Poking around the excellent Mondoweiss today, I came across this short video that was recorded on the previous delegation to Gaza I was on in May/June, in which blog author Philip Weiss interviews longtime activist Dennis James in the lovely indoor/outdoor restaurant at Marna House, where I sat up late on my last night in Gaza listening to shelling.
Dennis said something which I have heard a lot of people who have traveled to Palestine express, including veteran activists, something which I've felt myself. Multiple times during the six-minute interview, he says, in regards to what he witnessed on the trip, "I had no idea."
One of the things I am still sorting through as I get ready for my second trip to Gaza is just how utterly unprepared I was for what I saw there. It took me a while to realize this truth. I thought I knew what to expect. I had no idea.
I was very knowledgeable about Palestine, and completely supportive of the Palestinian cause, before I traveled there. I had read and read and read. I had watched nearly every film, documentary and fiction, shot in Palestine that I could get my hands on. I had followed news of the war daily on blogs written by activists on the ground. And still. I had no idea.
I have spent a lot of time studying state-sponsored violence and organizing against it. I am pretty familiar with the darker side of humanity. I thought I had lost my capacity to be shocked. Boy was I wrong.
After just a few hours in Gaza, I realized that, far from exaggerating the level of violence that people in the Occupied Territories face, I had vastly underestimated it. Vastly. It is staggering. At times it feels like standing in front of a tidal wave.
You can read the word disproportionate but until you're walking through a neighborhood where every house has been flattened--no, where every house has been blown up with land mines individually planted by Israeli ground troops--you don't really understand what it means.
I thought I understood occupation. I didn't. Not until I was riding down Gaza's coastal road at sunset, watching the lights of Israeli gunboats glitter in the sea on one side of the bus and the red warning lights of the eastern border blink on the other, all while listening for drones overhead. Not until I was listening to shelling and trying to imagine what it would be like to sleep under that every night. To sleep in a tent under that every night.
I thought I understood repression, violence and state terror. I was not prepared. For the shattered American International School, the destroyed parliament building, for the piles of rubble that appear without warning in the middle of a block, that used to be a home or a shop or a police station. For sitting in a meeting with family members of detainees, women and small children holding pictures of their family members who are prisoners in Israeli jails, facing their pain and feeling powerless beyond description. At that meeting, I happened to be sitting next to an ISM activist who leaned over to me and said at one point: "I feel ashamed, because I was arrested in the West Bank and I only spent one day in jail." I knew exactly what he meant.
I thought I understood resistance. Blessedly, I had no idea. I had no idea how extraordinary the human capacity to stand up to violence is, what fearsome weapons political will and solidarity can be, how amazingly powerful small acts of resistance can become. A flag planted on a pile of rubble, the Islamic University student who talked about her brother, a volunteer medic killed during the war, and said "they killed my brother but they can't kill our dreams," even something as simple as a cup of tea, offered by someone standing beside the ruins of their home.
In Palestine you will see how cruel people can be, but also how strong--how brave and sweet and loving and resourceful and creative and resilient and defiant and human. You will understand exactly how much violence oppressors can deliver--and exactly how much power the oppressed have to defeat it. You'll realize that human beings can do anything.
Monday, December 21, 2009
Friday, December 18, 2009
done. ish.
Grand total for the semester:
3 features (2 first drafts, 1 serious rewrite)
326 pages of script (net)
21 page research paper
2 class presentations
3 talks on Gaza
1 departmental assistantship with plenty of its own charms that aren't appropriate to go into on this blog
It was insane, and at times I became convinced it was physically impossible, but I did it.
Of course, it doesn't really feel like anything's over, since at my last formal commitment of the semester, a rewrite class on Wednesday, I got loads of notes on Gaza Sunrise, many helpful, others eminently frustrating. And I am leaving in four days, to spend four days in Baltimore and then a week in Gaza on the Gaza Freedom March, after which it's back to LA with less than a week before classes start again.
On the one hand, I can't imagine that next semester could possibly be harder than this. On the other hand, next semester I'll be graduating, a thought that conjures up a giant ball of stress and uncertainty that I imagine looking something like the giant ball of evil in The Fifth Element.
I keep waiting for the sense of triumph that you'd think would be due to me for conquering the semester from hell. It hasn't arrived yet.
But on the bright side, I finally got around to watching some Battlestar Galactica, and damn is it awesome.
3 features (2 first drafts, 1 serious rewrite)
326 pages of script (net)
21 page research paper
2 class presentations
3 talks on Gaza
1 departmental assistantship with plenty of its own charms that aren't appropriate to go into on this blog
It was insane, and at times I became convinced it was physically impossible, but I did it.
Of course, it doesn't really feel like anything's over, since at my last formal commitment of the semester, a rewrite class on Wednesday, I got loads of notes on Gaza Sunrise, many helpful, others eminently frustrating. And I am leaving in four days, to spend four days in Baltimore and then a week in Gaza on the Gaza Freedom March, after which it's back to LA with less than a week before classes start again.
On the one hand, I can't imagine that next semester could possibly be harder than this. On the other hand, next semester I'll be graduating, a thought that conjures up a giant ball of stress and uncertainty that I imagine looking something like the giant ball of evil in The Fifth Element.
I keep waiting for the sense of triumph that you'd think would be due to me for conquering the semester from hell. It hasn't arrived yet.
But on the bright side, I finally got around to watching some Battlestar Galactica, and damn is it awesome.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
occupation, apartheid and ethnic cleansing: what's in a name?
Around the time I was in Gaza, the Israeli military patrols along the Strip's eastern border had discovered a new pastime. They were setting Gazan farmers' fields on fire. They would wait until the grain was crackling dry, almost ready to be harvested, after the farmers had spent months tending their fields under constant threat of being shot at by these very same patrols. Then they'd roll along and firebomb the fields.
There are many, many things that Israel attempts to justify under the guise of "security." The wall, the checkpoints, the constant surveillance and control of Palestinian movement, buffer zones, air strikes, demolishing homes and destroying olive groves, house raids, arrests and torture. You may argue--correctly--that none of these things actually make Israeli civilians any safer, to say nothing of the Palestinians who are the victims of such abuses. But if you buy into the idea that Israel needs to defend itself from the resistance it itself has created...well, you can sort of see the logic.
But then there are things like this. There is just no possible military justification for setting somebody's crops on fire. That's not to say that if there were a military justification, specious or otherwise, it would all be okay. But I do think it's reasonable to assume that most Israeli soldiers believe their actions to be rational and justified in the name of Israel's security. Which makes me really wonder what was going through these particular soldiers' heads as they lobbed incendiary bombs onto the scant agricultural land of a starving, imprisoned population.
All occupations and colonial situations involve immense levels of violence, racism, and dehumanization of the oppressed. But I think many people familiar with Palestine will admit that Israeli colonialism brings with it a particular viciousness that demands a particular explanation. How are we to understand this action, or any of the countless other Israeli policies--from destroying Palestinian wells and rain-water cisterns to denying imports of chocolate to Gaza--that seem to exist out of nothing more than sheer, deliberate, calculated cruelty?
There are two possible explanations. One is racist: that Israelis are just inherently mean people. But saying all Israelis are sadistic bastards (while that may certainly appear to be true if you live in the Occupied Territories) is really no better than saying all Palestinians are fanatical terrorists, right?
The other explanation is that there is an intentional program of ethnic cleansing going on in Palestine--that the utterly ruthless way in which Israel attacks every possible facet of Palestinian society and daily life is part of a conscious plan to make life so unbearable for the Palestinians that they leave. The staggering level of brutality, and its thoroughly deliberate and calculated nature, can only be understood as actions carried out by people who see their claim to the land as superior to all others and refuse to acknowledge Palestinians as equal human beings.
Many comparisons have been made between Israel and apartheid South Africa. Those comparisons are absolutely valid--particularly the comparison between South Africa's Bantustans and all currently proposed models for a Palestinian state. The Palestine solidarity movement should absolutely continue to make those comparisons, because apartheid is a system that was de-legitimized by an international solidarity movement working in coordination with a national liberation struggle inside South Africa. Apartheid is now internationally not cool, thanks to the work of those movements. Zionism has yet to be de-legitimized in the same way, although it needs to be if any just solution is to be implemented in Palestine.
But the reality is that Israel has developed its own unique and particularly virulent strain of settler colonialism, one that goes much farther than South Africa's white supremacists ever dreamed. From its inception in the false idea of Palestine as "a land without people for a people without a land," Zionism has always had a genocidal edge that seeks to deny the existence of the Palestinians as a people--and, if necessary, create that reality on the ground. It is these aggressive, expansionist, exclusionary and exterminatory tendencies in Zionism--tendencies that slide straight into fascism at their most extreme--that make Israeli colonialism so particularly vicious, unstable and dangerous a system.
I recently had a debate with a fellow traveler about whether using terms like "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide" was useful in discussions about Palestine with folks who may just be beginning to understand that the Palestinians are the oppressed group in the situation, even if we-who-know-the-score agree that what's going on in Palestine IS ethnic cleansing and genocide. I think it is not only correct, but vitally important.
I think the most basic job of the left is to tell the truth, which those in power often have an interest in obscuring. By not calling something what it is, we are doing a disservice to ourselves, by muddying our own understanding of the situation; to those we are trying to persuade, by not giving them a full and accurate picture of the massive crimes taking place; and to those we stand in solidarity with, by assuming that the reality they live every day needs to be watered down for an outside audience. In the case of this particular issue, we are also giving in to the mainstream narrative that seeks to normalize Israel as a democratic state responding to terrorist threats, instead of an ethnocentric colonial entity that was built on the dispossession and expulsion of the indigenous population, a process that continues to this day.
As usual, Israelis themselves are more clear-eyed about this issue than the American left. A majority of Israelis not only believe that what's going on in the Occupied Territories is ethnic cleansing--they support it. A new poll recently revealed that 53% of Israelis surveyed support "transfer"--the forcible mass expulsion of the Palestinian population of the Occupied Territories (and, many fear, of the Palestinian minority inside Israel as well.) In fact, transfer--that is, finishing the job of ethnic cleansing that was started in 1948--is now the most popular "solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict among Israelis. This is a significant, and frightening, hardening of Israeli racism that is essential for Americans to understand.
After visiting Gaza, two things are absolutely, inescapably clear to me. One: what Israel is doing is a calculated, conscious and systematic program of ethnic cleansing. Two: the Palestinians will never give up. This means that the situation is fundamentally unstable and can only be permanently resolved in one of two ways--equality or genocide. A resolution on the side of equality--the dismantling of Israel as an exclusionist state and the creation of a home for all people, regardless of race or religion, in all of historic Palestine--is far from impossible, but it is also far from guaranteed.
It is crucial that Americans and other internationals in solidarity with Palestine understand exactly what it is we are fighting against, and exactly how high the stakes are. Palestinians, I have no doubt, are already quite aware. Unless we are able to look Israel's true nature in the face, unless we truly understand what it is we are facing, how can we expect to comprehend what it will take to win?
There are many, many things that Israel attempts to justify under the guise of "security." The wall, the checkpoints, the constant surveillance and control of Palestinian movement, buffer zones, air strikes, demolishing homes and destroying olive groves, house raids, arrests and torture. You may argue--correctly--that none of these things actually make Israeli civilians any safer, to say nothing of the Palestinians who are the victims of such abuses. But if you buy into the idea that Israel needs to defend itself from the resistance it itself has created...well, you can sort of see the logic.
But then there are things like this. There is just no possible military justification for setting somebody's crops on fire. That's not to say that if there were a military justification, specious or otherwise, it would all be okay. But I do think it's reasonable to assume that most Israeli soldiers believe their actions to be rational and justified in the name of Israel's security. Which makes me really wonder what was going through these particular soldiers' heads as they lobbed incendiary bombs onto the scant agricultural land of a starving, imprisoned population.
All occupations and colonial situations involve immense levels of violence, racism, and dehumanization of the oppressed. But I think many people familiar with Palestine will admit that Israeli colonialism brings with it a particular viciousness that demands a particular explanation. How are we to understand this action, or any of the countless other Israeli policies--from destroying Palestinian wells and rain-water cisterns to denying imports of chocolate to Gaza--that seem to exist out of nothing more than sheer, deliberate, calculated cruelty?
There are two possible explanations. One is racist: that Israelis are just inherently mean people. But saying all Israelis are sadistic bastards (while that may certainly appear to be true if you live in the Occupied Territories) is really no better than saying all Palestinians are fanatical terrorists, right?
The other explanation is that there is an intentional program of ethnic cleansing going on in Palestine--that the utterly ruthless way in which Israel attacks every possible facet of Palestinian society and daily life is part of a conscious plan to make life so unbearable for the Palestinians that they leave. The staggering level of brutality, and its thoroughly deliberate and calculated nature, can only be understood as actions carried out by people who see their claim to the land as superior to all others and refuse to acknowledge Palestinians as equal human beings.
Many comparisons have been made between Israel and apartheid South Africa. Those comparisons are absolutely valid--particularly the comparison between South Africa's Bantustans and all currently proposed models for a Palestinian state. The Palestine solidarity movement should absolutely continue to make those comparisons, because apartheid is a system that was de-legitimized by an international solidarity movement working in coordination with a national liberation struggle inside South Africa. Apartheid is now internationally not cool, thanks to the work of those movements. Zionism has yet to be de-legitimized in the same way, although it needs to be if any just solution is to be implemented in Palestine.
But the reality is that Israel has developed its own unique and particularly virulent strain of settler colonialism, one that goes much farther than South Africa's white supremacists ever dreamed. From its inception in the false idea of Palestine as "a land without people for a people without a land," Zionism has always had a genocidal edge that seeks to deny the existence of the Palestinians as a people--and, if necessary, create that reality on the ground. It is these aggressive, expansionist, exclusionary and exterminatory tendencies in Zionism--tendencies that slide straight into fascism at their most extreme--that make Israeli colonialism so particularly vicious, unstable and dangerous a system.
I recently had a debate with a fellow traveler about whether using terms like "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide" was useful in discussions about Palestine with folks who may just be beginning to understand that the Palestinians are the oppressed group in the situation, even if we-who-know-the-score agree that what's going on in Palestine IS ethnic cleansing and genocide. I think it is not only correct, but vitally important.
I think the most basic job of the left is to tell the truth, which those in power often have an interest in obscuring. By not calling something what it is, we are doing a disservice to ourselves, by muddying our own understanding of the situation; to those we are trying to persuade, by not giving them a full and accurate picture of the massive crimes taking place; and to those we stand in solidarity with, by assuming that the reality they live every day needs to be watered down for an outside audience. In the case of this particular issue, we are also giving in to the mainstream narrative that seeks to normalize Israel as a democratic state responding to terrorist threats, instead of an ethnocentric colonial entity that was built on the dispossession and expulsion of the indigenous population, a process that continues to this day.
As usual, Israelis themselves are more clear-eyed about this issue than the American left. A majority of Israelis not only believe that what's going on in the Occupied Territories is ethnic cleansing--they support it. A new poll recently revealed that 53% of Israelis surveyed support "transfer"--the forcible mass expulsion of the Palestinian population of the Occupied Territories (and, many fear, of the Palestinian minority inside Israel as well.) In fact, transfer--that is, finishing the job of ethnic cleansing that was started in 1948--is now the most popular "solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict among Israelis. This is a significant, and frightening, hardening of Israeli racism that is essential for Americans to understand.
After visiting Gaza, two things are absolutely, inescapably clear to me. One: what Israel is doing is a calculated, conscious and systematic program of ethnic cleansing. Two: the Palestinians will never give up. This means that the situation is fundamentally unstable and can only be permanently resolved in one of two ways--equality or genocide. A resolution on the side of equality--the dismantling of Israel as an exclusionist state and the creation of a home for all people, regardless of race or religion, in all of historic Palestine--is far from impossible, but it is also far from guaranteed.
It is crucial that Americans and other internationals in solidarity with Palestine understand exactly what it is we are fighting against, and exactly how high the stakes are. Palestinians, I have no doubt, are already quite aware. Unless we are able to look Israel's true nature in the face, unless we truly understand what it is we are facing, how can we expect to comprehend what it will take to win?
Thursday, November 12, 2009
score one for the resistance
Something kind of awesome is happening in my rewrite class, where I'm working on Gaza Sunrise. I can't tell you exactly when the transformation occurred, or precisely why. Perhaps it is the pictures and videos I have been sending out to accompany each new set of pages, of things like the Apartheid Wall and the Kalandia checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah. I sometimes forget that most people have no idea what the Occupied Territories really look like, and the images can be quite powerful. Perhaps it is the fact that after actually traveling there, I am able to be more clear and articulate and unapologetic and uncompromising (yes, it is possible!) about the fact that what's going on in Palestine is resistance to colonial oppression.
But for whatever reason, at some point, people stopped questioning the political positions of the script (or at least accepted that I wasn't going to change them to match their own views of Israel/Palestine), and started actually talking about how the characters operate within the landscape of this world that is very different from the modern United States. And all of a sudden we are talking about the Palestinian struggle like exactly what it is--a national liberation movement against an oppressive, occupying, colonial force--and the political and moral and personal choices one faces in being part of such a struggle. Which is of course what the script is actually about.
My professor (who I think is turning out to be one of my favorite professors at USC so far) said something amazing today about Moira, my protagonist. He called her a coward. For running away. For leaving Palestine after her militant father was assassinated in an attack that very nearly killed her as well, instead of following in his footsteps and continuing to fight. Which, if you think about it, implies some recognition of the idea that to stay and fight--despite the titanic risks involved--is the right choice in this situation, the choice that is not only honorable and brave but necessary for this character's growth and transformation. Which is exactly what Moira herself realizes over the course of the story.
Ha! I thought when he said that. I've got you thinking like the resistance now! But really, this is quite remarkable if you stop and think about it. At least within the confines of this rewrite class, I've won. I've succeeded in portraying these characters, who are involved in armed resistance against Israel, as not terrorists or religious fanatics or some fetishized Other, but as human beings who operate in an emotional landscape that is recognizable and understandable to people who've never been to Palestine and maybe don't even know that much about the conflict. If at the end of this script, I can get you to empathize with Palestinians who choose to stay and fight for their homeland, their rights and their loved ones against Israeli aggression...well, I've done my job, haven't I?
If anything, this semester has just reinforced my belief that the Palestinian cause is actually quite morally clear and easy to sympathize with when you know the reality of what's going on on the ground. Because the environment in the previous class in which I worked on this script was kind of hostile...or maybe un-empathetic is a better word...I think I spent a lot of time in the first draft trying to "complicate" the picture of Palestine I was presenting. When really, as Moira says near the beginning of the script, it's not that complicated at all. Oppressor. Oppressed. Which side are you on?
But for whatever reason, at some point, people stopped questioning the political positions of the script (or at least accepted that I wasn't going to change them to match their own views of Israel/Palestine), and started actually talking about how the characters operate within the landscape of this world that is very different from the modern United States. And all of a sudden we are talking about the Palestinian struggle like exactly what it is--a national liberation movement against an oppressive, occupying, colonial force--and the political and moral and personal choices one faces in being part of such a struggle. Which is of course what the script is actually about.
My professor (who I think is turning out to be one of my favorite professors at USC so far) said something amazing today about Moira, my protagonist. He called her a coward. For running away. For leaving Palestine after her militant father was assassinated in an attack that very nearly killed her as well, instead of following in his footsteps and continuing to fight. Which, if you think about it, implies some recognition of the idea that to stay and fight--despite the titanic risks involved--is the right choice in this situation, the choice that is not only honorable and brave but necessary for this character's growth and transformation. Which is exactly what Moira herself realizes over the course of the story.
Ha! I thought when he said that. I've got you thinking like the resistance now! But really, this is quite remarkable if you stop and think about it. At least within the confines of this rewrite class, I've won. I've succeeded in portraying these characters, who are involved in armed resistance against Israel, as not terrorists or religious fanatics or some fetishized Other, but as human beings who operate in an emotional landscape that is recognizable and understandable to people who've never been to Palestine and maybe don't even know that much about the conflict. If at the end of this script, I can get you to empathize with Palestinians who choose to stay and fight for their homeland, their rights and their loved ones against Israeli aggression...well, I've done my job, haven't I?
If anything, this semester has just reinforced my belief that the Palestinian cause is actually quite morally clear and easy to sympathize with when you know the reality of what's going on on the ground. Because the environment in the previous class in which I worked on this script was kind of hostile...or maybe un-empathetic is a better word...I think I spent a lot of time in the first draft trying to "complicate" the picture of Palestine I was presenting. When really, as Moira says near the beginning of the script, it's not that complicated at all. Oppressor. Oppressed. Which side are you on?
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
back to gaza! and other updates
If you have noticed a precipitous decline in my rate of posting since, oh, the start of the semester, it's only because my non-blog-writing workload has been epic as of late. But, as I've learned that my brain is too fried from eight consecutive hours of class on Wednesdays to handle anything creative, it's time for some updates.
1. As you may have surmised from my sidebar, I'm going back to Gaza during winter break for the Gaza Freedom March. The march will be a direct, nonviolent challenge to the Israeli blockade and the total closure of the border crossings controlled by Israel. Along with the upcoming Viva Palestina joint US-UK convoy, it will be quite possibly the largest mobilization of internationals to Palestine in history. Already, 500 people from 32 countries have signed up to participate in the march, including Alice Walker, Walden Bello, and current and former government officials from several nations. We expect to be joined on the march by some tens of thousands of Palestinians--the exact number remains unclear, but the list of endorsers from Palestinian civil society is impressive.
My first trip to Palestine was more amazing than I could have ever possibly imagined--horrible, yes, but incredible, too. I started from a position of solidarity with the Palestinians and what I would consider to be an above-average knowledge of the region and its politics (at least for an American), and I was still completely transformed by the experience of actually going there. Those six days shaped my understanding of the world in ways I'm still just beginning to understand. I can't wait to go back and I feel so lucky to have the chance to participate in what I think will be a historic action. I cannot think of a better way to greet 2010 than with some nonviolent direct action in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
If you would like to participate in the Gaza Freedom March, I think it will pretty much rock your world. Register on the website by November 30.
2. For anyone in the Los Angeles area, I will be speaking on Palestine at the Southern California Socialist Conference, happening November 21-22 at USC. Despite what the website says, my session will in fact be from 1:30-3 on Saturday. Check out a single session or the whole conference; there will be some awesome speakers, including a keynote by Mike Davis.
3. Also for those in Los Angeles: after my session at the conference, you can head right down the street to a citywide organizing meeting for the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. Activists will be strategizing about ways to protest the LA Department of Water & Power's cooperation with the Israeli national water company.
1. As you may have surmised from my sidebar, I'm going back to Gaza during winter break for the Gaza Freedom March. The march will be a direct, nonviolent challenge to the Israeli blockade and the total closure of the border crossings controlled by Israel. Along with the upcoming Viva Palestina joint US-UK convoy, it will be quite possibly the largest mobilization of internationals to Palestine in history. Already, 500 people from 32 countries have signed up to participate in the march, including Alice Walker, Walden Bello, and current and former government officials from several nations. We expect to be joined on the march by some tens of thousands of Palestinians--the exact number remains unclear, but the list of endorsers from Palestinian civil society is impressive.
My first trip to Palestine was more amazing than I could have ever possibly imagined--horrible, yes, but incredible, too. I started from a position of solidarity with the Palestinians and what I would consider to be an above-average knowledge of the region and its politics (at least for an American), and I was still completely transformed by the experience of actually going there. Those six days shaped my understanding of the world in ways I'm still just beginning to understand. I can't wait to go back and I feel so lucky to have the chance to participate in what I think will be a historic action. I cannot think of a better way to greet 2010 than with some nonviolent direct action in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
If you would like to participate in the Gaza Freedom March, I think it will pretty much rock your world. Register on the website by November 30.
2. For anyone in the Los Angeles area, I will be speaking on Palestine at the Southern California Socialist Conference, happening November 21-22 at USC. Despite what the website says, my session will in fact be from 1:30-3 on Saturday. Check out a single session or the whole conference; there will be some awesome speakers, including a keynote by Mike Davis.
3. Also for those in Los Angeles: after my session at the conference, you can head right down the street to a citywide organizing meeting for the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. Activists will be strategizing about ways to protest the LA Department of Water & Power's cooperation with the Israeli national water company.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
hunger games post #2: katniss, race and casting
So, not surprisingly, The Hunger Games is gonna be a movie. And since THG has already developed a substantial (and, judging by writing style, I'd guess mostly teenage) online fandom, that means that the fantasy casting mill is already grinding away, despite the film deal being still in its infant stages.
As I've been poking around for interesting Hunger Games-related stuff on the interwebs, I've noticed a disturbing trend. In the majority of fantasy-casting and fan art that I've found, Katniss Everdeen, the protagonist of The Hunger Games, has mysteriously become white.
The whole question of how race operates in the world of The Hunger Games is pretty interesting in itself. The books take place several hundred years into the future, after who knows what has happened to the population of North America. And also people can dye their bodies green and stuff. So there's no reason to assume people in Panem think about race in remotely the same way we do today. Many of the geographic and ethnic labels we currently use to identify race probably have no meaning in this world, since countries and even continents may no longer have the same names.
But given the general overall trend toward increased migration to and from increasingly diverse parts of the world, and a general relaxing of taboos against interracial marriage (unless of course you live in Louisiana), it seems a reasonable assumption that a future North America would contain more people of mixed race and fewer people who could be clearly identified as white.
Katniss and her best-friend-maybe-boyfriend Gale, who both grew up in the Seam, the poorest part of District 12, are described in the book as having "straight black hair, olive skin, [and] gray eyes." (On a side note, I'm pretty sure black hair + olive skin + gray eyes is a fairly statistically improbable phenotype, since gray eyes are produced by the same gene as blue eyes and tend to be more common in light-skinned, light-haired people.)
I've always pictured Katniss looking sort of Native American, maybe like a teenage version of Tonantzin Carmelo:
If you pictured her as looking sort of Latina you're probably not that far off either. The point is that Katniss, Gale, and most of the people of the Seam seem clearly (to me at least) not white.
The world of Panem, as I noted in an earlier post, has many features in common with the world of European colonialism (and slavery--we'll get to that.)* One of these is that there is a pigmentocracy in District 12. The people of the "merchant class," to which Katniss's mother, and Katniss's other potential love interest Peeta, belong, are described as having blond hair and blue eyes, while the poorer coal mining families of the Seam are dark-haired and dark-skinned.
And yet in the vast majority of fan art and fan casting, Katniss is depicted as having brown hair and light skin (and often looking about 30, but that's another issue). And while the casting suggestions have ranged from intriguing (Ellen Page--did you see her in Hard Candy?) to atrocious (Megan Fox. Um...WTF?) they have been 99% white. (Although I have to say the suggestion of Hugh Laurie as Haymitch made me laugh out loud.)
Even more disturbing is what's happening to the characters from District 11. District 11 is a plantation. If you didn't pick up on the not-too-subtle hints toward this in The Hunger Games, it's made explicit when Katniss and Peeta go there in Catching Fire. All the characters we get to know from District 11 are Black. Rue, the little girl with whom Katniss makes a heartbreakingly brief alliance in The Hunger Games, is described as having "dark brown skin and eyes." And yet somehow white Rue has popped up a few times too.
I'm pretty sure the British cover of The Hunger Games, which is otherwise very cool, is to blame for some of the whitewashing.
(By the way, this all reminds me very much of the controversy over the US cover of Liar, by Australian YA author Justine Larbalestier, which you can read about here and here. As a matter of fact, read her whole blog. She is a damn smart lady who has a lot of great things to say about race, gender and representation in YA literature.**)
But I'm also not entirely convinced that all the fans out there have seen the British cover. I kind of think they're doing this whitewashing on their own.
To me, the most disturbing thing is when fans say something like "That's how I always imagined that character looking!", when it's very clearly not how they are described in the book. If it were just Hollywood doing the whitewashing, I wouldn't be surprised. That's par for the course. Hollywood has spent most of its existence whitewashing the moving image, and it goes far beyond the really obvious stuff like blackface. (Alec Guinness is an Arab! Charlton Heston is Mexican! To name just two examples I can think of off the top of my head.) But the idea that fans themselves--who have actually read the book, which may not be the case for a Hollywood exec--are imagining all the characters as white, when they are very clearly not described that way, is something I find kind of frightening.
And yet, in a certain sense, I realize it is Hollywood doing the whitewashing, by constantly and overwhelmingly presenting images of whiteness, assuming white is neutral, and therefore implicitly (or explicitly) short-circuiting the careers of talented non-white actors. Is it really that surprising, in today's media world, that when asked to name half a dozen actors who can play a tough sixteen-year-old girl, almost all the choices are white? Life ain't easy for actors of color, and it's even harder for actors who don't fit into an easily-identifiable racial box. I don't have to go on about the obstacles for non-white actors in Hollywood--which are of course related to the obstacles faced by writers, directors and producers of color as well--and are as ubiquitous as the fact that if you don't specify a character's race in a script, they are universally assumed to be white. (I do, however, recommend this excellent article from Racialicious, which deals with the matter far more eloquently that I have done so far.)
This issue has been of particular concern to me of late since I'm writing a script, Gaza Sunrise, with a biracial protagonist, Moira Shaheed, who's the child of an Irish mother and a Palestinian father. In the script, Moira is described as being able to pass for white. In my mind, that is not the same as being white.
I picture Moira looking quite a lot like Lubna Azabal looks in Paradise Now.
She's fairly light-skinned, and probably has naturally curly hair like most Arabs, but straightens it and maybe highlights it a little to make herself look whiter. If you saw her on the street in Marseilles, where she lives at the beginning of the script, you might assume she was Italian or Spanish.
Okay, so technically Moira is half white. But the life experience that defines her is not that of a white European, but of a Palestinian refugee. And I know I would be goddam pissed if a white actor ever got cast in that role. (I'm hoping to circumvent this with the fact that the script is 90% in Arabic...unless someone decides to make it in English...don't get me started on that.) But do you know how many casting suggestions involving white actors I've gotten? Including Natalie Portman, who was BORN IN ISRAEL.
As for who will play Katniss, I have to say I think the chances of her being whitewashed are pretty high. I will probably be happy if they don't cast someone who looks 30. Which brings me back to Ellen Page, one of the few young actresses out there who I think could actually rock Katniss's non-feminine gender expression. Which is the subject of my next post.
But if Rue turns out to be played by Abigail Breslin, I'm boycotting.
*Actually, if you think of Panem as the product of a society that's collapsed, and is now re-forming itself by going through a process of primitive accumulation, the presence of social structures that resemble slavery and colonialism kind of makes sense.
**She also has footnotes on her blog! I want to learn to do this! Because I'm a giant nerd.
As I've been poking around for interesting Hunger Games-related stuff on the interwebs, I've noticed a disturbing trend. In the majority of fantasy-casting and fan art that I've found, Katniss Everdeen, the protagonist of The Hunger Games, has mysteriously become white.
The whole question of how race operates in the world of The Hunger Games is pretty interesting in itself. The books take place several hundred years into the future, after who knows what has happened to the population of North America. And also people can dye their bodies green and stuff. So there's no reason to assume people in Panem think about race in remotely the same way we do today. Many of the geographic and ethnic labels we currently use to identify race probably have no meaning in this world, since countries and even continents may no longer have the same names.
But given the general overall trend toward increased migration to and from increasingly diverse parts of the world, and a general relaxing of taboos against interracial marriage (unless of course you live in Louisiana), it seems a reasonable assumption that a future North America would contain more people of mixed race and fewer people who could be clearly identified as white.
Katniss and her best-friend-maybe-boyfriend Gale, who both grew up in the Seam, the poorest part of District 12, are described in the book as having "straight black hair, olive skin, [and] gray eyes." (On a side note, I'm pretty sure black hair + olive skin + gray eyes is a fairly statistically improbable phenotype, since gray eyes are produced by the same gene as blue eyes and tend to be more common in light-skinned, light-haired people.)
I've always pictured Katniss looking sort of Native American, maybe like a teenage version of Tonantzin Carmelo:
If you pictured her as looking sort of Latina you're probably not that far off either. The point is that Katniss, Gale, and most of the people of the Seam seem clearly (to me at least) not white.The world of Panem, as I noted in an earlier post, has many features in common with the world of European colonialism (and slavery--we'll get to that.)* One of these is that there is a pigmentocracy in District 12. The people of the "merchant class," to which Katniss's mother, and Katniss's other potential love interest Peeta, belong, are described as having blond hair and blue eyes, while the poorer coal mining families of the Seam are dark-haired and dark-skinned.
And yet in the vast majority of fan art and fan casting, Katniss is depicted as having brown hair and light skin (and often looking about 30, but that's another issue). And while the casting suggestions have ranged from intriguing (Ellen Page--did you see her in Hard Candy?) to atrocious (Megan Fox. Um...WTF?) they have been 99% white. (Although I have to say the suggestion of Hugh Laurie as Haymitch made me laugh out loud.)
Even more disturbing is what's happening to the characters from District 11. District 11 is a plantation. If you didn't pick up on the not-too-subtle hints toward this in The Hunger Games, it's made explicit when Katniss and Peeta go there in Catching Fire. All the characters we get to know from District 11 are Black. Rue, the little girl with whom Katniss makes a heartbreakingly brief alliance in The Hunger Games, is described as having "dark brown skin and eyes." And yet somehow white Rue has popped up a few times too.
I'm pretty sure the British cover of The Hunger Games, which is otherwise very cool, is to blame for some of the whitewashing.
(By the way, this all reminds me very much of the controversy over the US cover of Liar, by Australian YA author Justine Larbalestier, which you can read about here and here. As a matter of fact, read her whole blog. She is a damn smart lady who has a lot of great things to say about race, gender and representation in YA literature.**)But I'm also not entirely convinced that all the fans out there have seen the British cover. I kind of think they're doing this whitewashing on their own.
To me, the most disturbing thing is when fans say something like "That's how I always imagined that character looking!", when it's very clearly not how they are described in the book. If it were just Hollywood doing the whitewashing, I wouldn't be surprised. That's par for the course. Hollywood has spent most of its existence whitewashing the moving image, and it goes far beyond the really obvious stuff like blackface. (Alec Guinness is an Arab! Charlton Heston is Mexican! To name just two examples I can think of off the top of my head.) But the idea that fans themselves--who have actually read the book, which may not be the case for a Hollywood exec--are imagining all the characters as white, when they are very clearly not described that way, is something I find kind of frightening.
And yet, in a certain sense, I realize it is Hollywood doing the whitewashing, by constantly and overwhelmingly presenting images of whiteness, assuming white is neutral, and therefore implicitly (or explicitly) short-circuiting the careers of talented non-white actors. Is it really that surprising, in today's media world, that when asked to name half a dozen actors who can play a tough sixteen-year-old girl, almost all the choices are white? Life ain't easy for actors of color, and it's even harder for actors who don't fit into an easily-identifiable racial box. I don't have to go on about the obstacles for non-white actors in Hollywood--which are of course related to the obstacles faced by writers, directors and producers of color as well--and are as ubiquitous as the fact that if you don't specify a character's race in a script, they are universally assumed to be white. (I do, however, recommend this excellent article from Racialicious, which deals with the matter far more eloquently that I have done so far.)
This issue has been of particular concern to me of late since I'm writing a script, Gaza Sunrise, with a biracial protagonist, Moira Shaheed, who's the child of an Irish mother and a Palestinian father. In the script, Moira is described as being able to pass for white. In my mind, that is not the same as being white.
I picture Moira looking quite a lot like Lubna Azabal looks in Paradise Now.
She's fairly light-skinned, and probably has naturally curly hair like most Arabs, but straightens it and maybe highlights it a little to make herself look whiter. If you saw her on the street in Marseilles, where she lives at the beginning of the script, you might assume she was Italian or Spanish.Okay, so technically Moira is half white. But the life experience that defines her is not that of a white European, but of a Palestinian refugee. And I know I would be goddam pissed if a white actor ever got cast in that role. (I'm hoping to circumvent this with the fact that the script is 90% in Arabic...unless someone decides to make it in English...don't get me started on that.) But do you know how many casting suggestions involving white actors I've gotten? Including Natalie Portman, who was BORN IN ISRAEL.
As for who will play Katniss, I have to say I think the chances of her being whitewashed are pretty high. I will probably be happy if they don't cast someone who looks 30. Which brings me back to Ellen Page, one of the few young actresses out there who I think could actually rock Katniss's non-feminine gender expression. Which is the subject of my next post.
But if Rue turns out to be played by Abigail Breslin, I'm boycotting.
*Actually, if you think of Panem as the product of a society that's collapsed, and is now re-forming itself by going through a process of primitive accumulation, the presence of social structures that resemble slavery and colonialism kind of makes sense.
**She also has footnotes on her blog! I want to learn to do this! Because I'm a giant nerd.
Friday, October 16, 2009
oppression and resistance in the hunger games
Do you remember, my fellow degenerates, how I mentioned The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins's delightfully grim and violent post-apocalyptic dystopia, as the book I had to hide in my closet because I was afraid that once I started reading it I could not put it down?Well, I caved. I started reading it, and I was right. I couldn't stop. I was totally hooked. And despite the million tons of work I had to do that did not involve reading young-adult fiction, I devoured the combined 800 pages of The Hunger Games and its sequel, Catching Fire, in a matter of days.
I think there is an enormous amount to be said about The Hunger Games, and I've been able to find far less serious and insightful commentary on these books as I would have expected. I plan to make up for that with several blog posts, starting now.
What makes The Hunger Games so awesome? I think it's really not very different than what makes Harry Potter awesome, which is that underneath the fantastical and/or futuristic trappings is a really great resistance story that feels utterly and totally authentic.
The Hunger Games trilogy (the third book is due out next fall) is set several hundred years in the future, when the present-day nations of North America have collapsed, to be replaced with Panem, a brutal dictatorship controlled by the rich and technologically advanced Capitol. (I totally thought Colorado Springs, too!) The Capitol rules over twelve impoverished Districts in what is basically an old-school colonial relationship, complete with single-industry extraction economies, but maintained with all the terrifying technology of modern warfare. (Sound familiar?) Some seventy-five years before the start of our story, the Districts rebelled against this state of affairs. The rebellion was crushed. One District, 13, was wiped completely off the map. As punishment and an ongoing reminder of the Capitol's power, the remaining twelve Districts are forced once a year to send two of their children, one boy and one girl, to compete in a bloody fight to the death broadcast to the whole nation on live TV.
The selection of competitors, or "tributes," is supposed to be random, but in reality, there's a poverty draft--you can put your name in the lottery extra times in exchange for meager food rations for you and your family. If you are between the ages of twelve and eighteen, you can also volunteer to take the place of someone else who is chosen--which is exactly what Katniss Everdeen, the book's 16-year-old protagonist, does when her 12-year-old sister Prim is selected for the Games.
The first book follows Katniss, a hard-bitten and refreshingly ungirly heroine, as she competes in, and survives, the seventy-fourth Hunger Games. The Hunger Games are supposed to be a display of the Capitol's unlimited power, and by refusing to play by their rules, Katniss (mostly unwittingly) provides a spark that sets off what could very well be the beginning of a revolution in Panem. Catching Fire explores the consequences of Katniss's actions as the rebellion she never intended to start spreads and the Capitol's response threatens pretty much everyone and everything she loves.
So many things about this formula could so easily be cliched. It's Battle Royale, The Running Man, a gladiator game, a critique of reality TV, and the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur all thrown into a big pot. And yet somehow, Collins makes it work, and creates something brutal and scary and real and utterly compelling.
I have a writing teacher who is fond of telling us to exercise our inner sadist--meaning, figure out what will really hurt your characters, what their worst fears are, and then make them confront that. Well, let's just say that Suzanne Collins's inner sadist is ready for a marathon. (This is extra hilarious since she looks like a Girl Scout leader.) I'm someone who reads about torture in my spare time--it takes a lot to make me shudder when reading a book. In Catching Fire, Collins managed it three times.* She has a masterful understanding of the dynamics of oppression and resistance, and has created a chilling dystopia on par with the worlds of 1984 and The Handmaid's Tale. She gives her characters true horrors to face, and face them they do, and it's riveting.
Much of The Hunger Games deals with what it's like to grow up in a world that is unrelentingly violent--not just the obvious violence of the Capitol's heavily-armed police force (in a wonderful irony, they're called Peacekeepers), but the more insidious violence of generations of poverty, starvation, hard labor, restriction of movement and severely limited opportunities.
Katniss is a survivor, and Collins really reckons with what that means in a world like Panem. Since her father was killed in a mining accident when she was twelve, Katniss has kept herself, her mother and little sister Prim from literally starving to death by hunting illegally in the woods outside her home in District 12. She has grown up driven by a single-minded mission to keep her family alive, and has ruthlessly suppressed any emotion, dream or desire inside herself that does not aid that mission--to the point that she is hardly even capable of understanding her own feelings when they don't concern the immediate survival of those she loves.
The Hunger Games explores, with remarkable insight, how and why people resist oppression in conditions where the price of doing so is staggeringly high. The power of the Capitol is fearsome; its use of violence and state terror is calculated, deliberate, overwhelming and unforgiving. As I read The Hunger Games, a phrase from the Goldstone report, documenting Israeli war crimes in Gaza, kept running through my head: "deliberately disproportionate." Everything the Capitol does is deliberately disproportionate, and the Hunger Games themselves are the perfect example. They are a massive, public, indefinite form of collective punishment. The message couldn't be clearer: resist once, and we will punish all of you, forever, in the cruelest way we can imagine.
And yet the people of Panem do resist, in a thousand different ways, many of which are symbolic and almost all of which are, by necessity, nonviolent. My friend Madeline has written a splendid post about The Hunger Games as an exploration of what nonviolent resistance means in a violent world, and what she has to say is right on, so I don't feel the need to repeat it here. But suffice to say that in a world where the Capitol claims to have absolute control, even purely symbolic acts of resistance can take on enormous power. A salute, a song, flowers, a painting, a loaf of bread, a dress, the act of holding hands with someone you've been told is supposed to be your enemy--all these seemingly mundane things become potent weapons against the Capitol.
One of the things that Collins really nails is the way in which unbearable conditions drive people to resist despite the risks of doing so. The opening chapters of Catching Fire, in particular, beautifully capture the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" logic of oppression. Even if someone in the Districts "behaves" and slaves away uncomplainingly for her entire life, she'll still be oppressed from the day she is born until the day she dies. If the choice is between doing nothing and being oppressed and resisting and being oppressed, on balance, sometimes resistance just feels better. At least it gives you a chance to feel like you're doing something other than passively accepting your own subjugation.
At the beginning of Catching Fire, Katniss is jumping through hoops set up by super creepy President Snow (who has been "president," we learn, for at least 25 years), trying to control the rebellion she has unintentionally unleashed and avoid violent reprisal against her loved ones. At a key point in the book, she realizes that nothing she can do will ever satisfy the Capitol. She can't win by playing by their rules, because the game is fixed in their favor. The realization is terrifying, but also oddly liberating--it means, Katniss reflects, that "I am free to act as desperately as I wish."
Once Katniss decides she's down with the rebellion (although she still doesn't understand quite what that means), she must face the reality that not just she herself, but everyone around her may be punished for her defiance. She decides that she is capable of facing arrest, torture, and death at the hand of the Capitol--after all, she's already had to face these possibilities in the Games. But the idea of her family, particularly her younger sister Prim, being hurt because of her actions paralyzes her with terror.
I need only to think of Prim and all my resolve disintegrates. It's my job to protect her.... I can't let the Capitol hurt Prim.Couldn't have said it better myself.
And then it hits me. They already have. They have killed her father in those wretched mines. They have sat by as she almost starved to death. They have chosen her as a tribute, then made her watch her sister fight to the death in the Games. She has been hurt far worse that I had at the age of twelve.
Prim...Rue...aren't they the very reason I have to try to fight? Because what has been done to them is so wrong, so beyond justification, so evil that there is no choice? Because no one has the right to treat them as they have been treated?
Yes. This is the thing to remember when fear threatens to swallow me up. What I am about to do, whatever any of us are forced to endure, it is for them.
I realize I've already written quite a lot, and haven't even scratched the surface of some of the many other interesting elements of these books. There is so much to say about Katniss as a heroine and a narrator, and about the Games themselves as social commentary, that I feel at least one more blog post is in order here. And goddam, I haven't even mentioned what I think about Team Gale vs. Team Peeta. (Short answer: silly marketing gimmick engineered by Scholastic.)
There is so much fantastic stuff in these books about the dynamics of how and why people fight back, how the daily insults and humiliations and degradations of oppression build up inside people until they explode, how acts of violent repression are just as likely to propel people forward into struggle as backward into fear, how people move from the instinctive resistance necessary for survival to the organized resistance of revolutions, and the often bitter and brutal choices they must make along the way. Collins has set herself a very high bar for the third book, and I have to admit I'm just a tiny bit nervous about whether she will be able to live up to the truly radical conclusions of her own story. But I certainly know I'm dying to find out.
*In case you've read the books and were wondering, the three shudder-inducing moments for me were: pretty much everything in District 11, Gale's encounter with the new Head Peacekeeper, and that bit with the jabberjays, which is just about the most horrible thing I can imagine.
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