I have a few half-completed posts from my trip to Palestine with IFPB that I'm trying to turn into completed posts. Here's the first one.
The day after I was interrogated at the Allenby Bridge, I got up at the crack of dawn to go to Haifa. It was the end of a three-week trip and I was pretty exhausted. But we hadn't been anywhere in the north of Israel, my friend M wanted to go with me, and more than anything I wanted to talk to M about what had happened at the bridge, because she's Palestinian and has been interrogated many times by Israeli border officials. So I dragged my luggage up the Old City steps and onto a bus.
She asked me how I was, meaning were there any lingering effects from my border adventure the previous day. I told her I was fine. Of course I was. They'd let me in, right? They hadn't hurt me or anything, and I had never been worried that they would. I knew it wasn't that kind of situation. The worst they were going to do was try to scare me. And in the grand scheme of Israeli repression, what was a little psychological roughing-up, really? It was nothing, I said.
Really, I wanted desperately to talk about it, to pour out the whole story, every detail. I wanted someone to commiserate, to tell me I'd made the right choices, to say, "those bastards," with the shake of the head and the wry half-smile that says, "I've been there." But she said we should be careful what we talked about on the bus, so I held in the story and we talked about other things.
I spent most of the day in a haze of cognitive dissonance, wandering through the stunning ordinariness of Haifa. I got out most of the salient details over coffee in a shopping area that felt oppressively normal. I kept thinking about that quote from Joe Sacco's Palestine:
"Make no mistake, everywhere you go, not just in Marvel Comics, there's parallel universes. Here? On the surface streets: traffic, couples in love, falafel-to-go, tourists in jogging suits licking stamps for postcards...And over the wall behind closed doors, other things--people strapped to chairs, sleep deprivation, the smell of piss...other things happening for reasons of national security."
Okay, yeah, my experience wasn't nearly that dramatic. But still. I'd spent a few hours in that other world--or at least in the first circle of it--and today the ordinariness of the normal world that covered it up seemed unbearably criminal and sick.
Throughout the day, little things kept setting me on edge. The soldiers that seemed to be on every bus. A woman's voice with a particular accent. The bag search at the bus stop, which two days ago would have been a minor annoyance, but today felt invasive and icky.
By lunchtime there was a cold twisty knot of anxiety in my stomach, almost enough to keep me from eating. This wasn't a final-exam or a night-before-the-big-pitchfest nervousness, but something deeply wired into my body's emergency response system, an elemental fear. It wasn't the kind you could channel into a burst of adrenaline and focus, but the kind that paralyzed, the kind that made you want to curl up in a ball and hide somewhere. I realized the source of this fear was the thought of going through another Israeli-controlled border terminal (Ben Gurion Airport) in less than 24 hours. I had to do it because I had to get on the plane to go home, but I really, deeply did not want to.
I realized maybe I was not as fine as I'd said I was.
Then I started to get angry. I was angry at them for having so much control over me, and angry at myself for letting them. It felt like something that had been done against my will, this installation of fear. No matter how many times I told myself I wasn't afraid of them, that they didn't intimidate me, that my non-Palestinian identity kept me safe from actual physical harm, it didn't matter. My emergency responses were doing something else.
I was ashamed, too, at the thought that I'd let them get to me. I felt I wasn't living up to the Palestinian standard of toughness. Because what they did to me was so minor, really. Barely a blip on the radar compared to the repression they dish out against Palestinians. But it had still left a mark.
I also felt a kind of backhanded awe for the enormity of the oppressive power Palestinians have to face every day. And I realized why everyone always says they're fine. Because there's always someone who has a worse story. Because everyone feels a responsibility to be tough for everyone else, to shrug it off with a defiant grin and a flash of bravado. Because you don't want to admit how much of a hold they have on you, because if you admit it you might never get out.
I admitted to M that I was feeling really nervous about the airport. "It's helpful to prepare for the worst," she said. This didn't seem like very comforting advice at the time, but it actually turned out to be quite useful. After preparing myself for a strip search and more questioning, the quick bag check and pat down with clothes on, and the fact that the airport security people were merely bored and not hostile, felt like a gift. But that made me a little angry too. Because being only mildly harassed by airport security shouldn't feel like a fucking gift.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Monday, October 18, 2010
movie review: budrus
Sometimes I forget that the Palestine I know and love is so very different from the view of Palestine and Palestinians that gets presented in the mainstream media and is absorbed more or less uncontested by most Americans. Anyone who wants to see my Palestine--the real Palestine--should watch Budrus.
Budrus is a good documentary by any standard, but as an education tool it is simply superb. It shoots down so many myths about Palestine and Palestinians all at once--that Palestinians are unreasoning violent terrorists; that Israel is just defending itself; that there is too much ingrained hatred for Palestinians and Israelis to ever live and work together; that Palestinian women and girls are meek and submissive and play no role in the struggle. All these stereotypes and more are soundly demolished in the film's slight one hour and eighteen minute running time.
When the residents of the West Bank town after which the film is named learn that Israel's apartheid wall will slice through their town's land, cutting through the cemetery and separating villagers from most of their agricultural land, they decide to resist, using classic tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience. The Israeli army, predictably, responds with disproportionate, punitive violence. The struggle unites local activists from Fatah and Hamas, men and women, young and old, Palestinians, internationals and Israelis. Lead organizer Ayed Morrar's teenage daughter Iltezam is a force unto herself.
The scenes of Palestinian and Israeli activists defending each other against the army are some of the most inspiring moments in the film. You can see two groups of people learning to trust and care about each other like family. "They don't all hate us," realizes Iltezam Morrar, speaking about her new Israeli friends, which is striking because it's usually framed the other way around. You can see the change in the Israeli activists too, how someone from an oppressor settler-colonial society can be transformed by switching sides and throwing their lot in with the oppressed. In those moments, you can see how the whole apartheid system could collapse.
For those already familiar with the history of unarmed resistance in Palestine, Budrus won't present tons of new information. Visitors to the Occupied Palestinian Territories now have the choice of attending one of a dozen or so protests of the type seen in Budrus on any given Friday. What the film does do is tell the story of nonviolent resistance in one West Bank village incredibly well. The filmmakers were there at the right time, and in the right places, and they reveal the transformation of the village through struggle in such an uncomplicated, straightforward way that the film's power doesn't really hit you until some time after you've left the theater.
Budrus is currently playing in film festivals and limited release around the world. Look for a screening near you here.
Budrus is a good documentary by any standard, but as an education tool it is simply superb. It shoots down so many myths about Palestine and Palestinians all at once--that Palestinians are unreasoning violent terrorists; that Israel is just defending itself; that there is too much ingrained hatred for Palestinians and Israelis to ever live and work together; that Palestinian women and girls are meek and submissive and play no role in the struggle. All these stereotypes and more are soundly demolished in the film's slight one hour and eighteen minute running time.
When the residents of the West Bank town after which the film is named learn that Israel's apartheid wall will slice through their town's land, cutting through the cemetery and separating villagers from most of their agricultural land, they decide to resist, using classic tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience. The Israeli army, predictably, responds with disproportionate, punitive violence. The struggle unites local activists from Fatah and Hamas, men and women, young and old, Palestinians, internationals and Israelis. Lead organizer Ayed Morrar's teenage daughter Iltezam is a force unto herself.
The scenes of Palestinian and Israeli activists defending each other against the army are some of the most inspiring moments in the film. You can see two groups of people learning to trust and care about each other like family. "They don't all hate us," realizes Iltezam Morrar, speaking about her new Israeli friends, which is striking because it's usually framed the other way around. You can see the change in the Israeli activists too, how someone from an oppressor settler-colonial society can be transformed by switching sides and throwing their lot in with the oppressed. In those moments, you can see how the whole apartheid system could collapse.
For those already familiar with the history of unarmed resistance in Palestine, Budrus won't present tons of new information. Visitors to the Occupied Palestinian Territories now have the choice of attending one of a dozen or so protests of the type seen in Budrus on any given Friday. What the film does do is tell the story of nonviolent resistance in one West Bank village incredibly well. The filmmakers were there at the right time, and in the right places, and they reveal the transformation of the village through struggle in such an uncomplicated, straightforward way that the film's power doesn't really hit you until some time after you've left the theater.
Budrus is currently playing in film festivals and limited release around the world. Look for a screening near you here.
Monday, October 4, 2010
writing is a job
If I haven't been writing here so much in the past month, it is only because I am busy writing other things. I'm working on two feature scripts in collaboration with other people, plus some of my own stuff, plus organizing a move back to NYC for next month (yay!).
I do have several unfinished posts from my trip to Palestine that I want to get up in the next few weeks, and as November 19 approaches you know you can expect some posts of the wizard inclination. But if I am not writing here so regularly, fear not. I'll be back soon.
I do have several unfinished posts from my trip to Palestine that I want to get up in the next few weeks, and as November 19 approaches you know you can expect some posts of the wizard inclination. But if I am not writing here so regularly, fear not. I'll be back soon.
Friday, September 24, 2010
movie review: lebanon
Spoiler alert. Actually I'm pretty much going to destroy this movie, so...fair warning.
Samuel Maoz's highly praised film Lebanon is the perfect crystallization of the Israeli national tendency to want to be both victim and oppressor. Set during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon (in which Maoz was a participant), the film follows four young soldiers who drive a tank into a Lebanese town, then seem genuinely surprised to find themselves attacked while invading someone else's country.
Visually, the film is quite amazing. Staged almost entirely inside the belly of the tank, our only glimpse of the outside world is through the cross-hairs of the gunner's sights. The visual trick of being able to zoom in on a target leads to some breathtaking moments early in the film as victims of the war stare straight into the camera at us. Unfortunately, this slender thread of human connection is broken the moment the tank is hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. From then on in, the film becomes increasingly preoccupied with the fears and suffering of our protagonists embedded in their rolling fortress.
The film's visual style is an unintentional (I think) metaphor for Maoz's country. Encased in iron, carrying weapons of mass destruction, the guys in the tank are virtually indestructible. But they are still terrified. Believing themselves to be surrounded by enemies, they react with hysterical, disproportionate violence, and in doing so make their worst fears into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sealed into a permanent war machine, their only view of the outside world is through a gun sight. And if you view the world through a gun sight, it's not too long before every human starts to look like a target.
The soldiers spend most of the film in various states of mortal terror. Okay, I get it. War is scary. But in the back of my mind, there's a little voice that can't help saying, "Dude. You're in a fucking TANK." Imagine how scary that war would be if you didn't have an enormous white-phosphorus-shooting tin can to protect yourself with.
Many a glowing review has used words like "searing," "harrowing" and "sobering" to describe the violent things the characters see and do. And yes, these soldiers kill civilians--but only under carefully pre-selected conditions. There are two instances of fairly graphic carnage right in the beginning of the film. In one incident, the tank opens fire on an old man driving a chicken truck. This is the second car to come down the road that the tank is blocking--after a car carrying gun-wielding militants, who have the audacity to kill an invading Israeli soldier. In the second incident, the tank crew blows away a family in a half-destroyed apartment--but only because gun-wielding militants (again) are using the mother as a human shield. Said mother then has the temerity to ask the Israeli soldiers what happened to her daughter (who's dead) and freak out when a soldier rips off her nightgown, which has caught on fire (he was protecting her, see.)
In each incident, the violence of the Israelis is only a reaction--a hesitant, guilt-riddled reaction--to the true initiators of violence, who everyone knows are Arabs. Keffiyah-swathed, nameless, Kalashnikov-wielding Arabs who use women and children as human shields. (Sound familiar?) So you see? The tender young Israeli soldiers didn't want to kill civilians. The terrorists made them do it. Compared with this display of hand-wringing and self-pity, there seems to be something refreshingly honest about folks like the Wikileaks Apache helicopter crew, laughing as they mow down Iraqi civilians like targets in a first-person-shooter game. At least those guys aren't pretending to have any conscience left.
Lebanon shares strategy and tactics with another highly-praised war movie to which it's been compared, The Hurt Locker. Both films achieve the sleight-of-hand of making the invaders look morally superior while showing Arabs as victims of other Arabs. Of course, no attempt is made to explain any of the complexities of a war that had already been going on for seven years before Israeli planes and tanks came smashing in.
The leering Phalange militiamen who show up halfway through the film are appropriately creepy, but they're also a foil--the Israelis look downright civilized compared to those gap-toothed, swaggering butchers. The Israelis even protect their Syrian prisoner, the same guy who fucked up their tank. Like the guys in The Hurt Locker who risk their lives to defuse a poor helpless sop of a suicide bomber, these soldiers are so noble they go out of their way to protect some Arabs from the other Arabs who want to kill them.
Of course, the war in Lebanon was a civil war, so Arabs did kill other Arabs, in large numbers. As for the fact that the war's most notorious massacre, the slaughter in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, was carried out with Israel's knowledge, aid, and encouragement, by those Arabs who happened to be their allies...well, this isn't a movie about that, right? Let's just focus on the guys in the tank.
And here we come to another element that Lebanon and The Hurt Locker have in common. By insisting on such a narrow, intensely subjective perspective, the film scrubs away all context for the war. Like in The Hurt Locker, the war is just a setting--devoid of cause, history, and power dynamics--a neutral backdrop for the characters' moral dilemmas. Civilians and even The Enemy pop up like video game characters and disappear just as quickly, nameless extras in the Real Story, which is about how traumatic this all is--for the perpetrators.
This is the problem with this kind of intense soldier's-eye-view movies. By stripping away all context, you also remove responsibility. The fact that our heroes are invaders, occupiers, and would-be conquerors gets pushed out of the picture. They're just guys doing their job. We're supposed to feel for them and with them, and forget to ask whether their job is justified in the first place.
Lebanon has generally gotten rave reviews from US critics--it had an 87% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes when I last checked. Perhaps this is because Americans have been making this very same type of war movie for at least fifty years, albeit with slightly less pathos. (Americans proactively shoulder the burden of protecting the free world without complaint, while Israelis are only fighting because everyone's out to get them--a small but crucial difference in national mythology.)
Of course the vast majority of American war movies are from the invading perspective--we're usually the ones doing the invading, after all. It has become so natural for us to privilege the perspective of occupier over that of defender or civilian that we don't even think about it--we just assume that's how war movies are supposed to work.
Perspective is powerful. It tells us whom we are supposed to identify with, whose emotional experience we are supposed to be sharing. What unconscious effect does it have to be constantly looking over the shoulder of an invading soldier in our war movies, to be looking through the rifle sights instead of into the barrel as it's pointed at us? I think it just reinforces an already strongly-held American assumption, that war is something that happens in other places and to other people. It's never our homes, our neighborhoods, our families under the bombs. That fate is for other, unluckier people who have nothing in common with us.
Samuel Maoz's highly praised film Lebanon is the perfect crystallization of the Israeli national tendency to want to be both victim and oppressor. Set during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon (in which Maoz was a participant), the film follows four young soldiers who drive a tank into a Lebanese town, then seem genuinely surprised to find themselves attacked while invading someone else's country.
Visually, the film is quite amazing. Staged almost entirely inside the belly of the tank, our only glimpse of the outside world is through the cross-hairs of the gunner's sights. The visual trick of being able to zoom in on a target leads to some breathtaking moments early in the film as victims of the war stare straight into the camera at us. Unfortunately, this slender thread of human connection is broken the moment the tank is hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. From then on in, the film becomes increasingly preoccupied with the fears and suffering of our protagonists embedded in their rolling fortress.
The film's visual style is an unintentional (I think) metaphor for Maoz's country. Encased in iron, carrying weapons of mass destruction, the guys in the tank are virtually indestructible. But they are still terrified. Believing themselves to be surrounded by enemies, they react with hysterical, disproportionate violence, and in doing so make their worst fears into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sealed into a permanent war machine, their only view of the outside world is through a gun sight. And if you view the world through a gun sight, it's not too long before every human starts to look like a target.
The soldiers spend most of the film in various states of mortal terror. Okay, I get it. War is scary. But in the back of my mind, there's a little voice that can't help saying, "Dude. You're in a fucking TANK." Imagine how scary that war would be if you didn't have an enormous white-phosphorus-shooting tin can to protect yourself with.
Many a glowing review has used words like "searing," "harrowing" and "sobering" to describe the violent things the characters see and do. And yes, these soldiers kill civilians--but only under carefully pre-selected conditions. There are two instances of fairly graphic carnage right in the beginning of the film. In one incident, the tank opens fire on an old man driving a chicken truck. This is the second car to come down the road that the tank is blocking--after a car carrying gun-wielding militants, who have the audacity to kill an invading Israeli soldier. In the second incident, the tank crew blows away a family in a half-destroyed apartment--but only because gun-wielding militants (again) are using the mother as a human shield. Said mother then has the temerity to ask the Israeli soldiers what happened to her daughter (who's dead) and freak out when a soldier rips off her nightgown, which has caught on fire (he was protecting her, see.)
In each incident, the violence of the Israelis is only a reaction--a hesitant, guilt-riddled reaction--to the true initiators of violence, who everyone knows are Arabs. Keffiyah-swathed, nameless, Kalashnikov-wielding Arabs who use women and children as human shields. (Sound familiar?) So you see? The tender young Israeli soldiers didn't want to kill civilians. The terrorists made them do it. Compared with this display of hand-wringing and self-pity, there seems to be something refreshingly honest about folks like the Wikileaks Apache helicopter crew, laughing as they mow down Iraqi civilians like targets in a first-person-shooter game. At least those guys aren't pretending to have any conscience left.
Lebanon shares strategy and tactics with another highly-praised war movie to which it's been compared, The Hurt Locker. Both films achieve the sleight-of-hand of making the invaders look morally superior while showing Arabs as victims of other Arabs. Of course, no attempt is made to explain any of the complexities of a war that had already been going on for seven years before Israeli planes and tanks came smashing in.
The leering Phalange militiamen who show up halfway through the film are appropriately creepy, but they're also a foil--the Israelis look downright civilized compared to those gap-toothed, swaggering butchers. The Israelis even protect their Syrian prisoner, the same guy who fucked up their tank. Like the guys in The Hurt Locker who risk their lives to defuse a poor helpless sop of a suicide bomber, these soldiers are so noble they go out of their way to protect some Arabs from the other Arabs who want to kill them.
Of course, the war in Lebanon was a civil war, so Arabs did kill other Arabs, in large numbers. As for the fact that the war's most notorious massacre, the slaughter in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, was carried out with Israel's knowledge, aid, and encouragement, by those Arabs who happened to be their allies...well, this isn't a movie about that, right? Let's just focus on the guys in the tank.
And here we come to another element that Lebanon and The Hurt Locker have in common. By insisting on such a narrow, intensely subjective perspective, the film scrubs away all context for the war. Like in The Hurt Locker, the war is just a setting--devoid of cause, history, and power dynamics--a neutral backdrop for the characters' moral dilemmas. Civilians and even The Enemy pop up like video game characters and disappear just as quickly, nameless extras in the Real Story, which is about how traumatic this all is--for the perpetrators.
This is the problem with this kind of intense soldier's-eye-view movies. By stripping away all context, you also remove responsibility. The fact that our heroes are invaders, occupiers, and would-be conquerors gets pushed out of the picture. They're just guys doing their job. We're supposed to feel for them and with them, and forget to ask whether their job is justified in the first place.
Lebanon has generally gotten rave reviews from US critics--it had an 87% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes when I last checked. Perhaps this is because Americans have been making this very same type of war movie for at least fifty years, albeit with slightly less pathos. (Americans proactively shoulder the burden of protecting the free world without complaint, while Israelis are only fighting because everyone's out to get them--a small but crucial difference in national mythology.)
Of course the vast majority of American war movies are from the invading perspective--we're usually the ones doing the invading, after all. It has become so natural for us to privilege the perspective of occupier over that of defender or civilian that we don't even think about it--we just assume that's how war movies are supposed to work.
Perspective is powerful. It tells us whom we are supposed to identify with, whose emotional experience we are supposed to be sharing. What unconscious effect does it have to be constantly looking over the shoulder of an invading soldier in our war movies, to be looking through the rifle sights instead of into the barrel as it's pointed at us? I think it just reinforces an already strongly-held American assumption, that war is something that happens in other places and to other people. It's never our homes, our neighborhoods, our families under the bombs. That fate is for other, unluckier people who have nothing in common with us.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
i love you, new york
Photo credit: APThousands in New York rallied in defense of the proposed Park51 community center, for religious freedom and against Islamophobia. NY1 is reporting five thousand. Estimates from friends who were there ranged between 3,000 and 7,000, versus about 750-1,000 assorted bigots on the other side. The rally on our side sounded beautiful.
Dear New York. You may smell bad and be prohibitively expensive, but you come through when it counts.
a 9/11 post
In the seven years I lived in New York after September 11, 2001, I kind of got over 9/11 tributes. Many a September 11th passed without my feeling a particular need to memorialize, and I think plenty of New Yorkers felt the same. Not those who lost loved ones or suffered trauma, but the vast majority of us who were just there in the city on that surreal day of blue skies and ash-white smoke. We were around for the main event. Calling it up year after year seemed unnecessary.
But this seems to be the year that some people want to remember 9/11, and for very particular reasons. People who insist on a particular meaning for that event, slave graves and other inconvenient truths aside. And while I completely agree with the sentiment of this post--about the imperial arrogance of demanding that our tragedy be remembered above and to the exclusion of all others--I do remember. There are things from that day and the days that followed that I can recall with a visceral, snapshot clarity that hasn't faded after nine years and maybe never will.
On September 11, 2001, I was a 19-year-old sophomore at Columbia University. I was six miles away from the World Trade Center that morning, at the other end of Manhattan, but that was close enough. These are some of the things I will never forget:
Checking in with friends to make sure they are still alive.
Standing on the roof of my friend's building, watching the F-16s fly over Manhattan, with a Lebanese friend who casually remarks, "Huh. That's the first time I've seen those when they weren't going to bomb somewhere."
Eating a late dinner at JJ's Place a few days later, listening to some bigot-on-the-street scream hatred on CNN, and suddenly being engulfed in a physical, palpable wave of fear. Not fear of more terrorist attacks but fear of my own government, and what it might try to get away with under the shadow of racist hysteria.
The missing posters. The faces that stared up at you from subway stops and telephone poles, framed with the desperate pleading of loved ones, and the twisted connection they invoked to that other 9/11--also a clear blue Tuesday morning--a parallel so surreal it could only have happened in real life. The way people say missing when they can't yet bear to say dead.
That demonstration, that incredible night march through the streets of Manhattan ten days after 9/11, when we expected a hundred people and five thousand showed up. Chanting "No war, no attacks, bombs won't bring our loved ones back" as if the raw power of our grief could actually make those in power listen. Marching against war before we even knew where the war was going to be. The two-hundred-person antiwar organizing meeting held on the lawn outside Columbia's student center, when it seemed, for a historical split-second, that something other than slaughter might have been possible.
The moment at the end of that same night march, in Union Square, when the wind shifted, bringing with it the acrid smell of the still-burning rubble less than a mile away. "I left Sarajevo to get away from that smell," a woman standing near me said. At that moment we were just scared civilians in another bombed-out city.
And, most of all, the thing I thought about as we went out to get food after a long day of news-watching and check-ins to assure ourselves and others that yes, everyone we knew was still alive: Imagine living every day like this.
I know the terror and grief New Yorkers experienced for one day is minuscule compared to what our government has visited on other countries and on the people who were here before us. I am humble about our place in the world historic scale of destruction. But I think it is important not to forget those feelings, to hold on to them and to see in them the reflection of other bombed cities and shell-shocked survivors. I think they are useful when remembering whom to sympathize with and whom to fear, when remembering who is the us and who is the them.
Whenever someone shouts "Remember 9/11!" to justify war or Islamophobia or attacks on immigrants, I want to ask, "Do you?" Were you there? Because if you weren't, shut the hell up. And if you were, if you really remember the fear and vulnerability and pain that engulfed the city, how dare you wish that upon anybody else?
But this seems to be the year that some people want to remember 9/11, and for very particular reasons. People who insist on a particular meaning for that event, slave graves and other inconvenient truths aside. And while I completely agree with the sentiment of this post--about the imperial arrogance of demanding that our tragedy be remembered above and to the exclusion of all others--I do remember. There are things from that day and the days that followed that I can recall with a visceral, snapshot clarity that hasn't faded after nine years and maybe never will.
On September 11, 2001, I was a 19-year-old sophomore at Columbia University. I was six miles away from the World Trade Center that morning, at the other end of Manhattan, but that was close enough. These are some of the things I will never forget:
Checking in with friends to make sure they are still alive.
Standing on the roof of my friend's building, watching the F-16s fly over Manhattan, with a Lebanese friend who casually remarks, "Huh. That's the first time I've seen those when they weren't going to bomb somewhere."
Eating a late dinner at JJ's Place a few days later, listening to some bigot-on-the-street scream hatred on CNN, and suddenly being engulfed in a physical, palpable wave of fear. Not fear of more terrorist attacks but fear of my own government, and what it might try to get away with under the shadow of racist hysteria.
The missing posters. The faces that stared up at you from subway stops and telephone poles, framed with the desperate pleading of loved ones, and the twisted connection they invoked to that other 9/11--also a clear blue Tuesday morning--a parallel so surreal it could only have happened in real life. The way people say missing when they can't yet bear to say dead.
That demonstration, that incredible night march through the streets of Manhattan ten days after 9/11, when we expected a hundred people and five thousand showed up. Chanting "No war, no attacks, bombs won't bring our loved ones back" as if the raw power of our grief could actually make those in power listen. Marching against war before we even knew where the war was going to be. The two-hundred-person antiwar organizing meeting held on the lawn outside Columbia's student center, when it seemed, for a historical split-second, that something other than slaughter might have been possible.
The moment at the end of that same night march, in Union Square, when the wind shifted, bringing with it the acrid smell of the still-burning rubble less than a mile away. "I left Sarajevo to get away from that smell," a woman standing near me said. At that moment we were just scared civilians in another bombed-out city.
And, most of all, the thing I thought about as we went out to get food after a long day of news-watching and check-ins to assure ourselves and others that yes, everyone we knew was still alive: Imagine living every day like this.
I know the terror and grief New Yorkers experienced for one day is minuscule compared to what our government has visited on other countries and on the people who were here before us. I am humble about our place in the world historic scale of destruction. But I think it is important not to forget those feelings, to hold on to them and to see in them the reflection of other bombed cities and shell-shocked survivors. I think they are useful when remembering whom to sympathize with and whom to fear, when remembering who is the us and who is the them.
Whenever someone shouts "Remember 9/11!" to justify war or Islamophobia or attacks on immigrants, I want to ask, "Do you?" Were you there? Because if you weren't, shut the hell up. And if you were, if you really remember the fear and vulnerability and pain that engulfed the city, how dare you wish that upon anybody else?
Sunday, September 5, 2010
mockingjay review, WITH SPOILERS. and block quotes.
WARNING: This review contains SPOILERS. Big ones! If you've already read Mockingjay or you are some kind of weirdo who doesn't mind spoilers, read on. If you haven't read the Hunger Games series, you probably shouldn't read this either, because most of it will not make sense and I'll only ruin the last book for you.
Sometimes you want to like a book so much, it takes you a while to admit that it did not, in fact, meet all your expectations. Such was the case with Mockingjay, the final book in Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games trilogy.
Suzanne Collins could have knocked it out of the park with Mockingjay. All the ingredients were there. Collins had set so many wonderful, complex and exciting dynamics in motion by the end of Catching Fire. Sadly, so many things just didn't pay off in the way I hoped they would.
Remember this, from Katniss and Peeta's Victory Tour in Catching Fire?
So I was disoriented and distressed to find this popular element almost entirely missing from Mockingjay. It's like Collins forgot about all the social power she set into motion in the second book and somehow decided the only way to overthrow the Capitol was with a conventional military force. Enter District 13.
I hated District 13. I was suspicious of them the moment I learned they really did have nuclear weapons, because I didn't believe that Collins would ever make people who rely on nuclear terror the good guys. And they aren't, really.
Bringing District 13 into the mix destroys one of the best things about the series, which is the asymmetry of the conflict--the will and solidarity and creativity and ingenuity of ordinary people against the massive military power of the Capitol. Watching teenagers pwn the Capitol with improvised weapons was one of the things that made the books great. It doesn't work the same way when you start relying on a conventional military power.
I know we aren't supposed to like District 13--or, I should say, the leadership of District 13 (its people are strangely undifferentiated and passive.) But the problem is that while Collins doesn't encourage us to like Coin and her army, she can't quite dispense with them either. She relies on them to win the war. It's like she can't quite trust the popular revolution she set in motion in Catching Fire to actually take power.
Nowhere is this more clear than in the biggest missed opportunity of the whole book: the attack on the mountain-encased military base called the Nut in District 2. There's something that feels so wrong about districts fighting districts, and to her credit, Collins lets her characters think so too. The sudden flashback to the mine accident that killed Katniss's father is a total surprise, a scene I never expected to see, but it's brilliant. When Katniss looks at the people she's supposed to be fighting, she sees not enemies, but her own family. Instead of feeling victorious, she feels manipulated and sick. And to top it off, her scripted, stage-managed television appearance (in a series that's so much about the power of media) is interrupted by the real-life, bloody consequences of her actions. Katniss seems to realize that they're going about this all wrong, that she's just back in the Games again, fighting the wrong enemy. And she gives one of her best speeches of the entire series:
But instead, Katniss gets shot.
I kept waiting for confirmation that it was one of Coin's people who shot her. This would have made perfect sense, because Coin obviously sees Katniss as a threat, unscripted Katniss as a bigger threat, and Katniss with the power of the districts behind her as the biggest threat of all. But there is never any textual evidence to support this theory, so as far as we know, Katniss was shot by someone random who clearly wasn't listening very closely to what she was saying. I think this says a lot about how Collins feels about human nature.
In hindsight, I think this is where the book started to derail. This should have been the moment Katniss took the offensive and started calling the shots herself, making all her friends and allies choose sides and setting her up for an inevitable conflict with Coin. I thought maybe Coin was going to threaten to nuke the Capitol, and Katniss and friends would end up racing against time to stop the war before that happened. (That would have been cool, wouldn't it?) Instead, Katniss gets taken out of the action at a crucial moment with an injury.
This exact same thing will happen again, later, only the second time it will be infinitely more frustrating. It's like Collins is afraid to let Katniss take control of the story. The same way she doesn't quite trust or understand how to let the revolution she created take power, she can't quite trust her main character to move from figurehead to general, from reacting to driving the action herself.
In retrospect, this is a problem that plagues the entire series. My one discomfort with Catching Fire was that for the whole book, Katniss was a pawn in a game she didn't understand. It made her look stupid. I just assumed the third book would be when she finally came into her own. I was concerned when she wasn't part of the mission to rescue Peeta, but I was temporarily mollified by the twist of Peeta being insane, which was a cruelty that seemed genuinely worthy of the Capitol's sick imagination. But the place where Katniss's lack of agency drove me to distraction was in the final assault on the Capitol.
I guess this is the place to just come out and say it: I flat-out hated Prim's death. I will accept the death of almost any fictional character--provided it's earned. It was not. It was cheap and useless and didn't serve any dramatic purpose. The possibility of Prim being on the front line was never even planted as something we were supposed to be worried about. Then there is the fact that Katniss's trek through the Capitol had already been bloody enough. It had claimed the lives of quite a few characters we'd come to care about. Gale had just been captured and Katniss had failed in her one final promise to kill him in order to spare him a miserable slow death by torture. The stakes were already high enough without throwing Prim in there out of nowhere.
Killing Prim does something else. It short-circuits the entire trilogy. This whole story was set in motion because Katniss wanted to save Prim. While Katniss certainly couldn't have known how things would turn out, having her die anyway sends an awfully fatalistic message, doesn't it? Whether Collins intended it or not, it kind of makes you question whether everything Katniss did was worth it.
I don't think I would ever have been fully comfortable with Prim's death, but I might have accepted it if it had propelled Katniss directly into the president's mansion, into the final conflict with Snow and/or Coin. But that doesn't happen.
No matter what you think about Prim's death, the fact that the Capitol fell while Katniss was in the hospital is just wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. It's such a fatal dramatic error that I actually had to read that chapter twice to realize that's what happened. The whole trilogy had been preparing us for a showdown between Katniss and Snow. It's Katniss's one consistent goal throughout the book: I kill Snow. As Katniss approaches Snow's mansion, her mission couldn't be clearer: Kill Snow. End the war. And she fails.
I would have accepted a last-minute twist in the confrontation with Snow. (Like, maybe, Coin already being there, negotiating a surrender with him while their respective armies slaughter each other outside? And Katniss deciding to kill Coin instead, because she realizes Snow's power is already broken. That would have been cool, right?) But taking Katniss out of the action at this point with a near-fatal injury--one inflicted by people supposedly on her own side--made me want to throw the book against the wall.
Katniss's last mission was plagued with so much danger and bad luck and impossible odds, so many characters who risked or lost their lives to see her succeed, that having her fail at the last minute felt like a horrible sick joke. It made Katniss look criminally stupid and the whole ending section in the Capitol feel cheap.
So why did Collins do it? Either it was bad writing, or there was a purpose. Let us assume for a moment that it was not bad writing and that Collins was trying to say something.
Because Prim was killed by the rebels (or at least by a splinter cell acting on Coin's orders) the only message that I can possibly extract from this horrible dramatic choice is a kind "pox on both your houses" condemnation. The Capitol is awful, but the rebels are just as bad. Or, if they didn't start out as bad, they've become the very thing they're trying to destroy by engaging in war.
There are many scenarios under which I wouldn't have any problem with an antiwar message like this. Collins's other series, the Underland Chronicles, has a powerful antiwar message much along the same lines. And there it works beautifully, because the Underland Chronicles are all about the moral problems of conventional war. The different species in the Underland fight each other over land and resources and all kind of stupid shit, with conventional armies of approximately equal power. Their wars are useless and destructive. In this context, an antiwar message is not only radical and humanist, but logically the only dramatically satisfying conclusion to the series.
But the war in Mockingjay isn't a conventional war. It's a revolution. And the problem with tacking on an antiwar message at the eleventh hour is that you've just spent the better part of three books convincing us that Panem needs a revolution and the Capitol deserves to be overthrown. "A pox on both your houses" doesn't exactly fit with "We all have one enemy, and it's the Capitol!" In this context, an antiwar message becomes reactionary, because what's the alternative? The status quo? Not to resist at all? That would make a very boring book, wouldn't it?
Nevadeline, perhaps the only person who shares my obsession with the political book review with equal passion, suggested that maybe Collins is trying to show what happens when a genuine popular revolution gets taken over by people who are fighting the old order because they want to be the new ruling class--people who don't really plan on being less oppressive than the old ruling class. I wish I thought Collins was this politically sophisticated, but I don't think she is. I think if that was what she was going for, we would have seen some conflict between Coin and the folks who organized the uprisings in Catching Fire, instead of all those folks just kind of mysteriously disappearing in Mockingjay. I also think it's hard to reconcile that analysis with this quote, near the end of Mockingjay:
People may fight conventional wars for the interests of those in power, but we fight revolutions for ourselves. Collins seems to have lost track of this distinction somewhere along the line. Revolutions--even revolutionary wars--are waged for liberation. There is no guarantee the new order will be better than the old, but if people are willing to risk their lives, it's because the old order has become intolerable, and because something has given them hope that a better world is possible. You can argue about what methods and targets are moral or justified. You can question whether the leadership of District 13 is really on the same side as the ordinary people of Panem. You can debate whether war is actually necessary when the districts produce everything and the Capitol produces nothing. (I wish someone had! That's what general strikes are for.) But you cannot read these books and come out thinking that it is not justified to resist the Capitol.
What Mockingjay was missing most was a sense of hope. One of the reasons that Harry Potter feels like a realistic resistance story even though there are wizards and house-elfs and magic is that JK Rowling gets the emotional landscape right. Resistance has highs and lows. So there's grief and rage and terror and guilt and self-doubt and despair, but there's also love and camaraderie and purpose and liberation and empowerment and joy, and, sometimes, victory. And they're all mixed together and unpredictable, which is what makes resistance stories great fun to read and write.
The best moments from the first two books were the highs: the moments of defiance or humanity or triumph in the face of oppression--the little moments of victory for ordinary people against the Capitol. These little sparks could have grown into something much bigger, into a blaze that devoured the whole rotten system. But only if you believe these moments weren't just "symbolic resistance," but were the actions of people actually capable of remaking the world in their own interest. Only if you really believe ordinary people working together are capable of defeating even the most ruthless oppressor.
Sometimes you want to like a book so much, it takes you a while to admit that it did not, in fact, meet all your expectations. Such was the case with Mockingjay, the final book in Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games trilogy.
Suzanne Collins could have knocked it out of the park with Mockingjay. All the ingredients were there. Collins had set so many wonderful, complex and exciting dynamics in motion by the end of Catching Fire. Sadly, so many things just didn't pay off in the way I hoped they would.
Remember this, from Katniss and Peeta's Victory Tour in Catching Fire?
You can feel something in the air, the rolling boil of a pot about to run over. Not everywhere. Some crowds have the weary-cattle feel that I know District 12 usually projects at the victors' ceremonies. But in others--particularly 8, 4, and 3--there is genuine elation in the faces of the people at the sight of us, and under the elation, fury. When they chant my name, it is more a cry for vengeance than a cheer. When the Peacekeepers move in to quiet an unruly crowd, it presses back instead of retreating.Perhaps my favorite thing about Catching Fire was the way Collins captured the feeling of a revolution starting. People beginning to shake off the fear that used to paralyze them, suddenly having the courage to challenge power that seemed invincible only yesterday, solidarity and defiance blooming out of alienation and despair seemingly overnight. This was reflected in the Games of the second book--from the tributes holding hands in the beginning, all the way through to the epic win of an ending, when Katniss turns her arrow not against a fellow victim of the Capitol's game, but against the game itself. At the end of Catching Fire, the stage was all set for Panem's mass popular revolution to begin in earnest.
So I was disoriented and distressed to find this popular element almost entirely missing from Mockingjay. It's like Collins forgot about all the social power she set into motion in the second book and somehow decided the only way to overthrow the Capitol was with a conventional military force. Enter District 13.
I hated District 13. I was suspicious of them the moment I learned they really did have nuclear weapons, because I didn't believe that Collins would ever make people who rely on nuclear terror the good guys. And they aren't, really.
Bringing District 13 into the mix destroys one of the best things about the series, which is the asymmetry of the conflict--the will and solidarity and creativity and ingenuity of ordinary people against the massive military power of the Capitol. Watching teenagers pwn the Capitol with improvised weapons was one of the things that made the books great. It doesn't work the same way when you start relying on a conventional military power.
I know we aren't supposed to like District 13--or, I should say, the leadership of District 13 (its people are strangely undifferentiated and passive.) But the problem is that while Collins doesn't encourage us to like Coin and her army, she can't quite dispense with them either. She relies on them to win the war. It's like she can't quite trust the popular revolution she set in motion in Catching Fire to actually take power.
Nowhere is this more clear than in the biggest missed opportunity of the whole book: the attack on the mountain-encased military base called the Nut in District 2. There's something that feels so wrong about districts fighting districts, and to her credit, Collins lets her characters think so too. The sudden flashback to the mine accident that killed Katniss's father is a total surprise, a scene I never expected to see, but it's brilliant. When Katniss looks at the people she's supposed to be fighting, she sees not enemies, but her own family. Instead of feeling victorious, she feels manipulated and sick. And to top it off, her scripted, stage-managed television appearance (in a series that's so much about the power of media) is interrupted by the real-life, bloody consequences of her actions. Katniss seems to realize that they're going about this all wrong, that she's just back in the Games again, fighting the wrong enemy. And she gives one of her best speeches of the entire series:
"Who is the enemy?" whispers Haymitch. [Nice callback to the end of Catching Fire, SC.]YEEAAAHHHH! I'm thinking at this point. This is what we've been waiting for! Katniss is going to unite the districts--not as a figurehead, but as an actual military leader. The final battle against the Capitol is ON! I'm ready for someone to start singing the Marseillaise.
"These people"--I indicate the wounded bodies on the square--"are not your enemy!" I whip back around to the train station. "The rebels are not your enemy! We all have one enemy, and it's the Capitol! This is our chance to put an end to their power, but we need every district person to do it!"
But instead, Katniss gets shot.
I kept waiting for confirmation that it was one of Coin's people who shot her. This would have made perfect sense, because Coin obviously sees Katniss as a threat, unscripted Katniss as a bigger threat, and Katniss with the power of the districts behind her as the biggest threat of all. But there is never any textual evidence to support this theory, so as far as we know, Katniss was shot by someone random who clearly wasn't listening very closely to what she was saying. I think this says a lot about how Collins feels about human nature.
In hindsight, I think this is where the book started to derail. This should have been the moment Katniss took the offensive and started calling the shots herself, making all her friends and allies choose sides and setting her up for an inevitable conflict with Coin. I thought maybe Coin was going to threaten to nuke the Capitol, and Katniss and friends would end up racing against time to stop the war before that happened. (That would have been cool, wouldn't it?) Instead, Katniss gets taken out of the action at a crucial moment with an injury.
This exact same thing will happen again, later, only the second time it will be infinitely more frustrating. It's like Collins is afraid to let Katniss take control of the story. The same way she doesn't quite trust or understand how to let the revolution she created take power, she can't quite trust her main character to move from figurehead to general, from reacting to driving the action herself.
In retrospect, this is a problem that plagues the entire series. My one discomfort with Catching Fire was that for the whole book, Katniss was a pawn in a game she didn't understand. It made her look stupid. I just assumed the third book would be when she finally came into her own. I was concerned when she wasn't part of the mission to rescue Peeta, but I was temporarily mollified by the twist of Peeta being insane, which was a cruelty that seemed genuinely worthy of the Capitol's sick imagination. But the place where Katniss's lack of agency drove me to distraction was in the final assault on the Capitol.
I guess this is the place to just come out and say it: I flat-out hated Prim's death. I will accept the death of almost any fictional character--provided it's earned. It was not. It was cheap and useless and didn't serve any dramatic purpose. The possibility of Prim being on the front line was never even planted as something we were supposed to be worried about. Then there is the fact that Katniss's trek through the Capitol had already been bloody enough. It had claimed the lives of quite a few characters we'd come to care about. Gale had just been captured and Katniss had failed in her one final promise to kill him in order to spare him a miserable slow death by torture. The stakes were already high enough without throwing Prim in there out of nowhere.
Killing Prim does something else. It short-circuits the entire trilogy. This whole story was set in motion because Katniss wanted to save Prim. While Katniss certainly couldn't have known how things would turn out, having her die anyway sends an awfully fatalistic message, doesn't it? Whether Collins intended it or not, it kind of makes you question whether everything Katniss did was worth it.
I don't think I would ever have been fully comfortable with Prim's death, but I might have accepted it if it had propelled Katniss directly into the president's mansion, into the final conflict with Snow and/or Coin. But that doesn't happen.
No matter what you think about Prim's death, the fact that the Capitol fell while Katniss was in the hospital is just wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. It's such a fatal dramatic error that I actually had to read that chapter twice to realize that's what happened. The whole trilogy had been preparing us for a showdown between Katniss and Snow. It's Katniss's one consistent goal throughout the book: I kill Snow. As Katniss approaches Snow's mansion, her mission couldn't be clearer: Kill Snow. End the war. And she fails.
I would have accepted a last-minute twist in the confrontation with Snow. (Like, maybe, Coin already being there, negotiating a surrender with him while their respective armies slaughter each other outside? And Katniss deciding to kill Coin instead, because she realizes Snow's power is already broken. That would have been cool, right?) But taking Katniss out of the action at this point with a near-fatal injury--one inflicted by people supposedly on her own side--made me want to throw the book against the wall.
Katniss's last mission was plagued with so much danger and bad luck and impossible odds, so many characters who risked or lost their lives to see her succeed, that having her fail at the last minute felt like a horrible sick joke. It made Katniss look criminally stupid and the whole ending section in the Capitol feel cheap.
So why did Collins do it? Either it was bad writing, or there was a purpose. Let us assume for a moment that it was not bad writing and that Collins was trying to say something.
Because Prim was killed by the rebels (or at least by a splinter cell acting on Coin's orders) the only message that I can possibly extract from this horrible dramatic choice is a kind "pox on both your houses" condemnation. The Capitol is awful, but the rebels are just as bad. Or, if they didn't start out as bad, they've become the very thing they're trying to destroy by engaging in war.
There are many scenarios under which I wouldn't have any problem with an antiwar message like this. Collins's other series, the Underland Chronicles, has a powerful antiwar message much along the same lines. And there it works beautifully, because the Underland Chronicles are all about the moral problems of conventional war. The different species in the Underland fight each other over land and resources and all kind of stupid shit, with conventional armies of approximately equal power. Their wars are useless and destructive. In this context, an antiwar message is not only radical and humanist, but logically the only dramatically satisfying conclusion to the series.
But the war in Mockingjay isn't a conventional war. It's a revolution. And the problem with tacking on an antiwar message at the eleventh hour is that you've just spent the better part of three books convincing us that Panem needs a revolution and the Capitol deserves to be overthrown. "A pox on both your houses" doesn't exactly fit with "We all have one enemy, and it's the Capitol!" In this context, an antiwar message becomes reactionary, because what's the alternative? The status quo? Not to resist at all? That would make a very boring book, wouldn't it?
Nevadeline, perhaps the only person who shares my obsession with the political book review with equal passion, suggested that maybe Collins is trying to show what happens when a genuine popular revolution gets taken over by people who are fighting the old order because they want to be the new ruling class--people who don't really plan on being less oppressive than the old ruling class. I wish I thought Collins was this politically sophisticated, but I don't think she is. I think if that was what she was going for, we would have seen some conflict between Coin and the folks who organized the uprisings in Catching Fire, instead of all those folks just kind of mysteriously disappearing in Mockingjay. I also think it's hard to reconcile that analysis with this quote, near the end of Mockingjay:
They can fatten me up. They can give me a full body polish, dress me up, and make me beautiful again. They can design dream weapons that come to life in my hands, but they will never again brainwash me into the necessity of using them. I no longer feel any allegiance to these monsters called human beings, despise being one myself.... Snow thought the Hunger Games were an effective means of control. Coin thought the parachutes would expedite the war. But in the end, who does it benefit? No one. The truth is, it benefits no one to live in a world where these things happen.Yes, no one. Except the people who never have to send another child to the Hunger Games. Who maybe don't have to live the rest of their lives behind electric fences and under Peacekeepers' guns. Who don't have to watch all the fruits of their labor be loaded on trains to the Capitol while their families starve. Who maybe, just maybe, have a chance at a more equal society. They benefit.
People may fight conventional wars for the interests of those in power, but we fight revolutions for ourselves. Collins seems to have lost track of this distinction somewhere along the line. Revolutions--even revolutionary wars--are waged for liberation. There is no guarantee the new order will be better than the old, but if people are willing to risk their lives, it's because the old order has become intolerable, and because something has given them hope that a better world is possible. You can argue about what methods and targets are moral or justified. You can question whether the leadership of District 13 is really on the same side as the ordinary people of Panem. You can debate whether war is actually necessary when the districts produce everything and the Capitol produces nothing. (I wish someone had! That's what general strikes are for.) But you cannot read these books and come out thinking that it is not justified to resist the Capitol.
What Mockingjay was missing most was a sense of hope. One of the reasons that Harry Potter feels like a realistic resistance story even though there are wizards and house-elfs and magic is that JK Rowling gets the emotional landscape right. Resistance has highs and lows. So there's grief and rage and terror and guilt and self-doubt and despair, but there's also love and camaraderie and purpose and liberation and empowerment and joy, and, sometimes, victory. And they're all mixed together and unpredictable, which is what makes resistance stories great fun to read and write.
The best moments from the first two books were the highs: the moments of defiance or humanity or triumph in the face of oppression--the little moments of victory for ordinary people against the Capitol. These little sparks could have grown into something much bigger, into a blaze that devoured the whole rotten system. But only if you believe these moments weren't just "symbolic resistance," but were the actions of people actually capable of remaking the world in their own interest. Only if you really believe ordinary people working together are capable of defeating even the most ruthless oppressor.
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