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History

No good guys. None.

“So who are the good guys?,” my Beloved asked. “What do I know,” was my response, having only vague associations with Haiti, Papa Doc and Baby Doc, paramilitary violence of the Tonton Macoute, and devastating earthquakes. Crash course in history ensued, immediately regretted, given the revelation of nothing but horrors.

The small French-Creole nation occupies the western third of the Caribbean Island Hispaniola. Its inhabitants are the poorest in the Western hemisphere, with ⅔ of its children malnourished, and 1 out of 5 dying before the age of six. 60% of Haitians live on fewer than $2 a day. About half the population does not know how to write or read. How did it get there?

The island was claimed by Columbus for Spain in 1497, but the French took over in the 17th century and soon colonized it as a slave state raising sugar cane. Hard labor, torture and tropical disease ravaged the slave population, with endless slave ships arriving from Africa to keep the required numbers up around 800.000 slaves working for the French colonial masters. Definitely not good guys. In fact, really bad guys, because after a successful slave rebellion in 1804, they “negotiated” for years with the help of war ships to be paid reparations for their lost colony and human capital, eventually settling Haiti with a crushing debt of 150 million Francs to achieve indemnity, the acknowledgement of independence. With interest the debt was paid off finally in 1947. By then the necessary borrowing to be able to make the installments had undermined any chance to build a functioning educational and health system or public infrastructures. Details can be found here.

So the slave rebels were good guys? Hm, not entirely. The consistent rape of Black slave women by White slave owners had led to a separate class of Mulattoes who sought domination over the Black population after the uprising. Long story short, much infighting ensued between groups that really should have united forces against the colonial masters. The Mulattoe elites often used Black generals or politicians as puppets or their interest. Eventually the country divided in North and South being ruled by two different factions. The South clung to the ideal of the French revolution, with land being distributed to the poor. There, the average Haitian was an isolated, poor, free, and relatively content yeoman. In the north, the average Haitian was a resentful but comparatively prosperous laborer under restrictive rule of a royalist king.

Continued factional fighting and bloodshed eventually led to an occupation by US forces in 1915. Good guys? Ahem. Occupation was driven by interest in access to the Panama canal and vying for control of the Caribbean over European, particularly German interests. The occupation lasted until 1934.

Fast forward to 1957 with the election of Francois Duvalier, Papa Doc, who installed a regime of terror with the help of paramilitary executioner forces, the Tonton Makoute. Evil guy. More than 30.000 Haitians considered opposition were killed during his reign. His son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, Baby Doc, took over after his father’s death but had to flee to France when the extent of his kleptocracy, his regime’s theft and corruption became public. The role of the US? Bad guys. In the course of pursuing cold war interests, they did nothing to stop the atrocities or persecute those responsible later on, not even during human rights-focused administrations such as Jimmy Carter’s. “Butch Ashton, a business man who made his fortune during the Duvalier dictatorship by establishing corporations such as Citrus (a fruit exporter) and the Toyota dealership in the country’s capital, vehemently claims that the Tonton Macoute militia was trained by the U.S. Marine Corps and that the highest levels of the American government were complicit in this arrangement.” (Ref.)

And here we are in demand again, or so it is claimed by political observers who suspect that Haiti’s elite was behind last week’s murder of the current president, hoping to stave of a brewing revolution by the ever more impoverished population, suppressing it with the potential help of an American military intervention alongside Colombian and Honduran forces. Who was President Moïse, assassinated by a tightly organized group of paramilitaries pretending to be US Drug Enforcement agents, Americans and Columbians among them, apparently supported by Columbian ultra right-wing President, Iván Duque Márquez, bosom buddy of Brasilian president Bolsanero? (Particularly bad guys.)

Moïse a good guy? Nope. He had been clinging to the presidency even though his term was over; he had been syphoning away the money given through the Venezuelan funded program Petrocaribe to offset the devastating effects of the 2010 earthquake – 300.000 dead eventually and over a million Haitians made homeless, migrating to the cities in search for escape from starvation. Mass demonstrations against corruption and repression, urging his removal stoked fear in the 12 or so elite Haitian families who indirectly control the country.

There is clearly increasing rebellious fervor coming out of the millions of people cooped up in Haitian shantytowns. Marauding forces (no good guys either) were for the last decade a scourge on both the rich and the poor, with indiscriminate kidnappings and murders. Some of these gangs were hired by the business- and landowning mid- and upper class to protect their interests. Others formed as a response to the increasing poverty, particularly after the earthquake. Enter Jimmy Cherizier, a cop with an elite unit of the Haitian National Police called UDMO, the Departmental Unit of Maintenance of Order, who has organized many of these “gangs” into a G9 unit of vigilance on steroids and the expressed goal of cleaning up the rot of Haitian elites’ repression and extortion.

Moïse’s assassination might very well have been a means to an end to invite Columbian, Honduran and, in the end, UN or US forces, as a powerful barricade against a threatened revolution from below. In the meantime people starve to death, die of Covid-19 (inoculation has not even started,) and are kidnapped for ransom on random bases. No-one official coming to their rescue, as far as we can see, certainly no functioning government. Ariel Henry, the man who Moïse appointed prime minister just before the assassination claimed the right to lead Haiti, pitting him against acting head of state Claude Joseph, whose government has so far managed the response to the killing. Head of the Supreme Court, Judge René Sylvestre, who could have been Moïse’s successor, died of Covid-19 last week. No-one is certain who is in charge, when the next election will be, how to get a handle on the proliferating violence.

Repeat: no good guys. No easy solutions, either.

Music is a medley of Haitian musical styles from a recent performance at the Kennedy Center.

Montages are from my 2020 art series Setting Sail.

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Citizen Informants

Esther Bejarano z”l, one of the last survivors of Auschwitz’s girl orchestra, died this weekend at age 96. A life-long fighter for remembrance and against authoritarian regimes, she was a controversial figure in Germany to which she returned in the 1960s, critical of Israel’s politics and Zionism, something that (non-Jewish!) Germans would not tolerate as can even be seen in the varied reactions to her death. An active member of the German Communist Party (DKP), she taught many generations, mine included, about fascism and resistance, about the twin evils of silence and forgetting.

The Holocaust survivor taught us that to fight against authoritarian movements you have to be familiar with their play-books. When you see tricks from those books popping up all over the place, you know where to turn your attention. I was reminded of that when I read last week about the new law in Texas that prohibits abortion after 6 weeks of pregnancy, when you can detect the fetus’ heartbeat. One of the key clauses in this bill involves reliance on citizen informants, who can sue doctors and clinics if they detected “illegal” abortions, with an award for each successful lawsuit of a minimum of $10.000. All the gory details of this new law, and the implications of its attempts to switch enforcement from state to citizens can be found in this New York Times article.

Photographs are from sights and objects found in public squares in small Texan towns

I want to focus here, though, on the psychology of denunciation in our current political situation. When I think about informants my immediate thoughts turn to either Nazi Germany or the former GDR where 189.000 citizen informers fed the STASI with reports of real or assumed behavior of neighbors. In both cases, the betrayal of Jews, people with anti-Hitler sentiments, or prohibited sexual orientation in the 1930s, and the denunciation of anti-socialist, pro-western ideologies in the post-war GDR, led to extreme punishments, even death sentences. Actions had existential consequences and yet people flocked to tell on their neighbors.

Of course, Germany is not an isolated case. Think Argentinian security structures during the years of dictatorship, or look at the North Korean neighborhood watch system, that every single citizen is required to belong to. A self-policing citizenry helps an authoritarian regime, providing otherwise impossible access to private information and saving resources that would have to go to hired enforcement.

But what are the citizens’ motivations that lead to this collaboration? There is a bunch of scientific literature on the topic, but also literary case studies of individual cases, particularly of women who in this regard switch from the role of victim quite often to the role of perpetrator. Personal interest to settle old scores, jealousy, elimination of competition, attention seeking, trying to vie for favor with the state, fear and, yes, money, all contribute to the eagerness to denunciate. Seen from a different angle, women in particular, who are usually overall less free to act, more oppressed in authoritarian regimes and traditional societal and family structures, can experience agency.

And women will know about other women’s bodies. And no bodily issue is more about religious identity and revenge against a world that has seemingly left White evangelicals behind, than abortion.

Denunciations are nothing new in American history. As early as 1657 we had a New Hampshire law that incentivized locals to become informants on Quaker activities (and penalized anyone housing them) by offering hefty sums of money. In the early 1950s, with the United States in the grip of McCarthyism, the state encouraged a culture of denunciation, where thousands of Americans were accused of communist involvement or sympathies and subsequently publicly shamed, marginalized, persecuted or prohibited to pursue their chosen careers. Never mind that there often was no evidence, no right to respond, no legal protection.

Here and now, though, the extremes of polarization have made enmity personal. People are not just scared of some nebulous commies taking on the US, eager to protect the nation. People are seeing their own personal beliefs and circumstances under attack, their religious beliefs ridiculed, their relative societal status in decline from within. That makes motivation to get back at those around you, perceived to be the enemy, all the more personal, justifying to be vicious. Being active collaborators in this battle for religious. political and cultural dominance also creates an increased sense of in-group cohesion. It’s us against them, and if we can manage, let’s have them rot in jail. Down to the Über driver who transported the woman to the abortion clinic. I predict a deluge. As does the Texan government whose trick book is not coincidentally taking its tricks from regimes that they long to emulate. Hardening polarization, they know, will keep them in power by motivating and accepting extreme measures.

At least Esther Bejarano z”l is spared to have to live through a repeat of history. May her memory be a blessing – and an obligation.

Music depicts her performances in the last years with the Hip Hop Band Microphone Mafia. She was in her nineties. I stand in awe.

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(S)elective History

I’m coming back to the topic of truthful accounting of history because it matters. Any form of society that wants to function justly, equitably and ethically – I can think of none right now, but we can aspire – needs to look at the way things were historically handled, if only to rectify mistakes in pursuit of the desired state. And it irks me to no end, that the white-washing of history, the refusal to acknowledge bad plays or bad actors, is not exactly a monopoly of the bad guys (yes, you know who) but is happening as well in quarters that really should know better.

Some years back it was the rehabilitation of fascist film maker Leni Riefenstahl by no other than German feminist powerhouse Alice Schwarzer, refuted by Susan Sonntag, who pointed to the continual thread of fascist ideals across Riefenstahl’s life and work. Three years ago the Berlin Museum of Photography added to the “quiet absolution” of the famous artist.

Today’s case in point was brought to me by the successful, feminist  OnThisDay She Twitter account, which offers daily blurbs about women that have been neglected by history. Tania Hershman, a British poet, runs the account with Jo Bell and Ailsa Holland, all co-authors of the book  On This Day She: Putting Women Back into History One Day at a Time, which came out this spring. It features 366 stories about mostly forgotten women. So then, what do you make of this:

A dazzling feminist and sports icon, lover of Josephine Baker, close friend of Jean Cocteau, darling of the Paris intelligentsia? Punished for her identity? You’d think so. But why killed by the Resistance?

The tweet prefers not go there.

It turns out that Morris was alleged to have become a Nazi collaborator, said to have accepted a personal invitation by Hitler to attend the Berlin Olympics. She was accused of spying for German intelligence and of passing Allied military plans to the Germans, giving the names of members of the French Resistance to the Gestapo and of actively participating in the torture of prisoners, particularly women prisoners as well as having made huge profits from the black market sale of fuel confiscated by the German army. After a secret trial by the Resistance, she was killed by British commandoes and French partisans.

Here is another site which lifts obscure people from history, that goes even further. Rather than omitting crucial accusations, it pushes them aside along the line of, “but she was such a bad ass…”

Morris joined the Reich, performed acts of espionage against the French government throughout the late 30s, and when France finally fell to Hitler in 1940 Violette Morris became so ferocious in her tactics rooting out the French Resistance that she was known as “The Hyena of the Gestapo”. Rolling through town with psychotic thugs named One-Armed Jean, Jo the Mammoth, and Le Sanguinaire (“The Bloodthirsty”), this former boxing champ realized she had a hell of a knack for beating confessions out of prisoners – which, incidentally, is kind of the Gestapo’s thing anyways – and armed with nothing more than a whip and a zippo lighter she destroyed Resistance cells and British SOE spies anywhere she could find them. Which is admittedly pretty impressive, even though I don’t exactly have any love for her ideology. (Bolded by me.)

So… yeah, it’s kind of a bitter finale because this chick goes from Jimmy Johnson to Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS in the course of like 2 paragraphs, but it turned out that by-and-large the Nazis tended to get what was coming to them, and that’s exactly how it went down with Violette Morris. She became so notorious in her counter-espionage tactics that the SOE organized a special mission to take her out of the picture, and on April 26, 1944 – just a month or so before D-Day – British Commandos and French Resistance partisans ambushed her and opened fire on her supercharged sports car with a dozen or so machine guns, whacking her out in slow motion Sonny Corleone-style. She was buried in a potter’s field and is now basically almost universally-despised by everyone in France. Which, honestly, should probably count as bonus points somewhere.

As it turns out, we have no proof either way, Violette Morris being a nasty piece of work, or the victim of false accusations conveniently targeting a rebellious woman ahead of her time (or her sports competitors.) A 2019 book, “Femme qui court” (“Woman Running”), by Gérard de Cortanze, a Jewish author whose grandfather participated in the Resistance, argues that numerous historical sources and archival material relating to the Nazis revealed no proof for her collaboration. Since the Resistance trials were not documented for safety’s sake, we have no evidence from that corner either.

I think I’ve made my point, though. Just because some person scores on whatever identity board you count on – degree of badass, daring lesbian life style – does not mean you should not mention the darker side, or, worse, shrug it away. You should do full scholarship to be truly informed about your idol, and you need at least mention that there are competing versions of the full actions embraced by the historical figure. Something that is never done while white-washing.

Selective myopia is not going to serve us well.

Music hails from the Paris of the 1930s and 40s, photographs from Parisian flea markets that allow glimpses into the history of the population.

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Crossbones

Well, I lived to tell the tale. For a moment, though, I thought I’d succumb to a heart attack. Here I am, early morning in my chair at the window overlooking the pear tree, scrolling though my emails on my iPhone. All of a sudden something like a cannonball approaches, hitting the window right next to my head with a loud enough boom that the dog starts barking at the three-fire-alarm level. Not one, but two sizable birds, one clutching the desperate other, tumble downwards after impact, leaving in their wake a cloud of soft, small, white feathers that drift slowly like snowflakes over the butterfly bushes onto the ground.

All the way down there, the bigger one, a hawk, finishes what he started, hacking the mourning dove to death. High on adrenaline I manage to get a picture on the iPhone, then start yelling at him, if only to prevent the poor dove to be torn to pieces – which I would have to remove bit by bit… Then I run down, hissing at my dog to stay inside, and pick up the poor bird to dispose it where the puppy can’t get to it.

Upon my return, the hawk sits among the leftover feathers, wondering where breakfast went. With me still standing there, just a few meters away, a couple of crows swoop down and start to chase him. That was the end of it.

Except in my head. I could not stop thinking about the symbolism of hawks and doves, of war and peace, of the demise of the latter, no matter how much I tell myself about the necessary ways of food chains in nature. What is a woman to do? Why, distract herself with questions that can be answered, in contrast to the ones about warriors seeming to rule, forever.

Where did the hawks and doves connotation come from? It turns out it was coined, about 200 years ago, by a Congressman in this country, John Randolph.

“In the run-up to the War of 1812, Randolph described those clamoring for military action against Great Britain in the name of American honor and territory as “war hawks.” The term had talons and caught on. He was especially thinking of Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun, members of his own Republican party.“

Of course I had to look up that war as well, and found bitter-sweet convergence to my last blog’s claims about the variability of historical narratives. Historian C.P. Stacey summed it up:

“..the War of 1812 is ‘an episode in history that makes everybody happy, because everybody interprets it differently’. Americans believe they gave their former mother country a good drumming, Canadians pride themselves in turning back ‘the massed might of the United States’, and ‘the English are happiest of all, because they don’t even know it happened’. These competing perspectives are the result of the different functions the Anglo-American conflict served in their respective nations’ historical master narratives.”

“The war provided Americans with a set of symbols, heroes, and legends on which to build their national identity. Aside from giving a boost to American westward expansion and growing political support for a large standing army and a sizable navy, federally sponsored internal improvements, and a national bank, the war also produced symbols of national identity such as ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and ‘Uncle Sam.’” (Ref.)

What was it all about? Well, who would have guessed, economic competition and trade disputes at a time when England was busy trying to fight Napoleon, the British blockading sea ports and trying to prevent American westwards expansion, capturing American ships and forcing some 15.000 American soldiers shanghaied at sea into their own military forces. Hailed as a second War of Independence here in the US, it eventually catapulted General Andrew Jackson into the presidency. He was an expansionist who opposed the abolitionist movement and is most infamously known for his pivotal role in signing the Indian Removal Act, which forcibly removed most members of the major tribes of the Southeast to Indian Territory; these removals were subsequently known as the Trail of Tears.

And our friend John Randolph, he of the hawks and doves? Not really our friend, even though he did oppose the war of 1812. He was pro-slavery with a passion, with ardent speeches during his many years in congress. In 1825, he talked for several days in opposition to a series of measures proposed by President John Quincy Adams; Randolph argued these measures would give advantage to the emerging industrial powers of New England at the expense of the Southern states. This series of speeches was the first Senate filibuster. I repeat, not our friend.

Makes me grieve the dove, the doves, all over again.

But, of course, life goes on.

This is actually two doves, one drinking, shown from behind, the other looking on.

Meanwhile, in the old countries, Russia was fighting off the French, and this 1812 Overture is the eternal reminder….

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Cross Roads

If you had asked me some months ago what Critical Race Theory is, the likely answer would have been, “Huh?” These days, there isn’t a news outlet that doesn’t engage the term on a daily basis, with emotional appeals to ward off the Right’s attacks on racial reckoning, or accusations of Leftie indoctrination of blessed little school children (let’s equip teachers with body cameras so we can control if they are indoctrinating!, let’s pass state laws that prevent school curricula from teaching CRT,) or scholarly treatises that try to explain why this or that approach to teaching history must not/must include this or leave out that.

I figured we could use a most basic description of the issues in order to understand where the roots for the mobilization of the current hysteria about the evil of Critical Race Studies lie. And I mean basic. The long versions from which I summarize, can be found here and here.

Critical Race Theory is a body of work that is anchored in legal scholarship, with three complex principles under constant evaluation (certainly not found in any primary school curriculum!) The debate established three main principles: that there is a Constitutional Contradiction, an Interest Convergence, and the Price of Racial Remedies. The Constitutional Contradiction, scholars argued, describes the framers’ choice to privilege the rewards of property over justice. Interest Convergence refers to the demonstrable fact that Whites will promote racial advances for Blacks only when they also promote white self-interest. The Price of Racial Remedies assumes that Whites will not support civil rights policies that may threaten white social status.

More generally, these days we see a lot of scholars, historians and journalists engage in Critical Race Studies, which basically try to teach us why the undeniable inequality, the ongoing differences in experienced violence and trauma for Blacks is not just an outcome of racist acts committed by some biased, racist people. Instead, they argue, the roots for the differences in lived experiences between Blacks and Whites, lie in systems that perpetuate the original power differential and beliefs in the supremacy of one race over the other – systems that include parts of our culture and the way it teaches history, parts of the social infrastructure that allows those on the top to stay there and prevents others to get a leg up, and institutional set-ups that perpetuate a certain order.

According to the Right, slavery, racial subjugation, segregation and inequity did (or might have) existed, but that’s a thing of the past. We now have – at least theoretically – equality before the law, they say, and so any differences in economic or educational attainment, in longevity or susceptibility for diseases etc., is due to personal choices, engagement, or absence thereof. No need to bring the subject of racism into the classroom, where it makes white children feel bad, raises ugly memories of a Civil War, and subverts the origin story of this proud country from individual freedom and initiative to a nasty tale of the original sin of slavery.

Not so, counter the progressives, we have an ongoing process of racial discrimination that can only be changed if we tackle the origins and point to the continuity built into our institutional systems, from prisons to schools to banks. We are at a cross road. The rising awareness of parallel lives in our society, embodied most dramatically in the killings of Blacks by police in recent years, have alerted and concerned enough people that a more truthful debate about our history can begin and should be carried into the schools.

History is mobilized, then, for political purposes, on each side. That is nothing new, of course, except that the dominant class, those in power, always had a monopoly on what and how history was taught, at least officially. With the ability to access other sources, for both students and teachers (who, for example, can benefit from the NYT’s 1619 project’s syllabi) that exclusive right is now under attack. Having lost other battles in the culture wars,(the majority of Americans now thinks positively of same-sex unions, for example,) CRT is the perfect new bogeyman that can whip the base into a frenzy, race having always been an attractive issue for conservatives to mobilize around, given how it can be used to stoke white resentment. Nothing more threatening than losing control over what your children think, or how critical thinking is encouraged in the first place.

Of course, if you intentionally and repeatedly misrepresent and distort the facts of what the engagement with our racist history in schools implies, if you lie about the present-day existence of racism and its systemic roots, you do not just undermine any possible objective discussion, but you endanger the entire democratic project that the founders tried to establish.

That said, making history culpable for the present, singularly dwelling on it instead of looking how to fight for a better future is to be avoided. As Frederick Douglass said in his Speech for the 4th of July: “We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future.”

Or as Princeton historian Matthew Karp put it (from whom I also borrowed above quote):

“The past may live inside the present, but it does not govern our growth. However sordid or sublime, our origins are not our destinies; our daily journey into the future is not fixed by moral arcs or genetic instructions. We must come to see history… not as “what we dwell in, are propelled by, or are determined by,” but rather as “what we fight over, fight for, and aspire to honor in our practices of justice.”

And while we’re at it, one of the most accessible books about how the history of slavery is transmitted these days, is Clint Smith’s How the Word is Passed. Written at times poetically, always absorbingly, it is a must read. Review can be found here.

 

Music is by the Fiske Jubilee Singers.

 

 

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French Revolution meet my Pear Tree

I spend a lot of hours these days in an easy chair facing a budding pear tree nestled in a tall bamboo hedge. Its branches provide perches for all kinds of small birds, sparrows and chickadees, juncos and bush tits who disappear into the shelter of the bamboo the second they sense some change.

They certainly scatter when the Rufus Towhee, depicted below, appears to lord it over them all, choosing the highest branch and admiring his own colorful feathers, turning slow circles, spreading his wings and generally pretending he owns the place. Except for one pesky little brown sparrow who won’t have it, starting low on the tree and hopping with fierce determination ever higher until he is in Rufus’ face who is stunned enough at the chutzpah that he flies off.

And since we are on a roll with the anthropomorphizing, let’s hear it for the story that came to mind as an analogy – having just picked it up a couple of days ago in my insatiable appetite for narratives about unusual individuals who defy constraints and expectations.

Meet Zamor, a Bangladeshi boy who, at age 11, was captured by British slave traders who trafficked him to France via Madagascar and sold him to Louis XVI. He gave the boy as a gift to his mistress, Madame du Barry. The countess, by her on words, used him as a plaything and invited courtiers to tease and ridicule her “little African.”

At first I looked upon him as a puppet or plaything, but… I became passionately fond of my little page, nor was the young urchin slow in perceiving the ascendancy he had gained over me, and, in the end… attained an incredible degree of insolence and effrontery.”

The boy craved and received education, devouring Rousseau and studying the classics. At the start of the French revolution he joined the Jacobins and became an office-bearer in the Committee of Public Safety. Using his influential position he got the police to arrest the Countess in 1792, who was released from jail on this round eventually. Further charges by Zamor who was done with a slave’s existence, led to her second arrest, trial and execution by guillotine. It is sort of tragic, given that the Countess was born out of wedlock to a working class mother, made her way out of poverty and up the social ladder as a hired prostitute in ever more aristocratic circles due to her uncommon beauty, and eventually ended up as the King’s courtesan, an association that doomed her during the revolution.

Not exactly a happy ending in the wings for Zamor either. He was arrested by the Girondins on suspicion of being an accomplice of the Countess and a Jacobin. Friends secured his release from prison and helped him to flee France, only for him to return to a life of poverty and premature death after the 1815 fall of Napoleon.

The lavish pretender at the top of the social ladder was brought down by a small Jacobin hooked on big ideas about inequality, social contracts and other tenets of enlightenment. Let’s hope the colorful Towhee and the assertive small rebel sparrow do not exactly reenact the ultimate fate of their counter-parts. Just getting things shaken at the top is joy enough.

Then again, the Heritage Foundation might not agree….

Here is Pola Negri as Madame du Barry in a 1919 silent movie directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Spectacular mass scenes. Alas, explanatory text in French and German only. Zamor is played by a Victor Janson, hmmmmm.

For a more short lived musical amusement – La Piaf in It’ll be fine…..

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History, coded in color.

Inauguration – today we rejoice! Tomorrow we remind ourselves that the mascot is gone but the team remains intact.

It is surely no coincidence that I have been thinking about South Africa’s long history of colonial racism, eventually codified in laws imposed by the Apartheid regime. Racist practices had begun with the arrival of the Dutch East India Company in the 17th century, were later fortified by the British colonizers in the 19th century, but then legally structured (and then some) by the Nationalist Party which ruled South Africa between 1948 and 1994.

Despite the vanquishing of the racist German National Socialistic regime in 1945, South Africa decidedly went for its own version of White supremacy just three years later. Laws prohibited marriage and sex between the races, required registration of your race, enacted a prohibition for Blacks to vote and assigned them to certain areas or homelands through The Group Areas Act (1950.) This law partitioned the country into different areas, allocated to different racial groups. It represented the very heart of apartheid because it was the basis upon which political and social separation was to be constructed.

Gone are the Sacrificial Lambs (2011) (Series: Affirmation&Negation)

There were laws segregating universities, and those banning opposition parties. Laws drew divisions between the homeland areas themselves to prevent solidarity or joint action among different groups of Blacks. There were laws to formalize discriminations in employment, laws that controlled migration in and out of areas and protected forced and violent expropriation of property and relocations of Blacks to poor areas. As late as 1970 the Black Homeland Citizenship Act (1970) changed the status of the inhabitants of the ‘homelands’ so that they were no longer citizens of South Africa. The aim was to ensure Whites became the demographic majority within ‘white’ South Africa.

La Couturière (2010) (Series: (S)Elective Affinities)

By the mid to late 1980s opposition had become strong and vocal in a Defiance Campaign, and the regime reacted with violent oppression and police power. One of the ways the protest movements mobilized people and signaled meanings was through the use of color. Orange, white and blue, associated with the Nationalist Party, the colors of the first flag of the Republic of South Africa, were shunned. Visual graphics in posters and leaflets used black, green and gold instead, which stood for the color of the People, the green of the land and the gold for the wealth of the land. They had been chosen by the African National Congress, the main opposition party, since its inception in 1912. Those colors went underground in 1960 with the banning of the ANC, since people found by the regime to be in possession of items bearing these colours (no additional writing or image necessary) ran the risk of being beaten up, arrested or even killed.

But then came purple:

“On 2 September (1989,) police turned a powerful water cannon on thousands of protesters attempting to march to parliament. The water contained a strong purple dye, the intention being to mark all those who were protesting so they could face arrest at a later time, even if they managed to run away. Hundreds were arrested and for days it seemed a large part of the Cape Town population had become various shades of purple. This flew in the face of racial segregation laws and became a standing joke. People filled out ‘purple’ on the section of the arrest forms that demanded information about race and the defiance campaign slogan was changed temporarily to ‘the purple shall govern’. Ironically, the event contributed successfully to the Defiance Campaign in that people with different skin colour looked more alike. ‘Purple people’ signified the ultimate embodiment of the mode of colour as a political statement, more than the media of clothes mentioned earlier.” (Ref.)

The Moor (2010) (Series: (S)Elective Affinities)

A year later, the color red was added to the protest vocabulary.

Joe Slovo, General Secretary of the Communist Party of South Africa, on returning home for the first time in 1990 after 25 years in exile, sent a message to his supporters anticipating his arrival. ‘Wear red socks’, he said and thousands did. No written explanations, images or verbal slogans were needed. When people put on their red socks for Slovo, they were acknowledging their own history of concurring with the senti-ments, politics and strategies of the South African Communist Party, and joining these thoughts with the quirky humour of the leadership. The choice of media, namely socks, was deliberate because socks are not immediately and overtly discernible and can be shown or hidden at will. (Ref.)

I’m going on about this at length for two reasons. For one, it is timely to remind ourselves of how racism has governed historical developments not even 100 years ago and how a mass movement could break some of the spell. Secondly, the mind-blowing sculptures by South African sculptor and photographer Mary Sibande, who I want to introduce today, can only be appreciated if we understand the historical significance of both color and costume.

Sibande casts life-sized sculptures of her face and body molded in fiber glass, creating an alter ego, Sophie. She then dresses these sculptures in gowns filled with enough symbolic references that it compares to decoding a renaissance portrait. Sophie is the silent narrator of the history of South African Black women, often in servitude or barely paid domestic workers, who are allowed to express their fantasies of what the world should look like if they weren’t indentured.

Silent Symphony (2010)

Blue was the chosen color in her early work, the blue of the traditional maid’s uniform; the shapes of the gowns are of Victorian splendor, and the activities enacted are undermining the racial and class hierarchy. (Below Sophie, with eyes closed as always, is repairing a superman cape.)

More recently the artist has added the color purple and now even red to her repertoire and the alternate versions of Sophie are juxtaposed as those representing her maternal past and those standing for the future of the progressive movement with an allusion to the events of 1989 described above.

A Reversed Retrogress: Scene 1 (The Purple Shall Govern). (2013)

“Sophie” straddles time, pre-, during and post-Apartheid, as well as roles. There is the specific inheritance of stories and dreams of the women in the artist’s family, four generations who were maids or other kinds of domestic workers. There is Mary as Sophie, now, drawing on the repository of African myths, beliefs and wisdom.

There is also, it seems, a general representation of the struggle of Black women in the system, their marginalization in a post-colonial world as well. In each configuration she is confident, alive, a subject that tells the story, her story, rather than someone subjugated.

The sculptures really strike me as a celebration of strength.

Detail from the series “In the Midst of Chaos There is Also Opportunity” (2017)

I assume anyone not familiar with the politics of South Africa would still be moved and made to think by this emotive work. If you are able to fill in the necessary facts around the use of color, or other symbolism of note in the fight against Apartheid, the full power of these sculptures unfolds. Oh, when can we travel again to see all this in a museum in the country where it come from? Or at least in a gallery in our own nation?

Music today is interspersed with talk – I learned a lot. Music mobilizing protest.

Photomontages are from 2010 and 2011, chosen for the colors blue, purple and red and the fact that they, too, focused on narrative.

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Paris-Match (2)

Photographer Gisèle Freund (1908 – 2000) was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin, growing up around art (her father was a notable collector) and receiving a first rate education. She studied art history and sociology at the University of Freiburg and then Frankfurt, becoming acquainted with the Frankfurt School folks around Adorno, friends with Walter Benjamin, portraitist of Berthold Brecht, and engaged in antifascist student organizations.

She barely made it to France in 1933, answering the threatening questions of the police patrolling the train “if they had ever heard someone Jewish being called Gisela,” a classic German name, and handing over her camera that she had intuitively emptied of film in the train’s loo.

She escaped with few funds, but a lot of negatives depicting mass demonstrations and violence by the Nazis against leftist protests which introduced her as a photographer to an ever widening circle of friends and aquaintances in the literary and publishing circles in Paris. Her works can now be found at the Washington State University Libraries Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, depicting a veritable Who’s Who of (mostly) European intellectuals.

Prints include numerous portraits of: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Andre Malraux, Simone de Beauvoir, Man Ray, W.H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, Andre Breton, Andre Gide, Colette, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Eluard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau, Henri Matisse, T.S. Eliot, Leonard Woolf, Henri Michaux, David Siqueiros, Andrienne Monnier, Sylvia Beach, Max Ernst, G.B. Shaw, J.B. Priestley, Diego Rivera, Henry Moore, Herman Hesse, Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, Paul Valery, Elsa Triolet, Simone De Beauvoir, Pierre Bonnard, Vita Sackville-West, Georges Mathieu, Ivan Illich, Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, Marguerite Yourcenar, John Steinbeck, Philippe Soupault, Eugene Ionesco, Le Corbusier, Samuel Beckett, Jose Clemente Orosco, Iris Murdoch, Ivy Compton Burnett, Rosamund Lehmann, Christopher Fry. 1933-1974  She took the official photograph at the presidential inauguration of Socialist Francois Mitterrand in 1981.

Here are some of the images:

Previous travels to Paris had already brought friendship with some of the surrealists, more doors opened after she became friends and then lovers (she was bi-sexual) with the famous bookstore owner Adrienne Monnier, which left the latter’s previous partner, Sylvia Beach, in the dust. Monnier published her doctoral thesis (part of the book I reviewed yesterday,) made the connections to the literary illuminati, and helped to find a marriage of convenience with a resistance fighter so that Freund could stay in France.

Until she couldn’t. In 1940 she had to flee Paris, eventually traveling to South America, all the while being published by major publications like Life Magazine, Time Magazine, Paris-Match and Magnum, starting a year after its founding, and being written out of its history when she became politically risky. Argentina threw her out of the country after she photographed Evita Perón in heaps of her jewels and with stashes of accumulated riches. She found a harbor in Mexico City, became friends with Diego Riviera and Frida Kahlo and their circle, and was banned from entry to the US until the 1970s (!) because of her leftists associates.

She was described as a difficult person, temperamental, but I am in awe of the independence, the power to take risks and explore while forced to relocate under threat, and the flexibility to adapt to ever changing conditions. She also embraced color photography as one of the first influential photographers, scorned by many in the male establishment.

Postwar return to France saw her fame rise, details found here in an obituary that lamented, 20 years ago, that her work had been hidden from history for too long.

That is no longer true, and brings me to the question that reading her book and articles about her raised for me. How do you understand a person and feel free to interpret her motives for her work, when you can no longer talk to her? It is of course a task for many a biographer, but looking at photographs and interpreting them to infer the motivations of the photographer strikes me as difficult, particularly when their own recorded words stand in contrast to your interpretations.

Let me explain with an example, typical for many. A scholar of photographers in exile argues

“that exile by fascist regimes prompted certain European photographers to resort to human figuration in order to reconsider the possibilities of historical subjectivity at its moment of crisis…. Gisèle Freund, the color portraitist of the interwar French cultural luminaries, made a volte-face from the portrayal of the collective subject in the political demonstrations in pre-exile Frankfurt into the individual faces of the French intellectuals after her exile in Paris…led them to instrumentalize the photographic medium not only to address the aftermath of the European avant-garde—especially the end of its utopian quest to envision political collectives through human figuration—but also to measure and critique the new American mass culture and subjectivity.”

Ok, I have no clue what historical subjectivity is supposed to mean. Not for want of trying, but the literature explaining it is impenetrable for this aging brain. My bad. I do know, though, that Freund never gave up on photographing collective subjects, even during exile, as can be seen in work documenting the British poor, and political movements and working conditions all over the South American sub-continent in her years of exile. Never mind, that she also portrayed individual people with a passion pre-exile.

I have watched interviews with the photographer herself speaking late in life about her intentions. For one, being hired for portraits in the 1930s meant a means of economic survival (the print media were happy to display pictures of the rich and famous.) Shifting to color made her feel she could capture more life-like impressions, serving her goal to “familiarize strangers with each other, potentially decreasing enmity among them.” The close encounters with people also opened avenues for what she thought most important in all of the world: friendship and love.

The interview below is, alas, available only in German.

It ends with a comment that I translated here:

“I believed for many years that you could change the world with photography. I later realized that was an error. People used my photos to pursue their ideologies and I understood that photography lies even though people assume it tells the truth.”

She abandoned photography, her life’s passion, in 1980, a full 20 years before her death of a heart attack in the year 2000.

Photographs, selected for the color that Freund so cherished, are from Coyoacán, Mexico City, the neighborhood where Frida Kahlo, who was photographed extensively by Freund, lived. The blue house is now a museum – I wrote about Fridamania here.

And here we go down memory lane for my own youth…

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Paris-Match (1)

So it goes. You learn some interesting things from a book you received for Hanukkah, and then you get caught up in much more fascinating questions about the book’s author. Let me report on both, today and tomorrow, respectively.

The book, Photography and Society, by German-French photographer Gisèle Freund, is a seminal study of the relationship between photography and society, including its political implications.

Freund had to flee Germany in 1933 where she was involved in political resistance against the rise of the Nazis. Finding shelter in Paris, she studied at the Sorbonne and began to photograph an ever widening circle of cultural icons and famous literary types, later published in Paris-Match, and Life Magazine, among others.

The book is an assessment of photography’s role up to the late 1970s, when the book was first written (published in translation in 1980). Freund could not have been more visionary in what was yet to come in the next half century than she was on those pages.

What could I, a photographer who is often thinking about politics, find more fascinating? I’ll get to that in tomorrow’s installment.

Here’s the Heuer’s Digest review:

Freund, using the dissertation she wrote at the Sorbonne in the 1930s, first lays out photography’s history, including how it was invented and how it displaced the many artists who had come to serve the demands of a growing and ever wealthier bourgeoisie for portraits: painters, engravers, lithographers. Originally hailed as an advancement to serve science, it soon dominated in the social realm as a token of status or a means of remembrance. The early phases of artistically creative photography were soon superseded by adjusting to the mediocre tastes of those who paid for the pictures. Eventually professional photographers, a trade that had grown like wildfire due to demand, were sent packing when do-it-yourself photography took over.

The second part of the book relegates the big question Is photography art?, to the dust bin where it belongs. Of course, it can be. Why not ask the much more relevant question instead, What is photography for?

For one, as a means of reproduction, it has been a wonderful tool to disseminate art (painting and sculpture included) – just think postcards in museum stores, or books that open the minds of generations to visual art otherwise confined to museums.

Secondly, there are many types of photography that impact society in other ways. There is “concern” photography, the documentation of suffering in poverty and war and general social justice issues, photography as personal artistic expression, photography as photojournalism, as a propaganda tool, and last but not least, its commercial aspects in the advertising industry. And, of course, always, always self-representation – although the term Selfie did not yet exist when she wrote.

Freund provides memorable examples of how the “objectivity” of photography is laughable, given how what you select can shape an impression, how captions under a given image can completely change its meaning, or how juxtaposition of two photographs can manipulate opinion. For example: take a photograph of a Russian tank sent to squash the Hungarian uprising. Consider caption 1 vs. caption 2:

1. In contempt of the people’s right to self determination, the Soviet government has sent armored divisions to Budapest to suppress the uprising.

2, The Hungarian people have asked the Soviets for help. Russian tanks have been sent to protect the workers and restore order.

Freund concludes her book with thoughts roughly summarized below: What began as a means of self representation has become a powerful tool that penetrates all aspects of society. Yet finding photographs that go beyond representation, some that are truly art, is rare. The tool has democratized mankind’s knowledge and built bridges between people by providing a common language in civilization, but has also “played a dangerous role as an instrument of manipulation used to create needs, to sell goods and to mold minds.”

How was Freund’s life and photography influenced by these insights? Stay tuned.

Photographs today are street photography from my 2014 visit to Paris, Freund’s chosen home.

Music is mainly interesting for the vintage film clips of Paris in the background.
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Seeking a Model

You surely know those days when everything, even the most innocuous bit, takes on a dark halo, a portent, a trigger for irrational thinking. I am in the middle of one of those days as I write this – hopefully behind me tomorrow when you read this.

Most of the Pentagon leadership fired? Must mean war in the offing, or a coup where the military sides with the ones clinging to power. You get the idea – thoughts so far out of the ordinary that one would laugh at them during normal times, would scold me for even uttering them, and yet here they take on a realistic sheen in my already anxious universe.

Time to look for role models who have survived far worse and risen to live meaningful lives, using art for resistance. None more fitting than Lin Jaldati, an extraordinary Dutch woman who survived Auschwitz when betrayed after years of living in hiding in Amsterdam.

I learned about her in a project researched, written up and at times performed by historian David Shneer, z”l.

Shneer who died a few days ago at age 48 of a brain tumor, held the Louis P. Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History at the University of Colorado. He was an outstanding intellectual pursuing the history of Yiddish culture, but also a lively performer – some of the videos in the link below (Art is my Weapon) show him together with colleagues, in particular Jewlia Eisenberg, performing music and bringing the history of Jewish resistance to life.

The project is called Art is my Weapon – the radical musical life of Lin Jaldati, and tells the story of the Dutch, communist, Jewish cabaret actress who immigrated to East Germany after liberation from Auschwitz to become a famous singer and political player keeping up the memory of the Holocaust until her death in 1988. I familiarized myself with her on the basis of the incredibly poignant title of Shneer’s biography of the artist: Trümmerfrau der Seele. (Woman who clears the soul from rubble.)

Trümmerfrauen were the women who cleared the rubble, the debris, the ruins of the bombed-out buildings of post-war German cities. To envision that act done to the soul, finding pathways to and clearing away the destruction wrought by persecution or trauma, in her case opening space for the memory of a culture that was not destroyed after all, is for me an image that holds incredible power. Humans can withstand and overcome catastrophe, picking up the pieces, refusing to be forced into oblivion. A timely reminder.

Below are a few samplings of her music. One of the most famous songs, from Yiddishe Lieder, published in 1981, is In Kamf (In Struggle.) I have attached the translation of the lyrics. The song is about justice and persecution in a political domain not just reserved for Jews.

Mir vern gehast un getribn, Mir vern geplogt un farfolgt; Un alts nor derfar vayl mir libn Dos oreme shmaktnde folk.

Mir vern dershosn, gehangen, Men roybt undz dos lebn un rekht; Derfar vayl emes farlangen Un frayhayt far oreme knekht.

Ober undz vet nit dershrekn Gefenkenish un tiranay, Mir muzn di mentshhayt dervekn Un makhn zi gliklekh un fray.

Shmidt undz in ayzerne keytn, Vi blutike khayes undz rayst; Ir kent undzer kerper nor teytn Nor keyn mol undzer heylikn gayst.

Ir kent undz dermordn, tiranen, naye kemfer vet brengen di tsayt; Un mir kemfn, mir kemfn biz vanen Di gantse velt vet vern bafrayt.

Here is the translation

We are hated and ostracised, we are tormented and persecuted and all just because we love the poor people pining away.

We are shot, hanged, you rob us of our life, our rights so because we want truth and freedom for poor slaves

Hated & hunted & driven, turned out & chased from your doors & only because we have given our love to the weak & the poor

We perish by lash & by fire your prisons & armies we fill our bodies alone may expire our spirits you never can kill

You tyrants may murder or beat us new fighters will rise in our place& we’ll fight & you’ll never defeat us we fight for the whole human race

but you will never frighten us prison and tyranny we must wake humanity and make them happy and free and make them happy and free.

And for those particularly interested in how Yiddish fits into teaching about the Holocaust, here is an informative link.

Photographs are from Holland where Lin Jaldati was born.

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