Pharmakos (φάρμακος), the ancient Greek word from which derives the English pharmacology, can be interpreted to mean both poison and cure. Such ambiguity sets a precedent for the continuing mystification of medical terms within our modern society. While there are more ‘curative’ drugs than ever, these may poison our expectations of medicine, which increasingly seems ready to recommend a physical prescription for what is often a psychological problem. The misappropriation of medical terms now prevalent within the English language has created ‘medicaleze’, a language that inherits its authority from the popular myth of the reliability of science. Identifying the problem as an ‘itis’ or an ‘ism’ provides the reassurance of a name for a society infected with nameless fears. More so than ever, there is the awareness that progressive increase has not gone hand-in-hand with increased happiness.

“There are pills that will promote happiness, pills that will treat our unhappiness, pills to increase sexual longevity. Added to this, genetic investigation has gone from exploring the possibility of a genetic link with homosexuality to the latest discovery of what has been dubbed the ‘love rat gene’.”

When Don DeLillo conceived in his novel White Noise of a pill that could cheat our fear of death, he was anticipating the very near future. There are pills that will promote happiness, pills that will treat our unhappiness, pills to increase sexual longevity. Added to this, genetic investigation has gone from exploring the possibility of a genetic link with homosexuality to the latest discovery of what has been dubbed the ‘love rat gene’. Those who have DRD4 are supposedly twice as likely to cheat on a partner as those without. While findings of this sort subject scientific investigation to ridicule, the following terms were genuine diagnoses made at varying points in history that have only subsequently been dismissed as ‘medicaleze’.

Hysteria – In Victorian England the condition of female hysteria, deriving from the Greek hystera (ὑστέρα), meaning uterus, was traditionally treated with massage to bring the sufferer to orgasm. The perceived image of the ‘flooding woman’ arose from male misconception about the nature and effect of menstruation, and therefore the myth was allowed to be perpetuated that woman are unpredictable, irrational creatures controlled as much by their wombs as by their brains. In her landmark work, The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir described the female body as an ‘hysteric body’, which betrayed women themselves with ‘lacerating pains’ and bleeding. Exploiting this, the link was established between physical bodily symptoms and emotional instability by encouraging women to view their own bodies as alien.

Drapetomania – Before the American Civil War saw the abolition of slavery in the southern United States, those who fled the brutality of the regime were diagnosed with drapetomania. Compounded from two Greek words, the one for runaway slave (drapetes) and the other (mania) designating madness, the term was designed by Samuel Cartwright in the hope that the taint of mental illness would ensure other slaves considered their escape as the side-effects of a mental disorder rather than a positive defiance of institutionalized slavery.

Dysrationalia – This term first appeared in Scientific American in the 1990s, coined by Keith Stanovich and is distinguished only negligibly from irrationality through the issue of intent. Where irrational behaviour acts in wilful exclusion or ignorance of rational reasoning, dysrational behaviour is the inability to act rationally despite evidence or intelligence to the contrary. Dysrationalia means the sufferer is physically incapable of rational action.

Pronunciation: /juːˈtəʊpɪə/

Noun

An imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect. The word was first used in the book Utopia (1516) by Sir Thomas More.

 1. Brook Farm, Massachusetts, US, 1841-1846

Influenced by transcendentalism, and hoping to escape the confines of capitalist life, George Ripley set up Brook Farm in 200 acres in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. The Brook Farmers believed that by sharing the workload of the farm, and living in harmony, they would be left with time to enjoy intellectual and cultural pursuits as they wished. Prominent transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson visited the farm, and the school attracted students from as far away as Cuba and the Philippines. However, while all members took part in manual labour, the farm struggled to make money from its agricultural produce. A small pox outbreak in 1845, and a fire in 1846, accompanied by growing dissatisfaction amongst community members at Ripley’s attempts to introduce stricter, Fourier-inspired rules, lead to the community’s dissolution.

2. Oneida, New York, US, 1848-1881

Founded by John Humphrey Noyes, the Oneida community believed that Jesus had already returned in the year 70, making it possible to bring about his perfect kingdom themselves. The community, which had 300 members at its peak, practiced “complex marriage”, where everyone was married to everyone else, and children were reared communally away from their parents. A selective breeding program called “stirpiculture” was introduced in 1869. The community fell apart when Noyes attempted to hand his leadership over to his agnostic son Theodore, and then fled to Canada to avoid being charged with statutory rape. Oneida’s business ventures far outlived the community – they began manufacturing silverware in 1877, and Oneida Limited is still a successful distributor of cutlery today, though it ceased manufacturing itself in 2004.

3. Operation Atlantis, New York, US – Caribbean, early 1970s

Inspired by Ayn Rand, libertarian Werner Stiefel dreamed of a stateless community, a “Galt’s Gulch” somewhere on the world’s oceans, outside of any political jurisdiction. He purchased a motel Saugerties, NY, as the first stage, Atlantis I, inviting libertarians to come and live there to help him realise his ideal. A reinforced concrete ship, Atlantis II, set sail in 1971, from the Hudson River south into the Caribbean, where it was destroyed by a tropical storm. Undeterred, Stiefel tried creating an artificial island, only to be shot at by a gunboat belonging to Haitian dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier. He then bought a submerged seamount between Cuba and Honduras and towed an oil rig there, only to have it blown out to sea by a hurricane. Stiefel finally tried to negotiate sovereignty of an island he’d bought from Belize, giving up only when old age and bureaucracy overwhelmed him.

4. Republic of Minerva, South Pacific Ocean, 1971-1972

Another libertarian dream, the Republic of Minerva was the brainchild of Nevada real-estate millionaire Michael Oliver. Given the shortage of unclaimed islands, Oliver decided to create some, with the added incentive that, under international law, islands outside a country’s territorial waters can only be claimed if they are at least a foot above the high tide mark. The Minerva Reefs, 260 miles southwest of Tonga, being submerged at high tide, seemed ideal. After dredging sand onto the reefs, the Republic of Minerva was proclaimed on January 19th 1972. Tonga, however, wasn’t having any of it. Sources report that the Tongan landing party was sent with a brass band, whose job it was to play the Tongan national anthem while the flag of the Republic of Minerva was taken down.

5. Jonestown, Guyana, 1974-1978

Otherwise known as the People’s Temple Agricultural Project, Jonestown was set up as a “socialist paradise” on 3,800 acres of leased Guyanan land by Jim Jones, leader of the People’s Temple, a group which had been preaching “apostolic socialism” in the US since the early 1950s. After 15 members of the Temple said they wished to travel back to the US with visiting congressman Leo Ryan on November 18th 1978, the paranoid Jones ordered the community to commit “revolutionary suicide”, an act which had been rehearsed before. All but two of 909 Temple members died of cyanide poisoning, including over 200 children. Survivors reported seeing mothers injecting cyanide into their babies’ mouths.

A resident Isis photographer will be on hand to catch you at your best, and we will also be screening the 90’s classic Clueless.

Get your nostalgia kicks from:

BEATLES/ THE CLASH/ NEW ORDER/ MADONNA/ MICHAEL JACKSON/ PULP/ KATE BUSH/ BLUR/ CYNDI LAUPER/ and more

Come down if you are interested in getting involved in next term’s Isis, have a pitch, or want to speak to the editors or creative team.

£3 before 11 p.m., £5 after
See you there.

]]> http://isismagazine.org.uk/2012/05/isis-presents-top-of-the-pops/feed/ 0 http://isismagazine.org.uk/2012/05/is-twitter-killing-the-english-language/ http://isismagazine.org.uk/2012/05/is-twitter-killing-the-english-language/#comments Mon, 07 May 2012 12:23:41 +0000 admin http://isismagazine.org.uk/?p=1358 Continue reading →]]>  

Since 2007, the press have flaunted, hyped and heartily embraced Twitter, the “micro-blog” platform that began as a start-up in 2006. There are newspaper articles examining Twitter’s effects on language, politics, and media; hysterical interviews about the dangers of Twitter’s penchant for producing sound-bites of thought; CNN and other national news networks regularly read tweets during live broadcasts, either in response to a pertinent question asked earlier in the show or to provide an eyewitness account of an event. Publications collect readers’ tweets about current content and print them in the physical pages of that week’s issue as commentary, a peculiar phenomenon that divorces the tweets from their context and strands them in the analog world, without the instantaneous connections that explain and elucidate them on Twitter. Activists tout Twitter as the 21^st century revolutionary’s essential tool, and the site has played a role in protests from Egypt to Syria to Wall Street. The Chinese government thinks Twitter so threatening that the site is banned there. Twitter’s growing presence in our daily lives isn’t imagined or inflated, either, it’s real: in late 2008, Twitter’s popularity soared from less than 5 million users to more than 100 million in 2010, and it continues to expand.

 “As with new technologies throughout history…Twitter’s rise has been accompanied by much public handwringing over its potentially disastrous and dumbing effects.”

As with new technologies throughout history, from the printing press to the telephone to text messaging, Twitter’s rise has been accompanied by much public handwringing over its potentially disastrous and dumbing effects. Noam Chomsky said that Twitter “tends toward superficiality and draws people away from real serious communication” and that “it is not a medium of a serious interchange”, and the actor Ralph Fiennes commented in an October 2011 article that because of Twitter, “Our expressiveness and our ease with some words is being diluted so that the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us, and the word of more than two syllables is a problem for us”. The author J.D. Davidson accused Twitter of causing current English vocabulary to shrink: “You only have to look on Twitter to see evidence of the fact that a lot of English words that are used say in Shakespeare’s plays or PG Wodehouse novels are so little used that people don’t even know what they mean now”. It should be noted that none of these critics actually use Twitter themselves.

Is Twitter killing the English language? The answer, for anyone familiar with the scope of history or the patterns and truisms of linguistics, is a resounding and obvious no (Chomsky should know better). Nor is Twitter an arbiter of “superficiality”, syntactic simplicity, mental degradation, or vocabulary decline. Twitter is no guiltier of these sins than ordinary conversation is, and though its arbitrary 140 character limit certainly affects the language people use on it, this does not mean that they are discarding complex words in favor of lazier alternatives or are substituting inane thoughts for brilliant ones just because they won’t fit. In fact, the opposite might be argued.

 “The restrictions of Twitter actually engender linguistic creativity, forcing the invention of new words, syntax, and grammar.”

The restrictions of Twitter actually engender linguistic creativity, forcing the invention of new words, syntax, and grammar. No one would argue that the restraints imposed by the strict rules of a sonnet or a haiku are also strict restraints on innovation. And Twitter might even be more welcoming to ingenuity, because as an emerging medium, it is not subject to universally agreed upon rules. There are few widely accepted standardizations on Twitter. This makes it very idiosyncratic; it is a jungle of colloquialisms, slang, variant spellings, and personal tics. People on Twitter tend to express themselves as themselves, without fear that their words will be scrutinized for “correctness”. But this freedom is not a sign of a looming linguistic apocalypse. Instead, Twitter’s wild-west ethos supports a culture of individual and often inventive discourse.

 “The format encourages and rewards the funniest, snarkiest and cleverest. It is essentially a global linguistic popularity contest driven by rapid-fire bursts of words.”

Twitter is a place where “comedians are kings”. The format encourages and rewards the funniest, snarkiest and cleverest. It is essentially a global linguistic popularity contest driven by rapid-fire bursts of words. Salman Rushdie recently took to Twitter to pen a cheeky limerick about reality star and chronic attention seeker Kim Kardashian’s quickie marriage, featuring the alliterative lines, “The marriage of poor kim #kardashian/ was krushed like a kar in a krashian/ her kris kried, not fair!/ why kan’t I keep my share?/ but kardashian fell klean outa fashian”. Twitter is teeming with word play, irony, biting, teasing sarcasm, and a cacophony and range of voices that can’t be matched inside of geographic or physically constrained borders.

The historian Geoffrey Hughes has said that in the dawn of the printing age, words “traveled at speed across continents”. Never has been this so true as now, and at a rate that was once unimaginable, with Twitter leading the charge.

But the strong link between Judaism and comedy is not a recent one, dating back to the origins of the religion itself. One of the important Jewish texts, the Talmud, which discusses customs and ethics, employs absurdly complicated arguments and comic situations in order to define religious law. Over the past centuries, Eastern European Jewish humour was preoccupied with defending the poor against upper class exploitation, often via the comic character Hershele Ostropoler, who was a common staple of jokes in which he outwitted authority figures in the community. Even Freud analysed the science behind Jewish humour in his work ‘Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious’.

However, the golden age of Jewish humour began between the 1920‘s and 60‘s, when the tourism industry in the Catskill mountain region in New York State boomed. Thousands of American Jews flocked to the holiday resorts there, so much so that it was colloquially referred to as ‘the Borscht Belt’. In the evenings, the guests were entertained by some of the finest comedic talent of the time, who were mostly Jewish themselves. The Borscht belt became a platform for performers such as Jerry Lewis, The Three Stooges, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen and Joan Rivers.

Since then, the presence of Jews in comedy has continued to be strong, with the growth of the film and television industries introducing consequent generations to the works of these prolific comedians as well as many more recent writers and stand-ups like Larry David or Jerry Seinfeld.

So what defines this Kosher brand of humour? Rather than being a distinctive genre in itself, Jewish comedy is unified in its shared themes and personas, many recognisable outside of Jewish comic tradition. Adam Lebovits, producer of the Oxford Revue, is himself Jewish, and suggests that ‘comic archetypes’ such as the ‘neurotic’, or the ‘academic’ are often considered as Jewish stereotypes, but also cross over with Western ideas of humour. He adds ‘A lot of Jews over-analyse…and that’s the root for a lot of where comedy comes from in general.’

Having watched ‘Old Jews Telling Jokes’, two programs broadcast by the BBC last year, it struck me how much of the pensioners’ humour was based on self-deprecation or hypochondria, and exaggerated the part of the overbearing Jewish mother, often using heavily-accented voices or Yiddish words. The book accompanying the series divides the jokes into sections which give an indication of the content inside: Jewish Mothers, Food, Success, Rabbis, Husbands & Wives, Sex, Illness, Death and Oral Sex.

But why the apparent connection between Judaism and comedy? Perhaps the prominence of Jewish-American comedians is in some part due to their immigrant status in the USA post-WW2: the challenge of cultural integration was eased by making people laugh. However, many writers, including Lebovits, propose the role of anti-semitism in the development of Jewish humour. Mel Brooks, creator of comedy-musical ‘The Producers’ said: ‘’Feeling persecuted, feeling that the only way you can deal with the world is to laugh…that’s probably what’s responsible for the Jews having developed such a great sense of humour’.

For Lebovits personally, this wasn’t the case: ‘I can’t exactly say my own interest in humour intersects with any kind of triumph against adversity – the particular Jewish community I grew up in was a bit too comfortable and suburban to enable laughter in the dark, and I feel understandably short-changed by that. For modern, non-religious Jews, more assimilated into society and without as strong a need for ghetto or gallows humour, it’s probably just a sense of inheriting what you see by watching or listening to older Jewish comedians.’

Sam Hoffman, creator of ‘Old Jews Telling Jokes’, also values the role of older Jewish comedians: “One of [our] rules…is that you can’t tell a joke unless you’re over 60 years old. So the people who tell jokes have at least had some first-hand experience with parents who, or maybe grandparents… who came from the old country, who maybe spoke Yiddish. And their ideas, their ways of storytelling and the cadence of their speech is all … affected and inflected by that knowledge. It’s something that we don’t have anymore.’

Stephen Fry, in his language series, ‘Fry’s Planet Word’, considered the role the Yiddish language played in history of Jewish comedy: ‘‘it’s more a mindset than a language…a joke can be Yiddish even when it’s told in English…Yiddish is the language of emotion, and of sex and of failure and of hilarity, whereas Hebrew is a language of seriousness and ceremony.’

Although Yiddish is now an UNESCO endangered language, the tradition of Jewish comics does not seem to be under threat. Perhaps the enduring popularity of Jewish humour is that it’s impossible to tire of, because it mimics and ridicules everyday life with needle-sharp precision and a hefty dose of pessimism to which we can all relate. Or maybe it’s simply just funny.

“Look at those eyes”, filmmaker Sokurov remarked, watching archival footage of Stalin, “those are the eyes of a man who is absolutely free.” The achievement of this condition – freedom from ethical norms, from any conscience – is the question at the heart of a tetralogy of Sokurov’s films that has chronicled the lives of 20th century dictators. It is a series that, surprisingly, concludes with Faust, which received Venice’s Golden Lion this year. The nature of the wager Faust makes with the devil has evolved through time, each alteration relating to the character of the age, and Sokurov presents its most recent transformation to explain the source of the dictator’s freedom.

The original wager is infamous: 24 years of fulfilled desires and ambitions for the price of a soul, signed for in blood. It was born out of the dark confusion of the Reformation and its medieval heritage, beliefs thought unshakeable threatened and man no longer held at the centre of the universe. All that was reliable was the omnipresence of the devil and his occult paraphernalia – witches, alchemy, cosmology, Flamel. The wager, which sent Marlowe’s Faustus to a fiery hell, is a warning against an attitude of self-reliance in the face of God emerging in Renaissance thought.

For Marlowe, Faust becomes Prometheus, attempting to emancipate man from the restraints imposed upon his knowledge, “To practice more than heavenly power permits.” Marlowe, himself a dissident and critic, trialled for blasphemy and accused of atheism, uses the legend of Faust to ask how far we would go to get rid of the limitations of being human. Who wouldn’t sell their soul for a flight through the heavens or for a Helen whose face so famously “launch’d a thousand ships”?

By Goethe’s time, the wager had changed. When God asks Mephistopheles, “Kennst du den Faust?“, Faust becomes a mere pawn in a higher process. Though man, by his nature, is still a “grasshopper,” whose desire for power and knowledge means he “pokes his nose in all the filth he finds,” he is no longer required to sell his soul to get it. By the the Enlightenment, Mephistopheles is no longer an evil tempter and seducer – he is the spirit of negation, permitted by God due to his ability to enlighten man with his critical nature and cynical nihilism.

 “Throw off your limitations, throw away your conscience, and you’ve achieved that glint of absolute freedom in Stalin’s eye.”

And the people of Soviet Moscow need such a “Power which would / Do evil constantly, and constantly does good” to highlight the hypocrisy of their world. Bulgakov accordingly quotes Goethe’s interpretation of the legend in his epigraph to Master and Margarita, his satirical critique of 1930s Russia. Again, a new wager: Mephistopheles no longer needs to look for souls to seduce; they have signed up in advance. Secularisation has become vociferous atheism, and as the city’s windows trumpet the ‘Hallelujah foxtrot’, Berlioz the polite editor of communist literature, soon to be decapitated by a tram, declares the state’s rejection of religion. The devil sitting beside him is thrilled.

“We say that modern man does not believe in God. But can he at least believe in the devil?” writes Arabov, author of Sokurov’s screenplay. Faust’s narrative has been a medium through which to analyse the condition of society through the centuries. Sokurov’s Faust depicts a weak and clumsy Mephistopheles, squatting and mumbling, breathing heavily and barely able to walk, and a Faust who by contrast resolutely makes his own immoral decisions: in our age it is no longer the devil that tempts man, but man that tempts the devil. Spengler’s theory of the downfall of the west, a “Faustian civilisation”, needs no tempting to restlessly push beyond the boundaries of illicit knowledge, impatient for the infinite. And it must bear the consequences, from the expiry date set on our natural world to the threat of nuclear warfare.

“If you don’t even believe in the devil then you get absolute freedom.” Sokurov’s is the first interpretation to permit Faust the murder of Mephistopheles. But by doing so Faust does not heroically rid the world of evil. Instead, it is his own conscience and any reminders of his guilt that he stones to death. Throw off your limitations, throw away your conscience, and you’ve achieved that glint of absolute freedom in Stalin’s eye.

THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM

// Are newspapers viable in the 21st Century? // How can the media survive
the hacking scandal? // Will the internet destroy the quality of news reporting? //

with Isis alumni

TOBY YOUNG
Author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, Associate Editor at The Spectator
STEPHEN GLOVER
Founder of The Independent
CARL WILKINSON
Writer for The Guardian and The Financial Times

Chaired by
MARK DAMAZER
Former Controller of BBC Radio 4

Sasketchawan Room, Exeter College // 6.30 pm Monday 7 May // £5 entry // Wine included.
Look out for more Isis speaker events later in term.

Sponsored by the University of Melbourne
http://www.futurestudents.unimelb.edu.au/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_content=oa-20120502-fb&utm_campaign=oxford%20isis%20magazine

It is Sunday morning in Salvador, a city in Brazil’s northeast, and morning mass is just ending. The sun beats down as worshippers stream out of one of the city’s many baroque churches. The crowds—descendants of settlers who came here to build a new world and of the slaves brought in to do it—walk down narrow streets, past colourful houses, and down to the city’s golden beaches.

After having just left one service, these worshippers promptly begin another—this time to Yemanjá, goddess of the sea. As drums begin to beat to an energetic rhythm, the worshippers’ excitement mounts, and the women, in their white clothes and gold jewellery, begin to dance. They sway back and forth, singing chants and incantations, and wade into the clear water as they do so. One by one, eyes glazed over, they begin to shake, convulse and collapse, falling into trances. The chanting continues, the tension rises, and more and more people succumb, overwhelmed by the forces at work.

This rather unusual juxtaposition of Catholicism and animistic rituals is a core element of Afro-Brazilian religions, namely Candomblé and Umbanda. According to Paul Christopher Johnson, author of Secrets, Gossip, and the Gods, Candomblé developed in the northeast of Brazil soon after the arrival of slaves, and Umbanda later, in urban Rio de Janeiro of the 1920s. These religions, defined as ‘possession cults’, center on the possession of mediums, known as cavalos—or ‘horses’ in Portuguese—who are ‘ridden’ by orixás. The orixás are forces of nature, originating from traditional West African beliefs, which descend from the sky. According to Johnson, the orixás take control of the bodies and minds of the mediums and leave them in trances and fits of convulsions.

 “It is not uncommon to see someone before a statue of St. George or St. Barbara, only to discover they are in fact shrines to Oxossi or Iansã, the orixás of the forest and wind”

According to Johnson and Roger Bastide, author of The African Religions of Brazil, Candomble and Umbanda were formed through a process of syncretism: the fusion and assimilation of different, even opposing, ideas into a unified practice. As a result, it is not uncommon to see someone before a statue of St. George or St. Barbara, only to discover they are in fact shrines to Oxossi or Iansã, the orixás of the forest and wind.

According to Bastide, originally, slaves from West Africa and Angola brought with them their ancient beliefs in the orixás, such as Oxalá, who represents the sky, and Yemanjá, the sea. Due to the suppression of their traditional beliefs and forcible conversions to Christianity, slaves hid their beliefs behind the mask of Christian figures and concepts. This began the process of syncretism. According to Ana Zahira, an academic and active Umbanda mae-de-santo (or priestess), “what began as just a cover was internalised and absorbed” into the workings of the religions. The umbandistas also looked to the salons of 19^th century Paris for another unlikely addition to their belief system: ‘Spiritism’, the ideas of the eccentric Allan Kardec, who promoted re-birth and communication with transcendent spirits.

How and why these religions arose is a topic of debate: was it was a Marxist-style opiate—a sigh of the oppressed—or a noble form of resistance, or a search for identity? According to Johnson, following the abolition of slavery in 1888, the old records of the slave trade were burned, a supposedly well intentioned but cynical act that succeeded in destroying any knowledge of ancestry for the several million descendants of Brazil’s slaves. The subsequent need for history and identity led to the formation of Nigerian, Angolan and Congolese varieties of Candomblé, in an attempt to re-create a symbolic history for Afro-Brazilians, and a link to their African roots.

In the 19^th and much of the 20^th centuries Candomblé and Umbanda were viewed as subversive and rebellious and were actively persecuted by police. Once persecution stopped, however, and its practice was no longer restricted to a secret meeting room in a favela on the outskirts of Brazil’s cities, the rituals and ceremonies were opened to the general public and absorbed into the consciousness of the country. Once frowned upon by the intellectual elites of Brazil, the same figures now embrace the religions as a symbol of their national unity.

This newfound public acceptance has enabled these religions to spread. One Umbanda temple that began in Rio now has branches in numerous cities around the world. I spoke to an American woman living in Paris who is a follower of Umbanda. When I asked why she, with no particular connection to Brazil, had become a practitioner, she explained the appeal: “[I]t’s not just sitting there and listening to somebody talk.” The drumming, chanting, and dancing fostered a strong sense of community that she felt our more sober European traditions lacked. Through contact with your orixá, she said, you learn about nature, and by extension, yourself.

“In recent years Brazil has been swept with a wave of Pentecostal Christianity, which is predictably hostile towards Candomblé, Umbanda, and even Catholicism”

Despite the national and international acceptance of these religions in recent years, they are under a new threat. Brazil has traditionally been a bastion of Roman Catholicism, and, despite being separate, the Afro-Brazilian religions have co-existed peacefully. In recent years, however, Brazil, like many other countries, has been swept with a wave of Pentecostal Christianity, which has become hugely popular: in Rio, umbandista neighbourhoods have all but died out, and on streets where beating drums could once be heard, you now see lines of straight-laced young men, dressed in shirts and ties, marching dutifully past and proclaiming redemption and the forgiveness of sins.

These hard-line Pentecostals are predictably hostile towards Candomblé, Umbanda, and even Catholicism. The mae-de-santo I spoke to described Pentecostalism as a “threat” to her religion, breeding a fundamentalist mentality that undermines the plurality of these rather unique and distinctly Brazilian faiths.

It is a shame that single-faith dogmatism is threatening this culture and identity. Once truly a religion of the povo, Candomblé may soon only exist as a middle-class pastime. These faiths should arguably be respected, not least for what they reveal about this country and its people. As French ethnologist Roger Bastide remarked, studying Candomblé required him to radically alter his European, post-Enlightenment conceptual framework: in order to truly understand the faith, he had to accept so-called “irregularities” and “contradictions” as the very bread and butter of his work.

Restavec is a Creole word meaning, literally, ‘one who stays with’. It is also the term for a Haitian child who is abandoned by their family to a childhood of servitude in other households.Until very recently, this Haitian practice was virtually unknown to the outside world, and has only now been condemned as a modern form of slavery by the UN. UNICEF estimates that, on an island with a population of just 8 million, 300,000 children work as restavecs. Twenty years ago, the UN paid almost no attention to the issue, and had only a dim awareness that these restavecs even existed. After four speeches to the UN Assembly, two books, and tireless campaigning both in and outside of Haiti, it is no exaggeration to say that Jean-Robert Cadet is the man who put the Haitian restavecs on the map. A former child slave himself, Jean-Robert Cadet’s life story is, in part, one of violence and neglect at the hands of his former ‘owners’, of constant struggle against oppression and injustice. Yet it is ultimately one of catharsis, as his journey sees him cross, as he puts it, the seemingly unassailable gulf from “Haitian slave child to middle-class American”.

Jean Robert Cadet sits across from me in an unassuming service station on the M4. He wears a baseball cap and, and in his soft French-Caribbean accent he speaks confidently and candidly of his time as an abused and unpaid domestic servant throughout the first fifteen years of his life.  He states bluntly: “I did not have a childhood.” The illegitimate product of his wealthy white father’s philandering with his maid, Cadet was sent as a restavec to stay with a high-class prostitute (known under the pseudonym of ‘Florence’) whose clients included numerous government officials. In her care he was treated like the thousands of other Haitian children deemed socially unacceptable, and was subjected to physical and emotional abuse.‘Florence’ pulled and pinched his penis, beat him in his sleep, kicked him with her high-heels, forced his head down the toilet, made him wash her blood-stained menstrual rags.

However, it was the emotional and verbal abuse, Cadet confides, that left considerably deeper and longer-lasting scars. Florence called him a dog, told him he would never amount to anything more than a ‘shoeshine boy’ and, by making him sleep on the kitchen floor and forbidding him ever to sit at the dinner table with the rest of the household, ensured that Cadet would be unable to endure almost any social situation for decades after he finally left her. It is this lasting psychological and social damage, so acutely described in his first book Restavec, which make his poise and ease so remarkable.

As a restavec, Cadet was made to believe that he was worthless. “In Haiti, sleeping in a bed means that you are somebody,” he explains. “I never had a bed; I slept under the kitchen table… I believed I was not worthy of a bed.” He was the victim of a fragmented society in which “everybody wants somebody underneath them… all the way down to dogs.”Cadet harbours few doubts as to where the blame for this fragmentation lies. “The French,” he answers firmly, Haiti’s former colonial masters. Cadet explains that France, along with other colonial powers, were responsible not only for ‘quarantining’ Haiti after the independence in 1804, but also for imposing rigid social hierarchies on Haitian society, hierarchies capable of perpetuating slavery long after the French had left.

Understandably, Cadet has little time for those who question whether the restavec system really constitutes slavery in the strict sense: “Restavecs are treated worse than slaves,” he says unequivocally. He is similarly brusque about claims, particularly those of his fellow Haitians, that this tradition is best understood as an underground foster care system, rather than a system of slavery. “Haitians are proud of their history”, he explains. “As the descendants of former slaves, most are unwilling to believe that they could have become slave-masters themselves.” Even those at the very top of Haitian society are complicit in this culture. Cadet explains that the Chief of Police also holds children in servitude. In a society in which vast extended families are the norm, it is easy for people like this Chief of Police to have a ‘niece of his wife’ living in his household, being treated, whether they acknowledge it or not, as more of a slave than a member of the family. The subtleties involved in this mean that it is often difficult for people and organisations unacquainted with the culture, such as UNICEF, to identify which child is a normal family member, and which is a restavec. For this reason, it is easy for some to deny that restavecs are treated badly, with many arguing that the system is a form of social welfare similar to those seen in other countries; a way of helping a child from a poor family.

Cadet is dismissive of this. “The difference is the brutality,” he argues. “Many countries are very poor, and many may have similar systems, but the Haitian system is unique in its cruelty.” For Cadet, the reasons behind this are cultural; it is no use simply blaming poverty and assuming that the practice will disappear as GDP grows. Failing to value the sanctity of childhood is, according to Cadet, deeply ingrained in the country’s social fabric: “it is part of their cultural make-up dating back to colonial rule”. He explains that the Haitian language is rich in proverbs such as ‘a child is like an animal,’ and as such, the problem is a one of attitude and perception, rather than of material deprivation.This perhaps explains the prevalence of the system at all levels of Haitian society, and the lack of remorse on the part of Cadet’s former keeper Florence: “she felt no need to apologise. She didn’t think she had done anything wrong. She did what she did because someone before her had done the same.”

Cadet, unlike most of his fellow restavec children, was fortunate in that he was educated. He does not accept that this had anything to do with luck, however. “It was a matter of convenience,” he explains. “When a visitor would come round and I answered the door, I was expected to write the name of the visitor down for Florence when she returned home. If I couldn’t write the name down, then I was useless. That’s why they sent me to a literacy centre.” For most restavec children, education is not a possibility, but Cadet is insistent that this is the key to eroding this culture of slavery and abuse. An effective state education, and an education which instils Haitian children with the values of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ are what matters.The UN troops propping up the weak government are not the solution, nor are the NGOs, which, he says, are exploitative in their own way: “NGOs use the issue to make a living. Their programmes are not working.”

But if education is the most viable route towards a restavec-free future for Haiti, the 2010 earthquake certainly hampered its progress. Not only are the country’s institutions and infrastructure in tatters, but the number of restavecs has risen considerably. Prospects look bleak, but there is certainly still hope. The first step is in the work of people like Cadet; people who decide to tell their stories rather than stay silent.

——–

Jean Robert Cadet will be speaking on “A hope for Haiti – The restavek system and the future generations” with the International Relations Society on Thursday 19th January, 7.30pm, at Queens College, Lecture Room B

Early on the morning of August 21st 1911 a maintenance worker at Paris’ Louvre museum opened a locked door for one Vincenzo Perruggia, releasing him onto the bustling streets of the French capital. Little did the worker know, Perruggia walked away with more than just a spring in his step – concealed under his regulation smock was the Mona Lisa, now one of the most valuable paintings in existence. The theft changed the face of the art world and ensured that if that world was to have only one face it would be that of Da Vinci’s half-smiling muse.

To say that ‘La Joconde’, as the French know her, was not well known prior to the theft would be misleading – she was the only painting at the Louvre to have its own mailbox, such was the influx of love letters addressed to her – but this fame was nothing in comparison to what followed.

If someone wanted to view a painting in 1911 the only real way to do so was by physically going and seeing it. The theft of the Mona Lisa changed all that. To see her face all anyone had to do was glance at a newspaper, a magazine or one of the many novelty items that developed in the wake of the theft. The painting gained widespread publicity as coverage of the crime gained momentum and entered popular culture – La Joconde became an international celebrity.

When the Louvre reopened to the public a week after the theft there were queues for the first time in its history. Thousands, including a young Franz Kafka, came to view the empty space where the painting had been hanging, only four wall hooks betraying her absence.

Not only did La Joconde quickly become the most viewed face in art, she also became the most written about. The New York Times article covering the theft described her as “the finest picture in existence” and the degree of hyperbole only increased alongside the weight of writing on her. Critics swooned over her mesmerising smile, referred to ‘her’ rather than ‘it’ and described how her eyes would follow an admirer around the room. There were a few dissenting voices noting that some of these effects were not unique to La Joconde but they were very much in the minority.

It was not for her beauty that Perruggia chose her but for her size. At only barely over seventy centimetres tall, La Joconde was one of the smallest paintings in the gallery – something Perruggia knew as he had been commissioned to build a glass frame for her earlier that year. Perruggia’s plan to smuggle his prize out of the Louvre under his smock meant the larger paintings were off the menu.

 La Joconde “left the Louvre a work of art … she returned an icon.”

Was it this chance decision that propelled the Mona Lisa to fame? There is no doubting that it is an exceptional painting – even before the theft, one man was driven to commit suicide in front of it, hardly a common response to an average painting. Did the theft give rise to the legend, though? R.A. Scotti, in her recent book on the subject, asserts that La Joconde “left the Louvre a work of art … she returned an icon.” The theft made La Joconde the most publicised work of art in history and the subsequent entry into popular culture made her the toast of those at the bottom as well as the top of the cultural hierarchy.

Without Perruggia it is tempting to ask whether one might enjoy a more private audience with La Joconde than the sweaty, hurried viewing available in a packed out room in the modern day Louvre. As you gaze upon that most famous of faces perhaps a thought should be spared for the small Italian thief, forgotten by history, who may have brought the crowds but probably also brought you.

If we were to pick anybody to fight this corner fiercely and gallantly, it would be Steve Roggenbuck. Starting in 2009, Roggenbuck built up a vast internet presence as a creator and advocate of anything that could be described as Internet Poetry, a movement dedicated to “raising poetry to the level of internet culture”, rather than the other way around. After building a successful and thriving community around the concept, however, he is now distancing himself from the idea of Internet Poetry as a movement, saying that as he cultivated the project, “the word… started to feel like clutter to me”.

Perhaps this shouldn’t come as a surprise from somebody who has vehemently rejected genre distinctions and borders from the outset, urging people to “break free from the shackles of word” and to expand the term poetry to incorporate video, image and text combinations and GIF. Roggenbuck’s blog has repeatedly stressed that poetry is something he sees as loosely defined. Now, however, he sees the term as so loosely defined as to be more or less meaningless. He explains: “if we are really going to be open about putting language in various visual/multimedia forms– then why are we even calling it poetry as a rule?”

Roggenbuck’s waning enthusiasm for Internet Poetry as a concept might worry some of his loyal followers and fellow ‘poets’, many of whom have themselves built names for themselves under the term. Does this signify the death of the Internet Poem? Not exactly. He still speaks with great passion about the internet’s ability to facilitate literature, stating that it opens up “big opportunities for types of poetry that are maybe not respected in academic institutions but which actually have a big potential readership”. This explains his continued work in a similar vein to before, creating unlikely juxtapositions of text with out-of-place images.

When justifying his passion for an internet culture so regularly ridiculed for its apparent pointlessness, he writes articulately and passionately, a clear break from his famous online persona characterised by twitter-esque brevity and “post-ironic” sarcasm. “For me it’s really just culture. That’s the level at which I care about it: we are creating things that make other people happy and which tell us how to live.”

Zaraghuna Kargar, a short, brown-haired woman, is attentive as she escorts me to her sofa and selects an armchair for herself. As producer and presenter of the Afghan Woman’s Hour and the author of Dear Zari, she has defied the customs which imprison many women in her country. Set up by the BBC in 2005, the aim of Woman’s Hour is to broadcast a programme specifically aimed at women, cutting through social, economic and geographic differences. Aired in Dari and Pashto, it discusses gender, social issues and women’s rights, inviting doctors, psychologists and female politicians to provide information and opinions to women throughout Afghanistan. But the most popular section is when real Afghan women broadcast the individual stories of their lives, and it is these which comprise most of Dear Zari.

In the book, as in real life, Kargar radiates independence and candour. Dear Zari is a testament to her determination to provide Afghan women with a voice in a time when few are willing to hear them. Although many would say that such a liberated woman is an anomaly, she insists that all Afghan women are connected. In the book, Kargar chooses to interweave her life story with the other tales, creating the impression that she and the women are united. She explains: “I realised it doesn’t matter if an Afghan woman lives in London, she is still an Afghan woman and she will somehow suffer and go through the things that an Afghan woman is going through in North Afghanistan or another mother goes through in Kabul.” There is no better candidate to comment on the plight of Afghan women than Kargar herself; having unwillingly submitted to an arranged marriage, she divorced her husband to the astonishment and disapproval of her community. Kargar’s personal experience and journalistic work have given her both the sympathy and the experience necessary for raising awareness about the lifestyle of many Afghan women.

But what is it like to be an Afghan woman? “When it comes to relationships, when it comes to life, family, looking after children, in that sense I think women are globally similar. But when you look at the lifestyle, it is completely different, and even I as an Afghan woman – who had lived far away from my country and from the women I belonged to – found it shocking,” Kargar tells me. A palpable factor is the role of men; a woman is always under a male relative’s control. With bitterness Kargar talks of how women are seen as the property of their male relatives: “In many, many things, as a woman, you are just somebody who men of the family decide for: for your future, for your life. If it’s good or bad you have to live with it. That is that.” The marriage system enforces the perception of women as a commodity; it has been estimated that between 70 to 80% of Afghan marriages are arranged, and women are frequently forced to marry husbands selected by their families, regardless of her objections. Girls can be sold to settle family disputes and debts; Dear Zari is replete with daughters traded to settle old scores. The tale of Shereenjan is just one example: when her brother killed a man from another family, Shereenjan’s father traded his nine year old daughter in recompense. Now an old woman, she spoke on Afghan Woman’s Hour of how she grew up in the barn, slaving for the new family. Later she married the family’s eldest son and bore him children in lieu of the murdered man. She chose to end her story with the phrase, “this is the story of my life.”

“Women who have come out and try to speak about this and try to change this are supressed in many ways.”

“The face of woman is a source of corruption,” remarked a Taliban official in the 90s. “There are a big number of men out there who do think that women should be hidden,” Kargar remarks, with a shake of her head. And those men who don’t are concerned about gossiping neighbours and the scorn of their community, if their wives and daughters seem to be behaving scandalously. But what do Afghan women believe? Shockingly, some agree that they should be treated as inferior. “I think it is a culture imposed by men on them,” Kargar tells me, “because if you hear 24/7 from the man of the family ‘don’t go out without a burqua, it is shameful. Look, this neighbour did this, that neighbour did that, they don’t have shame or manners,’ then you start to believe that.” There are also women who defy such categorisations, but the choice is not easy: “Women who have come out and try to speak about this and try to change this are supressed in many ways. They are shunned by society, they are shunned by the men, and they are shunned by their fellow women who think they are not good women.” However, Afghanistan is rolling forwards: boys and many girls are receiving education, exposure to more tolerant perspectives and Kargar hopes for a more open-minded generation.

The combination of cultural restrictions, political confinement and war has worsened women’s situations substantially. “The consequences of war for women are far worse than for anyone else,” says Kargar. “If a woman is widowed she loses everything.” For a widow, remarriage means forsaking your children, but appealing to your in-laws and relatives means becoming a financial burden. In Dear Zari, Kargar introduces us to Layla, who after being widowed three times was shunned by her community as a “woman of dark steps.” Eventually she left her children and was forced to live as a servant in her brother’s house, reminded daily by her sister-in-law of her inferior status. Kargar sighs dejectedly: “I see that it is so widespread in my society. The widowhood, the pain, losing your kids, losing your name, being the subject of gossip.” In the 1980s, the Communist government established assistance for widows, providing monthly rations of essential imported items. But when the Taliban arrived the benefits ceased.

“Afghan society is very traditional and based on culture and traditions which are imposed by men and in favour of men. It is not even based on religious factors,” Kargar informs me. This year, as the tenth anniversary of military invention in Afghanistan approaches and talk of pulling troops out by next year grows, the prevalent attitude is that segregation is not the effect of a religious tyranny, but a cultural manifestation. David Cameron stated: “We are not there to build a prefect democracy, still less a model society.” Nevertheless, the West still has a substantial role to play. Even to compare the state of the country now to ten years ago before, the situation has improved tenfold. Before, Kargar tells me, “women literally had nothing.” Now there is education, women parliamentarians for the first time in Afghan history, women activists, media programmes specifically for women, such as Women’s Hour. Hussan Ghazanfar, Afghanistan’s minister for women’s affairs, on a recent visit to the UK, quoted that 57% of girls now go to school. However, Kargar fears the process ahead will be slow: “There will be heroes who go forwards for change, but even in England change didn’t happen so quickly,” she remarks with a smile. Indeed such progress is hardly received with open arms by many Afghans. Between March and October 2010, twenty girls’ schools were attacked, and in the same period at least 126 students and teachers murdered. The price to pay for education is still high.

“Afghan women are like sleeping lions: when awoken they can play a wonderful role in any social revolution.”

What is the role of Afghan women in creating change? Even under the Taliban there were those who covertly defied the laws. The Golden Needle Sewing School stands out as the salient example of a widespread phenomenon. Women met together under the pretext of learning to sew. In reality such gatherings were small classrooms, where they discussed a sometimes surprising, and eclectic, array of subjects, including James Joyce, geometry and Afghan history. These schools demonstrate Afghan women’s resilience and determination. In 2009, women protested against the Shia Personal Status Law, which decreed that any Shia woman could not leave the house without her husband’s permission, nor could she refuse him sex. The law was eventually softened. The truth however, is that this reflects only one section of Afghan women; especially in rural areas, old customs are prevalent. Organisations like RAWA – the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan – also have a major role popularising the plight of Afghan women. This group, founded in 1977, is the oldest organisation in Afghanistan fighting for liberation, peace and equality for women. Indeed, RAWA’S founder, Meena Kamal, remarked “Afghan women are like sleeping lions: when awoken they can play a wonderful role in any social revolution.” When I say this Kargar nods emphatically. “It is a very beautiful sentence and it is very true. In Afghan women the resilience I have seen shows it to be so.”