessed

Off for Senegal, land of sunshine, sabars, yassa poulet, teranga-aplenty (world-class hospitality). Miami via Madrid and a hop, skip, and jump down to Dakar. I fell asleep last night reading The Missing Piece by Shel Silverstein, realizing truth and beauty in as little words as possible, thinking about the nature of dreams and journeys and fulfillment. And feeling very grateful for all the friends and family and animals I've met along the way who have shown me humor and wisdom.
I'll write more, an ocean and a couple days from now......

Is African Art History?

(excerpt from essay by Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie and John Peffer, co-editors of Critical Interventions)
The question of value is topical because the generic undervaluing of African arts, cultures, and knowledge systems contributes directly to the minimal support given to its discourses by institutional funders and publishers. Critical Interventions engages the current crisis in academic publishing by offering a novel platform for advanced writing on African art. Publishing on African art is increasingly characterized by the production of patron-oriented picture books and generic anthologies, while fewer research-oriented or critically minded essays of substantial length have appeared in academic journals. Major academic presses now decline to publish intensive studies of African art unless printing costs are independently subsidized or they appeal to a popular audience such as the market for books related to African Diaspora issues. The deserving attention focused on Diaspora contexts is commendable, but unfortunately it seems to provide an additional basis for the marginalization of continental Africa. Funding for doctoral and post-doctoral work in African art has also diminished and, increasingly, only a small number of individuals working on “safe” topics, or well-established scholars are granted the opportunity to continue substantive fieldwork or to see their research into print. This climate of reduced publishing and funding opportunities curtails in-depth original and independent scholarship on African art from all eras. The situation truncates the aspirations of those anticipating a career in the field, and it jeopardizes the tenure prospects of younger scholars. The result is paradoxical: at the exact moment that the field is poised to become more fully art historical it is also threatened with extinction.

Critical Interventions promises to be "the principal site of discursive engagement for the field
of African art history in this century." You have to formally subscribe to read most articles but the site's worth a look, http://www.aachron.com/editions/critical_interventions/ci_index.html

halleluja

Quilts of Gee's Bend in Fort Lauderdale ... and they're even more fabulous all together, in real life (the postage stamp doesn't quite do them justice)

African films, alhamdulilay!! part deux

"This Is Nollywood tells the story of the Nigerian film industry—a revolution enabling Africans with few resources to tell African stories to African audiences. Despite all odds, Nigerian directors produce between 500 and 1,000 movies a year. The disks sell wildly all over the continent—Nollywood actors have become stars from Ghana to Zambia."

With a digital camera, two lights, and $20,000, Bond Emeruwa set out to document the Nigerian film industry in just 9 days. Digitalization of the industry has made it infinitely more accessible to aspiring African directors. African storytelling in new clothes.

trailer @ http://www.thisisnollywood.com/trailer.htm

This is Nollywood premieres in you guessed it Boston! Presented by the Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University, Thursday, Sept. 13 at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge. All proceeds benefit Nollywood Workshops, an initiative dedicated to providing training for filmmakers in Nigeria. http://www.brattlefilm.org/brattlefilm/index.html

Annual Rates of Global Migration

3% of the world's people were living outside their country of birth in 2005. What's really remarkable is the part, "Money Sent Home as a Share of GDP"

http://www.nytimes.com/ref/world/20070622_CAPEVERDE_GRAPHIC.html

in this day and age ...

Nicolas Sarkozy - France’s newly elected and rather right-wing President - already garnered little favor amongst Africans. As Jacques Chirac’s Minister of the Interior, he took a pretty virulent stance against immigration (particularly of Arabs and Africans). He also invited a little resentment for his role in sparking the riots in Paris’s minority-dominated suburbs in 2005 and for his general - if alleged - affiliation with the racist extreme-right. And yet on his late July tour through sub-Saharan Africa, thousands lent him an open ear. Some might have been surprised by his nominations of two African-French officials to government, but I think many were drawn by some sort of curiosity as to whether or not - as the authoritative face of France - he was ready to publicly recognize the multiracial character of French society.

It seems, however, Sarkozy poured a little salt on the wound. Speaking to the youth of Senegal as well as its intellectual elite at the University of Cheikh Anta Diop, he committed what the Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe calls an act of “violation by language.”

We’ve all experienced that moment of insult, when our favorite politicians drop the bomb, say something that so offends our intellect and sense of justice and reason (after seven years, we should be used to it). I think that’s a little how Sarkozy’s audience felt when he suggested Africans were a people continuously on the periphery, without history, and prisoner of their own spirit who could survive and navigate the future only by assimilating to certain European aspects of civilization. I encourage you to skim through Mbembe’s response in the “Le Messager” (which I'm kind of paraphrasing in the remainder of this): http://www.africultures.com/index.asp?menu=affiche_article&no=6816. If your up to it Sarkozy's speech in French: http://cdfafrique.afrikblog.com/archives/2007/07/31/5774862.html. (Senegalese Boubacar Boris Diop also wrote a response I have not yet read).

Mbembe claims that the intellectual framework underlying France’s policy towards Africa dates back to a late 19th century, obsolete philosophy and discourse. This was the era of the colonial ethnographers, those pseudo-scientists who conceived of Africans as sharing a “primitive” or worse, “pre-logical mentality.” This was the era of Conrad‘s Heart of Darkness, of Leo Frobenius's “African vitalism,” of societies “deeply plunged into the night of childhood.” (Senegalese poet-president Senghor was criticized for glamorizing this image in his work). This was the era of colonial exhibitions, human zoos, and primitive art that Picasso so adored. That can’t possibly carry over to our own era. We should not even have writers like Mbembe spending another minute of their time on these issues. I think the need to retire this “Other” business to the history books is well overdue. And yet here comes the President of France with a whopper that was plucked almost word for word from Hegel‘s passages on Africa. (Hegel died in 1831).

What stings the most, to Mbembe, is the way Sarkozy and other French elites continually characterize the African Man in opposition to the Modern Man. In some twisted effort to legitimize the crime of colonization (of which Sarkozy is not the first Frenchman to be guilty), to recast it as something more benevolent in the lens of history, there arises this need create a fixed characterization of the colonized as something "oppositional," or "less than..." And this happens in spite of generation after generation of scholars across the globe who claim that identity is (#1) invented and (#2) constantly changing. ("Fixed identity is the source of cultural death," as he says.)

But Mbembe, in few words, reveals the true failure of Sarkozy’s speech, the weakness of his ideology. To Mbembe, the future of Africans in the former French colonies does NOT depend on France. (Despite the millions in aid, much of which mysteriously fails to trickle down). “After half a century of formal decolonization,” he writes, “the younger generations have learn that there is little to expect from France…” And finally, overall, in conclusion, a la fin, “France simply lacks the moral credit that would allow it to speak with certitude and authority.”