Electra Street 01

ISSUE 01

A Journal of the Arts and Humanities

ELECTRA STREET A Journal of the Arts and Humanities www.electrastreet.net NYU Abu Dhabi 19 Washington Square North New York, NY 10003 Send inquiries to: Editor Electra Street NYU Abu Dhabi PO Box 903 New York, NY 10276-0903 electra.nyuad@gmail.com ISSN 2309-6012 © 2014 Electra Street

A Journal of the Arts and Humanities

EDITOR MANAGING EDITORS ART AND DESIGN EDITORS CONTRIBUTING EDITORS STAFF

FOUNDING EDITOR `PUBLISHER

Deborah Lindsay Williams Tessa Ayson / Diana Gluck / Sachi Leith Sarah Bushra / Darya Soroko Jennifer Acker / Marzia Balzani / Kevin Riordan / Darrin Strauss Geo Kamus / Chaeri Lee / Gayoung Lee / Mohit Mandal / Khadija Toor / Emily Wang / Helina Yigletu / Maheen Zahra Sheetal Majithia Cyrus R. K. Patell

Design Concept by the Design Collective at NYUAD Issue 01 | Spring 2014

Introduction Deborah Lindsay Williams and Cyrus R. K. Patell 7 Macbeth: The Tragedy We Have, the Tragedy We Need Catharine R. Stimpson Artwork by Lan Duong 14 HEARTPIECE in Mongolia Michael Littig and Kevin Riordan 38 An Inside Job? Revisiting Disciplinary Conceptions of “Native” Anthropology Ankhi Thakurta 52 Arab Crossroads Studies at NYU Abu Dhabi: A Regional Perspective Justin Stearns 70 Egypt Every Day: The Photographs of Yasser Alwan A Public Conversation Yasser Alwan with Shamoon Zamir 82

Every Body is Marked Joey Bui 106 Poems Sachi Leith 114 My Sister the Lifeguard Jennifer Acker Drawings by Sarah Bushra 120 Metaethics Matthew Silverstein 143 Traveling through the GNU Nathalie Peutz 154 Contributors 167

Shakhbout Al Kaabi

Thrown from a Thrown

Introduction WELCOME TO THE INAUGURAL print issue of Electra Street, a journal of the arts and humanities published at New York University Abu Dhabi.

The journal takes its name from the nickname commonly used for the street on which NYUAD’s first residential building was located, before the opening of the campus on Saadiyat Island. That street’s official name is “Sheikh Zayed the First Street,” and it also had a number: Seventh Street. According to the English-language daily Gulf News, Electra Street “inherited its unusual name from an old video and electronic games shop of the same name that has since shut down.” “Electra Street” thus signifies several different ideas simultaneously: a historical moment in Abu Dhabi’s past, the starting point for NYU Abu Dhabi, and a specific landmark that cannot be found on any official maps. The design of the journal embodies the ideas of intersection and taxonomy, creating a graphic juncture that draws on and preserves the street’s unofficial names.

Following the metaphors embedded in the journal’s name, the work we publish guides us to look at the past with fresh eyes, to examine the intellectual and academic histories that inform our present, and to explore the territories that rest outside the boundaries of official maps and conventional ways of thinking.

Both in print and online, the journal features creative and scholarly work drawn from the range of fields included in NYUAD’s Arts and Humanities Division: the Ancient World, Anthropology, Arab Crossroads Studies, Creative Writing, Film and New Media, History, Literature, Music, Philosophy, Theater, and Visual Arts. The

ELECTRA STREET

7

journal, like NYUAD’s curriculum, is committed to the idea that putting creative artists and scholars in conversation with one another enriches the work of everyone involved.

Electra Street adopts a cosmopolitan approach that embraces cultural and intellectual difference and that explores the interplay of both local and global perspectives. For Electra Street, local means the two cities to which NYUAD belongs: Abu Dhabi, where it is located physically, and New York, which is the home of the university of which NYUAD is an integral part. Both of these locales are cosmopolitan crossroads, where peoples from all around the world come to work and live. Our goal, however, is to appeal to a readership that includes but moves well beyond the confines of these two cities, and we hope to make extensive use of the intellectual resources of NYU’s global network of academic sites, which includes a campus in Shanghai and study centers in Accra, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Florence, London, Madrid, Paris, Prague, Sydney, Tel Aviv, and Washington, DC. Cosmopolitanism can only exist where there are people willing to engage in meaningful conversations across divides of culture, politics, and thought. We hope that Electra Street—in its current and future manifestations—will provide the crossroads where conversations like these can take place.

Our first issue begins with a meditation by the noted feminist scholar Catharine R. Stimpson on the “inseparability of war and the arts.” Through a nuanced reading of Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, Stimpson argues that the liberal arts give us a set of powerful conceptual frameworks that might enable us to provide better answers to the age-old question of why people continue to go to war one another. She argues that at the start twenty-first century “the liberal arts are better equipped to study war because of new, agile competencies, because of greater diversity, and because of

8

INTRODUCTION

the deep suspicion of myth contaminating reliable historical narratives.” Her article is illustrated with pictures created in response to Shakespeare’s plays by Lan Duong, an engineering student at NYUAD. The “pluralism and multiculturalism” that animates Stimpson’s piece are also the driving forces behind Michael Littig and Kevin Riordan’s account of Theater Mitu’s visit to Mongolia to create an adaptation of the German playwright Heiner Müller’s one-page play Herzstück (Heartpiece), in collaboration with local artists and artistic traditions. Mitu is a company that practices what it calls “Whole Theater,” a model of theatrical practice that strives to connect communities with performances that are rigorously intellectual, emotional, and spiritual. The production that resulted from their collaboration with the Mongolian recording artist Nominjin was an example of what Littig and Riordan call “theater-as-communitas,” an ephemeral but transformative experience that has much in common with “a spirit vision, a trance, or a love song.”

Sometimes scholarly and artistic breakthroughs occur as a result of going away from one’s customary milieu, from leaving “home” to explore situations that seem “foreign.” Sometimes, however, as Ankhi Thakurta argues in her essay “An Inside Job? Revisiting Disciplinary Conceptions of ‘Native’ Anthropology,” breakthroughs occur when one returns home. Turning the cultural anthropologist’s interpretive lens back on the Bengali American community in which she was raised, Thakurta discovers that “all researchers possess multiple identities that both connect them to and disconnect them from their sites of research.” Interrogating the idea that an anthropologist’s academic perspective invariably makes returning “home” an alienating experience, Thakurta argues that her experience has given her a way of reconceiving familiar dichotomies—like “inside” and “outside,” or “self” and

ELECTRA STREET

9

“other”—in ways that might push forward the discipline of “native anthropology”.

Reconceiving an academic discipline is also the project of “Arab Crossroads Studies at NYU Abu Dhabi” by Justin Stearns, which examines the rationale for creating a new kind of “area studies” program for the twenty-first century. Stearns emphasizes that any program called “Arab Crossroads” must take into account the diversity of groups currently associated with the term “Arab,” while “recognizing that the nature of this diversity varied according to time and place.” Offering a brief history of “area studies in the American academy” that reveals why so many scholars regard this approach with a mixture of suspicion and fatigue, Stearns argues that “area studies” remains “a productive place from which to study transnational and transregional influences, flows, and connections.”

Each issue of Electra Street features an in-depth interview with an artist whose work exemplifies the virtues of boundary-crossing of one kind or another. This inaugural issue features Yasser Alwan, an Iraq-born photographer who has made Cairo both his home and the subject of his life’s work. Alwan’s photographs of ordinary Egyptians use a seemingly old-fashioned technique—non-digital black-and-white portraiture—to shed new light on the life of Cairo and the conditions that led to the Arab Spring there. As Shamoon Zamir puts it in the introduction to the interview, “Alwan’s images arise out of a sustained relationship with particular locales and very often also with particular individuals. Alwan takes his time in the streets of Cairo, its cafes, its factories and work places, its bus stops and parks. It is this sense of a true inhabiting (so much more than a hanging around in the hope of a good shot) that finds its fulfillment in the human face sedimented with time and experience in the portraits.” The interview is illustrated with examples of Alwan’s Cairo series.

10

INTRODUCTION

Short stories by Jennifer Acker and Joey Bui explore the difficulties of reaching out across divides of age, sexual preference, and culture, and demonstrate the ways that a creative voice can be enriched and reinforced by academic rigor. Acker and Bui present us with stories about people who have been, one way or another, trapped by the worlds in in which they live, and while the lives themselves may seem suffocating, the work itself opens us up to new modes of experience. Sachi Leith’s work offers us similar portraits, but in the compressed form of poetic lyric.

Like Stimpson, Thakurta, and Stearns, philosopher Matthew Silverstein meditates on the nature of his discipline and charts a new direction for thinking about abiding problems. Silverstein introduces us to metaethics, a nascent field with contemporary analytical philosophy. In contrast to ethicists, who “see themselves as participants in our ethical practices,” metaethicists, according to Silverstein, “see themselves as standing outside of our ethical practices, looking in.” Silverstein’s work is an attempt to move beyond the impasse created by the form of metaethics that he finds to be most powerful—constructivism—but that has difficulty articulating why practical thinking that is philosophically “consistent” sometimes falls short of being “good” practical thinking.

Positioning himself against the idea of relativism, Silverstein ventures what might be called ethical approach to metathics.

The issue concludes with Nathalie Peutz’s essay “Traveling through the GNU,” adapted from an address delivered to NYUAD’s second group of incoming students in 2012. Taking as her twin points of departure Amin Malouf’s novel Leo Africanus and a bike trip from Europe to the Middle East that she took before beginning her doctoral studies, Peutz advocates an approach to liberal arts education that asks students and teachers to “take risks—intellectual, emotional, creative.” She urges us all to become

ELECTRA STREET

11

“traveler-scholars” who are unafraid to cross disciplinary boundaries and embrace cultural difference.

The work included here offers a compelling portrait of how the arts and humanities inform and enrich each other; together, these pieces make an argument on behalf of the continuing vitality— and the vital importance—of the liberal arts at the start of the twenty-first century.

—Deborah Lindsay Williams and Cyrus R. K. Patell

12

INTRODUCTION

Anna Ivanova Kurkova All the World’s a Stage

ELECTRA STREET

13

CATHARINE STIMPSON

THE TRAGEDY WE HAVE THE TRAGEDY WE NEED ARTWORK BY LAN DUONG

WAR HAS BEEN OMNIPRESENT in my life. I have always been physically safe and secure, but wars have dominated my political and social landscape: World War II, the Cold War, the Korean War, Middle East wars, the Vietnam War, various wars of liberation, 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan. I have known more wars than peace.1 Perhaps not surprisingly, ever since I discovered Shakespeare, I have been profoundly attracted to his war plays, especially to Macbeth. I read it, and seek out productions of it. Macbeth haunts many of us, and we perform it again and again, because it is one of the world’s most searing plays about political violence, the greed for power that leads to violence, and the aching efforts it takes to quell the violence once it is unleashed. Macbeth is also about the virtues that resist violence. Call them the three sisters of conscience: pity, empathy, and the fear of what might happen to us if we are violent and succumb to war.

As a result of my fascination with Macbeth, I was delighted, but not surprised, when I learned that the Global Shakespeare Festival held at New York University Abu Dhabi in March 2013 had three different student performances of the tragedy: one from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts, one from the American University in Sharjah, and one from Cairo University.2 Obviously, the text of Macbeth is malleable and adaptable, but it consistently shows the inseparability of war and the arts—in its case, theater, film, and opera. It also demonstrates the profound connections between war and the liberal arts, their dialectical and dynamic relations. The liberal arts should focus much more on war and on these relations in order to break or file away at the links between war and the liberal arts. More largely and more opti-

ELECTRA STREET

15

16

STIMPSON | MACBETH

mistically, I hope we can we move towards an amelioration of war.

Can war studies broker peace?

The study of history reveals—in neon lights—the incessant display of a hallmark of our species: the dialectic between the beautiful and the bestial. The terrible destroys the beautiful, but in a bloody miracle, the beautiful also emerges from the womb of the bestial, that “terrible beauty” of which the poet W.B. Yeats wrote.

History and the other liberal arts rub our hearts in the destruction of beauty, but their practitioners, liberal artisans, show the wresting of moral, intellectual, and aesthetic beauty out of the ugliest of human experiences—among them the violent monstrosities of war. They bring us to tears and a fragile hope.3 Macbeth is a savagely beautiful text about the gory dialectic between the beautiful and the bestial. It dramatizes wars between states, wars within states, wars among the genders, and psychomachia, a war within the self. Shakespeare, born in 1564, was in his very early 40s when the tragedy was originally produced in London around 1605–06. To write Macbeth, Shakespeare borrowed from a famous, multi-sourced book of British history, the Chronicles, by Raphael Holinshed. Shakespeare was an adolescent, sixteen years old, when Holinshed died in 1580.

The tragedy is about a well-born, energetic, childless couple in Scotland, erotically attracted to each other. The Macbeths struggle over the pace of the pursuit of their political ambitions, he initially more self-divided than she. She fears that his nature is too filled with the “milk of human kindness” (I.v.18). Yet ambition couples them. He wants to be king. She wants to be queen. They want the throne so much that they are ready to kill for it.

The current king, Good King Duncan, is a beloved figure. Earning love, however, is no guarantee of peace. He is fighting both a

ELECTRA STREET

17

18

STIMPSON | MACBETH

civil rebellion and the incursions of the King of Norway. He, his son Malcolm, and his staff receive a battle report from a sergeant who praises the valor and military skill of Macbeth, the king’s cousin, and Banquo, his companion in arms. The two warriors are doubling and redoubling their “strokes upon the foe” that they must wound and kill. The sergeant continues, before he collapses, that they meant either to “bathe in reeking wounds” or “memorize another Golgotha” (I.i.35–40).

Hovering on the edges of the battlefield and over the carnage are three hilarious, cackling, frightening, demonic creatures: a trio of Witches, or the three “Weird Sisters,” with their leader Hecate. Culturally, they are descendents of the Norns of Scandinavian myth and the three Fates of Greek myth, who determine our thread of life. The first Fate, Klotho, spins that thread; the second, Lachesis, apportions its length; and the third, Atropos, the inflexible, breaks it off, and we die. In Macbeth, the hags dance around a cauldron, tossing in eyes of newt and toes of frog. Full of tricks and malice and supernatural knowledge, they also predict Macbeth’s future. One is that he will become king, although his children will not.

Overly eager to pull the babe of the future out of the womb of time, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth assassinate King Duncan, Macbeth’s relative, in their own home. They get the throne, but they are haunted by guilt and by the prediction that they will not beget their own line of kings. Macbeth goes on a killing spree, especially of the children of his rivals. He creates more reeking wounds in Scotland. “Bleed, bleed poor country!” laments Macduff, another warrior/noble, whose wife and children Macbeth has had murdered. The Macbeths leave a world in ruins. They, too, are ruined, however. Lady Macbeth will die mad, a suicide, vainly attempting to bathe away the blood on her hands. Nihilism con-

ELECTRA STREET

19

sumes Macbeth. “Life,” he mourns, “is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing” (V.v.26–28). Macbeth will die on the battlefield at the hands of Macduff. Malcolm, Duncan’s son, will become king. He formally announces the end of the regime of “this dead butcher and his fiendlike queen” (V.viii.69).

All this is familiar stuff to the arts and liberal arts, but familiarity fails to blunt the ferocity of the tragedy’s representation of the on-going dynamism of the dialectic between the experience of war and of the beautiful and valuable. For war, which seeks to destroy human bonds, seems inseparable from love, which seeks to maintain them—love among those at war, love for those at the home front, love for those at the front.4 Macbeth and Lady Macbeth initially dramatize this conjunction. They are murderers and lovers. The pun in English on “arms” reflects this. “Arms” are both weapons and the limbs of an embrace, the sign of both Mars and Venus. In civil wars, we share bloodlines with the enemy.

Still another representation of the dialectical whiplash between war and the beautiful and valuable occurs in the sergeant’s phrase “bathing in reeking wounds.” War horribly wounds individual bodies, families, societies, and the land itself. We bathe, not in water, but in stench and blood. War leaves us wound up in shrouds.

However, many believe that blood, like water, can also cleanse, purge, and redeem us. The beauty of such regeneration is a message of the Apocalypse, of other holy wars, and of Golgotha, the place where Christ was crucified.

The play is of course a play: aesthetically beautiful and morally invaluable. The play’s the thing, which may catch the conscience of a commoner and king. As such, it reminds us that war has been the soil, the womb, the matrix, in which the arts have grown.

Macbeth has boiled up from a cauldron of historical violence. So have the liberal arts, fertilized by resilience, courage, anguish, or desperate necessity. Yes, the reeking wounds are also generative.

20

STIMPSON | MACBETH

It takes realism for the liberal arts to acknowledge this and perhaps a certain bravado, even blithe superficiality, for me to glimpse hope in such generativity. But the laws of war arise in order to tame the lawlessness of war. The Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) writes Concerning the Law of War and Peace in 1625, about two decades after the first production of Macbeth.

Slavery and apartheid in the United States, a civil war against African-Americans, create the blues. World War I is the hot spur for the legendary Core Curriculum of Columbia College in New York City.

The ability of the liberal arts to understand war is more urgent than it ever has been—simply because the human species, since World War II, has become more and more capable of destroying itself. How can I be killed? Let me count the ways. We are in a very risky period of history, a period of even greater unevenness and scarcity in the distribution of regional and global resources, of acute competition for global leadership, of the proliferation of nuclear and biological and conventional weapons, and of collision among militant faiths. The temptation to use force for a variety of motives leers out at us.

Every liberal arts discipline contributes to the critical understanding of wars. Literary and cultural studies explore the literature and language of war, including our epics from Homer to Harry Potter novels and movies.5 Musicology analyzes the music and noise of war; economics, the shifts in the distribution of goods and services during wartime; anthropology or history, the cross-cultural dimensions of the warrior ethic and rituals of battle. The biological and health sciences take up the breaking and healing of bodies; psychology and psychiatry the breaking and healing of minds; psychology and neural science the brain’s wiring of aggression and fear. Together, politics, philosophy, law, and religion teach us about the control of wars through treaties, nego-

ELECTRA STREET

21

tiations, conventions, laws, and theories of the just war. Since the 1970s, undergraduate and graduate peace and conflict studies programs have grown. Together, literature, psychology, psychoanalysis, history, law, and medicine give us the field now known as trauma studies.

Fortunately, the practitioners of the liberal arts are more prepared than they ever have been to organize our understanding.

This is so for three reasons: First, our competencies are sharper and more agile.

Globalization has increased the sheer quantity of accessible information about wars—their varying nature, their causes, their processes, their consequences. New tools of communication such as blogs quickly spread news and messages—sometimes openly, sometimes secretly and in code; sometimes from combatants, sometimes from observers. Recipients can widely distribute this information, including sonic resonances and visual images. Of course, the sheer ubiquity of images has contradictory consequences. It can threaten to turn war into a guilty aesthetic pleasure, or a spectator sport, or a video game that spares its players that nasty physical interactivity of actual combat, that disturbing gush of real blood. Yet the images can also document the sordid, the repellant, and the injurious, and force public revulsion against a war.

Second, the liberal arts are now far more diverse in their participants and their areas of inquiry.

Because of such fields as African-American Studies, Gender Studies, the new social history, gay and lesbian and queer studies, and post-colonial studies, we know far more about who fought where and for whom and how and why; far more about soldiers and their animals and machines; far more about the war

22

STIMPSON | MACBETH

experiences of the ordinary, marginal, and unlettered. We also know far more about the lives of civilians at war. The liberal arts are gaining a deeper appreciation of the histories, testimonies, diaries, and autobiographies of non-combatants in past and present. We read Gertrude Stein’s Wars I Have Seen (1945), not as the minor work of an avant-garde modern writer, but for what it is, a brilliant ethnography of civilians in twentieth-century war, told as an account of Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas, two aging Jewish American lesbians who manage to survive in Occupied France long enough to greet the American liberators.

Among the most revealing documents from the Occupation and wars in Iraq is Baghdad Burning, the now-published blog of “Riverbend,” the pseudonym for an educated Iraqi woman of 24.

Bringing together new technologies and the voice of a non-combatant, it also shows again a literary beauty being born in war. The introductory materials framing the book are polemical, but she is not. Indeed, she is often wickedly satirical and witty, the humor that harsh circumstances can provoke, that defuses self-pity, and that asserts one’s own will and subjectivity. She appreciates having readers, and likes questions and “differing opinions,” but she is in the midst of a hellishly hot city with little or no electricity, shattered glass and buildings, abductions, and so much death that the process of mourning has become “automatic.” She is fearful of both the Occupation Forces and the Islamic fundamentalists.

As the year of blogging (2003–4) passes, we watch her feelings about the American military presence shift. An initial pity and grief for Americans because of 9/11 evaporates. So does an initial sympathy for the American troops in their uniforms, with their equipment in the Baghdad heat. Burning her tenderness away are the photographs of Abu Ghraib, globally circulated digitally from a local prison. At last, repossessing the grievances of contempo-

ELECTRA STREET

23

24

STIMPSON | MACBETH

ELECTRA STREET

25

rary war, she writes with anger and weariness, “We have 9/11’s on a monthly basis.”6 Third, the liberal arts are the great setting for the struggle—even at the risk of unpopularity and of seeming ugly—to strip mythic narratives from historical narratives.

Understanding war means attacking an often emotionally and culturally satisfying misunderstanding about it. Such a tough struggle famously entails analyzing how historical narratives about war project the needs and desires of a specific culture.

These narratives then become fiercely defended castles of truth and beauty for that culture. Perhaps community mourning is the earliest of such buildings. To live in New York City during and after 9/11, as I do, is to witness them being built. As James Tatum writes in his eloquent study of the process of turning war into memorials, “The Iliad speaks to the way we think about war, because the one impulse that has proved as enduring as human beings’ urge to make wars is their need to make sense of them. The first step in making sense of any such loss is to mourn the dead.”7 No matter how much I respect the sincerity of such mourning, such sense-making can also lead to the grotesquerie of chauvinism, sentimentality, self-dealing, and manic self-delusion. Off we go into the wild blue yonder of myth.

My own experiences of war have been relatively benign, but I have soared into those wild blue yonders. On my wings, I have enacted that familiar Hegelian master/slave dialectic and its twofold discovery: first, how much we have constructed our identity through the construction of the Other, here as Mortal Enemy, and next, how much the Other as Mortal Enemy has done the same to us.8 I was a very young child in the Pacific Northwest during World War II. Every male member of my family of the appropriate age,

26

STIMPSON | MACBETH

including my father, was in the military. So were the male best friends of my mother and father. An aunt was with the Red Cross in the Pacific theater. Little Catharine was an ardent patriot. She worked in her mother’s Victory Garden, had her own war bonds, collected tin, memorized military ranks, followed battles, and could sing the anthems of every branch of the U.S. Armed Forces. On rainy and sunny days alike, she sat in a foxhole she had dug on a cliff overlooking Bellingham Bay, her wooden rifle on the lip of the hole, guarding against the Japanese who might swarm ashore and decapitate noble Americans.

Years later, professorial Catharine, now an ardent advocate of pluralism and multiculturalism, was team-teaching a course called “Law and Literature” with a section about the law of war. On our syllabus was One Man’s Justice by the Japanese writer Akira Yoshimura, a novel first published in 1978.9 I was shocked, and shocked to find myself shocked, by the narrative of a young Japanese air defense officer who, angry and traumatized by saturation bombing, participates in the beheading of a downed American pilot and feels he is right to do so. After the Emperor’s surrender, which appalls him, he flees but is arrested. He is then imprisoned, tried, and sentenced. What I would have called a war crimes trial is to him the implacable machinery of the victor’s justice. What was to me a vicious brutality by a young Japanese officer was to him an honorable act of revenge. I was forced into a difficult dialogue with myself about “my” World War II. In a fierce essay, Tony Judt, one of the towering historians of his generation, lacerates a far more general and pervasive American myth-making about war. He is an exemplary guide to understanding through the exposure of misunderstandings. We are turning the past, he writes, into a museum, “a moral memory palace.”

The mourning of war’s victims does not bring a sense of reality to

ELECTRA STREET

27

28

STIMPSON | MACBETH

the present. On the contrary, it is the dues we pay in order to join a club of amnesiacs. Judt reminds us that no twentieth-century war was fought on U.S. soil. Consequently, Americans have, for a century and more, been free from the worst of war. Rather than being grateful, they have forgotten its hard-bitten, bitter meanings. Empty of wisdom, they glorify the military; they refuse to understand the complexities of terrorist groups; they are complacent about torture; and they are ignorant of the knowledge that any clear-eyed study of the twentieth-century proves: “war brutalizes and degrades winners and losers alike.”10 Reading these words, the image of a frantic Macbeth and a distraught Lady Macbeth—after they have won the throne, increasingly alienated from each other—rose up unbidden before me.

In brief, the liberal arts are better equipped to study war because of new, agile competencies, because of greater diversity, and because of the deep suspicion of myth contaminating reliable historical narratives. Yet a deep question remains. My question for the liberal arts is why, why do people go to war and wars. What are the causes? Posing them, I fear I am simple and naïve, a grownup child wanting to know why the woods are dark at night. Why do wars seem to drive us, and we drive them? Is this the invisible hand of evolution, the invisible hand of the markets, the visible or invisible hands of the gods? Or are the hands our own, reaching for power and resources, thrones and new revenues, grasping a gun or machete, or tapping on the keyboard of a computer that will send a predator drone soaring?

Or can war represent a resilient, indefatigable lust for excitement and certainties? Chris Hedges, the war correspondent and student of the classics, writes in a profound study, “The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with the destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose,

ELECTRA STREET

29

meaning, a reason for living.”11 Even some of the most powerful of anti-war voices accept the compelling allure of war. This is not true of the grievous cries of the defeated, enslaved Trojan women.

This is not true of women and children raped during war. It is not true of some feminist anti-war statements. The more Utopian of them, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), ache to imagine a benign, non-contestable domain.

It is, however, true of other morally impeccable voices that use war to fight war. In his 1963 essay “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” Martin Luther King, Jr. resists the civil war against African-Americans, but displays a tempered muscularity. Although King knows that freedom must be “demanded” by the oppressed, his tone is deliberately reasonable, judicious, loving. He wants to occupy a third way between “complacency” and a “bitterness and hatred” that “comes perilously close to advocating violence.” Yet he is preparing for a “nonviolent campaign,” the goal of which is freedom. Like all good campaigns, it must be undertaken systematically and strategically. Facts must be collected to see if indeed “injustices are alive.” If they are, negotiations must be entered into. Then “self-purification,” a traditional preparation for warriors and questers, must be accomplished before “direct action” can be launched.12 “Letter” displays a warrior seeking to retain the warrior’s strengths but daringly stripping the warrior of the weapons of violence.

The most plausible opponents of war, as Judt tells us, are the people—like King—who have experienced war. For them, war is neither fantasy nor entertainment but a grim existential reality.

Significantly, Macbeth, in his psychomachia, alternates between his violence and his suspicion of it. Caught between wanting to murder his cousin/king, and resisting his own desires, he speaks of Duncan’s virtues. If he kills Duncan, he broods, “Pity, like a

30

STIMPSON | MACBETH

ELECTRA STREET

31

naked new-born babe/Striding the blast or heaven’s Cherubins, hors’d/Upon the sightless couriers of the air/Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye/That tears shall drown the wind” (I.vii.21–25).

Macbeth is aware that pity for the victim of his violence, here Duncan, can eventually overcome the terror that the victimizer, here Macbeth, engineers. Then tears, the water of pity, become the rushing waters of defiance.13 As they seek to embody the beauty and value of thought through the study of war, and as they listen to those who have smelled its reeking wounds, can the liberal arts prevent war? Control it? Heal it? Can they lead us to the beauty of a lively, kinetic, imagination-treasuring tranquility? For this, the liberal arts are not sufficient. They may educate the powerful and the powerless, but the liberal arts have a sorry record of being unable to dictate actions.

If, however, at their weakest, they can serve as an inoculation against propaganda, can the liberal arts at their most potent inoculate some of us against war itself? A virologist colleague told me that inoculation uses an attenuated or crippled virus vaccine to protect a body against a virulent disease. The vaccine induces a protective immune response in the host and thus prevents a future infection.14 Let us say that the virulent disease is war. The attenuated virus vaccine is our complex understanding of wars.

Our inoculations may produce cognitive revulsion, the response that war is stupid and stupidly dangerous to the headstrong warrior. War is to be feared. They may produce moral revulsion, the response that war is wrong and shameful. Or, our inoculations may stimulate a process of identification that inculcates an active empathy with and compassion for the victims of war. These inoculations open the ducts of our tears. If the liberal arts can so treat us, they will have done an invaluable service. They may even

32

STIMPSON | MACBETH

be smart and wise enough to suggest other ways of nurturing the creativity that wars engender.

The liberal arts can create beauty and value if we newly connect them to war, to the human capacity for bathing in the reeking wounds that have torn apart skin and bones and the very fabric of existence and yet, in such anguish, have also been generative of moral, mindful, and aesthetic beauty. As the liberal arts do so, may we be aggressively and lovingly capable of pity, of tears, and of a heart-wrenching, heart-strengthening, and fearful resistance to violence. In our sorrow, we must also remember that the root of “liberal” is liber, the Latin for free. We are not always free to choose what happens in our days and nights. Lady Macduff did not choose to be murdered with her children by Macbeth’s thuggish agents. But when we are free, we can choose to repudiate the way of Macbeth. That would be creating beauty.

NOTES A longer version of this essay, “Bathing in Reeking Wounds: The Liberal Arts, Beauty, and the Arts of War,” appeared in Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 13 (February/April 2014): 128–140 (first published online, 3 April 2013).

1

See the Electra Street website (http://electrastreet.net) for more information about the Spring 2013 Global Shakespeare Student Festival at NYUAD. 2

Another example: In 2012 and early 2013, extreme Islamic militants invaded Northern Mali, including city of Timbuktu, a great repository of Islamic learning, culture, and religion, including a library, the Ahmed Baba Institute. They destroyed several tombs 3

ELECTRA STREET

33

34

STIMPSON | MACBETH

of the saints, and as French and African troops pushed them from the city, they burnt priceless manuscripts. Residents of the city carefully hid thousands of other manuscripts, however, preserving them for history, keeping their beauty alive. See Lydia Polgreen, “As Extremists Invaded, Timbuktu Hid Artifacts of a Golden Age,” The New York Times (4 February 2013): A1, A8.

This is a point James Tatum explores in his eloquent The Mourner’s Song: War and Remembrance from the Iliad to Vietnam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 215.

4

PMLA’s special issue on “War” (October 2009) shows the literary humanities exploring war.

5

Riverbend, Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq (New York: The Feminist Press, 2005), pp. 167, 286. The introductory materials include a “Foreword” by Ahdaf Soueif and an “Introduction”

by James Ridgeway.

6

7

Tatum, p. xvi.

Clint Eastwood’s two 2006 films, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima try, I believe, to cut into this dialectic.

8

The Japanese title is Toi Hi No Senso. I read the English translation by Mark Ealey (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001).

9

The phrase is mine not Judt’s. The essay is “What Have We Learned, If Anything?” New York Review of Books (1 May 2008): 16–20.

10

Chris Hedges, War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning (New York: Public Affairs, 2002), p. 3.

11

ELECTRA STREET

35

The text I am using is from The American Reader: Words That Moved a Nation, ed. Diane Ravitch (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), pp. 325–29.

12

Denis Donoghue, “The Practice of Reading,” What’s Happened to the Humanities?, ed. Alvin Kernan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 124–25. Donoghue is skeptical of current ways of reading—feminist, psychoanalytic, new historicism—but offers a survey of post-WWII interpretations of Macbeth that includes them. I would point to the pun on “tears,” the water of weeping, and “tears,” rips in a fabric.

13

E-mail exchange with Professor Carol Shoshkes Reiss, 2 April 2008.

14

36

STIMPSON | MACBETH

ELECTRA STREET

37

HEARTPIECE IN MONGOLIA

MICHAEL LITTIG & KEVIN RIORDAN 38

Photos by Justin Nestor

LITTIG AND RIORDAN | HEARTPIECE

ON THE FIRST NIGHT IN ULAANBATAAR, the audience responded well to Theater Mitu’s collaborative production of Heiner’s Müller’s HEARTPIECE. The performance, featuring a Mongolian long song singer and Theater Mitu actors, took place in the Black Box Theatre, a space owned and operated by Migma, a prominent Mongolian director. During the post-show talkback, Migma stood up to say: “Twenty-two years ago Mongolia had a democratic revolution. Tonight we saw the beginning of an artistic revolution.”

Since its founding in New York in 1997, Theater Mitu has distinguished itself through its research and incorporation of world theater traditions. Their model of “Whole Theater” strives to connect communities with performances that are rigorously intellectual, emotional, and spiritual. To inform and deepen their artistic practices, this permanent group of collaborators has visited—and often returned to—sites around the world; in addition to Mongolia, the company is currently engaged in projects in India, Lebanon, Mexico, the United States, and the United Arab Emirates. When the company arrives in a new place, they strive to establish reciprocal relationships with resident communities and especially with local artists. During this, their first trip to Mongolia, actors Michael Littig and Justin Nestor joined Mitu’s artistic director Rubén Polendo, in trying something unprecedented, namely to collaborate with local artists to create a full production within a compressed rehearsal period.

During their one-month residency, Mitu—in collaboration with production intern Soyombo Enkhsaikhan and popular Mongolian recording artist Nominjin—devised an original piece based on the

ELECTRA STREET

39

German playwright Heiner Müller’s Herzstück (Heartpiece). Inspired by this one-page play and contributing material from their own experiences, these artists developed a one-hour show investigating different representations of love. In Migma’s space in central Ulaanbataar and again in Erdenet, Mongolia’s third-largest city, the group produced a kind of performance that had never been seen in this cultural landscape. It was the first major performance of this influential playwright in Mongolia and the first time that the Mongolian tradition of long song would be performed within a larger theatrical piece.

For many of its research trips, Theater Mitu has devoted its time to training with masters of different performance traditions.

At other times, it has toured finished work while teaching classes and workshops. In these respective guises, the company has participated as either students or teachers. For the Mongolia trip, the actors embraced the challenge of fusing these roles, stretching themselves to learn and to teach, to “call-and-respond” simultaneously, in a manifestation of what Jan Cruz-Cohen calls “engaged performance.”1 Mitu’s arrival coincided with an important cultural moment in Mongolia. For most of the twentieth century, Mongolia was a Soviet satellite state, and its theater in particular remains deeply indebted to the tradition of Constantin Stanislavski and the Moscow Art Theater. While in Ulaanbataar, Mitu attended an adaptation of Hamlet very much in this style at the State Drama Theater.

Contemporary artists are just now beginning to push the boundaries of this inheritance, to find modes of expression that better speak to both traditional and contemporary ways of life in Mongolia. New theater-makers are looking back to Mongolia’s heritage practices as well as outwards to important international work.

40

LITTIG AND RIORDAN | HEARTPIECE

To learn from and contribute to this artistic moment, Mitu researched and trained in Mongolian traditional arts while also teaching its own methods to local artists. During a few hectic weeks, Littig, Nestor, and Polendo taught classes to children in the ger districts (low-income “shantytowns” on the cities’ edges) as well as to university students. The Mitu artists studied contortion and acrobatics, and interviewed celebrated artists, monks, and shamans. On a whim they joined an acquaintance, one of Mongolia’s leading film actors, on a wolf-hunting expedition on the frozen steppe (in the end they saw no wolves). Amidst all of this, they developed and performed HEARTPIECE with Nominjin, a singer with nine number-one hits, who is also trained in long song.

Mitu’s itinerary was planned over the course of a year by Littig, who spent 2008 in Mongolia on a Fulbright Fellowship. In his earlier artistic training in the US, Littig had found an inspiring resemblance between the practice of the actor and that of the shaman.

Reading Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism and Uma Singh’s Between Worlds, Littig identified how both actors and shamans, in their seeming separation from daily life, operate “between worlds” as facilitators who serve their communities.2 While seeking out what is often seen as a traditional—and even archaic—practice, Littig found that shamanism is playing a surprisingly prominent role in contemporary Mongolia. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, shamans have importantly participated in the recovery of traditional histories and practices. And as Mongolia has now transitioned to a new period of rapid development, shamanism and the traditional arts continue to be both threatened and reaffirmed.

While one can become easily inured to globalization’s effects, Mongolia’s current transformation is startling. Due to the development of its lucrative mines, Mongolia boasts the world’s fastest

42

LITTIG AND RIORDAN | HEARTPIECE

growing economy, with an 18% increase in GDP in 2013. This boom has brought immense wealth to the capital as well as the usual side effects of such rapid expansion and growth. Ulaanbataar is among the most polluted cities in the world, and the World Bank describes its housing problem as easily the world’s worst. Sixty percent of the city’s denizens reside in the ger districts where there is no water, electricity, or sanitation, and where households must constantly burn coal and wood inside their homes to survive the –40°C degree winters.3 Despite this development, Mongolia remains the world’s most sparsely populated country, and its cultural traditions remain bound to and inspired by its open spaces, by the nomadic life on the steppes. Principal among these artistic traditions is the urtiin duu, the long song, named by UNESCO in 2005 as one of the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.

This lyrical chant dates back some two thousand years, and it is said that Chingiss Khan, the great ruler of the Mongol Empire, made his warriors sing long songs to give them both power and compassion. The songs’ melodies are often referred to as “cries from the heart” and most are sung in praise of Mongolia’s beautiful landscape. For a country whose people have always been nomadic, the booming long song also became a way to communicate over vast distances. With industrialization, which began in earnest in Mongolia during the 1950s, the way of life from which the long song emerges—and which it celebrates—has been in danger.

Nominjin, with whom Mitu would build HEARTPIECE, performs globally and has recently been based in Los Angeles. She remains tethered to Mongolia, however, and has prioritized the preservation and adaptation of its traditional forms of song. In fact, her first hit, “Ulemjin Chinar,” was a reworking of an old Mongolian

ELECTRA STREET

43

folk song. She would sing something closer to its original version in HEARTPIECE, which would allow audience members attuned to both traditional and pop music to sense this blurring of old and new. To help contextualize her music and to teach Mitu more about the long song tradition, Nominjin arranged a meeting between the company and her teacher Khongorzul, one of the world’s greatest long song singers.

Khongorzul has performed around the world, notably with YoYo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble. Nominjin arranged for the meeting at her relatives’ company offices, presenting her teacher with a gift from overseas, a bag from Victoria’s Secret. Over the course of more than an hour, Khongorzul related to Mitu how she began to sing on the steppe, how she was pulled aside and told she must develop her extraordinary vocal gift. Despite playing huge concert halls and on film and television, her art remains bound to her upbringing. She is skeptical that the song could be performed by anyone raised elsewhere: “there is not going to a long singer born from four walls, a box, because that person will never have the experience of countryside essence, of herding animals.”

This experience of space, of breathing it in, is crucial for the long singer’s craft. Littig and Nestor implored Khongorzul to introduce them to a few techniques, but she said it would take at least a week to wrestle with their breath before they could sing a single note. She did, however, demonstrate the long song, singing a single note for more than a minute in this borrowed office; Littig remembers his heart fluttering in response to the pure note. Still, Khongorzul insisted that long song is not only about breath or physical training. It is sung by the wise, through experience. Long song “is crafted by wisdom; it’s not sung with lyrics and notes, it’s crafted by intelligence.”

During HEARTPIECE, Nominjin would bring an adapted long song inside the four walls of a black-box theater for the first time.

44

LITTIG AND RIORDAN | HEARTPIECE

As with their engagements with other traditional forms, Mitu’s purpose is not to recover or reproduce the long song “authentically.”

Instead, Mitu’s research of and training in long-practiced forms seeks to stretch the expressive means of each performer and to examine how different theatrical elements can contribute to an intense emotional, intellectual, and spiritual experience. Remembering the company’s 1997 Noh Cycle, Polendo stresses how the company “had no interest in recreating the traditional Japanese Noh theater” but rather wanted to grapple with “the formality of the Noh theater and [determine] what it revealed about the movement of a body through space, about rhythm, silence, gesture.”4 In learning from and drawing on different world traditions, the company is careful to not claim authority over a particular vocabulary but rather to see what the encounter with difference inspires for the artist and how that inspiration can be passed on through formal articulation. Nominjin’s traditional singing alongside Justin and Michael’s renditions of American folk songs—while they all wear suits reminiscent of Mongolia’s Soviet era—illustrates the sort of cultural investigations at play in Mitu’s work.

For this compressed rehearsal period, the company selected Müller’s 1981 Heartpiece as a provisional dramatic architecture, as a conversation-starter. Heartpiece became the occasion for these artists to come together, and its strangeness offered a kind of puzzle that Nominjin and the company together could solve.

Müller’s script is a brief dialogue about the heart, and the play examines questions of love, a theme to which nearly all artistic forms speak, including Mitu’s recent work, Nominjin’s own songwriting, and the long song itself.

Müller, one of twentieth century’s most important playwrights, wrote Heartpiece a few years after his most famous play Hamletmachine, which Mitu produced in collaboration with NYU Tisch in 2000. Heartpiece is a mere ten lines of dialogue between “One”

ELECTRA STREET

45

46

LITTIG AND RIORDAN | HEARTPIECE

and “Two,” while a third person seems only to scream. To open the piece, One asks Two if she can place her heart at Two’s feet.

The line seems prosaic and a bit maudlin in its romantic desperation. Two protests, suggesting that such a gesture would make a mess of the floor. A couple of lines later, Two relents and decides to help remove One’s heart with knives. They extract it and he recognizes that her heart is actually a brick. Two announces this and the play concludes with One’s affirmation: “Yes. / But it beats only for you.”

From this simple text, Mitu began its “creation work,” the early rehearsal process during which they generate the physical, visual, and aural material that will become the performed piece. With the play’s spare dialogue and its themes of love, misunderstanding, and heartbreak, Mitu and Nominjin were drawn to various cultural representations of love and especially those conveyed in music, whether traditional or contemporary. In working through personal associations with love the performers offered sentimental songs: Littig sings, “Go to sleep you little baby;” Nominjin adds in Mongolian, “Though it has been three long years, we have been meeting in our dreams;” and Nestor lifts the mood, “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.” The physical vocabulary likewise was extracted—and then stylized—from the textures of common cliché: dreams and Disney, swing sets and held-hands.

In the process, in and out of the rehearsal room, the performers also traced the difficulties of communicating about love and of navigating cultural territory while creating a performance. Nestor and Littig struggled with negotiating certain cultural rites: how to enter a dwelling, how to honor an elder with vodka-drinking, how to cover one’s head. And despite being daring in the creation work, Nominjin balked at announcing that her heart was a brick; the statement was too jarring to her personal belief system.

ELECTRA STREET

47

For the performance in Migma’s Black Box, the industrial space remained open, framed by the lighting-grid grates and a couple of on-stage ladders. Three bricks lay on the floor: sometimes serving as the hearts of the performers, sometimes as stepping stones leading somewhere, at other times as just bricks. As it emerged from the creation work, the composition took on the quality of an always-shifting dialogue (with that always-intervening third person) in songs and stories: Nominjin sings “Ulemjiin Chanar / Perfect Qualities,” Littig screams heartbreak, and the three performers react to Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog,” which is surprisingly popular in Mongolia. The beginning and end of the performance mirror one another: Nominjin singing the long song in traditional dress, descending and ascending a staircase. In this way, the piece was framed and clothed by traditional echoes of the steppe, in an industrial space where Elvis is strangely a point of communion.

While the performance implicitly draws on German, American, and Mongolian cultural references, the collaboration is less interested in representing these nationally-identified cultures as much as animating their encounter, to give presence to the gaps, the synapses, the awkward in-betweens. Polendo’s direction values the jagged edges among cultural material in order to explore what that heterogeneity provokes. As with Mitu’s training in world traditions, the company resists the notion of performing a culture and instead deconstructs and examines cultures’ modes of expression. In performing “world theater,” Mitu pursues and honors cultural practices as practices, as dynamic rituals that can bind or transform a community. Whether it takes the form of the singing of a song, the lighting of a lamp, or the preparation of a dish, culture is always performative in both the theatrical and the linguistic senses. The doing of something does something; it recalls

48

LITTIG AND RIORDAN | HEARTPIECE

a future and predicts a past. It hails us here and there, and to the present.

As an art form, theater provides a rare opportunity to perform difference—cultural or otherwise—under special, experimental, and collective conditions. A long song sung amidst three bricks is a moment made strange, heralding a time for the incongruous, for surprise. HEARTPIECE in Mongolia engendered this kind of other space, “between worlds,” as an actor or a shaman might put it. Theatrical ritual ideally produces “spontaneous” rather than “normative” communitas, as anthropologist Victor Turner might describe it.5 Instead of being governed by formal and therefore mundane institutions, spontaneous communitas is what happens when “a congregation or group catches fire in the Spirit,” as Richard Schechner puts it in his gloss on Turner.6 This catching fire is not unlike the shaman’s trance, which might in turn inform the work of an American actor. What happens in spaces like Migma’s Black Box is powerful because of its distinction from everyday life, because it is outside ordinary time. It is to this that art often aspires, when a beautiful articulation becomes indistinguishable from the collective or, indeed, from the religious. Theater-as-communitas is profound not in spite of but because it is ephemeral, like a spirit vision, a trance, or a love song.

This collective piece of theater became an open investigation of love, with all its joy and terror, its clarities and confusions. It was Mitu and Nominjin’s response to one another, to the booming polluted city in which they made the work, and to the open spaces that surround it. Based on the production’s success and the responses from the audience, Mitu plans to extend the “HEARTPIECE model,” to see how this making of ‘spontaneous’ work can enrich their research relationships with other artists. The company will bring this way of working to places like India and Thailand,

ELECTRA STREET

49

where they have already studied extensively. The hope is to develop ways to learn in conversation with masters of traditions such as Kalaripayattu or Theravada meditation, to work as collaborators as well as students; when the exchange becomes free and open, the possibilities are magnified in the act of creation.

At all of the performances, the actors spoke with the audience before and after the show, inviting their feedback and dreaming of what could come next. Together, things seem different: a revered director sees a new direction beyond Soviet influence; some people heard a pop song and didn’t quite know what to make of it. At the second Ulaanbataar performance the power went out, forcing the company to consider performing the play by candlelight.

While waiting during the uncertainty of the power outage, the performers talked with the audience until that conversation too felt part of the artistic dialogue, figuring out if and how the next thing will happen.

NOTES Jan Cruz-Cohen, Engaging Performance: Theatre as Call and Response (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 3.

1

See Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1964; rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), and Uma Singh, Between Worlds: Travels Among Mediums, Shamans, and Healers (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2003).

2

See David Lawrence, “Mongolia’s Growing Shantytowns: The Cold and Toxic Ger Districts.” http://blogs.worldbank.org, 8 July 2009 (retrieved September 2013).

3

50

LITTIG AND RIORDAN | HEARTPIECE

Rubén Polendo, “Navigating Cultural Territory” (Theater Mitu Working Paper, 2008).

4

Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (1982; rpt. New York: PAJ Publications, 2001), p. 47.

5

Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 70.

6

ELECTRA STREET

51

AN

JOB

INSIDE

REVISITING DISCIPLINARY CONCEPTIONS OF NATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY

A N ANKHI K H I THAKURTA T H A K U R T A

Two Rituals, One Familiar and One Strange ON A BLUSTERY SUNDAY MORNING last February, I found myself sitting cross-legged on a carpeted basement floor with Bengalis I’d known for years. My parents had extracted me from college that weekend to attend a bari puja, or home ceremony, in honor of the goddess Saraswati. Mashis resplendent in intricately stitched saris and salwaars arranged fruits, sweets, and nuts on the papered floor in front of a makeshift shrine while their husbands huddled together on a sectional in the back to discuss business and the politics of the day. Soon after the ceremonial scriptures were read, we retreated upstairs in bands differentiated by age and gender to eat proshad and gossip. Such were the expected rhythms of this and all other pujas, the natural progression of events I had observed for more than half my lifetime.

Only that day, things weren’t exactly the same. As deeply known practices unfolded around me, I enacted a novel sort of ceremony on my own—that of the anthropologist, the allegedly empirical documentarian who sifts through the hodgepodge of everyday life with a guiding sense of purpose and procedure.

Conducting ethnographic research—the central methodology of the field—involves adopting the perspectives of participant and observer with deft simultaneity and working to achieve a degree of familiarity with a distant culture.

That’s what it usually means, anyway. In my story, the known and the strange were inversions of what they might have been in a conventional inquiry. For my undergraduate senior thesis, I

ELECTRA STREET

53

decided to conduct ethnographic research with a network of Bengali Americans I have regarded as a second family for the past decade. My association with this particular group began after my parents and I first moved to Maryland and, in the process of seeking new friends, found our way to a handful of Bengalis who were adapting the short story Juta Abishkar (the invention of shoes) for the stage. After Juta was performed at a local Bengali festival, the families involved in its creation continued to meet up for potlucks, adda (conversation), and several more performances. Although the group has long since abandoned its theatrical pursuits, members still refer to their social collective as the Natok or Theater Company in reference to the projects that brought them together.

Thus, while my fellow majors traced the footsteps of classical anthropologists by venturing into “foreign” communities for their projects, I turned my gaze in a direction I presumed was inward and wrote about what I thought I knew. When I began, the unknown quantity in the equation was the role of the ethnographer itself—after spending semesters immersed in the words and tales of working anthropologists, I felt uneasy about attempting what I thought might devolve into an absurd parody of the “real” academics I admired.

As one might imagine, the joke was on me. What began as a routine series of interviews and observations soon evolved into a process of denaturalization that illuminated how anthropological practices can render bizarre the normal and reframe the close and familiar. Though the project explored the identity formation processes of my participants—first- and second-generation members of the Bengali diaspora in the United States—I also scrutinized the implications of my own various identities, a list that included ethnographer, student, and Natok member. What story and indeed whose story was I trying to tell? How could I under-

54

THAKURTA | AN INSIDE JOB

stand myself vis-à-vis my subjects? What did it mean to straddle the divide between the personal and the academic, to write “scientifically” about people and ways of being I had known forever?

To invoke the traditional language of the “field,” would it be accurate to call myself a native reporting among natives?

The Emergence and Impact of Native Anthropology BEFORE DELVING INTO The specifics of my investigation, it is useful to briefly contextualize the concept of “native” anthropology.1 From the 1970s, a surge of such research began to dissolve the lines between “colonizer/seer/describer/knower and colonized/seen/ described/known” that traditionally demarcated the field.2 “At home” anthropologists—particularly those with ties to formerly dominated nations—profoundly reworked classical disciplinary hierarchies by challenging precisely who could assume the role of researcher. Far from their traditional predecessors, who surveyed “exotic” populations from afar, these investigators qualified their official “anthropologist” designation with convention-bending terms like halfie, bi-cultural, indigenous, native, and so forth.3 Marta Kempny cites the postmodern turn in anthropology, a movement that emphasized the process of knowledge production itself as essential to understanding “native” research such research: with the gradual “re/depositioning [of] the researcher from ‘all knowing’ analysist’ to ‘acknowledged participant’ in the construction of always partial and situated accounts,” she notes that a heightened emphasis on reflexivity emerged in the field.4 Besides drawing attention to the ways in which researchers inhabited positions of power with respect their subjects, this shift also underscored the limits of the “objective” scientific gaze.

ELECTRA STREET

55

The issues raised by the movement towards greater ethnographic self-awareness figure crucially in debates about “native” anthropologists, particularly with regards to how such researchers may be understood in relation to their sites of study. In one sense, certain factors distinguish “native” researchers from their peers: Abby Forster, for example, cites existing cultural knowledge as a particularly advantageous tool in the “native” arsenal—with their existing linguistic proficiencies and knowledge of the communities they study, native scholars might more easily build “rapport and deeper understandings” with their subjects.5 Kempny illustrates the benefits of such advantages in practice—during her fieldwork with Polish migrants in Belfast, Ireland, for example, her language fluency and “intuitive” sense of social norms enabled her to build useful community contacts.6 On the other hand, the practice of anthropology at home also raises important concerns. The same logic that cautions against classifying anthropologists as distant outsiders, for example, also inhibits us from describing ethnographers-at-home as participants in possession of complete and “authentic” knowledge.7 Kirin Narayan’s moving account of conducting research in Nasik, an Indian town where her father grew up, illustrates the limits of supposed local access. While she benefited from “years of association” with the locality and “the language and wider culture,” Narayan’s identification as a female academic with Western affiliations also left her feeling alienated on many occasions.8 Thus, her fieldwork narrative undermines the dichotomy of native/non-native anthropology by showing that all researchers possess multiple identities that both connect them to and disconnect them from their sites of research.

While the debate surrounding native anthropology remains charged, more reflexive “native” accounts will, if not clarify these

56

THAKURTA | AN INSIDE JOB

conversations, at least serve to enrich them. As the bounds of the discipline undergo continued expansion, the subject of the ethnographer at home remains a fertile site for continued investigation and contestation.

Assumptions and Pitfalls: Practicing “Native Anthropology” in the Natok Company I INITIALLY CHOSE THE NATOK COMPANY and the theme of identity for selfish reasons. After growing up across continents and fiddling continuously with questions about transnational subjectivity, I wanted to explore how people I knew thought about similar issues. First, though, was the matter of putting it all in context: turning to the existing literature, I built a frame for my project by referring to contemporary anthropological work on immigrant communities and identity formation. Since I wanted from the onset to challenge the cartoonish “caught between two cultures, old world/new world” identity models pervading popular representations of immigrant life, I relied on a more dynamic perspective presented in Kathleen Hall’s ethnography of second generation British Punjabi Sikhs. Focusing primarily on the category of citizenship, Hall contends that the immigrant subjects of her study are created through processes of social incorporation that occur across a variety of public and private sites. In particular, she notes that forces and structures in democratic capitalist nations including the law, policy, education and the media in conjunction with ethnic communities and families produce minority subjects who are particularly defined by “racial, ethnic, religious, linguistic, generational, and gendered terms.” But, as Hall shows, immigrant identities are not only ascribed, externally regulated,

ELECTRA STREET

57

and subject to particular forms of power and inequality; they are also continuously asserted and created by those identified through what she terms “acts of translation.”9 Relying on Hall’s vision of relationally constituted and shifting identity, I wondered how two generations of members in my community were potentially acting “in translation” themselves; I sought to examine how their “Bengali American” identities could be understood as self-presentations or performances through which participants both negotiated and responded to a range of internal, external, official, and unofficial identity-shaping pressures.

Besides this academic foundation, I also went into my investigation armed with two major assumptions. The first of these concerned my own identity. Having been affiliated with the Natok group since its inception, my “nativity” seemed as unquestionable and obvious as my bond with the other members. We traced our origins to the same geographic region, spoke English and Bengali, and adopted the same hyphenated label of Bengali American to classify our particular brand of multiculturalism. For years, we convened together in different houses across suburban Maryland to socialize, rehearse performances for upcoming community pujas, listen to Rabindrasangeet, and consume dal, sabzi, and mangsho from paper plates. Sure, I expected the generational split to account for slightly diverging experiences—our parents enacted the rituals and traditions of their homeland while we in the second generation, effectively unmoored from the places and times in which such practices were originally forged, accepted their reanimations as alternatives to utter cultural disconnection.

Nevertheless, the belief that members of Natok and I mostly shared a common experience and mode of identifying as Bengali American supported my second assumption: that members of both generations would offer variations of my views on living that

58

THAKURTA | AN INSIDE JOB

role. With my mind on Hall’s work and the complex racial hierarchies stratifying American society, I imagined there would be little dispute over the oppressive ways in which South Asian Americans were assigned various identities. Throughout American history, South Asian populations have been officially and unofficially constructed as “foreign” or “other” in a multitude of ways.

Besides facing early obstacles to belonging, South Asian Americans presently contend with various racialized labels that include “model minority” and, more recently, “terrorist.”10 I expected that these views would be manifest in anxiety-ridden anecdotes about not fitting in and feeling “not quite” American, especially in the charged and paranoid context of a post 9/11 world in which people looked you over on the street to conduct split-second evaluations of your loyalties.

But when I began, inhabiting old haunts and questioning friends with a put-on and decidedly uncomfortable self-consciousness, I was perplexed and surprised by what I found. Rather than expressing much discomfort with their “marginal” identities or the vexing racial place of South Asian immigrants as I had predicted, the study participants of both generations described their lives with enthusiasm. I noted an overall tendency to segment discussions of identity into domains—depending on the context, most participants said they could self-identify either as structurally integrated “public” Americans or culturally distinguished, “private” Bengalis. This meant that while they saw themselves as successful Americans in outside places like the office, they asserted their “cultural” identities more freely in the comfort of exclusive, Bengali-only spaces. I pressed people to describe any obstacles to self-assertion but heard instead stories and statements that defied my expectations. When I asked a Natok uncle about challenges he faced at the start of his professional life in the United

ELECTRA STREET

59

States, for example, he said: “Ei desher ashar pore, companir chakri hoyeche” (“After I came to this country, a company job happened”). How did it happen? “They picked up a phone and called me … that’s how it has been for me in this country.” Suggesting that his abilities alone had brought him success, this participant sketched an undiscriminating America that rewarded the worthy, the talented, and the diligent.

As I puzzled over these unexpected expressions of Bengali Americanness, my subsequent process of ethnographic analysis also doubled as a kind of unlearning. In my attempt to figure out what members of the Company were up to in an anthropological sense—calling my lifelong friends “research subjects” and their association a “fictive kinship network”—I began to perceive these well-known people and places afresh. The weightiest consequence of my new perspective was the realization that I could not claim insider privileges in my community because, quite simply, no discernible “inside” existed. Far from featuring a group of homogenous immigrants and their children around which a clear boundary could be established, the Company population was subtly differentiated along lines of age, gender, geographic origin, and religion. We had, for example, first-generation male Hindus from Dhakka, Bangladesh, and second-generation States-born female atheists represented by the same overarching label of Bengali American. My mistake in asserting a kind of “nativity” revealed my unconscious investment in preconceived notions of identity and culture; upon reconsideration, it was clear that my inquiry should not have been based on the given sameness of people in Natok but rather on how and why they established ties with others to produce a sense of commonality.

As I mapped my personal experience onto this complex topic and began to consider the ways in which my personal brand of

60

THAKURTA | AN INSIDE JOB

Bengali Americanness was distinct from that of other group members, I also reconfigured my methods accordingly. When collecting interviews with members of the first generation—for all intents and purposes the Company “elders”—I made sure to position myself deferentially. With “child” members, I spoke as a lifelong friend who, on account of being born in Kolkata rather than the United States, experienced the weird, skipped-rock removedness of second generationality a bit differently. But while I was able to rely on my established relationships to ask participants specific and personal questions on some occasions, I found that this history of affiliation also barred me from obtaining crucial information on others. For example, when investigating gender dynamics in Company homes, I could not candidly ask mashis and uncles how they viewed the institution of marriage. Doing so would, inevitably, entail overstepping the boundaries that circumscribed me as a Company “child.” Through the months of my research, my own shifting position—sometimes close to my research subjects, sometimes quite distant—made clear the limits of the “inside/outside” paradigm.

For a while, such movements and the selective sight they afforded left me mystified. What was I observing, I wondered, and what exactly was I supposed to be getting from it? Then, one afternoon, I sat sipping tea and interviewing a Natok uncle, one of the last subjects on my list. His account of being Bengali in the United States was inflected with the same sort of positivity I had heard from many others, leading our conversation across familiar territory. I decided to push him in a different direction. I mentioned that the history of South Asians in the United States was fraught with challenges, and brought up the example of how Indian Americans in New Jersey suffered discriminatory violence at the hands of “Dotbusters,” a group of irate young Caucasian Americans,

ELECTRA STREET

61

during the 1980s. While my subject acknowledged the troubling implications of this turbulent legacy, he also said that he could, to a certain degree, sympathize with the attackers. They were reacting to what they deemed undesirable and different, he said. In his view, contemporary, U.S.-based South Asians who lived too “loudly” and “dirtily” gave all subcontinental immigrants a bad image and constrained the degree to which the latter could be accepted as real Americans. These immigrants, he believed, needed to conform and assimilate to their newfound U.S. environments.

I left the interview enraged. Did my subject really believe that South Asian immigrants should minimize their “unruly” and “unclean” behaviors in the hopes of securing mainstream acceptance? Obsessively, I scrutinized the transcript of our exchange several times before finally considering the hidden dimensions of our conversation. In challenging the behaviors of other Indian Americans and distancing himself from them, what was my subject really saying? And how, indeed, did his criticism of undesirable, ineradicably “foreign” South Asians relate to his own experience of building a Bengali American identity?

These questions brought to mind an issue that seemed pertinent at the start of my investigation but had, in my scramble to collect data, gone largely neglected—how participants presented their Bengali American identities in ways that strategically emphasized certain elements while omitting others, thereby shedding light on the various pressures that constrained their self productions. I had initially approached the matter of “Bengali American” identity from a purely cultural standpoint by fixating on how Natok members created hybridized identities by forging ties with their land of settlement while simultaneously maintaining West Bengali traditions. These themes remained the focus of my interviews as I accepted—without fully understanding—my participants’ glow-

62

THAKURTA | AN INSIDE JOB

ing accounts of life in the United States. But there was obviously more to it. My last interview subject, for instance, constructed a narrative in which he possessed a fluid and well-positioned multicultural identity that permitted him to be both a structurally integrated American and culturally distinguished Bengali. When he was confronted with a history of violence and discrimination that ascribed to South Asians an undesirable “otherness,” he complained about “unassimilated” immigrants whose experiences in “The Land of Dreams” undermined his personal account of inclusion and success. By paying more attention to the hope and anxiety that permeated the expressions of empowered multiculturalism I heard, I began to see how subjects glossed over the complicated politics of belonging in the United States in favor of inscribing themselves in narratives of upward mobility.

After reviewing the rest of my collected data, I began to identify similar trends in my other interviews. Most of my subjects said that they were well-poised to define their own means of belonging in the United States as powerful citizens embodying a distinguished cultural difference. However, at the edges of such claims were also the challenges of doing so. Most people were obviously burdened by the very standards of “successful Bengali Americanness” they strove to fulfill in one way or another, a difficulty exacerbated by forces that constrained their processes of self-assertion. For example, while participants did not overtly reference struggles with oppressive identity assignments during their time in the United States, they implied them in casual anecdotes. One interviewee, for example, spoke of resisting comments about the “backwardness” of India at work. Another, when discussing her drive to work, mentioned her fear of being racially profiled by the police. Still another voiced frustrations about her appearance, which constantly cast her Americanness into doubt. “People always ask where I’m from,” she said.

ELECTRA STREET

63

These statements complicated the otherwise confident declarations of “positively cultured identity” that I heard. While most individuals described themselves as poised to dictate their own terms of belonging in the United States, they were also determined to distance themselves from forces that marked them as undesirably racialized or foreign. As participants asserted Bengali American identities in ways that reflected their considerable capital and upwardly mobile lives, then, their accounts also revealed how their processes of self formation were shaped by the pressure to be seen as successful and “problem-free immigrant citizens . . . who [could] be trusted to uphold the existing social order in their new country of residence.”11 Self-presentations that seemed disengaged from anxieties about marginality and power in the United States were in fact undergirded by those very concerns, and it was through strategic narrative emphases and omissions that participants conveyed what they felt was at stake.

Through dissection and research, I had demolished my community; in writing and analysis, I put it back together again. But the individuals I had committed to paper in my messy hundred and fifty page final draft were not the same as those I had approached initially, confidentiality waver in hand, with the half-joking request that they help me with my “school project.” If research had challenged my longstanding self-identification as a native, it seemed fitting that I should assume a designation that could accurately describe my newfound unfamiliarity with the Natok Company—foreigner.

But this self-branding, too, gave me pause. Using experience, desire, and aspiration as building materials, subjects situated themselves in narratives not exclusively to establish identities but also to make sense of their lives. To that end, we were all writing versions of ourselves into the world to achieve some sense of clarity and direction, negotiating a myriad of “contradictory cul64

THAKURTA | AN INSIDE JOB

tural influences” as we tried to stabilize something fundamentally volatile.12 And while terms like native or foreigner, insider or outsider were no longer sufficient to explain the particularity of my bond with members of the Company, I felt our instinct to create stories was something we shared.

Coda TWO RITUALS—ONE STRANGE and one familiar. By the end of my investigation, the ritual of being Bengali American was rendered peculiar and foreign while the ceremony of the anthropologist—once distant, theoretical, intimidating—became easier with practice.

To an extent.

If “native” anthropology provides us with a lesson of any sort, it is to reexamine untroubled presumptions of familiarity or unfamiliarity. Rather than constituting an experience for which I could easily rely on “authentic” insider knowledge, the process of conducting fieldwork at “home” featured a continuous cycle of disorientation and reorientation. Throughout it, I confronted a series of painful facts—how environments I initially perceived as private and familial were not hermetically sealed, but rather essentially shaped by class and power. How individuals fought to maintain particular more-than-just-American identities, but did so under the constraints imposed by hegemonic model minority discourses. How privilege shaped my own relatively untroubled upbringing as a Bengali American, ironically leading me to a fancy private college where I could study “marginalized” South Asian populations in textbooks and feel anger when individuals from said groups did not regurgitate the politically correct rhetoric of social justice I was used to hearing.

ELECTRA STREET

65

Fortunately, though, good things also emerged. It was good to see how capably members of the Company tackled the considerable task of building lives overseas. It was good to shoulder the unique burden of the anthropologist, to consider the implications of using people’s lives for “research.” It was good, by extension, to unravel the fiction of the distant researcher as well as the untroubled immigrant success story. And it was good to see that members of the Company inhabited not just two worlds—as popular discourses might lead us to believe—but many.

The aim of this narrative has not been to emphasize the hopelessness of the native anthropological enterprise—after all, what scope for understanding exists if we’re blind to what’s happening in our own “tribes”? Rather than exposing the vastness of our ignorance, self-reflexive anthropology offers numerous ways to reconsider how we might better understand our immediate lives and worlds. In forcing a reevaluation of accepted categories like “inside” and “outside,” it exposes the essential precariousness of the “Self/Other” paradigm and gives us a great deal to think about.

Research “at home” is hardly easy in practice. Besides the usual challenges that arise during fieldwork and the fact that there is no surefire way to follow Ruth Behar’s advice to simply “get up, dust yourself off, go to your desk, and write down what you saw and heard,” the ethnographic story, by virtue of being partially your own, cannot be concluded in a traditional sense.13 It cannot be wrapped up and stored away, neatly shelved for future perusal.

But almost certainly, there is also a curious joy in it: the experience confronts you while you work through it and will continue to trouble, amuse, pain, agitate, and inspire long after the last interview has been transcribed. For better or for worse, it will stay in your bones.

66

THAKURTA | AN INSIDE JOB

NOTES 1

Usefully distinguished by Abby Forster from “anthropology at home.” She denotes how “native anthropology” derives from the days when Western anthropologists relied on local informants to access [mostly marginalized] communities. Kirin Narayan further observes that the term is a remnant from the colonial context in which the anthropological discipline was originally built (“How Native is the Native Anthropologist?” American Anthropologist 95 (1993): 671–86.

2

See Takami Kuwayama, “‘Natives’ as Dialogic Partners: Some Thoughts on Native Anthropology,” Anthropology Today 19.1 (2003): 8.

3

Renato Rosaldo sketches the a caricature of “The Lone Ethnographer,” a distant researcher who perceived foreign cultures as “harmonious, internally homogenous, [and] unchanging” and relied on a native “sidekick” for insider information to illustrate prevailing disciplinary conceptions of the anthropological role until the late 1960s (Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis [Boston: Beacon Press, 1989, p. 31).

4

Marta Kempny, “Rethinking Native Anthropology: Migration and Auto-Ethnography in the Post-Accession Europe,” International Review of Social Research 2.2 (2012): 39.

5

Forster, p. 19. According to Forster, inguistic proficiency encompasses not just the language, but also cultural discourse styles.

6

Kempny, p. 45.

ELECTRA STREET

67

7

Lila Abu-Lughod argues that researchers are indisputably linked to the individuals they study. See her essay “Writing Against Culture,” Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, ed.

Richard G. Fox (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1991, pp. 137–62.

8

Naryan, p. 674.

9

Kathleen D. Hall, Lives in Translation: Sikh Youth as British Citizens (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), pp. 2, 6.

10

See, for example, The United States v. Bhaghat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923).

11

Monisha Das Gupta, Unruly Immigrants: Rights, Activism, and Transnational South Asian Politics in the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2006), p. 57.

12

Hall, p. 5.

13

Ruth Behar, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), p. 5.

Frontispiece:

Khadija Toor, Silk Screen Painting

68

THAKURTA | AN INSIDE JOB

Rasha Shraim

Houla, South Lebanon , 7 August 2013

ELECTRA STREET

69

ARAB CROSSROADS STUDIES AT NYU ABU DHABI A REGIONAL PERSPECTIVE

70

STEARNS | ARAB CROSSROADS

J U S T I N

S T E A R N S

“As the old Arab proverb has it: ‘Men resemble their times more than they do their fathers.’”

—Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft 1 WHAT IS AND WHAT HAS BEEN the Arab world? When we speak of Arab Crossroads, of which Arabs do we speak and in which connections are we interested? Do we turn to the seventh century when Arab Muslims established cities from southern Iraq and Egypt to Iberia in the West and Central Asia in the East? To the Yemeni and Omani merchants who over centuries traveled to and established connections in Indonesia and East Africa? To those Lebanese migrants who settled in Latin America during the first part of the twentieth century, or those who found their way to the North American midwest at the end of the nineteenth? Or is the Arab world simply where Arabic in all of its many dialects has been spoken and studied?

Over the past 1400 years, the “Arab World” was and continues to be a diverse world, one that took over four centuries after the prophet Muhammad’s death to become majority Muslim, and which contains substantial numbers of Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians, as well as a wide variety of Muslim groups. Ethnically it has long been composed of far more than Arabs, with Iranians, Berbers, Kurds, Copts, Turks, and Armenians playing vital roles in its history and society, and in more recent times, immigrants and

ELECTRA STREET

71

migrants from South-East Asia playing an increasingly important part in shaping its social and economic landscape. All of these groups naturally possessed their own languages as well, many of them with a rich written heritage. Any attempt to understand the Arab world—a term that we can now understand has more linguistic than ethnic value—must take this diversity into account, recognizing that the nature of this diversity varied according to time and place.

Arab Crossroad Studies (ACS) proceeds on the assumption that a solid grasp of the region’s history is necessary for an understanding of the current state of the Arab world. While globalization has been both celebrated and demonized in the media as a twentieth-century phenomenon, scholars such as Janet Abu-Lughod have shown us the degree of global economic integration that already existed a millennium ago and which connected West Africa and Europe, the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, Mesopotamia and China.1 We need to understand the ways in which these connections have shaped and continue to shape the region, from the time of the Islamic expansion, to the arrival of European colonialism, to the effects of the more recent capital and labor flows from inside and outside the region. Arab Crossroads Studies thus draws on scholarship from a range of disciplines, including history, sociology, anthropology, and literary and cultural studies in order to provide a firm grounding in the Arab world’s changing intellectual, social, religious, and cultural diversity.

2 AREA STUDIES IN THE AMERICAN ACADEMY has origins in European Orientalism and, less spoken of, in America’s tortured history of race relations and racial exploitation. As Robert Vitalis

72

STEARNS | ARAB CROSSROADS

has shown us, international studies as a field in the United States was directly connected with the division of the world into races, as is demonstrated by the influential international studies journal Foreign Affairs, founded in 1922, having first been entitled The Journal of Race Development.2 The founding of area studies departments in United States that focused on the Middle East began in 1919 in Chicago and in Princeton in 1927 as Oriental Studies and had clear links with respectively, archaeology on the one hand, and Biblical Studies and Semitic Studies on the other. The 1930s and ’40s, and the chauvinistic politics of Hitler’s Germany, brought a number of prominent scholars of the Middle East to the United States, where they founded departments in Middle East or Near Eastern Studies, both names that carried their own colonial past with them, as they connoted a European gaze that had situated the Arab world in relation to the Far East of China and Japan.

These departments received increased federal support during the Cold War after 1958 and the passing of the National Defense Education Act, which reflected an increased national awareness of the importance of developing a group of Americans with regional experience. As Edward Said’s influential 1978 monograph Orientalism argued, with occasional exaggeration, the construction of the past and present of the Middle East by European and American academics had historically been far from a disinterested affair and had reflected the political and economic foreign policy objectives of the countries where their institutions were located and where they had been educated.3 With such a past, then, what does it mean for NYU Abu Dhabi to offer a major under the title of “Arab Crossroad Studies” in 2013 in the UAE? The question of political and economic power is a particularly poignant one for an American institution in the Gulf, when the United States has yet to fully extricate itself from Afghanistan,

ELECTRA STREET

73

Asya as-Sughra [Asia Minor] qabla al-Milad [before the birth of Christ]

from the book Jughrafiya-i Osmani (published 1332/1914)

74

STEARNS | ARAB CROSSROADS

Iraq, and the “dirty wars” it has been waging around the region.

The United States also has a vested interest in regional oil production, is carrying out substantial arms deals with the UAE and other GCC countries, and is closely watching, along with the EU, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, all the while basing its Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. Keeping this context in mind, and drawing on the liberal arts model that informs NYUAD, Arab Crossroads Studies is rooted in the belief that an interdisciplinary approach—one that draws on both Humanities and Social Sciences—is necessary to understand both the past and the present of the Arabian Gulf, and the Arab world as a whole. This understanding emerges from the awareness that cultural, social, and religious developments have had and continue to have a political context. The specific situation of NYUAD—an American institution with a highly diverse faculty and student body (Americans represent roughly 19% of the class of 2015, for example, and Emiratis represent a similar percentage)—push us to approach the Arab World from other geopolitical perspectives, including from within.

Although Said’s Orientalism at times lends itself to suggesting that Americans and Europeans could not study or conceive of the Arab and Muslim worlds outside of their countries’ political and economic aspirations, more recent scholarship (such as the exemplary work of Suzanne Marchand on nineteenth-century German Orientalism) has given us examples of scholars in Europe and America from the Early Modern period until today who established personal, self-aware, and at times highly idiosyncratic relations with the regions of the world that they studied.4 In short, they were aware of how their own condition was shaped by specific power relations but chose to act outside that framework.

These are the types of students we hope to guide through the ACS major, students who have learned enough to understand the

ELECTRA STREET

75

historical and contemporary Arab world, who have the linguistic skills to begin communicating in Arabic, and have acquired the studied humility of knowing how much more they have yet to learn.

3 The ACS program brings together history, literature, and music from the arts and humanities, and anthropology, political science, and sociology from the social sciences. The inclusion of the social sciences in the major emphasizes the relevance of contemporary Arab societies for the program, and distinguishes our program from an older area studies model rooted in textual studies that reduced the Arab world to its written traditions. Our students all acquire experience with carrying out interviews, performing close readings on literary and historical texts, and most importantly, developing their own research questions. Arab Crossroads Studies moves even further from older area studies models by bringing students out into the field whenever possible. Faculty members are encouraged to take advantage of NYUAD’s location and take students on regional trips, both nationally to a variety of sites within the UAE, and further abroad, to Oman, Istanbul, Cairo, and Morocco and Southern Spain. These trips bring the Arab world and its crossroads alive for students, reframing what they have been reading and discussing in class and giving them the chance to meet professors and students at other institutions.

4 MOST WORTHWHILE DISCUSSIONS of the Arab world will draw on a linguistic and multidisciplinary grounding in the region, one that combines an awareness of its literary and artistic production as well as its historical, political, and cultural complexities. An 76

STEARNS | ARAB CROSSROADS

area studies approach also offers the potential to de-center the so-called West, to measure and understand the Arab world on its own terms, and not implicitly or explicitly in terms of models or developments from the European or American context. Such a de-centering is especially important for an American institution such as NYUAD, which has an instinctive, if understandable, tendency to perceive the world from an American viewpoint. To be sure, studying Arabic and the Arab World and its connections to the surrounding region is a complex and challenging order in Abu Dhabi, where English, Urdu and Punjabi are heard more often on the streets than Arabic. Adding to this complexity is the UAE’s involvement in the delicate process of defining and preserving its linguistic and cultural heritage even as the emirate of Abu Dhabi implements ambitious plans to remake itself as a global cultural hub. Precisely because of the complexity necessitated in any study of “the Arab World,” however, the task is worth attempting.

The argument for the importance of area studies should not be taken to suggest that the globalizing connections of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries and all their precedents do not continue to be relevant. In many ways these connections show us how important it is to have a better understanding of the Arab world as a complex and diverse region, precisely because of and not despite its connections to transnational processes. Two examples will have to suffice. The great strengths of Natalie Zemon Davis’s biography of the famed sixteenth century Granadan traveler and geographer Leo Africanus, Tricksters Travels, lay precisely in her ability to reconstruct the Muslim intellectual world that he came from in North Africa as well as that of the Christian scholarly circles he entered in the Pope’s court in Italy. Studies by Mercedes García-Arenal and Gerald Wiegers of the remarkable lives of the seventeenth-century Moroccan Jew Samuel El Pallache and his contemporary, the Spanish-Moroccan Muslim trav-

ELECTRA STREET

77

eller and polemicist al-Hajari, have similarly shown how members of all three Abrahamic traditions crossed religious and political boundaries and inhabited a shared if contested Mediterranean.

For the modern period, the remarkable studies by the political scientists Robert Vitalis and Timothy Mitchell have demonstrated the fallacy of trying to understand the relationship between the United States and the Gulf States as anything but co-constitutive. Even as American understanding of race relations unfolded in American business ventures in Saudi Arabia, the production and development of oil in the Middle East had a profound effect on how democracy came to be practiced in the United States.

This incomplete list of complex and nuanced scholarship is meant only to emphasize that area studies is a productive place from which to study transnational and transregional influences, flows, and connections. One needs a specific place from which to look at the world.5 Our study of the Arab world has long been confused by the presupposition that it is best understood through certain constants, be these religious (“Islam”), social (“patriarchy”), political (“authoritarianism”), or economic (“statism”). If nothing else, the events of the Arab spring have cast received wisdom into doubt.

Yet there have been other political events in recent history that similarly revealed how the academic community had poorly misread the contemporary state of affairs, perhaps none more dramatic than the Iranian revolution of 1979. To achieve a more accurate understanding of all aspects of the Arab world, and to avoid future reduction of the Arab world to immutable essences, we might take heed of the French historian Marc Bloch’s invocation of Arab wisdom in a short essay of his on the danger of worshipping at the idol of origins: “Men resemble their times more than they do their fathers.”6 As students of the Arab Crossroads, we do

78

STEARNS | ARAB CROSSROADS

well to take note that this generation of inhabitants of the Middle East, like all those before it, is interacting with creativity and dynamism to best answer the challenges of their day with the material and intellectual heritage handed down to them. And, as members of the community of NYU Abu Dhabi, we will seek to continue to provide a forum in which to discuss all aspects of this region, however constituted, in both past and present.

NOTES 1

See Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A. D. 1250-1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

2

Robert Vitalis, “International Studies in America,” Items and Issues; Social Science Research Council 3.3–4 (2002): 1–2, 9–12.

3

Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

4

Suzanne Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

5

See Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth Century Muslim Between Worlds (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007); Mercedes García-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, A Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); and Gerard Wiegers, “A Life Between Europe and the Maghrib: The writings and Travels of Ahmad b. Qasim ibn Ahmad ibn al-faqih Qasim ibn al-shaykh al-Hajari al-Andalusi (b.

977/1569-70),” The Middle East and Europe: Encounters and Ex-

ELECTRA STREET

79

changes (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992), pp. 87–115. On race relations and American business in Saudi Arabia, see Robert Vitalis, America’s Kingdom (2006; rev. ed. New York: Verso, 2009). On the effects of oil on U.S. politics, see Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy (New York: Verso, 2011).

6

Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Reflections on the Nature and Uses of History and the Techniques and Methods of Those Who Write It (New York: Vintage, 1964), p. 35.

Frontispiece:

Agustina Zegers, Detail from Downtown Abu Dhabi

80

STEARNS | ARAB CROSSROADS

Agustina Zegers

Downtown Abu Dhabi, August 28th 2013,

ELECTRA STREET

81

Egypt Every Day THE PHOTOGRAPHS of Yasser Alwan A PUBLIC CONVERSATION

FROM OCTOBER 2011 TO APRIL 2012, NYU Abu Dhabi hosted a large retrospective of work by the photographer Yasser Alwan at its Downtown Campus. During the Spring 2012 term, a small selection from this exhibition, together with some additional photographs, was shown at 19 Washington Square North, the New York City home of NYU Abu Dhabi. The interview presented here is an edited transcript of the public conversation between Alwan and Shamoon Zamir that launched the New York exhibition on February 8. The transcript includes questions from the audience, as indicated.

Introduction YASSER ALWAN HAS LIVED and photographed in Egypt for more than twenty years. He works almost exclusively in the genre of the portrait in all its variety. Though his subjects do include friends and their families, most of them are simply individuals encountered in the streets and other public spaces. They are, above all, workers who, more often than, not live in conditions of grinding poverty and hardship: a fifth estate.

For Alwan, however, social documentary is not the automatic alternative to orientalist clichés. His images doggedly eschew both the exoticism and also the potential sensationalism of human suffering or of the newsworthy incident that have so often characterized photography’s depiction of the cultural and social “other.”

Nor is there any intention, in what is by now already a substantial body of work, toward an ethnographic or social survey of the kind

ELECTRA STREET

83

that characterized many photographic projects in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—no attempt to create a systematic visual archive of a cultural group, class, or nation.

What we see instead in Alwan’s pictures—what seems to matter most in them—is the record of a particular kind of repeated human encounter that has, through a slow accumulation over the years, developed a unique and dignified eloquence that resists easy classification. Perhaps because of their unfashionable humanism, it is all too easy to approach these images by relying on resemblance and analogy, because they remind us of this particular photographer or that particular style. But if we “listen” to Alwan’s photographs carefully, they ask us to suspend the urge to name them in this way: to come to these images too readily through existing categories and comparisons in already to lose sight of them and to silence their own particular mode of address.

Alwan’s images arise out of a sustained relationship with particular locales and very often also with particular individuals. Alwan takes his time in the streets of Cairo, its cafes, its factories and work places, its bus stops and parks. It is this sense of a true inhabiting (so much more than a hanging around in the hope of a good shot) that finds its fulfillment in the human face sedimented with time and experience in the portraits. Even the images that seem to conform more closely to the norms of street photography (images captured as people wait for a bus, for example), seem to be marked by a careful ethics of regard that speaks of the same senses of time, place and personhood.

Most of the people photographed by Alwan agree to pose; in fact, they choose their poses. Self-presentation and the art of the photographer work together in complex ways. The pictures are sometimes returned to those photographed, and sometimes they are met with disappointment, even hostile rejection. In order to

84

ALWAN | EGYPT EVERYDAY

grasp the beauty and sympathy of these images, one needs something other than a Sunday-best sense of the visual self. Alwan’s are images that ask Egyptians to have the cultural confidence to imagine themselves anew.

The exhibitions presented in Abu Dhabi and New York included three portraits from the Tahrir Square demonstrations that occurred during Spring 2011. The portraits of individual protesters do not, at first glance and to the uninformed eye, stand out from the others. But these images refuse the dramaturgy of political protest precisely because Alwan’s portraits have in a sense been picturing the revolution all along. These are the faces of a long revolution, one that unfolds at a pace and in forms that the popular media are unable to recognize or represent. Alwan photographs the ordinary, the day-to-day, but his images are not mundane. They engage the viewer with what has been visible to Alwan’s eyes for many years: a human reality of fortitude, anger, persistence, good humor, and pride that is the reality of Egypt everyday.

— Shamoon Zamir

The Conversation Zamir: How did how you come to settle down in Cairo and make Egypt your subject?

Alwan: The first time I went to Egypt was as a Watson Fellow, after graduating from college. I didn’t know a thing about the country, and I spent a year and a half trying to learn about it.

It took my breath away. If you’ve ever been to Cairo, I think it’s very hard for the city not to take your breath away or not to totally disgust you. It’s one way or the other. In my case, it took

ELECTRA STREET

85

86

ALWAN | EGYPT EVERYDAY

ELECTRA STREET

87

my breath away. The variety of people who lived there, the history and social history, the kinds of architecture, and the hustle and bustle—Cairo reminded me very much of New York in the context of the Arab world. I didn’t know it at first, but I had fallen in love with the city. So when I came back to the United States, I basically wanted to find a way to return to Cairo.

I hadn’t known exactly how to do it as a Watson Fellow. We were spoiled. We were given a large check and told to go do your project. And so I did my work at that time without much knowledge of the country, its history, the social structure of Egypt and the Middle East. I decided that if I were going to do really serious work back in that part of the world, then I had better learn something about that part of the world, at least through books.

The fact that my parents are Iraqi didn’t give me any kind of access into Egyptian society whatsoever. And that’s the reason that I studied history and politics at Georgetown University. I focused on Iraq and on Egypt. That was a particularly bad time for people who were studying the Middle East. Iraq invaded Kuwait a month before I started my M.A. The entire faculty of the program that I was studying in was pretty unhappy and depressed about what they feared was going to happen. And then several months later, what they feared is, in fact, what happened. I immediately took off as soon as I finished my M.A., hoping to go to Iraq. I ended up in Jordan.

But Jordan and I didn’t get along very well. Amman felt like a very, very small town by comparison to Cairo. So when I found a way to return to Cairo, I did. And I’ve never left. And I feel entirely comfortable in that chaotic, bustling city—what appears to most visitors as a mess, to me appears as a sort of frenetic dance that I feel privileged to be a part of.

88

ALWAN | EGYPT EVERYDAY

Zamir: You’ve had exhibitions in London, Greece, Abu Dhabi, and now New York. But what about Egypt? How have these images been received there?

Alwan: The last time I showed some of these images in Egypt was in January 2000. I was trying to create something like a portrait of the working class. That’s a fairly heavy task to handle. What I did manage to do was to photograph labor. When the images were exhibited in Cairo, the reaction was quite negative. I was told that I was a foreigner making Egyptians look bad and photographing the wrong kinds of people. That reaction was quite vocal and quite harsh. I had spent many years working on this project, and the reaction for me was quite painful. Because it was quite the opposite of what I was trying to do. I was trying to photograph a group of people, who are the majority, the vast overwhelming majority of Egyptians, who basically suffer from a kind of semantic apartheid—in the sense that scholars and experts and academics and government bureaucrats talk about this class of people all the time, but don’t really know them.

And I decided then that I’m not going to show these pictures again. Or I’m not going to show any of my work in Egypt again.

Then suddenly the events of last year took place—the “Arab Spring” happened, Tahrir Square happened. And all of a sudden people are at least beginning to look at my work in a sort of different light now that at least the weight of the world is not on the shoulders of the working class or that there’s at least a sense that the working class has an opportunity and a possibility for a better life. Previously, they saw these pictures as demeaning. I see these pictures as a way of shedding light on the people who make the country work, actually function, day to day. Without these people, the country would not function.

ELECTRA STREET

89

Zamir: If I’m hearing you correctly, you’re describing the reactions primarily of the middle classes to the pictures. What about the people you photographed?

Alwan: That ran the entire gamut, from people who reacted quite negatively to my pictures to people who like them very much. But it wasn’t just the middle class. In London, I got questions from Egyptians who asked, “Why are you photographing the wrong set of people?” It happened to me in Paris. And it’s always the Egyptians. At least until January 25th last year, there was certainly an absolute state of denial in the country about the social situation of most people. That’s changing now.

It wasn’t just the middle class. People allowed me to photograph them, but they didn’t necessarily always like the images that I made of them. But, then, when a catalog was published of the photographs, people all of a sudden loved the fact that they were in a book. And one of the reasons for publishing the catalog in 2000 was to return it back to the communities where I had worked.

Zamir: Could you say a bit more about how you work? I think that’s an important and complex context for the images: how you work with communities, how the nature of portraiture has evolved in the work.

Alwan: Egypt is not a very easy environment to photograph in, although my guess would be that Egypt is among the most photographed countries. It was in the nineteenth century anyway. Egypt has an incredibly long history of foreigners going and making photographs. Photography was announced in July 1839. Six weeks later, two men are making photographs around the country. 1839: it wasn’t easy to get to Egypt.

90

ALWAN | EGYPT EVERYDAY

So there’s a reputation of foreigners photographing Egypt.

But there is a sense among Egyptians that foreigners shouldn’t photograph outside the canon of accepted sites, which would be the pharaonic sites and the Islamic monuments, that once you step outside of these particular areas, or once you step outside of the social settings that are acceptable to Egyptians for photography—weddings, for example (and by the way I’m very fond of photographing weddings), then photography’s not accepted.

When I began to photograph in Egypt, sometimes people would ask me to come and photograph them in their homes or, let’s say, in their Sunday best, which is something that I did. And for me, that was also a learning process. But there was no such thing as a documentary kind of photography established in the country at all. I realized that if I were going to try to do that kind of photography in order to express something about the place, then I’d have to be accepted by the communities—or at least, by the people I photographed.

I work very, very hard to break down the barriers and their prejudices about why and what I’m trying to do. I show them photographs that I’ve made in the past. We talk. I spend an enormous amount of time in the community, learning about what the community is. I’m entirely off-balance, and they are much more comfortable, because it’s their social setting. The way that I become comfortable is to gain people’s trust, slowly over time. One way I do that is by returning pictures to people so that they see the kinds of images I make. And that’s the real work. If I do that honestly, then I can often make a photograph.

Zamir: What about the relationship of what you do to the state apparatus? Has there ever been any interference?

ELECTRA STREET

91

92

ALWAN | EGYPT EVERYDAY

Alwan: The Egyptian state wishes that these photographs didn’t exist. Not that they’re published in the media: I’m not a photojournalist. These photographs are not appearing in The Guardian or The Times or in local newspapers in Egypt. When I was a Watson Fellow in 1986, working on the project on labor, I spent three days in a state security prison for making pictures. Basically, people identified me as doing something threatening. State security had me followed for several months, broke into my darkroom, took images. Photographing in this particular social setting is threatening to the power structure of Egypt. And that makes the environment very, very difficult to work in.

Zamir: You’ve just said that you’re not a photojournalist, but with many of these pictures, the easiest label that comes to mind is “documentary.” Your resistance to that label (which I approve, by the way) says a lot, I think, about what the pictures are really about.

Alwan: I dropped out of the photography program at RISD [the Rhode Island School of Design]. The kind of work I was doing then, and that I’ve continued doing in the context of Egypt and the Arab world, hasn’t been seen by the art establishment as being very avant-garde. At RISD, I was made to feel ashamed that I was doing documentary work: “This is old traditional photography. Get with the program. You want to be an artist, you better, you know, start thinking in different ways now.” Their kind of work—the work that became prominent in the last decades of this century—asks some really interesting questions, but most of it just doesn’t touch my heart.

Unfortunately, the word “documentary” has had a negative shadow cast over it during the last thirty years. But my photographs are, by their nature, extremely connected to the physical world that’s in front of the lens. I try to make myself equally con-

ELECTRA STREET

93

nected to that physical world. I’m not a passer-by in Egypt. I don’t want to be a passer-by. And I don’t want to photograph as a passer-by. If these photographs are somehow special to you, I think it’s because I’ve connected myself in the same way that a photograph is connected to the physical world that it shows.

Zamir: When you talk about your photographs and their contexts, you often frame the discussion in terms of the facts of social reality, the facts of labor, economics, and social conditions. The same is true in things that you’ve written. Those very terms seem to me to imply potentially a kind of documentary function. And yet, when you talk about the aesthetics of the photography that you’re trying to do, that’s precisely what you resist. There seems to be a kind of tension in the way you frame the work.

Alwan: It’s just a lot easier to talk about the social stuff. It’s awfully hard to talk about the formal aspects of the images, for me. If I knew how to write what I photograph, I’d probably be a writer. But I don’t. And that’s precisely why I photograph. It’s so much easier to talk about the social aspects of the world that I photograph rather than the formal qualities or the aesthetic qualities. And so I always leave that to people like yourself.

Zamir: Why do you only work in black-and-white?

Alwan: I like it more. Color is harder. I find very few color photographers who use color as an element of composition well. But of all my favorite photographers, there might be two color as opposed to twenty-five or thirty black-and-white photographers. I find the aesthetics more attractive. I also think because it’s simpler—for me, that simplicity allows you to look at the more important things.

94

ALWAN | EGYPT EVERYDAY

Zamir: I know that a number of photographers have been very important to you, among them Walker Evans, Cartier-Bresson, and August Sander. But could you give us some sense also of an Egyptian or an Arab tradition of photography? I know you’ve collected images. And you’ve written on certain traditions and images from Egypt. Is there a connection to that tradition that may not be immediately visible to an uninformed eye?

Alwan: If there is a tradition of photography in the Arab world, my guess would be that it began in the early twentieth century.

And that it’s mostly a studio tradition. I’ve collected studio photographs partly for what they tell me about Egyptian society. Egyptians went to these studios and wanted to be photographed in a particular way so that they could present themselves publicly in a particular way. I have maybe 4,000 or 5,000 photographs that I’ve collected over the last fifteen or so years. I collect them because they’re usually made by Egyptians of Egyptians. And I’m interested in how people present themselves to the studio and what their sense of their public image is.

That’s a tradition that continued until well into the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Sometime in the early ‘90s or so young Egyptian photographers began trying to make art photographs. And I don’t find myself connected to the art photography that’s taking place in Egypt now or that has been going on for the last fifteen or so years. If I am connected at all, I am more connected to the studio tradition. My pictures don’t quite appear like that studio tradition, but I am very curious about how people present themselves to the camera. And I guess that’s one reason why I’ve collected these studio images.

Audience: How have you acquired these images?

ELECTRA STREET

95

96

ALWAN | EGYPT EVERYDAY

ELECTRA STREET

97

Alwan: We have an enormous and interesting flea market in Cairo.

When I first arrived in Egypt in the mid-1990s, these photographs weren’t valued at all. And so they were usually thrown out when a grandparent died—they were considered the junk that people wanted to get rid of. But because of the way Egypt is structured, nothing is thrown out. And these things end up at the booksellers.

And I’m often at the booksellers.

I’ve been collecting old photographs, but also magazines for the photographs and for the caricatures, because an entirely different Egypt is presented in those images than in the images we see of Egypt today. And I just have done that over many, many years.

I’m privileged because I’ve made personal connections with the booksellers: you know, there’s this crazy guy who’s willing to buy fifty photographs in one shot. So they just give me a call. “Hey, I have fifty photographs, come and look at them.” And I rush over.

Zamir: What’s the reaction from other artists to your work? Is there any sense of appreciation of the work or is there hostility towards the work?

Alwan: As I said, I think I mentioned that young Egyptian art photographers are mostly not working in this style at all. I have two hypotheses for that. One is that to do this kind of work, you have to accept the sort of very basic and painful social realities of the country. And until January 25th, 2011, I think the entire country was basically in denial of the fact that 60% or 70% of the population is poor. And of that 60% or 70%, 80% of those people are working-class poor people.

The other reason is that this kind of photography hasn’t been fashionable. And if you’re a young photographer interested in the arts and trying to get your work seen in galleries in Cairo and abroad,

98

ALWAN | EGYPT EVERYDAY

this isn’t the style that you’re going to pursue, not if you want your work to be seen. So I think those are the two reasons why others aren’t working in this particular genre.

Zamir: You work almost exclusively with the portrait. I know there are some still-life images, but 99% of the work is portraiture. I’m struck, though, by the relative absence of women in your photographs. It’s actually quite common to have pictures of women in both the studio tradition and street photography. But in your work it’s quite rare. Why is that?

Alwan: This is a terrible shortcoming of my work. I’ve had an incredibly difficult time photographing women of the working class of Egypt. It’s much easier to photograph women of the upper class. I’ve had a lot of success there. It was also much easier to photograph women in Jordan.

I’ve gotten into quite a lot of trouble trying to make pictures like that in Egypt. And I’ve gotten some women in quite a lot of trouble because I took their photographs, even when I had permission. Even when I had permission from family members. This is a terrible, terrible shortcoming, a reproduction of the same kinds of invisibility that have already existed of the average Egyptian. I haven’t yet succeeded. I’m working on a project where I’m trying to do family portraits of the working class. But I haven’t yet succeeded in making a family portrait that includes the women of the household.

Audience: Would using a longer lens and greater distance from women subjects be a solution?

Alwan: No. Not at all.

ELECTRA STREET

99

Audience: Because the permission’s not there? What if it was?

Alwan: I use a normal to a wide-angle lens on purpose. I want to be part of the world that I’m photographing. I’m not a sports photographer, photographing from one hundred meters away. I can’t get the right image that way. It’s my interaction with the people that I photograph that make these images what they are.

Audience: Was there more openness to the photographing of working class people under Nasser, given his socialist agenda?

Alwan: Actually I do think that during Nasser’s period it was much easier to photograph both the working class and women. You can see that from the magazines that are available from that time.

But given the socioeconomics and the politics of the country over the last twenty-five or thirty years, it’s become more and more difficult to step out of the socially accepted spaces where photography is allowed. And that’s exactly where I go. People who refuse to be photographed say, “Well, why don’t you go take pictures of the pyramids?” And I say, “Well, everybody’s done that.” Anywhere in and around the tourist sites, photography is not only accepted, it’s expected. That’s not where I’m photographing.

Audience: In Cairo, much of the poverty is invisible to the general public or the middle class. Like the area where the garbage gets sorted. How do you work in an area like that or get beyond a surface view?

Alwan: That’s an excellent example. We basically have local garbage collectors, called zabaleen, who come to my building and pick up the garbage and take it to an extremely poor neighborhood

100

ALWAN | EGYPT EVERYDAY

[Mokattam Village] in a part of town that began as just a bare hill and that has grown up to become an entire neighborhood. For many years it did not have running water or electricity. Because of international development projects, that neighborhood has been one of the most visited neighborhoods by foreigners and local NGOs. And the photographs that have resulted are some of the most superficial photographs of poverty that have been made in Egypt. Yet through the worldwide NGO system, these photographs are seen all over. There are books on the zabaleen and films on the zabaleen and so on.

The way I go to neighborhoods is through personal contacts. I don’t have a plan—or, rather, my plan is about making a personal connection with a particular person who lives in the neighborhood.

And it’s like throwing a stone into water. If I can make a connection, maybe I can make two, and so on and so forth. And in that sense, I don’t think it’s just a surface view, what I’m doing.

Audience: To what extent are your photographs exhibited in the area in which you’re doing your photography?

Alwan: Not at all. In all of Cairo, we have maybe ten galleries. In the neighborhoods where I work, there’s no such space where anything could be shown publicly. But I do take the photographs back. That’s one of the pillars of the way I’ve developed in Egypt, in terms of working. That is, I try to return images back to people.

And I’ve used the images that I’ve made in the past as a sort of door to people’s trust.

I’ve had people tear up the images I take back to them. They didn’t like them. I have had people kiss me and hug me. And I have had people who want to give me something in return, because in Egypt you don’t give anyone anything for free. So they want to and

ELECTRA STREET

101

I try to find ways to get out of that. Most of the time, people are very appreciative of their image. But my deep sense is that most of the time people are also disappointed in the image that they see.

Audience: You mention that you’ve gone back and returned prints to the subjects. Diane Arbus, for example, developed relationships with the people that she was photographing and went back repeatedly and photographed them. Has that happened in your work? Are there particular individuals that for whatever reason are fascinating so you re-photograph them?

Alwan: Some of the images are based on relationships going back a decade or more. There are even some people I’ve been photographing for twenty-five years, from the very first time I went to Egypt, where I just developed relationships so that now we’ve sort of grown together over this period of time.

State security has systematically tried to destroy my relationships with people. At one point, they had me followed for three months: they followed me around to all the neighborhoods where I worked. They basically threatened and terrified the people I photographed. So those people didn’t want to see me again. I was causing them problems. They didn’t need a headache. They’ve got already a dozen headaches in their lives.

Audience: Are there poets or novelists who talk about or are involved in similar efforts to portray the world as you try to capture it?

Alwan: I often parallel myself with Naguib Mahfouz. Not because I particularly like him or think he was a great writer. But he’s looked up to in Egypt. Over the course of all of his novels, he has developed his own portrait of the working and lower classes. When peo-

102

ALWAN | EGYPT EVERYDAY

ELECTRA STREET

103

ple challenge me about why I’m photographing in this particular neighborhood and why I’m trying to portray people in a negative light, I say, “Well, you know, Naguib Mahfouz has written about your neighborhood. Why aren’t you upset about his writing?” It’s the visual image that takes people viscerally in Egypt.

Audience: Looking at the faces in these pictures, what I see there, what gives me hope is that these people have this strength in the face of immense poverty.

W

Alwan: That’s been my overwhelming experience with people in Egypt of all social classes. It’s the reason that I remain in Egypt: the strength of these people.

104

ALWAN | EGYPT EVERYDAY

ELECTRA STREET

105

JOEY BUI

EVERY BODY IS MARKED

BINH STOPPED THE Commodore behind the petrol station, where he wouldn’t need a parking ticket. He was a few minutes late but there was no sign of Tuan. A white middle-aged woman with ragged hair and pink pants eyed him uneasily through the windows as she walked by carrying her Safeway bags. Binh rolled down the windows, lit a cigarette, and pulled out his beaten copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. It was the paperback edition with black jacket and large white letters. After a few moments he let it drop in his hand without having taken in a single word.

He had read that book so many times that actually holding the book was only ceremony. It was in a box of Salvos donations that he received when he moved into the rented unit in ‘89. The pages were yellowed but the spine was tight, so he knew it hadn’t been read before. At first Binh used it as literacy material, flicking through to see which words he could recognize. When a volunteer spotted his copy at the learning center, she asked him about it. He tugged it away from her touch and shrugged, but he began to try with the book. Very slowly, and struggling, he got a blurred idea of the storyline. The euphemisms became clearer by the fourth or fifth reading. By the eighth reading he was enrolled in the university, part of the government-sponsored program.

The passenger door creaked and slammed shut. The Commodore shook as Tuan swung his gangling frame into it.

“Fuck you, Tuan, what took so long?”

“Sorry, sorry. A 50th birthday party stayed late today, so I had to wait up for them.”

Binh spat onto the pavement before rolling up the window.

ELECTRA STREET

107

“Did you at least get paid overtime?”

“Nah,” Tuan said through gum, “It was only a bit later, it was no extra work.”` “You idiot, what do you think you’re doing those people, a favor?” Binh reversed the Commodore, “Cleaning up after their shit. . . if you’re not getting paid, you’re letting them take advantage of you. They think they’re so much better than us, but they’re only Chinese.”

“They’re not so bad.”

“I’ve seen how you are with them. You have this idiot smile for them, and you say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘sorry’ all the time,” Binh said the English words in an exaggerated accent.“ And they don’t do shit for you.”

He glanced at Tuan, who started digging dirt from underneath his fingernails. “You don’t care!” he said. He knew he was overreacting but couldn’t help it. He slammed the dashboard with the heel of his palm.

Down the Monash freeway, neither of them said anything. Binh expected Tuan to retort or at least concede. Binh pushed down on the accelerator to provoke Tuan, who always drove carefully under the speed limit. Tuan caught his eye.

“Look, man,” Tuan said heavily, “I didn’t make you drop out.”

Binh turned to look at Tuan again. Though they were both twenty-eight, Tuan’s skin was thinner and greener, worn. He seemed to carry every grievance on his loosened skin, and it sunk his face.

He was the kid who fed Binh water when they were strangers on Bidong Island. Binh woke up from a hellish fever to see Tuan’s yellow teeth baring through the ugliest smile he had ever seen. With no family to follow, when each was asked where to settle, Tuan said “I hear they eat a lot of butter in Australia. I can really fatten up with some butter, hey?” So they went to Australia. His temper-

108

BUI | EVERY BODY IS MARKED

ament was milder than Binh’s, who had long fingers and smooth pale skin. Binh’s father used to examine his hands, turning them over and tugging at the joints. “These are your mother’s hands.

She washed clothes and gutted chicken with her bare hands all day—no matter, they would stay just like this, smooth and white,” he said, then slipped a pen into his Binh’s grasp, “A scholar’s hand.” Binh’s knuckles were turning white on the steering wheel.

“What the fuck, what does that have to do with anything?”

“You don’t like working at the fucking grocery store, Binh. Stop being so stubborn. It’s not too late to go back to the university,” Tuan said.

Binh stared down at the road. Tuan hadn’t commented on it, but they had driven far past Springvale. In fact, if he kept going down the freeway, he could be on his way to the university. But this route was unfamiliar because he used to take the train there.

Students don’t have cars. His uncle loaned him some money to put a deposit on the car when he started working at Co Nam’s grocery store. The grocery store was close to home, but the car was useful when Co Nam wanted him to pick up cartons of green soya milk and fermented pork patty for cheaper at 7pm from the other grocery stores because they’d expire soon. The Commodore, piece of shit though it was, was the most expensive thing Binh owned and when he suddenly found it in his hands, it was the heaviest deposit on his withdrawal.

“Why aren’t you in school then?”

Tuan snorted.

“You know why, man. I can’t do that stuff. School. Even before ’75, I was already running tables at Nam Vuong. But you were gonna be a teacher.”

Binh hated it when his friends referred so casually to Vietnam before the Fall of Saigon, as if it were just a marker of time.

ELECTRA STREET

1

“Well, like you then,” he said. “I got sick of it. They’re all fucking racists. I don’t need that shit. I mean, I got a steady job working with our people, save a little bit, trade in this shitty car, play pool, drink with you and the boys, do whatever I want.”

He never told Tuan about the broken chair. He had been struggling at the university for three months. It wasn’t the material that he struggled with. It was hard, but he was slowly getting it. But no matter what he did, he couldn’t get rid of his Vietnamese accent.

Students talked to him only when they had to, and even then they talked loudly and slowly. He watched with sickening hate the thin lips stretching grotesquely as they dragged out every word, the light eyes widening in question. The question was, ‘Do. You. Understand. Me?’ One day he spat into one of the faces. Tony Chilllinski’s face. Tony swung an arm to push him back. Not expecting the strength of his white, meaty palms, Binh staggered and to make up for it, he lunged forward to drive his elbow into the big man’s stomach.

The counselor that he was sent to was even worse. He pitied Binh. It was his chair that Binh smashed against the desk.

“It’s different,” Tuan said, “I mean that I couldn’t be in school, I don’t have the brains. You could do it, but what the fuck are you doing? Stacking shelves with freeze-dried noodles and greasing off every white man that walks past the store.”

“Fuck you. What if I can? I don’t want to. I don’t like it. You know what I get stacking shelves? Freedom. Nobody looks down on me there, I don’t buy into their fucking system. I don’t even like it,” he repeated.

In his peripheral vision, Binh saw Tuan hold up the copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. Feeling sick, he met Tuan’s eyes. Binh lunged sideways, and in a split second, he snatched the book and threw it out the window. He saw the pages in his mind’s eye, already

2

BUI | EVERY BODY IS MARKED

loosened by the spine that he had broken into four years ago, tearing off and littering the freeway with Scout’s overalls and Boo’s metaphors.

They didn’t speak again for another stretch of road. Sickened with hate, Binh started to feel how terrible it must be for Tuan to spend time with him. He wanted to explain. He had been trying to explain ever since, hadn’t he?

“Even back in the refugee camp, they didn’t treat us like this,” Binh said slowly. He felt ridiculously like crying. “Because they didn’t expect us to be like them. They only expected us to be us.

But here. In a university, where white people go to learn how to fucking be older white people, I…” He slammed his palm on the dashboard again.

“I used to go running every morning around the camp. Yeah, in the stinking hot, in my bare feet, empty stomach. Fuck knows nobody could afford runners. I thought I should keep fit, you know?

Because I wanted to be going somewhere to make myself better.”

His knuckles strained against the smooth skin, turning red. He imagined his bare bone ripping through and leaving scars.

“Let’s go,” Tuan said.

“What?”

“Let’s go running. Take the next exit out to Alexandra Gardens.

There’s this great running track that goes for miles and miles around the park.”

“No way. That’s so fucking white,” Binh said, recalling the running paths of women in bright sports bras and yoga pants. Old men with hairy chests and sagging bellies, businessmen in silky sports clothes and designer water bottles.

“Nobody owns running, man. It’s just running,” Tuan seemed stuck on the idea.

“Doesn’t feel right.”

ELECTRA STREET

3

“No, fuck you,” Tuan was smiling, “What could be more right than two guys going running because they feel like it?”

More so to make better company for Tuan than anything, he drove into Alexandra Gardens and parallel-parked against the running track. Their old t-shirts and daggy fleece trousers were for work or home, but it seemed the wrong time to talk about clothes. They didn’t say much as they got out of the car and started jogging. Running around the gardens in Melbourne was not something that anybody they knew did. Binh was right: only white people did it, and it made both of them nervous breaking into this new territory.

But nobody looked at them twice. There were no questions, only the general annoyance when someone running in the opposite direction came towards them. But the other jogger would shift to the left, and Binh shifted to his left. If not, he shifted the other way. Red-faced and panting, each jogger squinted hard for the end of his road. Binh started to enjoy it, and he felt that Tuan was too. Tuan was right, he thought. Nobody owns running. I’ve got to run and watch my own feet, because that’s what everybody else is doing. There is space for Tuan and me on the track, if we let it. It had been a long time since he did any exercise, and the old pain pressed down on his lungs and cramped in his calves.

Binh turned to look at his friend before he picked up the pace and started sprinting.

Frontispiece:

Caroline Gobena, Manly, Australia, 25 October 2013, 1pm

4

BUI | EVERY BODY IS MARKED

Caroline Gobena

Yorkeys Knob (Queensland, Australia), 10 October 2013, 5:30 am

ELECTRA STREET

5

Amah What’s left is less than your voice just the shuffle of your feet thin slippers on hard wood a faint nodding printed hats on a scarf on a cancer-bald head the lingering taste of your bah-tsang sticky fingered banana-leaf wrapped recipe-free eggshiitakefattyporkpeanut steamed tied fought over only three words understandable to my half-skin ears— barely a language lai come jia-pong eat hip-xiong photos (i own your name but none of your history) three photographs of us, pattern and forgery too many unasked questions one name, inherited but undeserved

ELECTRA STREET

7

On Words She dives through a newspaper treasure hunter of texts—searching new words, old words, not-commonly-used words.

She feasts on verbs and nouns— selects each from the craggy reef, prizes open snug shells.

Hungrily, she slurps succulent meat sucks cold briny juices from sea-worn shields plucks pearls of wisdom from iridescent pages.

A penumbra gleams above the silt and she pulls it away to join the shells of pasquinade and peridot.

A languid current flows over her stream of consciousness.

She scouts prepositions, darting updownunder, catches slippery vowels scuttling along the shoal.

Her dives are reckless, greedy, insatiable; the penumbra is a thing to be tasted, savored, turned over and over and dissolved on the tongue.

8

LEITH | POEMS

how to kiss in a fish trap Take the number eleven bus to the fish market, almost all the way.

Listen to the water smack the sides of boats.

Watch the men at work weaving igloo-shaped fish traps from thick wire.

Imagine yourself inside, gauge the size: two and a half of you to each nest.

Haggle.

Rumble back home in the fisherman’s truck.

Speed through city streets.

Smell like the sea.

Kick everyone out of the elevator.

Hug the trap, orb-like, to your chest.

Let it live in the center of the living room.

Line the bottom with cushions.

Decorate with gifted twinkle lights.

Sit inside and daydream.

When the giver arrives, remember to say thank you (for the lights).

Offer tea.

Blow smoke rings of conversation.

ELECTRA STREET

9

Brush your teeth.

Don’t go to sleep.

Wait beneath the window.

“Don’t leave—there’s room for two.”

Construct constellations in the twinkle lights.

Lie down and let laughter fill you like a helium balloon.

Say yes.

Smile.

Watch the sun rise upside down.

10

LEITH | POEMS

James Hunt All the World’s a Stage

ELECTRA STREET

11

MY SISTER THE LIFEGUARD

JENNIFER ACKER Drawings by Sarah Bushra

MY SISTER PICKS UP ON THE TENTH RING. “I’m up to my elbows in strawberries,” Suzy says.

Her Vermont kitchen is the size of my Phoenix Jacuzzi. I’m standing inside looking out at the tub and the perfect rectangle of the pool. Together, they’re an exclamation point. My eyes and nose are dry from the air-conditioning, and as I rewet them with drops and a spray, I say, “I’ve been thinking about the property.

That kidney of a pond we used to call a lake. We should do something with it before one of us gets hits by a truck.”

The sound of water running. Something metal like rings clanging against the water-filled pot where air bubbles are squeezed out of plastic freezer bags by submersion. I remember all the rituals.

“I’m not selling, Lee. Not to you, not anyone.”

“I’m talking renovation, Suze.”

“Three kids by four wives? Fixing up is hardly your strong suit.”

It would be nice to get my feet wet. I slide open the glass door and instantly retreat.

“I want to see the place. Stand on some spongy moss in my bare feet.”

“What about Gil?” she says. “Can he come?”

“He’s with his mother.”

Suzy says, “I’ve got houseguests from after the Fourth through Labor Day.” “Perfect. I’ll see you tomorrow night. We’ll pick up some whipped cream to go with those strawberries. You can make a pie.”

ELECTRA STREET

13

SUZY USED TO TAN SO DARK in the summer our aunt Etta called her a spic. She was a lifeguard at two different summer camps, and one year she actually saved a retard from drowning. Her feat was written up in all the local papers and clipped to the refrigerator until our parents retired and moved up to the Vermont place full time. I had to look at that yellowed piece of heroism every Thanksgiving, even though I was the one saving lives, as I told my parents more than once. In a real uniform, not some visor and tank top. “You never got beyond the camp walls,” our mother used to say, disappointed.

Now Suzy and me are all that’s left of our family. She’s 63 and I’m 67. We were supposed to be three, but twenty years ago our younger sister Eileen died of a brain aneurysm while hiking in the Alps.

At the airport, Suzy waits for me in the car. I had imagined a hug and a kiss and a big, “How are you, little sister?” but instead I pat the armrest heartily and say how good it is to see her.

Suzy the lifeguard now has papery beige skin. She wears my nephew Jackie’s old Red Sox cap and sunglasses. Jackie lives in Hawaii now and doesn’t make it home much.

There’s a strange presence in the car, a smell, a loose energy that doesn’t belong. I have the feeling I shouldn’t have come.

Suzy says, “I just had my uterus scraped.”

“Aw, Suze. I haven’t seen you in five years and you start with this?”

“They’re going to take it all out. The works.”

“What? When?”

“Soon, I hope.”

“Is Jackie disappointed he’s going to be an only child?”

“Funny,” she says. “That’s what Ruth said.”

14

ACKER | MY SISTER THE LIFEGUARD

ELECTRA STREET

15

“Who’s Ruth?”

“You’ll meet her.”

The car’s shocks are busted and we jolt along the back roads.

My sister is short, which makes her a bad driver. She doesn’t bother to crane her neck up, just sees what she can see by looking forward, through the steering wheel. The road ahead is lined with smothering green. Trees are arrogant buggers, constantly declaring life to be about growth. I didn’t used to feel this way, but I’ve realized I’m a cactus man, someone who appreciates spines, toughness, hoarding. Admires, maybe, is a better word. Envies.

We come to a four-way stop. No one is coming for miles and miles. Yet we sit there. “Just don’t get like Mother,” I say. “The way she was toward the end. Too lazy to even get up and piss in a toilet.”

“Yeah, incontinence is a bitch,” Suzy says. Then she barks a laugh, one from the old days. A bird swoops from a high branch to a low one and flaps its wings. A flash of red on the shoulder, a neat square. I imagine this is what my reduced heart looks like.

Then the wing flashes again and something releases, words tumble out of my mouth: “Red Finch! Blackbird! Chickadee!”

“Red-winged blackbird,” Suzy says.

We cross over a stream and Suzy takes a hard turn without slowing. Vrroom, she used to growl while driving one of my toy motorcycles up our father’s shin. “Going to be a racecar driver, Suze?” he’d say. But even that young Suzy didn’t aim higher than she thought realistic. “A teacher,” she said. For forty goddamn years. I look at my sister and am calmed by her firm Indian chief profile: bony nose, strong flat cheekbones, determined chin, plus the flinty, mischievous eyes she’s had since childhood. I feel a rush of closeness.

When I spot an Esso, I tell her to pull in.

“I’ve got half a tank,” she says.

16

ACKER | MY SISTER THE LIFEGUARD

“The whipped cream,” I say. A minute later I come out brandishing the overpriced pint like an Olympic medal.

THE KITCHEN AIR IS CLOSE AND RIPE. I sniff and try to identify the composting elements: berry, a feral lettuce, last night’s early corn on the cob. The smells instantly reacquaint me with Vermont summer. It’s like the fingers that remember the National Guard uniform, sliding the plastic rounds through the starched buttonholes real soft like a finger going up inside a girl. No rough stuff or they rebel.

My bowels are beginning to unwind after their constricted day, so I drop my bag in Jackie’s room and park myself on the bowl.

My thighs are fleshy and hairless like a girl’s where they rub each other. The skin is splotched, red and brown. I used to have my ex-wife check me regularly for moles, irregular outlines; it’s been months since anyone’s looked. I can feel the buggers forming, growing one cancerous cell at a time.

The junk I ate at the airport drops out of me with something like a celebration. Life’s small wonders.

In the kitchen, it’s hot. I thought it was the lack of ventilation making me sweat, but the wall thermometer confirms that the temperature is rising.

Outside there’s a car, the purr of something nicer than what Suzy picked me up in. Through the window I see a fat shiny Lexus lying in the driveway like a beautiful black-skinned bass.

“You pick your only surviving relative up in that horse cart when you’ve got an ES 350?”

When I turn back, my sister’s lips separate from those of a giantess who smiles down on us. She twists back a rope of black hair and secures it with a metal clip.

“We’re in for a hot spell,” the giant says.

My sister says, “Lee, this is Ruth.”

ELECTRA STREET

17

I stick out my hand and prepare to crush her mannish palm, but Ruth doesn’t reciprocate. Instead she walks over to me and plants a kiss on both sides. Her lips feel like smooth hard plastic, and she smells like a new toy. The foreign scent from Suzy’s car.

The delicate rubber and metal of a mint-condition matchbox motorcycle.

My sister is the only one smiling.

“Where do you live?” I ask.

“I work in Boston. I’m an endocrinologist.”

“Everything else is breaking down—heart, liver, skin—but I haven’t had the opportunity to see one of your kind,” I say. “Do you recommend the experience?”

Suzy continues to grin, the tight, show-offy smile she surely poured over that retard she saved when she was sixteen.

“Depends on your taste.” Ruth says. Then, “We thought you might bring Gil. The lake is wonderful for kids.”

RUTH WASHES THE DISHES after dinner, and Suzy and I sit in geezer rocking chairs on the screened-in porch. The humidity is increasing by the minute, and I sweat through all my pores.

Temples, spine, old man breasts: all are streaming. At least my cracked sinuses are healing. The wetted tissue pulses faintly. Suzy is telling me a story about one of her rural hard-luck students who got knocked up and couldn’t graduate high school, when Ruth appears in the doorway and blocks the light streaming in from the house. I’ve been trying to figure out why I dislike her so much. I honestly don’t think it’s the lesbian thing—my sister can do whatever she wants for fun, and it figures she’d run out of eligible men up here—but something about her hulking size. All through dinner I felt like she was throwing her large-boned competency around, clasping large ceramic bowls in one hand and serving out of them

18

ACKER | MY SISTER THE LIFEGUARD

with the other. Maybe it’s her youth that grates. Those boobies can’t be older than forty-four.

Ruth says, “I think we should consult with another surgical oncologist. Get more information about the robot-assisted option.”

I don’t know what she’s talking about. Then a stone drops into the pit of my stomach. “You never said anything about cancer,” I say.

Suzy looks at me with irritation. “We countryfolk don’t do hysterectomies for our own amusement, Lee.” “You could’ve been more explicit. I don’t know about female workings. Besides, you look fine.”

Ruth retracts into the house. But now I want her out here as a witness, proof of illness. My sister the lifesaver can’t possibly have cancer.

Ruth says, “All the odds are good. She probably will be fine.”

Probably is the most meaningless word in the English language.

When my first wife used it, we got married: “I’m probably pregnant.” My sister has never been one of those idiots who makes throw-your-hands-up-in-the-air assertions like “You never know what tomorrow will bring.” Because the truth is you do know the sun will rise tomorrow, followed by the moon, followed by another day of pain and disappointment. I worked in real estate, and I always knew who would buy and who would pass. You’ve just got to have good instincts. This Ruth, there’s something wrong with her instincts.

“Just tell me the facts,” I say.

Ruth turns her mouth inside out and shows me the glistening underbelly of her lips. She pulls at the flesh and lets it snap back.

Suzy says, “The tumor is 2.9 cm. It grew 80% in four months.”

“Those two peanuts are the only facts?”

My sister smiles as if she pities me. Like when she sat between

ELECTRA STREET

19

my parents on the bleachers of Roundville High and watched me walk off the football field after my hands had let me down again.

I remember why we talk just twice a year. She says, “There aren’t any more facts to be had. It’s all likelihoods at this point. Ruth wants me to go for some technological wonder called a da Vinci.

Less recovery time. I’ve heard it just turns butterfingers into decent surgeons. So let’s have dessert.”

With a metal whisk in a metal bowl, Suzy whips the cream.

Scrape, scrape.

IT’S NOT THE FRESH NEW ENGLAND night I had anticipated.

The air swaddles me. The roof closes in.

When Gil was a baby, I used to do the 3 a.m. feeding, and every wee morning I was surprised by his tiny striving bundle of energy. Because I was working during most of the lives of my two older children, I wasn’t very familiar with handling infants. Call it wishful thinking, but Gil would wave his arms in delight when I arrived with a warm bottle of lifeblood. He sucked, and I dozed, and I burped him and shuffled him side to side in my arms until sleep overcame him. Then I hovered the palm of my hand over his forehead, just beyond the layer of fuzz, and felt the great yearning heat of his body. I have never been so close to life before or since.

RUTH IS GONE IN THE MORNING—off to work in Boston. Suzy and I eat a couple of ground peaches from her orchard. They’re the size of golf balls, but the clear fruit where insects and worms haven’t yet probed is stunningly sweet and juicy and fresh. “This is a peach,” I say. The milk on the table is in a glass jar, just like the bottles of our suburban childhood.

“It’s too hot to make you pancakes,” Suzy says, putting out the cereal boxes.

20

ACKER | MY SISTER THE LIFEGUARD

“Not the right day for them,” I agree, thinking of how the batter puckers and expands on the griddle like malignant cells endlessly dividing.

After breakfast and a short pointless shower, we take the clunker to the property. Riding down the rutted road, excitement is jarred loose from somewhere deep in my innards. “Summer vacation!” I say.

Suzy asks, “How did you get away with not working all those summers?”

“Football. They were under the impression I had to train all the time.”

“You hardly exercised at all. They farmed me out like a migrant worker.”

“The key is doing just enough in the beginning to make an impression. I thought you liked your job. It made you famous.”

“You had to keep girls busy back then so we wouldn’t get pregnant.”

And then the narrow road births us into a small clearing, and the lake fills the windshield.

There is some scruff along the water’s edge, overblown patches of onion grass and a felled tree. A few yards out is a patch of lily pads, purple flower cups in full bloom. “Oh no,” I say, pointing.

Our father believed lily pads to be the scourge of the lake and would pull them out by the roots any time a leaf appeared. It was the first thing he did on the first day we arrived.

“The upkeep,” Suzy says. “I’ve got a life.”

“And then there’s the house,” I say. We both turn and take in its sagging form. The annex of bedroom, bathroom and laundry room are rotting from the floorboards up. That part, Suzy told me once on the phone, is basically condemned. But the original square footprint built in the twenties looks sturdy enough. I tell my

ELECTRA STREET

21

sister my vision: “Knock down the annex and fill in that stinking, frog-filled basement, then raise the roof on the main house and add a second-floor with bedrooms and a second bathroom. Redo the wiring, clean up the plumbing, and rebuild the porch. Rip out all the carpeting of course and replace with some kind of easy-care laminate. Voilá. A hundred thou, tops.”

“You’ve got four alimonies, and I’m a teacher,” Suzy says. She pulls off her tank top and unzips the back of her skirt. What a devil’s job is done on the female form between fifty and sixty. Not only do her shoulders round and her breasts pouch, but she’s got a mound of lower belly and the buttocks sag directly into the backs of her thighs. Fat and muscle quiver as she steps solidly into the water. Soon she is up to her neck.

“You came all this way. Aren’t you going to get in?”

The truth is I don’t really want to. I’m sweating like a sumo wrestler, but the lake is unappealing, like it would coat my skin in some kind of film. But there is no conversation to be had about the house if I don’t also submerge. So I push boldly forward and, as soon as it’s deep enough, dive in and pull. The turgid water does not part easily, but my fingers cut roughly through, and I keep pulling, imagining a sandy Caribbean shore on the other side. I pull until my chest starts to tighten, and even a few strokes beyond that to prove I’m not as old as my age and there are still moments in life when I can be fearless.

Then I can’t take it, and I gasp to the surface. Suzy’s gone back under. She’s racing me to the neighbor’s dock like we did as kids. So I set my eyes on the goal and go back under, again pulling and kicking through ribbons of water. Pop up for breath and keep stroking.

I no longer see the shoreline or have the energy to imagine murky depths. When I reach the dock, Suzy the lifeguard is already there and welcomes me aboard with a salute. But I can’t pull myself up yet, just hang off my elbows, legs dangling, and gasp, “Rental. Income.”

22

ACKER | MY SISTER THE LIFEGUARD

On the other side of the dock I find the corroded metal ladder and hoist up my panting body with two trembling arms. I make a big show of flopping down then close my eyes and will my dignity to be restored. I do swim in that beautiful pool in Phoenix. It’s not just for show.

“Sis, you’ve got a good angle. Check my back, will you? Moles.”

Her fingers rove over my skin. In a few places she presses firmly down and spreads a patch diagonally. She gets a fingertip into a diamond-shaped scar from last year’s excavation. For a moment I am optimistic about our collaboration. I’d come up every few months to review the progress. The giant and I would eventually become friends. There is nothing man loves more than hammering timber together and thrusting it into a solid foundation. Patting on walls and a solid leak-proof roof. Industry turning inheritance into property. The dock rocks dreamily underneath us.

“We could go seventy-thirty on the initial investment. I can get a loan, no problem.”

My sister gives me a long look. “Why do you care anyway?”

“This is what I do. Think about dwellings. Plus,” I add, thinking fast, “you’re right. Gil would like it up here.”

“Something to pass on,” she says.

Again I feel that creeping pity, that sick look of condescension, and I can’t stand it. I’m not one of her fifteen-year-old fuck-ups.

I say, “You must be thinking about death a lot, with that cancer gnawing away at you.”

“Yes,” she says, calm as always, and lays her shining head onto the flat pillow of her hands.

RUTH BRINGS HOME BLUEFISH FOR DINNER. She grills it outside on the Weber and its smoking oils drift in through the win-

ELECTRA STREET

23

dows. Thirsty, I open the fridge. “There’s no beer,” I say to my sister, who explains that Ruth is gluten intolerant.

All the local stores are closed by now. My sister is washing and spinning and chopping an enormous bunch of leafy greens.

“I hear they fight cancer,” I say.

My sister lays down her knife softly, blade flat on the board, and turns away from the counter. She stands still, a finger curled over her lips. She has shrunk in the past decade—an inch at least.

“Somewhere,” she says, “I’ve got something to keep you from expiring.” She kneels at a corner cupboard and from the way back she wiggles out three airline bottles of Jack Daniels. From the fridge a half bottle of flat diet Coke. “Fix yourself a drink.”

I turn over the living room looking for a newspaper and finally come up with a week-old Boston Globe. On the porch I read stale news and pretend to be on vacation. But I can’t focus. I think about my son. Almost eight years old, Gil still can’t read. His mother fussed and fretted and called in learning disability specialists. At first I scoffed, but the longer it’s gone on the more I believe that I’ve produced a kid that’s actually stupid. We did all the right things, reading to him every night, enrolling him in preschool and pre-kindergarten and summer this and that with freakishly bubbly and smooth-skinned college kids. He seems smart in every other way, so I try to believe it’s a matter of will. We did too much for him. He hasn’t learned that one day he will have to fend for himself.

And, right now, is my ex-wife shoving some hungry caterpillar book down his tender throat?

There is no sauce to go with the bluefish and its musty blackened flesh looks like excrement. I cut it in half, then quarters, and spread it around my plate while keeping it far away from the greens and boiled potatoes. It’s obvious what I’m doing but neither woman says a word. Ruth isn’t going so strong on her piece 24

ACKER | MY SISTER THE LIFEGUARD

either, I notice. Suzy the cancer patient has demolished all those omega oils.

“I’ve decided I don’t want the robot,” Suzy says. “People become surgeons because they want to use their hands. If they wanted fancy toys, they’d have become astronauts or video gamers.”

“The da Vinci is a huge advance,” Ruth says. “Surgeons are desperate to get their hands on them. Every day I hear them promising their first-born to schedule time on it.”

“Don’t exaggerate,” Suzy says. “I have a cockeyed uterus.

And I had to have the cesarean when Jackie was born. Someone should get in there and look around with their own eyes and hands.”

“Dr. Yoshi said that’s exactly what the da Vinci is good for. Binocular vision. Six degrees of motion.” Ruth sounds plaintive. Her fork clangs to the plate and she sits back, arms crossed heavy on her lap like sacks of flour. Still a lot of fish on that plate. Ruth says, “It’s your urban bias.”

“It’s your urban bias. New isn’t always better. Those machines haven’t been out long enough to do any real research on outcomes. I’m sorry it means you have to take care of me for eight weeks instead of two but I’ve made up my mind. Jackie will help out for a bit.”

Not having read or heard anything on the subject, there’s nothing I can contribute. I don’t know why I came. What can I possibly do for my sister? With shame I realize there are only things she can do for me, and we both know it.

The women spear their vegetables. The heat has flushed all our faces. I feel faint and distant and think longingly of the cool adobe Phoenix house with central air.

“What about all those summer visitors you told me about?” I say.

ELECTRA STREET

25

26

ACKER | MY SISTER THE LIFEGUARD

“Canceled,” Ruth says.

Ruth’s rubber-and-metal odor washes through the steamy room. Different moods have different smells, and this one is Agitated Ruth. My nervous sweat is more like rotten oranges. Suzy the lifeguard smells like an angel, of course.

AT NINE O’CLOCK I’M IN MY ROOM watching Jackie’s old teninch black-and-white. There’s no damn reception here in the north country, but I’ve gotten up three times already to mess with the controls and now I’m waiting for my eyes to blur over into a resting state. I don’t do what you call “sleep” anymore. My nighttime hours are more like featherweight naps frequently punctuated by short dribbling events standing over the porcelain. My prostate must be as tiny and hard as a Brazil nut these days. When I get off, to some lame women’s magazine stolen from the cardiologist’s office or the hot mixed-race ten o’clock news anchor, my wad is thick like pneumonia sputum. I dream about knocking girls up, young foul-mouthed innocents like the ones my sister teaches. It was good for the soul to create Gil at sixty, bumped up all my functions for a while—renal, circulation, mental acuity, compassion.

I’m thinking about a buxom sixteen-year-old dirty blonde with pimpled shoulders when there is a rush of footsteps down the hall, a door thrown open, and the vehement sound of vomiting.

Not just one retching episode, but two or three followed by dry heaves. All my wives were sick as dogs during the first trimester.

The burgeoning cells of Gil emitted some kind of nauseating effluence or simply grew in the wrong spot or I don’t know what, but his mother took it in the gut and was not quiet about it.

The bathroom light is on, and Ruth extends over my sister like a large fern. In the dark, her edges have softened. A manicured hand strokes Suzy’s shoulders. I expect to feel a force field repel-

ELECTRA STREET

27

ling me back to my single man’s quarters, but instead Ruth looks up with wet, shameful eyes. She doesn’t have to say. I know it was the bluefish.

“Food poisoning isn’t fatal,” I say. But the sight of my sister heaving over the toilet, the curlicues of drenched hair on her nape, the spine protruding through her thin cotton gown—it brings me to my knees. I rest my cheek on the curve of her back, just below the hand of the friendly giant, and say, “I’m going to help take care of you. You have that gut-tearing surgery, and I’ll be your water boy.”

OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS Suzy cleans up the house to make it patient friendly. She moves tables close to the bed and brings up an old footstool from the basement. She washes the bedroom windows inside and out and vacuums up the dust bunnies that witnessed the dissolution of her marriage to Jackie’s father. She stockpiles movies and books on tape and orders new viewing and listening devices from the Internet. Ruth leaves early in the morning and comes back late at night, sometimes staying over in Boston for two or three days in a row. When she returns she draws presents for Suzy out of a bottomless leather purse: a U-shaped neck pillow, an extendable go-go-gadget stick to reach things without getting up, Swedish egg-white facial soap, and Grade A painkillers.

Sometimes when Ruth and I look at each other I imagine her expression is inviting, her jaw softening, until she edges me out of the kitchen or shoots a laser look of disapproval if I go for a third or fourth whiskey. By now I’ve driven the two hours to the decent liquor store and stocked up.

I’ve made friends with a local contractor. The economy is still slow, and he’s got nothing to do but court my business, so I milk him for information about the property’s potential over tur28

ACKER | MY SISTER THE LIFEGUARD

ELECTRA STREET

29

key clubs and Moosehead beers at the town’s one eatery. Some days he’s lazy and doesn’t think hard and I know it, and I just buy him another beer. Other days he comes up with real genius ideas about how to turn the place into a shipshape moneymaker. Forget my expensive dormer solution. His idea is to raze the whole compost heap, salvaging the porcelain basins and copper pipes and original floors, and install a couple nice modular units. Nothing pretentious, but clean and new; the charms of camping with the benefit of electricity and running water. A few canoes with authentically cracked seats and a rusty box of fishing lures. The chumps we’re talking about would consider it heaven. In fact, it doesn’t sound half-bad to me.

I’ve got to get Gil up here.

But there is too much to do to call my ex-wife today. In the morning I bring the black-and-white TV to a repair guy, and in the afternoon the contractor meets me at the property and shows me a sketch: three mods encased in mature landscaping and a new wooden dock lapping out into the lake like a tongue.

“And the estimate?”

“Working on it.”

After he leaves, I strip off my clothes and wade splay-footed into the water. A cool freshwater tingle rushes up the back of my legs. In an unseeable pocket of woods or shore some birds flutter and call to each other. Gil will love it here. Suzy will teach him how to swim a proper crawl. He’ll learn the value of land and family. I am beaming with anticipatory pride and fondling the soft folds of my testicles when a canoe slips silently around the corner and I realize the birds I heard were human voices. Female. Ruth is in the bow and my sister in the stern. They paddle unfettered by life preservers, and their wet hair and eyes shine under a sun that takes up the whole sky. Their motions are full of promise and continuity, and even though they are the kind of proud feminist couple that 30

ACKER | MY SISTER THE LIFEGUARD

have always rubbed me the wrong way, I am happy to see them.

Until they pull closer and my sister reminds me of my nakedness, which I had been willing to overlook. In one swift glance she takes me in top to bottom and sees every wrinkled pouch of adipose tissue. All my limp, inept parts. She looks like our mother, beak nose and hair pulled tight back and that weary look of disappointment and amusement.

“Take a good look,” Suzy says to Ruth. “My brother the hero.”

But unlike our mother, there is, I want to believe, affection in her voice.

THE NEXT AFTERNOON THE HOUSE IS EMPTY. Suzy is shopping for recovery supplies at the Sam’s Club an hour away, and Ruth is at work. I putter around until after lunch when I finally call my ex-wife and tell her to put Gil on the first plane to Burlington.

She says he left half an hour ago.

“When’s he coming back?”

“I’m picking him up in six weeks.”

“You shipped off our kid? Without telling me? Forget it, your mother will send him without a fight. It’s a goddamn beautiful piece of America up here, and I should go fishing with my son once before I die.”

“He’s at camp,” she says. “He’ll go fishing there, with a nice young counselor who knows what he’s doing.”

“Some gay drama major? Where’s the camp?”

“I’m not telling you.”

What a stupid game. Standing in the kitchen, the phone cord wrapped around my shriveled fingers, receiver hooked over my shoulder, I lose heart. Once I would have dived in, thrashed around, and not surfaced from the depths until I clutched what I wanted—what I’d lost—in fought-out arms. Now I am breathless.

I am old.

ELECTRA STREET

31

On my way to the floor I swipe at one of the Grade A bottles and, ass now firmly on the wood and the phone cradled in my lap, I pop off the cap. Within minutes I know it’s the good stuff. A soft feeling like a breeze washes over my face, and I believe I am my son in the womb, sustained by a pulsing placenta. Just when I am comfortably awash, a man dressed in a suit enters the red room.

He tells me I’m sitting on valuable real estate, and if I would just move over, or, better, exit through that narrow chute to the south, he could put up some nice condos here and set me up with income for life. He flashes a wad of cash and glinting white teeth and I tell him I am tempted. But moving from my present comfortable spot seems like an awful lot of work, and where is he going to find those renters anyway? I’d rather stay. I could live here the rest of my life, thinks the me in my fetus brain.

IT‘S RUTH WHO FINDS ME. She has driven 95 miles-an-hour all the way from Boston because no one was answering the phone.

“And your Luddite sister doesn’t have a cell!” Her face is red and her hair undone and gray circles of sweat stain the underarms of her silk shirt. She pokes my jugular for a pulse.

“Look,” I say. “I don’t want to be any trouble. I don’t want to get in the way.”

“What are you talking about? Suzy’s told the neighbors with tears in her eyes that her brother is here to take care of her.”

Ruth is cunning.

“Fine,” I say. “I’ll go.”

She looks baffled, but I know it’s fake. This has been a turf war from the beginning, and now I’m willing to let her win. She’s got about thirty pounds on me and the endurance of the young.

She begs me to stay, and I am silent, and she is silent, and then I relent. But, I tell her, first we have to go get Gil. We’ll kidnap the kid like a band of thieves, throw him in the lake, and let him swim.

He’s the last of the line, and it’s the least we can do for all of us.

32

ACKER | MY SISTER THE LIFEGUARD

ά τ ά ε τ με μ

- ethics

MAT T H E W S I LV E R S T E I N

ά

CERTAIN IDEAS OR CONCEPTS are so fundamental that we hardly ever reflect on them. One way to think about what makes these notions—notions such as truth, knowledge, existence, goodness, and so forth—fundamental is that they are the notions we need to deploy in order to engage in reflection on other, more worldly or pressing matters. If, for instance, I’m on a jury and weighing evidence so that I can make a determination of fact, I can’t spend much time thinking about what a fact is. If I do, I may never get around to figuring out what happened. Similarly, if I’m a doctor struggling to understand what my obligations are in an ethically challenging situation, I can’t afford to get distracted by thoughts about what the nature of obligation is. If I do, I may never arrive at a conclusion about what I should do.

One of the hallmarks of philosophy is that it takes fundamental notions like these—notions that spend most of their time driving our inquiries—and makes them the objects of examination. You’re having a philosophical thought when you pause and ask, “Just what is a fact, anyway?” or “What does it mean for something to be right or wrong?” We all experience philosophical moments in which questions such as these arise, yet usually these moments pass almost as suddenly as they appear. I have great difficulty letting such moments pass, and that is why I am a philosopher.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTIONS I find most compelling are questions about the notions we employ when we are engaged in ethical thought and discourse, notions such as goodness, right-

ELECTRA STREET

35

ness, ought, obligation, rationality, reason, and so forth. But not all philosophical questions about these ethical notions are of the same sort. Philosophers tend to divide inquiry into our ethical practices into two subfields: ethics and metaethics.

Philosophical ethicists see themselves as participants in our ethical practices, struggling (perhaps in an especially theoretical or systematic fashion) with the same ethical questions we all face at various points in our lives: Which actions are morally wrong?

What do all of the morally wrong actions have in common, such that they are all wrong? Is it morally acceptable to kill one person in order to save four? Is it morally permissible to lie to a friend to prevent him from being hurt? Is there more to the good life than getting what we want? Should we tolerate practices in other cultures that seem to us to be terribly unjust?

Metaethicists, by contrast, see themselves as standing outside of our ethical practices, looking in. They want to understand what the various participants in those practices are doing, and what the world would have to be like in order for those practices to be sound. In other words, they seek to explain (and thereby either to vindicate or to debunk) what ethicists and the rest of us are doing when we struggle with ethical questions like the ones I listed above.

The questions metaethicists pose therefore look quite different.

They include: What are our ethical judgments about? Are ethical judgments best understood as attempts to describe the world?

When people are engaged in an ethical disagreement, is there ever a fact of the matter about who is correct? Are our ethical practices in tension with a scientific view of the world? To what extent, if any, can ethics be a science? Can we aspire to ethical knowledge? Are our ethical convictions grounded in anything more than our preferences or emotions?

36

SILVERSTEIN | METAETHICS

I am a metaethicist, and so it is this latter group of questions that drives my research in philosophy.

METAETHICS IS A RELATIVELY YOUNG FIELD: most philosophers would locate the date of its birth as a distinct subject of inquiry somewhere around the beginning of the twentieth century. Despite its youth, metaethics has seen the development of a complex landscape of theories and arguments. These metaethical theories can be organized into four broad approaches, each of which is distinguished by the way it answers some of the metaethical questions posed above. The four approaches are realism, the error theory, constructivism, and expressivism.

If we conclude that our ethical judgments are descriptions, and if we believe that the properties we ascribe in making such judgments are broadly independent of us and of what we think about them, then we are metaethical realists. To be a metaethical realist, then, is to think that our ethical judgments function much like our garden-variety judgments about the world around us. Just as there are facts about, say, cats that we can judge and describe, so are there facts about wrongness and value. What is more, these facts hold or obtain independently of our thinking—individually or collectively—that they obtain. Common sense tells us that many facts about cats are independent in this way. We normally think, for instance, that facts about where my cat is located—on the mat or on the roof—are not a function of our thoughts about my cat.

Even if the whole world were united in agreement that my cat is on the roof, we might be wrong: my cat might actually be on the mat. The same goes for scientific facts in general. The fact that the Earth orbits the Sun is not a function of how we think about the world; rather, it is an aspect of the world we discover.

ELECTRA STREET

37

Of course, in thinking that our ethical judgments are much like scientific judgments about the world around us, a realist need not think that these two kinds of judgments are exactly alike. There may be important differences. It is certainly tempting to think that there are important differences. For one thing, ethical judgments seem to play a special role in our practical lives, guiding our behavior in a way that other kinds of judgment do not. For another, we do not take our most basic ethical commitments to be the sorts of things on which empirical evidence bears. What kind of empirical evidence could either confirm or refute our conviction that causing pain for no reason is wrong? What kind of experiments could we conduct to test this conviction? Differences such as these prompt some philosophers to think that the facts we discover through ethical inquiry are not part of the causal world investigated by science. Thinking of ethical facts as different in this way helps us to understand the ways in which ethical judgments differ from scientific and garden-variety judgments, but it also leaves us with some difficult questions. What reason do we have to believe that the world contains such strange, causally isolated facts? And if they are causally isolated, how could we—enmeshed in the natural world as we are—ever come to know about them?

In the face of such puzzling questions, we might conclude that actually there are no ethical facts. Although in making ethical judgments we take the world to include a certain kind of property, in fact there are no such properties. If this is how we think about our ethical judgments, then we are metaethical error theorists. Error theorists regard our ethical practices much as we nowadays regard the practices of astrology and witchcraft. Sure, there are committed astrologers who believe that there is a direct connection between the movements of celestial bodies and everyday

38

SILVERSTEIN | METAETHICS

happenings here on Earth, but we tend to think that these astrologers are mistaken or even deluded. We take people who genuinely believe that they can summon spirits and cast hexes on their coworkers to be similarly confused and deluded. In short, both practices involve presuppositions or assumptions that were once widely accepted but that we now regard to be false. Metaethical error theorists hold that our ethical practices are similarly problematic. The causally inert properties posited by the realist are just too weird or occult to take seriously. Surely, the error theorist argues, science is our most reliable way of arriving at knowledge of what the world contains. If our ethical practices presuppose the existence of properties that are in tension with a scientific view of the world, then so much the worse for our ethical practices. Yet is it really plausible that so many of us could be so confused? After all, ethics is not the business of only a few benighted souls. We all make ethical judgments; we’re all participants in our ethical practices. Could we all be so deluded?

One way to avoid the error theorist’s pessimistic conclusion is just to dig in our heels and insist that the world really does contain strange, causally inert ethical properties. That’s not the only way, however. Even if we agree with the realist that ethical judgments are descriptions, we might deny that the facts described by these judgments are independent of us in the way that most scientific facts are. After all, many of our garden-variety judgments about the world are descriptions of facts which lack the independence characteristic of scientific facts. For instance, take judgments about marriage. There is a fact of the matter about whether I am married, yet there is an important sense in which this fact does not obtain independently of us and our judgments about my marital status. Marriage, like all social institutions, depends for its existence on our recognition of it. Put another way, marital

ELECTRA STREET

39

facts—facts about who is married to whom—depend on our attitudes and judgments about marriage. The same goes for facts about money, and for facts about the rules of games like chess and football.

Philosophers like to say that such facts are constructed. If, then, we believe that instead of being like scientific facts, ethical facts are more akin to facts about money or marriage, we are metaethical constructivists. The difference between constructivists and realists is that whereas the latter think that ethical facts are found, the former think that such facts are made. Of course, once we make things, we can go on to find them here or there. Once our social practices make it the case that certain pieces of metal are money, for instance, I can find money hiding between my sofa cushions.

Notice that constructivism eliminates the tension between ethics and science that motivates the error theory. If ethical facts are somehow constructed out of our judgments and attitudes, then all we need posit at the basic or fundamental level of reality are humans and their attitudes. And there is no problem finding a place for us and our psychologies in a scientific view of the world.

Constructivism nevertheless strikes many philosophers as only marginally less pessimistic than the error theory. For once we start to think that ethical facts are constructed, it is easy to conclude that they are somehow “softer” or less objective than scientific facts. Ethical facts might be constructed differently by different cultures, nations, families, or individuals, and so constructivism often involves some degree of metaethical relativism. There may be facts about what is wrong for me or for my culture (or for you or your culture), but there are no facts about what is just plain wrong.

The three approaches we have canvassed so far—realism, the error theory, and constructivism—all share a crucial assumption:

40

SILVERSTEIN | METAETHICS

ethical judgments are attempts to describe the world. As I noted above, this is a natural assumption to make, especially given the grammar of ethical discourse. But it is not unavoidable. And the more we think about the role that ethical judgments play in our lives, the more we might start to think that perhaps ethical judgments serve some other purpose. Ethical judgments seem to play a special role in our practical lives. If I judge that I ought to do something, I tend to be motivated to do it regardless of my other cares and concerns. The mere recognition that something is morally required of me is frequently sufficient to settle the question of whether to do it.

Garden-variety descriptive judgments are not like this. Perhaps, then, ethical judgments are not attempts to describe the world at all. Perhaps they are expressions of attitudes of a different sort— attitudes that are fundamentally practical (or conative) rather than descriptive (or cognitive). If we accept a hypothesis along these lines, then we are metaethical expressivists. Expressivists believe that it is a mistake to think that we engage in our ethical practices in order to discover facts about the world. According to expressivists, our ethical judgments are not attempts to describe or represent reality—constructed or otherwise. Rather, our ethical judgments are expressions of fundamentally practical states of mind: preferences, plans, commitments, values, and so forth.

Expressivists see ethics as fundamentally different from science—not because ethical facts are fundamentally different from scientific facts, but rather because ethics, unlike science, is not in the market for facts. One virtue of expressivism is that it undermines the worries that motivate the error theorist’s pessimism about our ethical practices. Those practices cannot rest on the sort of collective delusion that plagues the practice of astrology if they are not essentially attempts to represent the state of the

ELECTRA STREET

41

world. Yet most philosophers think that expressivists solve this mystery only by creating another. If ethical judgments are just expressions of approval or disapproval—akin to “Yay!” and “Boo!”— then how can such judgments figure into our thinking, and in particular into our reasoning. The sort of approval that would normally be expressed by “Yay!” does not seem to be the sort of thing one could reason to or from. Nor does it seem to be the sort of thing with which one can disagree, and this makes it difficult to see how genuine ethical debate and disagreement could be possible. In short, the worry is that our ethical practices are more varied and robust than the expressivist can allow or acknowledge.

EACH OF THESE FOUR APPROACHES finds plenty of support among philosophers working in metaethics. My own philosophical inclinations lean in the direction of constructivism, though I find the thoroughgoing relativism that so often accompanies this approach difficult to accept. Hence my research project, which is an attempt to articulate and defend a version of constructivism that is not so relativistic.

I believe that there are ethical facts, and that we construct these facts by reasoning our way to conclusions about what to do. In other words, I believe that ethical facts are the conclusions we arrive at when we engage in sound practical reasoning. This much is consistent with what most constructivists accept. Where I differ from other constructivists is in my belief that there are substantive constraints on what counts as sound practical reasoning.

Many constructivists think that practical deliberation is conducted flawlessly merely so long as certain procedural requirements such as consistency are met. This is why constructivism so often seems to entail relativism. If the only constraint on sound practical reasoning is that it be conducted consistently, then all manner

42

SILVERSTEIN | METAETHICS

of apparently nasty conclusions will count as ethical facts. If, for example, the premises or assumptions from which I reason are sufficiently vicious, then I can reason my way with perfect consistency to the conclusion that I ought to behave cruelly—say, that I ought to torture cats for fun. And if constructivism is correct, then it will be a fact that this is what I ought to do. Of course, it might also be a fact that you ought to try to prevent my cruel behavior, but you will not be able to criticize my actions on ethical grounds.

Repugnant as that those actions might be to you, they will be right for me, since I will have reached the conclusion to perform them through consistent practical reasoning.

I believe we can set the bar somewhat higher—that is, that there are perfectly consistent instances of practical thought that nonetheless fall short of being instances of good practical thought. Sound practical reasoning, in other words, requires more than consistency. Making good on this view is one crucial aspect of my philosophical research. Rather than lay out the details of that research here, though, let me conclude by illustrating how this view—if it can be made good on—would open the door to a less relativistic version of constructivism. If there are substantive constraints on sound practical reasoning, then not all of the conclusions we arrive at through consistent practical deliberation will count as ethical facts. At least some these conclusions will be based on the wrong premises. And so the mere fact that you consistently reason your way to the conclusion that you ought to perform some action will not by itself entail that you actually ought to perform that action. Some people’s practical conclusions will just be incorrect (and their reasoning unsound), and we will therefore be able to object to their behavior on ethical grounds. Although all ethical facts are constructed, on this view, not everyone con-

ELECTRA STREET

43

structs with equal authority. And thus we can avoid the problematic relativism that plagues so many constructivist theories.

Or so I hope. The metaethical theory I have just outlined represents the approach that seems right to me at the moment. However, I do not presume to have put the questions of metaethics to rest. There are undoubtedly philosophical pitfalls yet to be considered, and some of them may prove fatal to my nonrelativistic constructivism. Even if that turns out to be the case, my philosophical efforts will not have been in vain. As the great moral philosopher H. A. Prichard once observed, “in philosophy the truth can only be reached via the ruins of the false.” My approach may turn out to be unworkable. If it does, then I hope that the ruins of my view will prove enticing to future explorers bent on investigating the fundamental notions that underpin our ethical practices, and that my failures will lead them a little bit closer to the truth.

Frontispiece:

Kimberly Rodriguez, Liberty Bridge, Tblisi, Georgia

44

SILVERSTEIN | METAETHICS

Geo Kamus

Kathmandu, Nepal, 30 November 2013

ELECTRA STREET

45

Nathalie Peutz

TRAVELING THROUGH THE GNU

Adapted from a welcome address given to NYUAD’s incoming class of 2016 on August 28, 2012

WHAT DOES IT MEAN to be a student here?

To give the incoming class of 2016 a sense of the historical underpinnings of the place and context that we refer to at NYUAD as the “Arab Crossroads,”1 we asked them to read the novel Leo Africanus by Amin Maalouf. Born al-Hasan bin Muhammad al-Wazzan in circa 1489, Leo Africanus lived through the fall of Muslim Granada to the Catholic Castilian crown in 1492. As a young child, he emigrated with his family to Morocco and was brought up in Arab and Berber Fez. As a young man, he traveled on various diplomatic missions throughout Morocco and south to Timbuktu; he traversed North Africa by land, from Timbuktu to Cairo; and journeyed again, from Morocco through Algiers and Tunis to Tripolitania, all the while collecting information on the political, economic, and social life of the peoples he encountered. From Cairo, he traveled west to Alexandria, north to Constantinople, and east as a pilgrim to Mecca. Returning homewards by sea in 1519, he was captured by Sicilian pirates who took him to Rome and presented him, as a gift, to Pope Leo X. Having persuaded al-Hasan to convert, the Pope baptized him and gave him his (own) Christian name, Johannis Leo de Medici. In Rome, Leo Africanus taught Arabic and learned Italian. He penned his Descrittione dell’Africa, a geographical, historical and ethnographic treatise on the lands through which he had traveled. He compiled an Arabic-Hebrew-Latin dictionary and

ELECTRA STREET

47

wrote a survey of Islamic philosophers and a treaty on prosody.

Toward the end of his life, he returned to Tunis where he is thought to have reverted to Islam. As Maalouf has him say, “God did not ordain that my destiny should be written completely in a single book, but that it should unfold, wave after wave, to the rhythm of the seas.”2 Exceptional, but not unique, Africanus was one of many intrepid travelers of his day. At around the same time that Africanus was moving through and documenting the Mediterranean world to the west, his contemporary, the Arab navigator Shihab al-Din Ahmad ibn Majid surveyed and documented the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean world to the east. Ibn Majid, as he is know, was born in circa 1421 to a family of mu‘allims (masters of navigation) in the city of Julfar, then a province of Oman, today the UAE’s Ras al-Khaimah.

Ibn Majid, who also had a lion in his name—he styled himself “the Lion of the Sea in fury”—gained an intimate knowledge of nearly all of the sea routes from the Red Sea to East Africa and from East Africa to China. He was both a scholar and an author, having studied not only Arab and Greek works on navigation, astronomy and geography, but also ancient Arabic poetry and literature, while writing at least thirty-eight treatises on nautical science, the most famous of which is titled Kitab al-Fawa’id fi usul ‘ilm al-bahr wa al-qawa‘id (Book of Useful Information on the Principles and Rules of Navigation) (895 A.H./1490 A.D.). Ibn Majid’s precise descriptions of the Red Sea, the coastal regions of Africa and Asia, the twenty-eight lunar mansions, star charts, and the monsoons and local winds to take into account while crossing the Indian Ocean made him legendary among mariners and other travelers alike. He became known as the inventor of the mariner’s compass (although in fact he may have simply improved it) and became renowned as the Arab sailor who guided Vasco da Gama from Malindi to Calicut, enabling the successful completion of da Gama’s famous “discov-

48

PEUTZ | TRAVELING

ery” of the sea route from the Atlantic to India around the Cape of Good Hope in 1498, only six years after the fall of Granada.3 The discovery of this route also opened the doors, however, to the Portuguese Empire in the Indian Ocean region and, eventually, to Dutch and British colonialism as well.

Although we know even less of his personal life than we know of Africanus’, Ibn Majid’s experiences are especially fascinating to me as in his writings we find one of the few extant descriptions from the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries of the Indian Ocean archipelago, Socotra, where I conducted my anthropological fieldwork.4 Socotra in the time of Ibn Majid was ruled by the Sultan of Qishn in eastern Yemen whom Ibn Majid claims to have consulted on his strategy of retaining these islands as a place of retreat from the mainland’s tribal skirmishes. He describes also that which made Socotra so fascinating to his contemporaries: the fact of its predominantly Christian population under Muslim rule, an inversion of the governing relationship that had just befallen Granada and the rest of al-Andalus on the western end of the Arab world.

Even this small Yemeni archipelago, then, provides us with a rich example of the multifaceted history of the connections, conversions, and convergences in these “Arab crossroads,” stretching from Africanus’ Granada to Majid’s Calicut and beyond.

What make people like Africanus and Ibn Majid exceptional, however, is not the geographical distances they traveled but rather the cultural, ideological and intellectual ones. Neither hesitated, as Maalouf writes in Africanus’ voice, “to go far away, beyond all seas, all frontiers, all countries, all beliefs.”5 Both were committed to thinking broadly, to studying several languages, and to learning from the other.

Both were committed, moreover, to sharing their knowledge of the other with the other, one communing (quite literally) with the Italians, the other with the Portuguese. And both were courageous

ELECTRA STREET

49

in their intellectual pursuits, studying and contributing to the humanities, social sciences and sciences alike.

While hesitant to compare myself to these two “lions,” I have found it useful to reflect on their experiences as a way of contextualizing my own entry into these Arab “crossroads” and my subsequent academic career. I first came to the Arab World on two wheels: just after my graduation from college I ended up bicycling, mostly solo, from central Europe to southern Africa. Although I had traveled and lived abroad several times before, this journey required more of me, physically, mentally, and emotionally than any journey I had taken before. (I didn’t even know how to fix a flat tire when I began.)

During this period, I ended up spending nine months cycling through what we commonly refer to as “the Middle East”—this region that has experienced profoundly the influx of peoples, cultures, and commodities while also being an incubator of ideas and innovations. In addition to knowing near nothing about bicycle maintenance or repair when I began, I also didn’t know any Arabic.

As soon as I reached the border of Syria, then, where in the mid– 1990s all street signs were written only in Arabic, I found myself scrambling to learn the alphabet so that I could decipher which way to Aleppo, and which way to Damascus. (Students of the Arabic language al-Kitab series complain regularly that one of the first Arabic words they learn is the rather impractical term, United Nations; the first words I learned were indeed more prosaic, and more useful at the time: pavement [asfalt], sand [raml], dirt [turab].)

What helped my communication most, however, was not purely language acquisition but rather the gradually acquired courage to allow myself to be vulnerable. Having been concerned about being a female traveler alone, I had started the trip in poor disguise, sporting a crew cut, baggy clothes and a baseball cap hoping that I’d be mistaken for a man. One day, in southern Turkey, this very 50

PEUTZ | TRAVELING

A Turkish family posing with my bike

after having hosted me the previous night

Turkish school girls (without hijab), me (with hijab)

ELECTRA STREET

51

ambiguity led to a frenzied crowd grabbing at my chest to verify my gender. The next day, I took to wearing a hijab to accent rather than disguise my identity. As soon as it became clearly visible, from a distance, that I was unaccompanied female traveler, I was invited daily into people’s homes and from then on spent almost every evening not alone in my tent but with Muslim, Christian, and Jewish families along the way. My perceived vulnerability and, with it, my renewed commitment to open encounters, set the foundation for the entire trip and my subsequent career.

In Turkey, I ended up sleeping on one big platform bed with an entire family of three generations (grandparents, parents, and children) and thought to myself, I need to learn how to think and write about culture. In Syria, I was paraded in front of a classroom of school children who had never met a U.S. citizen before. In Beirut, I spent the holidays with a Lebanese Christian family who found me alone on the steps of their church, homesick and sobbing, and then gave me a Lebanese flag for Christmas the next morning. In Cairo, as an ever-hungry cyclist, I broke the fast at one street-side Ramadan table after another, not fully realizing at the time that I was eating a share of the charity to the poor. On a ship headed for Port Sudan (because the land route was closed), I spent three days communing with Muslim pilgrims who disembarked at Jiddah along the way. In Khartoum, I met the Minister of Youth and Sports at a café who invited my two male cycling companions at the time and me to the Sudanese-Mozambique football game. Being the only white spectators in the stadium (and myself, the only woman), we really stood out. At the end of the match, in which Sudan regrettably lost, a Sudanese man sitting in front of us handed me an envelope stuffed with Sudanese pounds, a collection the other spectators had gathered, for us to “feel at home” in their country. In the Ethiopian highlands, a stranger who insisted on sleeping next to my tent to protect me from the area’s

52

PEUTZ | TRAVELING

En route from Wadi Rum to Aqaba (Jordan)

with Andrew Kempe (in photo) and Alex Glasgow (photographer)

Crossing the Nubian Desert en route to Atbara (Sudan)

with Alex Glasgow (in photo) and Andrew Kempe (photographer)

ELECTRA STREET

53

nocturnally prowling hyenas had schlepped his aging father and young son with him to assure me that, as a “family man,” I needn’t fear him, instead. In the same region, having been waved in to a modest hut from off the road by an old man who reached under his cot to hand me a roll of bread, we both struggled to communicate, he trying Amharic and Italian, me trying English, German and Russian, until finally both of us found a common language in the few words of Arabic we each knew. These and similar encounters sparked my passion for cultural anthropology and for Arabic, which, having demonstrated to me its undeniable value as a regional and historical lingua franca, I vowed to study formally as soon as I had the chance.

Now, several decades after that bike trek, I am a cultural anthropologist teaching in the Arab Crossroads Studies program at NYU Abu Dhabi, an institution that aspires to create a truly global student body, a microcosm of the world that will, we hope, produce macroscopic innovations, advances, and results. (Collectively, NYUAD’s current student body represents 102 countries and speaks 98 languages.) Abu Dhabi seems to be a fitting place for such aspirations: it is a city that is positioning itself as a new global crossroads, a city in which over 80% of the population come from around the world and work together—not all equally, it must be stressed—to build a greener and brighter future for this country and, should their fates be kind, for themselves.

Reflecting upon NYUAD’s international student body (not to mention the numbers of others who move to Abu Dhabi each year in hope of a better future, but this is a different story), brings me back sometimes to my own travels and to thoughts about how we may “travel” through our scholarly endeavors, together. Traveling—truly traveling—is difficult and wearisome, but it also offers tremendous rewards. As tourists, we consume spaces, images, and entertainment. As travelers, we inhabit places; we allow them 54

PEUTZ | TRAVELING

to change us. We may try to be intrepid, but we must also make ourselves vulnerable. As Maalouf’s Africanus says, we “sometimes get lost in [our] turn.”6 And then we are transformed through that vulnerability. We learn languages; we seek knowledge; we take risks; we allow ourselves to be surprised and engaged. This stance is not comfortable, nor can it be achieved with a cynical detachment. For this openness to the encounter with others—and ultimately, and most importantly, with oneself—is not only the hallmark of a traveler, but also of a scholar, of traveler-scholars like Africanus and Ibn Majid whose journeys were not the wanderings of dilettantes, but rather the explorations of deeply engaged and intellectually curious souls.

Indeed, it is for such traveler-scholars that a liberal arts and sciences education, with its focus on the whole person, opens the most doors, windows and avenues to the physical and metaphysical world. Many students these days go to college with very specific educational goals in mind, but in my experience a college experience is enhanced when students allow themselves to become travelers and to wander into intellectual territories unknown.

Too many institutions tend to adopt an alternative model: the student as consumer. I find myself urging students not to think of themselves as “shopping” for classes—as if classes were just another item to be consumed—but instead to see themselves as explorers of the university and to think of the disciplines as foreign countries, each with its own distinctive culture. Discover their languages, I tell my students: find out who inhabits them and how.

Be intrepid, I tell them: test your theories, support your arguments, experiment with voice, play with passion, and critique your own work with confidence, while critiquing others’ work with generosity, as a good guest to your interlocutor’s thoughts. Commune with other travelers, I tell them. Our students here are assisted in their endeavors by a staff nearly as diverse as they are. All of us must

ELECTRA STREET

55

uncover a common language.

Because of its unique setting and its emphasis on creating a global student body, NYU Abu Dhabi is an attempt to revitalize the traditional model of the liberal arts education by globalizing it. On the one hand, it seeks to do so through its international student body whose members, by the time they graduate from here will, we hope, have traveled cultural, ideological and intellectual distances even greater than the geographical ones they traversed when they first arrived. On the other hand, it seeks to do so through strengthening its “global network university”—the GNU—of three portal campuses and eleven study away sites, which together offer students an extraordinary array of courses in context(s) that still matter.

Indeed, as we set our sights upon the global, we must always remember that wherever and however knowledge travels, it is also located and made local. In a recent editorial in the Chronicle of Higher Education, anthropologist and historian Nicholas Dirks reminds us that today’s increasingly interconnected world—with its global flows of processes, goods and markets, desires and pleasures, ideas and movements, information and media— seems to transcend the particular. But [… ]we should be cautious about assuming that abstract social theories are never affected by where they are read. We must study not just the connectedness of things, but the things that connect, what happens when they connect, and what connection looks like from specific places and to specific people.7 We at NYUAD spend much time thinking and talking about how to navigate the “global,” the “local,” and the various connections

56

PEUTZ | TRAVELING

through and through. The Arab Crossroads Studies Program in which I teach offers classes that examine not just the connectedness of things, but what these connections look like to people from yesterday’s Ibn Majid to today’s Arab intellectuals and political leaders.

Whether or not our NYUAD students take classes in Arab Crossroads Studies, however, I encourage them to inhabit these Arab “crossroads.” We may aspire to be a “global university” but it should matter, I believe, that they studied here, or in Ghana, or in Shanghai. Again, I find myself reminding my students to position themselves as travelers, not tourists. Let these sites really shape you, I tell them, so that even thirty or forty years down the road you may identify with Africanus in terms of your destiny not having been written completely in a single book.

NYUAD and, indeed, the entire GNU, is a bold undertaking.

As traveler-scholars having embarked on what is hard not to describe as a common journey, we may reach even further, however, by focusing not on how intrepid we are as “travelers” but how vulnerable and humble we ought to become. Only when we make ourselves vulnerable and take risks—intellectual, emotional, creative—do we see the full breadth of the world of knowledge that a liberal arts education opens up to us.

NOTES 1

See Justin Stearns’s article “Arab Crossroads Studies at NYU Abu Dhabi: A Regional Perspective,” earlier in this issue.

2

Amin Maalouf, Leo Africanus (Chicago: New Amsterdam Books, 1992), 81.

ELECTRA STREET

57

A pit stop in Northern Sudan

Shisha with the Minister of Youth and Sports in Khartoum (Sudan)

58

PEUTZ | TRAVELING

3

“Ibn Mād̲j̲id,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, ed. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W. P. Heinrichs (Brill Online, 2014). <http://referenceworks.brillonline. com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-2/ibn-madjid-COM_0335> (last accessed on 23 March 2014).

4

Cf. G. T. Tibbetts, Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean before the Coming of the Portuguese (London: The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1971), 223-24. [A translation of Kitab al-Fawa’id fi usul al-bahr wa’l-qawa’id by Ahmad ibn Majid al-Najdi].

5

Maalouf, Leo Africanus, 360.

6

Maalouf, Leo Africanus, 82.

7

Dirks, Nicholas B. “Scholars, Spies and Global Studies.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. 13 August 2012. http://chronicle. com/article/Scholars-SpiesGlobal/133459/

ELECTRA STREET

59

Eliza Tait-Bailey

Jebel Hafeet, 2013

contributors Jennifer Acker is founding editor and Editor-in-Chief of The Common, a print and online journal featuring literature and images with a strong sense of place. She has an MFA in fiction and literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her short stories have been published in literary journals such as n+1, Guernica, Ascent, Dogwood, Electra Street, and Sonora Review; translations and essays have appeared in Harper’s, Ploughshares, The Millions, The New Inquiry, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Acker teaches literature, creative writing, and editing at Amherst College and NYU Abu Dhabi.

Yasser Alwan makes portraits of the average Egyptian in his or her daily context. His portraits are observations on the ordinary, familiar and everyday—the social fabric of a society that projects a very different image of itself. Two catalogues of his photos have been published—Scream (Cairo, 2000) and The Liberty of Appearing (London, 2008)—and he has written Imagining Egypt (Egypt, 2008) on the photography of Lehnert & Landrock. His work has appeared in Cairo Papers in Social Science (AUC Press, 2012) and Alternative Histories (National Portrait Gallery, London 2011). His photos have been exhibited in Cairo, Beirut, Thessaloniki, Doha, Paris, London, Frankfurt, New York, San Francisco, and Abu Dhabi. His book, How We Look at Photographs, on how the practice of photography in Egypt has influenced the way Egyptians react to and comprehend the medium will be published in Arabic later this year.

ELECTRA STREET

61

Joey P. D. Bui is a Vietnamese Australian student at NYU Abu Dhabi. After some disillusionments with pre-quantum chemistry, she has turned to literature and creative writing. Joey is especially interested in writings about immigration and displacement.

She has won a Young Australian Writers Award for a short story, worked on freak and disability literature research at Columbia, and worked as news editor for NYUAD student newspaper The Gazelle. Joey is currently studying modern Latin American fiction in Buenos Aires.

Sarah Bushra is a third-year third year Visual Arts student interested in activist art focusing on issues related to gender roles. Her primary medium is video art, but she also uses charcoal drawings and photography.

A Los Angeles native, Lan Duong is a third-year civil engineering student concentrating in urbanization. In other words, her chosen raison d’etre is to understand the workings of complex macroscopic systems, whether they are engineered or socially fabricated, and she firmly believes in the need to be both scientifically and sociologically literate in order to successfully improve these systems. With such a background, her enthusiasm for poetry and literature and other arts of storytelling understandably manifests more through argument and comprehensive analysis than through creative self-expression, but she makes exceptions when a prompt is particularly gripping. Over a decade of training in classical piano and martial arts has established in her an obsessive appreciation for the combined effect of tangling intricacy, feverish speed, and tense counterpoint—a bias that is clearly observed in her creative style and in her fondness for uncompromising, humorless works of art.

62

CONTRIBUTORS

Michael Littig is an adjunct artist with Theater Mitu where he has performed in A Dreamplay (Abu Dhabi) Juárez: A Documentary Mythology (Mexico) and HEARTPIECE (Mongolia), in addition to leading research and training initiatives in South India. As an actor, his credits include NYSF/Public Theater, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey, Portland Stage Company, Hangar Theater, and the Utah Shakespeare Festival, among others. He is the founder of the Great Globe Foundation, an organization dedicated to creating artistic exchange with artists across cultures, most notably in the Dadaab Refugee Camp on the border of Somalia. He has received grants in cultural diplomacy from the UNHCR (United Nations High Council for Refugees), US State Department, Save the Children, Filmaid International, and CEC Arts Link. Education: BFA in Drama from University of Cincinnati (CCM), Fulbright Scholar in Drama (Mongolia).

Nathalie Peutz is a cultural anthropologist whose research interests focus on migration, globalization, conservation and development, and heritage in the Middle East. She has conducted fieldwork in Somalia and in Yemen. Before coming to New York University Abu Dhabi, Peutz held a postdoctorate position at Yale University and taught at Middlebury College and Wayne State University. Her publications include articles and a co-edited volume on deportation, The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement and several articles on the recent transformation of Yemen’s Socotra Archipelago into a World Heritage Site. She is currently completing a book-length manuscript on Socotra.

ELECTRA STREET

63

Kevin Riordan is an Assistant Professor of English at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He received his PhD from the University of Minnesota and a BA from Amherst College in English and Theater & Dance. Prior to joining NTU, he taught in the Writing Program at NYU Abu Dhabi where he also served as Associate Director of the Writing Center. He first worked with Theater Mitu on their 2012 research trip to Japan and has since served as a dramaturg for their productions of A Dream Play and The Odyssey (in collaboration with the NYU Abu Dhabi Theater Program). Riordan’s academic research examines how performance travels, and he is working on a performance history of the around-the-world tour. His writing has appeared in Theatre Annual and Modernism/ modernity, and he has an article forthcoming in Modern Drama.

Matthew Silverstein is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at NYU Abu Dhabi. His research focuses on the foundations of ethics— that is, in the question of what, if anything, we can say on behalf of our most basic ethical commitments. His current work is located at the intersection of metaethics and the philosophy of action. Silverstein hopes that we can use accounts of practical reasoning drawn from the philosophy of action to ground an account of normative reasons for action. Central to the project is a reductive theory of reasons for action, acccording to which reasons for action are considerations that figure into sound practical reasoning. Silverstein’s other philosophical interests include normative ethics, the philosophy of action, political philosophy, early modern European philosophy, and the history of ethics.

Justin Stearns is an intellectual historian whose research interests focus on the intersection of law, science, and theology in the pre-modern Muslim Middle East. His first book was Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Pre-Modern Islamic and Christian Thought 64

CONTRIBUTORS

in the Western Mediterranean (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), and he has published articles in Islamic Law and Society, Medieval Encounters, Medieval Iberian Studies, Al-Qantara, and History Compass. He is currently working on a book on the social status of the natural sciences in early modern Morocco entitled Revealed Science: The Natural Sciences in Islam in the Age of alHasan al-Yusi (d. 1691) as well as on an edition and translation of al-Yusi’s Muhadarat for the Library of Arabic Literature.

Catharine R. (“Kate”) Stimpson is University Professor at New York University, Dean Emerita of the Graduate School of Arts and Science, and Senior Fellow at the Steinhardt Institute for Higher Education Policy. She teaches at the NYU Law School, the Steinhardt School, and NYU Abu Dhabi. Her research interests include education, the humanities, women and gender, and literature. In June 2014, the University of Chicago Press will publish Critical Terms for the Study of Gender, co-edited with Gilbert Herdt. She serves on the boards of several educational and culture institutions, including New York Live Arts.

Ankhi Thakurta graduated from Swarthmore College in 2012 with a degree in English Literature and Anthropology. Her senior thesis focused on the ways in which individuals within a particular Bengali American community formed and asserted diasporic identities. Currently a second-year Global Academic Fellow at NYUAD, she supports two courses and helps students hone their academic writing skills. This fall, she will pursue a master’s degree in education to investigate how literacy studies engage with the topics of globalization, immigration, and social inequality. She hopes to work as a literacy instructor and eventually pursue a doctorate in education.

ELECTRA STREET

65

Shamoon Zamir is Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities and Associate Professor of Literature and Visual Studies at NYU Abu Dhabi. He is presently directing a major project devoted to Arab photography at NYUAD, which sponsors conferences, colloquia, and exhibitions and is creating an archive devoted specifically to photography produced in the UAE. His most recent book is The Gift of the Face: Portraiture and Time in Edward S. Curtis’s The North American Indian, a reassessment of Curtis’s early twentieth-century photographs of Native Americans presented as a series of close readings that explore the relationship of aesthetics and ethics in photography.

66

CONTRIBUTORS

ELECTRA STREET

67