Electra Street 03

ISSUE 03 LETTERS FROM AFAR

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: Cyrus R. K. Patell Publisher Electra Street NYU Abu Dhabi PO Box 903 New York, NY 10276-0903 electra.nyuad@gmail.com ISSN 2309-6012 © 2019 Electra Street

A Journal of the Arts and Humanities LETTERS FROM AFAR Guest Editor: Charles Siebert

PUBLISHER EDITOR MANAGING EDITOR CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Cyrus R. K. Patell Deborah Lindsay Williams Chiran Raj Pandey Joey Bui Asthma Nirmala Dious Gabrielle Flores Nikolaj Nielsen Grega Ulen Katherine Schaap Williams

Design Concept by the Design Collective at NYUAD

Issue 03 | Spring 2019

CONTENTS Carol Brandt, Foreword .............................................................................. 7 Charles Siebert, Introduction ...................................................................... 9 Valeriya Golovina, Berlin Fever: Searching for the Heart of Swing ......... 14 Tyler Headley, A Rising Hope for Ghana .................................................. 30 Jocilyn Estes, Femicide............................................................................ 46 Leslie Gray, Farming the Conflict.............................................................. 62 Zoe Jane Patterson, Ephemeral People....................................................78 Nikolaj Nielsen, H ..................................................................................... 94 Cyrus R. K. Patell, Afterword....................................................................127 Notes on Contributors .............................................................................130 Photo and Image Credits .........................................................................133

Opposite: Manara clock tower in Nablus, West Bank.

FOREWORD

Carol Brandt

O

n a long flight back to a toasty Abu Dhabi in August 2015, I came across a “Letter from Egypt” in The New Yorker by Peter Hessler

about Chinese lingerie shops in Cairo and Upper Egypt. I got to know the entrepreneurial Chinese shopkeeper in a largely conservative

Muslim neighborhood, the Egyptian brides-to-be, their nervous fiancés, their mothers and mothers-in-law, all working on selecting a mountain of dainty items for the bride’s trousseau. I could hear the pidgin of

Arabic, English, and Chinese they used for hard bargaining. I could see how gender, sex, religion, and business came together in this thriving cosmopolitan microcosm. Peter had spent a lot of time observing,

interviewing, researching, and figuring out how to bring the reader into the enchantment of this slice of ordinary life.

I immediately thought about all the NYUAD students studying abroad

that semester in Paris, Buenos Aires, London, Sydney, Berlin, Accra, Tel

Aviv, Prague, Madrid, Florence, New York, and Washington DC. To what

degree could they or would they immerse themselves deeply in the local community, to learn from members of that community? The poet Basho

said, “Learn about the pine from the pine. Learn about the bamboo from the bamboo.” How could our students find themselves in more forests

and start talking to the trees (or grass, I suppose, in the case of bamboo)?

I talked to Charles Siebert, a new faculty member in Creative Writing I had met on the very enthusiastic recommendation of former Dean of Arts and Humanities Judy Miller. Within minutes, Charles saw what was possible.

I wanted opportunities for greater cultural immersion, field research, and critical reflection for our students abroad. Charles wanted them “to sit

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still, stop time, and write an extended missive about the things they had witnessed.” We created “Letters from Afar,” NYUAD’s first two-credit,

portable class. Students would be abroad in the NYU Global Programs.

Charles would be here in Abu Dhabi. They would connect over Skype

and email. Katya Grim put out an announcement and the first class of

students signed up within minutes. The enrollment doubled in the next semester.

Recently, we learned from colleagues at NYU Global Programs that the first “Letters from Afar” course will be offered in-person this fall at NYU

Madrid for students visiting that site from NYU’s campuses in Abu Dhabi, New York, and Shanghai.

Charles and I have been enjoying the “Letters” for many years now, but

we want them to have a greater audience. They manifest the power of a

global education derived from a great local relationship. We are grateful to

Deb Williams and Cyrus Patell for dedicating this of issue Electra Street to a selection of NYUAD’s “Letters from Afar.”

8 BRANDT | FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION Charles Siebert

S

hould we,” the poet Elizabeth Bishop asks in her poem “Questions of Travel,” “have stayed at home and thought of here?” For the

many far-flung students of NYU Abu Dhabi, the question is as resonantly

rhetorical as the much-traveled Bishop intended it to be. Whether hailing from countries around the world or from Abu Dhabi itself, students here have not only already made the journey from home. They also get to

spend a full year of their undergraduate studies away in one of NYU’s many “portal” institutions around the world. In this sense, it could be

said of NYUAD students that they are at times “doubly afar” or “twiceremoved.” What a pity then it would be, to paraphrase Bishop, not to

have them write of the places they have been and the things they have seen. This sentiment, more than any other impulse, was the impetus

behind creating the “Letters from Afar” course that has yielded the kinds of stories collected in this issue.

Among the many selected pieces from The New Yorker magazine

arranged in separate piles on my office bookshelves, the ones I invariably find myself most drawn to for reading and teaching are the “Letters

from…” the many different locales to which The New Yorker’s writers

travel. What I like most about this particular format is that it embodies all the elements of long-form narrative journalism: reporting, interviewing,

quotation, description of people and place, dialogue, dramatic tension,

and yet allows for the more relaxed, discursive tone of, well, a letter that you’d write to someone you know back home.

Writing non-fiction features for a general audience can be a terrifying proposition, especially for undergraduate students with no prior

experience doing so. With non-fiction, after all, there is no escaping

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the fact that it is you talking. The feeling, especially at the start of such

pieces, is, as I often describe it to my students, very much like being in a crowded room in which you’re excitedly telling a friend a story, and then for some inexplicable reason the entire room turns to hear what

you’re saying. How do you continue talking to a roomful of people in the same impassioned and relaxed way you just were to one person? The knowledge that it is a letter you’re writing, even if only to an imagined

confidant, is one way of helping writers to overcome that initial terror and find their natural voice.

A letter. It sounds downright antiquated, quaint, in an age of e-mail, text, Twitter and Tweet, as though all human discourse has been reduced

now to the bite-sized chirpings of birds, if only we could be so articulate.

But as evidenced by the robust enrollment in “Letters from Afar” each semester and by the exemplary pieces published here, the impulse to

sit still, stop time, and write an extended missive about the things one

has witnessed and thought remains strong even amidst the dazzle of the

digital. The marvel is that students who have likely never written an actual letter in their lives and have also never attempted anything close to a

long-form piece of narrative non-fiction, are able to produce both over the course of one semester.

T

he process begins with the simplest of tasks and yet one that quickly realizes the primary goal of this course: to get students away from

their respective campuses and out into the city in which they’re residing.

They are then to stand still somewhere, and watch. In the immediate, this yields what I refer to as a “Standing-Still Sketch,” based on all

they’ve observed. It’s the very start of a process in which they transition from reading texts to reading the world. In the ensuing weeks, I expect

subsequent excursions to eventually yield the idea for their longer feature story. Inspiration can and has come from almost anywhere.

10 SIEBERT | INTRODUCTION

Not having the advantage of a lifetime worth of experiences with a

given place that can inspire and inform a sweeping portrait such as E.B. White’s Here Is New York, students in “Letters from Afar” must pursue

relatively small pinpricks in the larger fabric of their host city: a shop door, a window, a side street or alleyway, a flyer, a newspaper article, and then allow the story they find and develop within to reflect the larger whole

of the city in which that story is unfolding. One student gets taken with

the prospect of outdoor chess players in New York City parks and soon finds herself conversing with and writing about them. Another is struck

by the throngs of Japanese tourists bargain hunting for luxury goods in

Florence, and through interviews with both the shoppers and the various shopkeepers who cater to them, gets to bottom of that phenomenon. In Florence, another student enters the shop of one of the city’s last metal

sculpting artisans and after repeated visits and conversations, constructs a portrait of a man and his vanishing art form. One student meets a

popular American food blogger in Paris and profiles her, while in New York City, a student goes into a fortune telling parlor one day wearing an abaya and hijab, and on another day, enters without traditional Arab dress.

Intrigued by the different responses she gets depending on her garb, she repeats the same experiment in other fortune teller parlors around New

York and ends up with a telling look at how a people of Arab descent are perceived in that city.

The list goes on and on, but common to all the “Letters” composed for this course is the dynamic of daring to poke one’s nose in a strange

place, knock on a door, follow a lead, go down a rabbit hole, and then

give back to that roomful of eager listeners I alluded to earlier the journey of discovery. Such journeys are what travel is all about. Watching and listening, meanwhile, and taking copious notes, and going back for

repeated interviews, and conducting extensive background research for

present and historical context, and, finally, reading other standout “Letters

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from …” pieces in The New Yorker to learn how they are constructed, are all the elements that go into crafting a compelling narrative.

Once past their initial reticence and apprehension, the young writers in this course learn a number of valuable lessons. First, that people are,

by and large, quite eager to share their stories with others. Second, and most importantly, these students learn how to listen. How to openly

absorb and be edified by what they hear. It is, I have noticed from my

experiences teaching and from my own past, the way of the young to

cling as fiercely and defensively to their notions and preconceptions of

the world as older people do. But whereas the latter tend to do this out of a kind of inertia and intransigence, the young arm themselves with their

ideas and theories out of insecurity and fear. And yet to become a good, empathic listener and, by extension, a good storyteller, requires that you

allow yourself to be disarmed by what you hear. That you embrace rather than resist being thrown off balance, and then embody that experience both in the tale you tell and in the life you live. If “Letters from Afar”

teaches that skill to young people and nothing else, it will, I believe, prove to be invaluable to them in the future, whether they choose to devote themselves to writing or to any other pursuit.

I

n the pages ahead, you will encounter an impressive array of stories,

each of which illustrates, among other things, the steep learning curve

that each writer was able to complete over the course of a mere three-

and-a-half months. There’s a lovely story about the swing dancing craze

in Berlin, a piece that began in the classic “Letters from Afar” fashion: the author hearing on a cold February wind the wafting of lively jazz notes

from a cultural center building across the yard. From a student studying in Tel Aviv, comes a revealing look at the plight of Palestinian farmers, who are daily shepherded to and from their scant plots on the Israeli side of

the occupied West Bank. Over the course of a semester in Accra, Ghana,

12 SIEBERT | INTRODUCTION

a student followed and movingly profiled a crusading young lawyer

right up until the day he graduates from law school and commences his

struggle to combat mounting corruption in the Ghanaian justice system.

In the course of a term in Buenos Aires, a student crafted a stirring profile of an Argentinian university professor devoting her life to fighting the

rampant femicide in her country and others around the world. The author

of the arresting piece about Afghani refugees living on the streets of Paris, meanwhile, spent a number of days visiting and talking with her story’s often reticent protagonists, outcasts of both their home country and

of their purported refuge. Finally, there is the far more personal history

crafted by a New York- based student, who takes a bus to a New England college in order to attend a memorial service for a dear high school friend: a young Palestinian woman driven to suicide by her own family members

for opting to renounce her Muslim faith, pursue an education, and fight for social justice wherever possible.

With each new semester of “Letters from Afar,” I feel the same dueling sense of expectation and doubt. I dream of all the possible stories

students might discover and involve themselves in, and dread that their

inexperience and youth won’t possibly allow them to compose a resonant tale out of all they’ve experienced. And then, by semester’s end, I receive the kinds of stories you’re about to encounter and think to myself how

fortunate I am to be disarmed of my fears and preconceptions, to have

the opportunity to both edit and be so profoundly edified by what these students are able to achieve.

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14

BERLIN FEVER

Searching for the Heart of Swing Valeriya Golovina BERLIN, GERMANY Spring 2016

W

alking out from the academic building in the Kulturbrauerei one

afternoon this past winter, I heard lively jazz notes wafting from the

windows across the yard. People were walking inside the Frannz Club, a popular venue for celebrations and social dance parties. Some were

wearing colorful high-waist full-circle skirts, vests, sneakers, and tennis

shoes. It was a cold February Thursday in Berlin, with gusts of chilly wind, so I decided to walk inside and see what kind of event was about to start.

I was surprised to find the dining tables cleared out and the wide-open floor filled with people, dancing.

“What’s going on?” I asked a guy in a hat at the doorway collecting the

entrance fee: “Is it a dance class?” He smiled at me and said: “Swing. On Thursday we dance swing here!”

The following week I overheard one of NYU Berlin’s German instructors talking about swing classes and upcoming events in the city. When I

mentioned to her what I’d seen at the Frannz Club, she told me that swing is a very popular and evolving scene in Berlin.

“It enables people to travel in time,” she said.

Being a ballroom-dancer for nine years, I was suddenly burning with

curiosity to witness for myself this German love-affair with swing and jazz.

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Given the standard stereotype of Germans as being reserved and coolhearted, I assumed they’d be in love with more classy dance styles like

ballroom, Argentine tango, or foxtrot. Swing dancing developed with the style and rhythms of jazz music in the 1920s, giving birth to other styles still popular today such as Lindy Hop, Balboa, Collegiate Shag, Lindy

Charleston, East Coast Swing, Saint Louis Shag, and Solo Jazz. Lindy

Hop, which was one of the most popular styles, originated as a partner

dance in the 1920s and 1930s in Harlem, New York. Today there are many professional swing dancers who teach and compete internationally in various styles of swing.

O

ne of the first Berlin swing parties I attended happened at Clärchens Ballhaus, a former ballroom hall opened in 1913, now a nightclub

and restaurant, in the mitte of Berlin. This location, which has survived a wartime destruction and communist black-marketeering, was easily identifiable on the Berlin Swing Events Google calendar, open to the

public. I was surprised, however, to see that there are three to four dance scenes for each day of the week, non-stop from Monday to Sunday with live music and DJs.

I tried to get some other students to join me one Wednesday evening for some swinging, and got numerous sighs and no-thank-yous.

“Swing?” one of them said. “What do the moves even look like? No,

Valeriya, you should go, with your dancing background, and then teach us afterwards.”

Overleaf: A flyer for Swing Patrol Berlin’s dance venue in Friedrichshain, Frankfurter Tor Nr. 9., where Catarina and James teach Collegiate Shag / St. Louis Shag.

16 GOLOVINA | GERMANY

Something is wrong with the modern culture of night dancing I decided.

Young people feel incredibly comfortable in nightclubs, and yet they are

so reluctant to try something like swing or salsa. Having missed dancing since moving to Abu Dhabi, I was eager to shake out all the stress and

dullness of university life. At 9 pm I took the U6 metro line from the NYU

Residence to Oranienburger Tor, walked out at Auguststrasse and headed down the dark street, passing cozy cafes and abandoned buildings

covered in graffiti. Five minutes later, I entered an illuminated yard on my right, and saw the poster with the dancing couple, the words “Clärchens Ballhaus” in bold lettering above them.

There was a bit of a traffic jam at the entrance due to people’s

astonishment at seeing Berlin’s most popular dance hall. I made small talk with a charismatic old gentleman at the coat check and found a

living time capsule. The dance floor, made of the old wooden planks

assembled in zig-zag pattern and worn by a century of shaking, turning, and swinging, was slowly filling with people. Around the dancing area there were multiple tables and niches for people to enjoy their dinner and observe the dancers. Dark wood panels covered the walls dimly

illuminated by the candles on each table. The atmosphere felt inviting

enough for first-time dancers as for a friends’ catch up over a glass of wine and live music. The event starts at 9 pm and lasts till midnight. I

arrived just past 9, and the place was filled with people of all ages trying

out some moves. My eye was caught by a cute couple dressed in sporty

climbing outfits, their heavy backpacks thrown in the corner, stepping on each other’s toes now and catching with the rhythm. Together with the

subdued lighting and pleasant whispering of the patrons it all seemed a perfect set up for a film scene.

At half past nine, a couple appeared in the middle of the parquet floor

and announced a fifteen-minute swing crash course for the newcomers.

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The ladies were placed in one line facing the gentlemen. I could see

excitement, anxiety, light-heartedness in people’s eyes. A fit and energetic swing couple showed a basic routine consisting of three moves, and then we were all to find a partner. I got the tallest Irish guy ever, with whom

it was quite uncomfortable to move around. Yet, he let me, a tiny young

lady, lead, and at the end we managed to fit with the music and get some applause.

Around 10 pm, “real swingers” started to appear. There were small groups of four to six people, dressed in 1920s-style pants and shirts. All of them young men, they did not go straight to the dance floor; they sat, chatted with each other, and glanced at the people. I could tell that these young

men had taken dancing courses for one or two years and spent their free

time at the parties. Their movements were smooth and light, transcending time and bringing the roots of swing culture to its modern periphery.

There was something special about Clärchens Ballhaus attracting people

from all walks of life swinging together in a dance routine on a Wednesday night.

Only later would I learn that there is a specific etiquette for a swing party.

Usually one does not dance more than two songs with the same person.

A dancer should change, so that others do not feel rejected. One guy

told me that sometimes swingers bring up to three shirts for the evening to change into, because it gets warm and takes energy to swing. While Berlin social parties are known for being extremely open and friendly,

no one is required to dress up in a swing manner. Still, people in Berlin love to match with the atmosphere of the music and the swing era. In

his article “Hot Swing and the Dissolute Life: Youth, Style and Popular

Music in Europe 1939-49,” which appeared in the journal Popular Music

in 1989, Ralph Willett quotes one 1942 report of the Reichsjugendführer,

the highest paramilitary rank of the Hitler Youth, describing the distinctive

18 GOLOVINA | GERMANY

appearance of the Swing Youth, a group of young swing and jazz lovers in Germany: “The boys wear bright check shirts and corduroys. The female members wear dirndl skirts and windcheaters. The predominant form of dress consisted of long, often checkered English sports jackets, shoes with light crepe soles, showy scarves, Anthony Eden hats, an umbrella

on the arm whatever the weather, and, as in insignia, a dress-shirt button worn in the buttonhole, with a jeweled stone. The girls, for their part,

favored a long overflowing hair style. Their eyebrows were penciled, they

wore lipstick, and their nails were lacquered.” This is how a well-arranged swing party looks today in Berlin. Dancers, musicians, historians, iconic

Swing Patrol Berlin’s all-female dance troupe specializes in vintage jazz dances from the 1920s to the 1940s. Catarina choreographed the performance for the Berlin Swing Festival 2018.

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venues, locals, and visitors contribute to an evolving swing scene that is becoming a unique museum of everyday culture in Berlin.

W

eeks after my first encounter with Berlin swing, I was drinking tea

with Catarina and James, swing instructors I met at Frannz Club, in

their flat in Prenzlauer Berg. Catarina Pinto started dancing swing in her

hometown, Lisbon, back in 2011. The swing scene was very small there, but she still thought that it was particular to Portugal. An engineer who

came to Berlin for business, she went to a Lindy Hop party one night, met a swing guy named Marco and was fully charmed by this dance. Now she

is one of the swing instructors at Swing Patrol in Berlin, where they have a mix of German and international dancers. There are twenty members, not only professional swingers, but also lawyers, doctors, and economists, who just like to dance and have a pleasant break after work.

What made Catarina feel at home in Berlin is the city’s encouragement of creativity and its unique combination of history and modernity. After

visiting Canada and South America, Catarina understands why swing has very deep roots in Germany. People are more connected to the past and

its culture, which transforms and gives a new life to swing, jazz music and the city landscape as a whole. Even in Portugal, where she did her first

steps in swing, her parents would ask her once in a while, why she wishes to go back in time. Here, In Berlin, it is more acceptable because the

music is still alive here. Some think it belongs to the past, but in Germany people feel more attached to the past. Catarina believes that Berliners

like to go in a time machine to experience the beautiful past. Swing is a fantasy!

“Today we can have 130 people in a regular class per night,” Catarina said, “and during the open festivals it can get up to 400 people.”

20 GOLOVINA | GERMANY

Although it took quite a while for the swing scene to become popular

in Berlin, its preceding history helped it to come back to life. In fact, a lot of students come to swing classes because they heard from their

grandparents that they used to dance swing in the 1940s and 1950s.

“It is a real fever, attracting more and more people every year,” James explained. “The feeling of being able to experience the past through music and body movement attracts people.”

When Berlin Swing Patrol saw James and Catarina dancing together,

the instructors’ team there understood that the pair could be the perfect talent addition to their club. Four years ago, in England, James started

dancing swing, which made its way into his life through the electro-swing and neo-swing styles. In 2013, he came to Berlin for the swing dance

exchange, where couples from all over the world would have seminars

and workshops. The organizers took dancers around the city and showed

them the most famous and historical dancing sights, which made quite an impression on James. He signed up for a summer writing course in Berlin

in hopes of becoming part of that hipster city’s subcultures and clashes of past and present. After only a year, one of his friends told him that Swing Patrol was looking for a partner for Catarina, and he finally moved in.

“Because we are not from Germany, and we adapted to the culture, we

could find the balance between having fun and keeping things energetic

in our classes” Catarina told me. “Germans like things organized and the

worst thing for learning dancing is to be too rigid and worry about making mistakes. Mistakes are unacceptable in Germany.”

In the initial phase of a swing party, the ice needs to be broken and the

people motivated to believe in themselves. Once good energy in a swing class is established, everything follows. In a couple’s dance, people

learn how to connect physically and emotionally, improving social skills,

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too. Perhaps Germans need a little bit more time to start dancing with

another person in a class than Brazilians or Argentinians. It took a while for Catarina, meanwhile, to build trusting relationships with her partner.

Switching from dancing to teaching swing was a challenging period

because she became the main center of attention. Germans and Catarina appeared to be in the same boat: they were hesitant to learn, and she was shy to teach.

Catarina and James teaching their Lindy Hop class at Frannz Club.

22 GOLOVINA | GERMANY

Catarina and James do not limit themselves only to dancing swing. James plays ukulele in various swing bands. He has done a couple of concerts already and is preparing for another big event this summer.

“The majority of musicians come from dancing,” James said. “We train our body to be a musical instrument expressing the combination of physical movements and feelings.”

Catarina also works as a swing dancer and instructor in films. A real

swing dancer is a big boost for any film’s success, because he or she

knows everything about history, fashion, and socio-political landscape of the 1920s and ’30s. Dancers come fully prepared to a movie set, with a cheerful mood and the right clothing and make-up. After our

conversation, Catarina showed me her collection of swing outfits, which consisted of more than a hundred dresses, including some that were historically authentic, and fifty pairs of shoes.

“I hope that swing scenes in Berlin will become more grown together,” Catarina told me when I was leaving her apartment. “If competition appears, and swing becomes more commercialized, I am out.”

I

discussed the development of swing and its place in urban culture in Germany over a coffee break with swing historian, DJ, and collector

Stephan Wuthe. The author of Swingtime in Deutschland, Stephan was

born in Wilmersdorf, the south-west borough of Berlin, in 1966. Stephan

started to collect jazz records and dance when he was a teenager. Today his apartment has 8,000 records and authentic swing posters depicting dancing couples from the last century.

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Swing did not start in Germany in 1933, as many scholars in English-

speaking academia have argued. Stephan explained that in the 1920s

there was a strong connection between Berlin and American jazz bands.

The bands from Germany traveled to the US, while American groups came to Berlin, Paris and Prague, sharing their music and passion.

“Seeing black musicians performing jazz on stage in Berlin was quite

normal because we did not have segregation at that time.” Stephan said.

Stephan Wuthe listening to “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön” by Margot Friedländer.

24 GOLOVINA | GERMANY

“Germany lost its colonies in Africa after World War I and was showing a love for exotic people: ‘We lost you, but you all are guests now.’”

Still, no one danced Lindy Hop at that time. Apparently, people danced foxtrot, but tried to make it wild, imitating the actions they saw in

the pictures of American swing dancers. According to Stephan, this

dance style was referred to as “swing” or “swing time.” Stephan heard from his instructors who lived through World War II that they called it “kleiner foxtrot” (“little foxtrot”). During the war, when a couple came

for a swing class, the swing instructor always said: “While I have to do

some paperwork for you and write down the moves, you may try a ‘little foxtrot.’”

S

wing dance was, contrary to popular belief, never banned in Nazi

Germany. All dancing in public with the beginning of World War II was

forbidden. After losing their jobs, however, musicians and band leaders complained to the employment office, which shortly after withdrew the

interdiction of dancing and reopened the dance halls. Of course, some

of the dance halls were used as hospitals or storage facilities during the

war, but swing dancing was not singled out. Even though, after watching

Swing Kids (dir. Thomas Carter, 1993), I was drawn to the film’s energizing dance sequences, I kept wondering whether the representation of young people easily neglecting the rules of the Third Reich had anything to

do with reality. According to Stephan, swing dancers were not actually

breaking as many rules as we are led to believe: “Swing enthusiasts never considered themselves resistance fighters, they wanted to have fun and discover the world by listening to international music.”

“While the Nazis didn’t appreciate the racial aspect of jazz music much,” Stephan told me, “they were mostly upset that people were listening to British swing music and selling forbidden (enemy’s countries’) records,

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and copying British hair and outfit styles.” Nazis could arrest swing

dancers and musicians, not for the fact that they played jazz or danced

to it, but for looking British and allegedly being British spies. Even though some of the swing dancers committed small crimes (such as theft or

black marketeering), they preferred non-violent acts of protest such as wearing British clothing and listening to American jazz. Also jazz and

swing music were tolerated by the authorities around the time of Olympic games in 1936 to create the showcase of tolerance to the international community.

“Somehow the films shot during the Nazi Germany showed jazz musicals using real musicians and dancers,” Stephan enthusiastically exclaimed.

“On the stage you can see performances like this in Germany during the war!”

Swing even became a shelter for many people in Berlin, including Jews.

Stephan met with Jews who were living openly with civilian papers and

going out for dancing in the late 1930s. Since they were half Jewish and half German, they were not allowed to fight at the front. Many young people obviously decided to not consider themselves objects of the

Nazi’s politics regarding the Jews: “Why should I wear yellow star? Do

you see that I am a Jew?” Of course, parents were scared, but youth was off to swing concerts and dancing. One concentration camp survivor,

Heinz Jakob “Coco” Schumann, arrested in 1943, told Stephan that he was there because Nazis identified him as a Jew, and not because he was playing jazz. He played for different swing bands before the war.

Schumann became a member of the Ghetto Swingers, a jazz band in the Nazi concentration camp Theresienstadt. He spent two years in camp

surviving spotted fever, and being a jazz player helped him to move on and become one of the most celebrated jazz guitarists, playing with Marlene Dietrich, Ella Fitzgerald, and Helmut Zacharias.

26 GOLOVINA | GERMANY

One of the most popular songs associated with swing culture, “Bei Mir Bistu Schön,” a work composed for a 1932 Yiddish comedy musical,

was sung in Berlin by Margot Friedländer in 1946. For Friedländer, jazz became an unexpected shelter. During World War II, she was hidden in plain sight, traveling around Germany and performing on stage.

Friedländer was a full Jew, hiding with her mother in Berlin. Since her

family did not have any papers to leave Germany, her fate was seemingly determined.

Stephan’s vintage gramophone playing an original recording of Margot Friedländer’s “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön,” recorded in Berlin in May 1946 by Odeon Records

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Friedländer got her break during the late 1930s, when the young singer

met with the Spanish musician Juan Llossas, who had relocated to Berlin in 1923 and had become the leader of a tango orchestra. He was known popularly as “the German King of Tango.”

“What’s going on?” Llossas asked her.

“I can’t really speak, but it’s not going nice,” Margot replied.

“Well, I am looking for a singer.” Juan told her. “I asked my niece Josett to come from Spain and join me in Berlin. I have her working permit and her papers.”

After pausing for a moment, a smiling Juan happily exclaimed: “My niece looks exactly like you. I will tell her to stay where she is. Now you’re Josett!”

It was only after the war that “Josett” was able to appear under her real

name as Margot Friedländer and record the worldwide hit “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön.”

I

n 2012, Stephan, together with his fellow swingers, joined a great

night of celebrating jazz. The seventeen-piece Swing Dance Orchestra

was performing the best of their jazz music for the past ten years. Four couples were hidden in a dark corner at the back of the hall, trying out

some moves on a square meter. Suddenly, the dancers heard insults from the public: “Can’t you behave properly?!” “Go to the dancing club!” At

this moment, Andrej Hermlin, the conductor of the orchestra, which had begun in the late 1980s in his father’s garage, stopped the piece, took

the microphone, and said: “Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, my orchestra is called ‘Swing Dance Orchestra.’ I am happy to welcome these four

28 GOLOVINA | GERMANY

couples at the back. If one is insulting the swing dancers, they do not get the meaning of my music, the true passion of jazz.”

Today, many of the jazz lovers of Stephan’s generation feel nostalgic for

the 1990s swing revival. Back then everyone had one little thing to add to

its development, and they felt part of a unified community drawn together by the love of art. But today, as feared by Cat, many see competing

elements are beginning to appear. When Stephan was doing his casual

work as DJ at the party last April, no one was doing a basic swing move, the “swing out,” anymore. And younger DJs were not playing the old

traditional swing music. To Stephan’s great disappointment, people left

the floor when he put on his authentic 1910s and 1920s jazz records. Yet, the people who’d been gathered around Stephan’s console cheered him and went to the dance floor.

“It was a relief,” he told me. “But the feeling of anxiety that swing becomes too quickly modernized does not leave me alone.”

O

n my last day in Berlin, passing by Frannz Club, I saw Catarina and James happily going through their dance routine. I felt that there

might yet be another chapter in the story of Berlin swing fever. The city and dance grew so tightly together that it would be hard to separate

them. The question of how the dance’s spirit, its cheering of the past, can be transformed into the celebration of the future is one for Berliners to

decide. Perhaps the strong bond between musician and dancers will keep it alive. Capturing the last glimpses of this vibrant city, I witnessed Swing

Dance Orchestra playing jazz and swingers reveling in the greenery of the Bürgerpark Pankow.

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A RISING HOPE FOR GHANA Tyler Headley

ACCRA, GHANA Spring 2016

I

n September of 2015, widespread judicial impropriety, described by Ghana’s president as “the largest scandal in [Ghana’s] history,” was

uncovered by renowned investigative journalist Anas Anas. Over two years, the secretive Anas and his firm, Tiger Eye PI, collected video

evidence of more than 500 instances of justices accepting bribes in return

for certain verdicts. Anas then accumulated these videos into a three-hour long documentary that he screened for free across Ghana.

In the ensuing uproar, more than thirty justices, some of whom served in the third-highest court, were suspended. One year later, criminal cases against these disgraced justices are still ongoing. While the scandal’s

ripples have mostly subsided, the reputation of the once highly renowned Ghanaian justice system may be irreparably tarnished.

The Ghanaian justice system had long been a shining beacon of

trustworthiness throughout West Africa. Both the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Georgina Wood, and the Attorney General, Marietta

Oppong, are women of high regard. Unlike the executive and legislative branches of government that have been embattled by claims of

corruption, nepotism, and inefficiency, the judicial branch of Ghana

appeared to be running well. A US State Department brief from 2012

noted, “the [Ghanaian] courts have, when the circumstances required, entered judgment against the government.” The memo implicitly

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remarked furthermore that the weakness of the judiciary was its inability to enforce its decisions, a responsibility that lay with other branches of government.

But Anas’s rude awakening has now silenced any optimism about the court system. Maya Angelou once wrote, “We are only as blind as we

want to be.” For an up-and-coming lawyer like Benjamin Attakrah, Anas’s revelations would become a galvanizing moment to strive for justice.

I

was shocked. Outraged,” Attakrah said one afternoon as he sat behind his behemoth wooden desk laden with papers and files stacked well

above his head. While thirty-two years old, the thick, square glasses

perched on his nose made him appear younger. The heat was seeping

through the jagged cracks and crevices in the second-floor window frame that flanked Attakrah’s desk. He was wearing a suit that he bought in

the UK, and here in humid Ghana it seemed to hold in sweat like a wool blanket.

“You know, when I was in law school,” Attakrah continued, seemingly unperturbed by Ghana’s typical swelter, “I sat in on a case presided

over by a well-respected judge. After he gave his judgment, which we

all deemed to be very fair, my fellow students and I went back to his law office and talked to him awhile. He was humble, charming, and full of

good cheer.” Attakrah paused here with a slight grimace on his face. “Yet four months later, I’m sitting here watching a video Anas took of this very same judge accepting bribes to alter court cases. It’s a travesty.”

Attakrah is a newly hired attorney at Francois & Associates, a law firm

specializing in pro bono work and conflict mediation. He was born in the

32 HEADLEY | GHANA

rural north of Ghana in a province called Kumasi. The youngest of four

children and the only boy, he excelled in school. In high school, Attakrah’s peers all thought that he’d end up in politics because he had a keen knack for leadership and organizing events.

“Growing up with my siblings and my rigorous primary school instilled

in me a tough system of morals,” Attakrah said, as a small line of sweat

curled around his eye and then down his left cheek. But he didn’t brush

it away. “I’d turn in students who cheated or stole from school, because I always wanted to stick up for justice. For me, I saw justice as a way to help the little guy.”

In college, Attakrah decided to pursue a visual arts degree in graphic design, but, upon obtaining his diploma, he felt unfulfilled. In his own

words, “I felt like my passion for justice was not being used.” So, after

consulting with his family, who he said were more than happy to support him in an endeavor that they believed fit his skill set more closely, he resolved to attend law school.

Ghana has one law school with multiple branches across the country. The

primary campus, which Attakrah attended, is located in Accra in the same complex as the Supreme Court and neighbors the rowdy Makola market.

250 students are admitted each year and begin their two-year-long law

schooling. Admission is tough, however. Every year, there are more than three applicants for each available spot, and the wait list to begin is four years long. In addition, to apply, most students must have previously

obtained an LLB degree in an undergraduate college, a degree that takes three or four years to complete.

The law school operates at maximum capacity, but even so, it can’t churn out enough lawyers. In 2012, according to a friend of Attakrah’s, there

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were more than 9,000 cases per lawyer in Ghana, a stunning backlog that

would challenge any judicial system. While the new lawyers who graduate from the Ghana School of Law are top notch and have plenty of work

opportunities available, they are all launching their careers at perhaps the lowest point in the history of Ghanaian jurisprudence.

T

he interior of Attakrah’s beat-up Mercedes smells of old mothballs and burnt plastic, as we careen down the pothole-riddled streets

of Accra toward the city’s main law school. It’s an exciting time for

Attakrah. After completing his first six months of residency at Francois & Associates, he is finally eligible to obtain his Bar certificate and

practice law before court. Over the last few weeks, Attakrah has become increasingly excited as April 1 approaches, the day he’ll at last be called to the Bar.

The instant Attakrah walks through the school’s flaking iron entrance

gates, he’s flocked by friends and former professors. If there has been a

breakdown in mood because of the Anas scandal, it’s not overtly visible.

People are still bustling about their daily lives, as the roar of the market

and nearby street odors waft through the gate and into the law school’s

courtyard. Attakrah pushes through the smiling faces and makes it to the cantina. Immediately, a large woman clothed in a yellow dress made out of the local Angelique fabric bounds out from behind the counter and

smothers Attakrah in a bear hug. From within the confines of the woman’s arms, Attakrah explains that this woman runs the canteen and that he spent much of his time during law school eating here.

In contrast to the woman’s cheerful mood, the cantina demonstrates something more: the absence of funding pervasive throughout the

government and specifically the judicial system. The sole restaurant in

34 HEADLEY | GHANA

the largest branch of the law school of Ghana is housed in a crumbling, yellow-stained building. Instead of metal or wooden chairs, there are

dilapidated plastic seats moored by rusty chains. Above Attakrah’s head, the tarp that acts as the canteen’s ceiling is flapping in the wind, so we

are trapped in the snow globe of scents stemming from the fried rice and

eggs, which are cooking in the corner. Becoming a lawyer in Ghana is one of the most lucrative jobs that students can hope to attain. But seeing

the poor state of the law school and the battered, secondhand cars that

linger in the parking lot, it’s little wonder why so many High Court justices manipulated cases in exchange for bribes ranging from $20 to $10,000.

The rest of the Legon branch campus is compact, sparingly air-

conditioned, and clustered into half of a city block. Instead of spreading

into the surrounding area, the campus seems to have been sequestered

by the nearby market, and thus had had to expand the only way possible: vertically. The tight constellation of multi-storied buildings look like a

city block transplanted from 1970s New York. The law school is host to

many committees that aren’t even technically part of the curriculum. The Ethics Committee, for instance, is located on the third floor of one of the buildings, accessible only by stairs that are exposed all day to the brutal heat. This clustered series of buildings, though, is the place where the future of Ghana’s judicial system will study and learn.

The advantage of having such an intimate campus is that an excessive

amount of networking goes on every single day. Each graduating batch

of lawyers will know each other, and by proxy, almost the entire network of lawyers throughout all of Ghana. In a country where lawyers are not allowed to advertise for their legal services—that’s right, there are no

Better-Call-Saul-style billboards advertising personal injury settlements— this networking becomes an invaluable resource and advantage to extroverted lawyers like Attakrah.

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As we walk up yet another set of staircases to the form-distribution

center, Attakrah mentions that it’s somewhat suspicious that more people did not know about the judicial system corruption, considering how well everyone knows each other. But he quickly ceases this train of thought

as soon as he sees one of the Supreme Court justices walking down the stairs towards us.

A

week earlier, I sat in a corner office of the law firm, waiting for

Attakrah to arrive. The afternoon heat permeated the air, circulated

throughout the room by the shimmying fan overhead. Moments later, Attakrah strode in and quickly began leafing through a thick ream of papers on his overflowing desk.

“Look at these,” he griped as he flipped through the pile of contract non-renewal notices for twenty-seven electricians. The group had

been referred to Francois & Associates through the grapevine network of lawyers. As part of the firm’s mission of helping those in need, the electricians had been taken into the fold as a pro bono case.

The shocking aspect of this project, and the source of Attakrah’s

irritation, was the sheer exploitation of these workers by the company that had recently terminated their contracts. The workers had worked six days a week for ten hours a day every month for more than two

years. Yet despite this grueling manual labor, most were paid less than

three hundred Ghana cedis, or seventy-five dollars, a month. This wage

amounts to thirty cents an hour for manual labor conducted from dawn till dusk.

Even worse than the meager pay was the fact that the contracts given to the electricians had clauses that stated the employees would need their

36 HEADLEY | GHANA

contract reconfirmed every year, and this year, the company had opted

to not renew them. So instead of receiving severance pay, these workers were simply put back onto the street, even after being made to work a few months over their contract’s stipulated employment period.

As soon as Attakrah finished looking through the file notes on the

case, he walked back to the entrance of the law firm, which doubles

as the conference center. Sitting in a line of chairs facing him were the electricians who had been called into the firm to be interviewed about their mistreatment.

“Welcome, everyone,” Attakrah began in a loud, booming voice. “Thank you all for coming. Now, I know many of you have many questions, and

we will get to those soon. But what I want to make sure you know is that

our constitution and our legal code guarantee you rights, rights that have been unduly taken from you by your firm.” He paused for a few seconds

as if to gather his thoughts. Across the lobby, the electricians, all dressed in worn and hole-filled clothing were viewing him with rapt attention.

There was not a shred of doubt that the case before Attakrah was a

must-win for them. Attakrah, who had finished looking around the room,

then continued; “I know many of you may have doubts about our judicial institutions after the Anas scandal. But trust me when I say that our

system is healing, and through it, you will all get the justice you deserve.”

As soon as Attakrah finished, there was a slight pause while everyone

took in what he had just said, and then the room erupted into euphoric applause. After the electricians left the building, he turned to me.

“Speaking well is one thing,” he said, as he began to pack up the chairs.

“It’s something that all politicians are good at here. But action is another, something that the politicians here aren’t so good at. Let’s get to work.”

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R

ising out of the smoke of Accra’s cityscape is Jamestown, a city-sized slum situated between a landfill, the train tracks, and the ocean. If

you follow the smoke that billows from the temporary-turned-permanent buildings, you’ll eventually find yourself in the Jamestown market, a

bustling food market filled with vegetables, meat, wheat, and absolutely no foreigners.

Passing among the food stalls, under the canvas tarp ceiling, and

between the women distilling oil, you come to a small, secluded oasis in

the midst of the roaring market. This is where the queen mother, the head of the market, lives.

When people hear “land dispute,” they often conjure up images of traditional village chieftains at war with the government or white

colonizers. But most people don’t realize that land disputes are frequent in urban centers, too, which is why Attakrah has made his way to the Jamestown market. Accompanying us was a group of large men that

Francois & Associates had hired as our bodyguards and guides. Attakrah had already explained to me that just last year, armed men had stopped his taxi and taken his phone while he was driving through this part of

town. Luckily, throughout our trek to the market, there’d been no sighting of overtly dangerous persons.

Four years ago, a large market conglomerate and the Jamestown market

expanded to the point that they began to clash. Along the de facto border between the established and ad hoc markets, one stall would pay tribute to the conglomerate, and another would pay tribute to the Jamestown

market’s queen mother. Before violence could ensue, the conglomerate

took the Jamestown market to court, which brings us, four years later, to the present day. This is a case that Attakrah has been avidly working on

since he began at Francois & Associates six months ago, though clearly the case predates even him.

38 HEADLEY | GHANA

Fishmongers in Jamestown, Accra.

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As we walk through the market, Attakrah occasionally stops to ask

vendors how the market conglomerate has affected their business.

Sometimes, though, he just breaks to chat and catch up with certain

people. At a stand selling palm oil, Attakrah even stops and asks the hardworking woman about her children. Finally, Attakrah manages

to meander to the queen mother, the head of the marketplace. She’s

dressed in a green dress with Angelique patterns wrapping around in a

circular pattern. Around her sit her advisors, all women, who look like they

might be fifty years old. The queen mother herself said she’s nearing sixty, but she looked only half that. While Attakrah and the queen mother speak in the local language, Twi, instead of English, it’s clear from their smiles and quick jokes that they’re friends. By late afternoon, Attakrah bid the

queen mother farewell and returned to the courthouse, where Madame Francois was in the midst of cross-examining a prosecution’s witness.

“Have you ever seen these documents before?” Madame Francois asked

the Deputy Mayor of Accra, on the stand for the Jamestown market case.

Madam Francois is dressed in a pantsuit, and despite her charismatic

presence in the room, the entire court has to strain to hear her. Attakrah

has entered the court just as the Deputy Mayor is testifying about whether the city’s plans definitively show that the market conglomerate has rights to the Jamestown market space.

“My lord,” the Deputy Mayor began, readjusting the frayed blue tie around his hefty neck: “I have not.”

This back-and-forth has been going on for half an hour beneath the bright white lights and cool air churned out by an air-conditioning unit humming at full blast. The High Court, Ghana’s third-highest court, is housed in

the newest and most luxurious of all of Ghana’s judicial buildings. From its sixth floor, one can peer down into the roiling dark gray, expansive

40 HEADLEY | GHANA

Atlantic Ocean that spreads out as far as the eye can see. Unfortunately, this courtroom looks the opposite way onto the congested Accra, full of

multicolored single-story and often single-roomed houses, with pinpricks of smoke rising into the air. There’s a saying that here in Accra, there’s always a fire burning somewhere.

The dialogue between Madam Francois and the Deputy Mayor continued for another forty minutes, whereupon the attorneys decided on another day, two weeks out, to continue the trial. Justice must, and will, be

served, but in its own meandering time. Justice in Ghana, like everything else, seems to take just a little while longer, and often far too long: the

average length of a case conducted in Ghana is more than three years.

Even a simple divorce matter can take six years.

“While the Anas scandal exposed the unforgivable corruption of some of our most touted judges,” Madame Francois told me when we first met,

“the sheer length of cases poses a larger threat to the institution of justice here in Ghana.”

Unfortunately, and to Madam Francois’ displeasure, the backlog and

timetable of cases doesn’t show any sign of letting up. More cases are

entered every year. Yet the Jamestown market case is a good example

of the widespread passion for justice. While Attakrah was in college, he

and his friends co-founded a non-profit aimed at improving education for middle and high school students. Though the non-profit has since been

disbanded due to budget constraints, Attakrah stands by his commitment

to spend much of his life working for justice on behalf of people who don’t have much of a voice. This is the reason that the Jamestown market case is so important to him. It’s also why he took me, on my first day, to watch the criminal proceedings of a rape case.

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A

ll rise for the honorable judge.” The sound of squeaking fills the

room as chairs are hurriedly pushed back. The short-statured man

in the chair next to me is trembling, and I can barely make out the sound of his quivering prayers that blend together, the mark of words repeated thousands of times. The man—if that is what he is, because he doesn’t

look much older than a teenager—is wearing a beat-up red polo shirt and jeans that have been ripped and mended dozens of times. Shiny metal

handcuffs clasp his two bruised wrists together. Still he rocks back and forth, the mumble of his prayers filling the humid courthouse.

The judge sits down, and the room reverberates with the sound of people settling into barely-cushioned seats. A wordless, hulking policeman

hustles the defendant to the front of the colorless courtroom where he stands, hunched over, his back resembling the curve of a banana. A

woman whose puffy and wrinkled face shows signs of either age or grief takes the stand. It’s soon apparent that the bloating is from grief. Over

the next hour she sits spinning a heartbreaking story, with the occasional prompting of the judge or the prosecution’s lawyer, of her eight-year-old

daughter getting “defiled”—the Ghanaian legal term for rape—by the man who had been sitting next to me.

Two weeks later, he was convicted and sentenced. As my first experience with Ghanaian justice system concluded, Attakrah, who’d been sitting besides me the entire duration of the trial, took me aside.

“Was he guilty?” he said. “Yes. But note how he wasn’t punished or

harmed before he had an impartial trial. This is what our judicial system is supposed to be about: integrity. Fairness. Justice.” Attakrah paused here

for a second to collect his thoughts, and then continued, “It’s these ideals and aspirations that Anas showed are still lacking. But notice how we still can try.”

42 HEADLEY | GHANA

T

he brilliant gold sun pierces the crisp morning air that rushes and

roars through the taxi’s window. Attakrah, frocked in a judge’s black

robes and a long, white wig is peering out the window at the blurred

buildings and people as we speed by. It’s April 1, 2016. Today, after four years of college, two years in law school, and six months at Francois & Associates, Attakrah is finally getting called to the Bar. His face is

expressionless, giving nothing away about his mood. Is he nervous?

Anxious? Joy-filled?

After a speedy twenty-minute drive to the High Court, the taxi pulls up to the new white building. Attakrah gets out of the taxi and quickly strides

past the machine gun-wielding guards who scowl under their bright-green helmets. Attakrah whisks up the outside stairs to the court, and with only

a quick grin back over his shoulder at me, he maneuvers his way through security and into the building.

The Call to the Bar Ceremony is happening in a green and yellow room

in the sixth floor of the High Court. It’s the first time that the Ceremony is occurring here—the building is that new. Towards the front of the room, the new lawyers who are getting their certificates are seated, quietly

murmuring to themselves. Near the doors, a riot is close to breaking out.

Apparently too many people were invited to a ceremony that can only

seat two hundred and fifty people. The parents, siblings, and friends of

the inductees are attempting to charge through the door to see their loved ones on this important day. Attakrah later emphasizes to me the irony that even here in the center of Ghanaian justice, chaos still abounds.

Towards the back of the room, a choir made up of law school students

is belting out Christian gospel music, which reverberates throughout the large, wood-paneled room, making for an ironic contrast to the rioting in the front of the room. At one point a group of parents, some dressed in

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expensive Western business suits and others in traditional yellow village garb, breaks through security and runs up the stairs towards the last

available seats in the room. Attakrah, still seated in the front, is contorting his body in an attempt to spot his relatives, now lost in the multicolored horde still jostling for a good position.

Finally, after the choir has been unceremoniously kicked out so that more seats can be offered up to the angry mob, the Chief Justice and her

entourage emerges. The entire room stands at attention. A local priest is

ushered to the front of the luxurious room to open the ceremony in prayer, and then the Chief Justice takes to the stand to deliver her speech.

“Justice is the bedrock of society,” she begins, and for the next ten

minutes, she stresses the necessity of integrity and honesty, transparency, and accountability in Ghana’s judiciary. These newly sworn-in lawyers,

she exhorts, must live up to these ideals for Ghana to prosper and thrive.

Though she never explicitly names Anas, the handful of lawyers I would speak to after the ceremony confirmed that her speech was alluding to the judicial scandal.

The fifty-nine new lawyers proceed down the velvet carpet to collect

their Bar certificates. As music plays in the background, I’m struck by the omnipresent hope in the room. A new generation of future judges

and would-be politicians were now eligible to fight for people’s rights.

The first female Chief Justice and the first female Attorney General in

Ghana’s history had sworn in these lawyers. Some may not be the morally righteous citizens that Ghana needs most. But one can dare to hope

that many more will be like Attakrah, stalking injustice and championing integrity and honesty in a system that must be repaired from the inside out.

44 HEADLEY | GHANA

After the ceremony, I asked Attakrah how the system could move forward from its present crisis.

“To fix our shattered system that Anas exposed,” he said, readjusting

his white ceremonial wig while speaking, “we need to teach our children how to act, to show them what is right and wrong, and to give them the opportunity to exceed our own expectations. With them, our future is bright. With them, I have a rising hope for Ghana.”

He then proceeded down the marble steps of the High Court into the

warm embrace of his waiting family. In the distance, a large Ghanaian flag whipped back and forth, dancing under the rising sun.

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FEMICIDE Jocilyn Estes BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA Spring 2017

I

n May of 2015, fourteen-year-old Chiara Paez’s body was discovered

under her boyfriend’s porch in Rufino, Argentina. She had been beaten

and then buried alive, found three days after she was reported missing.

Paez died as a result of beatings to her head, face, and body. Later,

investigators would discover she was eight weeks pregnant at the time

of her murder. Small traces of abortion-inducing drugs were still present in her system, leading the police to suspect the girl’s sixteen-year-old

boyfriend of several months. Reports conjecture that Paez’s death was a

result of a disagreement with her boyfriend and his family surrounding the pregnancy, as friends of the victim believe that she wanted to keep the baby.

When confronted, Paez’s boyfriend, who had originally assisted in the

search for the victim after she was reported missing, would confess to

the crime. He would then be charged with forced abortion, aggravated

murder, and a more specific crime—femicidio, or femicide. Defined as the murder of a woman because of her sex, femicide is typically committed

by husbands, boyfriends, friends or acquaintances of the victim. On more than one occasion women in Argentina have been set on fire by their partners, raped, or tortured.

Activists estimate that one femicide takes place every thirty hours in

Argentina. While this statistic is by no means the worst relative to other

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areas of the world with incredibly high levels of gendered violence, it is

troubling nonetheless. With an admission of guilt from Paez’s boyfriend, it seemed that the brutal homicide which had dominated headlines in

Argentina for weeks had ended. However, the death of a schoolgirl in a small town, 250 miles away from Buenos Aires, would prove to mean much, much more.

A small city in an unassuming province in the center of Argentina, less

than 20,000 people inhabit Rufino. Few people from Argentina, or even from the province where Rufino resides, have ever been there. Yet the

nation was enthralled with the crime. No Argentine television could be on for more than an hour without broadcasting updates from the Paez case.

Following Paez’s murder, women took to the streets as the nation looked on. Over 7,000 individuals marched through Rufino in mourning for Paez and in protest of the violence that led to her death and the deaths of so

many others. They held photographs of the schoolgirl and signs reading “Rufino is in mourning.”

A

mong those whose eyes were trained on Rufino, transfixed by the

consistent trend of violence against women, was Cecilia Palmeiro.

“Micropolitical change was evident in our everyday lives. Nobody felt the same about our bodies, our duties, our rights and prerogatives,”

commented Palmeiro. A university professor by choice and porteño by

birth, she earned her Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese Languages and

Cultures at Princeton University following her undergraduate study at the University of Buenos Aires.

Overleaf: Sign at the Ni Una Menos International Women ́s Day March, Buenos Aires, 2017.

48 ESTES | ARGENTINA

Like most in the country, Palmeiro followed Paez’s story. Another murder, another woman gone. She saw the women in Rufino mourn one of their own. In Buenos Aires, where she was teaching at the time, she began

to hear whispers about a demonstration. People were riled up: they felt that Paez was emblematic of Argentine women as a whole. Abused,

oppressed, and threatened in many cases solely because of their gender.

And then one day, Palmeiro was invited to a meeting of concerned women by one of her colleagues.

Unsure of what the collective of women were gathered to accomplish,

but strong in her resolve to do something, she joined the meeting in an unassuming living room in the posh neighborhood of Palermo Soho.

Looking around the room, Palmeiro knew almost all the other women from her professional life. It seemed all of them came from writing: academics, journalists, authors. The group of twelve discussed the issue of femicide in their society. The women shared mate, and the sad-looking desserts that someone had prepared were left untouched on the coffee table.

They talked about the escalation in violence against women, and the loss of Paez. They decided that now was the moment to use the increased

attention of the news media to bring this issue to light. In the back of her

mind, Palmeiro felt called from her academic comfort zone into the realm of activism.

Quickly, a plan came together. A women’s march, from Congress to

Casa Rosada and the Supreme Court. In the heart of the nation’s capital, people would take notice. Nearly a month after Paez’s death and the

march of 7,000 women in Rufino, an estimated 300,000 people arrived at the Congressional Plaza in Buenos Aires in response to the brutal killing that had shocked a nation. Word of mouth and use of social media had turned a small planned protest into the social movement of the year.

Women from various walks of life, ages, and political orientations left work

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and filled the streets in downtown Buenos Aires. Women’s organizations, labor unions, and even the Catholic church expressed their support for the movement—Ni Una Menos. Meaning essentially “Not One Woman Less,” Ni Una Menos refers to the series of walk-out demonstrations,

protests, and marches that took place across Argentina following Paez’s murder.

Protesters cried out, “¡Ni una menos! ¡Queremos a todos nosotros vivos!”

Not even one woman less. We want us all alive. Thousands marched, sang, drummed, and yelled. Those twelve original women, in that

unassuming apartment, had started something they seemed unable to

stop. Palmeiro was awed at the numbers of people who showed up that day, and even more in shock at the amount of support they received worldwide. This felt like something new, something innately hopeful.

A

tall and tan woman with long dark hair, Palmeiro looks as Argentine as they come. Like most porteños, she is casual. When she

teaches, Palmeiro wears jeans or leggings with patterned tank top or

simple t-shirts. She towers over the ducked heads of her students, who

frantically scribble down notes as she speaks. She taught for a period in the United Kingdom, and her accent when using the rare English word

is a strange mix of south-of-London-posh and pure Latina. Her research revolves around contemporary Latin American cultural studies, focusing specifically on relations between gender, queer theory, and politics in

Argentinean and Brazilian literature. The class moves quickly and is taught exclusively in Spanish. Palmeiro guides discussions of texts by Argentine

authors, highlighting idiosyncrasies of the literature that students—whose first language is not Spanish—might overlook.

Today, they discuss an anthology written concerning a single family in

Buenos Aires over time. Students analyze mother-daughter relationships

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Ni Una Menos Protest in the Plaza de Mayo, 2017.

as portrayed by the author, and how the culture and geography of Buenos Aires is reflected in the text. Sunshine filters in from the window, and the sound of impatient taxi drivers punctuates the lecture.

Palmeiro speaks in rapid-fire Spanish, quickly calling on students one after another, most of whom ask her to repeat questions or define

unfamiliar words. She is pushing her students. While the broader context of the class concerns gender relations in Argentine culture, Palmeiro is attempting to guide them towards some inconspicuous aspect of

the story. There is something specific that they are not getting from the

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text, something important. She paces, trying to tease the information

out of them. Palmeiro emphasizes familial ties, the intimacy of relation.

Eventually, she plops down exasperated at a desk and looks knowingly at her students. It almost appears comical, the small purple desk warped by her height. Her eyes flick from student to student.

“Incest! It’s incest!” she exclaims. The class looks confused. They

definitely missed something. Palmeiro takes the last few minutes of the class to explain the subtle references hidden in the book. The author’s ostensibly meaningless turn of a phrase or use of a word, all of which collectively communicate something much darker.

As students lazily exit the classroom into the early afternoon, Palmeiro

stays to organize a few of her things and makes some haphazard notes

in a small blue journal she then shoves into her backpack. Busy seems to be a state of being for her, consistently running from meeting to lecture

to meeting to conference. At this moment, she has to hurry off to teach

another class at a local university. She speaks quickly as she walks out of the building.

“Argentina, and, well, the region as a whole, has a real storied history of

issues with gender relations.” She pauses. “Femicide is not a brand-new concept that Ni Una Menos invented. It is a lived reality, that women like us have experienced for centuries.”

A

rgentina is a relatively well-educated country, with strong civil-society groups. A long history of violence perpetuated by the government

during Argentina’s nearly ten-year dictatorship has fostered a culture of memory. It is also a nation with a long history of female activism. In the 1890s the first explicitly anarchist-feminist newspaper—La Voz de la

Mujer or “The Voice of Women”—was published in Argentina, capitalizing

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on a thriving anarchist movement. Written in Spanish, with a few articles

translated into Italian in the face of heavy immigration, La Voz de la Mujer ran for around a year. In that time, the paper focused on the multiple forms of oppression women were subjected to everyday.

In the decades following, women’s labor unions slowly gained influence,

and continued to stage strikes and protests calling attention to the plight of the working woman. More recently, the National Council for Women, Special Prosecutor for Gendered Violence, and the Domestic Violence Office within the Supreme Court of Argentina were all established to

tackle women’s issues. At the center of these issues is violence against women, and therefore femicide. Diane Russell first wielded the word

“femicide” during testimony in the 1976 International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women. She asserted that men commit femicide as a result of “misogynistic motives, or an extreme expression of patriarchal force.”

The first law in Argentina directed against domestic violence was passed in 1994 as a result of international pressure, which defined domestic

violence as injury, physical, or psychological abuse by family members.

Argentina, along with seven other Latin American countries, recognize

the notion of femicide legally. Article 80 makes femicide an offense that

carries a maximum sentence of life in prison when the victim of the crime is the man’s relative, spouse, or former spouse.

Femicide is widely recognized as an issue in Argentina, and yet no

official statistics for the crime exist. Hours after the first protests erupted

following Paez’s death, Supreme Court Justice Elena Highton announced that the Court would establish a registry of femicides. No registry has since been established. However, several organizations have made

estimates. In 2008, a woman is said to have been killed every 40 hours. In 2014 these estimates shifted, suggesting that a woman is killed every 30 hours. This is consistent with The Meeting House’s estimates that there were 277 femicides in Argentina in 2014.

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Many activists believe that the lack of comprehensive and actionable

response from the government can be attributed to the lack of policies,

funding and implementation tools. In 2009, President Cristina de Kirchner helped to enact the “Comprehensive Protection Law to Prevent, Punish and Eradicate Violence Against Women Within Their Interpersonal

Relationship Environments,” which was “designed to end violence against

women.” In 2012, alongside other countries in the region, Argentina raised the sentence for crimes of femicide to twenty-five-years to life.

Still, government financing for the agency responsible for implementing the protection law was long delayed. While the law mandated annual

femicide statistics reporting, publication of statistics are often put off for years. Women’s shelters organized by the National Council for Women remain severely underfunded. The Special Prosecutor for Gendered

Violence has only six full-time individuals on its staff. Much of legislation surrounding femicide in Argentina is therefore perceived as lip service.

In response to inaction by elected officials, Ni Una Menos set out a five-

point plan to improve the legislative framework around femicide. It begins with the actual implementation of resources and monitoring described in

the National Plan of Action for the Prevention and Eradication of violence against women, established in Law 26.485. Second, it ensures the

access of victims to justice, which entails personnel to receive complaints coupled with a legal mechanism that does not re-victimize women

and includes free legal representation. Thirdly, the plan establishes

an actual official registry of victims of violence against women with

accurate annual statistics. Fourthly, it formalizes a commitment to sexual education throughout the country, including training for school teachers and administrators. Lastly, it provides protection for victims via the use

of electronic monitoring devices of perpetrators “to ensure that they do not violate the restrictions that impose justice.” To date, none of these demands have been met.

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I

n October 2016, over a year after Chiara Paez’s body was discovered in Rufino, Lucia Perez was found outside of a hospital in the city of

Mar del Plata. She had been abducted, drugged, and gang-raped. She eventually died as a result of her injuries. It took less than a week for

activists on social media to coordinate a strike and protest. Named “Black Wednesday,” this day of protest called for women dressed in all black to signify a national period of mourning, not only for Lucia Perez but more broadly for all victims of femicide and gender violence.

Recalling the moment in 2016 when women left their work and homes to

congregate, Palmeiro described it as deeply emblematic. “It was a cipher code that was at the same time evident to everyone.”

Walking to that protest in particular, Palmeiro felt different. Women were

angry not only about femicide, but about the forces behind a culture that precipitated femicide. Palmeiro described walking towards the Plaza

de Mayo. It was a cloudy day. Wind streamed through her highlighted hair, and her black jeans and tank top were wet with rainwater. Signs throughout the Plaza recognized the structures of power behind the violence.

The speeches and slogans that day, the similar movements in other

countries, echoed the same sentiment. Palmeiro recalls climbing up onto the makeshift stage that had been erected in the middle of the Plaza de

Mayo. Looking out at the crowd of women clad in black, she realized the importance of what this movement meant. The sea of black, like some small reference in an Argentine novel, represented something much, much darker.

“We want to live without fear, without persecution,” she began. “We want to be treated as equals. We don’t want another woman to end up on a roadside or in a bag somewhere. This is simply what we want.”

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Graffiti in tribute to Lucia Perez, Mar del Plata, 2017.

In her speech, Palmeiro went on to reference other murders, other women who have been used, abused and then left on the side of highways.

Despite the incredible reaction of women to Paez’s murder, her case

was by no means unusual. Lucia Perez, the teenage victim in Mar del Plata who sparked Black Wednesday, was also not an outlier. Mere

months earlier, the body of Daiana Garcia, 19, was found in trash bag

on a roadside. Approximately six months prior to that, Melina Romero

went missing after celebrating her 17th birthday at a club. Her body was eventually found near a waste-processing plant. Angeles Rawson, María

Eugenia, and Vera Lanzetti were all high-profile cases of women murdered by men in the months and years leading up to Paez’s death.

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Palmeiro was among several speakers that day. She spoke about the

way women have been treated over time in Argentina, and the worrying increase of violence in their nation. She discussed the momentum the

movement had at that very moment — the power all of these women held

collectively. She encouraged the crowd to demand change. This was truly

one of the most invigorating moments of her life. She felt deeply engaged, part of something much bigger than herself. This rally represented a

turning point for the movement, an inflection point that meant not only addressing violence but also the mechanisms behind the violence.

Palmeiro believes that this second protest, coupled with the growth of the movement sends a cultural signal.

“We have spoken loud,” she says, “[that] this is the time of our revolution.”

She looks deeply serious when she says this, but a hint of excitement pervades her words.

“Misogyny will no longer be tolerated,” she continues, “and machista bullshit will no longer be entertained.”

T

he term machista (like machismo) refers to an exaggerated brand of

self-reliant masculinity and masculine pride, often associated with the

necessity of a male to act as a protector and provider. In Iberian-languagespeaking communities and countries, the term communicated the deeply entrenched ideal societal role played by men. In the 1960s and 70s the

term was adopted by Latin American feminists to specifically refer to male violence and aggression, and to criticize Latino patriarchal structures and gender relations. Palmeiro tends to use this term a lot when she speaks,

and in any given context—with friends, colleagues, in her classes. For her,

it evokes a particular image of everything Ni Una Menos is fighting against:

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a Latina woman who stays at home, who is subordinate, obedient,

dependent upon a mere archetype of a strong and aggressive man.

Born and raised in the capital city of Buenos Aires, Palmeiro has

experienced the saliency of these gender concepts for years. She grew up on the streets of Argentina’s capital city, during a period where the

idea of activism and political memory took on a new relevance. When the military dictatorship fell in 1981, she had just been born to two middle-

class sociologists. The years following saw struggle for Argentina. Even as a young child, Palmeiro witnessed a nation in recovery. She faintly

recalls the first democratic elections, remembers the slow movement to discover the truth about what happened during the Dirty War.

Her parents tried not to shelter her, and as Palmeiro grew older, the

influence of her parents became clear. As a girl, she was fascinated by

people and their culture. She wanted to understand why it was strange for a woman to want a career at that time, why her mother—a professional herself—always did the dishes after dinner. In high school, she was

introduced formally to the study of literature, and decided to pursue this reflection of Argentine culture at the University of Buenos Aires. Though Palmeiro eventually left for graduate school and to teach in the United

Kingdom for a short while, she knew that the issues she cared most about were the ones she had noticed when she was just a teenager.

Buenos Aires is infamous for the prevalence of catcalling, and the

aggressive way men tend to pursue women. Street harassment is almost a given of living in the city, and many activists believe that this culture

precipitates violence against women. Ni Una Menos, as well as Palmeiro, point to the machismo culture of Latin America as a major contributor to both the damaging portrayal and dangerous treatment of women.

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That aside, Palmeiro insists there is room for men in the feminist

movement. In the first Ni Una Menos rally, the only male speaker at the event was a popular actor.

“This is a movement led by women,” Palmeiro said, “but its impact can be felt by everyone.”

She believes strongly that feminism is not anti-male, but it should be

understood as a movement that needs to be spearheaded by women.

She believes in alliances, and the importance of intersectionality. More

recently, Palmeiro has taken on the role of International Coordinator for

Ni Una Menos. Groups all over the world support and even use the same moniker as the group Palmeiro and eleven others began.

Still, they say they feel no sense of ownership. In 2017, Ni Una Menos joined a global protest on International Women’s Day. Once again,

handwritten signs flooded the road stretching from Congreso de la Nación to Plaza de Mayo. However, this time they were joined by women all

over the world, echoing their call. From Sweden to New York, hundreds of thousands of women struck in response to unfair pay and gendered violence across the globe. In Buenos Aires, thousands of people,

including labor unions, political groups, and religious organizations

marched down Teatro Avenida, looking towards the heart of their city and the nation’s seat of power.

The weather was beautiful. Sunny and warm, with a heat that only

became overwhelming when one was pressed against thousands of

people in a crowded square. Banners streaked across the sky, blocking the Casa Rosada from view. They displayed slogans like “Pan y rosas,” in reference to a famous women’s strike in Lowell, Massachusetts in

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the nineteenth century. Families marched with black and white photos

of loved ones who were victims of femicide, a procession of grief. They flooded into the square, coming directly from Congress.

Plaza de Mayo has long been a focal point for political and social movements in Argentina. The place itself is named after the May

Revolution of 1810, which catalyzed the country’s independence

movement. It was in the Plaza de Mayo that labor unions forced the

release of the future president, Peron, from political prison. The same

plaza saw the bombs drop in the attempt to overthrow Peron, eventually witnessing his coup d’état. Crowds gathered in the Plaza at the

inception of the Falklands War, as well as in solidarity with mothers of the disappeared, and when financial crisis nearly broke the country in

2001. Now, the spirit of women—not only in Buenos Aires but across the world—inhabited the Plaza.

Palmeiro, in purple face paint and a #NiUnaMenos t-shirt, shouted across a crowd: “Our demands have not been entirely heard by the government

here, or elsewhere, [and] we are taking the next step: the first international women’s strike!”

The crowd cheered, and Palmeiro smiled broadly. The smell of asado

drifted through the air, and people wandered around with portable coolers hawking beer and soda. There were drum circles throughout the square, and women shouted slogans to their beat. There was an undeniable

energy, coupled with a profound sense of community. It was as though everyone was standing up at once, all together. It felt powerful.

Following the protest, sitting in her office in the upper-middle class neighborhood of Recoleta, Palmeiro reflects on the inception and

growth of Ni Una Menos. “Considering the enormous quantity of people

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attending our rallies and protests,” she says, “most of them are taking the streets for the first time.”

Her office feels almost like a modern art exhibition. Upon first glance, everything appears minimalist and meaningless. Binders are placed

precariously on a thin windowsill, labeled with names like “Contexts”

“Queer” and “Corrupt.” Post-it notes with indecipherable shorthand cover one wall, papering over several black and white posters. She sips on

sparkling water, bought from a kiosco across the street and sighs. It has

been nearly two years since the murder of Chiara Paez, and many things have changed.

Palmeiro believes the group is becoming more radical, likely in response

to the political and economic shifts in Argentina. Many believe that things have gotten worse for women following the election of a new center-right

president. Palmeiro is certainly one of them. Still, when she speaks about

things like economic violence or patriarchal market structures, something awakens. Her hands grow become animated, almost knocking over the

coffee-stained mug on her desk. She speaks loudly and quickly, as if she is unable to force the ideas and imperatives out fast enough. The pink

eyeglasses resting on her long ski-slope nose keep slipping as she tells her story. She pauses every couple of minutes to push them back up.

The women of Argentina, and of the world, she insists, must keep

fighting. She believes wholeheartedly in an Argentina where gender does not contribute to the likelihood that one will be a victim of violence. She

believes in the power of activism to make a difference. She maintains that change can be catalyzed by everyday people. “Every new protest is the

first day of our new lives” she says determinedly, pushing up her glasses.

“We just have to keep fighting and speaking out.”

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FARMING THE CONFLICT

Palestinian Farmers in the Seam Zone Leslie Gray WEST BANK, PALESTINE Spring 2017

L

ocated at 32° 21’ N 35° 03’ E, Atil’s agricultural checkpoint is a

gateway between the West Bank and Israel to allow Palestinian

farmers from the northern town of Atil access to their farms located on

the Israeli side of the separation barrier. The checkpoint is operative daily: opening in the morning around 7 am, again around midday, and finally at 3:30pm at which time the farmers must return home.

While these farmlands have been passed down within Palestinian families

for generations, this checkpoint is rather new. Construction of the security barrier began in 2003 during the Second Intifada, which saw a large wave of suicide bombings throughout Israel, targeting buses and other civilian locations. In more rural areas, the barrier takes the shape of a messy

combination of barbed wire, electronic gates, and a military access road; however, near major cities such as Jerusalem or in areas where there are large numbers of snipers it becomes a cold, massive 25-foot concrete wall.

The security barrier was designed to create a more secure Israel by

physically separating Israel from Palestine, yet it often deviates from 1948 armistice lines that designate the somewhat official border between Israel and the West Bank. This barrier has separated many Palestinian lands

from their Palestinian owners in an agricultural area that has come to be known as the Seam Zone.

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With the security barrier firmly in place, a new layer of bureaucracy has

been added to each of Atil’s farmers’ morning routines. Instead of heading

directly to their fields, farmers must head to the checkpoint and wait until a little after 7am when the soldiers arrive to open it. Then the soldiers check everyone’s permits to ensure that they are in fact agricultural permits, that

they haven’t expired yet, and have met various other unknown regulations.

Only then are the farmers allowed to head to work. After passing through the checkpoints, many farmers hop on tractors or donkeys in order to

ride to their respective fields, often down rocky, unpaved dirt roads. Then in the early afternoon, around 3 or 4, the farmers have to return to the

checkpoints and go home for the day, regardless of the work left to be done on the farm.

J

ust next to the separation barrier, but quite a distance from the

checkpoint, adjacent to the Israeli town of Ibtan, is the farm where

M, A, and F work. It’s comprised of numerous greenhouses growing

tomatoes, cucumbers, bell peppers and various other products to sell to the local supermarkets. M and A aren’t just farmers though. In fact, they actually rent the land, a common practice originally initiated to ensure

that Palestinian land-owners who are too old to work continue earning a

living. When not out on the farm, M and A are university students studying engineering. I first met the three of them on a trip to help harvest some of their crops in fear that the Israeli government was going to tear down the

greenhouses closest to the separation barrier. In between the greenhouses and the separation barrier is a small corridor just wide enough for a

tractor allowing access to the front of the green houses. As my friends

and I picked cucumbers that mid-March morning, M and A acted as food inspectors, throwing out the cucumbers that were too big or too oddly

shaped. The barbed wire then became a vegetable graveyard with unwanted cucumbers impaled or slit open, their guts splayed on the ground.

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Separation barrier next to the greenhouses.

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That day on the farm seemed ideal. As guests, we were brought kunafah

(a famous dessert from Nablus) on a tractor, hummus and other goodies.

For every 30 minutes of work we did, we rested for at least 45. M and A largely spent the day chatting with us and relaxing rather than picking vegetables themselves. An Arab-Israeli arrived with a water-pipe and

snacks for our rural party. Although there was impending Israeli doom

lurking in the back of everyone’s minds, the farm seemed largely peaceful and easy. Of course, spending just one day on the farm barely gave us a glimpse of what life is truly like as a Palestinian farmer.

O

n the eve of Memorial Day (May 1), the Israelis decided to restrict

Palestinian movement between the West Bank and Israel for 3 days

except in extenuating humanitarian cases. This is a security measure to ensure that the day after Memorial Day, Independence Day (or as it is

called in Arabic “the catastrophe”), can be celebrated sans terror attacks.

For the Israelis, the border closure means security. While agricultural

checkpoints go unaffected this holiday season, the closure still inhibits

most other Palestinian movement. This is always the give and take with

the wall: for Israelis the wall means security, but for some Palestinians it means they can’t live their lives or access their lands.

On my second trip to the Seam Valley in early April, I met a man named

J who organizes the Atil farmers and owns a lot of the land. As it neared

time for the checkpoint to open, J added his own input about the security barrier, claiming that it wasn’t really for security. The fence, he said, could easily be jumped (something that had been happening frequently enough

that some checkpoints now had soldiers standing guard there at all times of the day), and once the fence was cleared, either by jumping or legally

with permits, Palestinians had free rein. He pointed out how close the bus

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stops were, and once on a bus, the Palestinians could go anywhere in Israel.

J’s point was proven as soon as I turned around to return to the car. A man who seemed out of place on the farm approached me and Karin,

the Israeli woman who had become my guide to, and interpreter of, the

farmer’s struggles. He identified himself as a former prisoner in Palestine.

He said he had been accused of collaborating with the Israelis after

marrying his Israeli wife, starting his family, and serving as a volunteer interpreter between locals and soldiers. Now he was legally stuck in

Palestine save for his agricultural permit. While in theory this only allowed for him to cross daily to cultivate the fields, it was quite obvious from his street clothes that’s not what he was doing.

As he told his story, he revealed himself to be one of the Palestinians

that J talked about. Some mornings, B would cross the checkpoint with his agricultural permit and then catch a bus into the nearby city. With

enough confidence and his Israeli bus card, no one thought to question

him. He runs an electronics repair shop in a nearby town where he would sometimes spend the night. He even admitted that sometimes he could

stay in Israeli for weeks without arousing suspicion. Nevertheless, it was still difficult though for him to visit his family. He lives in constant fear of getting caught overstaying his welcome in Israel and losing his permit forever.

While some major checkpoints, such as the ones between Jerusalem and Ramallah, have ID scanners, agricultural checkpoints have no system to

check whether people have returned. Movement is restricted but not well

tracked. Israel tries to deter people from abusing their permits by creating harsh punishments such as imprisonment and permanent loss of permits.

While these deterrents may reduce small crime such as overstaying

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F with some of the volunteers in front of the cucumber plants and flanked by the security barrier.

68 GRAY | PALESTINE

a permit, it does nothing to deter those who gain permits with more nefarious crimes in mind.

W

hen I visited the farm again in early April, A was no longer there.

His permit had expired at the end of March and there was no hope

of renewal. Normally permits can be renewed, but in recent months,

the Israeli District Coordination Offices (a branch of the Interior Ministry) changed permit regulations regarding land ownership and paperwork,

making it harder for those working on rented land to gain permits. The

Palestinian Authority District Coordination Offices responded by refusing to pass permit applications on to the Israelis, worrying that restricted

permit regulations are the first step to Israel taking the Seam Valley land.

This, in effect, has completely stopped permit renewal for the time being, preventing many farmers from reaching the farms.

The mood on the farm was still quite joyous though. When Karin and

I asked about how the cucumbers were doing, M took us on the farm

tour. The greenhouses that were haphazardly close to the fence hadn’t

been knocked down, but the cucumber plants that had been producing fruit just a few weeks before seemed as if they were dying. The green

leaves were wilting with cucumbers still on the stalk. The bell peppers were finally reaching their peak though. M picked a few peppers of

each color and proceeded to chase Karin around the green house in an

attempt to give them to her. This routine continued with the tomatoes and further screams of “Lo” and “La” (the Hebrew and Arabic words for no,

respectively) followed by giggles. He finally reached her and poured all the vegetables into her bag as she continued to refuse them.

As we sat down to breakfast, Karin checked M’s permit. Realizing that it didn’t expire until early June she was hopeful. “It should be resolved by

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then,” she commented referring to the permit debate. As we continued our breakfast of pickles, boiled eggs and cookies, we were joined by a few other farmers from nearby greenhouses. One, it turns out, was

actually there without an agricultural permit. R explained over breakfast how, as a man over 55, he can go to a more remote civilian checkpoint

and pay 50 shekels (approximately $13.85 USD) for a one-day permit to

visit Israel. He does this in order to get to his farm; however, the permit he pays for doesn’t allow for his agricultural work. If he were found working on his farm, he would no longer be eligible for any permits.

After breakfast, we went to visit his farm, where his wife and son were

working. His wife has an agricultural permit, but R worries for her safety

when she crosses the agricultural checkpoint alone so he brings her with

him to the farther civilian checkpoint and pays fifty shekels for her as well.

His son is the lucky one. Out of fourteen children, he is the only one to

have a permit while the rest idle at home. When we arrived, R gestured all around the farm demonstrating his eighteen donums (Ottoman unit

of land equivalent to the amount of land one ox could plow in a day; 1

donum = .1 hectare) of land but says the Israeli government only officially recorded nine donums so he can only claim permits for that part of the land.

“Come see,” he said. “Come look.”

One major issue that Atil faces is that over half of its land is considered ma’aliya or undocumented by the Israeli District Coordination Office.

These are the lands that have been passed down from father to sons over numerous generations. Having documented land was actually seen as

a punishment just a century ago. Official land ownership meant paying taxes, so in many cases ownership was never documented.

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Unfortunately, the Israeli government refuses to recognize land ownership if there are not papers to prove it. Even more detrimentally, permits are

granted based on the amount of land officially recorded, leaving R vastly under-staffed. This is also another reason that the Palestinian Authority

is hesitant about cooperating with the Israeli District Coordination Office.

With much of the land unaccounted for, Palestinians are worried that

Israelis could claim it for their own and use it to plant their own crops or worse: use it for new and existing settlements.

Permits, meanwhile, are only granted for people who own at least 5

donums so small farms that were shorted a few donums by officials now

may be unable to obtain any permits at all. In addition to this, it is tradition for a Palestinian father to evenly distribute his land to each of his sons as

inheritance; however, for small farms such as R’s, this is not an option and fathers must now decide how they want to divide the inheritance in order for their sons to be able to continue farming on this side of the barrier.

While continuing to explain his situation, R gave us a tour of his

greenhouses. Some had ripe zucchinis ready to pick while others had bell peppers that were merely budding. In the distance, R pointed out

some olive trees that also belonged to him. The crops he had to throw

out weeks ago due to neglect were nowhere to be seen. He has all these plants and trees but, on a good day, only three hands to take care of them. He says he has tried hiring extra people to help or even taking

volunteers, but they aren’t skilled and they don’t cultivate the vegetables

correctly. A lot of the skilled farmers have moved on to construction work in nearby towns as a more reliable source of income.

This year, R spent 15,000 shekels (approximately $4,150 USD) on new

plants and greenhouse materials, but he can’t juggle all the tasks. Back

in the main greenhouse where his son is busy packing zucchinis, R tells

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us about his friend who tried to sell his peppers after a rough season.

Normally peppers sell for 60 shekels a carton, but his friend could only

sell his for 20 shekels per carton. He incurred a profit loss of 40 shekels ($11.08) per carton of peppers (farmers produce hundreds of cartoons

in a season) simply due to bureaucracy and the heat. In explaining why his friend’s peppers cost less R curled up his hand into a sort of claw, underscoring how deformed his friend’s peppers had become.

R continued telling us about the issues as we walked back to our car. He was obviously fed up with his situation. He had been ranting for almost 30 minutes now and allowed Karin to record him for documentation

purposes. Karin turned around at one point to translate something R had just said: “They might as well have told us we didn’t have land.”

A

s we drove back to the other farm, Karin turned to me and asked,

“What can we do for them?” Karin is a Jewish Israeli who works in Tel

Aviv but lives close enough to the checkpoints that she has taken notice

of what is happening. She joined the Machsom Watch group, which acts

as civilian witnesses to the conflict by publishing checkpoint reports. Due to the lack of news coverage, many other Jewish Israelis don’t know or don’t care about what is happening. Furthermore, Arab-Israelis aren’t

doing much to help their Palestinian brothers and sisters. Their lack of help is not because Pan-Arabism is a failed venture, but because the

Israeli-government can charge them as collaborators or blacklist them.

Although some Arab-Israelis self-identify as Palestinians, it can be difficult for them to find a way to help the Palestinian cause.

One Arab-Israeli, H, visits the farm where M and F work every weekend.

He brings food, a water-pipe, a small amount of money, and ultimately

diversion. He is related to some of the guys there so he feels it is his duty

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to try to help in some way. As he slumps on the couch, smoking the water pipe, he talks to M and F, learning about new challenges and trying to

figure out how to help them further. While H tries to help as much as he

can, he does so cautiously. If the government thought he was getting too involved, he could be blacklisted by the Israeli Security Forces, causing him various problems in his personal life and possibly the loss of his

Israeli citizenship. In order to protect his identity, he refuses to let Karin

take a picture of him, slowly backing away whenever he sees the camera.

Not all Arab-Israelis want to help the Palestinians though. On our way

to R’s farm we drove by various plots of land. One looked quite different

from the rest though, with high fences and tons of security cameras. Karin told me this used to belong to a Palestinian family, but when the patriarch died, the widow was unable to take care of the land. An Arab-Israeli

swept in and grabbed the place instead. He fenced in the lot and added

security cameras so he can prosecute anyone that tries to trespass. This was no longer Palestinian land.

Arab-Israelis aren’t just taking land though. Some are also taking water, restricting the farmers’ ability to nourish their crops. For Atil’s farmers,

there is a US AID-funded water tower in Atil with pipes running under the security barrier to supply all the Seam Zone greenhouses. Atil’s mayor

has an Arab-Israeli relative who has taken over the water tower, cutting off water to a large number of the farms, leaving many plants without one of their key nutrients. For people with influence like J, this isn’t much of an issue, but smaller farms with no bargaining power are left to suffer.

O

n April 2, twenty people held a demonstration in a town near the Seam Zone in order to protest for permit renewals. While the

protesters were small in number, television crews showed up to document

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the protest and help raise awareness. Israeli soldiers also came armed

with tear gas but realized the protesters were not dangerous and backed

off. An Israeli officer came and said he would issue permits for the farmers immediately if the Palestinian Authority would pass on the applications;

however, the protest organizers feel that it was just a way to placate them.

Their hunches were correct; no permits were renewed. Although it was a small venture, it seems to be the future of Palestinian resistance.

One answer to Karin’s “How can we help them?� seems to be protesting to raise awareness. On the second visit to the farm, Karin and H kept trying to impress upon M how important it was for large numbers to

organize a protest or some sort of resistance. They kept telling him to

WhatsApp his friends and invite all the other farmers to demonstrate. For them it was important not just that Israelis showed up to protest but also

the farmers that were being affected. The grassroots movements seem to be most effective here.

When we were leaving the farm, H mentioned that he would try calling the Israeli DCO during the week to see if anything could be done about the

permits. As an Arabic-speaker, H was hoping that speaking Arabic to the Druze DCO director could help their case in some way. For him, this is how he could best contribute.

As for J, he plans on taking his case to the Israeli Supreme Court. The land that the security barrier was built on is his and he finds the time

crunch difficult as well. Rushing home every day around three or four no matter how much of the farming is complete takes a toll on his potatoes that need regular tending. While J sees the Supreme Court as a useful

alternative, Karin is worried that it will take too long. It is also a privilege for J to access these resources, and a Supreme Court win for him may not help other Palestinian farmers in the long run.

74 GRAY | PALESTINE

Atil is just one of town of many affected by the security barrier. Near

Jerusalem, construction just restarted on another part of the wall that

will end by surrounding three sides of al-Walaja, cutting yet more farmers off from their land. Israel is already planning on developing a nature park on one side of the wall, and people from the town fear it will be on their farmland.

O

n my second trip to the Seam Zone, I asked Karin to show me the

agricultural checkpoints. Driving down the dirt road, it was a scenic

agricultural landscape. Situated on a hillside lay olive tree after olive

tree, along with occasional ruins from the Crusader era. The view was

picturesque until we reached the checkpoint. Marred by a yellow shipping container, barbed wire, and an electric fence, the scenery changed from charming to foreboding. Soldiers were stationed at the checkpoint even

though it wasn’t time for the checkpoint to be open. Apparently, this is a new tactic to prevent people from jumping the fence.

As we drove back through the olive trees, Karin exclaimed, “They’re

dying! They’re just dying!” I knew she was referring to the olive trees and the neglect they were suffering, but I was left wondering how much it applied to the Palestinians as a whole.

Further down the road, we passed by a humanitarian checkpoint that

allows children who happened to be born on the wrong side of the fence

to go to school each day. Their backpacks are inspected by soldiers each time they pass through the checkpoint.

While some checkpoints are manned by the Israeli Defense Forces

personnel, who are in charge of all the permits, the Israeli government

has started awarding contracts to outside companies. Now the security

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barrier has evolved from simply a security measure to a profit-making

business for Israelis, echoing the development of the US prison-industrial complex.

W

ith the construction of the security barrier, Israel took over 6% of West Bank lands, most of which was agricultural. Besides this,

Israeli settlements take up an estimated 90% of Area C (the area of the West Bank under complete Israeli military control). While agriculture used to be one of the mainstays of the Palestinian economy, it may

soon become a mere memory of the past. The decrease in the amount of arable land has created not only economic loss but also job loss

throughout the West Bank. According to the World Bank, unemployment in the West Bank was at 18% in 2016.

While Palestinian farms are falling behind due to lack of government investments and difficult working conditions, products from Israeli

settlements are spreading internationally. Every day the Palestinians can’t get to their land and every time their plants don’t get enough water, they slip farther and farther behind in the global market. Some Palestinian

farmers are finding that farming is simply not economically viable for them anymore.

As of late May, permit renewals have slowly resumed in some districts for a few special cases such as a farmer whose field has been left neglected for the past 3 months. However, the District Coordination Offices in

the Tulkarim district where Atil lies have not budged. Karin and other

activists are brainstorming how to solve the issue. They are thinking about involving an Arab Knesset member or trying to gain media attention, but they know from previous experience that this doesn’t help.

76 GRAY | PALESTINE

M, whose permit expires in early June, now must accept that he may be

out of work in a few weeks if the permit renewals remain stagnant. Some Palestinians have started applying for permits as construction workers in

order to access their land. Others ask a cousin of a cousin’s friend to help out. While these solutions are at best temporary and at worst dangerous,

the farmers in Atil remain in limbo, and the future of the land and its crops seems grim.

People waiting for a checkpoint to open near Tulkarim.

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EPHEMERAL PEOPLE Zoe Jane Patterson PARIS, FRANCE Spring 2018

S

tretching along the Bassin Louis Blanc in Paris are clusters of multicolored tents, sitting idly, practically steaming in the May heat. The

canal water lurks quietly by, and next door, Parisians sip beer or coffee at a trendy bar turned breakfast spot during the day. The bar is called Point Ephémère, French for “ephemeral”: fleeting, transient, temporary.

“I was going to have my throat cut in Afghanistan.”

It’s one of the first things he tells me. His assertion that he deserves

refugee status, that he was in real danger — he will say it to some student who is not even French. I imagine he’s said it over and over again.

“I am a translator by profession. I speak five languages.”

His resume, his proof that he’s not a migrant worker. France is ostensibly friendly to refugees, but wants to stop the flow of migrant workers, especially into Paris.

“In Afghanistan, I had a big villa, a nice car…”

He is not moving to Paris because he was poor at home and wants to

make money. He is an intellectual, a skilled worker. He is useful. He is not a leech. He is more than his situation.

“This is not my life.”

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While living in a temporary shelter beside the Bassin should have been a

situation “ephémère,” Ahmed has lived on the street for over a year. After fleeing his situation in Afghanistan, he eventually arrived in Europe and made it to Paris: the city of love, the city of lights. Stickers on the door

outside Point Ephémère advocate for refugees, “J’existe”; around the city there are stenciled graffiti cutouts that have cropped up all over Europe —“refugees welcome.” He tells me that he wants to stay in Paris. He is good at French, he has family who have settled here, he wants to stop moving.

Immigrants in France who do not have documentation are called sans-

papiers. The majority are refugees, and while they wait for the government to determine their status, they are not allowed to work. They are therefore dependent on charities and a government allowance to stay alive. For

hundreds of refugees in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, there are a few portable toilets and there are the tents. While French President Macron

had promised to see refugees housed by the end of 2017, thousands are

still sleeping rough in the streets waiting for their fates to be decided. The ultimate measure by which they’re judged is, did you suffer enough at home to be allowed to stay here? Are you worthy of Paris?

This year Paris saw an unusually cold winter. The snow made the city

picture-perfect, but while many Parisians marveled at city dressed up in

white, French police were spraying asylum-seekers’ blankets with water.

The water would freeze, making it impossible for them to stay on the

street and be warm, thus forcing them to go to immigration centers. No one seemed to ask why people would be sleeping on the street if there

was space for them to be anywhere else. There were accounts of police telling immigrants to disperse, and when they asked where they should go, the police officers said, we don’t care, just somewhere else.

I didn’t meet Ahmed and the other Afghan refugees until the snow had already melted, but they told me that it was Parisians, and particularly

80 PATTERSON | FRANCE

people who are of immigrant descent, who helped them to make it

through the cold. It was Parisians who brought blankets, food, water and winter jackets. Meanwhile the shelters were at full capacity. Temporary settlements cropped up and were treated like weeds by the police.

Sprayed, cleared, and the people shuffled along. Sometimes they had to sleep standing up to avoid being noticed by the police.

I

first encountered Point Ephémère accidentally, on a night out with two friends in March. I was on my way to a jazz club near the Stalingrad

metro station; night had already fallen, and the Stalingrad area is already a little sketchy to begin with. When you exit the metro, you pass a neon

“Paris Fried Chicken” shop and are dwarfed by a grey bridge with peeling posters and graffiti. It’s easy to get confused on the Parisian streets,

especially when it’s nighttime and your mobile map app thinks you’re

floating in the Seine for some reason. It took us a long time to find the

jazz club, so we were disappointed when we looked through the window

and saw a lone musician and an empty restaurant. The music that floated through the glass was sub-par, and my jazz-expert friend deemed it “not worth it.” We decided to go to a different place, Point Ephémère, which popped up as a suggestion on the internet.

We stood on a bridge near to where we were supposed to be and I pointed out four rats to my friends as we paused to look at the

bewildering scene below us. On one side of the rat meet-up there was

a line to get into an odd-looking club. On the other side of the rats were tents, sleeping bags, and a canal with the most overpowering smell I’d encountered in Paris thus far.

My friends and I looked at each other, and then looked back at the scene.

This club was beside the water, a prime location to party, but didn’t these club-goers notice the slum beside them? Didn’t they care? Across the

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canal there were about a dozen police vehicles. Unsettled, we followed

our map up the wrong street, and then down that same street, and then up it again. We were sure that place below couldn’t be where we were

trying to go. A smiling stranger walking his fluffy white dog stopped us: “You seem lost!”

We explained what we were looking for. He frowned, “That’s it, it’s right by the canal.” He pointed to some stairs we could take down to the water.

When we peered down onto the alley below we saw three men peeing against the wall.

Some people come to Paris because it’s the city of love, the city of lights.

It’s easy to see Paris through these rose-colored glasses. You smell

something funny and breathe through your mouth; you hear something

scuttle in the corner of the metro, and you choose not to look. Why ruin an otherwise perfect place by paying attention to those little flaws?

Other people, the artsy types, come to Paris because of that layer of

grime. It seemed we had found one of those places; the kind of place

where the music is loud, the hipsters are chatty, and artists float in and out with ideas spewing from their multi-colored lipstick mouths. Point

Ephémère calls itself “a center of artistic dynamics”, with visual artists

and musicians in residence, rehearsal studios, a concert hall and a bar.

As with so many places in this city, you never know who you might meet there.

We descended the stairs, careful to avoid puddles of anything at that point, and entered into a crowd by the canal. People were drinking

and smoking, talking and laughing. We weaved our way through and approached the bouncer, but paused when we saw the tents.

“Why would they camp next to a river?”

82 PATTERSON | FRANCE

“Well they need somewhere to go to the bathroom.”

“I wonder if they’re immigrants.”

“I wonder if they’re gypsies.”

Someone was barbecuing next to a tent. We debated whether the people in tents were actually a bunch of hippies who were choosing to sleep outside of the club.

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“Is that allowed?”

The smell told us otherwise. These people were living here at least

semi-permanently. We looked at the bright lights of the club and the fog of people pressed against each other. I kept thinking I could see a rat

out of the corner of my eye. We decided to leave, with our heads full of questions about Point Ephémère.

H

omelessness and poverty in Paris are two things that you can choose to confront or ignore. I’ve noticed that many people tend to pretend

not to see it, or they romanticize it. In the Châtelet metro station there is a woman who lies with her forehead to the ground and her hands stretched out in front of her, a coffee cup balanced in her fingers. People mill right past her. Entire families sit on the stairs in the metro, children asleep on their parents’ laps, signs balanced on their knees, stating that they’re

Syrian refugees, or that they just need a meal. Sometimes people come onto the train with cups, declaring their need for food, or quietly asking

each person for a euro. There is a particular question I often heard asked

by Parisians when the beggar or homeless person is a person of color,

about whether he or she is a refugee or not. I didn’t realize how important that question was until we returned to Point Ephémère for a second time.

I brought the same two friends with me. The Stalingrad area looked totally different in daylight. It felt like it had its arms open; there were people with babies in strollers and groups standing outside smoking and chatting.

Even the “Paris Fried Chicken” shop that had seemed so comically seedy at night looked like a nice place for a fried chicken sandwich during the day.

We approached the tents and the bar and noticed that there were patrons sitting happily by, eating lunch. Once again, I was shocked by how little the average patron seemed to care about the people in tents beside

84 PATTERSON | FRANCE

them. The club-goers or hipsters and the people living in the tents came from two different worlds: one of abstract care for immigrants among

little-known musical beats and one of homelessness. Two worlds that don’t mix.

We approached a man having breakfast and asked him if he knew a

little bit about the club and the people living near it. We were surprised to learn that all the people in tents were “Syrian refugees.” He told us

that they were being supported by NGOs and that they had to live there until they received official refugee status. They sometimes came to the

club for Wi-Fi. We asked him what he thought might be a solution to the problem, and he said that the only solution was to end the war in Syria.

Then we clarified that we’d meant what was the solution to people living

outside in tents, and he shrugged, “The situation is so complicated, very complicated. The NGOs do good work for them.”

We walked past a man sitting cross-legged on the slope leading up to

the bridge. He was wearing round John Lennon-style glasses, had long flowing blond hair, and was eating his lunch with the view of the slum

below. Another hipster who wanted a taste of the grimy layer of Paris, but was sitting, literally, above the slum-dwellers. I felt uncomfortable looking at him.

We stood on the bridge contemplating how to approach these “Syrian

refugees” when my friend Chiran caught the attention of several of the men standing there. One waved to him, and he waved back. Then we

stood, awkwardly staring at each other. My friends and the people near the tents below were all laughing and glancing at each other, unsure of

how to handle the situation socially. Chiran broke the impasse by waving

for them to come up onto the bridge. They did, and what we learned was surprising.

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Around ten of them came up to talk to us, and at first it was difficult to

navigate through a sea of French and English. We found ourselves miming to them. Finally, after the men clarified that they're from Afghanistan,

my friends realized that they had first languages in common: Hindi and

Urdu. My friends spoke to everyone this way, but especially a man named Malang. That was when I met Ahmed.

He tried to speak to me in French first, since it was obvious that I didn’t understand Hindi. Then he switched to English. For some reason he

thought—or hoped—that telling me his story would bring about some

change. He had spoken to journalists and government officials, people who were full of promises.

“They take our fingerprints and our pictures, and they tell us soon, soon, soon. I’ve been living here for a year.” Meanwhile, one of the men said to my Indian friend, “India and Afghanistan are brothers. You have to

help us.” She was lost for what to say, then gently reminded him that we’re students but would do what we could.

Some of the men watched my conversation with Ahmed intently, adding

pieces and weaving strands into his story. They took us seriously. I asked what happens once they get refugee status; do they get any more help?

“Sometimes people move in with family once they get the papers, but some of us already have them”—one of the men passed his to me gingerly—“and we still live here: we have nowhere else to go.”

For the group of people whom I met, as well as asylum-seekers all across Paris, health and sanitation are rapidly deteriorating. Public bathroom

facilities are available, but they often require a fee. Without being able to wash themselves properly, people risk skin infections and scabies.

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They also live in fear of the police, who slash their tents and force them to move on. Immigrant centers turn them away because they’ve been

maxed out. There are simply too many people to accommodate. Police show up without warning at temporary shelters like the one along the Bassin Louis Blanc and force immigrants onto buses to temporary

shelters. People who don’t happen to be at the camp when it’s rounded up may be separated from friends and family, and risk losing the few

possessions they do have when the entirety of the camp is thrown into dumpsters. Police have been known to tear-gas the groups as well.

Sometimes the police don’t send them anywhere in particular: they’re just

told to disperse. Immigrants are treated like criminals in Paris, for all of the graffiti insistence that “immigrants are welcome” and Macron’s claim that France is “honored to welcome refugees.”

Round-ups have created a vicious cycle for refugees of flitting from under one bridge to another. They go to immigration centers only to end up on the streets again. They are photoshopped out of the pristine Paris and

are woven with flower crowns in the hippie wonderland. Ahmed told me

his greatest annoyance was that people from the bar would come to take pictures of the camp.

“When we ask them why, they say they will make a Facebook post so

people know about us. But people already know, and it is not dignified.”

The life of the refugee is transformed again, into a sad story that is

shareable. A thread in a night at an artsy bar that you visited. A grimy layer in a tapestry. But the people living in those tents are not just a backdrop. They are not ephemeral people.

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T

he problem with awareness campaigns and Facebook statuses

is that these people are already very visible. They are so visible in

Paris that it becomes possible to have a cigarette next to their living

space. To have a cocktail and talk about contemporary art. To piss a few

meters away from where they have to sleep at night, seeing them but not understanding what their presence really means. They become reduced

to the way they look, flattened into “Syrian” refugees for whom “we,” the true Paris, can do nothing. In Paris, people view immigrants, especially immigrants of color, in two ways. There are refugees, who only matter

because of their sad situation, and there are economic migrants. I met

one man in the Paris flea market who, when I said I was from Abu Dhabi, told me he wanted to go to Dubai.

“Paris is racist. They don’t like me because I am Arab, because I am Muslim, because I have a beard.”

The man we met was not a refugee, so he is seen as a leech. Taking “true” Parisians’ jobs. Not French. Not worthy. His journey has been

deemed not sad enough, not enough of a struggle. His story is a thread

that many Parisians would like to tear out of the tapestry. He is a beard, a religion, an “other.” Ahmed’s thread, by comparison, is a thin one, a

thread that we’re used to seeing and can’t distinguish from all the other

refugee threads. I’m surprised when he tells me that he goes into the bar sometimes, that he parties, that he hates his boredom the most out of everything he has to deal with in Paris.

I left my conversation with Ahmed with a head full of questions. I

had wanted a neat narrative, the kind of story that would help me to understand him and use him as a lens to see all refugees through. I

wanted to write a story that would also act like a manual for how we could help “them.” Instead I was confused. The story was messy, and facts

88 PATTERSON | FRANCE

conflicted from one person to the other as I spoke to them. My friends got the phone number of Malang, the refugee they’d spoken to the most. He said to call him any time. We promised that we would. I was determined

to retrieve a “classic” refugee story, to dig out that thin thread and twist it around my finger.

A couple of weeks passed. When we called Malang, he said of course

he remembered us. We asked to meet at a McDonalds in Stalingrad, but he said to come to the camp and pick him up from there. I had a list of

questions ready for him. I wanted to know who his family was, how he’d

come to Paris, what he was running from, the smallest details of his life in the camp. I wanted a beginning, a turning point, and a journey. I wanted trauma. I wanted a checklist for how to help.

When we arrived in Stalingrad we called him, as he’d told us to. A different voice answered the phone.

“Can we speak to Malang?”

“Who?” “Malang. The owner of this phone.”

“This is my phone. I don’t know a Malang.”

We had just called less than an hour ago to arrange the meeting. We

wondered if Malang’s phone had been stolen, who was that other voice?

We decided to call back a little while later. This time a different voice answered.

“What do you want with Malang?” … “I don’t know who Malang is.” …

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“My name is Walih Khan” ... “Who are you?” … “wrong number I think.”

Everything we asked was met with increasing suspicion. We told the voice we were students, that we’d arranged to meet him a little while ago.

“Malang got his papers and has a house now. He can’t meet with you because he has his papers.”

The voice hung up, and I stood in a McDonalds in Stalingrad with a list of questions and no answers. I had wanted to learn the story of a refugee

but realized how short-sighted I’d been. Of course, strangers asking for

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him by name would be suspicious. Refugees in Paris get treated like

criminals. Men who don’t have homes and papers disappear, not worthy of the city or too afraid of the system to continue to trudge through it.

They become ghost people, ephemeral and flittering, bounced from

place to place without dignity. There is no one story of being a refugee, and there are no true answers to the who, what, when, where. There is especially no answer to the question why.

Just like the patrons at Point Ephémère who had infuriated me, I was flattening the refugee story. I tried to whittle it down to one man, and I colored the entire experience in one shade rather than accepting

complexity. When Ahmed told me that he hated that people came to the slum and took pictures, I was confused about why it would bother him

so much. I thought he was worried people might see him living in such conditions, but it was so much more than that. The attempt to take a

snapshot of the refugee experience is futile: not only do we see it all the time, we also fail to see it because we’ve decided, like the French man who told us that they were Syrian, that we know the truth already.

I

’m not the only writer who has tried to tell The Refugee Story. In our compassion, we often try to dig up the people who are suffering,

already having decided what the narrative is going to be. We think that in

telling their stories we’ll make some change. What we create is an easilyconsumed mistruth.

Popular newspapers and magazines have focused on the widespread

refugee situation, collecting heart-wrenching quotes from asylum-seekers about feeling like animals, being mistreated, being exhausted. The

Independent writes about the “trail of misery,” while City Lab writes about the asylum-seekers’ hope “unraveled” in Paris. They take a snapshot

of the lives of each refugee and we read the newspaper and sigh. Then

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those stories become part of the picture of Paris, a part that you step

over just like you step over the woman bowed with a cup in her hands

in the Châtelet metro station. An easily consumed story is also an easily forgotten one.

When Malang-not-Malang instructed me to meet him in Stalingrad and

then another Malang-not-Malang said he didn’t know who Malang was, it frustrated me. I imagine that I got a small taste of the frustration Malang and Ahmed and other asylum-seekers feel in Paris. They’ve lived on the street for over a year and there are no answers. They do exactly what

they’re instructed to do but there is no neat ending in sight. While they’re very visible as a group, the individual man is a ghost. His story is too

complex, too difficult to write, especially when we expect him to speak

for the entire group. It’s easier to take a picture and let it speak for him; it’s easier to collect quotes that only depict suffering, as if everything

about him is his pain. Statistics and snapshots are important. It would be much worse for the refugee to be invisible because nobody wants to try to depict the complexity of his story. Brushing it into a different alley, or

under a different bridge, is exactly what we don’t want to do. Awareness is important, but it has to be accompanied by the individual story.

The first thing Ahmed told me about himself is that he is a translator.

He can speak five languages. I learned from him that our compassion

can also rest heavy on the shoulders of people who are suffering. In an effort to understand, or even help, we flatten. Malang and not-Malang taught me how difficult Paris has made it to know refugees because

they’ve been dehumanized to the point of self-silencing. Discovering the individual refugee has been made into a near-impossible task because

we’ve expected them to speak for the entire group, and because the city

has been so hostile to them that they have to hide in case the “truth” has them deemed unworthy.

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94 NIELSEN | USA

H

Nikolaj Nielsen NEW YORK, USA Spring 2017

“Maybe there is some not yet understood return to people we have loved and lost. I need to imagine the possibility even if I don’t believe it.”

—Susan Howe, “The Quarry”

I

am sitting in what may well be the most beautiful room in the country’s most beautiful building: the recently restored Rose Main Reading

Room of the New York Public Library’s main branch by Bryant Park. The

frescoed ceilings fifty feet overhead, European in their baroqueness, were reinforced this summer after one of the fifteen-pound rosettes fell to the floor in 2014, nearly hitting a patron and prompting a three-year closure

of the hall for a full restoration that I am now benefiting from. Satyrs and

angels dance across the mural above me. Three painters worked full-time during the restoration to re-sharpen the figures’ contours and to brighten their colors, faded as they had become after taking in a century of

sunsets through the cathedral windows that line both sides of the room.

The reading stations, solid vintage mahogany, complement and augment

the seeming heaviness of the ceiling but also underscore the inescapable elegance of this space.

Since the life of a student in New York City is essentially an extended game of musical chairs—especially when it comes to finding decent study spaces where one does not have to buy a $4 latte to justify

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hawking a seat—I have learned not to take for granted the days when I

am lucky enough to secure a spot in the Rose Room. I have come here

every weekend since I arrived in New York late this January, but with the exception of a seat I managed to secure on Saturday, January 28—my

birthday—I have usually stood on the threshold of this enormous hall, the shoulder bag by my side full of books, and felt disappointment creep up through my body as I realized that every single seat was taken, the piles of books next to each laptop a way for the Saturday squatters to signal that they do not intend to leave early.

Today, however, I decided to one-up my competing patrons and head

to Bryant Park half an hour before the library opened at 10:00 AM. Half a dozen New Yorkers were ahead of me in the line, but I felt confident

that I would get a seat in the Rose Room this time. Faith in the system,

however, gets you nowhere in the mad scramble for space in what surely must be the world’s most overcrowded city, though, so I speed-walked

(“No running allowed!” as the librarians told me) up the stairs to the Rose Room the moment the doors opened. Being in relatively good shape and utterly unconcerned with the opinions the people around me may have

of me, I became the first patron to snatch a seat in the Rose Room that

morning. I took up a bench at the exact center of the room, and I have not risen from my seat since.

I am sitting in what may well be the most beautiful room in the country’s

most beautiful building, and I am crying. I am crying because of marble— specifically, the three-foot slabs of marble that form the walls around me—and all that of which the provenance of those gigantic squares

of stone reminds me. A marvel of Greek revival architecture, the main

building of the New York Public Library was constructed using the same

material that the Athenians used. For reasons of patriotism and thrift, the building’s architects sourced their marble from a now-defunct open-

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pit mine in New England where, in late December 2016, a passer-by

discovered the body of a Palestinian junior at a New England college: my former best friend H.

When H killed herself that December morning, I had not thought about

her for two months. As high school friends who would soon be displaced by the moves to our respective colleges, we had promised each other to stay in touch. As college students scrambling to keep up with too many overlapping social commitments, we inevitably neglected each other.

When we were struggling through moments of vulnerable self-discovery, we had been each other’s confessors. Now, I relive the scene when I

watched, from ten time zones away, as divers fished her body out from

underneath an ice sheet in an abandoned quarry. How can I not feel that I am to blame, that I am not in some way complicit? To build the walls that tower around me, hundreds of quarriers had to excavate tens of

thousands of cubic feet of marble, leaving behind a flood-prone recess in the ground that formed the winter lake where my friend would eventually kill herself. “That’s ridiculous,” I may be able to tell myself, “she could have killed herself anywhere, in any of many different ways.”

Little does that insight do to stop my mind constantly playing back

the intricacies of her death: How she disappeared late on December

17, less than twelve hours after she sent text messages to three of her closest friends, telling them how glad she was to be staying with such

a hospitable host family over Christmas; how those friends launched an

online campaign to find H the following day; how state police discovered a body in a quarry thirty miles from her college just over an hour before I boarded a flight for Denmark; how I spent the duration of that eight-

hour flight hoping that it was not her, knowing that it probably was, and worrying how my family would find out about her death; how the body

had been identified as H’s when I landed in Denmark; how my parents,

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who hosted her over Christmas break three years earlier, could not stop imagining that H had killed herself at our house instead; and how the

police refused to rule her death a suicide until early February, for fear that the news “would upset the Christmas spirit” among the people who knew her.

W

hen she was sixteen, H applied for a scholarship to pursue a

two-year high school diploma at a boarding school abroad. From

hundreds of applicants, she won one of five such scholarships for

Palestinian students. An unnamed Englishwoman paid the €50,000 cost of her two-year stay at a glitzy international school in the Netherlands.

Visa complications, however, threatened to deny her that experience

before it began: At the Dutch embassy in Tel Aviv, H had three meetings with a man who was hellbent on keeping her out of the Netherlands.

The staffer, a Geert Wilders-lookalike with slicked-back milky curls and

condescension painted across his face, interrogated her in English and, noticing her hesitance, would let her go within five minutes of each

meeting. A week later, an email rejection would cite her poor command of English as the main reason for denying her a student visa.

H’s English had not improved when, for inexplicable reasons, she made the trip to Tel Aviv for the fourth time. The blond Dutchman had called

in sick that day, however, leaving her to meet with a female staffer in a

private room instead. During her interview, H uttered the same memorized lines of English: “How are you doing? I am a student. Miss Jones will

pay all my costs. I understand that I must leave the country as soon as my visa expires.” Her accent was just as heavy as it had been the past three times she recited her lines. The only variables that changed were

the substitution in personnel and her appearance without a hijab. She got her visa that Sunday and packed her bags overnight before traveling to a wealthy city on the banks of the Meuse at the southern tip of the Netherlands.

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Because of her issues at the Dutch embassy, H reached campus two weeks later than the rest of us. She missed a weekend camping trip

for first-year students, which had helped the rest of us find our social footings. Before she even arrived, I had committed to bringing three

people, all supposedly my newfound friends, to my house over fall break.

When H finally arrived on a sunny Sunday in mid-September, she was already an outsider among her supposed peers.

Word had begun to spread throughout the boarding house that a new student would arrive that afternoon, so a group of Arabic-speaking students improvised a welcome committee to induct H into the

community she would be joining. When she rolled her suitcase down the cobblestone alley in search of the school’s dorms that afternoon,

however, more students had gathered by the entrance to the boarding house than the well-meaning group of Arab greeters. Around fifteen

first-year students, myself included, had gathered across the narrow cobblestone alley, as if expecting a spectacle to unfold.

We were not disappointed, either: We saw a 5’3” Palestinian teenager wearing a dark long-sleeve shirt and an ankle-length skirt, her head

obscured by a hijab wrapped so carefully that not a single strand of hair showed to the mostly male onlookers. We were fascinated, too, by the

red soft-shell suitcase that trailed her across the uneven pavement—an

impossibly small vessel to carry the sum total of H’s possessions for the

next two years—but our attention quickly shifted when a Libyan secondyear student (the son of an imam) greeted H with an outstretched hand that she politely declined by crossing her right arm over her chest.

Flustered and possibly worried that a year spent in the Netherlands

had made him forget the cultural mores of his home culture, the Libyan boy smiled and laughed nervously, while he explained in Arabic that the building H was facing would be her home for the upcoming two

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years. By the time she had nodded in acknowledgment the Libyan boy’s

introduction, H was face to face with a fifty-year-old Indian man who, her

Libyan interlocutor explained, would be legally and practically responsible for her well-being during her time at the school. The Indian man greeted

her with a short speech that must have been utterly incomprehensible to her, because the only replies she managed were “Yes” and “Sorry?”

“Upon arrival on campus,” the Indian man who had welcomed H would

later tell me, “all students struggle through similar but different processes of coming to terms with who they are versus who they or their parents would want them to be. It is only natural.” This pattern—one he had spotted after twenty years as a house parent, or legal guardian and

pastoral care figure, at various international boarding schools across

the world—may help explain why I spent my first semester avoiding H,

because for me, that project of self-discovery meant coming out as gay.

From the moment H refused the Libyan boy’s hand, I flagged her as

religious, conservative, and, by association, homophobic. I was wrong, of course: H found out I was gay from her roommate, who had been among the three first people I came out to. She showed enough strength of

character to not just congratulate me on my honesty, but also begin her

own process of self-discovery. Moments after she shocked me by telling me she knew I was gay, she shocked me even more by taking off her

headscarf in the company of a man outside the family. As we sat on the

top floor of a narrow carpeted spiral staircase that doubled as the fire exit

for our dormitory, H, hijab in hand and tears down her cheek, came out to me as a non-believer.

T

hirteen months after our scene on the balcony, H became one of two of my classmates to spend Christmas 2013 at my house. I lured her

to Denmark by promising that she would see snow for the first time in her life, but it never snowed that Christmas. A day before the Dutch winter

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break began, temperatures across Denmark soared over the freezing

point. They would stay there until H and I returned to the Netherlands.

She never complained about the unseasonably warm weather, but it

denied H the fairytale experience of wintry Scandinavia she had pictured.

Instead of skating on frozen fjords and hiking over white mountains, H

spent two weeks trudging through gray, light-starved streets and dodging massive roadside puddles where freeze-thaw action had cracked the asphalt.

Perhaps the collective disappointment felt by everyone who spent

Christmas in Denmark that year explains the sulk on the faces of the

security personnel who frisked H at Billund Airport before she flew back to Amsterdam: They, too, had waited on a white Christmas that never came. Thus disappointed and eager to take their aggression out on a

scapegoat, they must have eyed the young, Palestinian girl with malignant expectation. “That head full of beautiful, jet black hair was enough to make anyone envious,” H’s eulogizer would say at her memorial four

years later. It was not her physical beauty that got H in trouble, however; the canister of pepper spray she carried in her purse was enough to warrant a closed-curtains questioning and her near-incarceration by

Danish police. It took an hour of apologies and stubborn insistence that the Dutch police had equipped her with the pepper spray for her own

protection before the visibly disappointed head of security at the airport confiscated the illegal canister and waved her through.

H spent the one-hour flight from Denmark to Amsterdam reproaching

herself for being stupid enough to pack the pepper spray in her carryon and praising the border security agents for not jailing her despite

her possession of an illegal weapon. As she boarded the train for our

college at the southernmost tip of the Netherlands, however, feelings of embarrassment and gratitude gave way to unarticulated concern, then

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downright terror as she rolled into the train station unarmed. That day

would be the only time she hailed a European taxi and paid thirty euros

for a half-hour drive to the gated safety of her high school campus. The school’s head of security met her on arrival, flanked by two security

guards on his right and the principal with his wife on left. The guards

escorted her to her dorm room and handed her a fresh canister of pepper spray.

In the months that followed her confession to me that she did not believe in Islam, H had begun coming out as non-Muslim to a growing circle of friends. Like me, she preferred gradual disclosures in person to grand

declarations online: We both wanted our comings-out to occur when we

were prepared for it. Unlike me, however, H did not discover a universally accommodating, welcoming community after coming out.

While most of her peers accepted her religious non-belief as a personal matter that they had no stake in, two divergent wings within the

community reproached her for the way she handled her self-realization.

The outermost wing of left-leaning students at our already left-leaning

high school rejected the premise that her religious non-belief was enough of a concern to warrant any sympathy. Comparing my coming-out to

hers, they argued—I think—that while I struggled against institutional, indoctrinated homophobia, she enjoyed a life perfectly suited to the

hegemonic operations of the heterosexual matrix. In the school’s most progressive students’ optics, H’s non-belief was a non-problem.

On the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, a subset of conservative Muslim students accepted—or at least claimed to accept—her doubts about Islam but took issue with the practical consequences of that

decision. As H began experimenting with her headgear, she would wear her hijab on certain days—at official functions, when she had Arabic classes, and whenever she risked having her picture taken—while

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either not wearing a hijab or, worse yet, draping it over her head so

loosely that her hair showed underneath on other days. These sartorial experiments struck a group of three Levantine Arabs, all men, as too

lighthearted: On two occasions, the Palestinian leader of the trio pulled H aside and called her clothes frivolous, profane, and even blasphemous, though to his dismay, the complaint he eventually filed to the school

about the unorthodox way H wore her headscarves failed to make the administration take action.

His attempt at official recourse through the school having failed, the Palestinian leader of the trio did something that would forever alter

the course of H’s life. Through a brother who lived in Bethlehem, H’s

hometown, he tracked down her family and informed them that their

daughter, had become an apostate. Worse still, he added, she was the

kind of apostate who “lets her hair down around other men like a whore.”

Immediately after her father hung up on the Palestinian boy, H’s Skype account lit up with attempted calls from relatives in various states of

agitation. Her mother cried, as did H. Her father yelled until he lost his voice. Her uncles called her a disgrace to the family. It was an older

brother, however, whose words she would be unable to forget. The older brother, who was living in Germany at the time, only heard about the

revelations of H’s non-belief after her father dropped his Skype call with

her in a rage at around two hours and forty minutes. Having hung up on

H, her father called H’s adult male relatives in a late-night conference call.

Their agenda: Decide which member of the family would resolve to kill

her. Later that night, when the brother in Germany had been chosen, H

took a collect call. The first words her brother spoke: “I am going to kill you.”

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T

hese things are not supposed to happen, except perhaps in special

reports on Al Jazeera English. Brothers are not supposed to threaten

their younger sisters with honor killings, let alone over something that

initially did not qualify as enough of an issue to warrant sympathy from H’s most inveterately Marxist classmates. Bodybuilding brothers living

in Germany are not supposed to take pictures with foot-long machetes

while flexing their grotesquely muscled biceps to scare their sister even

further, nor should they get in their cars, speed west to the Netherlands, take a photo next to the city’s coat of arms, send it to their sister, then

head back to Germany, knowing that they terrified her more than anything ever would.

Such plots—in the rarer sense of the word, denoting the intent to commit a heinous, murderous crime—have a scripted quality that make them, literally, unbelievable when they unfold in reality. H felt first-hand the

problem of other people’s disbelief when, the same day she received her brother’s selfie with the coat of arms, a Dutch policeman told her

he struggled to believe her story and therefore would not take action, pending a formal investigation of her charges. It took two hours of

panicked tears and her catatonic refusal to leave the police station before the police believed H’s story, or at least gave in to her pleas for some

form of protection. They armed her with a can of pepper spray and an

alarm button—hardly the proper weapons for fighting off assailants with machetes—and sent H back to the dormitories with a police escort.

She did not sleep the following two nights, and though she eventually

collapsed on my bed at four in the afternoon on day three, she insisted

that I lock the room and not leave it. She woke up twenty-six hours later, just in time for dinner.

That night, a Tuesday, our head of college joined us for a vaguely inedible serving of stamppot—mashed potatoes, curly kale, and boiled turkey

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sausage to accommodate halal requirements—and announced during the meal that the entire campus, which at this point had transitioned

from its temporary home downtown to a larger suburban space complete with a surrounding moat, would be under constant lockdown outside the school’s opening hours for daytime students. Two additional night-time guards would join the school, he added, prompting disgruntled noises from those students who had not yet heard about the fatwa over H’s

head. Thankfully, those unhappy students were somewhat appeased by his closing words: “Please do not worry, none of the guards are armed.

We care too much about your safety to run that risk.”

Though it unsettled H to learn that none of the three guards whose job

it was to keep her safe carried weapons, time would prove the school’s

administration justified in their nonchalant attitude toward the imminent

threat to her life. H’s bodybuilding brother never tried to kill her. Despite

the straightforwardness of his death threats, he never acted on them. He eventually lost track of H’s online persona when she created new email and Facebook accounts in the spring. The police recalled her pepper

spray. The school fired its two additional security guards. Curfew rules

went back to normal. H even ventured to sneak out with us for shots at

the nearby dive bar. Absent immediate and concrete reasons to fear for

her life, H seemed to have emerged unscathed from her personal crisis: As far as we could tell, H had begun to thrive in her last weeks in the Netherlands.

It would take three years and the discovery of her body under an ice

floe in a flooded quarry for H to prove us wrong. Maybe an instance of

collective myopia kept us from seeing the true extent of H’s inner torment; maybe her tormentors kept their influence on her too well hidden for

others to spot. No matter the explanation for our oversight, the facts

remain that four or five men contributed greatly to H’s suicide, and that

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the profound sway those men had over her went unnoticed by others.

What makes the fact of H’s psychological undoing so poetic, so tragically poignant, is the fact that these men drove her to the brink of suicide because of how much they loved her.

H

’s father started her undoing the night he disowned her with a fatwa.

The brother in Germany joined her father’s project by his threats and,

more diffusely and persistently, by looming over her life throughout her

time in the Netherlands. Given the inhumanity of their treatment of H after she removed her hijab, it seems tempting to claim the two men never

cared about her. To do so, however, one must ignore the familial love that allowed H’s father—a man whose conservatism and sense of ownership over his female children needs no further proof—to permit her to leave Palestine to study in the Netherlands. With a reputation built on legal

marijuana, cheap beer, radical leftism, and sexual frivolity, the Netherlands represented everything H’s father wanted to shield his daughter from: the decadent West and its morally vacuous apostates. Given his resentment of Europe and the values it coded for in his mind, his resolve to let his daughter study in the Netherlands was a tremendous display of love.

After she won the high school scholarship and before her father

acquiesced to her attempts to secure a Dutch student visa, H entered into a series of tenuous negotiations with her father. Among the conditions

H agreed to during this phase were her father’s demand that she fly to

Munich, meet her bodybuilding brother in the airport, drive to campus in

his car, let him inspect her room, and let him instruct H’s guardian not to let her interact with male students outside the classroom. She likewise

agreed to pack twenty-eight hijabs, one for each day in a lunar month, to turn down any meat products unless she had seen the “Certified Halal” sticker on the box from which it came, and to let her bother visit the

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school during her first three months. Her father never even discussed the possibility that H might drink alcohol, eat pork, have sex, or renounce Islam.

Having negotiated her way across the Mediterranean, H left her father’s

sphere of immediate influence. Still, while the liberties of life as a boarding student suited her when she could afford to take them, the financial and

cultural realities of H’s world made it unfeasible for her to gain, sustain, or even desire the total freedom most students around her yearned for. Her

scholarship limited H’s ability to care for herself in moments of need. The full stipend she won from a British heiress covered her tuition and room

and board expenses, even allowed her €50 per month in pocket money, but she still lacked the financial stability most of her peers enjoyed.

School breaks were a chance for most students to explore Western and

Central Europe; for H, they coincided with a scramble for housing at one of the too few local host families willing to take groups of teenagers in

for a week during the public holidays. While most students dodged the

school’s canteen, whenever it served certain particularly Dutch dishes— variations of boiled sausage on beds of mashed cabbage, potato,

curly kale, or carrot, usually served with yesterday’s boiled snow peas

and dressed with black pepper to reduce the blandness—and went to

nearby cafes, H had no other options than to eat the food the canteen staff served her. Since the company that ran the canteen stored all

meat products in large, unlabeled containers, H had to forgo the boiled sausage, leaving her only the tasteless bed of carbs and a side of stale vegetables.

The horrors of the canteen aside, H struggled with more fundamental

issues as she tried to express herself. Her English could only improve

since that befuddled opening encounter in the cobblestone alley outside

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the boarding house in early September, but eighteen months into her twoyear degree, she still struggled with failing grades for her English class,

a course designed for students with near-zero proficiency upon arrival at the school. And since all non-language courses were taught in English, her language difficulties bled into her remaining coursework.

No matter how eager she was to learn Chemistry, her subject of choice, H had to work twice as hard as her classmates to earn worse marks. While her peers lingered in the canteen after meals, H returned to her desk to

translate her notes from the day’s classes into Arabic. This transcription usually took her two to four hours, at the end of which process she had reviewed so many key words that she could not possibly remember all

of them. Despite her diligence, H had a Chemistry vocabulary that was basic at best. Given the mercurial instability of the English-based facts

in her Arabic-speaker’s brain, H inevitably turned to her Arabic Literature

class for respite. Twice per week, this course gave her a chance to prove her eloquence, sophistication, and perfectionism, and thereby to regain her sense of academic worth and merit. Her professor, an autodidact

Belgian-Lebanese teacher, would not only acknowledge her intelligence;

he would fall in love with it, becoming the third in a series of men to grow passionately, abusively fond of H.

I

n retrospect, it seems almost inevitable that H would become his

favorite student. Like her, he could barely express himself in English:

Twenty years of marriage to a Belgian woman had perfected his French but left his English as rudimentary as it had been before he left Beirut.

Like H, he was a Levantine Arab surrounded by the sons and daughters

of the Gulf’s wealthy elites: In H’s Arabic Literature class alone, he found himself teaching a princess, an heir to an oil company, and the son of

the Sultan of Oman’s aide-de-camp—a position of proximity to extreme power and wealth that must have reminded him that he had spent his

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life struggling to scale the social ladder from its lowest rungs in Beirut’s slums, and that he would never come close to reaching the top.

To the teacher, H represented not just a distilled version of the ideal

student to receive a scholarship to attend this school; in her, he saw

himself. He complemented her intelligence and, because H enjoyed the intellectual recognition he gave her, began openly playing favorites. On her first report card, he called H “an utter delight”; halfway through her

second semester, she was “everything that makes it worthwhile to teach.”

At the end of H’s first year, he had to quote Adonis to express his feelings for her, though as he warned the “unfortunate souls” who do not read Arabic, it loses the beauty in translation.

A year after he quoted Adonis, he found the words—in almost non-broken English—to express how he had felt about H at the time. In an email sent to the entire school with the title “H and me,” he gave his perspective on the evolution and derailment of their relationship. In a meandering

indictment of everyone from the school dentist, her house parent, and

the “evil friends” who led her astray, H’s teacher spent a thousand words on a clarifying email that got him fired in disgrace. His exposé made

clear that “I accuse Miss H for nothing, Miss H is a victim of her society, of the negligence of school responsible [sic] and her evil friends.” This

assurance aside, he informed the whole student body that “In June 2013, Miss H felt very tired physically and mentally,” adding that H “chose to

visit my family, my wife and me, and told me terrible things in her private

life. She asked us for help, and shelter. Indeed, she has stayed with us for several days, emptying her painful past, sometimes very painful.”

The role he envisioned for himself as H struggled through her detachment from her family becomes evident in the email’s twenty-second paragraph: “We were true mom and dad to her, especially when she decided to call

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us Mom and Dad in September 2013, and we assumed this role fully [...] she is not obliged to call us dad and mom, although it brings us much happiness.” The supposed idyll of H’s life with her Arabic teacher and

his wife would culminate later that fall: “We sang together, danced, and

laughed. She flourishes in the right way. We helped her in whatever she

wants, as long as it does not harm her, or she turns down the wrong path [...] In brief, nothing missed to her!”

But come H’s eighteenth birthday that November, H’s teacher noticed

changes to her behavior: “Bad friends led her to declare war against her parents,” he notes, adding that “The school decided to support Miss

H, drive her to the police, declaring her fear of her father to you in the

canteen, playing the role of martyr, suddenly changing his approach by adopting a strategy by eliminating me.”

His email laments H’s changed behavior and highlights her supposed

ingratitude toward him: “she stopped speaking to me, even on Dec. 20th, the day of her departure with Nicolay in Denmark during the Christmas

holidays,” he notes, before summarizing: “It’s hard, when I pay the ticket to her, and she refuses to say goodbye to me...”

What his email omits, however, are the reasons for H’s sudden

detachment from him: Nowhere in his thousand-word email does the teacher mention the times when he sought H’s permission to legally

adopt her. It never occurs to him that while she “chose her room in our house, [and chose her] wallpaper, bed, mattress...” H felt trapped by a

dominating patriarch who reminded her of the controlling father whose

love became so oppressive it choked her. He says H “decided to continue her studies in Belgium (because she hated studying in the United States)”

but fails to mention the weeks he spent coaxing H into attending a college close to his home. Likewise, he leaves out his irate in-class outburst the

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day H announced that she had matriculated at a college in the country he claimed she hated so much.

That e-mail was, in short, a public shaming so severe that the school’s

head of college sent a response within ten minutes, asking all students to delete his message and wrote a follow-up e-mail announcing the Arabic teacher’s dismissal an hour later.

A week after the first email, I received another email with a similarly

cryptic title: “Guess whose email [address] this is...” I had asked H to

tell me the moment she decided between the four US colleges that had offered her full scholarships to pursue a four-year liberal arts degree. I

needed to look no further than the sender: H—@—.edu. In the body, a

single line: “As promised, you are the first one I am sending an e-mail to from my college account.”

At risk of reading too much into a medium that many people loathe and

no one takes very seriously, that email did more than merely blow digital white smoke in my direction; it signaled that H had recovered from the

shock and embarrassment of having her Arabic teacher put her innermost struggles on display. It literally and symbolically started a new chapter in H’s life.

By joining an educational institution in the US, she seized the chance to break free of three men whose possessive love had made her life

miserable. For H, the move across the Atlantic meant a chance at stable inner peace. In New England, there would be no vindictive brother in

the next state over; at college, no professor would fall so madly in love with her mind that he would try to legally adopt her; as a legal adult,

she no longer had to inform her parents of her whereabouts, send them

her grades, or rely on them financially. And yet H’s American dream had

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its darker dimensions: total severance from the men who oppressed

and tormented her in the past, also meant that she was, for all external purposes, completely forgotten.

H

’s college may be in that state’s third-largest city, but when my

Greyhound driver drops me off at the bus station, it does not take

me long to see the place for what it is: a sleepy town—or rather, a shire, the New England term for a cluster of houses too large to be a village

but far too small to constitute a city—where so little happens that on a

Friday afternoon like this one, a visitor can toss a sandwich wrapper in a trash can by the main bus terminal and return an hour later to discover that it is still the only piece of garbage in the bag. My total solitude at

this downtown bus stop is not an unusual phenomenon, I later discover: For want of passengers, the shire recently had to downscale both the

size and number of its town buses. Rather than drive the 48-seaters that

operate in most provincial cities, bus drivers here move through the city in custom-fitted motorhomes. Every two hours, these buses run along three routes—the Emerald, Ruby, and Diamond Lines—through the town and

its vicinities. They seat up to twelve people, though there are only three of

us on board this afternoon’s Emerald Line bound for the college. Because my fellow passengers alight several stops before me, the bus driver

shows me a service that is entirely unwarranted given the $1 price of my ticket and drives me all the way through the college’s iron-clad gates along a perfectly-paved road to the college’s main building.

Few people visit H’s college, and those who do so usually travel by car to avoid the ten-hour, three-transfer Greyhound ride, so my friend M—

knows it can only be me sitting on the back seat of the Emerald Line as it rolls onto the college grounds. This gives her time to hide behind one of

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the Grecian columns that adorn the college’s beautiful neoclassical main building. I leave the motorhome and as I struggle to wedge my suitcase free of the bus door, M comes running up to me and hugs me from

behind. She cries, of course, but I know her tears are about more than the fact that we haven’t seen one another in three years. “I am so happy to see you,” M will tell me later, “but I also hate that you have to be here.”

H

ow did no one see it coming? That question loomed during the first

night’s conversation with M and friends over bottles of red wine and

bad pre-packaged curry, just as it would at the following afternoon’s memorial for H, held in a campus canteen-cum-lounge. The official

college lectern seemed out of place given the locale, its crescent-shaped rows of chairs. Still more people were standing around the room’s

perimeter, bringing the total attendance close to three fourths of the

college’s population of eight hundred students. Alongside the lectern was a large photo portrait of H mounted on an easel that once stood in her bedroom.

The picture, taken by M half a year before the suicide, shows H outside

a yellow timber building. She is wearing a light blue denim shirt. The two buttons she has undone barely hint at her cleavage but fully expose her

necklace, which has a small pendant that is less notable for what it is—a silver loop—than for what it is not—a crescent moon. Her hair, jet black against the patches of light green in the background, stands out and

commands the viewer’s full attention. At least until her eyes, hazel and inscrutable, come into view. With her brows raised slightly higher than

most people’s, H might come across as self-confident and amused, even arrogant, but the foreboding melancholy of her head-on gaze undoes

that impression. The result is a photograph that mesmerizes the audience

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for no other reason than the incredibly scant information it reveals about its subject—a condition of general mystery that was emblematic of H’s existence.

First to speak, the college’s president tried to hide her natural ease with public speaking in front of this day’s audience. Her voice, an otherwise lively legato, was as soft and solemn as possible as she thanked us

for having come to the service. “This has not been an easy time for us

all,” she begins, adding: “The loss of a community member is always a

tragedy for those affected, but to lose someone who is—was—as full of life as H, that is something we cannot possibly fathom.”

Her eulogy would go on to animate H as the college officials knew her,

but it also went beyond mere platitudes. Listing H’s accomplishments, the president traced H’s life from the girls’ school she attended in Bethlehem, and how, fresh out of middle school, she pioneered an initiative to help

women married to abusive husbands find the courage to go to court and,

*at the end of her Palestinian education, she ranked first in the country.

She recounted H’s time in the Netherlands, the student groups she

started and led, the classes she aced, and the challenges she faced.

Finally, she spoke of her nearly cinematic list of accomplishments while at college, a list made all the more unreal by the fact that H never once

boasted about any of it: the way she rallied students from twenty colleges across New England to participate in concrete relief efforts that brought

food on the table and translators on the ground for hundreds of refugees on Lesbos; how she volunteered as a student on the college’s Judicial

& Restorative Justice panel to adjudicate over student infractions such as rape or sexual harassment; and how she spent the summer after

her sophomore year documenting purposeful miscarriages of justice in a Jordanian refugee camp, which apparently got her detained by the

Jordanian secret police and resulted in her permanent ban from entering the country.

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Of course, neither the president nor the subsequent eulogizers that

day were able to answer that looming question about H’s reasons. But

somehow in their overlapping variations on the same themes of H’s life, the speakers did hint at a possible reason why this tragedy so caught everyone by surprise: H’s unknowability.

I

considered H my closest friend for two years of my life and tried my

best to stay updated on at least the most significant events in her life,

but I knew nothing of the things that the college’s president enumerated that day. I also didn’t know until I heard the second eulogy, given by the woman who hosted H that Christmas break and was the last person to

see her alive, that H had attended weekly services at the nearby Roman Catholic church, and “died a Christian who inhabited the teachings and values of Jesus Christ.”

It wasn’t until the closing words of the third eulogy, however, that I realized why there was so much I did not know about H. J, a

quintessential young jock who looks like he should be rushing fraternities at a business school instead of eulogizing an Arab woman at a far-

left liberal arts college, emerged as the day’s most eloquent speaker.

He spent most of his time behind the podium cycling through H’s

distinguishing features, covering everything from “that beautiful head

of hair” to her remarkable equipoise and tolerance when confronted by

the opposite. Citing the time he once yelled back at a local truck-driver

hurling racial and religious slurs as he and H walked across downtown, he recalled how H rebuked him for responding.

“An enemy is a friend you are refusing to listen to,” he quoted H as

saying. “The greatest task for all of us, the only way we can hope to know someone, is by letting them say things that hurt.”

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I remember my immediate reaction—that it was so wonderfully, tragically like H to think that the most meaningful interactions we have with other people must necessarily hurt us—but it took me the rest of the day to

understand just how much resonance those words truly had for H in her personal life.

That night, I overheard a fight between M and A—, a Pakistani student who was part of H’s close circle of college friends. M, it seems, had

planned to boycott the memorial. She wanted to protest the college’s

decision to hold it in a cafeteria and to mount five-by-three print-outs of

H’s face on easels that would loom over the audience and remind them of their loss. Her decision to attend the memorial after all, prompted by my visit and the pressure it placed on her to be a gracious host, angered A, who had first proposed the boycott and counted on M to support him.

As they fought about the best way to commemorate a person who chose to kill herself, A reproached the school for presenting a too-polished, one-dimensional version of H as a high-achieving angel who whose

suicide was fated by her early life and the notion that she was too good

for this world. The college had airbrushed H’s life, he argued, leaving only trace amounts of her flawed humanity. To M, however, A’s insistence on

presenting a multi-faceted, imperfect H was every bit as reproachable as the college’s supposed airbrushing of her life.

“Everyone in the audience knows she killed herself,” I heard her shout at

one point. “And everyone is still angry with her or hurt by her actions. Why would you want to repeat that she was a flawed, fragile person to a crowd of people who already know that?”

The dispute between A and M devolved into general ad hominem

comments, and their positions grew both more inveterate and more

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severe. To her, he was tarnishing a dead person’s reputation to feed a perverted fascination with creating strife. To him, she had done H

injustice by showing up to a memorial service that H would never have wanted. The two found unlikely common ground, however, when their conversation turned to the day’s final eulogizer.

“J gave the final speech,” M told A, “Do you really think I can disgrace her compared to that?”

“How the hell could they let him do that,” A responded. “After everything he did to her?”

It had been obvious from J’s eulogy that he and H were lovers once, and

that he regretted her death because he wanted burningly to be able to go on loving her. What it turns out he had not disclosed, however, was the

disruptive, tormenting role he had played in H’s life in the months leading up to her death in December. After a year-long relationship in which they divided their time almost evenly between mad love and bitter feuds, H

and J had broken up that September. He had said the words to end it, but

the ease with which she was able to get over him apparently made J want both to win her back and to psychologically torment her.

When H rejected his advances, he gave up the first part of his plan and began undermining her self-confidence. He called her a slut so often

that H seemed to grow indifferent to it. He tried to convince her would-

be lovers that she was aloof and vicious. He pursued every romantically

disruptive strategy that a slighted lover might use to take revenge on his ex, and while J could not have known that his attempts to punish H for

whatever he felt she had done to him would work so effectively, his ploys made him the fourth in a series of men who’d grown violently possessive of H when she did not reciprocate their affection to the extent that

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they wanted her to. Like H’s father, brother, and former Arabic teacher, J tormented H as retribution for what he must have thought was her deliberate aloofness.

J’s opinion of H moved in oscillating motions between extreme love and extreme hatred. His mental reversals may seem inexplicable, but they

follow a too-familiar pattern. H’s father adored his young daughter, and

his idealization of her eventually grew so extreme that he cited her as his greatest, if not his only, source of pride. He thought she was destined for greatness and tried, as much as possible within the misogynistic

bounds of H’s home society, to encourage her to excel. While outsiders may regard her father’s decision to let H travel abroad for high school

as unworthy of great praise, it marked a degree of faith in and hope for H that he did not have for her five sisters. H’s brother shared this faith in her future and literally drove many hours out of his way to pick her

up in Amsterdam when she first arrived in Europe, to drive to her high

school bearing presents for her over Eid, and to give her all the parochial support she needed. When that relationship soured after H’s biological relatives became murderously obsessed with her, her Arabic teacher followed the family’s template and went from boundless admiration

through borderline obsession to eventual resentment as he found himself unable to monopolize H’s life and mind. J, too, was so infatuated with

H, her intellect, her optimism, and her promise of something impossibly

desirable, that he also grew possessive of her. He could not bear it when she refused to let him mean as much to her as she meant to him. J felt the what every significant male figure in H’s life has felt about her: that she either had to be his or had to die.

During the first three months of their relationship, J bought H a bouquet

of lilies every week, paid for each of the countless pricey meals they ate

together, introduced her to his family, took her yachting in Massachusetts,

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took her on a weekend trip to Chicago for her birthday, and helped

her through a semester-long dispute with college administrators over

the terms of her status as a non-resident alien in the United States. He

was her chauffeur, chef, friend, and lover. When she applied for asylum as a religious refugee, she listed him as a reference to vouch for her

conversion to Christianity and the “imminent, life-threatening danger” she faced in Palestine. It is perversely fitting the that in the end, J

deliberately inserted himself into a feud that H would give anything to

escape. Not long after her suicide, he would travel sixteen hours by plane and car to reach Bethlehem. He would wander through the city’s Islamic graveyards, scanning countless tombstones with inscriptions written in an alphabet he could not read, searching for a line of Arabic script that

looked like a print-out of H’s full name written in Arabic calligraphy. When he found it after three days of searching, he would fulfill what he called his “duty as a friend and a Christian” and plant a small, wooden cross

beside her tombstone. He would have preferred to reinter her ashes but found comfort in knowing that her family would never lay flowers at her

grave, thereby allowing him the hope that his subversive cross would go undetected for a long time.

T

he first time H gave me reason to debunk my assumptions about her was fifteen minutes after midnight on a Saturday in October of 2012.

She and I shared a biology class, so we had spent that day fulfilling that

course’s fieldwork requirement on a day-long trip to the Drielandenpunt, a forest in which the unfenced borders of three countries meet: the

Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium. The Drielandenpunt is unremarkable except as a geopolitical oddity, but as temperate forests tend to do in the fall, it grows in beauty as its leaves start to fade. Our teacher, a patriotic Dutch woman who seized every opportunity to imply the superiority of

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her country over all others, had spent the afternoon pursuing an unusual hypothesis: She split our class into three groups of five and tasked each group with measuring the species diversity in each national zone within the Drielandenpunt.

To guarantee that her country would tally the most species, our teacher joined the Dutch team and counted quadrants for five consecutive

hours, giving the two remaining groups ample time to walk around the

forest pretending to do work. H led the German expedition, while I was

across the border in Belgium, but our groups quickly merged. H had an idea that could spare us a day of counting: We would take two or three photographs of each group hovering over a quadrant, spend the rest

of the afternoon as we pleased, and make sure that when the groups

reconvened, Mrs. de K—announced her group’s tally first. We would then

subtract between five and ten percent from the Dutch figure, leaving Mrs. de K happy that her country had triumphed and the rest of us happy to have tricked our teacher.

H’s plan won instant and unanimous support. Having resolved to

plagiarize a teacher in a way that would let us taunt and ridicule her

patriotism without risking discovery, we felt a subversive, rebellious glee that made everyone’s day. Still, our collective scam of Mrs. de K would

only serve as a precursor to the greater, more intense feelings of bliss that followed. As we walked for hours on end below the variegated foliage

overhead, the ten of us felt the instinctive, intensive joy that only our total awe at nature’s beauty can prompt. Six of us had grown up in temperate climates, of course, and three other students had gone on trips to

Western Europe in the fall, but for the one student who had never walked through a deciduous forest in the full splendor of early fall, the trees were so beautiful that she could not contain her emotions. I was walking next to H when she began to cry. Asking her if anything was wrong, I got a reply through stifled tears: “It is so beautiful here.”

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Three years later, as she talked to me over Skype from a swing set

overlooking the valley below her college, H would repeat those words.

She did not cry, but the same melancholy look leapt from her eyes. Her

lips were pursed in a half-full smile, but her downturned eyes, facing away from the camera, created an emotionally incongruent impression that has stayed with me to this day. She seemed to proclaim her total happiness

with the lower half of her face and undo it or declare herself unworthy of that joy with her eyes.

“Seeing comes before words,” John Berger tells us, and these two

moments have stayed with me precisely because I cannot unpack the emotional state they are coding for. H’s two utterances share a loose

family resemblance with comments by at least two of history’s greatest,

most enigmatic women: In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Daisy spends an afternoon eloping in her mind with Gatsby, her former lover.

As she imagines alternate realities and wonders if she could have married him instead of her husband, Daisy smiles with total emotional investment but barely manages to conceal her profound sadness. She might have kept up this facade, too, were it not for the unforgettably cinematic

scene in which Gatsby ascends a balcony, picks out an endless stream of gorgeous dresses, and throws them down to Daisy, who is standing

below, “crying stormily” as if the dresses falling from the sky were her, a woman who is free to do everything except pursue the lover she wants more than anything in the world.

Like Daisy in Gatsby, Anna Karenina experiences a confluence of absolute joy and irrepressible sadness in Tolstoy’s enormous novel. When she

consummates her affair with Vronsky, Anna’s body shows her complete

devotion to the man she wishes were her husband. In a climactic scene that marks Anna and Vronsky’s first physical intimacy, however, Anna’s eyes fill with “tears of shame.” In one of the more romantic passages

across the Western canon’s greatest love stories, joy and suffering remain

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inextricable, the former always giving us reason to fear the onset of the

latter. Anna’s abandon marks an apotheosis of joy, but through a system

of mental checks and balances, she both feels unworthy of her happiness and realizes the inevitability of her demise. Five hundred pages before

she—like H—jumps to her death for unknowable reasons, Anna senses that she cannot deviate from her fatal trajectory.

She is not alone in this realization: The history of Western drama is replete with tragic heroines who start irreversibly down a path toward death at

the exact moment that they come within grasping distance of their most passionate yearnings. La Traviata’s Violetta spends several years as a

Parisian courtesan, but her tuberculosis only enters its terminal phase

the moment she falls for Alfredo; Emma Bovary waits until she is most

desperately in love before committing suicide; and more recently, the only woman whom James Bond truly loves drowns herself during their monthlong Venetian honeymoon in Casino Royale.

The greater a tragic heroine’s proximity to the object she desires, the

more imminent her collapse or suicide. When she jumped into the quarry that December morning, H was closer than ever to attaining a goal she had striven toward for at least a decade: independence. Her decision to enroll at a college in the US presented H with a serious chance at

permanent safety. There would be no brother looming in the neighboring state; indeed, the FERPA rules and her legal severance from her parents

meant neither they nor her Arabic teacher could find out at which college she had enrolled.

With her matriculation, H gained freedom in the negative sense of the

word, freedom from want. But the psychological relief that came with this guarantee of her safety would eventually backfire: H finally enjoyed the

most elementary human need in Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs”:

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physical security. But once she no longer had to worry about staying

alive, her needs grew more complex and unattainable. The higher rungs of Maslow’s pyramid—love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization— must have struck H as impossible ideals: While she was the victim of her

father’s fatwa, her anxieties revolved exclusively around survival. Her only goal: not to get killed.

The severity of this threat galvanized her emotions, leaving her

psychologically invincible for as long as she struggled to stay alive. While she risked murder at her brother’s hands, H had neither worried about

gossip nor struggled with impostor syndrome. When these threats faded, H not only faced retrospective psychological trauma but also quickly

developed an emotional fragility that would ultimately prove fatal. As she abandoned the survivalist mindset of her high school years, H shed her mental armor. Ironically, H’s family may have succeeded in their goal of killing her the moment they could no longer physically pursue her.

If H’s suicide was triggered by her heightened emotional sensitivity and

fragility, then who is to blame for her death? J? Her teacher? Her father?

Her brother? Herself? Perhaps, but as tempted as I am to retroactively designate one person as H’s indirect murderer, that move would be

largely self-serving. If I could name a person directly and exclusively to

blame for H’s psychological disintegration, I could avoid wondering if I,

like those other significant male figures in her life, might have contributed to her death. Did my negligence and ignorance contribute to her sense

of despair? When she jumped into the quarry, I had not spoken to her in

months. I had missed her last three incoming Skype calls in the preceding months. I had failed to honor a promise to see her for two consecutive

summers. Perhaps my inability to honor our friendship and to reciprocate the attention she gave me at regular intervals increased her sense of emotional isolation?

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A therapist might discourage this line of self-incriminating questions,

but to insist that “you should not blame yourself” is to forgo a thorough

consideration of my possible culpability. I did not mean to encourage H’s suicide, but neither did J. My mistreatment of H may lack J’s purposeful malevolence, but it would be naive to trivialize how much it can hurt to lose a friend. H tried in vain to administer CPR to our friendship.

Given how close our friendship had been in high school and how much she must have wanted to maintain that intimacy, can I really say with

confidence that I hurt her less through my neglect than J did through his social manipulation? Than her teacher did by his public shaming of her?

Than her brother did by threatening to kill her? Than her father did by denouncing her?

Perhaps the question of my possible culpability is nothing more than a

coping mechanism, a way by which I remind myself to grieve and regret.

Perhaps I self-torment because I want to feel something like the profound emotional hurt she must have felt before she committed suicide. I like

these possibilities and want to believe that there is little to be gained by

studying the mistakes I made in my relationship with H. I can even accept the argument that I am less likely to have triggered her suicide than the other men in her life. But what I cannot accept and cannot stand is the stubborn residue of doubt that leaves the question of my culpability

unresolved. That tormenting uncertainty exists because of the character trait that H’s eulogizers all cited: her unknowability.

H may never have lied to her acquaintances, but she also never gave

anyone a full view of her inner life. Instead, she showed different sides of her personality to each of us. The H I knew was soft-spoken and

reflective; M knew her as a party-starting extrovert. The college president regarded H as a budding social justice activist; J viewed her as a brave

escapee from a repressive society who needed saving. It is not so much

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that each of us hold different pieces of a complex puzzle. Rather, we hold pieces of different puzzles, pieces that seems so radically different that they cannot possibly belong to the same contiguous whole.

Only a person as unknowable and complex as H could contain so many

diverging character traits, so many different fates and life goals, so many opposite moods within a single mind. Unfortunately, the inscrutability of

H’s true self—or true selves—would make it impossible for those around her to sense that something was wrong. H’s opaqueness and mystery

would leave no solid explanation of or motive for her suicide, making the memory of her death a constantly fresh wound that is ripped open every time I see her portrait, pass a young Arab woman who looks like her, or,

like now, find myself studying inside the marble walls of the Rose Room of the New York Public Library.

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AFTERWORD

Cyrus R. K. Patell The philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that “power ceases

in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.” The

essays in this issue of Electra Street demonstrate the virtues of shooting across gulfs and crossing boundaries—boundaries of nationality, race, class, gender, sexuality, language and—let me stress this—academic

discipline. I’m a literary scholar by trade, but I’ve always been interested in the intersections between literary study and other disciplines. Guest

editor Charles Siebert is a an author and journalist with an MFA in poetry, and his non-fiction work consistently explores the intersections between

the humanities and the sciences. Two of the authors whose work appears here are, or were, majors in Literature and Creative Writing, but the others

hail from Film, Philosophy, Political Science, and Theater. What links them all is an abiding interest in the power of storytelling and a willingness to

explore the stories of those they encountered as they traveled the world during their undergraduate experience at NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD).

I was an undergraduate in the early 1980s. When my first-year roommate wanted to spend his junior year abroad at American University in Cairo, perfecting his Arabic and enhancing his understanding of the Middle

East, he had to jump through hoop after bureaucratic hoop in order to get the year abroad set up and approved. The attitude that seemed

to prevail at our university was, “Why would you want to spend time

anywhere else than here?” Things are apparently different these days.

According to the website for that college’s office of admissions, “about

60 percent” of its undergraduates “integrate international experience into

their undergraduate careers,” through “enrollment in a foreign university,”

“enrollment in a program sponsored by another US college or university,”

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“participation in field and experiential programs,” or “programs administered” by the university’s summer school.

Over the past decade, NYU has been trying to go further, to create

what its president emeritus, John Sexton, has described as a “global

network university:” an integrated collection of campuses and studyaway sites designed to counteract the parochialism that beset most

US universities in the second half of the twentieth century. In a 2010

essay that articulated this conception of the university, Sexton invoked

Kwame Anthony Appiah’s description of the “cosmopolitan patriot” who “can entertain the possibility of a world in which everyone is a rooted

cosmopolitan, attached to a home of one’s own, with its own cultural

particularities, but taking pleasure from the presence of other, different, places that are home to other, different people.” Sexton argued that “in

the decades ahead, a significant share of the most talented and creative faculty, students and staff will be Appiah’s cosmopolitans.” Sexton’s

hope was that NYU and other universities that adopt the network model

will become places where “in a reinforcing cycle, cosmopolitans can find each other, meet and re-meet, engage and re-engage in a kaleidoscopic set of contexts and relationships.”

The essays in this volume dramatize the power of an undergraduate

education shaped by this vision of cosmopolitan circulation. NYUAD’s Office of Global Education and Outreach facilitates the circulation of NYUAD through the college’s study-away programs, which enable

students to spend semesters and three-week January terms at NYU’s

campuses in New York and Shanghai, and its study-away sites in Accra, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Florence, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Paris,

Prague, Sydney, Tel Aviv, and Washington, DC. The Letters from Afar

initiative is one way in which the office promotes deep engagement with the local contexts in which these study-away experiences take place.

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The result, as you have seen from reading these essays, is thoughtful

connection with the dynamics of culture in both local and global terms.

The NYUAD curriculum is an example of how the model of the US liberal arts college can be adapted to become a vital part of a global network university. A well-designed liberal arts curriculum enables students to become critically aware of the complexities of meaning-making and

knowledge-production. It relies not on distance learning but on close,

face-to-face learning, at its best across seminar tables. It asks students to engage in cosmopolitan conversations—with their professors, with

their readings, with their classmates—across divides of nationality, race, class, gender, sexuality, language and academic discipline. It’s a good

thing when engineering students are asked to take literature courses like mine that require them think outside of their comfort zones; it’s a good

thing when literature majors have to take courses that require them to be in labs or to deal with numbers. Adding global education to this model

enables students to apply these ideas and skills to practical interactions

with cultures, peoples, and stories from around the world. This globalized liberal arts curriculum prepares them to confront the complexities that

accompany the lived experience of cosmopolitanism, in which the kinds of “conversations” I’ve described are rarely easy—and are often quite difficult, indeed.

Cosmopolitanism isn’t a panacea, because it has no mechanism to bring counter-cosmopolitans—those who are unwilling to test their beliefs

and practices by listening closely to those whose beliefs and practices are quite different—to the conversational table. But what these essays

suggest in the end is that the world would be a far better place and far more able to deal with the significant challenges that face our species

in the coming century, if more people adopted the kind of cosmopolitan engagement that these writers have dared to explore.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Carol Brandt is Associate Vice Chancellor for Global Education and

Outreach and Vice Provost at NYU Abu Dhabi. She leads the strategic

and academic administration for NYUAD’s programs of global education, including Semester Study Abroad, the January Term Program, Summer

Programs, Regional Academic Seminars, the Engineers for Social Impact program, Community-based Learning in the UAE, and Student Global Mobility Services.

Jocilyn Estes is a senior at NYU Abu Dhabi, studying Philosophy and Political Science. She originally hails from the Texas Hill Country, and

misses both good Tex-Mex cuisine and her dog, Charlie, on a daily ba-

sis. Her interests include practical philosophy, public diplomacy, and the intersection of US foreign and social policy.

Valeriya Golovina was raised in a small town of Yakymivka in the SouthEast of Ukraine. She graduated from NYU Abu Dhabi with a double

major in Film & New Media and History. She has pursued studies and professional opportunities in the US, Germany, England, China, UAE, Ukraine, and Tanzania. Her creative interest lies in the intersection of

photography, writing, and documentary projects that reveal personal

narratives and complicate official stories. Currently, Valeriya is based in Wellington, New Zealand pursuing an MFA in Film.

Leslie Gray is a senior at NYUAD with a major in Theater and minors in

Political Science, Arabic, and Gender and Sexuality studies. His current research includes queer festivals in the Middle East and the circulation

of a global queerness. He has also worked on numerous theater projects as a lighting designer including the British School Al-Khubairat’s Billy

130 CONTRIBUTORS

Elliot and National Queer Theater’s forthcoming Criminal Queerness Festival.

Tyler Headley is currently a Brent Scowcroft Award Fellow at the Aspen Strategy Group. His work has previously been published in magazines

including Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, and The Diplomat, as well

as in peer-reviewed journals. He graduated from New York University Abu Dhabi summa cum laude with a BA in Political Science.

Nikolaj Nielsen is a member of the NYU Abu Dhabi Class of 2018. He graduated with a BA in Literature and Creative Writing. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His contribution to this volume, “H,” was completed in the spring of 2017.

“H” explores the life and death of his best friend from high school.

Cyrus R. K. Patell is Global Network Professor of Literature at NYU

Abu Dhabi and Professor of Literature at NYU in New York. His study

of Lucasfilm for the series “Philosophical Filmmakers” (Bloomsbury) is

forthcoming in 2020. With Deborah Lindsay Williams, he is the co-editor of The Oxford History of the Novel in English: American Fiction since 1940.

Zoe Jane Patterson is s a third-year Literature and Creative Writing major at NYU Abu Dhabi. She is from Canada, but grew up in the

oasis city of Al Ain in the UAE. Zoe is interested in the role of children

in literature (as both subjects and readers) as well as feminism, family and identity. She writes poetry, fiction, and literary analysis and has aspirations to write a novel.

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Charles Siebert is the author of three critically acclaimed memoirs, The Wauchula Woods Accord: Toward A New Understanding of Animals, A

Man After His Own Heart, and Wickerby: An Urban Pastoral, a New York

Times Notable Book of 1998, as well as a novel, Angus; an e-book Rough Beasts: The Zanesville Zoo Massacre One Year Later; and a children’s

book, The Secret World of Whales. A poet, journalist, essayist, and con-

tributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, he has written for The

New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Vanity Fair, Esquire, Outside, Men’s Journal, National Geographic, and numerous other publications. He presently teaches creative writing at NYU Abu Dhabi.

132 CONTRIBUTORS

PHOTO AND IMAGE CREDITS Cover: Berlin Street Still Life. Cyrus R. K. Patell.

Page 4: Manara clock tower in Nablus. Leslie Gray.

Page 6: NYU Berlin at the Kulturbrauerei. Cyrus R. K. Patell.

Page 14: Swing Patrol Berlin Flyer. Valeriya Golovina.

Page 19: Swing Patrol Berlin’s all-female dance troupe. Valeriya Golovina.

Page 22: Catarina and James teaching their Lindy class. Valeriya Golovina.

Page 24: Stephan Wuthe listening to “Bei Mir Bistu Shein” by Margot Friedländer. Valeriya Golovina.

Page 27: Stephan’s vintage gramophone. Valeriya Golovina.

Page 30: Makala Market, Accra. Ben G. Griff/Wikimedia Commons.

Page 39: Fishmongers in Jamestown, Accra. Angela L. Rak/Wikimedia Commons.

Page 46: Sign at the Ni Una Menos International Women ́s Day March.

Jocilyn Estes.

Page 51: Ni Una Menos Protest in the Plaza de Mayo. Jocilyn Estes.

Page 56: Graffiti in tribute to Lucia Perez. Jocilyn Estes.

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Page 62: Separation barrier (detail). Karin Etedgi.

Page 65: Separation barrier. Karin Etedgi.

Page 68: F. with volunteers. Karin Etedgi.

Page 77: People waiting for a checkpoint to open near Tulkarim. Leslie Gray.

Page 78: J’existe. Zoe Jane Patterson.

Page 83: Bassin Louis Blanc, Paris. Zoe Jane Patterson.

Page 90: Point Ephémère. Zoe Jane Patterson.

Page 93: View of the Eiffel Tower. Cyrus R. K. Patell.

Page 94: Rose Reading Room, New York Public Library. Todd Eberle/ Getty Images.

Page 125: Unknowable. Liam Patell. Pencil, chalk, and charcoal on paper.