On Thursday Oct 6th at 5 pm, in the D’Angelo Center (Room 128), the Academic Center for Equity and Inclusion (ACEI) at St John’s is inviting the University community to a screening of the 2022 documentary film, Who We Are. According to the invitation:
[Who We Are] is a film version of former ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jeffery Robinson’s groundbreaking talk on the history of U.S. anti-Black racism. The documentary is interwoven with archival footage, interviews, and Robinson's story, and it explores the enduring legacy of white supremacy and our collective responsibility to overcome it.
You can watch a trailer of the film here:
You can find out more and register HERE. I encourage everyone to go as it touches on many of the issues of identity that we’re exploring in this course. Not to mention many of the issues that we still face as a nation.
As William Faulkner said: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
The following week, ACEI will also be hosting a discussion about the film with one of the film’s producers, Jayashri Wyatt. You can find out more about that HERE.
As you may or may not know, October is Domestic Violence Awareness month. This year on Saturday, Oct 1st at 3pm in Astoria Park (Ditmas Blvd side), a group of women from Queens are kicking off the inaugural Queens Women’s Safety Festival.
You can find out more about the event and register HERE.
Executive Director and Founder of Malikah, Rana Abdelhamid
As community organizer, activist, former City Council candidate Rana Abdelhamid describes the event:
This festival is part of our effort to envision a model for community safety that is rooted in strong relationships, communal well being and joy. As the Founder / ED of Malikah – an Astoria based non-profit committed to building safety and power for our communities – this year we’re also focused on securing our first physical space which will serve as a wraparound service and training center for women and girls.
If you are unable to attend, you should check out Malikah anyway. It has been around for over 10 years and boasts both a global reach and vibrant local organizing, all centered around empowering women. Rana herself ran for City Council in the primary in Queens this past cycle, until her district was redrawn, breaking up the community base that she was depending on. It’s a disorienting thing to have your familiar ground suddenly disappear from under your feet.
Nevertheless, Rana continues to build and continues to organize, and this promises to be an exciting and meaningful event, the first of many.
Since we’re discussing names and naming, it’s worthwhile reading Malikah’s manifesto, where they describe the meaning of the word “Malikah” as follows:
What does Malikah mean?
The word Malikah captures women’s power in seven distinct global language traditions. Our logo is an image of an inverse crown, indicating our efforts to disrupt entrenched, stereotypical notions of who represents and has access to power. Malikah women believe that every single woman should have full power over her body, choices, socio-political and cultural institutions and economic agency.
This Thursday, September 22nd, 2022, there will be a live-streaming event, sponsored by WNET 13 (PBS), called “The Border Between Then and Now” that continues the conversation about the US’s putative and draconian immigration policies. Perhaps forgotten by many as a relic of the Trump years, the debates around immigration stretch well into America’s past and are still with us today.
In recent days, for example, we have been following with a kind of bewildered horror the accounts of the Governors of Texas and Florida loading legally admitted immigrants onto buses and sending them to various liberal enclaves up north, a stunt that may play well with their base but is horrifying in its utter lack of humanity. We remember during the Trump years the assaults on DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival) and the camps set up by ICE that were used to house immigrants seeking refuge in the most inhumane conditions. It wasn’t until a ProPublica reporter released audio of the conditions in these camps, including the howls of children, that the general public began to realize what was being done in their name.
These issues seem to bubble up in the news now and then but they are an ongoing nightmare for countless families and migrants seeking some kind of stability.
In this course, the idea of the border, not to mention the question of documentation, is central to the way that we write about ourselves and the world. In this episode — which is the last in a series of events under the general title Sometimes We Must Interfere: Conversations on Confronting Inhumanity, a series curated by the brilliant Brian Tate — we hear from 3 asylum seekers who have for years pushed back against their own deportation, even while being subject to the humiliation and anxiety of ICE check-ins. Some of these people have been in the States for years, even decades. It is the only home they know. Hear their stories about the impact of living under this nightmare system and how to get involved in efforts to push back against them.
We will hear panelists Hüsniye Çöğür, Ravi Ragbir, and Naïscha Vilmé talk about their own painful and frustrating experiences navigating the immigration and asylum processes.
The event is online and free, but you do need to register, which you can do by clicking HERE
Kapka Kassabova’s 2017 travel book Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe brings new life to the travel genre by drawing on its most enduring and pervasive anxiety: the border between one country and another, between one language and another, between one story and another.
In an earlier travel book, Twelve Minutes of Love: A Tango Story, Kassabova told this story through the intimacy and intricacy of Tango, a dance of partners that playfully explores the border between bodies, a dance that itself originated in a borderland, the shoreland communities of the Río De Plata, which links Uruguay and Argentina. But in this earlier book, the border wasn’t so imposing. Seemingly, all that she needed to get from one place to another was a pair of dancing shoes that she carried with her as she Tangoed from Edinburgh, to Berlin, to Buenos Aries, to Auckland New Zealand, where her family moved after fleeing Bulgaria the country where she was born.
Artist and filmmaker Em Cooper, who explores the boundaries between oil painting and film, created this beautiful and brief trailer for Twelve Minutes
Dancing is certainly a more pleasurable motion than fleeing. And returning home, as Kassabova does in Borders, is perhaps as close as one can get to making of emigration a dance. When Kassabova decides to return to that strange borderland between the East and the West — that place where she grew up and that time that was behind the Iron Curtain — she seeks out people who stayed and elicits from them what stories she can. What she finds is that the border lingers differently for different people. The psychological impact of the “hard” border between Bulgaria and Turkey is not something that was suddenly swept away in the delirium of 1989. Kassabova writes:
An actively policed border is always aggressive: it is where power suddenly acquires a body, if not a human face, and an ideology. One obvious ideology that concerns borders is nationalist: the border is there to divide one nation-state from another. But a more insidious ideology is centralist in practice: the belief that the centre of power can issue orders from a distance with impunity, and sacrifice the periphery; that what is out of mainstream sight is out of memory. And border zones are always the periphery, always out of mainstream sight. (xvi)
We’ll be talking and writing a lot about borders this semester, borders between places and borders within identities, linguistic borders and the borders and boundaries that make up the self. I’ll end with Kassabova doing some work for us and attempting to define what a border is:
What is a border, when dictionary definitions fail? It is something you carry inside you without knowing, until you come to a place like this. You call into the chasm where one side is sunny, the other in darkness, and the echo multiplies your wish, distorts your voice, takes it away to a distant land where you might have been once. (4)
I came across this book recently, Travel Notes, by Stanley Crawford (writer, farmer), republished in 2014 by Calamari Press, but originally published in 1967, the year of my birth.
Calamari Press, now Calamari Archive Ink., was founded and is run by Derek White, who also posts on 5cense, which he describes as:
“ ≠ a Substack nor part of a blog cir¢ul... it'5 free + there'5 no ads > we have n0 ulterior motives hear xcept knowledge 4 th sake of knowledge, language 4 th sake of language + 2 do¢ument R Xistence w/ tXt, img + sound > if u dig 5tuff disↄussed herein plz 5upport th artists + Ↄalamari Arↄhive) > thx 4 reading”
The manuscript review and publication process of the Press is just as idiosyncratic as the blog. Instead of a traditional “author submission” section, they have a “Submission Guidelines/Manifesto” that reads more like a journal entry from Trash Robot than anything. It is less a statement of acceptable style than it is a full on re-visioning of the publication process:
“Undoing the wrongs of copyright The 1 amendment to our new manifest is that going forward Calamari Archive will no longer publish copyrighted works. © is a cancerous snake that bites intellectual property in the foot. As it stands, we can no longer live w/ ourselves being part of such a corrosive + antiquated system that restricts the ability of a work of art to freely copy itself + propagate. At most we will insert the ɔopyleft symbol in books: (ɔ), all rites reversed. As we've said before. To publish should mean to set free, not restrict.”
In fact, Calamari even takes issue with the word “manifesto,” or the idea of having a masthead at all, and only upon repeatedly being asked did they create this page, even as they changed the name from “Press” to “Archive.”:
“«Any statement or manifesto about the press is contained in the summation of its books at this time.»”
“the summation of its books at this time.” That’s quite a statement when you actually come to read Travel Notes and realize how absolutely un-summarizable it is, how resistant to logic, how damnably unsettling. I’ve read weird fiction and this is not that, nor is it slipstream Reading it is like that first 20 seconds after you wake from a lucid dream that makes perfect sense until you try and explain it to someone. The words eat the dream alive.
The book begins with the narrator having arrived at an airport terminal, his destination, from some undisclosed place of origin. He immediately hires a car and a translator because he doesn’t know where to go or how to communicate. They convince him that he HAS to see the Famôus Lake, and so they set out along a desolate road. Three hours outside the city, the car breaks down as does the plot. The driver informs him (through the translator) that the only thing for him to do is to completely disassemble the car. The man agrees and goes out foraging. This disassembly takes some time and is done in the middle of the road.
At one point a bus approaches going in the opposite direction and is unable to get past the disassembled car. After some back and forth the bus driver and passengers decide to disassemble the bus, move the pieces one by one to the other side, and re-assemble it there so they can be on their way.
There is much more and much less that happens, but I’m not going to try to re-assemble the plot right here. You need to find another way around. Futile gestures.
Just came across the essay below the other day. Thought you all might enjoy it. It struck me for 2 reasons: 1) we’ve been reading his essays, and 2) that album he’s pictured with on the floor next to him is the recent re-release of Prince’s Sign O The Times, Deluxe Edition.
The image I’ve included with this post is a reference to a poem that Abdurraqib included in his first collection of poetry, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much (Button Poetry/Exploding Pinecone Press, 2016). It’s called “Ode to Prince,” and you can watch him perform it here.
But here’s the essay:
“Hanif Abdurraqib Wants You to Feel as Excited About Music as He Does,” by Char Adams, from NBC News
Here is a link to a recent essay by Talia Lavin called “War Music: A Short History of the Ukrainian Language.” I thought people might benefit from reading it, for one because it touches on a subject that we have been writing and thinking about: language. And secondly because it is about an ongoing, current, and perhaps difficult to understand event, at least for some of us.
It may be difficult because we are unfamiliar with the region, the history, the political dynamics, not to mention the language; but it also may be difficult because during times like this, the language of politics itself becomes deliberately foggy. I realize that for some, this may be all too familiar. By focusing on language the way she does, and bringing in some sense of the history, she allows us to see what’s at stake for those who are the victims of this brutal campaign from a perspective that we have not perhaps getting:
“I thought I would start with language, since the Ukrainian language is in the crosshairs of this dictator, and there is reason to believe that, if his conquest, God forbid, takes hold, its musical syllables will be barred from the public sphere.”
She also includes some videos of traditional Ukrainian music played on traditional instruments, which I also thought relevant to our discussion of Hanif Abdulrraqib’s essays that we’ve been reading.
Do listen to the music. She ends by saying:
“And let the birds say it and let the singers say it, in Russian and Ukrainian and every language there is—no more people dying in the snow, as lonely as everyone is in death, no to war, no to bullets, no to bombs. The two languages differ but one word is exactly the same in both: мир—peace.”
The following notice about the upcoming Hostile Terrain 94 exhibit comes from Dr Anne Galvin, Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology in St. John’s College, who was instrumental in bringing this important project to campus.
If you are interested in participating in this project — or just interested in some of the wonderful courses and opportunities in Sociology and Anthropology — reach out to Dr. Galvin directly or let me know and I can put you in touch.
If enough people are interested and available, maybe we can figure out a way to do this together as a class. This is certainly a topic that fits in to our own work on identity and borders and documents.
From Dr Galvin:
St. John’s has been accepted as a host institution for the participatory art installation, Hostile Terrain 94.
Hostile Terrain 94 is a participatory art project sponsored and organized by the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP), a non-profit research-art-education-media collective, directed by anthropologist Jason De León.
The exhibition is composed of ~3,400 handwritten toe tags that represent migrants who have died trying to cross the Sonoran Desert of Arizona between the mid-1990s and 2019. These tags are geolocated on a wall map of the desert showing the exact locations where remains were found. This installation will simultaneously take place at a large number of institutions, both nationally and globally.
Catholic Relief Services (CRS) is organizing volunteer hours for participants to handwrite toe tags bearing witness to the deaths of migrants who lost their lives attempting to cross the U.S./Mexico border.
Participation has also been arranged as an Academic Service-Learning opportunity that can be completed as a classroom component or during designated volunteer hours listed on the attached promotional poster.
There will be a constellation of invited speakers and a documentary film viewing in association with the installation opening, which is scheduled for the second week in March through early April in DAC.
Information for volunteering can be found through scanning QR code on flyer and page links:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScylKMehpNSfcCMH8O3-mAryCHv1CCwoB3I5_OGcjih_Civqg/viewform
https://stjohns.givepulse.com/event/280725
Volunteer dates/times/locations:
Feb 11th from 12noon -5pm in DAC 100 (Food Court Area)
Feb 18th from 12noon-5pm in DAC 128 (Org Lounge)
Feb. 25th from 12noon-5pm in DAC 100 (Food Court Area)
All students seeking ASL credit must register through GivePulse and we will have sign in/sign out sheets on site.
During each volunteer day/time, participants will have the opportunity to learn more about the Frontera and will become part of the Undocumented Migration Project here at St. John's. Fair Trade Coffee and individually wrapped snacks will be provided.
The hope is that we have the great majority of tags filled out during these pre-scheduled sessions. While shifts are scheduled hourly, we welcome everyone for however long they can stay and participate!
The embedded video below is obviously not from the Super Bowl halftime performance by Prince in 2007 (which you find if you click through HERE). Instead it is a performance he did in Manchester, UK in February, 2014. I couldn’t post the halftime performance here because the NFL claims rights to the video and doesn’t allow it to be embedded on other sites. It’s readily available on YouTube. I suggest watching the full 12 minute version.
I include this video of the Manchester performance because it is one of my absolute favorites, though I never really watched it until after he passed in April of 2016. The song he performs below is “Something in the Water (Does Not Compute),” from his 1982 album 1999. It’s a song that he performed live many times in his last years, in many different forms. I almost didn’t recognize the song when the music first starts and the crowd calls back because it’s so different from the ice-cold techno beat of the original.
It’s ironic that the NFL would claim copyright over the halftime performance, since ownership and copyright (and sampling and covers) were such an important issue for Prince. The performance below is one that he released on a website himself. There is an official Prince YouTube channel (which was never really the case when he was alive, though he did host various online spaces). It’s mainly a place for the estate to post promotional videos for the posthumous releases. Prince died intestate so what is meant by his “estate” is an ongoing legal question, one made more complicated just the other day with the announcement that the principal stakeholders, made up mainly of family members, have formally split into two separate camps. This move no doubt comes on the heels of the recent (to my mind) undervaluing of his back catalog.
It’s not clear what this will mean for all the remaining unreleased material.
Tomorrow evening (Tuesday, Feb 8th at 7pm, the Institute for Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) at St John’s University is sponsoring a presentation by Rev. Dr. Willie James Jennings entitled: “To Educate toward Belonging: Race, Faith, and the Problem of the Finished Man."
Dr Jennings is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies at Yale Divinity School and is the author of The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, published with Yale University Press. This book won the American Academy of Religion Award of Excellence in the Study of Religion in the Constructive-Reflective category the year after it appeared and, in 2015, the Grawemeyer Award in Religion, the largest prize for a theological work in North America. Englewood Review of Books called the work a “theological masterpiece.”
Writing in the areas of liberation theologies, cultural identities, and anthropology, Jennings has authored more than 40 scholarly essays and nearly two-dozen reviews, as well as essays on academic administration and blog posts for Religion Dispatches.
This presentation will be followed by an opportunity for discussion, questions, and answers
This event is part of St. John’s University’s observance of Black History Month, and will be held online.
You can register here.
On Tuesday, October 26th at 7pm, there will be an online conversation sponsored by the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies on populism, nationalism, and identity politics. The conversation will be between Dr. Stan Chu Ilo, Associate Professor of Catholic Studies, De Paul University and our colleagues Dr. Azzedine Layachi, Professor of Government and Politics, and Rev. Danny Pilario, C.M., Ph.D., Associate Professor and Dean, St. Vincent School of Theology at Adamson University.
Rev. Pilario is currently serving as the Vincentian Chair for Social Justice here at St. John’s.
Registration link here
This past Wednesday evening (daytime here in the States), The William Blake Society hosted a Zoom talk with Iain Sinclair. Sinclair’s new book The Gold Machine: In The Tracks of The Mule Dancers will be released soon and this talk was part of a multi-media….not PR campaign exactly. Or not only that. When Sinclair releases a book,it is always just one part of a constellation of media, and his authorship is always one of a clutch of creators or collaborators, all of whom bear responsibility (if not deserve authorship) for bringing the book into being.
Iain Sinclair, more than any author, was my companion throughout the Covid lockdown. Even more so than the strange fictions of Clarice Lispector, Sinclair kept my mind working while we were stuck at home. Sinclair’s prose renewed for me the sense of what language could do, even if it wasn’t always clear in some of those books just what it was doing. It helped the binge that Sinclair publishes so prolifically, like one of those 19th century novelists who were paid by the column inch. It also helped that he had such strong affinities with some of the modernist writers I am familiar with, especially Pound and Lewis. Though he seems so different from them in so many ways.
Anyway, to use the word “masque” in the title of this post — a form of courtly entertainment that flourished in the 17th cent. — is deliberately provocative. Sinclair, for all his “difficulty” is more about entertaining the masses than the court. But it does register the humor and the satire we see in books like Sorry Meniscus. But it’s a different kind of mask that Sinclair writes about in a piece I just came across today, a mask we’re all much more familiar with these days.
“Exposed By masks” gives a good sense of Sinclair’s prose.
Click the image below for the essay…
“That’s one way of looking at the matter. Another is that Schapp puts his frenzied memory and his obsessive attention to the arcane in the service of something important: the struggle of memory against forgetting—not just the forgetting of a sublime music but forgetting in general.” — David Remnick, “Bird Watcher”
We mourn the passing of Phil Schapp
As long as I can remember —at least during those times I resided in NYC, within the reach of Columbia University’s WKCR radio, which as it happens was the first radio or TV station to transmit its signal from an antenna atop the South Tower of the World Trade Center — I would listen to Phil Schapp’s morning program on Charlie Parker, called “Birdflight” as I commuted to school in the morning The program ran from 8:20 am and ran until 9:40, an odd time for a radio show. It didn’t quite line up with most morning commutes or competing programs (not that there has ever been anything quite like it before during or since). It always seemed like one of those odd starting times of elementary schools, which because they had to navigate around district-wide school bus schedules were staggered at weird ten minute intervals. But it worked for my commute and Phil Schapp’s voice coming out of the radio while I drove up Peninsula Blvd is part of who I am.
I wasn’t an avid Jazz fan, though I loved and knew the music pretty well. For me it wasn’t Bird or Coltrane, it was Mingus around which everything else swirled. But beyond individual preferences and individual musicians or groups there was always this sense for me of Jazz as a deeply rooted art form, one where the technical proficiency of so many musicians was matched by the vocabulary and expression of the form. Jazz had a history that was deep and wide. And no one was more knowledgeable about this history than Phil Schapp. He delivered it in this dry almost professorial voice, though there was none of the ego of academics about Schapp. Sure he had a “specialty” (Bird) but he didn’t try to come across as the pontificating sage. At times he was recounting things that he knew and had thought about. At other times, he was clearly thinking through material, a process that would in many cases end with his confession that he couldn’t come to any conclusions about this or that bit of esoteric information.
It was this humility, this ability to let gaps in knowledge stand as gaps (but doing so only after exhaustive research) that attracted me to Schapp and shaped my view of what a researcher was or could be.
I didn’t listen to his show during its entire run, but I recall it vividly from the late eighties. I left NYC for a while for much of the nineties and didn’t think much about Birdflight, engaged as I was in my own research. But when I returned to New York more than a decade later and began a different commute, I recall instinctively pressing that pre-set, this time on the Van Wyck, and from the speakers Schapp’s voice emanating, like there was never even any interruption. That’s my memory. Read the articles I link to above and find out more about him to get a sense of size of the loss, the blow that history will take with his passing
Cristina Rivera Garza’a 2002 novel The Iliac Crest (trans. into English in 2017 by Sarah Booker for the Feminist Press) has a similarly dreamlike quality to her 2012 novel The Taiga Syndrome. I don’t think it would be more correct to call these fictions “nightmarish,” since dreams can be disturbing enough, even those that offer us hope or insight. Part of the strangeness of Garza’s fiction also comes from how well she sees genre not as something into which you pour a story, but as something that you can scavenge for effect. If I was forced to shelve The Taiga Syndrome in Borges’ Library of Babel (an infinite structure with infinite books) I would put it in with the detective books, with Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but also in with the poetry books of Gabriela Mistral and Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo. There must be a room like that in Borges’ building.
We’ll be reading an essay by Garza on the importance of publishing more women authors later in the semester. But having just read The Iliac Crest I was struck by her author’s note at the beginning and wanted to quote it here because it touches on some of the things that we’ll be talking about:
From “A Note from the Author” (vii)
Borders are a subtle but pervasive force in this book. I was born on the eastern tip of the US-Mexican border and lived between San Diego (California) and Tijuana (Baja California) when I wrote The Iliac Crest. There are questions you cannot escape when approaching immigration: Who are you? Where do you come from? Anything to declare? Awareness of geopolitical borders soon leads to questions about the many lines we cross — or don’t, or aren’t allowed to — as we go about our daily lives. Our bodies are keys that only open certain doors. Our bodies speak indeed, and our bones are our ultimate testimony. Will we be betrayed by our bones?
While women’s voices throughout the world continue to be silenced and those in power continue to argue for the irrelevance of gender equality, characters in this book understand that gender — and what is done in the name of gender — can be lethal.
Mia Bay’s deeply researched, wonderfully written, and timely book, Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance, touches on issues of identity, law, mobility, and race , all of which will be central to the way we approach our writing this semester. Bay’s focus is on the severe and dehumanizing strictures that were placed on Black Americans who attempted (especially) interstate travel in the Jim Crow South. Though this is not just a book about a location (“the south”) since we know that Jim Crow existed in the north as well. Neither is it a book that is just about the time of Jim Crow, but instead Bay shows how in many ways Jim Crow’s still haunts us today. Though masked and renamed, it still works to restrict the mobility of black bodies. It is for this reason, for example, that Michelle Alexander calls mass incarceration “the new Jim Crow.”
The legal framework for Jim Crow begins in many accounts with the Supreme Court Case Plessy Vs. Ferguson (1896), which institutionalized the concept of “separate but equal,” though these practices were already widespread in both the north and south in the wake of Emancipation. As Bay reminds us, the case was brought about because of travel, through the actions of Homer Plessy who deliberately refused to abide by Louisiana’s “Separate Car Act” that governed the state’s railroads. In other words, Plessy’s was a direct action, meant to test the law and bring attention to these conditions. It was, in Bay’s reading, an act of protest. For Bay, Black protest and Black travel are inextricably bound. She discusses not only the Freedom Riders, for example, but the individuals and organizations that preceded them and the actions they inspired, in order to sketch out a much more detailed genealogy of Black protest.
Enforced by violence and upheld by law, the limits placed on “Traveling Black” coincided with what in other frameworks and perspectives is seen as the high point of travel. And as we consider our own stories of movement and travel, we need to bear in mind the ways in which travel is never a neutral activity, but depends very much on who we are.
Bay’s study promises to have a transformative impact on travel studies. The creation, perpetuation, and survival of Jim Crow was due time and again to laws surrounding black travel. Law is the main engine of Jim Crow, never the tool for its elimination. Bay’s book shows us the power and potential of Critical Race Theory and Black protests movements, and, frankly, reading Bay’s book explains why so many use CRT today as a fear tactic: CRT shows us not just who we were or how we got here, but who we are right now, barely a year after the George Floyd protests.
Here’s an essay from 2015 that came across my timeline that might be of interest to those of you writing about Language/s for our third assignment...
Are We Different People in Different Languages?
“One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot” James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
Tomorrow evening join me at 5pm if you can for an online screening of “Holding Fire,” an entry in the Pulitzer Center’s The Migrant Experience series about Somia Elrowmeim, a Yemeni activist and community leader from South Brooklyn who has for years been working to empower Arab and Muslim women in the political arena and beyond.
I’ve had the pleasure of working with Somia in a number of contexts over the years and am constantly amazed at her tireless efforts to fight for her community and all Arab and Muslim women during a time and in a place of increasing Islamophobia and xenophobia.
Click the link above to register and see the program for the evening.
Anyone who wants to can write their 500 weekly response about the film if you wish.
Here’s an article from the BK reader about Somia and the work she does.
If there’s a soundtrack for this pandemic summer, these dark times, these continued black deaths, these waves of protests, it’s by a mysterious group that goes by the name of Sault. Sault has released an astonishing 4 albums in the past 2 years (2 of which are double albums). The first two albums 5 (written out in a matchstick tally) and 7 came out in 2019. This year saw Untitled (Black Is) that was released soon after and in response to the murder of George Floyd, and Untitled (Rise), which just came out a few days ago. Never with any fanfare or press releases.
They have virtually no social media presence, no videos, hell, no wikipedia article. But in their music they are telling a story about black life that winds its way through different genres and tones and black musical traditions of both sonics and protest. It’s an anonymous group, but not anonymous like the internet hacktivists with familiar disguises and masked voices, but a group that channels the voice of communal struggle. A more vital kind of anonymity.
Here’s" “Scary Times”:
